西部地区的文化冲突与法律调适

民族文化冲突造成的价值观念、民族心理和政治文化的嬗变是影响民族地区社会稳定的隐性文化因素.缓解与避免文化冲突必须进行民族文化适应.目前,西部地区的文化冲突已成为影响当地民族团结、社会稳定的重要因素,为此,应当在尊重文化发展规律的基础上,正视文化冲突的影响,将文化安全纳人法律的框架之内,在各民族间牢固树立团结稳定的核心思想借助法律武器捍卫国家的文化主权;我国的法律制度应当确立“国家认同”的核心价值观,让“祖国”、“中国人”成为各个民族间不可分离的文化纽带;要以宪法为核心,以文化法为主要内容,加快建立有中国特色的少数民族文化权利法律保护体系.     

Coming in from the Cold: Grenada and Cuba since 1983

Abstract

The Grenada Revolution’s radical course was stamped by the bold turn to Cuba in April 1979. Cuban commitment to Maurice Bishop’s regime was crucial to its consolidation. In 1983 counter-revolution and invasion ruptured Grenada–Cuba ties and damaged Havana’s relations with Caribbean Community states. Since the demise of the Cold War, Havana’s survival strategy has prioritised regional integration and cooperation in the Americas. In the Anglophone Caribbean, Grenada has been at the centre of this rapprochement since 1993. Despite Washington’s disapproval, Grenada champions expanded ties with socialist Cuba. The rekindled alliance brings tangible mutual benefits and validates the strategy of South–South cooperation advocated by Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary Government and New Jewel Movement.     

Le phénomène “Krouman” à Sassandra: la marque d’une institution séculaire

A recurrent anxiety in contemporary Botswana is the perception of an immediate threat from external forces: strangers, livestock, and disease. How do the state and its citizens react under these conditions? The following article explores this question in the context of globalization, discourses of autochthony, and the blood-based politics of population management in Botswana. In recent years, Batswana increasingly see themselves as a nation under siege from foreigners, and in particular, newly arrived migrants from Zimbabwe. Under pressure from outside, Botswana citizens fear the loss of their physical homeland and the denigration of their collective identity and sense of morality. Through a reading of publications in the print media, I examine the articulation of the rhetoric of invasion and national paranoia that has taken root in Botswana. Although the presumption of assault by outsiders is said to threaten the existence of the Batswana nation through the erosion of the supposedly distinct boundaries between citizen and stranger, these apprehensions also carry a potent creative potential. I argue that, in an environment of economic uncertainty and ethnic instability, the specter of the stranger/Zimbabwean is used to reconfigure the content and emphasis of citizenship in Botswana.     

Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times

The article is a consideration of the question of identity in South Africa, and also in a global context. Just as South Africa has looked to the world in order to understand its place, so too the world might look to South Africa to illuminate patterns less immediately visible elsewhere. Far from being unrepresentative in the apartheid period, South Africa was the ‘state of exception’ that incarnated and concentrated global realities; equally in the current era the reciprocal relations between the South African and the global evoke haunting concerns. The article begins with a consideration of the ‘classic’ generation of anti-apartheid activists, including figures such as Nelson Mandela and Bram Fischer, as they fashioned a new sense of South African identity. Yet it goes on to consider what happens when the classic period is over, and older definitions and oppositions are no longer available. Here the navigations of fiction, both in South Africa and elsewhere, become significant, and the article examines the work of writers from Gordimer, Coetzee and Ndebele, to Caryl Phillips and W. G. Sebald. It ends with a contemplation of the current period, nearly twenty years after the democratic transition in South Africa. In the era of the Marikana massacre and other pressing developments, both music and fiction open up some of the ambiguities and obligations. Drawing on Agamben, I suggest the intrinsic mutuality of the ‘home’ and the ‘foreign’ in establishing a more promising—and challenging—sense of belonging and identity both in South Africa and the world.     

“Be a Mighty Hard Message”: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Exploration of Whiteness in the Post-Apartheid Classroom

In post-apartheid classrooms students sometimes regard systemic racial oppression as distant history. They often note that they “did” apartheid at school. This paper considers how teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved can prompt a profound self-examination in both black and white South African students. Beloved demands the active participation of the “born free” generation in a deliberate, serious engagement with the traumatic historical past. Furthermore, Morrison’s interrogation of white behavior, white constructions of black people, and the threat of racialized violence that whiteness contains within it, can productively challenge white racial identity. Teaching this novel has provided some insight into the continued articulation of white privilege and aversive racism among white South African students. Some are unnerved, express resistance, or refuse the novel’s inquiry into race. I discuss how I encourage my students to heed Morrison’s call to engage with historical memory so as to move towards a more viable future.     

