Domination

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences

Terms modified by Domination

  • domination number

  • Selected Abstracts


    Discipline and the Arts of Domination: Rituals of Respect in Chimborazo, Ecuador

    CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2005
    Barry J. Lyons
    Mestizo and indigenous authorities on 20th-century highland Ecuadorian haciendas exercised authority through culturally hybrid practices of ritual discipline. Rather than opposing force to persuasion, I argue that hacienda discipline used coercion as part of a strategy of persuasion. This argument is tied to a social-structural as well as cultural notion of hegemony: By regulating internal social relations, authorities linked their power to the notion of morality and "respect" held by subordinates, thereby also shaping the latter's understanding of resistance. [source]


    The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency: Colonial Texts and Modes of Evidence

    HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2000
    Premesh Lalu
    This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as ,alternative history.' The aim in effecting this interruption is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of rewriting South African history, critical history, it issuggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its practices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules established by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category ofevidence as an object for a politics of history of the present. [source]


    Departures from Everyday Resistance and Flexible Strategies of Domination: The Making and Unmaking of a Poor Peasant Mobilization in Bangladesh

    JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 2 2007
    SHAPAN ADNAN
    James Scott's influential work has popularized the notion that everyday resistance among the peasantry takes covert and backstage forms, termed ,weapons of the weak'. This paper, however, provides a case study involving transformation of covert resistance and outward compliance of the poor into open dissent and confrontation with power-holders, though falling well short of the limiting conditions of rebellion or revolution. Such instances serve to dispel the notion that poor and weak groups adopt only covert forms of resistance in their everyday existence. The paper takes up the questions of why, and under what circumstances, such transformation of covert resistance into overt forms can come about. These issues are explored using evidence from a poor peasant mobilization in rural Bangladesh during the parliamentary election of 1986. The analysis shows that there were sequential shifts in the respective strategies of domination and resistance of the rich and the poor, which shaped each other interactively over a dynamic trajectory. Such adaptive and variable responses require an approach that can accommodate flexibility and substitution in the strategies adopted by the weak and the powerful. These also call for further exploration and analysis of the middle ground between everyday and exceptional forms of resistance. [source]


    Genetic Enhancement as Care or as Domination?

    JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 1 2005
    The Ethics of Asymmetrical Relationships in the Upbringing of Children
    Should a society oriented towards justice provide parents with the possibility of enhancing their children's genes? The opposing arguments of authors in the Rawls School and of the theorist of communicative action, Jürgen Habermas, are analysed in terms of their key concepts. Their positions are then assessed from the point of view of the principles of the pedagogical task to educate towards autonomy under conditions of asymmetry. They each call for respect both of children's difference and of their dependence, and they ask for parents to moderate their expectations. In the light of this, Habermas's critique of genetic intervention, based on a Kantian understanding of autonomy as the capacity to be moral, on Kierkegaard's concept of being able to be oneself, and on respect for finitude, is here to be justified. [source]


    Introduction to "Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence"

    AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2005
    K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN Guest Editor
    By studying and writing about social revolutions and popular protest, James Scott has provided anthropologists and social theorists with a wide-ranging analytical vocabulary for speaking about peace and its inseparable twin,violence. His particular area of expertise has been the arts of repressive peace, and the artfulness of those who elude or defy such silencing technologies. The publication of The Moral Economy of the Peasant in 1976 initiated the first interactions between Scott's unique brand of political theory and anthropology in the shared topical space of peasant studies and the shared geographic space of Asian studies. The authors of this "In Focus" have assembled this special collection to celebrate and evaluate those and subsequent interactions covering a quarter of a century and spanning the publication of at least three other books: Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and Seeing Like a State (1998). [source]


    Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge Contextual Historians

    POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 5 2001
    Patricia Springborg
    Philip Pettit, in Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), draws on the historiography of classical republicanism developed by the Cambridge Contextual Historians, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, to set up a programme for the recovery of the Roman Republican notion of freedom, as freedom from domination. But it is my purpose to show that classical republicanism, as a theory of institutional complexity and balanced government, could not, and did not, lay exclusive claim to freedom from domination as a defining value. Positive freedom was a concept ubiquitous in Roman Law and promulgated in Natural Law as a universal human right. And it was just the ubiquitousness of this right to freedom, honoured more often in the breach than the observance, which prompted the scorn of early modern proto-feminists like Mary Astell and her contemporary, Judith Drake. The division of society into public and private spheres, which liberalism entrenched, precisely allowed democrats in the public sphere full rein as tyrants in the domestic sphere of the family, as these women were perspicacious enough to observe. When republicanism is defined in exclusively normative terms the rich institutional contextualism drops away, leaving no room for the issues it was designed to address: the problematic relation between values and institutions that lies at the heart of individual freedoms. [source]


    Freedom, Interference and Domination

    POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2001
    Steven Wall
    Interference and domination make persons less free. This paper discusses how they do so. It considers and rejects two influential recent accounts of freedom, one that holds that freedom is best understood in terms of non-interference and one that holds that freedom is best understood in terms of non-domination. Against these accounts, the paper argues that both interference and domination play an important role in reducing freedom and that neither concept can be reduced to the other. To bolster this argument, the paper presents and defends an account of freedom that relates both concepts back to a common source. This account shows that while interference and domination have independent significance for judgments of freedom both reduce freedom by obstructing the ability of persons to plan their lives. [source]


    Pierre Bourdieu's Masculine Domination: A Critique,

    CANADIAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY/REVUE CANADIENNE DE SOCIOLOGIE, Issue 4 2002
    Howie Chodos
    Les auteurs montrent que la tentative de Pierre Bourdieu de résoudre le problème de la « domination masculine» est limitée par l'application inconséquente de son propre répertoire conceptuel, par l'emploi d'exemples empiriques périmés et par l'utilité douteuse du cas des relations sociales en Kabylie. Un rejet des catégories fondamentales (« homme », « femme ») et le recours à une conception plus nuancée de la domination seraient une approche plus prometteuse. An uneven application of his own conceptual repertoire, outdated empirical materials and the questionable utility of the example of relations in Kabylia limit Bourdieu's attempts to come to grips with "masculine domination." A more useful approach would move beyond essentializing categories and engage with a more nuanced conception of domination. [source]


    Compositional effects accompanying near equilibrium vapour growth of solid solution crystals of the types IV-VI and II-VI

    CRYSTAL RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 7 2010
    A. Szczerbakow
    Abstract Near equilibrium evaporation-condensation in a sealed ampoule leads to almost full compositional reproduction of a solid solution if it consists of components having comparable vapour pressures; this can be qualitatively interpreted by domination of entropy increase. Nevertheless, even vestigial separation requires closer characteristics, since it may prove crucial , particularly for properties of semiconducting solid solutions. Maximum component separation allowed by a small temperature difference is described here in terms of thermodynamics and kinetics of solid-vapour and vapour-solid phase transitions. Theoretical models of the determining effects having different character are shortly described, and their applicability areas are determined. Experimental data collected for crystal growth of numerous semiconducting solid solutions of the II-VI and IV-VI type support the conclusion drawn from the models that the near equilibrium crystal growth from the vapour in a closed system ensures the highest degree of compositional uniformity. (© 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim) [source]


    Saxon military revolution, 912,973?: myth and reality

    EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE, Issue 2 2007
    B.S. Bachrach
    For more than a generation Karl Leyser's influential thesis, which credited Henry I with undertaking a military revolution which made possible the Saxon dynasty's rule of Francia orientalis, has dominated the scholarly literature. According to Leyser, Henry radically reformed the Saxon military by building a large force of heavily armed mounted fighting men. These men provided the means necessary to assure Saxon domination. It is argued here, by contrast, that this Saxon military revolution is a myth and that the continental Saxons, as contrasted to those in England, saw the gradual development of a heavily armed mounted fighting force following their conquest by Charlemagne in 805. The real Saxon military revolution was Henry's creation of the agrarii milites and the building of frontier fortifications. [source]


    Networks and dominance hierarchies: does interspecific aggression explain flower partitioning among stingless bees?

