FAO from the Field and from Below: Emma Reh and the Challenges of Doing Nutrition Work in Central America

While much of the historical literature on FAO has adopted a headquarter perspective, this article examines FAO's nutrition activities in Central America from the vantage point of a field worker stationed in the region during the 1950s. Emma Reh's professional background broadens our understanding of the careers of staff members in international organizations and makes visible the connections between the US Indian Bureau and development work. Correspondence and field reports shed light on FAO's difficulties in establishing a strong presence in Central America. Moreover, the article shows that dietary surveys with their socio-economic perspectives on nutrition were underfunded as well as marginalized in the processes of knowledge production and diffusion while a medicalized approach to nutrition took hold at the FAO Nutrition Division. In the early1960s, the FAO Nutrition Division returned to a less reductive view on nutrition.     

‘The Claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the Age of Ambivalent Internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.     

Transnational Development on the Frontier: The FAO's Fishery and Forestry Missions in the Brazilian Amazon

In the early 1950s, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) organized a mission to the Brazilian Amazon Valley to assess development needs and help implement a development plan. The Brazilian government saw this as part of an initiative to integrate a sparsely populated and ‘backward’ region more firmly into the nation. The FAO's local partner was the Superintendancy for the Plan of Economic Valorization of the Amazon (SPVEA), a regional development agency created in 1953. This article analyzes the operation of the Mission, specifically its fishery and forestry sections, to understand the dynamics of transnational development cooperation. The mission eventually failed because the Brazilian state never offered sufficient support on FAO terms; SPVEA never acquired the necessary financial resources, administrative capacity and technical expertise. The FAO experts recognized the problems, but had no means to enhance the resources or change the approach of the local partner. The government's decision, in the late 1950s, to prioritize the building of a major road from Brasília to Belém, aggravated the lack of resources for the Mission's work. Importantly, the failure was not a question of ideological resistance to foreign meddling or a fundamental opposition to the FAO development strategy.     

From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955

This paper examines the early years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its conceptualization of ‘rural welfare’, an approach that foresaw the modernization of agricultural societies and the alleviation of poverty through improvements in labor, housing, health, education of people working in agriculture. Based on the correspondence of FAO officials and experts, the paper shows how in the late 1940s, the Rural Welfare Division, under the leadership of its Director Horace Belshaw, promoted a low-modernist and local-sensitive approach to rural development that emphasized the subjectivity of welfare and that was skeptical of top-down development programs. As the paper argues, Belshaw's holistic understanding of rural communities was abandoned in the early 1950s in favor of an increasingly technical development consultancy, characterized by short-term interventions rather than by an intellectual and scientific debate about the larger implications of development.     

THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM REDDY,BARBARA ROSENWEIN,AND PETER STEARNS

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian's intellectual‐biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy's concepts of “emotive,”“emotional regime,” and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein's “emotional community” and on Stearns's “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian's ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women's history” in the 1970s.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

LÖWITH,LÖWITH'S HEIDEGGER,AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY

This article is about the problem of the unity of history as seen through the writings of Karl Löwith. By “unity of history” I understand the notion that all history constitutes one and only one range of kinds of objects and/or one field of knowledge. The article argues that the problem of the unity of history—though often neglected as a matter of mere argumentative infrastructure—is central to a number of wider problems, most prominently the possibility of a plural understanding of historicity and the possibility of ultimately avoiding a unified historical teleology. The article revisits Löwith's writings and proposes a variety of novel interpretations with the aim of evincing the centrality, and of exploring diverse aspects, of the problematic of the unity of history. This problematic is shown to have informed Löwith's work on the secularization thesis as well as his debate with Hans Blumenberg. The foundations of Löwith's discussion of the problem are pursued across his ambivalent critique and appropriation of Heidegger's model of an ontology of historicity as marked by inevitable internal conflict and thus disunity. The paper reconstructs the manner in which, after the Second World War, Löwith's philosophy of history sought to salvage basic traits of the Heideggerian model when it tried to establish the possibility of plural historicity from a notion of the natural cosmos. It is demonstrated that the motives for this salvage operation ultimately extended beyond the problem of Löwith's reception of Heidegger and concerned the possibility of continuing any debate on the philosophy of history.     

