‘Civilizing’ the pastoral frontier: land grabbing,dispossession and coercive agrarian development in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes frontier dynamics of land dispossessions in Ethiopia’s pastoral lowland regions. Through a case study of two sedentarization schemes in South Omo Valley, we illustrate how politics of coercive sedentarization are legitimated in the ‘civilizing’ impetus of ‘improvement schemes’ for ‘backward’ pastoralists. We study sedentarization schemes that are implemented to evict pastoralist communities from grazing land to be appropriated by corporate investors. It is argued that frontier imaginations of pastoral lowlands legitimate coercive practices of ‘emptying’ the lowlands for investments. ‘Improvement schemes’ enroll private investors and enterprises affiliated with Ethiopia’s ruling party in the politics of ‘thickening’ state presence in the pastoral frontier. Agricultural extension packages serve to expand state control over sedentarized pastoralists and make lowland resources more extractable, for investors and for the ruling regime.     

Soy states: resource politics,violent environments and soybean territorialization in Paraguay

Soy production has radically transformed the social, ecological, territorial and political form of Paraguay. This paper traces waves of sojización – soy territorialization – to analyze how soybean resource politics are changing environmental governance and state–society relations in Paraguay. I argue that political, social and ecological ruptures mark each territorialization: agrarian reforms that reconfigured land control, the introduction of genetically modified soy varieties, and most recently a ‘parliamentary coup’ preceded by spectacular acts of violence against campesinos. The violent rejection of post-neoliberal politics espoused by former President Fernando Lugo marked the beginning of a third wave of sojización defined by the increasing influence of the soy industry, campesino and indigenous dispossession, and violent environments. Paraguay reveals unexpected consequences and contradictions of the Left Turn in Latin America. The country’s experiment with post-neoliberal politics created conditions that eventually broadened and deepened neoliberalizations of nature. The term ‘soy states’ indicates three conjunctures of soy production and how they reconfigure state–society relations and conceptions of ‘the state’ in Paraguay vis-à-vis soy production. My arguments draw from extensive qualitative field research and applied work in Paraguay coupled with secondary source analysis, contributing to debates about neoliberalizations of nature, plant territoriality, agrarian political ecology and state formation.     

二元劳动力市场背景下就业质量的提升机制研究 ——基于 CLDS 数据的实证分析

中国城市劳动力市场的二元分割背景下,劳动者的就业质量提升机制呈现出一定的差异性。研 究基于资本和职业流动视角,利用中国劳动力动态调查（CLDS）数据,多重考察和检验不同劳动力市场影响劳 动者就业质量提升的因素。研究发现：首要劳动力市场就业者的知识人力资本、弱关系型社会资本、干部职位 政治资本对提升就业质量有积极作用,次要劳动力市场就业者通过提升知识人力资本、技术人力资本、弱关系 型社会资本、干部职位政治资本提升就业质量;首要劳动力市场就业者通过主动、自愿的职业流动实现就业质 量的提升,次要劳动力市场就业者通过增加职业流动次数有效提升就业质量;资本因素对首要劳动力市场就业 者通过职业流动提升就业质量不具有抑制作用,但一定程度上会抑制次要劳动力市场就业者通过职业流动提升 就业质量的作用。因此,要充分了解劳动者的诉求与真实就业状况,帮助次要劳动力市场就业者增加资本 ( 人力 资本、社会资本、政治资本 ) 的投入和积累,以提升其就业质量。     

