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ABSTRACT Anthropologists of science conventionally examine the cultural politics of natural sciences. However, historical and social sciences also have cultural contexts and consequences. This article extends science studies to public engagement with Maya hieroglyphic decipherment. In the 1970s several scholars claimed to discover Maya hieroglyphs' grammatical structure. Linda Schele popularized decipherment through sites including the Maya Meetings, public workshops at the University of Texas–Austin. As archaeologists and competing camps of hieroglyph experts challenged Schele and her colleagues' interpretations, the Maya Meetings established a public of witnesses committed to these experts' claims. The Maya Meetings cultivated assent through highly regulated practices enabling participants to imagine that they independently confirmed decipherments. Public engagement bolstered experts' problematic claims to have imparted "voice" and "history" to the ancient Maya by transforming this complex medium into writing. I show how such public engagement did not simply democratize knowledge production and intensified hierarchies within Maya studies. [public science, Maya hieroglyphs, witnessing, anthropology of science]RESUMEN Los antropólogos de la ciencia examinan la política cultural de las ciencias naturales. Sin embargo, las ciencias históricas y sociales también tienen contextos culturales. Este ensayo amplia los estudios culturales de la ciencia a la participación del público en el desciframiento de los jeroglíficos mayas. Durante la década de 1970, unos expertos pretendieron haber descubierto la estructura gramatical de los jeroglíficos. Linda Schele popularizó las técnicas de desciframiento a través de talleres públicos en la Universidad de Texas–Austin. Mientras unos arqueólogos y campos de epigrafistas dasafiaron el desciframiento, los talleres establecieron un público de testigos comprometidos con estos expertos. Los talleres permitieron a los participantes que imaginaran que habían confirmado los desciframientos. La participación pública reforzó los reclamos problemáticos de expertos que habian impartado "voz" e "historia" a los antiguos mayas. Muestro cómo la participación pública no democratizó la producción de conocimiento y intensificó jerarquías en los estudios mayas.

In this paper, I work with Aristotles discussions of Sparta, Crete, and Carthage to begin an examination of the prospects for a "polity" in the real world. I believe that Aristotle is showing that the painstaking lawgivers of these admired communities could not engineer a situation in which both the citizens would be virtuous and the city stable. On the other hand, these regimes did achieve some good political effects in terms of stability, if not those at which the original lawgivers aimed. I conclude that Aristotle suggests that, as important as the initial lawgiver is for establishing the way of life of a regime, he cannot take all contingencies into account and he cannot rely on future statesmen to maintain the way of life against all odds. If chance must play a large role in human affairs, then certain characteristics of a political order will enable it to weather the storm. What characteristics must the citizens embody and the regime entail to guard the basic arrangements against inevitable decay? In his discussion of these regimes, admired as attempting to be the best simply, Aristotle points toward the institutional arrangements of a polity, which mixes the influence of the rich and the poor to create a regime that is neither democratic nor oligarchic, but a little of both. We shall see that the Spartan, Cretan, and Carthaginian regimes already mixed some democratic elements with quite a few oligarchic elements yet still failed. I will argue that if Sparta, Crete, or Carthage had offered him the opportunity to advise them on reform, Aristotle would have suggested creating a substantial middle class, the lesson he teaches in his in-depth discussion of the polity in Politics IV as the best means of strengthening the balance of oligarchic and democratic elements in these regimes, thereby creating the best atmosphere for political stability and achievable justice. Adapted from the source document.

Este trabajo plantea el estudio de la revista Sardio como una formación cultural que incluye o postula un programa literario pero también político y cultural. Se trata de estudiar cómo esta formación introduce en el ámbito de la cultura nacional algunas disputas sobre la fi gura del artista, el compromiso intelectual, las formas de legitimación del escritor en el espacio público, y cómo poco a poco sus miembros van adoptando posiciones ideológicas radicales que responden a intereses e influencias de la época. ; This paper proposes a study of the magazine Sardio as a cultural formation that includes or postulates a literary as well as a political and cultural program. It attempts to explore how this formation introduces in the national cultural field some disputes about the figure of the artist, intellectual commitment, the writer's forms of legitimation in the public sphere, and how little by little Sardio's members start to adopt radical ideological positions that respond to their epoch's interests and influences. ; 55-73 ; alconber@ula.ve, alconber@yahoo.com, alconber@gmail.com ; Anual

"Governing by Design offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves.In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of forms: modernization, obsolescence, technology, capital, ergonomics, biopolitics, and others. The chapters explore the diffusion of power through the establishment of norms and networks that frame human conduct, action, identity, and design. They follow design as it functions through the body, in the home, and at the state and international level.Overall, Aggregate views the intersection of architecture with the human need for what Foucault termed "governmentality"--societal rules, structures, repetition, and protocols--as a way to provide security and tame risk. Here, the conjunction of power and the power of design reinforces governmentality and infuses a sense of social permanence despite the exceedingly fluid nature of societies and the disintegration of cultural memory in the modern era"--

