The Islamic commercial crisis: Institutional roots of economic underdevelopment in the Middle East

During the second millennium, the Middle East's commerce with Western Europe fell increasingly under European domination. Two factors played critical roles. First, the Islamic inheritance system, by raising the costs of dissolving a partnership following a partner's death, kept Middle Eastern commercial enterprises small and ephemeral. Second, certain European inheritance systems facilitated large and durable partnerships by reducing the likelihood of premature dissolution. The upshot is that European enterprises grew larger than those of the Islamic world. Moreover, while ever larger enterprises propelled further organizational transformations in Europe, persistently small enterprises inhibited economic modernization in the Middle East.

Shifting Loyalties: World War I and the Conflicted Politics of Patriotism in the British Caribbean

This dissertation examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Rousing appeals to imperial patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns and postwar commemoration movement linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, coloured, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty.

To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and West Indian civilians throughout the war years. It begins by reassessing the origins of the BWIR, and then analyzes the regional campaign to recruit West Indian men for military service. Travelling with newly enlisted volunteers across the Atlantic, this study then chronicles soldiers' multi-sited campaign for equal status, pay, and standing in the British imperial armed forces. It closes by offering new perspectives on the dramatic postwar protests by BWIR soldiers in Italy in 1918 and British Honduras and Trinidad in 1919, and reflects on the trajectory of veterans' activism in the postwar era.

This study argues that the racism and discrimination soldiers experienced overseas fueled heightened claims-making in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the war, veterans mobilized collectively to garner financial support and social recognition from colonial officials. Rather than withdrawing their allegiance from the empire, ex-servicemen and civilians invoked notions of mutual obligation to argue that British officials owed a debt to West Indians for their wartime sacrifices. This study reveals the continued salience of imperial patriotism, even as veterans and their civilian allies invoked nested local, regional, and diasporic loyalties as well. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the origins of patriotism in the colonial Caribbean, while providing a historical case study for contemporary debates about "hegemonic dissolution" and popular mobilization in the region.

This dissertation draws upon a wide range of written and visual sources, including archival materials, war recruitment posters, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, and memoirs. In addition to Colonial Office records and military files, it incorporates previously untapped letters and petitions from the Jamaica Archives, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados Department of Archives, and US National Archives.

Where are cultural and social in ecosystem services? A framework for constructive engagement

A focus on ecosystem services (ES) is seen as a means for improving decisionmaking. In the research to date, the valuation of the material contributions of ecosystems to human well-being has been emphasized, with less attention to important cultural ES and nonmaterial values. This gap persists because there is no commonly accepted framework for eliciting less tangible values, characterizing their changes, and including them alongside other services in decisionmaking. Here, we develop such a framework for ES research and practice, addressing three challenges: (1) Nonmaterial values are ill suited to characterization using monetary methods; (2) it is difficult to unequivocally link particular changes in socioecological systems to particular changes in cultural benefits; and (3) cultural benefits are associated with many services, not just cultural ES. There is no magic bullet, but our framework may facilitate fuller and more socially acceptable integrations of ES information into planning and management. © 2012 by American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved.

Crossing the cultural divide: assessing the needs of a local immigrant community

Gemstone Team CARE (Community Assessment of Resident Experiences)

Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012

"Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012" is a critical history of the unfolding of feminist literary study in the US academy. It contributes to current scholarly efforts to revisit the 1970s by reconsidering often-repeated narratives about the critical naivety of feminist literary criticism in its initial articulation. As the story now goes, many of the most prominent feminist thinkers of the period engaged in unsophisticated literary analysis by conflating lived social reality with textual representation when they read works of literature as documentary evidence of real life. As a result, the work of these "bad critics," particularly Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin, has not been fully accounted for in literary critical terms.

