Panchayati Raj em Goa

Goa commemorated in 2011 the golden jubilee of the end of colonialism (19 December 1961) and the beginning of its participation in the democratic institutions of India. The administrative decentralization known as Panchayati Raj is an ancient tradition in India, but it suffered dilution and breaks during centuries of Muslim and British domination. During the early years of Independence, the Union government was more worried about security concerns, and hence the policies of centralization. However, the second five-year plan and during the decades of 50 and 60 one could notice greater openness towards decentralization. This was done through Constitution Amendment Act nº 73 (1992) and the inclusion of article 243 in Part IX of the Constitution. The present essay seeks to clarify how the Panchayati Raj is the key to the success of the Indian democracy in the context of its demographic magnitude and ethnic, religious and linguistic diversities. Obviously, the challenges persist, but a country like India would be ungovernable without a democratic functionality at its bottom. It would be interesting to reflect and discover if Portugal has anything to benefit from the democratic experience of India and one of the fast growing emergent economies of the world.

Dinámicas sociales y étnicas de desestructuración y recomposición en Cuenca colonial (Debate: perspectivas sobre El Mosaico Indígena de Jaques Poloni-Simard)

Presentación del libro 'El mosaico indígena' (Quito, Abya-Yala 2006) desarrollada en la Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Sede Ecuador, el 11 de abril de 2006.

Latinoamericanismo, Barroco de Indias y colonialidad del poder: reflexiones sobre políticas de exclusión (Debates)

Este ensayo examina los debates y las relecturas a propósito del llamado Barroco de Indias que se han originado en el ámbito de los estudios latinoamericanos en las últimas décadas. Se enfoca en los estudios sobre el escritor peruano Juan Espinosa Medrano C1629?-1688, llamado el ""Lunarejo"", y problematiza los postulados que claman ver en el barroco y en sus representantes literarios, los primeros procesos de definición de una identidad y modernidad ""americana"" propias. El autor considera que estas lecturas, a pesar de que buscan responder a interpretaciones colonialistas, rearticulan un proyecto latinoamericanista que excluye las conflictivas relaciones étnico-culturales entre indígenas y no indígenas, así como también refuerza lo que Aníbal Quijano y Walter Mignolo llaman la colonialidad del poder.

¿Qué conocimiento(s)? Reflexiones sobre las políticas del conocimiento, el campo académico y el movimiento indígena ecuatoriano (Tema Central)

Este artículo analiza la manera en que las nuevas políticas culturales e identitarias del movimiento indígena del Ecuador han venido desarrollando, recuperando y (re)creando nuevas formas de conocimiento y de agencia social. Al destacar la construcción de marcos epistemológicos tanto indígenas como interculturales que desafían las geopolíticas de conocimiento dominante y el disciplinamiento de la subjetividad, el artículo demuestra qué está actualmente en juego con la pregunta: ¿Qué conocimiento?

The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander

The Egyptians mesmerized the ancient Greeks for scores of years. The Greek literature and art of the classical period are especially thick with representations of Egypt and Egyptians. Yet despite numerous firsthand contacts with Egypt, Greek writers constructed their own Egypt, one that differed in significant ways from actual Egyptian history, society, and culture. Informed by recent work on orientalism and colonialism, this book unravels the significance of these misrepresentations of Egypt in the Greek cultural imagination in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Looking in particular at issues of identity, otherness, and cultural anxiety, Phiroze Vasunia shows how Greek authors constructed an image of Egypt that reflected their own attitudes and prejudices about Greece itself. He focuses his discussion on Aeschylus Suppliants; Book 2 of Herodotus; Euripides' Helen; Plato's Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias; and Isocrates' Busiris. Reconstructing the history of the bias that informed these writings, Vasunia shows that Egypt in these works was shaped in relation to Greek institutions, values, and ideas on such subjects as gender and sexuality, death, writing, and political and ethnic identity. This study traces the tendentiousness of Greek representations by introducing comparative Egyptian material, thus interrogating the Greek texts and authors from a cross-cultural perspective. A final chapter also considers the invasion of Egypt by Alexander the Great and shows how he exploited and revised the discursive tradition in his conquest of the country. Firmly and knowledgeably rooted in classical studies and the ancient sources, this study takes a broad look at the issue of cross-cultural exchange in antiquity by framing it within the perspective of contemporary cultural studies. In addition, this provocative and original work shows how Greek writers made possible literary Europe's most persistent and adaptable obsession: the barbarian.

‘Purpose’ as a way of helping white trainee history teachers engage with diversity issues

Based on a three year action research project, this study examines one strand of that research, namely the impact that ‘purpose’, i.e. exploring the range of rationales for studying a subject, has in helping white trainee teachers embrace cultural and ethnic diversity within their teaching. Through ‘purpose’ trainees explored different reasons why history should be taught (and by implication what content should be taught and how it should be taught) and the relationship of these reasons to diversity. Focusing on ‘purpose’ appears to have a positive impact on many trainees from white, mono-ethnic backgrounds, enabling them to bring diversity into the school curriculum, in this case history teaching. It offers one way to counter concerns about issues of ‘whiteness’ in the teaching profession and by teaching a more relevant curriculum has a potential positive impact on the achievement of students from minority ethnic backgrounds.

