Modernization of Costa Rica's Beef Cattle Economy: 1950-1985

Measured in strictly economic terms of profits, diversified exports, hard currency earnings and a more favorable trade balance, Costa Rica's beef cattle economy took a giant step toward modernization between 1950-1985. Unfortunately, this modernization had a minimum of socially desirable and environmentally adaptive components. Costa Rica, like other developing Latin American countries, is learning that economic development frequently entails painful social and ecological costs.     

(Mal)Development in Central America: Globalization and Social Change

This article develops a globalization framework and a model of transnational processes for analysing social change and development, and then applies the model to Central America. The analysis emphasizes determinacy, in the last instance, of social forces in historic developmental outcomes, and documents how social forces in struggles in an emergent transnational environment have shaped Central America's changing profile within the global economy and society. Revolutionary movements, a new class structure, US geo-political considerations, and the internationalization of East Asian economies, have all contributed to a new model of development; from the 1960s into the 1990s the national model of development is being replaced by a transnational model. Maquiladora garment production, tourism, non-traditional agricultural exports, and remittances from emigrant workers are coming to eclipse traditional agro-exports as the most dynamic economic sectors linking the region to globalized circuits of production and distribution. The article also examines Central American migration to the US and gender dimensions of the new transnational model of development.     

Feeling sexual transgression: subjectivity,bodily experience,and non-normative hetero-erotic practices in women's cross-border sex in Costa Rica

Participating in sexual tourism and cross-border sex, heterosexual Euro-North American women are a targeted social group whereby accusations, such as ‘fucking gringa’, label them as sexual transgressors for violating multiple boundaries of heteronormativity. The complex power dynamics of women's cross-border sex are due to negotiations of race, gender, and class that are played out in specific locales and political economies of desire. Within these dynamics, women are agentive social actors and exert considerable sexual agency in their desires for local men who are positioned unevenly vis-à-vis tourist women's mobilities within erotic markets. Yet women's hetero-erotic sexual practices, which are experienced at the level of the body, cannot be assumed; looking at the lived experiences of women as sexual trangressors in these spaces promises to complicate non-normative heterosexuality and the gendered dynamics of (straight) transnational sex. Using critical ethnography and a performance approach to writing that places subjectivity at the center of the ethnographic record and analysis, this article conveys an ‘insider’ or emic account of women's transnational sex taking place in a Caribbean region of Costa Rica renown for women's sexual and romance tourism. In taking this approach, I aim to show how heterosexuality, hetero-erotic practices, and cross-border sex are not always what they seem and a glimpse into ‘the subjects’ worlds in their words' (Madison, Soyini. 2005. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. London: Sage, 174) has implications for theory concerned with the body and performance as fundamental to the social production of sexual transgression.     

A 4,000-year-old shaman’s stone cache at Casita de Piedra, western Panama

During new excavations at the preceramic rockshelter of Casita de Piedra in western Panama, a cache of 12 unusual stones was recovered near the back wall, dating to between 4800 and 4000 cal bp. The stones include quartz, pyrite, a chalcedony vein nodule, a bladed quartz and jarosite aggregate and a human-modified dacite cylinder. Based on the unusual lithic types and the context of the cache, we suggest that these stones once belonged to a ritual specialist, such as a healer or shaman. Special stones are frequently mentioned as being an important component of a shaman’s ritual paraphernalia in ethnographic records of various historic Native American groups throughout Central and South America, including the Bribri and Cabécar of southeastern Costa Rica and western Panama (formerly known as the ‘Talamanca’). The cache of stones recovered at Casita de Piedra may represent the earliest material evidence in Central America of shamanistic practice.     

Preliminary Investigations of Two Shipwreck Sites in Cahuita National Park,Costa Rica

Recent underwater archaeological investigations in Costa Rica focused on two sites as potential candidates for Danish West Indies slave ships wrecked in 1710. Historical research suggests a landmark wrecking event associated with a large infusion of Africans, many who remained in Central America. This paper is the first interim report of two fieldwork seasons combining field methods, research, and preliminary interpretation of the findings with voyage history. Context within the broader theme of slave‐ship archaeology and Costa Rica Caribbean landscape is addressed. An integral part of the initiative is community memory, stewardship, and education.     

For Whom the Bells Fall: Metals from the Cenote Sagrado,Chichén Itzá

Bells of copper and copper alloys and gold–copper alloys were deposited in events at the Cenote Sagrado at Chichén Itzá, Mexico during the site's primary occupation (ad 750–1050) and in later centuries. Housed in three museums in the United States and Mexico, bells (n = 38) were evaluated for traces of fabrication and alteration using Vis–UV–IR optical microscopy. Bulk compositions were determined through p‐ED‐XRF. Phases and compositional variation by depth were characterized through XRD and RBS. The technological styles of bell groups were ascribed to communities of metallurgical practice, from West and Central Mexico to Costa Rica and Panama.     