Global Horizons: Mexico,the Third World,and the Non-Aligned Movement at the Time of the 1961 Belgrade Conference

This paper analyses the autonomous streak that marked Mexico's foreign policy during the presidency of Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64). Throughout this period, Mexico showed reluctance to participate fully in the flagship Kennedy programme for Latin America, the Alliance for Progress. At the same time, the López Mateos government adopted a position of defence for Cuba's right to self-determination in spite of Washington's attempts to eradicate the Cuban Revolution from the Western Hemisphere. During López Mateos's term, Mexico tried for the first time in its history to elaborate a foreign policy with broader international outreach, an effort highlighted by the Mexican presidential trips to Latin America and Asia as well as other countries that belonged to the Non-Aligned Movement. While historiography has explored Mexico's attitude towards the Alliance for Progress and, more consistently, the country's Cuban policy, much less attention has been dedicated to López Mateos's engagement with the Non-Aligned Movement. Focusing on Mexico's failed participation at the First Conference of Heads of State of Non-Aligned Countries celebrated in Belgrade in 1961, this article aims to fill this research gap. Indeed, even if Mexico did not ultimately participate in the conference, Mexican diplomacy did show great interest in the gathering. For a country that had formally sided with the United States after the beginning of the cold war, Mexico's flirtation with the Non-Aligned Movement represented a detour from the diplomatic path it had adopted at the end of the Second World War. This work argues that Mexico's engagement with the Non-Aligned Movement presents a different dimension of the country's international strategy during the 1960s, reflecting Mexico's desire to loosen the bipolar constraints that limited its economic development and increase its leverage with Washington.     

World Food and Agriculture Elements of the System to the Year 2000

Abstract

The predominating characteristic in world food and agriculture is a high degree of national self-sufficiency. Divergencies in national situations are, however, so great that accurate aggregate statement are difficult to make. The domestic food problems of OECD countries are and should remain relatively minor; those of the USSR and East Europe are more severe but they too should be fully manageable in the medium to longer run. China is likely to remain basically self-sufficient but could become one of the world's greatest importers. The food problem is most critical in low income countries. A continuation of the trends of the last two decades would worsen some aspect of their situation. Such an outcome is not inevitable. A just-completed 90-country study by FAO assessed that developing country food output could grow at around 3.7% over the years 1980–2000 compared with a trend of just under 3%. If this is accompanied by some redistribution of purchasing power and improvements in the international policy framework, including larger food stocks, by the year 2000 their food problems could be largely solved. The inescapable modernization of developing country agriculture will be difficult and very expensive. Developing countries must receive at least one dollar in six of their agricultural investment requirements as external assistance.     

Power,Humanitarianism and the Global Liberal Order: Abolition and the Barbary Corsairs in the Vienna Congress System

Although the convergence has been little noted, for several years after Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the moves to extend abolition of the African slave trade internationally following Britain's unilateral declaration in 1807 were joined with efforts to interdict the taking of European captives by the Barbary corsairs of the Ottoman Empire's North African Regencies. Examining the conjunction of the two campaigns consequently deepens our understanding of the development of each. At the same time, study of the combined negotiations and lobbying efforts sheds significant light on several important developments in international history during the congress era, including the extension of a liberal order of political economy and diplomacy beyond Europe, the universalization of humanitarian norms, the internationalization of humanitarian interventions and the emergence of new institutions of collective security following the Vienna settlement of 1815. Analysis of the politics surrounding abolition and Barbary also illuminates the nature of the relationship between power, ideas and institutions in the nineteenth-century international system.     