This dissertation returns to Dworkin and Millett's work to argue for a different history of feminist literary criticism. Rather than dismiss their work for its conflation of fact and fiction, I pay attention to the complexity at the heart of it, yielding a new perspective on the history and persistence of the struggle to use literary texts for feminist political ends. Dworkin and Millett established the centrality of reality and representation to the feminist canon debates of "the long 1970s," the sex wars of the 1980s, and the more recent feminist turn to memoir. I read these productive periods in feminist literary criticism from 1968 to 2012 through their varied commitment to literary works.

Chapter One begins with Millett, who de-aestheticized male-authored texts to treat patriarchal literature in relation to culture and ideology. Her mode of literary interpretation was so far afield from the established methods of New Criticism that she was not understood as a literary critic. She was repudiated in the feminist literary criticism that followed her and sought sympathetic methods for reading women's writing. In that decade, the subject of Chapter Two, feminist literary critics began to judge texts on the basis of their ability to accurately depict the reality of women's experiences.

Their vision of the relationship between life and fiction shaped arguments about pornography during the sex wars of the 1980s, the subject of Chapter Three. In this context, Dworkin was feminism's "bad critic." I focus on the literary critical elements of Dworkin's theories of pornographic representation and align her with Millett as a miscategorized literary critic. In the decades following the sex wars, many of the key feminist literary critics of the founding generation (including Dworkin, Jane Gallop, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Millett) wrote memoirs that recounted, largely in experiential terms, the history this dissertation examines. Chapter Four considers the story these memoirists told about the rise and fall of feminist literary criticism. I close with an epilogue on the place of literature in a feminist critical enterprise that has shifted toward privileging theory.

Age Effects in Cultural Life Scripts.

Life scripts are culturally shared expectations about the timing of life events in an idealized life course. Because they are cultural semantic knowledge, they should be known by all adult age groups including those who have not lived through all events in the life script, but this has not been tested previously. Young, middle-aged and older adults from the Netherlands were therefore asked in this online study to imagine an ordinary Dutch infant and to name the seven most important events that were likely to take place in the life of this prototypical child. Participants subsequently answered questions about at what ages these events were expected to occur and about their prevalence, importance and valence. We found that the cultural life script was similar for young, middle-aged and older adults and for adults with different educational attainment.

Cross-cultural variability of component processes in autobiographical remembering: Japan, Turkey, and the USA.

Although the underlying mechanics of autobiographical memory may be identical across cultures, the processing of information differs. Undergraduates from Japan, Turkey, and the USA rated 30 autobiographical memories on 15 phenomenological and cognitive properties. Mean values were similar across cultures, with means from the Japanese sample being lower on most measures but higher on belief in the accuracy of their memories. Correlations within individuals were also similar across cultures, with correlations from the Turkish sample being higher between measures of language and measures of recollection and belief. For all three cultures, in multiple regression analyses, measures of recollection were predicted by visual imagery, auditory imagery, and emotions, whereas measures of belief were predicted by knowledge of the setting. These results show subtle cultural differences in the experience of remembering.

Cultural life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory.

Three classes of evidence demonstrate the existence of life scripts, or culturally shared representations of the timing of major transitional life events. First, a reanalysis of earlier studies on age norms shows an increase in the number of transitional events between the ages of 15 and 30 years, and these events are associated with narrower age ranges and more positive emotion than events outside this period. Second, 1,485 Danes estimated how old hypothetical centenarians were when they had been happiest, saddest, most afraid, most in love, and had their most important and most traumatic experiences. Only the number of positive events showed an increase between the ages of 15 and 30 years. Third, undergraduates generated seven important events that were likely to occur in the life of a newborn. Pleasantness and whether events were expected to occur between the ages of 15 and 30 years predicted how frequently events were recorded. Life scripts provide an alternative explanation of the reminiscence bump. Emphasis is on culture, not individuals.

Inner speech and bilingual autobiographical memory: a Polish-Danish cross-cultural study.