Marianne Moore and the Arcadian Pleasures of Shopping

When R. P. Blackmur declared in 1935 of Marianne Moore that 'no poet has ever been so chaste',he was deploying a gendered critical language describing Moore's work as ideologically pure, untainted by the commercialism of capital; at the same time, he was carefully demarcating the boundaries between high culture and mass culture (Blackmur 1935:206). However, while Moore's status as an exemplary modernist has secured her a place in the modernist canon, this has inevitably led to readings that marginalize aspects of the poet's work that declare an interest and textual investment in mass culture. Moreover, interpreted within these narrow critical parameters, Moore's verse has been effectively transformed into what Randall Jarrell called one of the 'nicer animals': it has been declawed and tamed, divested of its more radical properties in order to reinforce a self-sufficient and autonomous modernist aesthetic. While it is undoubtedly important to recognize the ways in which modernist women writers have contributed to forms of avant-garde culture, those forms should be identified, in Rita Felski's words, as 'only one of a continuum of cultural practices' rather than as the dominant model for critical investigation (Felski 1994:191-208). Tracing the relation between Moore's poetry and the discourses of fashion, advertising and consumerism is an attempt to resist reproducing what Andreas Huyssens has referred to as 'the great divide' reinforcing modernism's cultural hegemony. The philosophical frames of modernity, particularly as it has been theorized by Walter Benjamin, provide the discursive context for making visible and valuable Moore's preoccupation with aspects of her own contemporary popular culture. Furthermore, by gendering this modernity, by recognizing the ways in which the formations of capital produce and consume 'woman' as discursive subject, Moore's poetic shopping sprees reveal the difference gender makes to our understanding of modernity and its relation to modernism. Moore's work, as illustrated by archival material based at the Rosenbach Museum and Library as well as her poems and her critical essays, is as much constructed out of the arcadian pleasures of modernity as it is the expression of the poetics of high art. With its investment in the aesthetics of display, the discourses of advertising and the pleasures of consumption, Moore's poetry offers a model for reading a gendered modernism in the context of modernity. The poem, 'When I Buy Pictures' (1921) will provide the focus for this discussion as it suggests not only how the aesthetic is related to consumer culture but it also reveals the textual traces of a debate taking place in the visual arts in the United States concerning the nature, value and function of 'pictures' as cultural signs. However, before looking more closely at the poem, it might be worth reconceptualizing Moore's writing in relation to some of the recurrent 'motifs' of modernity.     

女性非正规就业的影响因素研究 ——基于中国社会状况综合调查的实证分析

系统考察女性劳动者选择非正规就业的因素,不仅对揭示其非正规就业选择的机理具有重要意义,而且对其权益保护也具有深远影响。本研究基于中国社会状况综合调查(CSS)数据,分析女性非正规就业的影响因素,并考察影响非正规就业女性选择不同就业身份和职业类型的因素。研究结果表明:非正规就业已经成为女性非农就业的主要途径;户籍等个体特征、家庭中子女数量等家庭因素以及所在地区等对女性劳动者非正规就业选择有显著影响,而人力资本不但对女性非正规就业的选择有显著影响,对其就业身份和职业类型的选择也有显著影响。研究建议:应完善非正规就业政策,结合影响女性非正规就业的因素制定措施保障其合法权益,提升女性劳动者的人力资本水平,进而提高女性非正规就业劳动者的就业质量。     

Why do pastoralists in Mali join jihadist groups? A political ecological explanation

Since 2015 jihadist groups have taken control of the Mopti region in central Mali. We ask how such a radical development has been possible in a country previously praised as a bulwark against radical Islam in Africa. While the dominant literature on the crisis in Mali has focused on how global political economic developments and international jihadist thinking and organisation relate to national dynamics, we take a materialist political ecology approach to explain the current situation. By focusing on the micro-politics of two land-use conflicts and how these conflicts are affected by the jihadist expansion, we seek to explain peasant (or pastoral) logics behind joining these armed groups. In particular, pastoralists seem to support the jihadist takeover, because of an anti-state, anti-elite and pro-pastoral jihadist discourse, because they have become increasingly fatigued by and disgruntled with a predatory and corrupt state, and because the development model imposed by the state and international donors has not responded to pastoral priorities. Rent-seeking by government officials has been especially intense in relation to conflicts over pastoral land, environmental management and the fight against desertification. This happened while the international community continued to praise Mali as a model of African democracy.     

人力资本理论 ：问题及新解释

人力资本理论认为教育有助于工人工资的提高,但这一理论存在诸多问题。人力资本理论分析教育投资的均衡,假设教育投资边际回报递减,但经验研究显示,教育投资的边际回报递增。人力资本理论在解释教育对工资提高的作用时,没有把教育投资与劳动力市场的供给和需求相联系,而任何工资的变化如果不联系劳动力市场供给和需求的变化,就难以得到合理解释。为此,本研究就教育对工资提高的作用提出一个新解释:教育投资同时增加了受教育者在劳动力市场的稀缺性和需求,由此提高了其议价能力从而提高了工资。这一理论解释隐含,随着教育的发展,劳动力市场上受教育层次较高工人稀缺性降低,导致教育投资回报率下降。经验研究显示,随着高等教育毛入学率的增加,高等教育的回报降低,可视为是人力资本理论新解释的支持性证据。     

我国企业民主制度的变迁与创新研究

回顾建党百年来我国企业民主制度发展的历史进程,研究我国企业民主制度演进中取得的成就 和成功经验,对完善当前我国企业民主管理制度有重要历史意义和现实价值。基于制度变迁视角,对我国企业 民主制度历史变迁进行分析,本研究发现国家经济体制变迁是导致我国企业民主参与制度变迁的根本原因,经济 体制变迁过程中引发劳动关系各方包括政府、企业、工会、职工相互关系的变化,成为我国企业民主参与制度变迁 的重要影响因素。此外,我国企业民主参与制度变迁以国家主导下的强制性特征为主,但在市场化改革进程中市场 劳资主体驱动下的诱致性因素已经出现,对国家主导企业民主参与制度变迁发挥了重要补充作用。     

