New Guinea Leadership as Ethnographic Analogy: A Critical Review

Increasingly, archaeologists are recognizing cultural anthropological work in New Guinea as an important source of ethnographic analogy for understanding the initial stages of cultural evolution. This article critically reviews the literature on leadership in contact-era New Guinea. It is intended as an introduction both to different theoretical interpretations of leadership, as these have developed from Marshal Sahlins's Big-man archetype to the present, and to the primary literature on the topic. It points to several implications for archaeological theory, identifies a number of problems in the ethnography and theory of contact-era New Guinea leadership, and concludes with a brief guide to deploying the ethnographic and theoretical literature.     

Women's Interests and Empowerment: Gender Planning Reconsidered

This article looks at the empowerment approach in relation to issues of women and development. After explaining why this is currently the most fruitful perspective in the field of gender planning, it then goes on to explore two central problems of the empowerment approach. The first problem is the conceptualization of women's gender interests. The distinction between women's practical and strategic gender interests was introduced by Molyneux and popularized by Moser. It is argued here that this distinction is theoretically unfounded and empirically untenable. Secondly, gender planners tend towards a preference for simplified tools and quantifiable targets. Here it is argued that women's realities should not be bent into this planning framework but that instead planners, working from an empowerment perspective, should demonstrate flexibility and theoretical grounding, and be aware of the political dimensions of their work.     

社区参与旅游的制度性增权研究

西方研究者认为社区参与旅游迫切需要解决的是信息、心理、教育和社会增权,而中国现阶段由于产权界定模糊导致的制度性的缺权才是阻碍旅游地社区通过参与旅游获得公平发展的主要障碍,西方国家清晰的产权制度使得其旅游增权理论欠缺了对制度性缺权状态的研究。本文在对制度和增权等基本概念进行辨析的基础上,划分了4种制度性增权类型,分别讨论了制度缺失和制度失灵两种社区参与旅游的缺权状态,探索了中国的政治体制和社会现实下可行的制度性增权途径,为进一步开展旅游社区增权的实践研究夯实了理论基础。     

旅游增权理论本土化研究——云南迪庆案例

增权是促进旅游发展公平性和可持续性的有效途径。本文通过对云南省迪庆州政府、开发商与当地居民在旅游发展中的权力关系状态的实地调查,探索将旅游增权理论应用于中国旅游实践的框架和途径。研究表明,在旅游发展过程中,由于旅游资源产权界定不清晰、信息不对称、缺乏权利意识和管理技能,社区居民普遍处于被排斥的无权状态,导致了旅游发展中尖锐的社会冲突,成为我国旅游发展面临的最大的约束和引发各种社会矛盾的根源。必须打破不平衡的权力关系,增进社区的权能。其中,明晰资源产权,改革旅游资源租赁使用制度是解决所有问题的起点,同时也需要信息增权和教育增权的支持。     

Taking Care into Account: Leveraging India's MGNREGA for Women's Empowerment

The potential of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) for women's empowerment is immense. Studies examining gender‐related issues in MGNREGA have attested to the high levels of participation of women on worksites, and their positive experiences of working in MGNREGA. This article argues, however, that an exclusive focus on increased participation of women does not serve an agenda of promoting ‘women's empowerment’. By ignoring the dynamics and processes of unpaid care work, both the making and the implementation of the Act fall short of the goal of women's empowerment. The author argues that this invisibilizing of care arises from the gendered nature of the interactions of formal and informal institutions that have shaped MGNREGA. The article examines the gendered debates during the formulation of the Act and analyses the gendered nature of its implementation. It concludes that a true focus on women's empowerment requires that women's lived experiences are taken into account, especially those relating to their unpaid care responsibilities. MGNREGA's potential for women's empowerment can only be achieved through adequate implementation and monitoring of its gender provisions, which in turn depend on changing the formal and informal institutions that underpin policy processes.     

