Faust and Mon Faust

Following is a list of publications by Álvaro Félix Bolaños.     

Principios y fines del “Quijote.” Eduardo Urbina

This brief article offers a panoramic view of Álvaro Félix Bolaños's intellectual and academic trajectory. It emphasizes his ethical beliefs and practices and his solidarity with the indigenous peoples of the Americas.     

19世纪中期英国中产阶级慈善活动论析

19世纪中期,英国进入从传统农业社会向现代工业社会急剧转型的时期,并形成了以私人慈善、自助互助和政府救济为主要形式的多元救助体系。但由于政府奉行自由资本主义,私人慈善便承担起了大部分的社会责任,中产阶级成为私人慈善活动的主力。私人慈善尽管不是社会发展的核心要素,但它却是英国社会转型的润滑剂,发挥着政府救济不可替代的作用。     

‘Buy and promote the national cause’: consumption,class formation and nationalism in Mandate Palestinian society1

ABSTRACT. This article deals with patterns of consumption and of advertisement, as a field for the analysis of two major processes in the Palestinian society of Mandate Palestine: the growth of an urban middle class and the consolidation of the Palestinian national movement. The advertisements, sampled from the popular daily paper Filastin, analysed in the context of political and economic events, highlight the complex interplay between nationalism and class formation, and the contradictory tensions between the two processes. A smaller sampling in al‐Difa' points to similar, though not identical, trends. This analysis also highlights new dimensions of the Jewish–Arab conflict by drawing attention to the semi‐private sphere of consumption which appears to have been less segregated than the more often studied political and economic spheres.     

Hopes,dreams and anxieties: India's one-child families

While rapid fertility decline in India in the last two decades has received considerable attention, much of the discourse has focused on a decline in high parity births. However, this paper finds that, almost hidden from the public gaze, a small but significant segment of the Indian population has begun the transition to extremely low fertility. Among the urban, upper income, educated, middle class, it is no longer unusual to find families stopping at one child, even when this child is a girl. Using data from the India Human Development Survey of 2004–2005, we examine the factors that may lead some families to stop at a single child. We conclude that the motivations for this very low fertility are likely to be a more extreme form of those for low fertility rather than reflecting the qualitative change in ideologies and worldviews that is hypothesized to accompany very low fertility during the second demographic transition.     

Shadowing the White Man's Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line

Abstract

Travel lectures were a popular part of the American self-culture movement of the mid-nineteenth. Audiences enjoyed travel lectures because they possessed analogical potential rooted in narratives of self-discipline and mastery to aid in the adaption to the socio-economic changes of the market and consumer society. Audiences viewed the lecturer Bayard Taylor as a model of liberal/republican masculinity. His career also reveals the role that metaphors of mobility served in the transformation from the ethos of character to the later outer-directed, “personality” driven, pursuit of personal self-realization.     

Becoming Rafinesque: Market Society and Academic Reputation in the Early American Republic

This article focuses on how knowledge came to be valued in conflicting ways in the American Republic during the 1820s and 1830s – one based on a market model that considered knowledge to be a commodity for sale, and another that produced cultural value through social connections created in new academic institutions. Constantine Rafinesque, who taught at Transylvania University in Kentucky, and his research in the natural sciences serve as an example of the first sort of scholarship. His life also illustrates how a market society could lead to dandies, like Rafinesque himself, even in academia, and how that threatened both new middle class social proprieties and a system of clubby social relations that had come to dominate America’s colleges and universities in the early nineteenth century.     

Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

In this article I seek to apply the notion of anti-Semitism as a cultural code, which I initially developed 25 years ago with relation to the antimodernist trends in late-nineteenth-century Germany, to the phenomena of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism today. From the 1960s anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism formed part of a larger ideological package consisting of anticolonialism, anticapitalism, and a deep suspicion of US policies. In the eyes of members of the developing countries, Jews became a symbol of the West and legitimate targets for hatred. Thus, the position on the Jewish question, even if not in itself of paramount importance, came to indicate a belonging to a larger camp, a political stand and an overall cultural choice. The question is whether the position towards Israel today, which has become a central issue for the European left, can still be considered a cultural code or whether it rather indicates a more direct anti-Jewish attack, above all as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.     

Russia's Involvement in the International Environmental Process: A Research Report

The paper surveys Russia's engagement, both in terms of policy formulation and implementation, with the main initiatives outlined at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Although coverage extends through the entire period from 1992 to present, a particular focus is on recent developments under the Putin administration, a period characterized by an ostensibly utilitarian approach to environmental management. Russia's response to the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) is assessed in the broader context of the country's problems in effecting major environmental policy changes.     

Documenting the indignation: Responses to the 2008 financial crisis in contemporary Spanish cinema

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to analyze two Spanish documentary films that reflect on the 2008 financial crisis in Spain, Mercado de futuros (Mercedes Álvarez, 2011) and No estamos solos (Pere Joan Ventura, 2015). These movies could be marked as political for their choice of a collective protagonist and for dealing with the issues of inequality with the purpose of appealing to mobilization and resistance to the neoliberal Western agenda that have provoked social cutbacks after the 2008 crisis. Mercedes Álvarez and Pere Joan Ventura follow the tradition of political documentaries traced by filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, Pere Portabella, and Basilio Martín Patino and open the debate on how people can contribute to searching for renewal policies in times of crisis.     

The transnational one-child generation: family relationships and overseas aspiration between China and the UK

ABSTRACT

Education-motivated migration from East Asia is regarded as a family capital accumulation project where middle class families reproduce their socioeconomic advantage at a transnational level. This study focuses on one-child generation migrants from mainland China who came to study in the UK as teenagers or young adults but remained to work as professionals after their education. Caught between the British social/employment system and the Chinese family system, the one-child migrants showed a fragmented sense of belonging and a high level of uncertainty in the migration plan. The pervasive Confucian family culture in these transnational families also calls for an expanded conceptualisation of the term ‘children’ and a long-term observation of their mobility curve in the project. This paper incorporates rational motivation with human complexity in the context of transnational reality, thus it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of changing intergenerational relationships in the transnational family capital accumulation project.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.     

Pre-emptive mobilities: Russian real estate abroad (the case of owners from Murmansk Region)

The article discusses mobilities connected with Russian real estate acquisition abroad during the post-Soviet decades. We take the specific case of Murmansk Region as a source location. Our main argument is that such mobilities are motivated to a significant extent by a search of risk-free destinations and thus reflect perception of insecurity at home. The empirical data reveal the predominantly post-Soviet middle class nature of this movement, as well as its trans-generational agenda. We claim that the movement is pre-emptive in the sense of establishing a foothold abroad in view of possible negative economic and political developments at home. Theorizing this phenomenon requires placing it in a politically informed and temporally extended perspective. We conclude that Russian real estate acquisition abroad reveals divergences between current ideological rhetoric of the political leadership, on the one hand, and preferred courses of action by the post-Soviet middle class, on the other hand.     

Globalization and the politics of local and regional development: the question of convergenc

Globalization, and the increased exposure to international competition that it has supposedly induced, has led to expectations of institutional convergence in, among other things, local and regional development policy and the politics surrounding it. There have been changes in the United Kingdom, but not of the decentralizing, neo-liberalizing form anticipated. A comparison of the British with the very different, highly decentralized, American case seeks to shed light on this. Emphasis is placed on both the strongly embedded nature of institutions and on misunderstandings about the strength of the forces of globalization.     

从官品到俸秩:关于唐五代县之等第的考察

唐代县的等第,以户口、官品、俸秩、迁转次序等不同的标准看,有四等、五等、六等、七等、八等、十等诸说。从历时性而言,县等是不断增多的,由前期的六等逐渐发展到后期的十等,只是天宝时曾一度事实上取消下县,稍显波折。而望、紧、次赤、次畿县的出现,均与户口多寡无直接关系,更多地体现出“资地美恶”的特征。其中“次赤县”的问题尤其复杂,因其牵涉“赤县”的广义和狭义问题,综合分析,次赤县制度在传世文献中出现,不晚于唐德宗初年,很可能最迟代宗初期已经产生。而代宗末年至德宗前期形成的俸秩,对唐后期乃至五代的县之等第,也有新的影响。五代皆以户口多少定县的等第,只是不同王朝有不同的标准,繁简不一。通观唐五代县之等第,总体上呈现出从官品本位到以俸秩为准的演变路径。     

Exploring the context and elements of local environmental stewardship: An embedded case study of the Niagara Region,Canada

Environmental stewardship—a concept that describes the relationships between humans and the environment—is gaining increased attention as an approach that can address planetary sustainability issues. In-depth empirical investigations of local environmental stewardship are needed to understand how social-ecological context influences stewardship, as well as the arrangement of conceptual elements in applied settings. This study addresses these needs by conducting an in-depth exploration of environmental stewardship in the Niagara Region of Canada. A single embedded case study design is employed, with environmental stewardship initiatives constituting the individual units of analysis with the case. Analysis of the spatial arrangement of a total of 89 initiatives indicated that initiatives tended to cluster closer to the Niagara River and in more populous municipalities. The significance of collaboration, tensions between the environment and economic development, and concerns about political impacts emerged as themes across contextual factors. The configuration of stewardship elements reveals interesting discrepancies between initiatives and previous stewardship research focused on larger scales, individuals, and organizations. Further analysis is encouraged to illuminate environmental stewardship in other settings as well as advance relational understanding of conceptual elements.     

The Determinants of Political Cleavages in Jordan,Tunisia, and Yemen: An Analysis of Political Attitudes Structure in the Arab World

This article investigates the determinants of political cleavages composing the structure of political attitudes in Jordan, Tunisia, and Yemen following the Arab Spring. Further, it tests whether political cleavages carry predictive weight on ordinary citizens’ electoral choices in general elections. Using the Sixth Wave of the World Values Survey, discriminant analysis was conducted to generate the dimensionality, type, and structure of political attitudes in the three nations. Findings suggest that the structure of political attitudes in Jordan, Tunisia, and Yemen is multidimensional: the Islamic‐Secular division, a conflict along economic policy visions and an emerging divisive dimension concerning political reform. Evidence indicates that political cleavages do not possess significant predictive power in determining voters’ choice at elections booths. This research also points to the significance of social transformation processes such as modernization and globalization in causing a shift in values among ordinary citizens in the Arab World. This research argues that in countries where the effects of modernization and globalization are higher, a weakening of the Islamic‐Secular division is witnessed. This research is important since it paves the way for further empirical analysis on political ideology in the Middle East. It shatters conjectures concluding that Arab polities are only divided by a single hierarchical dimension: Islamic‐Secular. It contributes to comparative research on the dimensionality of political ideology by showing that the Arab World is similar to the industrialized world in the dimensionality, nature, and structuration of political ideology.