    ECOLOGICAL ENTOMOLOGY, Issue 2 2010
    KAI DWORSCHAK
    1. The distribution of consumers among resources (trophic interaction network) may be shaped by asymmetric competition. Dominance hierarchy models predict that asymmetric interference competition leads to a domination of high quality resources by hierarchically superior species. 2. In order to determine the competitive dominance hierarchy and its effect on flower partitioning in a local stingless bee community in Borneo, interspecific aggressions were tested among eight species in arena experiments. 3. All species tested were strongly mutually aggressive in the arena, and the observed interactions were often lethal for one or both opponents. Aggression significantly increased with body size differences between fighting pairs and was asymmetric: larger aggressors were superior over smaller species. Additional aggression tests involved dummies with surface extracts, and results suggest that species- and colony-specific surface profiles are important in triggering the aggressive behaviour. 4. Sixteen stingless bee species were observed foraging on 41 species of flowering plants. The resulting bee,flower interaction network showed a high degree of generalisation (network-level specialisation H2' = 0.11), corresponding to a random, opportunistic distribution of bee species among available flower species. 5. Aggressions on flowers were rare and only occurred at a low level. The dominance hierarchy obtained in the arena experiments did not correlate significantly with plant quality, estimated as the number of flowers per plant or as total bee visitation rate. 6. Our findings suggest that asymmetries in interference competition do not necessarily translate into actual resource partitioning in the context of complex interacting communities. [source]


    Managing ecosystem services: what do we need to know about their ecology?

    ECOLOGY LETTERS, Issue 5 2005
    Claire Kremen
    Abstract Human domination of the biosphere has greatly altered ecosystems, often overwhelming their capacity to provide ecosystem services critical to our survival. Yet ecological understanding of ecosystem services is quite limited. Previous work maps the supply and demand for services, assesses threats to them, and estimates economic values, but does not measure the underlying role of biodiversity in providing services. In contrast, experimental studies of biodiversity,function examine communities whose structures often differ markedly from those providing services in real landscapes. A bridge is needed between these two approaches. To develop this research agenda, I discuss critical questions and key approaches in four areas: (1) identifying the important ,ecosystem service providers'; (2) determining the various aspects of community structure that influence function in real landscapes, especially compensatory community responses that stabilize function, or non-random extinction sequences that rapidly erode it; (3) assessing key environmental factors influencing provision of services, and (4) measuring the spatio-temporal scale over which providers and services operate. I show how this research agenda can assist in developing environmental policy and natural resource management plans. [source]


    Restraining the Genuine Homo Economicus: Why the Economy Cannot Be Divorced from Its Governance

    ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2003
    Stergios Skaperdas
    The Homo economicus of traditional economics is far from being completely self-interested, rational, or as individualistic as he is purported to be; he will haggle to death over price but will not take what he wants by force. Implicitly, he is assumed to behave ruthlessly within a well-defined bubble of sainthood. Based on a simple model, I first examine what occurs when this assumption is relaxed and genuine, amoral Homo economici interact. Productivity can be inversely related to compensation; a longer shadow of the future can intensify conflict; and more competition among providers of protection reduces welfare. The patently inefficient outcomes that follow call for restraining self-interest, for finding ways to govern markets. I then review some of the different ways of creating restraints, from the traditional social contract, to the hierarchical domination of kings and lords, to modern forms of governance. Checks and balances, wider representation, the bureaucratic form of organization, and other ingredients of modern governance can partly be thought of as providing restraints to the dark side of self-interest. Though highly imperfect, these restraints are better than the alternative, which typically involves autocratic, amateurish, and corrupt rule. Then, thinking of most problems in terms of a first-best economic model is practically and scientifically misguided. [source]


    Education and the Politics of Difference: Iris Young and the politics of education

    EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 1 2006
    Avigail Eisenberg
    Abstract Three key contributions of Iris Young to democratic political theory, and three challenges that have arisen in response to Young's theory, are examined here in relation to education. First, Young has argued that oppression and domination, not distributive inequality, ought to guide discussions about justice. Second, eliminating oppression requires establishing a politics that welcomes difference by dismantling and reforming structures, processes, concepts and categories that sustain difference-blind, impartial, neutral, universal politics and policies. The infatuation with merit and standardized tests, both of which are central to measuring educational achievement, are chief amongst the targets in need of reform. Third, a politics of difference requires restructuring the division of labour and decision-making so as to include disadvantaged social groups but allow them to contribute without foregoing their particularities. The challenges that have arisen in response to Young's theory are first, that difference is merely another way of getting at inequality of resources or opportunities, and if it is not, then, second, a politics of difference values difference for the sake of difference rather than for the sake of alleviating social disadvantage. Third, in theory and in practice a politics that focuses on difference putatively jeopardizes a politics whose aim is to improve the redistribution of resources. [source]


    Regional sustainable development in France: assessing the environmental implications

    ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND GOVERNANCE, Issue 5 2005
    F. Bertrand
    Abstract This article considers the environmental dimension of regional sustainable development in France. The first part evaluates the position of the environment in regional sustainable development policies using two levels of analysis. First, it examines the stated objectives for regional sustainable development that relate to a balanced integration of the environmental dimension in relation to the economic and social dimensions. Second, it demonstrates how efforts to implement regional sustainable development (RSD) invariably lead to domination by environmental factors, as a consequence of well established environmental policies. Thereafter, a critical analysis of this outcome is presented, illustrating how the disparity between what is said and done has produced an ambiguous notion of sustainable development (SD), and how different actors have adopted strongly opposing views. This confusion has created resistance by environmental actors, who perceive sustainable development as potentially diluting environmental demands. The article concludes by discussing the possible future role of the environment within regional sustainable development. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]


    External Transaction Costs and Large-scale Farming in Moscow Oblast Coûts de transaction externes et agriculture à grande échelle dans la région de Moscou Externe Transaktionskosten und landwirtschaftliche Großbetriebe in der Oblast Moskau

    EUROCHOICES, Issue 2 2010
    Nikolai SvetlovArticle first published online: 3 AUG 2010
    Summary External Transaction Costs and Large-scale Farming in Moscow Oblast The article addresses the reasons for the domination of large-scale corporate farms in the Moscow oblast of Russia and concludes that high external transaction costs are likely to be an important determining factor. Over the nine year period studied, larger farms are shown to achieve higher performance. Increasing returns to scale, however, were not significant in explaining the superior performance of the larger farms. It is hypothesised that high external transaction costs due to lack of transparency in the milk market, typical of underdeveloped markets, give the larger farms a competitive advantage. Their search costs per unit of output are relatively low and they are able therefore to achieve higher farm-gate prices for milk as a result. The results confirm the dependence of the farm-gate milk price on farm size due to the presence of high transaction costs in the market of milk, the major output of the studied farms. The high performance farms were able to grow during the study period whereas the lower performing farms had limited growth capacity. A more competitive and transparent market environment along with improved infrastructure could lower transaction costs and entry barriers and provide opportunities for smaller scale corporate farms to compete more effectively. Cet article essaie d'expliquer les raisons de la domination des grandes exploitations agricoles constituées en société de la région de Moscou et conclut que l'ampleur des coûts de transaction externes est probablement un facteur explicatif important. Au cours de la période étudiée qui couvre neuf années, les exploitations les plus grandes ont enregistré les performances les plus élevées. Les rendements d'échelle croissants n'ont cependant pas expliqué de manière significative la meilleure performance de ces exploitations. Nous faisons l'hypothèse que les forts coûts de transaction externes liés au manque de transparence sur le marché laitier, typique des marchés incomplètement développés, donnent à ces plus grandes exploitations un avantage compétitif. Leur coût de recherche par unité de produit est relativement bas et elles sont donc capables d'obtenir des prix au niveau de la ferme plus élevés pour le lait. Les résultats confirment la dépendance des prix à la ferme envers la taille de l'exploitation du fait de la présence de coûts de transaction élevés sur le marché laitier, le lait étant le principal produit des exploitations étudiées. Les exploitations très performantes ont pu croître au cours de la période examinée tandis que les capacités de développement des exploitations les moins performantes étaient limitées. Un environnement de marché plus concurrentiel et transparent ainsi que de meilleures infrastructures pourraient réduire les coûts de transaction et les barrières à l'entrée dans le secteur, et fournir des opportunités aux exploitations constituées en société de plus petite taille d'être concurrentielles de manière plus efficace. Dieser Beitrag untersucht, weshalb es in der russischen Oblast Moskau hauptsächlich große Corporate Farms gibt, und kommt zu dem Schluss, dass dafür wahrscheinlich hohe externe Transaktionskosten ausschlaggebend sind. Über den neunjährigen Untersuchungszeitraum waren größere Betriebe erfolgreicher. Steigende Skalenerträge waren jedoch bei der Begründung für den höheren Erfolg der größeren Betriebe nicht maßgeblich. Es wird angenommen, dass hohe externe Transaktionskosten aufgrund von fehlender Transparenz auf dem Milchmarkt , typisch für unterentwickelte Märkte , den größeren Betrieben einen Wettbewerbsvorteil verschaffen. Ihre Suchkosten pro Produkteinheit sind relativ gering, daher sind sie in der Lage, höhere Preise für Milch ab Hof zu erzielen. Die Ergebnisse bestätigen die Abhängigkeit des Preises für Milch ab Hof von der Betriebsgröße, weil es auf dem Markt für Milch (dem wichtigsten Produkt der untersuchten Betriebe) hohe Transaktionskosten gibt. Den erfolgreichen Betrieben gelang es, über den Untersuchungszeitraum zu wachsen, während die leistungsschwächeren Betriebe nur eingeschränkt wachstumsfähig waren. Ein wettbewerbsfähigeres und transparenteres Marktumfeld in Kombination mit einer besseren Infrastruktur könnte die Transaktionskosten und Marktzugangsbeschränkungen senken sowie kleineren Corporate Farms Möglichkeiten eröffnen, um effektiver am Wettbewerb teilzunehmen. [source]


