The Mafia,the market and the state in Italy and Russia

Pino Arlacchi (1983) La mafia imprenditrice (Bologna: II Mulino); translated by Martin Ryle as Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1986), $13.95, ISBN 0‐86091‐892‐0.

Raimondo Catanzaro (1988) II delitto come impresa: storia sociale della mafia (Padua: Liviana Editrice); translated by Raymond Rosenthal as Men of Respecc: A Social History of the Sicilian Mafia (New York: Free Press, 1992), $22.95, hardback, ISBN 0‐02‐905325‐0.

Diego Gambetta (1992) La mafia siciliana: Una industria della protezione privata (Turin: Einaudi revised paperback edn, 1994); translated as The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), $39.95 hardback, ISBN 0‐674‐80741‐3.

Salvatore Lupo (1993) Storia della mafia dalle origini ai giorni nostri (Rome: Donzelli Editore).

Alexander Stille (1995) Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (New York: Pantheon), ISBN 0679425799.

Stephen Handelman (1995) Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mafiya (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), $27.50, hardback, ISBN 0‐300‐06352‐0.

Robert Putnam (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), $39.95, hardback, $14.95, paperback, ISBN 0‐691‐03738‐8.     

Tourism in a nature-based destination: the human versus the ecological perspectives

In the tourism studies literature, wilderness has been addressed from two perspectives. From the first, human, perspective wilderness is a social, subjective construction that exists only in the mind of its users. From the second, ecological, perspective it is a material, objective reality. Here, we compare these two perspectives based on data collected in one of Poland's most popular nature-based destinations, The Great Masurian Lakes region, and develop a methodological framework which would operationalise this comparison and make it measurable. The research approach combined a survey of tourists and mapping of natural features. The data was analysed, first, to verify whether stated preferences regarding nature and the natural features surrounding tourist accommodation were coherent; this resulted in the construction of a Coherence Index (CI). Second, we analysed how stated preferences with respect to nature were linked to outdoor recreational activities; this was measured by a Nature Cruciality Index (NCI). Finally, both indexes were mapped and their spatial distributions were analysed. The findings showed that the subjective, social construction of wilderness does not always correspond to objective reality. Although tourists declared natural environment to be very important to them, in some cases the analysis found a lack of consistency between expressed preferences and the natural features found around accommodation. The phenomenon was mainly found in towns, where tourists were most nature-indifferent. Moreover, they were not interested in activities with high NCI. In some cases, however, the two perspectives were coherent, especially among nature-oriented tourists who stayed near lakes and those who stayed in villages (who were most conscious of their choices). Tourists who stayed near lakes undertook the most nature-crucial activities. These findings can be used to enhance local planning, management and marketing strategies for nature tourism.     

问道武当山

<正>题记:北京奥运开幕式上的太极阵带来视觉震撼,武当山这个道教圣地掀起了人们对道教这本土宗教的又一次探索。为何时至今日,它依旧被称为"亘古无双圣境,天下第一仙山"?     

旧金山之美

<正>彩虹飞架大洋岸,巨龙衔起两青山;西海波涛连天际,东湾碧水映白帆。红桥出浴晚霞天,轻纱薄雾彩云端;三藩景色多妖娆,金门桥头最好看。如果你还活着,旧金山不会使你厌烦;如果你已经死了,那旧金山会让你再度起死回生。     

The impossible intimacies of M N Roy

Manabendranath Roy (1884–1954) was a Marxist philosopher, an Indian nationalist, and an anti-colonial cosmopolitan. M.N. Roy ended up imprisoned in India for six years from 1931 to 1936, in the midst of the greatest colonial counterterrorism campaign ever organized by the British Raj. Aged 36 when he entered prison in 1931, he had already engaged in anti-colonial guerilla warfare in his youth during the swadeshi insurgency, 1903–1915. In subsequent years, up to his arrest in 1931, but especially during his prison years, Roy embarked on a long-term project to rethink and revise his own understanding of revolutionary action. Roy came to see the chief exponents of revolutionary action as “deviant” Indian women whose intimate relations transgressed the bounds of the traditional Hindu family. This essay studies the radical feminist currents in M.N. Roy's prison writings, and interprets his broader revolutionary project as a pursuit of “impossible intimacies” that transgressed the cultural bounds both of empire and of nation.     

The impossible interview with the man of the hidden biological structures. Interview by Paolo Mazzarello

This paper presents an "impossible interview" to Professor Camillo Golgi, placed in time in December 1906. The Italian Professor Golgi from Pavia has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine ex aequo with the Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Both scientists have obtained the award for their work on the anatomy of the nervous system. However, they have opposite views on the mechanisms underlying nervous functions. Golgi believes that the axons stained by his "black reaction" form a continuous anatomical or functional network along which nervous impulses propagate. Ramón y Cajal is the paladin of the neuron theory, a hypothesis questioned by Golgi in his Nobel lecture of Tuesday, December 11. After the ceremony, an independent journalist has interviewed Professor Golgi in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Excerpts about his education, his main scientific discoveries, and his personal life are here given (reconstructing the "impossible interview" on the basis of Golgi's original writings).     

