Back to the margins in search of the core: "Foreign Land"'s geography of exclusion

The crisis of the national project in the early 1990s, caused by a short-lived but disastrous government, led Brazilian art cinema, for the first time, to look at itself as periphery and re-approach the old colonial center, Portugal. Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land (Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, 1995), a film about Brazilian exiles in Portugal, is the best illustration of this perspective shift which provides a new sense of Brazil’s scale and position within a global context. Shot mainly on location in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, it promotes the encounter of Lusophone peoples who find a common ground in their marginal situation. Rather than as a former empire, Portugal is defined by its situation at the edge of Europe and by beliefs such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when the country was dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of “core” or “center” are devolved to the realm of myth. The film’s carefully crafted dialogue combines Brazilian, Portuguese and Creole linguistic peculiarities into a common dialect of exclusion, while language puns trigger visual rhymes which refer back to the Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave) repertoire and restage the imaginary of the discovery turned into unfulfilled utopia. The main characters also acquire historical resonances, as they are depicted as descendants of Iberian conquistadors turned into smugglers of precious stones in the present. Their activities define a circuit of international exchange which resonates with that of globalized cinema, a realm in which Foreign Land, made up of citations and homage to other cinemas, tries to retrieve a sense of belonging.

Knowledge Interfaces and Practices of Negotiation: Cases from a Women's Group in Bolivia and an Oil Refinery in Wales

This chapter examines encounters between international institutions that frame their objectives through a global policy language, and people whose lives are the focus for change heralded by these institutions. It explores how a global policy language, which seeks consensus and equality, can be at odds with local understandings, conflict and intentions.

Non-concordance between genetic profiles of olive oil and fruit: a cautionary note to the use of DNA markers for provenance testing.

To investigate the contribution of paternal alleles to the DNA content of olive oil, genetic analyses of olive DNA samples from fruits, leaves, and oil derived from the same tree (cv. Leccino) were carried out. DNA extracted from maternal tissues--leaves and flesh--from different fruits showed identical genetic profiles using a set of DNA markers. Additional simple sequence repeat (SSR) alleles, not found in the maternal samples, were amplified in the embryos (stone), and they were also detected in DNA extracted from the paste obtained by crushing whole fruits and from the oil pressed from this material. These results demonstrate that the DNA profile obtained from olive oil is likely to represent a composite profile of the maternal alleles juxtaposed with alleles contributed by various pollen donors. Therefore, care needs to be taken in the interpretation of DNA profiles obtained from DNA extracted from oil for resolving provenance and authenticity issues.