Trade or raid: Acadian settlers and native Americans before 1755

Public Choice - Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? To answer this question, we utilize the case of French...     

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...     

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.     

Intimacy at work: servant and employer relations in Que horas ela volta? (The second mother)

ABSTRACT

This chapter examines servant/employer relationships in Anna Muylaert’s film Que horas ela volta? (The Second Mother, 2015). Written in the first person by someone who locates herself as a white, middle-class Brazilian from humble origins who has lived abroad for nearly 30 years, the chapter focuses on the sense of discomfort caused on her by the film and by Brazilian middle-class reliance on domestic servants, whilst at the same time analysing the role played by intimacy and servitude in the film. In dialogue with Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s definition(s) of “cordialidade” (and with later discussions of it), the chapter examines what “cordialidade” can mean in the context of employers/domestic servants relationships in contemporary Brazil.