Social cohesion for the unfinished business of land reform in South Africa

Abstract

This article aims to discuss social cohesion as an alternative instrument to address the ever dragging land question in South Africa. Although there are various activities that have been undertaken and policy programmes that have been proposed, all those initiatives have not been able to completely translate land reform policy into practice as intended. Other than recognising the ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ policy which appears not to have been internalised by the stakeholders concerned, this article also presents a transformative approach for both white land owners and black emerging farmers to work together in a tolerant and amicable manner. The most critical step that is required for land reform in the whole country is a public consultation process for government to be able to engage with all parties and to put a list of informed alternatives on the table for discussion. Obviously, that includes the willing seller willing buyer policy. Based on the outcomes of such discussions, the government has to play a mediation role to heal the racial division caused by the Natives Land Act of 1913. In short, this discussion presents social cohesion to heal the past without land owners perceiving transformation policies as apartheid in reverse.     

ISSUES OF RACE,ETHNICITY, SOCIO-ECONOMIC POSITION AND SPATIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA: HOW SPATIAL ACCESS AND EXPRESSION STILL PERPETUATE NOTIONS OF DIFFERENCE,SEPARATION AND UNCERTAINTY AMONGST THE SOUTH AFRICAN COLOURED1 POPULATION

ABSTRACT

While the Native Land Act [Act 27 of 1913] and the Native Trust and Land Act [Act 18 of 1936] dispossessed black South Africans of their land physically, the insidious Group Areas Act [Act 41 of 1950] and the Population Registration Act [Act 30 of 1950] reified perceptions of race and ethnicity in the context of phenotype, culture, language and even religion. Although these Acts were repealed the legacy remains part of the South African psyche still. Such perceptions are evident in the Coloured communities where the Population Registration Act classified and defined the group as a singular unit while the Group Areas Act segregated and confined them, and restricted their association within the group almost exclusively. This meant that education, access to information, socialising, and religious assembly and to a limited extent employment were restricted mostly to these designated segregated areas. Limited interaction between various legislated groups, even within the Coloured group itself reinforced the socio-economic racial hierarchy and the prejudices linked to economics. The combination of these Acts created an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ hostility further (re)enforcing notions of separateness and difference. The article seeks to examine social and racial interpretation (based on income and spatial realities) of the Coloured population in the Eastern Cape and how the group perceives its primary identity and allegiance in terms of ethnicity or national identity as salient in the current socio-political environment. The objectives are first to assert that legislated segregation created rigid jingoist structures of ethnic and racial identities that will take longer to dismantle than the Acts of separation had and secondly that national identity can be salient amongst a minority group irrespective of socio-economic position. The conclusion highlights that the social and identity Acts, spatial acts, regarded once as a legislated absolute, reduced the Coloured communities specifically, to regard themselves as different yet the same, inferior and superior, marginalised yet included, but that this is not incompatible with nation building.     

Sharecropping contracts in rural India: A note

In this article we examine the terms of sharecropping contracts using data from rural India. We examine the effect of - (1) the sharing of input costs between landlord and tenant; (2) the tenant's capacity to borrow; and (3) the existence of outside employment opportunities for the tenant — on the share parameter. We regress the share paid by the household on a set of cultivating household and village level characteristics and find that cost sharing and the existence of outside employment opportunities significantly affect the share parameter.     

Sewing to satisfaction: craft-based entrepreneurs in contemporary Kyrgyzstan

This article focuses on the reassembling of apparel production in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. We contribute to this special issue on well-being in Central Asia by examining how individual craft-based apparel producers (a subset of producers in the apparel industry) describe the process through which they built upon their Soviet past and reoriented their professional trajectories in a new competitive market environment. These producers locate professional satisfaction in their ability to draw upon and creatively re-employ local knowledge and experience learned in Soviet institutions, ultimately – as they articulate and perceive – deriving pride and well-being from the process of selling highly regarded ethnically inspired apparel products both at home and abroad.