A persistent question in the study of American federalism is if the states actually serve as "laboratories of democracy" for the country as a whole. I argue that political attention to policy areas can diffuse upwards, from state legislatures to Congress. National and state legislators share a party brand and can learn from policy debates in other levels. In particular, we should expect to see the diffusion of messaging legislation, or bills that were introduced without the intention of becoming law, after members of Congress observe their political effects in the states. Using an original dataset of introduced bills in all 50 state legislatures in 22 policy areas since 1991 drawn from LexisNexis, I show a positive association between changes in the number of state legislative bills introduced in 12 policy areas and the number of Congressional bills introduced in the next session, which is taken as evidence of "bottom-up" diffusion. This relationship is more prevalent between Republican state legislators and members of Congress, within state delegations, and in issue areas where the interest group community lobbies before both the states and national government. To the extent that states are laboratories for the nation, they may be political laboratories.

The vast majority of party and electoral researches, including the countries of the Visegrad Group, focuses on the impact of elections and electoral systems on the institutionalization of parties and party systems, predominantly at the national level. However, the proposed article broadened this analysis mainly at the national level, in particular by analyzing regional elections and regional party systems. This is due to the fact that party-electoral interconnection is not one-tier, but instead is determined territorially, including territorial or administrative heterogeneity during elections. In other words, the study aims to show how region and regional elections (in the format of party system regionalization) affect the national political process, and, conversely, how national elections (in the format of party system nationalization) influence the regional political process in the context of the countries of the Visegrad Group. In this regard, the indicators of voter turnout, electoral volatility, influence of regional parties and coalitions, peculiarities and consequences of electoral blocs' and coalitions' formation, parameters of territorial and socio-political cleavages and constructions of electoral systems and formulas were the directories of this relationship, both at national and regional levels, in the proposed study. Their use at the example of the Visegrad countries has made it possible to argue that the relationship between regional and national level of electoral competition and the parameters of the structuring of party systems in the analyzed region is largely reflected in nationalization processes at both national and regional level. Although it is theoretically found that such a relationship is bilateral and counter-dependent on the processes of regionalization of national elections and national electoral systems, or instead on nationalization of regional elections and regional party systems.
Keywords: national elections, regional elections, party systems, nationalization and regionalization of party systems, the countries of the Visegrad Group.

NO-DO is the official name of the Spanish state newsreels, an acronym formed by the abbreviation of Noticiarios (News) and Documentales (Documentaries). In contrast to cinema newsreels in other occidental countries, NO-DO is closely associated with Franco's dictatorship (1939–1975). Created by Franco's propaganda ministry in 1943, NO-DO reels were shown until 1981, just a few years after Franco's death in 1975. The aim of this paper is to analyze Spanish newsreels' modes of representation of politics and of political alterity in Mouffe's sense. It seeks to examine how NO-DO portrays the political antagonism that facilitated the Francoist regime's construction of its own identity. In order to do so, the paper firsts draw a genealogy of this genre in Spain and frames it within the context of 1968. Second, it presents an overview of the contents and the modes of representations of the newsreels during this year, later focusing on the timeframe from May to August. The goal is to examine the medial strategies used by the newsreel genre to deal with political Others lurking within and beyond Spain's borders.

To reduce environmental problems, citizens, governments, and organisations need to take action to reduce their environmental impact. In the current paper, we tested if and how perceived environmental responsibility of organisations and government is related to pro-environmental behaviour and acceptability of pro-environmental policies among employees, customers, and citizens. We hypothesised that the stronger perceived environmental responsibility of organisations and government, the stronger the environmental self-identity of employees, customers, and citizens because they are a part of that organisation. We hypothesised that a stronger environmental self-identity, in turn, is positively related to a range of pro-environmental actions as well as acceptability of pro-environmental policies. We tested our hypotheses in three studies. We found that a stronger perceived environmental responsibility of organisations is indeed related to a stronger environmental self-identity among employees and customers of the organisation. A stronger environmental self-identity was in turn related to a range of pro-environmental actions. An alternative explanation for our findings is that those with a stronger environmental self-identity are more likely to become a customer at an organisation with a strong perceived environmental responsibility. However, we found support for our hypotheses among those who chose and among those who did not freely choose to be a customer of the organisation, suggesting that the alternative explanation does not fully explain our findings. Furthermore, we found that citizens report a stronger environmental self-identity when perceived environmental responsibility of their government is stronger. A stronger environmental self-identity was in turn related to a higher acceptability of policies aiming to promote energy savings. Our findings are in line with social identity theory, which states that people partly infer how they see themselves based on the groups to which they belong. Furthermore, our ...

