[
    {
        "id": 212414,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 356,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "333\n\ntheatre-going society of pre and post-war London, personified by Noel Coward. Indeed he belonged to that world.\n\nBeaton was an extremely talented man - a man of the theatre (as stage designer); and of films (as artistic designer). He was also an extremely brilliant portrait photographer of celebrities - politicians, film and stage stars, beautiful aristocrats - and a sharp autobiographer.\n\n―\n\nOxford University Press have, indeed, performed a public service in re-printing these two books, products of the propaganda arm of the Allied War effort in World War II. They capture in words and pictures the exotic and heroic backdrop of places and people - the military, of course, but also the peasant men, women and children of the two main theatres of war in the Far East, South East Asia and China. The words of Beaton's travel diaries and pencil sketches provide marginal observations to the photographs which, in most cases, \"speak for themselves\" in usually the direct language of propaganda. (However, it must be admitted that exposures of the manly heroic breasts of the soldiery record as well Beaton's sexual ambivalence, which doubtless lies at the heart of his creative genius).\n\nIt is interesting to note that at the time, in 1942, when these War Correspondent's despatches were being executed, Beaton was anguishing over the artistic dilemma of whether to carry out the assignment, principally as a photographer war-artist, or whether to pursue his more artistic endeavours.\n\nIn conclusion, it is perhaps unfair to Oxford, when they have done a very good job with an introduction by the Keeper of Photographs at the Imperial War Museum, London, illuminating the context of these now exceptional picture archives of the war - for this reviewer to feel a slight pang of disappointment with the reprints when compared with the originals. There the typography, design and format provide an additional dimension of insight into the ethos of that dramatic period of history.\n\nALAN BIRCH\n\nNancy Tapper, Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, xx + 309pp. Bibliography, Index.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212415,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 357,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "334\n\nWhen you buy a book in your field — in my case women — you often do so simply because it is there and you have to have it. It is only when you get it home and start to weigh it up that you start to form judgements. If it concerns something I am writing about at the time, I look first at the bibliography and index. More generally, I look first at the illustrations to get a feel of a book, then at the preface and acknowledgements to get a feel of the writer. A book concentrating on marriage from whatever perspective, or about wherever in the world, should give out a whiff of something fascinating in that distinctive aspect of society. In this respect, The Bartered Brides starts well. There are three pictures captioned ‘A married couple ask to have their picture taken’ (p. 135). If in that particular case the bride was bartered, then both partners were, it seems, happy with the deal. Their warm feelings for each other, and their sense of fun, are delightfully apparent.\n\n—\n\nThe author, anthropologist Nancy Tapper, from whose doctoral thesis the book is derived, starts her acknowledgements, 'My debts to Richard Tapper are limitless' (p. xix); she then elaborates on their long and fruitful collaboration in both fieldwork and writing among the Maduzai of Afghanistan. ‘This woman has a head start in an attempt to analyse marriage,’ was my reaction, whether or not she is going to find for or against the marriage system of the tribal people about whom she writes, \"We care very deeply for them\" (p. xx). What is more important about this book is that, since the recent upheavals in Afghanistan, it is a unique record of a way of life that has inevitably disappeared; it is a memorial.\n\nThis introduction may have given the impression that Bartered Brides is a book for the general reader; that is not so. It is an academic one — scholarly, indeed — intended for those actively pursuing interests in gender studies, anthropology (including politics and economics), and Afghanistan. This last category includes Central Asia, for the Maduzai, one of the major tribes of the Durrani Pashtuns, are an Islamic Turkic people.\n\nThe problems of the anthropologist in observing a society and then of explaining it to the reader start, as Tapper explains, with translation. The fact that some terms are apparently easily translatable into English brings its own difficulties with, for example, the term 'marriage' itself. To point out such difficulties is to hint at the...",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]