Uneven Process (uneven + process)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Ethnicity, Economic Polarization and Regional Inequality in Southern Slovakia

GROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2000
Adrian Smith
This paper examines the relationships between ethnicity and regional economic transformation in Slovakia. It takes as its focus the position of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia in the uneven process of regional change. The paper places these issues within the context of struggles over ethnicity and ,nation' in post-independence Slovakia. The paper argues that ethnicity has been a thoroughly contested issue since the collapse of ,communism' in Slovakia and a variety of struggles have been waged over enhancing the rights and position of the Hungarian minority population. The concentration of the Hungarian minority in the southern Slovak border regions with Hungary is examined within the context of the uneven economic impacts of the ,transition to capitalism'. It is argued that, while the economic decline seen in many of these ,Hungarian' regions has impacted negatively on the local populations, the roots of these changes lie within the ways in which such regions were integrated into the state socialist regional division of labor. In particular, the role of peripheral industrialization in such regions prior to 1989, in attempting to reduce economic differences among various ethnic groups, resulted in the establishment of branch plant economies which have had difficulty in surviving since 1989. It is therefore the interweaving of the economics of regional decline and the politics of ethnicity that help us to understand the complex place of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. [source]


Anthropological race psychology 1820,1945: a common European system of ethnic identity narratives

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 4 2009
RICHARD McMAHON
ABSTRACT. This article examines ethnic stereotypes in biological race classification of Europeans between the 1830s and 1940s as part of political discourse on national identity. Anthropologists linked physical-psychological types to nations and national character stereotypes through ,national races', achieving an often quite enduring international consensus on each race's mentality. The article argues that race mentality narratives were therefore partly dictated by their place within a dynamic interlocking European system. I focus on two key interacting elements that structured this system: the central role of the Germanic-Nordic blond and the geographically uneven process of modernisation. I consider the spatiality of socio-cultural and political factors ,external' to the stereotype system, such as geopolitics and modernisation, but also emphasise that discursive relationships between national stereotypes helped structure the international stereotype system. My conclusion argues for greater consideration of the influence of both scientific and international systemic factors in research on national identity. [source]


D/developments after the Meltdown

ANTIPODE, Issue 2010
Gillian Hart
Abstract:, Part of what makes the current conjuncture so extraordinary is the coincidence of the massive economic meltdown with the implosion of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, and the reappearance of US liberal internationalism in the guise of "smart power" defined in terms of Diplomacy, Development, and Defence. This essay engages these challenges through a framework that distinguishes between "Development" as a post-war international project that emerged in the context of decolonization and the Cold War, and capitalist development as a dynamic and highly uneven process of creation and destruction. Closely attentive to what Gramsci calls "the relations of force at various levels", my task in this essay is to suggest how the instabilities and constant redefinitions of official discourses and practices of Development since the 1940s shed light on the conditions in which we now find ourselves. [source]


RE-READING INSCRIPTIONS IN CHINESE SCROLL PAINTING: THE ELEVENTH TO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

ART HISTORY, Issue 5 2005
ZHANG HONGXING
Art historians often regard Chinese art as the classic example of the unity between word and image. Such a view is predicated on the uncritical acceptance of canonical Chinese art theory and on mistaken notions about a changeless China and ideographic Chinese writing. Those misconceptions have prevented an understanding of the historical specificity of the relationship between the two graphic systems. In applying Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of the three fundamental types of sign (icon, index, symbol) to Chinese writing, scholars tend to conclude that it is not a symbolic-indexic system, but primarily an iconic one. Taking as the point of departure an antinomy between word and image, I demonstrate that the introduction of inscriptions into Chinese scroll painting was a long and uneven process. Between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, inscriptions initially entered pictorial space timidly; gradually growing in size and type, they eventually became separated from the pictorial elements, bringing about a fundamental change to the relations between word and image. In the age of the advent of codex and the invention of printing, inscriptions, through their intrusions into and encounters with painting, served to rescue the scroll from oblivion and to transform it into the major bearer of pictorial culture. [source]


Recovering from Crisis: The Case of Thailand's Spatial Fix

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 4 2007
Jim Glassman
Abstract: Although the Asian economic crisis has been the subject of numerous analyses, the varied and uneven processes by which different Asian countries have recovered from the crisis have received comparatively less attention. This article focuses on the process of recovery in Thailand. While the crisis and recovery both have international dimensions that go beyond individual nation-states, the case of Thailand can be used to analyze some of the forces that are at work in both the national and international contexts. Thailand's process of recovery can be analyzed by noting tensions and overlaps among different forms of spatial fix,those involving investment in Bangkok' built environment, those involving the geographic decentralization of investment to lower-cost production sites, and those involving the effort to expand exports. Each of these spatial fixes involves different accumulation strategies and, therefore, political coalitions. This situation suggests the centrality of social struggles over the appropriation of surplus to both crisis and recovery. [source]


Institutional Diversity and Capitalist Transition: The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Arunachal Pradesh, India

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 4 2009
BARBARA HARRISS-WHITE
This paper contributes a preliminary analysis of the process of agrarian capitalist transition in Arunachal Pradesh, one of the least studied regions of India. Primarily based on information collected through a field survey in eleven villages, the paper seeks to explain the nature and implications of institutional unevenness in the development of capitalism. Institutional diversity is not simply mapped across space, it is also manifested in the simultaneous existence of market and non-market institutions across the means of production within the same village or spatial context. In addition, there is a continuous and complex interaction among these institutions which both shapes and is shaped by this capitalist transition. Primitive accumulation emerges as a continuing characteristic of the on-going agrarian and non-agrarian capitalist transition. Institutional adaptation, continuity and hybridity are as integral to the emergence of the market economy as are the processes of creation of new institutions and demise of others. There is no necessary correspondence between the emerging commercialization of the different productive dimensions of the agrarian economy. These uneven processes are deeply influenced by existing and emerging power relations and by the state. Framed by the Bernstein,Byres debate about the contemporary (ir)relevance of the agrarian question, evidence is presented to justify the conclusion that although the processes at work are far from the classical models of the transition to capitalism, all aspects of the agrarian question remain relevant. [source]