The Virtues of Persistence

Book reviewed in this article:
Mark A. Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, The Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II     

The Persistence of Theocracy: Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

This article argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter can provide insight into the persistent appeal of the moral and political certitudes that theocracy offers and that can serve as a corrective to liberal secularism's often myopic tendency to downplay the continuing moral and political appeal of religious belief and authority. Focusing on three puzzles raised in the structure and narrative of The Scarlet Letter, the article explores Hawthorne's consideration of theocracy as a foundation in the past, as an antidote to the modern tendency toward materialism, and as a persistent alternative that deserves continued reflection.     

The Persistence of Milpa Agriculture in Highland Guatemala1

In southwestern Guatemala, within the western realms of the basin of Quezaltenango, peasants have maintained the traditional system of milpa agriculture in the face of repeated cultural intrusions. The Spanish conquest resulted in the adoption of a plethora of tools, crops and domesticated animals that modified, but did not alter the basic character of the milpa. The milpa system has evolved more recently to accommodate the production of cash crops, principally wheat and potatoes. Chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and improved varieties of seed have been accepted as necessary adjuncts in the production of these crops. In contradiction of the counsel of well-intentioned advisors, however, the Guatemalan peasants persist in their adherence to the traditional milpa. Many Westerners are inclined to regard this as irrational behavior. Although not capable of articulating fully all of the subtle advantages of milpa agriculture, the majority of the region's peasants perceive the milpa as an economically secure and culturally compatible agricultural system that has evolved on a trial-and-error basis over a long period of time. This is not to suggest that the subsistence-oriented milpa will not ultimately give way to the commercialization of agriculture, as has occurred to a limited degree elsewhere in Guatemala. Given the veneration of maize as embodied in rituals and native religious beliefs, however, agricultural commercialization will likely occur only to the extent that the peasant perceives the potential monetary gain to outweigh the security and cultural good embodied in the traditional customs and practices.     

教育旅游、旅游教育与可持续旅游发展

本着重讨论教育旅游、旅游教育与可持续旅游发展的内在逻辑。     

The Nature of Things: Dead Labor, Nonhuman Actors, and the Persistence of Marxism

This article is about the question of social agency in the animation of things , and about how this problematic has been conceptualized in Marxist and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches to human–nature–technology relations. Notwithstanding many obvious differences, we note that each tradition was founded on a radical shift to a relational ontology, a world of relations and processes and not things-in-themselves, and that each has developed, partly as a consequence of this move, analytically useful ways of investigating and talking about the work that things do, or appear to do, in the world. By relating the ANT category of non-human actors to the Marxist concept of dead labor, and by revisiting Marx's own dialectics of technology as embodied in his figure of the "living machine" in Capital , we explore the different implications of these approaches for our understandings of the nature, materiality, and the efficacy of social agents. We argue that ANT's reconfiguration of agency as a collective social and technical process—a process wherein the "nonhuman" can have very real social effects—can be deepened and given some political efficacy only if we take seriously the ontological problems of causality, accountability, and the directedness of social relations (and things) which ANT, and its wider, still evolving ethos among the social sciences and cultural studies, would have us forestall.