The impact of the changing weaving industry on the culture and socioeconomic development of Maya women in Guatemala

Growing demand for handwoven Maya textiles from Guatemala parallels recent international fascination with Maya civilization. This thesis surveys the effects of increases in demands for artisan textiles in Guatemala, and explores the reactions of women involved in Aj Quen, a weavers' association. The hypothesis is that the well-being of Maya women depends on their participation in the association. This is tested by using indicators of the weavers' attitudes defined as their "well-being" regarding (1) health, (2) education levels, (3) child care practices, and (4) economic stability. Interviews were conducted with 127 Maya women. Data were documented, providing a crucial missing link in the current literature of "women in Guatemala." The results of this study yield baseline data demonstrating that health and child care practices are not directly related to women's participation in the association. Their education levels increased as a direct result of working with the association, as did economic stability, although less consistently.

Civilizing the tropics: The highlanders' failed attempt to transform the Colombian Amazon, 1850--1930

The subject of this dissertation is the nature of the environmental transformations, both symbolic and physical, that took place in Colombia between 1850 and 1930. This period begins with the attempt by the Colombian elite to leave behind colonial ties, overcome economic disorganization, and link Colombia to the international market. These efforts were part of a general project to “civilize” this tropical country. The period closes with the transition toward an industrialization and urbanization process led by the Colombian state during the 1930s. ^ Frequently, environmental studies as an academic field are dominated by biological concerns. However, most environmental thinking accepts their interdisciplinary nature. Under this framework not only spatial but also symbolic concerns are key elements in understanding environmental transformations. ^ This study finds that despite several attempts to transform the Colombian landscape physically, most of the substantive changes were localized and circumscribed to the Andean region. Other changes were mainly symbolic. This dissertation thus uses the Amazon as one of several regions that did not experience significant changes in the forest canopy. While highlanders originally dreamed of the Amazon as an untapped El Dorado, their failed attempts to exploit the region caused them to imagine it as a nightmarish “green hell”. ^ This dissertation concentrates on three pairs of concepts: tropicality/civilization, landscape/territory, and symbolic/material changes. It presents both a general vision of Colombia and case studies of three regions: Cundinamarca, and Cauca Valley are used to compare with the Amazon region that is developed at length. Whereas mainstream Colombian histories have either fixated on the Andean highlands or, in a relegated second place, on the Caribbean region, this dissertation attempts to significantly contribute to the historiography of Colombia by focusing on the largely neglected Amazonian region. ^ To understand imageries about Colombia's landscape, the dissertation relies on travel writings, chorographic descriptions and maps. It also makes uses legal documents and other published primary sources, including literary pieces and memoirs. ^

Dulce Maria Loynaz' Jardin: Subversive tropological discourse

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how the tropes or figurative discourse in Loynaz’s novel, Jardín, becomes a means by which she involves the reader within a text that subverts socio-cultural conventions. Through textual analysis, it explains how the poet communicates her views of the world as a conflictive space where existence is the will to live, life being a human construction like a garden, and a woman’s decision –often frustrated by men– to seek self-realization.^ By tracing some critical studies focused on polarities allegedly present in Jardín, such as: poetry/prose, lyric poetry/novel, word/silence, life/death, character novel/space novel, civilization/barbarism, posmodernismo/vanguardismo, and femininity/feminism, this essay explores Loynaz’s esthetic and ideological codes to demonstrate how opposition can be seen in her novel as part of her arrangement of an artistic philosophy.^ This research refers to three main sources: the semiotician Umberto Eco’s notion of the text’s indeterminacy as an opera aperta, reception theory, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism. By applying these theories to the analysis of this novel, I seek to show Loynaz’s literary modus (tropological language) and ideological dictum , which correlate oppositions and transform them as a point of departure to reconsider civilized life. The poet is presented as an esthetic force that compels the reader to question some false values, by creating an implicit but intelligent dialogue between him/her and a lyrical text. To describe such literary procedure, I coin in this study the term dialirismo (dialyricism). ^ My essay is centered on the tropes through which Loynaz creates her dialyrical text. By focusing on metaphor, symbol, synecdoche, and metonymy, I examine Jardín as a convergence of the following conceptual aspects: intertextuality, primitivism, and feminist discourse. I argue that Loynaz’s novel is a creative response to the literary tradition, as well as a proposal to understand writing –and reading– as an open, interactive process in search not only of artistic values but also of critical knowledge.^ This exploration shows how the novelist faces a so-called civilized world through the eyes of her fictional character, Bárbara, who confronts patriarchal discourse. It celebrates Loynaz’s poetic representation of this inquisitive woman, in her fenced garden, as a human being who can see, above and beyond an iron curtain, the possibility to overcome an aggressive male-centered civilization.^