Authority over Forests: Empowerment and Subordination in Senegal's Democratic Decentralization

Senegal's 1998 forestry code transfers rights to control and allocate forest access to elected rural councils, ostensibly giving the elected authorities significant material powers with respect to which they can represent the rural population. But the Forest Service is unwilling to allow rural councils to exercise these powers. To retain control, foresters use pressure, bribes and threats while taking advantage of the inability of the rural representatives to influence actors higher up in government. They justify themselves with arguments of national good and local incompetence. The foresters ally with urban‐based forest merchants and are supported by the sub‐prefect. Despite the transfer of forest rights, the foresters continue to allocate access to lucrative forest opportunities — in this case charcoal production and exchange — to the merchants. Despite holding effective property rights over forest, such as the right to exclude others, rural councils remain marginal and rural populations remain destitute. The councils cannot represent their populations and therefore cannot gain legitimacy: they have no authority. Despite progressive new laws, the Forest Service helps to maintain Senegal's healthy urban charcoal oligopsonies, while beating back fledgling local democracy.     

Subaltern Empowerment in the Geoweb: Tensions between Publicity and Privacy

Geographers have argued that the emergence of the geospatial web, or geoweb, represents a radical shift away from the state's monopolization of geospatial technologies. Like the public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) movement before it, the geoweb research agenda has emphasized a desire for empowerment and participatory democracy. However, this research agenda has also inherited a conceptualization of power that emphasizes the linkages between empowerment and public visibility, and this paper argues that this inheritance opens potentially sensitive geoweb data to exploitation. Geographers therefore have an important role to play in emphasizing the need to explore ways of harnessing the power of the geoweb for marginalized communities while nonetheless maintaining those communities' privacy. This paper uses work with the Maijuna indigenous people of Peru as a case study to begin a discussion about how the political goals of disempowered people may be best obtained through both public and private uses of the geoweb.     

New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy

This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so–called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command–center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.     

Fichte and the German Idiom: the Metaphysics of the Addresses to the German Nation

This article argues against the dominant Anglophone and Francophone interpretation of Fichte, which reads him as advancing either a form of ethnic or cultural nationalism. It claims that what is missing from the current reception of Fichte is the essentially philosophical and cosmopolitan character of his nationalism – the fact that the Addresses to the German Nation uses non‐empirical and cosmopolitical concepts to develop and articulate its nationalistic viewpoint. It therefore claims that the notion of a national philosophical idiom that the Addresses present, far from being a screen for its nationalism, is its driving engine. It does this by considering the problems of translating the German locution ist unsers Geschlechts. Consequently, it is claimed that the cosmo‐nationalism of Fichte is not reducible to a set of claims regarding ethnicity or even the empirical world, even if a discourse on the organismic, on what counts as life, irreducibly haunts the Addresses.     

Women's Empowerment Through Home–based Work: Evidence from India

This article examines the extent to which home–based production in the garment sector of Ahmedabad, India, serves to empower its female participants, defining empowerment in terms of control over enterprise income and decision–making within the household. It places this question within the literatures on resource theory and bargaining models of the household, both of which posit that improved access to resources increases women's power in the household. This study highlights why access to resources may not lead so directly to improvements in women's position in the household in the Indian context. It then discusses why home–based work may be less empowering than sources of work outside of the home. The arguments about the empowerment potential of women's access to resources through home–based work are tested by examining, first, the determinants of control over the income generated by women in home–based garment production and, second, to what extent access to and control over income from this source translates into involvement in decisions which are atypically women's and yet important to their lives. The results provide a better understanding of the potential of home–based work to offer women in urban India a source of economic activity that also can translate into increased intra–household power.     

Finnish municipalities and planning in transition: Empowerment,impulses and strategies

In a complex and turbulent environment, planning should have a different form from planning in a time of stable development. The modes of action of planning are changing with the environment. The main features of changes concerning planning in the Finnish local government crystallize in a shift from government to governance. The focus of this article is on: (a) an evolution of Finnish municipalities; (b) a possible new form of planning according to principles of governance (including empowerment, impulse planning and strategies); and (c) a quest for a new solution for the future in three Finnish municipalities.