Migration in West Africa: a savanna village perspective

The author describes the determinants and impact of temporary labor migration from northern Ghana, an area dependent on subsistence agriculture, to the south, where employment opportunities in mining, commercial agriculture, and the public sector are relatively abundant and higher-paying. The effects on social organization, agriculture, and population dynamics are discussed. (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

Zapotec innovation in a Mexican village: Building an autonomous mobile network

In 2013, a Zapotec village in the Mexican state of Oaxaca drew international attention when its citizens successfully created an autonomous mobile phone network. Using open‐source software and with technical assistance from an NGO (non‐governmental organization), the people of Talea de Castro obtained antennae, a base station and software that enabled them to build a fully functional mobile network with global reach. This article examines theoretical questions about the nature of innovation and the conditions that might help promote it. It also places the network in broad historical and social contexts. The article reviews the political, legal and technical processes by which villagers were able to create the network. For many years, Talea has been a centre of technological creativity and experimentation. The network might be seen as the village's latest innovation in a centuries‐long process in which creative problem‐solving is integrated with indigenous patterns of mutual aid, reciprocal labour and cooperativism. The article concludes with a discussion of the challenges facing the network and its users.     

The peasantariat and politics: migration,wage labor,and agriculture in Botswana

This article examines Botswana's wage labor migration in terms of 2 reigning theories: 1) as a dichotomy between traditional and modern society, with workers viewing agriculture as an alternative to more desirable wage employment; or 2) as a subordination of colonial society to capitalist society, with workers drawn from the resulting underdeveloped and impoverished areas and divorced from their agricultural potential. Approximately 90% of Botswanan households have a wage worker; less than 1/4 of households rely on the agricultural economy alone. 80% of the population works in agriculture in some way, but agriculture contributes only 35% of total rural income. Over 50% of households are below the poverty level, and most must rely on a variety of income sources for subsistence. 68% of rural households (Botswana is 84% rural) have absent wage earners while 45% have 1 or more wage earners present. Absent wage earners work mainly in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in Botswanan towns (44%) and villages (22%), and lands and cattlepost locations (5%) in South African mines (19%), and other jobs in South Africa (8%). Individuals with low socioeconomic status tend to migrate to South Africa; those with higher status move to Botswanan towns. Working for wages has become customary for most Botswanans. This article undermines conventional development theories by showing the close interweaving of the modern and traditional societies, and arguing that traditional retention of communal land rights and cattle ownership served the capitalistic system by becoming the basis for wage earning; previous income source (agriculture) did not disappear, but their use was altered. South African mining returns to the Botswanan government since 1965 largely benefited a growing petty-bourgeois class and marginally improved the life styles of the peasant labor class. Botswana's development depends on the relationship between the peripherial laboring class and the dominating petty-bourgeois and its internal structure.     

Migration,age, and education: a cross-sectional analysis of geographic labor mobility in Japan

"This paper presents some new empirical evidence on the determinants of prefecture-to-city migration in Japan, using a model based on the human capital-search theoretic approach." Several hypotheses relating the rate of migration to age, education, distance moved, and earnings are tested, and the applicability of the theoretical framework to the analysis of labor migration in Japan is evaluated. Data are from the 1970 census and the 1968 Employment Status Survey.     

The cultural construction of Italy in Albania and vice versa: Migration dynamics,strategies of resistance and politics of mutual self-definition across colonialism and post-colonialism

This article analyses the shifting ways in which Italy has been strategically represented in Albania during the different key passages of the latter's relatively recent history as a sovereign independent state. As a parallel narrative, the article also examines the way Albania has been equally strategically represented in Italy before and during the two periods in which Italy has been militarily involved in Albania, and the way this has been consistent with an attempt to elaborate and sustain a politically strategic definition of Italian identity and culture. The history of the asymmetrical relationship between Albania and Italy is deeply embedded in the social, cultural and political environments that are on the two shores of the Adriatic Sea. The cultural construction of Albania in Italy and vice versa of Italy in Albania should be linked to seemingly independent instances of domestic reforms. The dynamics of projective identification or dis-identification stemming from these instances should be seen as intertwined within two parallel processes of mutual definition encompassing both the colonial and the postcolonial relations between and within the two countries.     

The cultural politics of shit: class,gender and public space in India

In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as symbolic action underpinned by ideas of purity, pollution and ‘the body politic’. Part two takes the political economic approach to gain further insights into contemporary discourse, performance and cultural politics surrounding toilets and open defecation in India. Part three examines civil society activities, state campaigns and media accounts of open defecation to explore the disruptive potency of everyday toilet activities, and how these interplay with issues of class, caste, and gender. Drawing on interviews and a review of ethnographic work, we seek to interrogate the idiom of modern sanitation, with its emphasis on cleanliness, progress and dreams of technology, as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Indian modernity.     