Diversity and knowledge in the age of nation-building: Space and time in the thought of Yanagita Kunio

The study examines the thought of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), an influential Japanese nationalist thinker and a founder of an academic discipline named minzokugaku. The purpose of the study is to bring into light an unredeemed potential of his intellectual and political project as a critique of the way in which modern politics and knowledge systematically suppresses global diversity. The study reads his texts against the backdrop of the modern understanding of space and time and its political and moral implications and traces the historical evolution of his thought that culminates in the establishment of minzokugaku. My reading of Yanagita’s texts draws on three interpretive hypotheses. First, his thought can be interpreted as a critical engagement with John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of history, as he turns Mill’s defense of diversity against Mill’s justification of enlightened despotism in non-Western societies. Second, to counter Mill’s individualistic notion of progressive agency, he turns to a Marxian notion of anthropological space, in which a laboring class makes history by continuously transforming nature, and rehabilitates the common people (jomin) as progressive agents. Third, in addition to the common people, Yanagita integrates wandering people as a countervailing force to the innate parochialism and conservatism of agrarian civilization. To excavate the unrecorded history of ordinary farmers and wandering people and promote the formation of national consciousness, his minzokugaku adopts travel as an alternative method for knowledge production and political education. In light of this interpretation, the aim of Yanagita’s intellectual and political project can be understood as defense and critique of the Enlightenment tradition. Intellectually, he attempts to navigate between spurious universalism and reactionary particularism by revaluing diversity as a necessary condition for universal knowledge and human progress. Politically, his minzokugaku aims at nation-building/globalization from below by tracing back the history of a migratory process cutting across the existing boundaries. His project is opposed to nation-building from above that aims to integrate the world population into international society at the expense of global diversity.

Climate Change and Regions at Risk: A Look at Central America

Climate change has been a security issue for mankind since Homo sapiens first emerged on the planet, driving him to find new and better food, water, shelter, and basic resources for survival and the advancement of civilization. Only recently, however, has the rate of climate change coupled with man’s knowledge of his own role in that change accelerated, perhaps profoundly, changing the security paradigm. If we take a ―decades‖ look at the security issue, we see competition for natural resources giving way to Cold War ideological containment and deterrence, itself giving way to non-state terrorism and extremism. While we continue to defend against these threats, we are faced with even greater security challenges that inextricably tie economic, food and human security together and where the flash points may not provide clearly discernable causes, as they will be intrinsically tied to climate change. Several scientific reports have revealed that the modest development gains that can be realized by some regions could be reversed by climate change. This means that climate change is not just a long-term environmental threat as was widely believed, but an economic and developmental disaster that is unfolding. As such, addressing climate change has become central to the development and poverty reduction by the World Bank and other financial institutions. In Latin America, poorer countries and communities, such as those found in Central America, will suffer the hardest because of weaker resilience and greater reliance on climatesensitive sectors such as agriculture. The US should attempt to deliver capability to assist these states to deal with the effects of climate change.

The Chef In Society: Origins And Development

In his discourse - The Chef In Society: Origins And Development - Marcel R. Escoffier, Graduate Student, School of Hospitality Management at Florida International University, initially offers: “The role of the modern professional chef has its origins in ancient Greece. The author traces that history and looks at the evolution of the executive chef as a manager and administrator.” “Chefs, as tradespersons, can trace their origins to ancient Greece,” the author offers with citation. “Most were slaves…” he also informs you. Even at that low estate in life, the chef was master of the slaves and servants who were at close hand in the environment in which they worked. “In Athens, a cook was the master of all the household slaves…” says Escoffier. As Athenian influence wanes and Roman civilization picks-up the torch, chefs maintain and increase their status as important tradesmen in society. “Here the first professional societies of cooks were formed, almost a hierarchy,” Escoffier again cites the information. “It was in Rome that cooks established their first academy: Colleqium Coquorum,” he further reports. Chefs, again, increase their significance during the following Italian Renaissance as the scope of their influence widens. “…it is an historical fact that the marriage of Henry IV and Catherine de Medici introduced France to the culinary wonders of the Italian Renaissance,” Escoffier enlightens you. “Certainly the professional chef in France became more sophisticated and more highly regarded by society after the introduction of the Italian cooking concepts.” The author wants you to know that by this time cookbooks are already making important inroads and contributing to the history of cooking above and beyond their obvious informational status. Outside of the apparent European influences in cooking, Escoffier also ephemerally mentions the development of Chinese and Indian chefs. “It is interesting to note that the Chinese, held by at least one theory as the progenitors of most of the culinary heritage, never developed a high esteem for the position of chef,” Escoffier maintains the historical tack. “It was not until the middle 18th Century that the first professional chef went public. Until that time, only the great houses of the nobility could afford to maintain a chef,” Escoffier notes. This private-to-public transition, in conjunction with culinary writing are benchmarks for the profession. Chefs now establish authority and eminence. The remainder of the article devotes itself to the development of the professional chef; especially the melding of two seminal figures in the culinary arts, Cesar Ritz and August Escoffier. The works of Frederick Taylor are also highlighted.

