Russian Peasant Farms and Household Plots in 2003: A Research Note

An American specialist on Russian agriculture surveys the current legal status of peasant farms and subsidiary agriculture ("private plots") in Russia following the enactment of two important new laws in 2003. In the process, he highlights differences between peasant farms and subidiary plots in terms of the quantity and type of food produced, the size of land plots utilized, and their legal status. Also reviewed are selected aspects of the recent economic perfomance of these two pillars of private-sector agriculture. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O13, O18, Q15. 16 references.     

Collective Action through Voluntary Environmental Programs: A Club Theory Perspective

Voluntary environmental programs are institutions that seek to induce firms to produce positive environmental externalities beyond what government regulations require. Drawing on club theory, this paper outlines a theoretical perspective to study the relationship between program design and program effectiveness. Effective programs have rule structures that mitigate two central collective action problems inherent in producing positive environmental externalities: attracting firms to participate in the program and ensuring that participating firms adhere to program obligations. Because program efficacy can be undermined by collective action problems associated with free riding and shirking, effective voluntary clubs should be designed to mitigate these challenges.     

A Father's Perspective on Bridewealth in the Making of the Transnational Papua New Guinean Household

That people value ‘people’ over ‘things’ is argued often by anthropologists, but how people value specific forms and qualities of relations as they do in the example of bridewealth is less so. I explore the perspective of Papua New Guinean-born fathers in Australia as they advocate innovations in bridewealth traditions and thereby enable daughters to marry for love, cultivate a companionate marriage, and create a Papua New Guinean household. Past generations gauged the worth of traditional bridewealth by the quantity and distribution of items given and the number of exogamous clan connections forged as an index of past and future relations between clans. The current generation judges the value of even alternate forms of bridewealth for making new possibilities for those who share in it. If bridewealth enables the transnational household to emerge as the unit of decision making that replaces the clan, then innovations in bridewealth support, rather than undermine, a new normativity of companionate marriage that empowers that much wider net of kin. Drawing on a theory of value as the importance of social action towards the goal of the new normativity of the transnational household, I show how choosing a spouse is cultivated by women's fathers who refuse bridewealth, as often as it is by their husbands who provide new forms of wealth at marriage.     

Agricultural Development and Household Incomes in Central Asia: A Survey of Tajikistan, 2003-2008

Two noted specialists on the agricultural economies of the former Soviet Union examine the effects of land reform on agricultural production and the income of rural house-holds in Tajikistan. The authors utilize official government statistics to discern trends of agricultural output at the national level, and the results of three extensive surveys conducted in 2007-2008 (N > 2,000) and one in 2003 (N = 4,000 respondents) by international organizations (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Asian Development Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, World Bank) to identify household-level changes. They also review the legislative framework for agrarian reform in the country; examine national-level trends in farm structure and organization, livestock production, farm productivity, and cropping patterns; and analyze shifts in size of land holdings and rural family incomes at the household level. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D130, O130, P320, Q150. 11 figures, 10 tables, 42 references.     

西方地图史研究:收藏兴趣、后现代转向、多样化

地图史研究在20世纪六七十年代兴起,在各种社会思潮的影响下,20世纪八九十年代很快就发生了转向。其中,哈利(John Brain Harley)、大卫·特布尔(David Turnbull)、克里斯蒂安·雅克布(Christian Jacob)是地图史研究转向中展开系统理论阐述的代表性学者。尤其是哈利成就卓著,他关于地图史的理论阐述被称之为地图史哲学,而以他为核心的学者群为地图史研究做出了重大贡献,影响深远。他们对地图史研究理论的阐释有着内在的一致性,都强调了对地图的重新定义,地图与其所处的社会的关系,地图与知识、权力的关系。在理论发展的推动下,地图史研究在20世纪90年代以后开始蓬勃发展。首先,传统的实证主义专题在继续发展的同时,吸收新的思路与方法,不断深化;其次地图史不再只是地图史本身:地图史同时也呈现历史,而地图更被用来构建历史。第三,也是极为重要的,从权力、资本、知识关联性角度,讨论地图史与地理空间的相互创造过程。第四,地图装饰和女性主义等其他地图史专题研究,同样引人注目。     

Sowing the Seeds of Modernity on the Ottoman Frontier: Agricultural Investment and the Formation of Large Farms in Nineteenth-Century Transjordan

In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire initiated a series of modernization reforms. In an effort to address the economic viability of the state, it turned its attentions to its frontiers, in an attempt to bring these regions back into the fold of the empire. In Transjordan, the state targeted Bedouin subjects; as part of the Ottoman project of modernity, efforts were made to settle nomadic pastoralists and transform pastureland into agricultural spaces. The rural countryside was opened to capitalist investment in agriculture. However, agricultural intensification, and the establishment of large farms created a crisis of modernity for many Bedouin. The intensification of agriculture brought increased taxation, diminished control over production, indebtedness, and ultimately the appropriation of land. But some Bedouin used the built environment and natural landscape to confront the Ottoman project of modernity as it unfolded on the frontier.     

Gender,Contracts and Wage Work: Agricultural Restructuring in Brazil's São Francisco Valley

Brazil?s São Francisco Valley provides an example of the ways in which agro-food firms are attempting to mobilize and control labour as they expand production of fruits and vegetables for domestic and global markets. In crops where cost reduction is a primary concern, firms choose highly ‘flexible’ forms of labour mobilization, drawing on the casual labour of migrants from the Brazilian Northeast. In crops where the quality and timing of produce are of great importance, firms use either subcontracting arrangements that mobilize family labour, or the labour of local women and children. In this way, firms involved in the production of fruits and vegetables show many similarities to their counterparts in certain branches of industry: they are actively experimenting with labour arrangements that tap the most vulnerable segments of the international workforce, and that appropriate unpaid family labour.     

