JFK, Democracy, and U.S. Security Policy in the Americas

Book reviewed in this article:
Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America     

Re-thinking festivals: a comparative study of the integration/marginalization of arts festivals in the urban regimes of Manchester,Copenhagen and Vienna

Arts festivals have been on the ascendant since the 1980s. However, while these are proliferating, it remains unclear as to whether they are also flourishing. The present narrow construction of festivals for marketing and economic purposes tends to disregard the festivals’ social and cultural potential, i.e. in terms of functioning as urban laboratories where new and alternative urban and cultural strategies can be tested and developed. In order to address these imbalanced conceptualizations of arts festivals within urban policy frameworks, the article is based on a comparative case study of festivals that try to function as urban laboratories. By examining how these festivals are integrated in or marginalized by the urban regime, and how this influences their operational conditions, the research elucidates the need to create new and more holistic policy frameworks to chart an equitable path for the future development of arts festivals.     

The making of the Heart of the World: representation and the Kogi

Abstract

The Kogi of Colombia's Sierra Nevada have maintained a culture isolated from colonial contact since 1600. Living in the ‘Heart of the World’ they call themselves ‘Elder Brother’. They consider themselves the world's caretakers and the keepers of a traditional knowledge long since lost by the invasive and destructive colonizing ‘Younger Brother’. An invitation from a BBC filmmaker to provide a medium for the Kogi to contact the outside world was accepted. The result was a film that the Kogi planned and devised to warn Younger Brother to stop his destructive behaviour.     

Memory,history and the classical tradition

‘Memory’ is often confused and mistaken for myth; this is in turn connected with the widespread use of mistaking collective mythology and common myth for the idea of a ‘collective memory’. This essay discusses memory and history terminology in the context of the generic concept ‘classical tradition’. The case study explored here – the nineteenth-century Walhalla ‘temple’ near Regensburg in Southern Germany – is an attempt to discuss the classical tradition, focusing on archaeology and architecture rather than philology), within the parameters of the memory and history debate in contemporary historiography. The essay aims to develop the position of the iconic and symbolic importance of antiquity and the classical tradition in the memory and history debate as well as in historical writing. The concluding remarks emphasise the necessity of historicising tradition and its genealogies, conceptualised here as a tradition of legacies.     

Language,tradition, and the self in the generation of meaning

An analysis of Mark Bevir's account of the role of language and tradition on the one hand, and the individual on the other in the generation of ideas, and proposal of an alternative account It endorses Bevir's project of finding a middle way between individualism and collectivism, but finds that Bevir exaggerates the role of the individual. It argues that human selves always remains dependent on language even to articulate their own intentions to themselves. Whilst they have a capacity to create new linguistic expressions, this is always limited to the exploration of possibilities already latent in the language. However, no one is a mere recipient and conduit of a given language: everyone hands it on transformed by their unique appropriation of it. The antifoundationalist analyses of Wittgenstein, Newman Collingwood, and Neurath are invoked to argue that this state of affairs also applies to the individual's relation to the beliefs and values inherited traditionally: there is no possibility of a wholesale rejection of what is received; no individual can reject all received traditions, and erect an entire belief structure from scratch, but can only modify it on a piecemeal basis, so that received tradition always remains constitutive of the individual mind. It is also argued that human self-consciousness is always socially formed, and no person ever completely integrated, and stabilized. No one is ever therefore in a state of complete self-possession. One therefore must reject Bevir's claim that the historian of ideas must initially presume that individuals are sincere, conscious and rational in their expressed beliefs: ‘sincere’ self-consciousness is an ideal never fully achieved, and beliefs as to what constitutes ‘rationality’ are so varied that specific presumptions cannot be made.     

History,tradition, and memory among the Basques

This article explores the historical commemoration, the Alarde of the Spanish-Basque town of Hondarribia, re-enacted for almost 400 years. It is a social account of the past portrayed through a history of local militarism and a history of commemorative performance. Since 1996, controversy has divided local inhabitants concerning wider female-inclusion in the male-dominated event, separating the town into factions, traditionalists (asserting traditions remain the same) and feminists (advocating broader female involvement). Theoretical concerns include examining traditions and their gradual transformations over time, rather than as episodic change; that interpreting the past can be competitive over rights of belonging; that history may be influenced by different agencies of gender, kin ties, memory, politics, and social experience; that people do not purposefully ignore the passage of time but may be protecting communal harmony; that commemorative rites are more than embodied performances; and that history can be a multiple, contested, and lived experience.     

Government, Business, and U.S. Economic Expansion in the Americas in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Reappraisal

Books reviewed in this article:
Pletcher, David M. The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economics expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900     

Hemispheric Integration and Subregionalism in the Americas

The project to construct a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is unique in its attempt to integrate and build on existing subregional blocs. The impact of the hemispheric integration process on subregionalism can best be understood not through a simplistic strengthening/weakening dichotomy, but rather as involving a substantial reconfiguration of subregional projects. This article focuses on the manifestations of this relationship in the case of the Mercosur, with comparative glances at other subregions. It pays particular attention on the one hand to strategic 'bloc bargaining' issues, and on the other to the policy challenges generated by the FTAA project, which form the twin pillars of the reconfigured form of subregionalism that is currently emerging.     

Rousseau,Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century natural law tradition

The relationship between the political theory of Rousseau and modern natural law continues to be the subject of debate, both with regard to Rousseau's faithfulness to the idea of natural law itself and regarding the precise extent of the debt he owed to his predecessors. In this article the author re-examines this relationship by focusing attention on what has been defined as the protestant tradition of natural law. In particular she concentrates on the political and theoretical exercise that Jean Barbeyrac had sought to perform by constructing a particular version of this tradition, namely that of using the science of natural law to promote a policy of tolerance between protestants and to justify the right of citizens to resist catholic sovereigns who denied them religious freedom, as well as the right of protestant countries to come to the aid of persecuted fellow believers. The thesis asserts that Rousseau was fully aware of this exercise, just as he was aware that some of Barbeyrac's ideas had been adopted and reworked by another illustrious Genevan, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, a member of the Small Council, to support anti-populist and antidemocratic politics in Geneva. Viewed in this way it is possible to perceive in Rousseau's political thought not so much a “first crisis” of natural law as an intention to reformulate this science from a republican perspective in order to derive rigorous principles of political law from it. And in developing his republican political theory Rousseau took up and overturned the analysis of democratic sovereignty carried out by Pufendorf, who in opposing the “pro-monarchist” excesses of authors such as Hobbes and Horn had unhesitatingly demonstrated the complete validity of democratic sovereignty.