"This book traces how the geographical sciences have become entwined with politics, territorial claim making, and nation-building in Israel/Palestine. In particular, the focus is on the history of geographical sciences before and after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and how surveying, mapping, and naming the new territory become a crucial part of its making. With the 1993 Oslo Interim Agreement, Palestinians also surveyed and mapped the territory allocated to a future State of Palestine, with the expectation that they will, within five years, gain full sovereignty. In both cases, maps served to evoke a sense of national identity, facilitated a state's ability to govern, and helped delineate territory. Besides maps geopolitical functions for nation-state building, they also become weapons in map wars. Before and after the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, maps of the region became one of the many battlefields in which political conflicts over land claims and the ethno-national identity of this contested land were being waged. Aided by an increasingly user-defined mapping environment, Israeli and Palestinian governmental and non-governmental organizations increasingly relied on the rhetoric of maps in order to put forth their geopolitical visions. Such struggles over land and its rightful owners in Israel/Palestine exemplify processes underway in other states across the globe, whether in South Africa or Ukraine, which are engaged in disputes over territorial boundaries, national identities, and the territorial integrity of nation-states. Maps, no less, have become crucial tools in these struggles"--

Regional governance from a comparative perspective / Detlef Nolte, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany . - State and society in the transnational space / Wolfgang Hein, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany . - Analysis of global and regional convergence from an international economic perspective / Víctor M. González-Sánchez, UNED, National University of Distance Education, Madrid, Spain . - Financial literacy and financial inclusion : a double challenge for public sector / Susana de los Ríos-Sastre, Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid, Spain. - Does university education develop entrepreneurial qualities? / Sylvia Rohlfer and Sergio Pulgarin, CUNEF, Colegio Universitario de Estudios Financieros, Calle Leonardo Prieto Castro, Madrid, Spain, and others . - State-formation and patterns of violence : a cross regional comparison / Sabine Kurtenbach, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany . - Between independence and control : recent developments within the judiciary in Latin America / Cordula Tibi Weber and Mariana Llanos, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany . - China-Cuba relations in the 21st century / Adrian H. Hearn, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia . - Subnational authoritarian enclaves and their impact on national democratic rule : evidence from Mexico / Allyson Lucinda Benton, CIDE Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico D. F., Mexico . - State and society structural distance and measurements : an empirical analysis of China's national business associations / Long Ningli, China Center for Comparative Politics & Economics, Beijing, China . - A methodology for economic analysis of water reuse projects : the case of the city of Barcelona / Oriana Correia, "Scar Alfranca and Luis Seguí, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

How do emerging states obtain international recognition and secure membership of international organizations in contemporary world politics? Using the concept of 'metis', this article explores the role of everyday prudent and situated discourses, diplomatic performances and entanglements in the enactment of sovereign statehood and the overcoming of external contestation. To this end, it describes Kosovo's diplomatic approach to becoming a sovereign state by obtaining international recognition and securing membership of international organizations. Drawing on institutional ethnographic research and first-hand observations, the article argues that Kosovo's success in consolidating its sovereign statehood has been the situational assemblage of multiple discourses, practiced through a broad variety of performative actions and shaped by a complex entanglement with global assemblages of norms, actors, relations and events. Accordingly, this study contributes to the conceptualization of the everyday in diplomatic practice by offering an account of how micro-practices feed into macro-practices in world politics.

How do emerging states obtain international recognition and secure membership of international organizations in contemporary world politics? Using the concept of 'metis', this article explores the role of everyday prudent and situated discourses, diplomatic performances and entanglements in the enactment of sovereign statehood and the overcoming of external contestation. To this end, it describes Kosovo's diplomatic approach to becoming a sovereign state by obtaining international recognition and securing membership of international organizations. Drawing on institutional ethnographic research and first-hand observations, the article argues that Kosovo's success in consolidating its sovereign statehood has been the situational assemblage of multiple discourses, practiced through a broad variety of performative actions and shaped by a complex entanglement with global assemblages of norms, actors, relations and events. Accordingly, this study contributes to the conceptualization of the everyday in diplomatic practice by offering an account of how micro-practices feed into macro-practices in world politics.

It has been said that technological and economic development lead ultimately to the decline of communal conflict, and that the emergence of new kinds of socio-economic roles and identities undercuts the organizational bases upon which communal (that is, "racial," "ethnic," "religious," or "tribal") politics rests. In the past decade, several scholars working in culturally plural societies have challenged this conventional view. They have suggested that communalism may in fact be a persistent feature of social change, and that the dichotomous traditionmodernity models which have often guided our empirical investigations have obscured this theoretical alternative and thereby produced false expectations concerning the direction of change. This paper attempts to synthesize the various elements of this emerging theoretical perspective through the formulation of several propositions which link modernization to communalism. While our discussion will draw primarily upon the Nigerian experience for illustrative material, the propositions are intended to be applicable across societies."Communalism," in this paper, refers to the political assertiveness of groups which have three distinguishing characteristics: first, their membership is comprised of persons who share in a common culture and identity and, to use Karl Deutsch's term, a "complementarity of communication;" second, they encompass the full range of demographic (age and sex) divisions within the wider society and provide "for a network of groups and institutions extending throughout the individual's entire life cycle;" and, third, like the wider society in which they exist, they tend to be differentiated by wealth, status, and power.