Children's agency in resettlement: a study of Swedish cultural orientation programs in Kenya and Sudan

The focus of this study is cultural orientation programs (COPs) for refugees being resettled from Kenya and Sudan in Sweden in 2011. This study aims to highlight how, if at all, children's agency was facilitated during the COPs. The programs were video recorded in order to look at the continuous negotiations during the meetings between the Swedish delegation and the children and youth. The concept of thick and thin agency is used in order to understand how sometimes the overall context of the program as a part of the resettlement process thins the agency of the children.     

Black male: Advertising and the cultural politics of masculinity

During the 1980s, men's bodies began to appear with increasing frequency in television, cinema and billboard advertising. The advertisers’ preferred image of masculinity has generally been young, white, able‐bodied and staunchly heterosexual. This paper explores a partial exception to these generalisations: Ogilvy & Mather's highly successful relaunch of the soft drink, Lucozade. By using selected images of black male bodies and their popular associations with sporting and sexual prowess, Lucozade was able to shake off its long‐established associations with sickness and convalescence, becoming a popular ‘in‐health’ drink with a revitalised and revitalising image. The paper places contemporary representations of black men in British advertising in relation to wider changes in attitudes towards gender, sexuality and ‘race’, arguing that the success of the Lucozade campaign depended not so much on general associations between sport and ‘race’, manliness and muscularity, as on the reader's (socially constructed) knowledge of the particular personalities represented. This assumed knowledge effectively suppresses the more threatening aspects of a stereotypically anonymous and rapacious black male sexuality, provoking desire without evoking dread.     

Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism: cultural politics in the era of Mussolini

The article explores the efforts of Marinetti's futurists, Sarfatti's Novecento movement, and the Tuscan circle that propounded strapaese to shape a cultural basis for Italian Fascism. The first two movements sought to become an official art for Fascism, while the third sought to produce a culture that would remain true to Fascism's origins in 1919, but all were in different ways 'modernist' movements and they are therefore contextualized both in terms of the challenge presented by Fascism and those faced by their modernist counterparts elsewhere in Europe. It is argued that the three movements enjoyed some success in the 1920s but were effectively shut down by the rise of the intransigent Right in the 1930s. Yet it is also argued that they needed the regime because they were too weak by themselves to assert the principle of artistic autonomy in the face of an internationally ascendant commodity culture. L'articolo esplora i tentativi dei futuristi facenti capo a Marinetti, del movimento Novecento di Sarfatti, così come del circolo toscano detto di Strapaese, nel costruire e definire le basi culturali del fascismo italiano. I primi due movimenti cercarono di costituire un'arte ufficiale del fascismo, mentre la terza si protese a far nascere una cultura che rimanesse legata alle origini del movimento fascista del 1919; ma tutti erano, in maniera diversa, movimenti 'modernisti' e sono qui tra l'altro posti sia nel contesto del cambiamento, nel clima politico e culturale, rappresentato dal fascismo che in quello degli altri movimenti modernisti europei. Viene messo in evidenza che i tre movimenti ottennero un discreto successo negli anni venti, ma furono censurati da una destra intransigente che emergeva negli anni trenta. Tuttavia, è possibile affermare che tutti e tre i movimenti avevano bisogno del Regime perché troppo deboli ed incapaci di consolidare un principio di autonomia artistica nei confronti di una emergente cultura consumista nel contesto internazionale.     

James Arbuckle and Dean Swift: cultural politics in the Irish confessional state

James Arbuckle, born a Presbyterian in Belfast, educated at Glasgow University, moved to Dublin under the patronage of the radical Whig Viscount Molesworth. He arrived at the time of Swift's triumph as ‘The Drapier’. Writing under the name ‘Hibernicus’, he produced a series of essays in the style of Addison's Spectator (1725–26). They can be read as a ‘polite’ Whig critique of Swift's Irish writing, particularly on confessional division. Arbuckle was clearly identified as a political opponent of Swift in a series of lampoons from Swift's circle. He wrote more incisively against the confessional state in his 1729 work The Tribune, lost to historians because of a mistaken attribution to Swift's friend Delany. This article will study Arbuckle's critique of Swift, aiming to give an insight into cultural conflict, both Whig/Tory and Anglican/Presbyterian in a period when both Whig and Presbyterian views have generally been overlooked.