Suchergebnisse

Discusses Ann Petry's short story, "Like a Winding Sheet" (1946), in the context of black feminist literary theory, exploring the possibility of developing a reading strategy that does not replicate the effacement of black women's subjectivities. Petry's story is read as a delineation of the impossible position of black female flesh in US cultural discourse; the black female subject is erased & simultaneously constructed as ungendered flesh. It is suggested that black feminist literary criticism has failed to create a vocabulary that speaks to the specificity & diversity of African American women's experiences in the US. Instead, it has worked against the available cultural categories to reduce the complexity of black female lives to the status of incoherent differences. Merely being heard will not solve the problem of black female unrepresentability; a theorization of the discursive conditions that allow complex subjects to be rendered as singular social agents is advocated. D. M. Smith

The evolution of information technology is likely to result in intimate
interdependence between humans and technology. This fusion has been
characterized in popular science fiction as chip implantation. It is,
however, more likely to take the form of biometric identification using
such technologies as fingerprints, hand geometry and retina scanning.
Some applications of biometric identification technology are now
cost‐effective, reliable and highly accurate. As a result, biometric
systems are being developed in many countries for such purposes as
social security entitlement, payments, immigration control and election
management. Whether or not biometry delivers on its promise of
high‐quality identification, it will imperil individual autonomy.
Widespread application of the technologies would conflict with
contemporary values, and result in a class of outcasts.

The numerical determination of the relationship between the sanitary conditions in which people live, and the risks to health and life this may involve is a relatively new method of understanding infectious disease. It came to be known as "sanitary statistics" in the early nineteenth century, when this kind of investigation reached the climax of its social importance. But its roots go back to the late seventeenth century, when England was again visited by the plague, shattering a country that had hardly recovered from two decades of civil unrest. The two basic motives of sanitary statistics, which later made it so potent a reformist tool, were already present then in a first outline, namely the attempt to rationalize the frightful phenomenon of the epidemic and the conviction that its causes were somehow bound up with the social organization of urban life. As long as people had seen in the great epidemics God's punishing hand, the flagellants' reaction made sense. Man could only bow to Him; the arm of flesh might at most seek to avoid His punishment by punishing itself in advance. But when in 1854 the Presbytery of Edinburgh suggested to the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to call for a national fast against cholera, they received the cold reply that "the weal or woe of mankind
depends on the observance or neglect of those laws" which sanitary statistics had recently discovered. Divine reference was replaced by statistical reference, and the correlations thus revealed pointed to action by the "arm of flesh".

Learn the laws of inheritance and teach them to the people; for they are one half of useful knowledge. t·1ohannned (Fyzee 1955: 329) When the prophet created this aphorism he had in mind the rules of in heritance law revealed to him by Allah. We could apply it to social an thropology as well sincethe inheritance of property and the succession to positions of socio-political authority are among the most important elements of social organization. They are the vehicles of continuity which maintain property and authority through time. In many societies, and particularly in those generally studied by anthropologists, inherit ance and succession are closely interconnected with kinship and descent and provide the economic and political substance for the existence and continuity of kinship- or descent-based social groups. They are, as it were, the flesh on the bare bones of kinship relations. The importance of inheritance has, of course, not escaped the notice of social and legal anthropologists, and in recent years several studies have ably demonstrated the point (Radcliffe-Brown 1952, Goodenough 1951, Leach 1961 b, Goody 1962, Lloyd 1962, Gray and Gulliver (eds.) 1964, Derrett (ed.) 1965, Gluckman 1972, Moore 1969, Burling 1974). Yet in general, property and inheritance have rather been treated as an appendix to economic and kinship studies

In his article in this issue Vicente Navarro augments his presentation on the global nature of the crisis of social welfare under capitalism with a financial summary of the Reagan budget (for fiscal year 1981/82). This article adds additional flesh to Navarro's discussion through an examination of some of the critical details as well as wider implications of the Reagan budget, particularly as it affects recipients of social welfare programmes for the coming period