Thirty years after fleeing from Poland to Denmark, 20 immigrants were enlisted in a study of bilingual autobiographical memory. Ten "early immigrators" averaged 24 years old at the time of immigration, and ten "late immigrators" averaged 34 years old at immigration. Although all 20 had spent 30 years in Denmark, early immigrators reported more current inner speech behaviours in Danish, whereas late immigrators showed more use of Polish. Both groups displayed proportionally more numerous autobiographical retrievals that were reported as coming to them internally in Polish (vs Danish) for the decades prior to immigration and more in Danish (vs Polish) after immigration. We propose a culture- and language-specific shaping of semantic and conceptual stores that underpins autobiographical and world knowledge.

New World Gold Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain

Elvira Vilches examines economic treatises, stories of travel and conquest, moralist writings, fiction, poetry, and drama to reveal that New World gold ultimately became a problematic source of power that destabilized Spain’s sense of ...

Witnessing Crisis in Contemporary and Golden Age Spain

In this volume, experts on the Spanish Golden Age from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States offer analyses of contemporary works that have been influenced by the classics from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Cultural development and technical and financial assistance on the basis of the CDCE (Convention on diversity of cultural expressions)

info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Implementación de un Proyecto de Desarrollo Local como herramienta de intervención para superar la problemática socio-productiva de la Comunidad 'Colonia La Hortensia, Tacuarendí'

La presencia y actuación en territorio de una institución educativa rural para adultos propicio la formulación de un proyecto de apoyo al desarrollo en la Comunidad La Hortensia, distrito Tacuarendi, provincia de Santa Fe. Esta comunidad se sitúa en la cuenca cañera santafesina, economía regional que fue afectada por políticas económicas liberales y cambios estructurales a ellas asociadas de la década de los 90, encontrándose hoy su población en situación de riesgo social, pobreza estructural y marginalidad. La comunidad comprende alrededor de 40 familias, integradas por pequeños productores y obrero del surco. En este trabajo se presenta la trayectoria seguida en la formulación de un Proyecto de Desarrollo Local que pueda dar respuesta a la problemática mencionada así como el proyecto propuesto. Se inicio mediante un diagnostico participativo, generando junto a la comunidad una hipótesis futurible. Se definieron estrategias empleando el Análisis FODA potenciando fortalezas y disminuyendo debilidades. Se observó en el territorio características que definieron la viabilidad del proyecto. El proyecto propone diversos ejes (productivo, cultural /educativo, organizacional). Se promueve conformar grupos productivos, que con asistencia de un equipo técnico realizaran experiencias productivas asociativas. Se propone la recreación de espacios sociales comunitarios. Se complementaran estas actividades con las acciones de la propuesta educativa de la Escuela para jóvenes y adultos Nª205, que promueve la alfabetización de sus alumnos y su formación como emprendedores. Las expectativas de la intervención propuesta se concentran en lograr el Consejo Local de la comunidad, como factor movilizador de los demás aspectos del proyecto. Las acciones en lo productivo y culturas son medios para lograr y concientizar la importancia de generar nueva institucionalidad en la comunidad. Este trabajo final tiene como objetivo analizar la importancia de una herramienta de intervención, el proyecto de desarrollo local, en una comunidad perteneciente a una economía regional en crisis.

Mediación cultural con SimCalc en la adquisición del conocimiento del movimiento rectilíneo

Esta investigación de corte cualitativo tiene el objetivo de estudiar cómo un grupo de estudiantes mexicanos de 16-18 años logra significar la relación entre las gráficas cartesianas de distancia-tiempo, velocidad-tiempo y aceleración-tiempo al interactuar en un entorno digital. Nuestra interpretación se basa en asumir que el conocimiento resulta de las acciones del sujeto cognoscente que se acerca a su objeto de conocimiento provisto de artefactos culturales de mediación. Las gráficas cartesianas atadas a la animación promueven en los estudiantes una actitud para expresar y explorar sus ideas a través de las representaciones simbólicas que ellos mismos producen. Los resultados sugieren que este tipo de experiencias puede ayudar a construir una sólida base para acceder a las ideas del Cálculo.