Fenced in: Common property struggles in the management of communal rangelands in central Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

This paper takes as its starting point the assertion that current rangeland management in the central Eastern Cape Province (former Ciskei) of South Africa, is characterised primarily by an ‘open access’ approach. Empirical material drawn from three case-study communities in the region is used to examine the main barriers to management of rangeland as a ‘commons’. The general inability to define and enforce rights to particular grazing resourses in the face of competing claims from ‘outsiders’, as well as inadequate local institutions responsible for rangeland management are highlighted as being of key importance. These are often exacerbated by lack of available grazing land, diffuse user groups and local political and ethnic divisions. Many of these problems have a strong legacy in historical apartheid policies such as forced resettlement and betterment planning. On this basis it is argued that policy should focus on facilitating the emergence of effective, local institutions for rangeland management. Given the limited grazing available to many communities in the region, a critical aspect of this will be finding ways to legitimise current patterns of extensive resource use, which traverse existing ‘community’ boundaries. However, this runs counter to recent legislation, which strongly links community management with legal ownership of land within strict boundaries often defined through fencing. Finding ways to overcome this apparent disjuncture between theory and policy will be vital for the effective management of common pool grazing resources in the region.

Playing with history: negotiating subjectivity in contemporary lens based work

Contemporary artists exploring Jewish identity in the UK are caught between two exclusions, broadly speaking: an art community that that sees itself as ‘post –identity’ and a ‘black’ art scene that revolves around the organizations that emerged out of the Identity debates of the 1980s and 1990s, namely Iniva, Third Text, Autograph. These organizations and those debates, don’t usually include Jewish identity within their remit as Jewish artists are considered to be well represented in the British art scene and, in any case, white. Out of these assumptions, questions arise in relation to the position of Jews in Britain and what is at stake for an artist in exploring Jewish Identity in their work. There is considerable scholarship, relatively speaking on art and Jewish Identity in the US (such as Lisa Bloom; Norman Kleeblatt; Catherine Sousslouf), which inform the debates on visual culture and Jews. In this chapter, I will be drawing out some of the distinctions between the US and the UK debates within my analysis, building on my own writing over the last ten years as well as the work of Juliet Steyn, Jon Stratton and Griselda Pollock. In short, this chapter aims to explore the problematic of what Jewish Identity can offer the viewer as art; what place such art inhabits within a wider artistic context and how, if at all, it is received. There is a predominance of lens based work that explores Identity arising out of the provenance of feminist practices and the politics of documentary that will be important in the framing of the work. I do not aim to consider what constitutes a Jewish artist, that has been done elsewhere and is an inadequate and somewhat spurious conversation . I will also not be focusing on artists whose intention is to celebrate an unproblematised Jewishness (however that is constituted in any given work). Recent artworks and scholarship has in any case rendered the trumpeting of attachment to any singular identity anachronistic at best. I will focus on artists working in the UK who incorporate questions of Jewishness into a larger visual enquiry that build on Judith Butler’s notion of identity as process or performative as well as the more recent debates and artwork that consider the intersectionality of identifications that co-constitute provisional identities (Jones, Modood, Sara Ahmed, Braidotti/Nikki S Lee, Glenn Ligon). The case studies to think through these questions of identity, will be artworks by Susan Hiller, Doug Fishbone and Suzanne Triester. In thinking through works by these artists, I will also serve to contextualise them, situating them briefly within the history of the landmark exhibition in the UK, Rubies and Rebels and the work of Ruth Novaczek, Lily Markewitz, Oreet Ashery and myself.

Social entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa

Responding to calls for a better understanding of the relationship between social enterprises and their environments, this article focuses on contextual influences on social entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. We identify four predominantly African contextual dimensions, i.e., acute poverty, informality, colonial history, and ethnic group identity, and explore their influence on the way social ventures perceive themselves and on their choice of activities. Our empirical study of 384 social enterprises from 19 sub-Saharan African countries suggests that ethnic group identity and high poverty levels influence both self-perception and activity choices, while the country’s colonial history only influences self-perception and informality has no significant influence on either. These findings point to the need to consider both self-perception and the choice of activities in defining social entrepreneurship. Our study also highlights the importance of African contextual dimensions for understanding social entrepreneurship, and underlines the added value of incorporating insights from African data into management research more broadly.

The ethical dimensions of global change

This chapter briefly examines the connections between ethics and the politics of global environmental change. I contrast ethical conceptions of the environment with more conventional characterizations of the environmental challenge, in order to indicate some of the core issues and related questions about which ethical theorists engaging with the global environmental change discourse tend to be concerned. I also offer a brief discussion on the key challenge of ethics on global institutional governance of environmental change.

Trust in the German police

The relative levels of trust in the police are explored, using data from the fifth round of the European Social Survey (ESS) which covered mainly 28 European countries. In this article, the position of Germany is examined within the international context. German trust in the police, for both German natives and ethnic minorities, for those 15 and over is high in comparison to other European countries. The article also tests if it is the fair treatment of citizens by the police, or the high value placed on rule adherence and conformity, that is driving the German citizen’s trust. It shows that the German police is trusted due to their perceived fairness, effectiveness and shared moral values, rather than on value placed on conformity to authority.