    Geomorphology and fish assemblages in a Piedmont river basin, U.S.A.

    FRESHWATER BIOLOGY, Issue 11 2003
    D. M. Walters
    Summary 1.,We investigated linkages between fishes and fluvial geomorphology in 31 wadeable streams in the Etowah River basin in northern Georgia, U.S.A. Streams were stratified into three catchment sizes of approximately 15, 50 and 100 km2, and fishes and geomorphology were sampled at the reach scale (i.e. 20,40 times stream width). 2.,Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) identified 85% of the among-site variation in fish assemblage structure and identified strong patterns in species composition across sites. Assemblages shifted from domination by centrarchids, and other pool species that spawn in fine sediments and have generalised food preferences, to darter-cyprinid-redhorse sucker complexes that inhabit riffles and runs, feed primarily on invertebrates, and spawn on coarser stream beds. 3.,Richness and density were correlated with basin area, a measure of stream size, but species composition was best predicted (i.e. |r| between 0.60,0.82) by reach-level geomorphic variables (stream slope, bed texture, bed mobility and tractive force) that were unrelated to stream size. Stream slope was the dominant factor controlling stream habitat. Low slope streams had smaller bed particles, more fines in riffles, lower tractive force and greater bed mobility compared with high slope streams. 4.,Our results contrast with the ,River Continuum Concept' which argues that stream assemblages vary predictably along stream size gradients. Our findings support the ,Process Domains Concept', which argues that local-scale geomorphic processes determine the stream habitat and disturbance regimes that influence stream communities. [source]


    Particulate fatty acids in two small Siberian reservoirs dominated by different groups of phytoplankton

