Nationalism,identity and landscape in contemporary Galicia

In escaping the territorial trap of the nation-state, political geography has devoted mounting attention to sub-state geographies of nationalism. This paper traces the history, geographies, and politics of Spanish Galicia, in light of the contradictory processes of contemporary European integration and secessionism. After a review of sub-state nationalism, it contextualizes Galician nationalism within Spanish regionalism. It offers an historical overview that highlights the uniqueness of Galician culture and explicates the roots of the current nationalist movement. Finally, it delves into contemporary Galician politics, including its electoral dimensions, cyberpolitics, and banal nationalism, in which territory plays a decisive role.     

Derrida on Identity and Difference: A Radical Democratic Reading of The Other Heading

Abstract

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power pre suppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that social actors have multiple interpretative horizons avail able to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism.     

A Common Future and a Common Identity： The Transformation Process of Political and Social Identities in the South Caucasus Countries

In reflecting on the case of the South Caucasus （Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia）, one of the most popular perspectives is its lack of a common identity. The main argument is that it is a culturally diverse region with old-fashioned, ethnically exclusive nationalism. From this point of view, the process of the formation of a European identity in the region acquires particular importance. A European identity could act as a catalyst for bringing the region together. This identity could be considered as based on much more than just political orientation but fundamentally grounded in common values. This comprehensive integration in the South Caucasus can be achieved through the formulation and acceptance of a common political identity based on the political orientations of the South Caucasian States and their citizens. The main question that this study tries to answer is how people in the South Caucasian countries identify themselves in terms of a European identity. A suitable analysis is increasingly important at both the micro and the macro levels. The author examines the people＇s attitudes in the three South Caucasian states toward Western culture, states, and organizations, drawing on opinion polls conducted by the Caucasus Research Resources Center （CRRC）. The author seeks to analyze attitudes toward the West in the South Caucasus on a macro as well as on a micro level. The author seeks also to provide a much-needed analysis for decision making, based on empirical data that help understand public opinion toward the European Union （EU） in the countries of the South Caucasus, and that can contribute to the refinement of integration strategies.     

所有权制度的历史分析

从历史的角度看,没有哪一项法律制度像所有权这样承载着极为厚重的人文价值。人类社会从蒙昧时期、文明时期发展到近现代社会时期,所有权制度经历了从原始的财产支配到个人人性乃至社会整体的精神解放、从等级身份制条件下的公然不平等到形式主义的人人平等、从近现代的绝对所有权到现代社会兼顾实质平等的所有权这些重大的法律价值嬗变。所有权制度的有效性,是法律体系的核心目标,而有效的所有权制度,只有从认真对待民众的自然权利的角度入手才能够真正予以理解。在我国,解放民众所有权上的制度和思想桎梏、建立科学的公共财产所有权制度,应当成为我国进一步发展所有权制度的社会共识。     

Art et artisanat en Afrique Noire: Problèmes d'une définition différentielle

In 1977, John Lonsdale published a review of William R. Ochieng's study APre-Colonial History of the Gusii of Western Kenya in the Kenya Historical Review. Entitled “When did the Gusii (or any other group) become a ‘Tribe’?”, the ten-page article was less a book review and more a treatise on the practice of history in Africa. Taking Lonsdale's question as a point of inspiration, this article provides a critical rethinking of the theories of “tribe”, ethnicity and identity politics that continue to dominate African scholarship by examining the particular case of the Luyia in western Kenya. Through the seemingly incongruous and stubbornly diverse accounting of Luyia political community, this study suggests that histories of ethnic identity remain trapped by their own constructivist logic, elevating the “inventors” of traditional accounts at the expense of the plural and dissenting voices that characterise the multiple forms of political imagination practised across Africa that, while diverse, continue to rely on the idiom of the “tribe”.     

Scarification and identity in the liberated Africans department register, 1814–1815

This research intersects with ongoing efforts to understand the identity of enslaved Africans entering the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Methods of reading scarification, along with its close analogue tattooing within the African context are a fundamental starting point for this study. Evidence for this approach may be found in the Registers of Liberated Africans, which are held at the Sierra Leone Public Archives at Fourah Bay College and at the National Archives in Kew. These documents, created between 1808–1862, provide data for nearly 100,000 Africans removed from vessels and holding pens which would have sent them to the Americas. Considered in light of anthropological theories of identity and the marked body, this data can be unpacked to find hidden meanings. This study employs a new approach to understanding origins, by translating body modification to understand the information conveyed through the skins of individuals.     

Against General Theory in Comparative Research

This paper argues against the search for a general theory of crime causation in comparative criminology. It includes a critique of two advocates of general theory, and offers three propositions which suggest appropriate strategies for theory construction in comparative research.     

‘I'm still a hustler’: entrepreneurial responses to precarity by participants in phase I clinical trials

Abstract

This paper questions the implications of entrepreneurial responses to conditions of employment precarity by ‘healthy volunteers’ in phase I clinical trials in the United States. Such individuals are typically serial participants who often identify as professional volunteers and seek out drug studies as their primary source of income. Drawing on extensive qualitative research, this paper illustrates how healthy volunteers selectively import the identity of ‘hustler’ from the street environment and reposition it as connoting a set of valuable creative skills that give them a competitive edge over other participants. An entrepreneurial ethos allows them to view personal sacrifice and exposure to potentially dangerous drugs as smart investments leading to financially stable futures. These discursive moves normalize extractive, and at times dehumanizing, labour relations that offload expenses and risks to workers.     

Family history,identity, and public history: writing a history of The Benevolent Society in its 200th year

Abstract

Since 2011, the authors have worked together on outputs associated with the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society of New South Wales, Australia's oldest charity, established in 1813. This article focuses on one of those outputs—a project making use of family histories of clients of The Benevolent Society's Asylum, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to reveal the histories of these families in colonial New South Wales. The project also involves an exploration of the many different ways in which contemporary Australians are active agents in the creation of historical knowledge when practicing family history.     

State,identity, and the politics of music: Eurovision and nation-building in Azerbaijan

Albeit often – and fairly – degraded in the world of high culture as a populist and politicized representation of music, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) – by sheer virtue of the populist and politicized nature of its essence – stands among the most consequential cultural encounters to which post-independence Azerbaijan has been exposed, in that the extent to which Baku's victory in the ESC-2011 – and the further developments this victory has generated – can potentially impact on, and contribute to, the very process of nation-building and national identity formation, with which this post-Soviet Muslim-majority country is currently struggling, is unparalleled by any of the state's earlier encounters of the kind. This paper focuses on, and examines, four intimately related ways in which the ESC and Azerbaijan's successful involvement with the latter worked to interfere with the country's nation-building: as a dubious factor in the evolution of the Western sense of self among Azerbaijanis; as a unifying force within the structure of the country's rapidly maturing civil society; as a medium working to open up a channel through which Western popular cultural elements could interfere with the evolving dynamics of, and work to globalize, indeed de-endogenize, indigenous Azerbaijani culture, on one hand, and unify the discursive realm within which the country's cultural domain is to further evolve, on the other; and, finally, as an important element serving to decouple the evolving processes within the country's cultural domain from the unfolding dynamics of conflict settlement and hence conducive to the diversification of public discourse in Azerbaijan.