The Sandinista revolution and the limits of the Cold War in Latin America: the dilemma of non-intervention during the Nicaraguan crisis, 1977–78

This paper seeks to understand the construction of a broad alliance between the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a socialist inspired guerrilla group, and various Latin American liberal and authoritarian governments, mainly Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama and Cuba, between 1977 and 1979. I will seek to understand the construction of this unusual partnership, as well as the deep conflicts and mistrust that existed between the parties during the revolutionary upheaval in Nicaragua. This process will be examined by analysing the way Cold War politics and Latin American regional tensions shaped the events leading to the Sandinista revolution.     

Conservation Narratives in Costa Rica: Conflict and Co‐existence

This article examines narratives about nature conservation in Costa Rica, specifically those related to wildlife and biodiversity, and their evolution with the growth of tourism and bioprospecting industries. It outlines a traditional conservation narrative and two streams of an emerging counter‐narrative, and discusses problems and prospects for each in contemporary Costa Rica. The use of narrative and counter‐narrative follows Roe (1991, 1995), Fairhead and Leach (1995), and Leach and Mearns (1996). The article focuses particularly on the ways in which the narratives are increasingly drawing on, informing, and sometimes conflicting with one another; it is based on the author’s research undertaken in various protected areas in Costa Rica since 1994 and on research published by others.     

The Power of Place: Tourism Development in Costa Rica

Abstract

In this paper, I question how representations of tourist destinations color and are colored by development. Presenting the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, I find that the authenticity of portrayals of place is important not for its veracity, but for the social work it performs. Authenticity is not merely socially constructed but expressive of social relations which value people and places. Tourist perceptions of the caribe sur as genuinely underdeveloped—gauged by an analysis of photos and guidebooks as well as surveys—produce an approach to resource use within the community that is limiting. Because the value of the place is its underdevelopment, development itself constrains the possibility of sustaining further growth. Ultimately, reading development via place can be a guide for critically appreciating contemporary patterns of tourism and sustainable development in the caribe sur and elsewhere.     

The Levelling Process as a Function of the Masses in the View of Kierkegaard and Ortega Y Gasset

The present article is an analysis of the emergence of a new Uruguayan author, Armonía Somers (1914–94), as well as the publication in 1950 of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman). It focuses on the Uruguayan social body of the 1950s, when society lived the paradox of recognizing women in its legal structure, but limiting them in the everyday social and cultural life. In this context, Somers's novel symbolically explores what I call the “crisis of feminine subjectivity,” through the creation of a woman who on her thirtieth birthday decided to throw away all the costumes and masks with which society and tradition imposed feminine roles and, naked, tried new ways of being, new subjectivities. Central to this study is an analysis of the different ways in which historical, social, and cultural demands produce certain kinds of human bodies, especially how they produce a woman's body. The specific argument that underlies this article is that the body inserts itself in conflictive and tense manners with the marks imposed on the genders. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of “feminine subjectivities” and “historical marked bodies” in a fiction that presents itself as a black box in which Somers finds herself as a woman who became a novelist in the 1950s and in which readers also find themselves questioning the persistence of gender marks on their own social bodies.     

Recent Work on U.S. Relations with Costa Rica

Kyle Longley. The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the US during the Rise of José Figueres
Aviva Chomsky. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1920     

Urban Transition and Interstate Relations in a Dynamic Post-Soviet Borderland: The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China

Two noted American geographers examine transition in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (a de facto Soviet protectorate in the 1930s and early 1940s) within the context of that region's strategic position. The paper, based on field work exploring urbanization in the People's Republic of China, investigates the area's role as a bridgehead and corridor for emerging economic relations between China and the neighboring republics of Central Asia. The focus is on the demographic dimensions of urban growth and the underlying geopolitical and economic factors. Considerable attention also is given to the implications of increased trade and improvements in transportation links with the newly independent Central Asian states. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F14, F15, O15, O18. 4 figures, 6 tables, 51 references.     

Locating and Dislocating Gender in Rural Zimbabwe: The making of space and the texturing of bodies

In this article the author analyses some of the key discourses and practices that locate the meanings of gender in contemporary rural Zimbabwe and maps their strategic reproduction throughout a century of upheaval and change. In so doing, the author attempts to make several original contributions to an already well-developed literature: he analyses the hitherto largely neglected spatial dimensions of gender relations in this context, argues that the social construction of space and of gendered bodies is interlinked in this region, reinterprets many of the established accounts of corporeality in this context, and develops a Foucauldian inspired notion of power and patriarchy to help explain the constitution of space, bodies and gender relations in this particular arena. The author's detailed empirical analysis of a specific case is of interest to regional specialists but also has broader appeal as an example of the utility of contemporary theory to the investigation of developing world contexts . In attempting to describe the ways in which gender is located in material and discursive space in this context, the author's purpose is to assist those engaged in contemporary feminist struggles in Zimbabwe to ask questions about how gender might be dislocated from these geographical foundations.     

