Tocqueville, Sarmiento e Alberdi: três visões sobre a democracia nas Américas

Analisaremos comparativamente três importantes ideólogos liberais do século XIX, Tocqueville, Sarmiento e Alberdi, que situados em diferentes continentes discutiram o significado da democracia nos marcos da ordem liberal. Explicaremos os argumentos e conceitos desenvolvidos em algumas de suas obras mais importantes, em articulação às posições políticas e ideológicas por eles sustentados nos contextos específicos em que atuaram.

The Space Race di Alex Latimer. Traduzione del romanzo di un autore sudafricano.

In the following thesis I present the book The Space Race from South African author Alex Latimer and my translation of some chapters, from English into Italian. Alex Latimer is an illustrator and author based in Cape Town, known mostly for his picture books for children, although his works also appear in magazines and advertisements. The Space Race is his first novel, but it immediately had a good reception amongst readers and critics. The author, his work and his novel The Space Race will be presented in depth in Chapter 1 of the thesis. Then, an overview on the South African fictional production will follow in Chapter 2, focusing mainly on the contemporary trends and trying to understand if and how The Space Race fits. Before presenting my translation and my reflections on the translating process itself, I will outline in Chapter 3 my general approach to the text and its translation, as well as explain the reasons why I chose those specific parts of the book. The original texts and their translations are presented in Chapter 4, preceded by a short introduction to better understand the position of the chapter in the plot and the elements of interests contained in it. A commentary on the translating process will follow in Chapter 5, about problems or just remarks on aspects of interest; also, further elements of complication in the text are described and my solutions presented. The thesis ends with a conclusion on the work done.

Gerd Schwerhoff and Alex Kästner, eds., Göttlicher Zorn und menschliches Maß: Religiöse Abweichung in frühneuzeitlichen Stadtgemeinschaften (Constance: UVK, 2013)

This book presents six essays by researchers associated with the Technological University of Dresden’s collaborative research centre, Transzendenz und Gemeinsinn, on the interesting theme of religious deviance in early modern cities. As Gerd Schwerhoff and Alexander Kästner make clear in the introduction, early modern religious deviance is a broad concept, and one difficult to delimit, particularly because most early modern secular crimes—theft, adultery, witchcraft and magic, blasphemy—were also sins. Should such offences fall under the rubric of secular or religious deviance? Historians have traditionally approached these offences as secular (and indeed, they were commonly prosecuted in ‘secular’ courts), but one cannot help but see their religious roots. Moreover, religious deviance also encompassed divergence over confessional practices and doctrinal beliefs among Catholics, Protestants, Anabaptists, Calvinists, and so on. To try and demarcate this broad field, Schwerhoff and Kästner advocate using the ‘labelling approach’, drawn from sociology and previously used in Schwerhoff’s work: that is, behaviour only becomes deviant when contemporaries classified (or labelled) it as such (p. 27).

Alex Trier

C. O.

Organic geochemistry of sediments from North Alex Mud Vulcano

Hydrocarbon seeps are ubiquitous at gas-prone Cenozoic deltas such as the Nile Deep Sea Fan (NDSF) where seepage into the bottom water has been observed at several mud volcanoes (MVs) including North Alex MV (NAMV). Here we investigated the sources of hydrocarbon gases and sedimentary organic matter together with biomarkers of microbial activity at four locations of NAMV to constrain how venting at the seafloor relates to the generation of hydrocarbon gases in deeper sediments. At the centre, high upward flux of hot (70 °C) hydrocarbon-rich fluids is indicated by an absence of biomarkers of Anaerobic Oxidation of Methane (AOM) and nearly constant methane (CH4) concentration depth-profile. The presence of lipids of incompatible thermal maturities points to mixing between early-mature petroleum and immature organic matter, indicating that shallow mud has been mobilized by the influx of deep-sourced hydrocarbon-rich fluids. Methane is enriched in the heavier isotopes, with values of d13C ~-46.6 per mil VPDB and dD ~-228 per mil VSMOW, and is associated with high amounts of heavier homologues (C2+) suggesting a co-genetic origin with the petroleum. On the contrary at the periphery, a lower but sustained CH4 flux is indicated by deeper sulphate-methane transition zones and the presence of 13C-depleted biomarkers of AOM, consistent with predominantly immature organic matter. Values of d13C-CH4 ~-60 per mil VPDB and decreased concentrations of 13C-enriched C2+ are typical of mixed microbial CH4 and biodegraded thermogenic gas from Plio-Pleistocene reservoirs of the region. The maturity of gas condensate migrated from pre-Miocene sources into Miocene reservoirs of the Western NDSF is higher than that of the gas vented at the centre of NAMV, supporting the hypothesis that it is rather released from the degradation of oil in Neogene reservoirs. Combined with the finding of hot pore water and petroleum at the centre, our results suggest that clay mineral dehydration of Neogene sediments, which takes place posterior to reservoir filling, may contribute to intense gas generation at high sedimentation rate deltas.

Hacia una comprensión del método en las ciencias políticas : el pensamiento de Alexis de Tocqueville

Fil: González, Juan Antonio. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales