Challenging Orthodoxies: Understanding Poverty in Pastoral Areas of East Africa

Understanding and alleviating poverty in Africa continues to receive considerable attention from a range of diverse actors, including politicians, international celebrities, academics, activists and practitioners. Despite the onslaught of interest, there is surprisingly little agreement on what constitutes poverty in rural Africa, how it should be assessed, and what should be done to alleviate it. Based on data from an interdisciplinary study of pastoralism in northern Kenya, this article examines issues of poverty among one of the continent's most vulnerable groups, pastoralists, and challenges the application of such orthodox proxies as incomes/expenditures, geographic remoteness, and market integration. It argues that current poverty debates ‘homogenize’ the concept of ‘pastoralist’ by failing to acknowledge the diverse livelihoods and wealth differentiation that fall under the term. The article concludes that what is not needed is another development label (stereotype) that equates pastoralism with poverty, thereby empowering outside interests to transform rather than strengthen pastoral livelihoods.     

Gender and poverty: what we know,don’t know,and need to know for Agenda 2030

Drawing on historical debates on gender, poverty, and the ‘feminisation of poverty’, this paper reflects on current evidence, methods and analysis of gendered poverty. It focuses on initiatives by UN Women, including the Progress of the World’s Women 2015–16. Our analysis of the data compiled by UN Women raises questions about what might account for the over-representation of women among the poor in official accounts of poverty, and how this is plausibly changing (or not) over time. The paper highlights that analysis of what is measured and how needs to be understood in relation to who is the focus of measurement. The lack of available data which is fit for purpose questions the extent to which gender poverty differences are ‘real’ or statistical. There is a continued reliance on comparing female with male headed households, and we argue the move by UN Women to adopt the notion of Female Only Households reflects available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data. Wider UN processes highlight that while sensitivity to differences among women and their subjectivities are paramount in understanding the multiple processes accounting for gender bias in poverty burdens, they are still accorded little priority. To monitor advances in Agenda 2030 will require more and better statistics. Our review suggests that we are still far from having a set of tools able to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty.     

Constructing Poverty Trends in Uganda: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

In late 1999, apparently contradictory pictures of what was happening to poverty in Uganda emerged from the Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) and the household survey. This article analyses certain conceptual and methodological characteristics of the PPA and the pictures of poverty trends arising from it, with a view to dispelling confusion and to better understanding the relationship between these and the pictures emerging from survey data. It argues that the apparently contradictory visions, when explored carefully, are found to be compatible, and concludes that deeper and less oppositional understandings of the purpose of PPAs vis‐à‐vis surveys for poverty assessment are an important and timely contribution to current research and knowledge about poverty.     

The Debate on Globalization, Poverty and Inequality: Why Measurement Matters

In the last year or so, markedly different claims have been heard within the development community about just how much progress is being made against poverty and inequality in the current period of 'globalization'. This article provides a non-technical overview of the conceptual and methodological issues underlying these conflicting claims. It argues that the dramatically different positions taken in this debate often stem from differences in the concepts and definitions used and differences in data sources and measurement assumptions. These differences are often hidden from view in the debate, but they need to be considered carefully if one is properly to interpret the evidence. The article argues that the best available evidence suggests that, if the rate of progress against absolute poverty in the developing world in the 1990s is maintained, then the Millennium Development Goal of halving the 1990 aggregate poverty rate by 2015 will be achieved on time in the aggregate, though not in all regions. The article concludes with some observations on the implications for policy-oriented debates on globalization and pro-poor growth.     

Poverty and development in a marginal community: case study of a settlement of the Sugali Tribe in Andhra Pradesh, India

The concepts of poverty and development have many meanings in contemporary globalized societies. Development by definition implies desired changes in terms of livelihood, improved quality of life and better access to assets and services, etc. However in reality development programmes sometimes have negative consequences, perhaps unintended, multiplying the acute scarcity of resources and opportunities, or reproducing poverty. Also, the consequences of developmental programmes often appear to be out of focus, and seen at the ground level, there seems to be a gap between what is intended and what is actualized. In this framework, this paper presents a case study of the social, cultural and economic correlates of the development processes in Adadakulapalle, a settlement of Sugali peoples, once a semi-nomadic tribe, in Anantapur District of Andhra Pradesh, South India. The paper shows how factionalism and faction politics affect the implementation of development interventions. It also looks at the poverty in the settlement and focuses on the types of change that people have experienced with the implementation of different schemes by both government and other agencies. The type of change is discussed in the present study through the macro and micro analysis of development programmes.     