试论自主创新与风险投资

自主创新发展高科技已成为我国调整产业结构和转变经济增长方式的一个中心环节,打造自主创新的风险投资机制,建立以企业为主体、市场为导向、政府资助和社会闲置资本为主体的风险投资体系,是实现我国自主创新、“十一五”规划的重要手段。风险投资在发达国家已取得了辉煌的成就,在我国尚处于开发阶段,完善我国的资本市场,形成风险投资的退出机制将是风险投资成败的关键。     

Feminist Contestations of Institutional Domains in Iran

Iranian Feminists outside Iran are divided on women's positions in Iran under the Islamic state. Some have argued that the process of Islamization has marginalized women. Others have argued that the dynamic nature of Shari'a interpretation and the debate among religious scholars in Iran have shaped the indigenous forms of feminist consciousness, feminisms and women's involvement in the process olf change. This paper, based on field research, is challenging both views. It will be argued that the contradictions of the Islamic state and institutions led to the process of feminist consciousness. In the period 1990–2000, Muslim and secular feminists in Iran have found their own ways of coming together, making demands and pressurizing the State and institutions to reform laws and regulations in favour of women's rights. But women are divided by the nature of their diversity. As their alliance has challenged the limitation of the Islamic state, the breakdown of their alliance (2000–2001), could have a great impact not only on gender relations, but also on the process of democratization and secularization.     

打破中资企业“原罪论”的迷思 ——基于利益相关者视角的跨国企业海外工会实践研究

跨国企业正在成为我国对外直接投资的重要主体，其海外雇佣关系与工会实践逐渐引起国内外 学者的关注。在解释我国跨国企业的具体雇佣关系实践时，学界普遍存在基于路径依赖观点与“中国例外论” 得到的中资企业“原罪论”观点，认为资本原产地决定了中国跨国企业在海外的固定管理模式与工会实践。基 于利益相关者的产业关系系统视角，本研究对德国大众集团和中国福耀集团在美国的工厂组建工会的案例进行 了比较研究，揭示了强调资本原产地的“原罪论”存在的局限性。研究认为，东道国地方制度情境因素和多个 利益相关者的复杂博弈与互动过程对跨国企业的海外工会实践具有重要影响。     

Resisting the New State: Peasants and Pastoralists in Iran, 1921-41

This article examines the responses of the rural poor, both settled peasants and pastoral nomads, to the upheavals unleashed in the Iranian countryside by Riza Shah's adoption of a programme of authoritarian state-building and rapid modernization. The article shows how, contrary to the conventional assumptions of rural passivity held by both Western scholarship and Iranian nationalism, peasant and nomad communities in fact generated a variety of active responses to the regime's initiatives, both on their own account and in combination with other social forces, aimed at defending themselves and resisting unfavourable changes in their relations with landlords and state officials.     

Out of the mainstream: water rights,politics and identity

ABSTRACT

Indigenous maize from Mexico has become crucial for a wave of contemporary agricultural development initiatives seeking to cultivate a ‘Green Revolution for Africa’. Plant breeders developing disease-resistant hybrid maize for Africa use cutting edge technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 to mine the genomes of maize collected in Mexico 75 years ago, during the Green Revolution’s earliest incarnation. Historicizing this transnational linkage, this paper argues that Green Revolution science appropriates indigenous maize through racial logics rooted in whiteness. In the 1940s, American scientists sent by the Rockefeller Foundation to improve Mexico’s agriculture negotiated their own racial subjectivity through their encounters with Mexico’s indigenous people. In the process, they constructed a racial hierarchy that equated whiteness with scientific superiority and indigeneity with underdevelopment. This racialization undergirded a maize program led by E.J. Wellhausen that collected and catalogued hundreds of varieties of Mexico’s maize – and then distributed them to American seed companies. Wellhausen’s seeds formed the genetic backbone for subsequent Green Revolution projects. The ‘white science’ he embodied expanded as the Revolution sought out nonwhite agriculture across the global South. Today, the Green Revolution’s racial logics are re-articulated along its geographical and technological frontier, as indigenous maize provides the seeds for the African Green Revolution.     