    FRESHWATER BIOLOGY, Issue 3 2003
    Nadezhda N. Sushchik
    SUMMARY 1. We studied the composition of fatty acids (FAs) in the seston from two small freshwater reservoirs (Bugach and Lesnoi) with distinct periodicity of domination by cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae during the growth season. 2. The diatoms in the both reservoirs were characterised by a high content of 14:0 and C16 unsaturated acids, whereas that of the essential FA 20:5,3 [eicosapentanoic acid (EPA)] was low. The correlation between this polyunsaturated FA (PUFA) and diatom biomass was not significant in either reservoir. The percentage of 20:5,3 in seston significantly correlated with the biomass of euglenophyta in Bugach and dinophyta in Lesnoi. Hence the diatoms, usually referred as a valuable food for zooplankton, were not an important source of the essential PUFA in these systems. 3. The dominant cyanobacteria in Bugach, and the green algae in Lesnoi, both contained the same marker acids: 18:3,3 and 18:2,6. Hence, a discrimination between these two phytoplanktonic groups on the basis of FA biomarkers may be difficult in some cases. 4. We found no significant correlation between the content of 20:5,3 in seston and the biomass of the dominant daphniids in either reservoir. This is contrary to expectations, based on the literature, that EPA is generally important. Rather, the biomass of the two dominant Daphnia species in Bugach correlated strongly with the content of 18:3,3 in the seston. The cyanobacteria were a probable source of this ,3 FA for Daphnia. We conclude that EPA is not always important for Daphnia populations although, in such cases, some other PUFA (e.g. 18:3,3) might be related to their growth. [source]


    Embodying Gender, Work and Organization: Solidarity, Cool Loyalties and Contested Hierarchy in a Masculinist Occupation

    GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2002
    Lee F. MonaghanArticle first published online: 21 MAY 200
    Despite a ,somatic turn' in the social sciences, there remains a dearth of theoretically informed research on male working bodies, the embodied doings of masculinities independent of biological sex and intra,gendered workplace relations. This is unfortunate because embodiment is thoroughly implicated in major social divisions, including gender domination in institutional contexts. Using an embodied sociological perspective and data generated during an ethnography of British nightclub and pub security work, this article goes some way towards embodying the social study of plural masculinities, work and organization. Exploring worker solidarity, cool loyalties and contested hierarchy in this risky masculinist occupation hopefully makes several contributions to the literature. Furthering the (theoretically informed) empirical study of masculinities and socially embedded bodies, the article sensitizes other researchers to gendered/embodied processes possibly taking a more diluted form in other work settings. [source]


    Blinded by the Enlightenment: Günter Grass in Calcutta

    GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 3 2003
    Daniel Reynolds
    Günter Grass's 1988 Zunge zeigen has been criticised as an example of Eurocentricism, an especially harsh charge against this author known for his critique of globalisation. The claim that Grass writes about India as a colonising Westerner overlooks the ways in which he undermines the sovereignty of the Western subject through his polyphonic, self-reflexive account. The result is a sincere attempt to destabilise the oppressive subject he has been accused of promoting. This attempt notwithstanding, Grass's critique does falter for two reasons that critics of Zunge zeigen have not addressed. The first concerns his use of Theodor Fontane both as a bridge to the history of colonialism and as a model for engaged literature. Fontane proves tenuous on both counts, and diverts Grass's attention both from India's colonial history and literary present. Second, Grass's prescription for overcoming the misery he documents in India and Bangladesh , the Enlightenment , ultimately reinscribes a discourse of domination that favours Europe. By choosing Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, to represent India, Grass reinforces the notion that rationality is a European invention that is alien to the mystical, chaotic East. Ultimately, Grass fails to account for the Enlightenment's own historical complicity in colonialism. [source]


    FLORENTINE CIVIC HUMANISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN IDEOLOGY

    HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2007
    HANAN YORAN
    ABSTRACT This article revisits the question of the modernity of the Renaissance by examining the political language of Florentine civic humanism and by critically analyzing the debate over Hans Baron's interpretation of the movement. It engages two debates that are usually conducted separately: one concerning the originality of civic humanism in comparison to medieval thought, and the other concerning the political and social function of the civic humanists' political republicanism in fifteenth-century Florence. The article's main contention is that humanist political discourse rejected the perception of social and political reality as being part of, or reflecting, a metaphysical and divine order or things, and thus undermined the traditional justifications for political hierarchies and power relations. This created the conditions of possibility for the distinctively modern aspiration for a social and political order based on liberty and equality. It also resulted in the birth of a distinctively modern form of ideology, one that legitimizes the social order by disguising its inequalities and structures of domination. Humanism, like modern political thought generally, thus simultaneously constructs and reflects the dialectic of emancipation and domination so central to modernity itself. [source]


