Embodying Transition: FGC,Displacement, and Gender-making for Sudanese in Cairo

In this article I analyze both generalized propriety as a boundary marker of Sudanese identity in Cairo, and gendered attitudes toward morality and female genital cutting (FGC) as a fundamental aspect of that boundary. Sudanese have been profoundly affected by the ongoing political crisis in their home country, by the displacement triggered by political and economic collapse, and by their deteriorating legal and social status in Egypt. The dramatic changes in the circumstances of Sudanese residence in Cairo have challenged the cultural norm of gender complementarity as men ‘stay at home’ for want of work while women seek and find new opportunities for themselves. This unstable situation has led Sudanese to place more emphasis on ‘proper’ ways of behaving and being, an assertion that helps define the ethnic boundaries of the Sudanese community in Cairo. I demonstrate the inconsistencies between discourse and reality through ethnographic data while analyzing how Sudanese have found new ways of asserting their identity and resisting the practice of FGC.     

Political and economic motivations for labor control: A comparison of Ireland, Puerto Rico, and Singapore

The global economy imposes many constraints on small economies, especially those pursuing export-oriented industrialization (EOI) through the attraction of foreign direct investment. It has been argued that the success of EOI depends on the government’s ability to meet the labor requirements of this economic model—labor peace and low wages—through labor control policies and even repression. This article compares the histories of labor control in Ireland, Puerto Rico, and Singapore, three island-nations of similarly small size and high degree of integration with the global economy. While the pressures for labor control during EOI are evident in each case, there is a great deal of variation in the strategies governments adopted to rein in organized labor. I argue that the labor control methods employed during EOI are not explained by an economic logic but by a political one inherited from an earlier period when labor control was motivated by the efforts of a dominant party to consolidate its power.     

Regulation in Sport as a Borderline Case between State and Law Regulation and Self-Regulation

The study deals with the basic questions of a new field of law: the sports law. Sport is traditionally the world of self-regulation, since the sport-associations do create and apply law as well. The state has interfered in this monopolistic world in the last fifty years, so did, on the basis that intrusion, the law. Where are the limits of the regulation by law, and under which conditions can the state and its courts supervise the norms of sports, these questions are dealt by the study.     

Rediscovering Buchanan’s rediscovery: non-market exchange versus antiseptic allocation

Public Choice - While Buchanan is best known for the economics of politics and constitutions, his seminal contributions to this field are but one branch of his more underlying methodology and...     

Pork barrel politics and electoral returns at the local level

Public Choice - Does the targeted spending of public resources provide electoral benefits for incumbents? Despite the attention of scholars to that question, the empirical results are mixed thus...     

The stigmatized Italian visionary and the devout French physician: Palma Mattarelli d’Oria and docteur Imbert Gourbeyre*

ABSTRACT

The paper examines the case of an Italian local celebrity, Palma Mattarelli, born in 1825, and stigmatized at the significant age of 33. From that moment on, extraordinary phenomena multiplied around her: ecstasies, visions, ‘holy’ communion, apocalyptic prophecies. In the climate of renewed Catholic sensibility for extraordinary supernatural phenomena Palma’s fame soon extended abroad. The Docteur A. Imbert-Gourbeyre visited Palma in 1871, and dedicated the second volume of Les stigmatisées to her. Palma’s celebrity was undermined by the hostility of the local church authorities, and an inquisitorial examination of her which ended in 1872 with a negative judgement, ranging her cause in the frame of ‘afettata santità’. Imbert-Gourbeyre was advised not to republish his successful book on her. Yet, the extraordinary phenomena kept on recurring around her till her death in 1888.     

Homicidal hanging

We report a case of homicide by hanging of a 29-year-old woman that was committed by her husband, who nearly escaped from justice. We offer some reflections on the rarity of this method of mechanical asphyxia in cases of homicide, and on the difficulties in the diagnosis of the medico-legal etiology of these situations. We also offer a short review of similar cases in the medico-legal literature.     

Growth,control and tensions in an open socialist economy

Persistent contradictions among growth, efficiency and equilibrium in East European countries are analysed in our theoretical model. Internal and external tensions are distinguished. Both types of tension diminish the efficiency of investment and of foreign trade, moreover, they modify macrodistributional shares. Competing growth strategies are compared achieving constant internal and/or external tensions. A simple numberical macromodel is constructed to be used in computer simulations.