China Gazes West: Xinjiang's Growing Rendezvous with Central Asia

A senior American specialist on the geography of China surveys that country's enduring interest and involvement with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, increasingly on the basis of Xinjiang's role as a bridgehead for economic linkages. Among the key features of this growing involvement reviewed in the paper are the establishment in 2001 of a regional security alliance (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) to combat Islamist extremism as well as separatist activities; growing commercial linkages (especially with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) in tandem with improved transport links and increasing crossborder movements of merchants, traders, and tourists; and China's growing need for oil and increasing reliance on Kazakhstan as a key source for petroleum. China's growing engagement with Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries is examined within the context of both opportunities as well as challenges, the latter reflecting the increasing complexity of Han Chinese and Uyghur/Turkic relations owing to increased Uyghur ties to affiliated populations in the Central Asian states.     

Realizing Carbon's Value: Discourse and Calculation in the Production of Carbon Forestry Offsets in Costa Rica

Abstract: This article examines the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon forestry offset project among indigenous smallholders in Costa Rica. By analyzing a pivotal cost–benefit calculation that changed the trajectory of the project, this article makes two principal claims. First, the intelligibility of the calculation is grounded in a discursive formation that is emergent from a history of development projects in the region, where particular ways of speaking about the relation between indigenous bodies and agriculture have allowed carbon's commodification to emerge as a desirable project. Second, the calculations resulted in quantified representations of space that were necessary for the offset to become useful within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In this case, the forestry offset's use value derived from quantified representations of agricultural space; a process that opened some forms of land use for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others.     

The Impact of National Park Development on Tortuguero,Costa Rica

This study explores the relationship between Tortuguero National Park and Tortuguero, a neighboring village in northeastern Costa Rica. Based largely on a household survey, the study considers the effect of the establishment of the park on the subsistence and commercial economies of Tortuguero. It also considers the impact of park-based tourism and its potential role in the economic development of the community. Survey results indicate a general decline in the village's standard of living in the decade since the park was created, but an increase in nature tourism has somewhat offset the decline in commercial resource exploitation. Increased participation by villagers in park-based tourism appears to offer hope for sustainable economic 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.     

Gendering places: residential technology and changing family relations in Korea

This research is based on the understanding that the house form shapes and is shaped by predominant socio-cultural values and norms. The study outlines how the physical evolution of the Korean house form, specifically its heating system called the ondol, has been part of Korean women's lives since the fourteenth century. In particular, however, I focus on the twentieth century. I first describe how the physical structure of the Korean house and the ondol evolved in conjunction with larger societal changes during this period, arguing that these technological changes have substantially influenced the everyday practices of women, the social interactions among family members at home, and women's experiences of being at home. Second, and in order to provide more in-depth analysis of these interactions, I look to the results of 30 interviews with Korean American seniors. This study suggests that the living experiences of the residents were variously affected by their gender and generational relationships within the family.     

Changelings: transformative perceptions of San José's street children, 1965-1981

Between 1965 and 1981, Costa Ricans changed their perceptions of which characteristics they thought defined appropriate urban childhoods. By 1981, the model of a modern, urban Costa Rican child was that of a child who attended school, did not work on the streets, and played in specifically designated places. Children who did not fit this mold began, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to be viewed as dangerous to society and as evidencing social pathology. Whereas children who worked on the streets during the 1960s were considered part of the urban landscape, and their childhoods, though difficult, were not perceived as deviant, these same children, two decades later, were viewed as marginal and problematic. To trace this change, this article focuses on the changing perceptions about children on the streets that writers for and public contributors to La Nación, one of the preeminent Costa Rican newspapers, show during the sixteen-year period under analysis.     

Tribal diplomacy and frontier territoriality in modern China: Hunza and Nationalist China, 1947–1948

In the immediate post-World War II period, the Chinese Nationalist regime was eager to consolidate its position and formulate a proactive policy toward China's traditional Central Asian peripheries. Postwar Nationalist China's momentary confidence in extending central influence into the Pamir and Kashmir regions can be understood in such a geopolitical context. The withdrawal of British colonial rule in India further increased Nanjing's optimism about bringing Hunza, a Muslim tribal state in northwest Kashmir, under its territorial and administrative sway. To prevent possible infiltration of Soviet influence in Central Asia, the Nationalists at one point even considered resorting to the restoration of imperial “tributary ties” as a political expedient in their dealings with postwar China's frontier territorial issues. A careful examination of the Nationalists' previously unknown abortive attempt to reclaim Hunza enables us to fill an important scholarly lacuna in the history of modern China's external relations with its South and Central Asian neighbors. This reevaluation, moreover, may also lead us to further reconsider modern China's intriguing and complicated frontier diplomatic and territorial scenario, as well as how that scenario could have been manipulated by a certain group of ambitious distant Nationalist border officials during the course of postwar China's problematic frontier undertakings.