Catholic student movements in Latin America: Cuba and Brazil, 1920s to 1960s

This dissertation examines the ideological development of the Catholic University Student (JUC) movements in Cuba and Brazil during the Cold War and their organizational predecessors and intellectual influences in interwar Europe. Transnational Catholicism prioritized the attempt to influence youth and in particular, university students, within the context of Catholic nations within Atlantic civilization in the middle of the twentieth century. This dissertation argues that the Catholic university movements achieved a relatively high level of social and political influence in a number of countries in Latin America and that the experience of the Catholic student activists led them to experience ideological conflict and in some cases, rupture, with the conservative ideology of the Catholic hierarchy. Catholic student movements flourished after World War II in the context of an emerging youth culture. The proliferation of student organizations became part of the ideological battlefield of the Cold War. Catholic university students also played key roles in the Cuban Revolution (1957-1959) and in the attempted political and social reforms in Brazil under President João Goulart (1961-1964). ^ The JUC, under the guidance of the Church hierarchy, attempted to avoid aligning itself with either ideological camp in the Cold War, but rather to chart a Third Way between materialistic capitalism and atheistic socialism. Thousands of students in over 70 nations were intensively trained to think critically about pressing social issues. This paper will to place the Catholic Student movement in Cuba in the larger context of transnational Catholic university movements using archival evidence, newspaper accounts and secondary sources. Despite the hierarchy's attempt to utilize students as a tool of influence, the actual lived experience of students equipped them to think critically about social issues, and helped lay a foundation for the progressive student politics of the late 1960s and the rise of liberation theology in the 1970s. ^

Stray dogs in Bucharest, and the political economy of Romanian socialism. From hunting the “enemies” of Stalinist economy, to poisoning urban parasites, and the rise of urban anarchy: 1950s-1990s.

My paper discusses three different ways in which stray dogs have been intertwined with ideologies of economic and urban development in Romania. I categorize results from archival and ethnographic research under three major time periods: early socialism, late socialism, and post-socialism. During early socialism stray dogs were seen to be damaging the soviet economy by killing species that humans could also hunt, like rabbits. During late socialism, stray dogs appeared as the enemies of the communist city, and the department of urban sanitation was given orders to poison dogs with strychnine. Finally, the increasing number of stray dogs in Bucharest after the collapse of communism was seen as a direct result of former communist demolitions, and was also taken as a sign of the collapsing state. Through such examples my paper discusses how the state and particular population groups have seen dogs as parts of an unwanted and dangerous nature, rather than a species that needs to be protected. I argue that distinctions of nature and culture have served discourses of civilization and the view of Bucharest as a model socialist, and then European city. Throughout my paper I juxtapose the treatment of stray dogs with other, more “valued” urban natures like the protection of parks, the wide-spread hobby of pigeon breeding during socialist years, the most recent debate on saving the rural area of Rosia Montana from non-environmentally friendly methods of gold extraction, and the current trend of healthy eating and living.

Digital signal processing implementation for near real-time wavelet transformation system for binary images

Communication has become an essential function in our civilization. With the increasing demand for communication channels, it is now necessary to find ways to optimize the use of their bandwidth. One way to achieve this is by transforming the information before it is transmitted. This transformation can be performed by several techniques. One of the newest of these techniques is the use of wavelets. Wavelet transformation refers to the act of breaking down a signal into components called details and trends by using small waveforms that have a zero average in the time domain. After this transformation the data can be compressed by discarding the details, transmitting the trends. In the receiving end, the trends are used to reconstruct the image. In this work, the wavelet used for the transformation of an image will be selected from a library of available bases. The accuracy of the reconstruction, after the details are discarded, is dependent on the wavelets chosen from the wavelet basis library. The system developed in this thesis takes a 2-D image and decomposes it using a wavelet bank. A digital signal processor is used to achieve near real-time performance in this transformation task. A contribution of this thesis project is the development of DSP-based test bed for the future development of new real-time wavelet transformation algorithms.