Russian Agriculture During Putin's First Term and Beyond

An American specialist on Russian agriculture surveys developments during Putin's first term in office, as well as the challenges that loom for the future. The focus is on how economic growth more broadly, and agrarian reform policy more specifically, have led to increasing agricultural output and improved financial stability of farms, with emphasis on the large-farm sector (former state and collective farms). Among the at least partially successful stabilization measures described in some detail are development of reliable sources of farm credit, debt restructuring and cancellation, greater fulfillment of state budget obligations, state intervention in grain markets, and trade protectionism. The paper also assesses the agenda for increasing Russian agriculture's global competitiveness in Putin's second term. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F13, O18, Q10. 3 tables, 61 references.     

D. W. Meinig and The Shaping of America

Published over eighteen years, between 1986 and 2004, in four volumes and well over 2000 pages, Donald Meinig's The Shaping of America quartet is one of modern geography's most substantial achievements. It warrants and repays careful attention. This essay seeks first to situate or contextualize The Shaping project by attending to the development of Meinig's ideas and scholarship before 1986. It argues that the approaches and emphases of Meinig's magnum opus were substantially but not entirely adumbrated by his earlier work and that the four volumes reflect something of the intellectual contexts in which Meinig developed his ideas about historical geography and the discipline more generally, as well as of Meinig's own particular interests and circumstances. The second section of this essay turns attention to the four volumes and offers some assessment of their contribution to, and significance for, geography, historical geography, and the study of American and Atlantic history.     

Madonna,Glamour and Politics: Nation Branding and Pop Concerts in the Promotion of Montenegro as an Elite Tourist Destination

Tourism is a strategically important industry for Montenegro, which especially since the restoration of its statehood in 2006, is utilized by the governing structures to enhance the country's economy and symbolic representation. Tourism also serves as a vehicle to depart from the socialist past, as a significant effort and money are invested in rebranding Montenegro as a Mediterranean tourist destination offering natural beauty, coastal folklore and “spectacular” entertainment and pop culture events. This article focuses on music events contributing to the development of “pop/rock tourism”. In the past few years, Montenegro has staged performances by some of today's biggest music stars and thus tries to boost Montenegro's image as an attractive and, above all, exclusive tourist destination in the Mediterranean. Their organization has been supported by the current political and economic elite with an aim to produce a prominent commercial effect but also to refurbish the state image on the international tourist market.     

Work,Gender & History in the 1990s and Beyond

By the end of the 1980s, having amply demonstrated that the study of class could no longer be separated from the study of gender, feminist historians were advocating a new gendered history of work. At the beginning of the 1990s, American historian Ava Baron identified four problems that women's labour history had left unresolved: the need to move women's labour history out of its ghetto; an explanation for the mechanisms of sexual difference in labour relations; the theorisation of women's and men's ‘consent’ to oppression; and an understanding of the differences among women. The quest for a gendered labour history required new conceptual tools and new theoretical approaches. This paper tests this agenda against research on work and gender in the last decade of Gender & History. The moves toward the interrelation of public and private, work and family, as well as toward the construction of identities calls into question whether work remains a distinctive historical field.     

NE ME RACONTE PLUS D'HISTOIRES: DERRIDA AND THE PROBLEM OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

This essay reads Derrida's early work within the context of the history of philosophy as an academic field in France. Derrida was charged with instruction in the history of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, and much of his own training focused on this aspect of philosophical study. The influence of French history of philosophy can be seen in Derrida's work before Of Grammatology, especially in his unpublished lectures for a 1964 course entitled “History and Truth,” in which he analyzed the semantic richness of the word “history.” According to Derrida, “history” comprised both the ideas of change and of transmission, which allowed the writing of history at a later time. In the Western tradition, Derrida suggested, philosophers had consistently tried to reduce the idea of history as transmission, casting it simply as empirical development in order to preserve the idea that truth could be timeless. Derrida's account of the evolving opposition between history and truth within the history of philosophy led him to suggest a “history of truth” that transcended and structured the opposition. I argue that Derrida's strategies in these early lectures are critical for understanding his later and more famous deconstruction of speech and writing. Moreover, the impact of this early confrontation with the problem of history and truth helps explain the ambivalent response by historians to Derrida's analyses.     

