Gate Of Asia
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The Bronx
Use this handy, comprehensive illustrated guidebook to discover the often-overlooked rich cultural, historical, and natural attractions of the Bronx—one of the five boroughs of New York City. Author and foremost Bronx historian Lloyd Ultan and educator Shelley Olson provide detailed descriptions, information, and maps visitors need, including hours and directions, to enjoy both famous and lesser-known historic and architectural marvels, museums, art galleries, performance venues, gardens, parks, and recreation facilities.
The Gate of Asia
The first chapter of this book gives a brief justification for writing a travel memoir about these particular civilizations. The author begins with the problem of defining the border between East and West. Physical geography is inadequate, since human civilizations span geographic dividing lines, but the civilizations themselves are also inadequate to draw definite lines. He identifies the cultural influence of Persian and Syrian (and Turkish) peoples as the clear dividing line between "east" and "west," defining them together as "The Gate of Asia." Warfield describes and discusses the places and cultures he visits. The conditions of roads in cities, for example, or the number and type of languages local people know, are included. He repeats stories of local color that he hears from Europeans living along his route.
The Banana Tree at the Gate
The "Hikayat Banjar", a seventeenth-century native court chronicle from Southeast Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as "the banana tree at the gate." Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system, standing on its head the prevailing view of resource-poor and economically marginal tropical forest dwellers. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo's native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful. This success is based on the development of a "dual" household economy, with distinct subsistence- and market-oriented sectors, which has historically made these "smallholders" extremely competitive with the large-scale, heavily capitalized, state-supported plantation sector. Dove sheds new light on the nature of smallholders and in particular their relationship with the global economic system. He demonstrates that processes of globalization began millennia ago and that they have been more diverse and less teleological than often thought. His analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out. The ubiquitous but historically inaccurate emphasis on isolation and resource-poverty disguises that the overweening characteristic of these communities is their political marginality and that their greatest want is not to be uplifted economically but to be empowered politically.