Against the Grid: The Cultural Emergence of Villas Miseria in Buenos Aires

This article traces how poverty emerged culturally in mid-century Buenos Aires. It does so by examining two contrasting models: (1) the state’s, revealed in the plans it prepared for the eradication of villas miseria (the local term for slums), (2) that of a corpus of cultural objects depicting slums between 1957 and 1963. My basic claim is that the politically motivated conceptual erasure of the slum informed its aesthetic representation. In particular, I look at Bernardo Verbitsky’s novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957), and Antonio Berni’s series of multimedia collages focused on the fictional character of Juanito Laguna (1958–1978). As my essay shows, each of these works responds to the state plans to eradicate slums. Each takes up the state’s idea of the slum as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, but inserts into this plane an excess of materiality. By looking at the shared forms of these objects, I describe how culture came to place the slum within the city’s regular grid, interrupting the linearity imagined by the state. Such a gesture will ultimately have the consequence of turning poverty into something absolutely consumable.     

Architecture as material culture: Building form and materiality in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Anatolia and Levant

Mudbrick technology and permanent architecture are Neolithic hallmarks but their origins are not well understood. By adopting a symmetrical approach to the examination of building materials, and contextualizing these materials within a cultural knowledge of resources and other concurrent social practices, this paper challenges environmentally determined approaches to explain the adoption of mudbrick technology during the PPNA in Anatolia, Upper Euphrates and the Levant. This research illustrates the weak correlation between architectural form and building material, suggesting that although nature provides resources, it is culture that dictates architectural form and material use. It is argued that the human-constructed environment became normalized throughout the PPNA and the social complexities of village life created a conceptual shift towards an artificial environment, supported by other changes in symbolic behavior. If building materials, such as mudbricks, were considered objects reflexive of human behavior, then we can access the complex and entangled relationship between people and things. Furthermore, the choice of building materials and their use in architecture can be considered codes of social practice and even ideology. As material culture, architecture becomes a metaphor for human engagement and symbolic communication.     

Inequality,Growth, Poverty and Lunar Eclipses: Policy and Arithmetic

Alleviating poverty, mitigating inequality and achieving growth are all acknowledged goals of development, whatever the degree of success with which these goals might have been addressed in various economies of the world. Apart from questions of resolve and genuine commitment, what makes it hard to engage with these goals is that the pursuit of any one of them does not necessarily secure the ends of either or both of the other two. Such engagement requires a measure of conceptual clarity, an identification of normative priorities, and the deployment of carefully crafted policies that accommodate trade-offs among competing goals. In particular, policies such as the single-minded pursuit of growth as a panacea for all the difficulties of development appear to be misguided, and based on a faulty application of deductive reasoning to past experience. These issues are addressed here by attending to some elementary arithmetic revolving around the measurement of money-metric poverty and inequality, and the decomposition of poverty changes into effects attributable to growth and distributional changes.     

EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE

Conceptual history is a useful tool for writing the history of emotions. The investigation of how a community used emotion words at certain times and in certain places allows us to understand specific emotion knowledge without being trapped by universalism. But conceptual history is also an inadequate tool for writing the history of emotions. Its exclusive focus on language fails to capture the meanings that can be derived from emotional expressions in other media such as painting, music, architecture, film, or even food. Here emotion history can contribute to a rethinking of conceptual history, bringing the body and the senses back in. This article proposes a theoretical model to expand conceptual history beyond language by exploring three processes of emotional translation: First, how the translation between reality and its interpretation is mediated by the body and the senses. Second, how translations between different media and sign systems shape and change the meanings of concepts. Third, how concepts translate into practices that have an impact on reality. The applicability of the model is not limited to the research on concepts of emotion; the article argues that emotions have a crucial role in all processes of conceptual change. The article further suggests that historicizing concepts can best be achieved by reconstructing the relations that actors have created between elements within multimedial semantic nets. The approach will be exemplified by looking at the South Asian concept of the monsoon and the emotional translations between rain and experiences of love and romance.     

Using Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty to rethink cultural policy: a case of Poland

The overarching aim of this paper is to rethink the normative aspects of Polish cultural policy after 1989, using a conceptual framework built upon Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty. More specifically, this article aims to analyse the rhetoric used in cultural policy and the practice of policy-making, in order to uncover and characterise the normative role that the state has played in shaping and executing cultural policy in Poland after 1989. The analysis shows that Polish cultural policy has been dominated by a perfectionist logic, which corresponds to Isaiah Berlin’s concept of positive liberty. It means that cultural policy has not been axiologically neutral but instead it has been based on state’s judgements about what kind of art is worthy support. On the other hand, the analysis shows that Polish cultural policy after 1989 cannot be classified as negative liberty.     

三普新视角关注被过去忽视的文化遗产类别

三普成果中出现了一大批和人们的印象中与遥远,古老无关的文物类型,从古物到文物,再到文化遗产,概念的变化反映着人们对文化遗产认识的深化和发展。工业遗产、乡土建筑,20世纪遗产、文化线路、文化景观等概念不断被提出,在普查过程中,这些新的理念得到了充分重视,各地也积极开展新类型文化遗产的专题调查,北京、天津、河北、黑龙江、吉林、山东、江西、湖北等省(市)组织了工业遗产专题调查:湖南、云南、贵州、四川、西藏、青海、甘肃、宁夏等省(区)开展了文化线路遗产调查。     

Who's afraid of sovereign wealth funds?

A spectre is stalking the world: the spectre of a rich Chinese state buying strategic resources, hollowing out companies, gobbling up financial institutions and threatening the sovereignty of the countries in whose resources and companies it invests. The China Investment Corporation (CIC) – a sovereign wealth fund company (SWF) – is the stalking horse of the Chinese state. Using the CIC as an example, this article argues that the warning about SWFs has little to do with their size, the speed of their growth or what SWFs have or have not done. It is about a shifting power relationship in the global economy. This broader realignment may have been occurring slowly, but it is happening. Neither side – those who have been writing the rules of the game for international political economy and those who are historically rule-takers – is fully willing to acknowledge the shift and take responsibility to build a new architecture of an international financial system that can accommodate interests of old and new players.     

France,Patrie, Nation: figures de lutte et discours national (XVIème–XIXème siècles)

This article explores the conceptual changes and semantic shifts of ‘patrie’ and of nation from the Renaissance up to the French Revolution and the First Empire. It emphasises the causes and consequences of both concepts' occurrence and tries to discover their fundamental differences synchronically and diachronically. A brief comparison with other European countries allows us to understand that both concepts are not typically French and highlights the very fact that they are interactive, discontinuous, and at the same time evolutionary, since they are successively inserted in a specific historical context. Above all, ‘patrie’ and nation turn out to be used more often during national and international political conflicts, even though they did not have the same connotation and register. It is therefore interesting to consider precisely what characterises both concepts, and to reflect upon the origins of the modern meaning of nation.     

Quebec and Canada at the Crossroads: A Nation within a Nation

Abstract. I argue first that there are many different concepts of the nation, and advocate a certain conceptual pluralism. I also argue that a population as a whole cannot constitute a nation unless it has a certain national consciousness. I then show that we must adopt a fundamental principle of tolerance. I also try to attend to the complexities of the relations between Quebec and Canada, and argue that different populations represent themselves as nations in different ways and with different concepts. 1 show that Quebec constitutes a nation within a nation. I then wonder what it would mean for Canadians to accept a Quebec nation. Finally, I try to explain why a very large proportion of the population of Quebec has increasingly been favourable to sovereignty, and favourable to making a partnership proposal to Canada.     

