Average,normal, and beautiful: representations of bodies in Brazilian biotypology (1930-1940)

Th present article deals with the visual culture present in the books and textbooks on biotypology in Brazil, in the 1930s and 1940s. It analyses the representations of bodies in images, all of which were employed to guide people on the reasoning and practices of bodily measurement and classification according to the main biotypology approaches. Images herein discussed expressed the following scientific modus operandi of biotypology in Brazil: anthropometry, biometry and the construction of an average body; categorisation of biotypes, physical culture and classic aesthetic; and the link between normality, beauty and moral conceptions applied to women’s body features. This analysis also seeks to shed light on some of the ways in which biotypology strayed from and was consistent with eugenic discourse in Brazil. The representation of bodies in Brazilian biotypology showed the efforts to construct normal and deviant bodies defined according to ideals of national and racial identity, perfection, symmetry, harmony, goodness, fairness, femininity and beauty.     

Roadside corpses in Nigeria: social anonymity,public morality,and (in)dignity of the human body

In Nigeria, it is quite common to see human corpses decomposing by the roadside. Existing scholarly comments have emphasised the aspect of state failure implicated in the phenomenon. However, based on observation, analysis of media reports, and informal discussions, this paper identifies some of the cultural factors that deny roadside corpses the basic honour of burial. Firstly, corpses that decay by the roadside are usually disconnected from the network of kin relations, thereby provoking meaning about space and social signification of the human body. Secondly, the low social status often ascribed to these corpses points towards an idea of the human body as a possible site for enactment of social inequality. Thirdly, public indifference to roadside corpses is explained in terms of contrasting public moralities, neoliberal ideals of self-contained individual, a resentment of the police intertwined with a complicated criminal justice system, and a cultural attitude towards strange entities.     

Settler Colonialism and (re)Conciliation: Frontier Violence,Affective Performances,and Imaginative Refoundings

Settler Colonialism and (re)Conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings . By Penelope Edmunds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp.xvi + 253, US$95.00.     

德国社会市场经济:基础、功能、限制

文章阐述了德国社会市场经济制度的主要内容 ,德国社会市场经济的基本结构 ,也分析了这种制度对社会经济的积极作用 ,认为社会市场经济应不断调整 ,所以它是一种具有活力的发展过程     

Some Talk,No Action (Yet): Interdependence,Domestic Interests and Hierarchical EU Governance in Climate Policy

This article analyses why Switzerland has so far remained outside the European Union's emissions trading system (EU ETS), the centerpiece of the EU's efforts to combat climate change. In doing so, it contributes three insights to the literature on the EU's external governance. First, it shows that interdependence is of limited explanatory power in predicting EU–Swiss interactions. Secondly, it identifies domestic interests in the non‐member state, Switzerland, as the key factor in explaining the EU's external governance structures concerning emissions trading. Thirdly, it highlights the EU's limited flexibility in dealing with third countries in areas where its internal governance mode is hierarchical. The article presents a hypothesis about the future development of emissions trading in Switzerland and discusses implications for both the external governance literature and the development of global carbon markets.     

ZANU(PF) strategies in general elections, 1980-2000: Discourse and coercion

For many analysts, the general election campaign in 2000 showeda new face of the ruling party, ZANU(PF). Against the new oppositionparty, the Movement for Democratic Change, ZANU(PF) engagedin violence and intimidation, often relying on youth and warveterans, even as it accused its opponents of subversive violence.Moreover, ZANU(PF) appealed to its liberation war credentials,while dismissing its chief opponents as puppets of British imperialismand reactionary white settlers. After the election, PresidentMugabe appealed for reconciliation between winners and losers,only to permit violence against those who had voted againstthe ruling party. For ruling party perpetrators of violence,there was impunity and later a presidential pardon. The purposeof this article is to demonstrate how the ruling party usedremarkably similar strategies in every general election since1980, notwithstanding striking differences in the contexts,issues, and nature of the chief opposition party. Given thiswell established pattern of ruling party violence and intimidationand characterization of opposition parties as illegitimate,the article seeks to understand why analysts repeatedly sawin the regular multiparty elections either a democratic systemor one that was amenable to democratization.     

Doing business in Yabaolu Market,Beijing: (inter-)ethnic entrepreneurship,trust and friendship between Caucasian and Chinese traders

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in China and Georgia, this article traces the origins and describes current practices of post-Soviet tourist trading in Yabaolu Market in Beijing. While traders from across the Caucasus visit Yabaolu, my focus is on Georgian traders who today perceive themselves as biznesmeny. Focusing on a typical trade visit, the article explores the role of ethnic and kinship ties in the organization of this trade. It questions the notion of ethnic entrepreneurship and the idea that ethnic cooperation itself may serve a basis of trust and underpin traders’ activities. Instead, the article illustrates how enduring transnational linkages are built on other forms of reliability and reputation. These are framed in the lexicon of friendship, as well as kinship and pseudo-kinship vocabulary, and facilitate commercial transactions between traders of different ethnic, social and religious backgrounds in an environment where state regulation and legal law enforcement are almost absent.