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When people create new societies, economies, and nations—both now and in the past—they create gods, rituals, and miracles to support them. Even what seem to be some of the most timeless and sacred sites in the world have been shaped, reshaped, and reinterpreted by countless people to produce oases of peace and nature today.

Using miracle tales, votive plaques, diaries, and newspapers, Sarah Thal traces such changes at one of the most popular Japanese pilgrimage sites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the shrine of Konpira on the island of Shikoku. This rich and fascinating history explores how people from all walks of life gave shape to the gods, shrines, and rituals so often attributed to ancient, indigenous Japan. Thal shows how worshippers and priests, rulers and entrepreneurs, repeatedly rebuilt and reinterpreted Konpira to reflect their needs and aspirations in a changing world—and how, in doing so, they helped shape the structures of the modern state, economy, and society in turn.

Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods will be welcomed by all scholars of Japanese history and by students of religion interested in the construction of modernity.

In this in-depth examination of community policing in Seattle, William T. Lyons, Jr. explores the complex issues associated with the establishment and operation of community policing, an increasingly popular method for organizing law enforcement in this country.

Stories about community policing appeal to a nostalgic vision of traditional community life. Community policing carries with it the image of a safe community in which individual citizens and businesses are protected by police they know and who know them and their needs. However, it also carries an image of community based in partnerships that exclude the least advantaged, strengthen the police, and are limited to targeting those disorders feared by more powerful parts of the community and most amenable to intervention by professional law enforcement agencies.

The author argues that the politics of community policing are found in the construction of competing and deeply contested stories about community and the police in environments characterized by power inbalances. Community policing, according to the author, colonizes community life, increasing the capacity of the police department to shield itself from criticism, while manifesting the potential for more democratic forms of social control as evidenced by police attention to individual rights and to impartial law enforcement.

This book will be of interest to sociologists and political scientists interested in the study of community power and local politics as well as criminologists interested in the study of police.

William T. Lyons, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Akron. He previously worked for the Seattle Police Department.