The impossible interview with the man of the neuron doctrine. Interview by Edward G Jones

This paper follows the form of that by Mazzarello that precedes it (Mazzarello, 2006) and presents an imaginary interview with Santiago Ramón y Cajal in December 1906. A few days earlier Cajal had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, an award that he shared equally with Professor Camillo Golgi. Golgi had been recognized for his work as a pioneer into investigations of the nervous system, primarily on account of his discovery of the "black reaction" of silver chromate impregnation of whole nerve cells and their processes. Cajal had been recognized for his implementation of that method and for laying with it the foundations of what was to become modern neuroanatomical science. Paradoxically, the two awardees had been led by their researches to diametrically opposed views of the organization of the nervous system. Golgi believed in a continuous network of axons that formed the basis of all the integrative properties of the nervous system, while Cajal had provided the information that led to the formulation of the neuron doctrine that saw the nervous system as being made up of chains of discontinuous cells joined by polarized functional contacts that we now call synapses. The paper takes the form of an interview with Professor Cajal in the Grand Hotel Stockholm. His responses to questions posed by the imaginary interviewer are all taken from Cajal's own writings.     

美国城市旅游

美国城市旅游对我国发展都市旅游有借鉴意义。本介绍了美国在散客旅游方式、旅游交通、城市旅游资源开发、旅游宣传资料以及旅馆业经营方式方面的一些做法。     

执子之手,我们赏美景、看星星

<正>七月七日长生殿,夜半无人私语时"。这一夜好像总是凉爽,总是晴好天气,调皮的萤火虫一闪一闪的,与天上那眨眼睛的星星遥相呼应。夜深了,暑热散去,抬头就看见满天的星河璀璨,仔细寻觅,真的可以找到两颗星星在银河里相会呢!而人世间的这一对,低下头,也该是情话绵绵了。     

Seeing the churches like the state: taxes and wealth redistribution in late antique Italy

Two key economic questions tend to be asked about the transformation of the Roman world. First, how did Roman fiscal structures continue, disintegrate and transform? Second, how did emerging churches play a role in the redistribution of wealth through new administrative structures to create a new social system, what Ian Wood has called a ‘temple society’? These two processes – one focussing on the continuity or discontinuity of the Roman economic structures and the other on churches within that system – are usually examined separately or assumed to follow, what we call here, a ‘Gallic model’. In this article, we first demonstrate that Wood’s ‘temple society’ is far more complex in its emergence in Italy than in Gaul. Second, we argue that the churches of Italy remained embedded within late Roman fiscal structures, even as they transformed during late antiquity. Fiscal arrangements, examined through the churches of Rome and Ravenna, established churches as ever more central economic actors to the state fiscal system by 600 and shaped their long-term wealth redistribution process.     

梁启超《中国之美文及其历史》的整理问题

梁启超的《中国之美文及其历史》属于生前未完之作,死后由人整理出版,但其章节的编排存在问题,本文对其整个卷章结构进行了还原。     

The state of globalisation and the globalisation of the state

This article examines how to evaluate claims about the extent and impact of globalisation. A focus on the significance of earlier phases of globalisation is essential, but underestimating the importance and scope of recent developments is the wrong lesson to learn from a more historically informed analysis. While it is necessary to maintain a healthy scepticism towards endings, inevitability and irreversibility, it is important to remain open to the possibility that the world political economy has indeed undergone substantial transformation. This article argues that quantitative measures of globalisation need to be supplemented with an analysis of the pivotal role of the state in spurring and sponsoring the process of global economic interaction. State constructions of the imperatives of globalisation have aimed to bolster the acceptance of policy changes that support globalisation and transform domestic political economies. There is continuing potential for state activity to have effects--both positive and negative--on the progress of economic globalisation.     

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。     

Daily life in the country. The co-existence of Jews and Christians at the end of the Weimar Republic

Godwin's controversial claim for earthly immortality in the first edition of Political Justice has been largely dismissed by scholars as a flaw in his philosophy or as absurd speculation which Godwin cannily omitted from the later editions of the text. In this paper, I will demonstrate, not only that such claims were not nearly as idiosyncratic or eccentric as they have been presented, but that they constitute an intrinsic part of his overall philosophy regarding perfectibility and human progress. Moreover, by examining the revisions made to Political Justice in the second and third editions, it will be possible to prove that the essence of his argument regarding material immortality was not as radically altered as is widely accepted. I will further show how the population controversy of the 18th century forced Godwin to apply his perfectibilist theory to contemporary demographic challenges and how he defended his concept of immortality from both the principle of population and, more particularly, Malthusian philosophy.     

法国、意大利考察见闻

2002年11月5日至18日,我参加了国家物局组织的法国、意大利博物馆及其信息化工作的考察活动。主要考察了法国、意大利两个国家的15个博物馆和遗址,与法国遗产学院和意大利罗马博协举行了座谈。这次考察的主要有以下收获。