The impact of the changing weaving industry on the culture and socioeconomic development of maya women in Guatemala

Growing demand for handwoven Maya textiles from Guatemala parallels recent international fascination with Maya civilization. This thesis surveys the effects of increases in demands for artisan textiles in Guatemala, and explores the reactions of women involved in Aj Quen, a weavers' association. The hypothesis is that the well-being of Maya women depends on their participation in the association. This is tested by using indicators of the weavers' attitudes defined as their "well-being" regarding 1) health, 2) education levels, 3) child care practices, and 4) economic stability. Interviews were conducted with 127 Maya women. Data were documented, providing a crucial missing link in the current literature of "women in Guatemala." The results of this study yield baseline data demonstrating that health and child care practices are not directly related to women's participation in the association. Their education levels increased as a direct result of working with the association, as did economic stability, although less consistently.

Russia's Islam: Discourse on Identity, Politics, and Security

Despite the long history of Muslims in Russia, most scholarly and political literatures on Russia’s Islam still narrowly interpret Muslim-Slavs relations in an ethnic-religious oppositional framework. In my work, I examine Russia’s discourse on Islam to argue that, in fact, the role of Islam in post-Soviet Russia is complex. Drawing from direct sources from academic, state, journalistic, and underground circles, often neglected by Western commentators, I identify ideational patterns in conceptualizations of Islam and reconstruct relational networks among authors. To explain complex intertextual relations within specific contexts, I utilize an analytically eclectic method that appropriately combines theories from different paradigms and/or disciplines. Thanks to my multi-dimensional approach, I show that, contrary to traditional views, Russia’s Muslims participate in processes of post-Soviet Russia’s identity formation. Starting from textual contents, avoiding pre-formed analytical frames, I argue that many Muslims in Russia perceive themselves as part of Russian civilization – even when they challenge the status-quo. Building on my initial findings, I state that a key element in Russia’s conceptualization of Islam is the definition, elaborated in the 1990s, of traditional Islam as part of Russian civilizational history, as opposed to extremist Islam as extraneous, hostile phenomenon. The differentiation creates an unprecedently safe, if confined, space for Islamic propositions, of which Muslims are taking advantage. Embedded in debates on Russian civilization, conceptualizations of Islam, then, influence Russia’s (geo)political self-perceptions and, consequently, its domestic and international policies. In particular, Russian so-far neglected Islamic doctrine supports views of Islamic terrorism as a political and not religious phenomenon. Hence, Russia interprets both terrorism and counterterrorism within its own historical tradition, causing its strategy to be at odds with Western views. Less apparently, these divergences affect Russian-U.S. broader relations. Finally, in revealing the civilizational value of Russia’s Islam, I expose intellectual relations among influential subjects who share the aim to devise a new civilizational model that should combine Slavic and non-Slavic, Orthodox and Islamic, Western, and Asian components. In this old Russian dilemma, the novelty is Muslims’ participation.

Effective energy conservation and management in the building sector : the answer to the energy predicament

Modern civilization has developed principally through man's harnessing of forces. For centuries man had to rely on wind, water and animal force as principal sources of power. The advent of the industrial revolution, electrification and the development of new technologies led to the application of wood, coal, gas, petroleum, and uranium to fuel new industries, produce goods and means of transportation, and generate the electrical energy which has become such an integral part of our lives. The geometric growth in energy consumption, coupled with the world's unrestricted growth in population, has caused a disproportionate use of these limited natural resources. The resulting energy predicament could have serious consequences within the next half century unless we commit ourselves to the philosophy of effective energy conservation and management. National legislation, along with the initiative of private industry and growing interest in the private sector has played a major role in stimulating the adoption of energy-conserving laws, technologies, measures, and practices. It is a matter of serious concern in the United States, where ninety-five percent of the commercial and industrial facilities which will be standing in the year 2000 - many in need of retrofit - are currently in place. To conserve energy, it is crucial to first understand how a facility consumes energy, how its users' needs are met, and how all internal and external elements interrelate. To this purpose, the major thrust of this report will be to emphasize the need to develop an energy conservation plan that incorporates energy auditing and surveying techniques. Numerous energy-saving measures and practices will be presented ranging from simple no-cost opportunities to capital intensive investments.

Lecture by Thomas Hoving, given at Florida International University, September 19, 1997

Thomas Hoving discusses his book "Greatest works of art of Western civilization", his inspiration for the book and some of the art pieces in the book. Introduction by Dahlia Morgan.