    FELLOW CITIZENS AND IMPERIAL SUBJECTS: CONQUEST AND SOVEREIGNTY IN EUROPE'S OVERSEAS EMPIRES

    HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2005
    ANTHONY PAGDEN
    ABSTRACT This article traces the association between the European overseas empires and the concept of sovereignty, arguing that, ever since the days of Cicero,if not earlier,Europeans had clung to the idea that there was a close association between a people and the territory it happened to occupy. This made it necessary to think of an "empire" as a unity,an "immense body," to use Tacitus's phrase,that would embrace all its subjects under a single sovereign. By the end of the eighteenth century it had become possible, in this way, to speak of "empires of liberty" that would operate for the ultimate benefit of all their "citizens," freeing them from previous tyrannical rulers and bringing them under the protection of more benign regimes. In such empires sovereignty could only ever be, as it had become in Europe, undivided. The collapse of Europe's "first" empires in the Americas, however, was followed rapidly by Napoleon's attempt to create a new kind of Empire in Europe. The ultimate, and costly, failure of this project led many, Benjamin Constant among them, to believe that the age of empires was now over and had been replaced by the age of commerce. But what in fact succeeded Napoleon was the modern European state system, which attempted not to replace empire by trade, as Constant had hoped, but to create a new kind of empire, one that sought to minimize domination and settlement, and to make a sharp distinction between imperial ruler and imperial subject. In this kind of empire, sovereignty could only be "divided." Various kinds of divided rule were thus devised in the nineteenth century. Far, however, from being an improvement on the past, this ultimately resulted in,or at least contributed greatly to,the emergence of the largely fictional and inevitably unstable societies that after the final collapse of the European empires became the new states of the "developing world." [source]


    The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency: Colonial Texts and Modes of Evidence

    HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2000
    Premesh Lalu
    This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as ,alternative history.' The aim in effecting this interruption is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of rewriting South African history, critical history, it issuggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its practices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules established by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category ofevidence as an object for a politics of history of the present. [source]


    Historical Anthropology of Modern India

    HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2007
    Saurabh Dube
    The last three decades have seen acute interchanges between history and anthropology in theoretical and empirical studies. Scholarship on South Asia has reflected these patterns, but it has also reworked such tendencies. Here, significant writings of the 1960s and 1970s brought together processes of history and patterns of culture as part of mutual fields of analysis and description. These emphases have been critically developed more recently. Anthropologists and historians have rethought theory and method, in order not only to crucially conjoin but to explore anew the ,archive' and the ,field'. The blending has produced ,historical anthropology': writings that approach and explain in new ways elaborations of caste and community, colonialism and empire, nation and nationalism, domination and resistance, law and politics, myth and kingship, environment and ethnicity, and state and modernity , in the past and the present. Work in historical anthropology focuses on practice, process, and power, and often combines perspectives from gender, postcolonial, and subaltern studies. [source]


    Hillslope-swamp interactions and flow pathways in a hypermaritime rainforest, British Columbia

    HYDROLOGICAL PROCESSES, Issue 15 2003
    D. F. Fitzgerald
    Abstract The process of water delivery to a headwater stream in a hypermaritime rainforest was examined using a variety of physical techniques and tracing with dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and the stable isotopes of water. Headwater swamps, often the major discharge zones for water draining off steep forest slopes, strongly affect the physical and chemical character of streamflow in the region. The headwater swamp selected for detailed investigation was sustained by relatively constant groundwater input from the steep colluvial slopes that maintained the water table above the ground surface. During significant storm events the water table rose quickly and the swamp expanded to engulf marginal pools that developed rapidly on the adjacent ground surfaces. The corresponding release of surface water directly to the stream typically comprised up to 95% of total stream discharge. The proportion of groundwater seepage to the stream by matrix flow (<1%) and via macropore-fed springs (up to 73%) increased during the recession period, but could not be sustained over the longer term. In more protracted drying periods, deep groundwater contributions to the stream were routed first to the headwater swamp. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in the stream, measured daily or more frequently during storm events, was found to be directly proportional to discharge, owing to the domination of DOC-rich headwater-swamp water sources. Although ,18O and ,2H composition of rainwater, groundwater and stream flow were found to be similar, deuterium excess (d ,2H , 8,18O) of water components was often found to be distinct, and suggested short water residence times of roughly 12 days for one event. Overall, observations of a typical headwater swamp reveal that the groundwater regime is dominated by rapid infiltration and short, emergent flow paths. With a relatively short turnover time, potential disturbances to the system by harvesting of upslope areas can be expected to occur rapidly. Forest managers can mitigate some of the harmful effects of logging operations by respecting the integrity of headwater wetland systems. The nature and magnitude of such perturbations will require further study. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


