Suchergebnisse

Caste inequality is a heatedly debated issue in contemporary Kerala, in stark contrast to an earlier time, when the idea that Kerala had overcome caste hierarchies through the twin strategies of social development and political mobilisation was still hegemonic. Post-1990s, political developments have pushed the question of caste back into the forefront of public debate, and 'Dalit identity politics' has been perceived as a serious threat by Kerala's powerful left parties, despite the fact that Dalit political formations are not numerically powerful. Three processes seem to be crucial in precipitating the current situation: (a) the transformation of politics itself in the mid-1990s from the 'public action' mode to the 'liberal' mode, which was rejected by the Dalits and tribal communities; (b) rapidly widening economic inequalities and rapidly crystallising elite ideological dominance led to the strengthening of abjection as a mode of marginalisation of the lower castes which is being resisted; (c) the transformation of the Malayali literary public brought to the fore questions of caste and gender that were submerged under the earlier socio-cultural consensus generated by the hegemonic Malayali national popular shaped by the communists.

This article carries out an investigation into the experience of engagement with the idea of national self-reliance in the developing world during the period of last fifty years with a special focus on India's experience. It compares the experiences of implementation of the strategies of import substitution, export promotion and global integration with a view to understand their contribution to the achievement of the goals of development for a country like India during the period of last two decades. It brings out that even during the post-liberalisation period in those sectors where the policy-makers deliberately chose to delay the implementation of external liberalisation and selectively provided state protection, technological achievements have been better. However, it argues that in the post-WTO world there is the need to engineer a shift away from the exclusive reliance on either import substitution or export promotion. The strategy of development should also focus on those pathways of sustainable development that have the aim to upgrade directly the local capabilities of peasants and artisans and their access to local resources and local markets to achieve self-reliance for the people.

This article examines the cross-cultural influence that worked on the absorption process of the goddess Kāmākhyā (Assam) within the Brahmanic pantheon, through a correlation of textual and historical-religious pieces of evidence. 2 2 This article is an enlarged and revised version of a paper that I presented on 18 September 2015 during the sixth Coffee Break Conference (17–19 September) held at the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies of 'Sapienza' University of Rome. In Assam, the cross-cultural interaction, between local tribes and Indo-Aryan speakers, began around 200 BCE–100 CE—when the Vedic culture had already changed from its earlier theological pattern. Therefore, after had been influenced by a long cross-cultural negotiation, the early medieval north-eastern purāṇas transformed the dakṣayajña myth, legitimising the temple of Kāmākhyā on Nīlācala as the greatest śākta pīṭha (seat of power), where the yoni (vulva) of Sat ī was preserved. In this way, the Purāṇas reconnected Nīlācala–Kāmākhyā not only to the sexual symbolism, but also to an ancient cremation ground and its death imaginary–a fact that the systematisation of the yoginī cult (ninth–eleventh century) into the Yoginī Kaula school corroborated. In this cross-cultural context, the early medieval Assamese dynasties emerged tied to the danger of liminal powers—linked to both the heterodox śākta-tantra sects and tribal traditions that were harnessed by the kings through the exoteric and esoteric rituals practised at Kāmākhyā.

The goal of this research is to examine the processes of suburbanization and sprawl in two post-socialist capital cities in Southeast Europe – Belgrade, Serbia and Sofia, Bulgaria. Our analysis begins with a survey of relevant historical developments in the two cities, which illustrates the impact of major political, economic and social drivers on urban development processes and form. We follow this with an empirical study aimed at identifying contemporary features of peri-urban processes occurring in the two cities. Specifically, we explore spatial patterns, general population trends and changes in urban densities. Our study confirms earlier observations by other researchers that processes of suburbanization are occurring in Belgrade and Sofia. Yet this research goes further and emphasizes the specific combination of conditions inherited from the era of state socialism and the features of South-east European urban culture. Thus regarding the form of urban expansion, we observe relatively weak trends of sprawl with strong local specifics. On this basis, we discuss our empirical results with the objective of identifying the specifics of studied processes in Belgrade and Sofia as a grounds for the articulation of an appropriate policy framework

Over 8,200 large city fires broke out between 1000 and 1939 CE in Central Europe. Prometheus Tamed inquires into the long-term history of that fire ecology, its local and regional frequencies, its relationship to climate history. It asks for the visual and narrative representation of that threat in every-day life. Institutional forms of fire insurance emerged in the form of private joint stock companies (the British model, starting in 1681) or in the form of cameralist fire insurances (the German model, starting in 1676) They contributed to shape and change society, transforming old communities of charitable solidarity into risk communities, finally supplemented by networks of cosmopolite aid. After 1830, insurance agencies expanded tremendously quickly all over the globe: Cultural clashes of Western and native perceptions of fire risk and of what is insurance can be studied as part of a critical archaeology of world risk society and the plurality of modernities

AbstractDuring the Cold War, cities were seen as likely targets of modern total warfare and systems of civil defence were created to protect cities and their inhabitants. Yet existing civil defence histories have focused little on the specifically urban aspect, and urban historians likewise have paid civil defence little attention. Using Aarhus, Denmark, as a case-study, this article examines civil defence through planning, practices and materiality in a specific urban landscape. By analysing how civil defence was organized, performed and built in Denmark, the article sheds light on the mutual imbrication of urban planning, geography and materiality and local civil defence. I argue that through biopolitics, local civil defence authorities imagineered an idealized survivalist community of city dwellers who would pull together to protect and save their city and that this contributed to taming an incomprehensible, global, nuclear catastrophe into a manageable, localized, urban calamity.

Report of the French army's activities in various Spanish towns including Tarancon and Santa Cruz de la Zarza, dated Seville, 8 February 1808. Followed by 'Carta interceptada', commenting on the Spanish army's movements against the French, dated Madrid, 26 December 1808. Possibly published Buenos Aires, 1809

In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of "Spaceship Earth"-the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system-exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions.Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the "global"-as in global population, global climate, and global economy-an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO's Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.

Foreword /by Irasema Coronado and Christine Marín --Acknowledgments --Introduction --1.The Mexican Revolution of 1910 --2.Reenganche: the promise of good-paying jobs --3.Linking one country with another, 1848-1960 --4.Family: shifting views --5.Arizona mining towns --6.Barrio life in Phoenix: stay in your corner --7.Midwestern Catholic refugees --Epilogue --Appendix A. Summaries of the women interviewed --Appendix B. Conducting a community resolana.