Off the Map
An Expedition deep into Empire and the Global Economy
Chellis Glendinning

Chellis Glendinning lives in northern New Mexico, a place you might say is off the map, but it isn't. There is nowhere that is off the map, at least not physically, anymore. Our world has been mapped, our lives have been mapped and to resist this element of empire, which "originates in the perception of place" is futile. To go on this expedition deep into empire and the global economy the reader must quickly acknowledge that the author equates the world we live in to one that is damaging every aspect of our being.

Her earlier work, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilisation, describes the trauma we all suffer from - whether we believe it or not. The question is, what if the map didn't exist.

Reviewer: RA

A World of Fine Difference
Adrian Peace

Anthropologist Adrian Peace calls his study village Inveresk - "the inlet of the fish". It is a fictional name, as are all the names of the people and some of the other places in this book. It does not matter that he cannot identify the actual village, because the social patterns he describes resonate through much of Irish life, rural and urban. But his study community is unique - hence his "world of fine difference". The members of Inveresk also see themselves as "a different place altogether" from neighbouring communities, which in turn see Inveresk as "a place full of really queer people". But Inveresk is not one community, it is three closely-knit, diverse communities; Peace describes them as country, village and pier. Where Inveresk may differ from other similar coastal fishing and farming communities is that each lives cheek by jowl, with the country folk no further than a few miles removed from the pier folk.

In Inveresk, Peace shows a community that has no desire to live up to the caricature that rural Ireland is dying or losing its cultural identity to modernity. He writes:

"Despite the extent of this sustained induction into modernity, Inveresk retains a strong, indeed pervasive, sense of its own distinct identity, of being a special place in the world. Notwithstanding the many external forces which threaten to breach and subvert it, this sense of distinction is articulated with pride and the residents work hard to sustain it."

Inveresk is "a modern place in a late modern society" yet sadly perhaps "also a distinctively peripheral locale in which, one presumes, the negative effects of global marginalisation should be especially pronounced". There is little argument that "the inhabitants of Inveresk share a sense of powerlessness in relation to the politics of government concentrated in the metropolitan core". However that has not stopped them from consciously and deliberately attempting to reshape their own small world from within their local environs while keeping an eye on what is going on beyond.

Reviewer: RA

Webs of Power
Notes from the Global Uprising
Starhawk
New Society Publishers

It would be wonderful to think that Sky and CNN and their ilk would broadcast the work of reporters like Starhawk. A typical report would go like this.

After the last day of the women’s training, we go home with Arish to her village of Sarda, open the door in the blank cement wall that faces the street, and enter a walled garden, with mint and fava beans, fig trees and grape vines, sages and roses lining the paths. In front of the house is a wide porch, and on the sides and back are courtyards. Arish brings us inside, to sit and drink tea and admire a perfect model of the Al Aqsa Mosque made by her brother, the engineer. Arish is young, in her early twenties, not yet married, an artist and writer. She shows us her drawings of her nieces and her mother, she has a round, bronze face and half-moon eyes that crinkle up as she smiles. Then the women beckon us out back, and we crowd onto a low bench in a small, cement-block outbuilding. In one corner is a sunken oven, heaped with coals and ashes from burning olive pumice, what's left after the oil is pressed. Arish’s mother presides, patting out flat slabs of dough, and Arish removes the lid which has a long, vertical handle so they can lay them in the pit, replace the cover, and heap the ashes on. After just a few moments, the bread is done. Wide sheets of flat bread dripping with olive oil, with flat leaves of zata sandwiched in, and thin pasties of crisp, sweet bread basted with honey. They fill our hands with it, and we eat as tea is poured. It’s a warm, intimate women’s space, heated by the oven, like a sauna or a sweat lodge, and we laugh and smile and eat. I have seen clay models of this oven in sculptures thousands of years old.

Generations of women have patted the dough, baked the bread, gathered at these hearths to gossip and laugh – a warm and womblike female space in a male world. I feel so safe, so welcomed, that I’m lulled into being happy, a feeling I just can’t shake as the afternoon goes on. In spite of the harsh realities we’ve been discussing in the training, the techniques for self-protection when facing tear gas, sound bombs, rubber bullets, beatings, the ominous approach of the Wall that will shatter the fabric of these villages, the overwhelming oppressive realities of the occupation, something strong and sweet as this honey bread survives. For a little while longer.

Sadly this is the not the kind of report you are likely to see on Sky or CNN. But don't despair. Reports like this one from the West Bank form the thread of Starhawk's wonderfully titled book, where she does what she does very well - recording the daily lives and actions of people on the front line of the global rising. These writings are the stuff of real soap-opera, not the one manufactured by the world's power brokers.

Reviewer: RA