The gypsy as vanishing mediator in Russian television coverage of inter-ethnic tension

The article addresses the representation of gypsies in Russian television news bulletins and popular drama series over a 15-month period. It seeks first to explain the prominence of the media image of the gypsy relative to the size of the Roma population and second to account for the relationship between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation. Situating itself within the broader field of post-Soviet Russian identity studies and applying qualitative tools differentiated according to the arena of analysis, it looks at questions of lexicon, voice and viewpoint in relation to news and issues of characterization, fictional space and plot with respect to drama. The two apparatuses are linked through a shared emphasis on narrative, and in particular on its dual orientation toward the exceptional (what makes a story worth telling and capable of embracing “difference”) and the typical (what enables it to represent and project “identity”). In its central argument it maps this dual “identity/difference” dynamic onto the gypsy's liminal status as both “of the self” and “of the other”, and its mediatory function: the ability to serve as a proxy for ethno-cultural difference more generally, and to negotiate the tensions between the cultural and racial aspects of ethnicity.     

The noble art of the chase in the Arab world

Sir Terence Clark is a Council Member of the Society. He retired from the Diplomatic Service after a distinguished career spent mainly in the Middle East, where he was Ambassador to Iraq and Oman, and is the author of many articles in specialist journals on hunting and co‐author of The Saluqi: Coursing Hound of the East (1995), Dogs in Antiquity (2001) and Oman in Time (2001). This article is based on a lecture delivered to the Society on 23 October, 2002.     

Russian Studies Without Russia

A distinguished American specialist on Soviet and Russian politics addresses the lessons of the seven years leading to Russia's crash of 1998 for how US scholars, journalists, and politicians have analyzed Russia under Yeltsin. Citing a wide range of academic and journalistic sources, including materials published from October 1998 to January 1999, the article surveys and criticizes the mainstream concepts employed for comprehending social, political, and economic life in that country. It proposes both an alternative vocabulary and different comparative references for explaining and predicting developmental trends in Russia.     

Urban change in China. Politics and development in Tsinan,Shantung, 1890–1949

Abstract

Over the last decade, in response to the metropolitan, heavily political concerns of the “China's response to” school in Western research on modern Chinese history, there has been a move toward local (regional, provincial, county and urban) studies. A focus on localities has meant increased emphasis on social and economic change and their linkages with political events. A new sub-field has emerged—Chinese cities. David Buck's ambitiously titled Urban Change in China is the first monograph to appear from the urban history sub-field. Its publication should, therefore, be an occasion for assessment of the parameters it assumes for the sub-discipline.     

Trends in poverty and destitution in Wollo,Ethiopia 1

According to several studies, poverty in rural Ethiopia has fallen significantly since the early 1990s, thanks to improved governance and economic liberalisation policies. This paper presents several arguments that challenge this view. The first questions the methodological foundations of the data from which these positive trends are derived: we argue that the original sampling frame was too small and unrepresentative to provide a basis for extrapolating national poverty levels or trends. The second argument questions the conceptual underpinnings of these studies: poverty estimates based on levels of current consumption fail to allow for non-income dimensions of wellbeing, nor for confounding factors such as seasonality, annual rainfall and food aid receipts. The third strand considers alternative sources of data on changes in wellbeing in Ethiopia: recent qualitative studies report that the poor perceive themselves as poorer and more vulnerable than poverty headcount figures suggest.

Finally, we report findings from our own survey in chronically poor and historically famine-prone Wollo. First, a significant proportion of households in the study area are destitute – destitution being defined as inability to meet basic needs, lack of key productive assets, and dependence on transfers. Secondly, the numbers of destitute people, and of people vulnerable to becoming destitute, have increased over the past ten years. Thirdly, the crisis of livelihoods underlying this trend is affecting entire communities – the dominant pattern is an aggregate downward shift, rather than stratification – and the decline of wealthier households is exacerbating the vulnerability of the poorest. These findings cast serious doubts on generalisations about poverty trends in Ethiopia. At the very least, national-level data need to be disaggregated: improving national trends may conceal pockets of entrenched poverty and a deepening livelihoods crisis in parts of rural Ethiopia.     

The importance of household asset diversity for livelihood diversity and welfare among small farm colonists in the Amazon

Taking a small farm colony on the Amazon frontier as a case study, this article examines the relationships among household assets, livelihood diversity and welfare. The findings show that: (1) few households diversified into non-agricultural income sources, but those that did also had agricultural incomes comparable to households primarily reliant on agriculture; (2) distinct household assets influence the extent of agricultural and non-agricultural diversity, implying that households with combinations of specific assets were best able to diversify their livelihoods, and (3) while specific types of household assets influence household welfare, livelihood diversity does not exert an additional effect on welfare. A key issue that emerges is that different arrays of assets are important for agricultural and non-agricultural diversity as well as for household welfare, implying that households need diverse assets for diverse livelihoods as well as better welfare.     

Safeguarding Common-Pool Resources in Transition Economies: Experimental Evidence from Central Asia

Empirical evidence suggests that the propensity to cooperate in common pool resource dilemmas is higher for small, homogeneous groups with efficacious monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms. Given that transition from socialist to market economies is associated with larger, more heterogeneous groups with diluted opportunities for monitoring and sanctioning, individuals in later-stage transition economies may be expected to be less cooperative than their early-stage counterparts. However, evidence from experiments conducted with subjects in two economies at different stages of transition suggests that this may not be the case. These findings have implications for both theorists and practitioners alike.     

Comparative anti-corruption policy: the american,soviet and russian cases

In light of significant conceptual and methodological difficulties that face comparative corruption research, we propose to treat comparative anti-corruption policy as worthy of study in its own right. By using measures of enforcement activity as evidence of anti-corruption, rather than flawed proxy measures of corruption, we endeavor to surmount some of obstacles to comparing radically different political systems. We compare anti-corruption activity in the US and the USSR and elaborate three theoretical perspectives-emphasizing political, institutional, and symbolic factors--and show how each might improve our understanding of anti-corruption policy in the two nations. By applying these three frameworks to the Russian republic, we assess anti-corruption policy in an unsettled, emerging political system and suggest that the dynamics that underlie Russia's anti-corruption policy will more closely resemble US policy than was the case in the USSR.