The Health of the Rurality: The Encuesta de Folklore and Popular Healing Practices in Tucumán, 1921

This article examines healing practices among the rural inhabitants of Tucumán in the opening quarter of the twentieth century through a reading of the 1921 National Folklore Survey. It argues that popular medical practices, referred to as curanderismos (popular healing), continued into the twentieth century not only as cultural practice of the popular classes but as necessity due to limited investments in public health in the rural regions on the part of the national and provincial government.     

China's New Development Philosophy

T HIS year marks the first centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China(CPC).The achievements made by China during the last 100 years are the result of the efforts of several generations of Chinese people under the leadership of the CPC,which has tasked itself with the mission to seek happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation since its birth.     

Means and Capabilities in the Discussion of Distributive Justice*

Abstract. Dworkin's equality of resources can be interpreted as a proposal that integrates distributive criteria taken from both equality of means and equality of capabilities, and overcomes the risks of subjectivism, overrigidity and perfectionism inherent in theories of welfare, means and capabilities respectively. This can be achieved by concentrating on arrangements of justice working within the parameter of equality of resources that equalize capabilities at a level of minima, thus avoiding the perfectionist risk and, once the threshold that ensures autonomous subjects is passed, ruled by criteria taken from theories of means. In such a task, the concept of moral person will be used as the criterion for determining the threshold of autonomy, and not only will it allow for the discrimination between the different circumstances that make the application of distributive criteria possible, but it will also specify the circumstances in which it is possible to attribute responsibility to an agent.     

HOW CITIZENS ASSESS JUST PUNISHMENT FOR POLICE MISCONDUCT*

In their dealings with citizens, police in most jurisdictions across the country are prohibited from using unnecessary force, abusing their authority, discourteous behavior, and offensive language. This study examines the factors that contribute to citizens' judgments of fair punishment for police misconduct. Using a factorial survey, citizens are asked to judge vignettes of police misconduct that describe encounters between officers and civilians in detail. The findings show that citizens do weigh the officer's behavior, particularly the unnecessary use of force, and mitigating evidence, particularly the degree to which the civilian is injured. Also, the findings show that respondents' social status, including their race, does not explain ratings, but that respondents' political orientation, that is, liberal versus conservative orientation, does make a significant difference. The findings demonstrate a normative consensus among respondents about the factors to weigh in judging a fair punishment for police misconduct as well as a consensus about the relative severity of appropriate punishment. There is some disagreement among citizens, however, about how to translate judgments of relative severity into a specific punishment for a particular case.     

Fragile Convergence: Understanding Variation in the Enforcement of China's Industrial Pollution Law

Official statistics and independent survey data show that in the last decade China has witnessed a remarkable change in its enforcement of environmental pollution violations, moving toward more formalistic and coercive law enforcement with more enforcement cases as well as higher fines. The data also show that there is considerable regional variation with coastal areas having more and higher punishments than those inland. This article explores these findings, seeking to understand the explanation and meaning of these temporal and regional variation patterns. The study shows how enforcement varies when there is a convergence of governmental, social, and economic institutional forces. The article argues that the basis for such convergence has been fragile, as national pressures have lacked consistency and local community and government support evaporates when dominant sources of income are at stake.     

On the Ruins of the Democratic Transition: Human Rights as an Agenda Item in Abeyance for the Brazilian Democracy

This article discusses one of the main controversies in Brazilian society at this moment: the development of a national policy of human rights and the return of the debate on political crimes committed under the military dictatorship from 1964 onwards. The main hypothesis associates the barriers imposed on that human rights policy to the way in which democracy was retaken in the country and the model on which important segments related to the authoritarian government occupied strategic roles. Even today, this presents a real difficulty in terms of recovery and, if necessary, punishment for the crimes committed by the government during the dictatorship, which in turn makes the development of human rights policies more complicated.