Banking on Folk Art: Banamex‐Citigroup and Transnational Cultural Citizenship

This article offers two readings of The Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art, a travelling exhibition of the Fomento Cultural Banamex, AC's folk art collection that coincided with Citigroup's buyout of Banamex, Mexico's second largest bank. The first, a political economic critique, situates the exhibition within the neoliberal economic reform of the Mexican banking system and the designs of US‐based transnational banks on migrant remittances. The second, a material culture approach, focuses on the exhibitionary strategies employed to incentivise folk art consumption as a mode of cosmopolitan citizenship.     

The Coloured People of South Africa

Miss Attles, a sister of the Prime Minister, has worked in theUnion for 37 years, first in the Railway Mission and since 1929in Claremont, a suburb of Cape Town. This article representspart of a lecture on the 30th April with the Dowager CountessBuxton in the Chair. After the discussion, the Union Governmentfilm Towards the Future was shown, giving the obverse side ofthe medal, with schools and amenities greatly in advance ofconditions in comparable areas, like the West Indies.     

PROSTITUTION,IV DRUG USE,AND SEXFOR-CRACK EXCHANGES AMONG SERIOUS DELINQUENTS: RISKS FOR HIV INFECTION*

There is mounting evidence that HIV infection among adolescents is increasing, particularly among minorities and inner-city youths involved in certain high-risk activities, such as multiple sex partners and intravenous drug use. Interviews conducted “on the street” with 611 seriously delinquent male and female adolescents (ages 12–17) included questions about their involvement in prostitution, intravenous drug use, and sex-for-crack exchanges. Findings included high percentages of youths engaged in these HIV-risk activities and a consistent association between all of them and greater illicit drug use. This would suggest that these risk behaviors may be surprisingly prevalent among some inner-city adolescent groups. Special AIDS prevention/intervention targeting these groups is warranted and urgently needed. Drug treatment should be a central focus of such programs.     

Bounding the Commons: Land Demarcation in Northeastern Nicaragua

In north-eastern Nicaragua, territorial titling of communal lands conflates particular notions of ethnicity with proprietary conceptions of space to generate new forms of conflict within and between indigenous and black communities, and with mestizo migrants. Notions of rights between competing groups, or within conflicting normative frameworks, become increasingly polemic during demarcation. While analysis of three land titling case studies demonstrates that results are socially contingent and place based, trends include: (a) power disparities; (b) tension between 'traditional' and 'modern' patterns of land tenure and resource rights; and (c) contradictions fed by international conservation agendas and neoliberal economic reforms. Combining critical actor-based analysis with practical policy critique our work illuminates how contestations over the bounding of communal territories contribute to social injustice.     

THE NEW 'EVALUATI STATE'

This article is based on a comparative study of three forms of evaluation used by government, the Audit Commission, consultants and the Social Services Inspectorate. The paper argues that these evaluative bodies strengthened the authority of government in the 1980s and supported the shift from a professional to a managerial culture in government. Their contribution to those changes can be linked to the kinds of knowledge they used and the positivist assumptions about knowledge that reasserted themselves in evaluation and in government in the 1980s. However, the research also provides further support for the critics of positivism. The distinction between fact and value and between technical expertise and political argument often broke down in evaluative practice.     

U.S. Social Structure and Imprisonment

An article by Joubert, Picon and McIntosh (1981) is found to contain several serious methodological flaws. A second analysis using a similar data set suggests that these methodological problems may have caused them to draw erroneous conclusions regarding the effects of social structural variables on prison admission and release rates.