流行的群体"暴力":以"杀手"游戏为中心

"杀手"是近年最流行的成人集体游戏之一,引来如《新周刊》等各类报刊以及包括三大门户网站--新浪、搜狐和网易--在内的诸网络媒体的广泛关注和报道。中国人民大学的沙莲香、郭星华两位教授从社会学、传媒学、伦理学与心理学的角度认识到这一游戏的价值,进行了初步的探讨。然而,作为当代都市民俗的"杀手"游戏似乎并没有进入民俗学特别是游戏学学者的考察视野。本文仅是一个抛砖引玉的     

A Precious Medicine: Tradition and Magic in Some Seventeenth-Century Household Remedies

The White Book Mabinogion: Welsh Tales and Romances reproduced from the Peniarth MSS. Edited By J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Pwllheli (Subscribers Only). 1909. By Alfred Nutt.

The Hooden Horse. By Percy Maylam. Canterbury: Privately Printed, 1909. 4to., pp. xvi +124. 5 Plates. By Charlotte S. Burne.

Old Etruria and Modern Tuscany. By Mary Lovett Cameron. Methuen, 1909. 8vo, pp. xxii + 332. 32 ill.

High Albania. By M. Edith Durham. Edward Arnold, 1909. Demy 8vo, pp. xii+ 352. ill. and Map. By W. H. D. Rouse.

With a Prehistoric People. The Akikûyu of British East Africa. Being some Account of the Method of Life and Mode of Thought found existent amongst a Nation on its first Contact with European Civilisation. By W. Scoresby Routledge And Katherine Routledge (born Pease). Edward Arnold, 1910. Ryl. 8vo, pp. xxxii + 392. Map and cxxxvi ill. By A. Werner.

Volkskundliches aus Togo. Märchen und Fabeln, Sprichwörter und Rätsel, Lieder und Spiele, Sagen und Tauschungspiele der Ewe-Neger von Togo. Gesammelt von Josef Schönhärl. Leipzig: Kochs, 1909. 8vo, pp. x + 204.

Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria West Africa. By Elphinstone Dayrell. With an Introduction by Andrew Lang. Longmans, Green, &; Co., 1910. 8vo, pp. xvi + 159. Frontispiece. By A. R. Wright.

The Garos. By Major A. Playfair. Introduction by Sir J. Bampfylde Fuller. (Published under the orders of the Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam.) Nutt, 1909. 8vo, pp. xvi + 172. Illustrations and maps. By W. Crooke.     

Method and Confusion in the Study of the Household: A Review

Abstract

When analyzing Woodrow Wilson's narrow victory in the presidential election of 1916, students of the Electoral College have focused on the closeness of the popular vote in California. None of them have noticed that Wilson's victory in the Electoral College depended on non-enforcement of the Penalty Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Using Morgan Kousser's analysis of voter disenfranchisement across the South between 1880 and 1910, this article demonstrates that Charles Evans Hughes would have won the electoral vote if the Penalty Clause had been enforced when the House was reapportioned following the 1910 census.     

奴隶劳动在两河流域家庭农业中的重要作用——以两件分家泥板文书为例

本文分析了乌尔第三王朝和古巴比伦时期的两件分家文书.文件表明在古代两河流域的家庭生产资料中,奴隶作为动产的主要部分在家庭的农业生产和生活中占有极其重要的地位,许多家庭在生产劳动中大量使用男女奴隶劳动力,说明古代两河流域文明是建立在奴隶制社会上的农业文明,古代两河流域社会是奴隶制社会.     

Restructuring Beijing's Social Space: Observations on the Olympic Games in 2008

Two American geographers comment on the preceding analysis of restructuring of Beijing's social space (Feng et al., 2007) by presenting observations on the city's Olympic Games, forthcoming in the summer of 2008. The authors focus on some of the more salient geographical impacts stemming from construction, relocation, and related measures undertaken by the authorities to accommodate the event. Included in the paper are sections on environmental concerns (particularly air pollution), infrastructure (water supply, automobile traffic, and mass transit), and relocation and displacement of residents (particularly of migrants and other disadvantaged segments of the population). Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I31, O15, O18, P20. 2 figures, 2 tables, 44 references.     

Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies

The memory wave in the humanities has contributed to the impressive revival of cultural history, but the success of memory studies has not been accompanied by significant conceptual and methodological advances in the research of collective memory processes. Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights into past and present historical cultures cannot be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness. This methodological problem is even enhanced by the metaphorical use of psychological and neurological terminology, which misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory as an effect and extension of individual, autobiographical memory. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed through the extensive contextualization of specific strategies of representation, which links facts of representation with facts of reception. As a result, the history of collective memory would be recast as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers. The negotiations among these three different historical agents create the rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics, and the reconstruction of these negotiations helps us distinguish among the abundance of failed collective memory initiatives on the one hand and the few cases of successful collective memory construction on the other. For this purpose, collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception, and continue to use a wide range of interpretive tools from traditional historiography to poststructural approaches. From the perspective of collective memory studies, these two traditions are closely related and mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive, ways of analyzing historical cultures.     

经济学视角下的政府旅游管理职能研究

纯粹的市场经济存在着信息不对称、“公地悲剧”、外部性问题和合成谬误等自身难以克服的缺陷。需要政府对旅游经济运行进行干预,因而在旅游发展过程中政府主导力量起着重要的推动作用。然而政府本身并不完美,其掌握信息的不充分、行政能力的有限理性和部门间的利益冲突决定了其在进行旅游行政管理时的局限性。因此,需要在旅游发展过程中,根据不同阶段特征对政府计划和市场两种手段进行有效的组合,并建立多中心体制来保证旅游业的健康持续发展。