We Know Not God's Designs in Permitting a Separation: Women Religious,the Consolidation Controversies,and the Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Church*

This article bridges the fields of Catholic history, Women's history, and American religious history to propose a new perspective for studying the development of the American Catholic Church, termed by me as the consolidation controversies. Previous historians have focused on the development of the local parishes and the dioceses, focusing on the power conflicts between the lay trustees and the local bishops that accompanied this institutional growth. However, an often-forgotten aspect of Catholic history is the simultaneous rise of religious congregations and orders. As these communities developed, their leaders clashed with the local bishops over questions of property and authority over members of the communities. Often at the centre of these power struggles were the women religious. Rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated, women religioudemonstrated their own autonomy, navigating larger institutional politics. Should these women fail, they faced losing their place in the diocese as well as their position and vocation as women religious.     

The Political Construction of Extractive Regimes in Two Newly Created Indian States: A Comparative Analysis of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh

This article presents a multidimensional account of the politics of resource extraction in two subnational regions of India in response to the question: what are the political conditions that facilitate extraction? Emerging from the same moment of state creation in 2000, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are adjacent mineral-rich states with similar demographic profiles and comparable levels of economic development. The authors argue that despite these similarities and India's highly centralized legislative framework for natural resource governance, the two states have developed distinctive ‘extractive regimes’ in the years since statehood, which contrast in important ways across three dimensions: political organization and history, institutional effectiveness, and the nature and management of social resistance. The article offers the first in-depth, comparative account of how subnational territorial reorganization in India acts as a critical juncture enabling the formation of extractive regimes, which have also converged in important ways in recent years.     

Regionmaking and conceptual development in South China: Perceiving islands,the Pearl River Delta,and the Greater Bay Area

The Pearl River Delta in South China is today associated with one of the world's largest megaregions. Even though scholarship often treats the Pearl River Delta as a natural region and unit for analysis, this area has only recently been regionalised. This paper undertakes a critical rewriting and remapping of the Pearl River Delta's history, starting in precolonial times in which the Chinese population saw the area as composed of islands and waterways, moving through the period when colonial powers saw the area as a pathway up from the colonial island enclaves of Hong Kong and Macao and into China's interior, and ending in the Reform and Opening Up era when the modern Chinese state has implemented a succession of planning-oriented conceptions of the region. As the area has moved conceptually from a world of islands to a delta and now to the Greater Bay Area, perceptions about what the area means have changed as well. From a position in urban island studies and critical reflexivity, this paper troubles taken-for-granted colonial, technocratic, and governmental visions and regionalisations, focusing on how physical and cultural geographies develop in tandem. The notion of the interstitial island is used to help understand how the Pearl River Delta's island geography has influenced the area's conceptual development.     

China's New Leaders: Perspectives on Geographic Trends and Realities

A senior American specialist on the geography of China examines several aspects of China's society, economy, regional organization, and geopolitical position in light of the change in the country's leadership at the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012. After a brief comparison of the incoming and retiring leadership groups in terms of backgrounds and past policy pronouncements (as well as discussing the challenge posed by corruption), the author proceeds to discuss a series of key social and regional development policies that may be subject to some degree of change under the new leadership, including hukou and the one-child policy. He then focuses on the 12th Five-Year Plan, which provides a broad outline of the new leadership's goals, and particularly its emphasis on balanced regional development (a commitment to further develop the interior of the country as well as to revitalize the old heavy industrial region, the Northeast). The author then turns to China's growing military (and particularly naval) power in connection with its increasing assertion of territorial claims in the South and East China Seas as well as ability to project naval power across the Taiwan Strait and beyond into the Pacific and Indian Ocean theaters.