英语教育的劳动市场回报及英语教育政策调整 —— 基于 2016年问卷调查数据

中国的英语教育近年来受到越来越多的重视。无论是国家还是个人都投入了大量资源用于英语教育,如此巨额的投入所带来的劳动市场回报值得关注。英语教育的劳动市场回报可以分为人力资本投入回报和信号作用回报。研究发现,英语在实际工作中使用越多,工资收入越高,是为英语教育作为人力资本投入回报的证据。但在工作中很少用到英语的人,通过英语四六级考试对其工资也有显著影响,反映了英语教育具有信号作用的功能。调查显示,英语教育的信号作用是英语教育劳动市场回报的主要方面。因此,中国的英语教育有过度教育从而导致资源配置低效率之嫌,建议及时调整国家的英语教育政策。     

Sacred groves,sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization,intensification and neo-nature in South America

Soy has become one of the world's most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the ‘neo-nature’ of the soy complex and the political economy of the sector in South America, including the new corporate actors and financial mechanisms that produced some of the world's largest agricultural production companies. We then discuss key environmental debates surrounding soy agribusiness in South America, challenging especially the common arguments that agroindustrial intensification ‘spares land’ for conservation while increasing production to ‘feed the world’. We demonstrate that these arguments hinge on limited data from a peculiar portion of the southern Amazon fringe, and obfuscate through neo-Malthusian concerns multiple other political and ecological problems associated with the sector. Thus, discussions of soy production become intertwined with broader debates about agrarian development, industrialization and modernization. Finally, we briefly outline the contributions in this volume, and identify limitations and fruitful directions for further research.     

Memsahibs and their servants in nineteenth-century India[1]

Abstract

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, British memsahibs, the wives of officials, military officers, missionaries, and merchants, consistently expounded an image of Indians to the female reading public in Britain through their letters and diaries to female relatives, and through published autobiographies, advice manuals, articles, and advice columns in women's periodicals. Since servants were the group of Indians with whom memsahibs had the most contact, their relationship with domestics shaped British women's attitudes towards the Indian in general. The servants' dark skin and their religious, social, and linguistic differences contributed to the negative attitudes of the memsahibs towards them. The Indian rebellion of 1857 and the emergence of social Darwinism further heightened memsahibs' beliefs that Indians were subhuman savages. Earlier generations of memsahibs influenced the later generations through their derogatory comments about Indian domestics. Furthermore, by writing about their Indian servants, memsahibs identified themselves as active participants in Britain's imperial venture in India.     

Urbanization through dispossession: survival and stratification in China's new townships

Rural land dispossession has become a dominant mechanism of capital accumulation in the Chinese economy. However, the Chinese economy continues to rely on a migrant labor system that enables enterprises to accumulate capital precisely by not dispossessing laborers, but instead enlisting rural communities in absorbing costs of workforce maintenance. These dual and contradictory mechanisms are particularly visible in China's urban construction sector, where enterprises require both low-cost labor and low-cost land for profitability. This contribution draws on long-term ethnographic research in Lan-ding Village, a labor-sending community undergoing land expropriations in Sichuan Province, to document a new system of class stratification resulting from these dual accumulation mechanisms.     

Plain tales from the rice trade: Indications of vertical integration in foodgrain markets in Bangladesh

Through a series of case studies of the interactions between foodgrain traders and between traders and producers, this article questions the widespread belief that foodgrain markets in Bangladesh are characterised by low trading margins, no vertical integration and a general competitive health. The article indicates that merchant's capital plays two key roles in the market (i) in some areas of the country, the provision of merchant's credit deprives the poor producer of access to the market price for his or her output; (ii) working capital extended to subordinate traders may also enable a small group of large traders to influence prices. Further case studies of the interaction between traders and the state food distribution system indicate ways in which the private market may be able to frustrate or limit policies intended to regulate its operation. These insights suggest that the domination of merchant's capital may be one factor explaining low levels of productivity in the Bangladesh countryside. They also raise questions about the consequences of policies intended to increase the role of private trade in the economy.     

Neoliberalism on the Ground in Rural India: Predatory Growth,Agrarian Crisis,Internal Colonization,and the Intensification of Class Struggle

Focusing on the countryside and rural poor, this article delineates the contours and considers the effects of the Indian state's adoption of neoliberal policies in the early 1990s. It argues that the shift to neoliberalism has produced a pattern of predatory growth that has privileged urban India, entailed a withdrawal of state support for the agrarian sector, and increasingly involved the forcible expropriation of the land and resources of the rural poor. This pattern and the neoliberal policies underpinning it have precipitated an agrarian crisis, while domestic and international capital have been the principal beneficiaries of the ‘internal colonization’ of the poor through dispossession and suppression. At the same time, the shift to neoliberalism has formed the specific context for an intensification of agrarian class conflict that has included the mobilization of rural elites as well as the rural poor.     

Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.