A REGIME OF UNTRANSLATABLES: TEMPORALITIES OF TRANSLATION AND CONCEPTUAL HISTORY

This essay focuses on untranslatability to discuss the diachronic temporality of the history of concepts. Defining untranslatables as the paradoxical origin and product of translating, it explores their role in mediating the long‐term history of concepts by disrupting the historical boundaries of a period and challenging the contexts through which past meaning is confined to the moyenne durée. Addressing first the critical appraisal of the history of ideas by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, it discusses their alternative suggestion of a history of discourses, rather than concepts or ideas, to move to Pocock's formulation of the category of “diachronic translation” as a shift from the moyenne to the longue durée. It then turns to Begriffsgeschichte to explore the interrelation of untranslatables, Koselleck's consideration of translation, and his theory of historical times. It suggests that Koselleck not only states that translation mediates the history of concepts, but also envisions a distinct temporality associated with the aporetic condition of translating what is untranslatable. The aporia of translations underlies both the historical depth of concepts as a conceptual reserve and an act of silencing past meaning. The ensuing conjunction of surplus and erasure qualifies Koselleck's category of multiple times by designating the time of translation as “obscure time.” It is a time that displaces us from the apparent meaning of concepts in a certain period by receding toward the otherness of the past and suspending meaning that is already in the future. These two characteristics of obscure time, its receding and suspending nature, not only stand against the continuity of periodizing; they also make visible a politics of translation as an act of disruption of the present wherein the past becomes a reserve of meanings resisting appropriative interpretation.     

Aid and the Geopolitics of the Post‐Colonial: Critical Reflections on New Labour’s Overseas Development Strategy

In the post Cold War era, issues of poverty, inequality and social exclusion have become central to many of the key discussions of international relations and development aid. In this context, this article sets out to analyse the nature and specificity of the development strategy of the New Labour government in Britain, as it has evolved since 1997. In the setting of the literatures on post‐colonialism, aid and development, the authors examine the specific concepts and approaches that help to frame such a strategy, giving particular attention to the commonalities and divergences between the British Government’s 1997 and 2000 White Papers. The perspective used connects ideas and issues from domains of knowledge which tend to remain independent of each other, namely aid and development studies and post‐colonial theory. Situated on the terrain of aid and development, the guiding objective of the article is to raise certain questions concerning power, knowledge and geopolitics, so that a wider conceptual and policy‐oriented debate might be engendered.     

SEALED SILVER IN IRON AGE CISJORDAN AND THE 'INVENTION' OF COINAGE

Summary. Recent finds of hoarded silver in Cisjordan present new material for the consideration of the conceptual history of coined metals. When the fundamental concepts associated with coinage are abstracted from the various objects that express them, it is possible to see that a kind of coined metal existed in Cisjordan and other parts of the Near East prior to the traditional 'invention' of coinage by the Lydians and Greeks c. 600 BC. ¹ Both hoards and written sources indicate that seals affixed to precious metals at times qualified them in a numismatic sense by guaranteeing weights set to standards as well as controlled composition. What has been characterized as the 'invention' of coinage was rather an adaptation of these same principal concepts. The frequency and size of silver hoards from Cisjordan point to a proliferation in the 'monetary' use of silver in that region during the Iron Age and suggest a relationship to the overwhelming preference for silver coinages among the Greeks.     

CREATIVE CITIES: THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIES AND THE CREATIVE CLASS

The aim of this article is to critically examine the notion that the creative class may or may not play as a causal mechanism of urban regeneration. I begin with a review of Florida's argument focusing on the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings. The second section develops a critique of the relationship between the creative class and growth. This is followed by an attempt to clarify the relationship between the concepts of creativity, culture and the creative industries. Finally, I suggest that policy-makers may achieve more successful regeneration outcomes if they attend to the cultural industries as an object that links production and consumption, manufacturing and service. Such a notion is more useful in interpreting and understanding the significant role of cultural production in contemporary cities, and what relation it has to growth.     

How does a house remember? Heritage-ising return migration in an Indonesian-Chinese house museum in Guangdong,PRC

This paper is an attempt to integrate heritage and museum studies through exploring the complex relationship between the materiality of architecture and social memories with a house museum of return migration in Guangdong, PRC as a case study. It unveils that the ongoing process of memory is intrinsically intertwined with spatial and temporal dimensions of the physical dwelling and built environment and the wider social-historical context and power relations shaping them. I argue that it is the house as ‘object of exhibit’ just as much as the exhibits inside the house that materialises the turbulent and traumatic migratory experience of Returned Overseas Chinese, embodies their memories and exposes the contested nature of museumification. By looking at the socially and geographically marginalised dwelling of return migrants, the house draws people’s attention to the often neglected importance of conceptual periphery in re-theorising what is often assumed to be the core of heritage value. It points to the necessity to integrate displaced, diasporic, transnational subjects to heritage and museum studies that have been traditionally framed within national and territorial boundaries.