    Politics Improper: Iris Marion Young, Hannah Arendt, and the Power of Performativity

    HYPATIA, Issue 4 2007
    JANE MONICA DREXLER
    This essay explores the value of oppositional, performative political action in the context of oppression, domination, and exclusionary political spheres. Rather than adopting Iris Marion Young's approach, Drexler turns to Hannah Arendt's theories of political action in order to emphasize the capacity of political action as action to intervene in and disrupt the constricting, politically devitalizing, necrophilic normalizations of proceduralism and routine, and thus to reorient the importance of contestatory action as enabling and enacting creativity, spontaneity, and resistance. [source]


    Why No Shop Committees in America: A Narrative History

    INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2001
    David Brody
    This article explores the origins of the prohibition against shop committees in modern labor law. It identifies World War I as the crystallizing moment and argues that shop committees might have become a permanent feature of American industrial relations at that time but for a series of contingent events arising in particular from the great steel strike of 1919. Historians have missed this linkage, the article concludes, because in the intervening 1920s, employee representation became disassociated from industrial democracy, with the notable exception of the railroads, where blatantly antiunion use of employee representation prompted the judicial condemnation of employer domination of labor organizations that provided the doctrinal foundation for Section 8a(2) of the National Labor Relations Act. [source]


    Sisters organising in Japan and Korea: the development of women-only unions

    INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL, Issue 3 2007
    Kaye Broadbent
    ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the development of women-only unions in Japan and Korea. Women-only unions, which organise women workers across enterprises and employment status boundaries in both countries, have appeared only recently and are new areas of research. While the strategy to form autonomous women-only unions in Japan and Korea is a recent phenomenon, women workers in both countries are continuing a tradition of women's activism that has challenged both management and the male domination of the union movement. By taking a broad scope and by organising the growing non-full-time workforce and women employed in small workplaces, the formation of women-only unions in Japan and Korea is a positive development for both non-unionised women workers and for the broader workers' movement in general. [source]


    A new fast block matching algorithm based on complexity-distortion optimization

    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF IMAGING SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 2 2002
    Pol Lin Tai
    Most fast block matching algorithms ignore the efficiency in motion compensation within each checking step. In order to achieve better-compensated performance, the limited computational complexity should be allocated more carefully into each block. It means that the fast block matching algorithm can be viewed as a kind of rate-distortion optimization problem. The complexity-distortion optimal fast block matching algorithm should find the maximized quality of the compensated image under a target computational complexity. In order to approach the optimal complexity-distortion solution, some strategies are developed. For example, a domination-based motion vector prediction technique is developed to set the initial motion vector for each block. A predictive complexity-distortion benefit list is established to predict the compensated benefit for each block. Also, a three-level pattern searching is employed to check the candidate motion vector. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms significantly the three-step search. For example, in "Salesman," the average checkpoints for one block is 33 by using the three-step search. The average checkpoint is 1.75 by using our proposal algorithm under the same average PSNR condition. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol 12, 63,67, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ima.10012 [source]


    The return of the political in social work

    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 1 2009
    Mel Gray
    This article is a follow-up to our article ,Revisiting social work as art' and in part a response to Karen Healy's reply [both published in IJSW 17(2)]. It is, however, also a significant extension of this material since it engages with more general concerns about the critical project that is intrinsic to social work. Social work is not just about self-foundation based on knowledge, values and skills formation, but also about self-assertion. Crucially, it is through this notion of self-assertion that social work can be best understood as an agent of change. This transformative aspect of social work is our central focus. We are not concerned with structural conditions of power and domination but with theorising what a transformative politics would look like for social work using the lens of the French political philosopher Alain Badiou as a conceptual medium for permitting the return of the political for social work. [source]