Back in their proper place:: racial gerrymandering in Georgia

During this decade the United States Supreme Court has made significant rulings on constitutional challenges to representative districts purposefully drawn to empower minorities as district majorities. Arguments have set the Voting Rights Act against the Fourteenth Amendment's goal of a colorblind society. The court has generally struck down the aggressive drawing of majority–minority districts, finding them racial classifications not narrowly tailored to achieve compelling state interests. This study analyzes and evaluates these legal developments, principally through a focus upon the most recent litigation in Georgia. My thesis — that the Court has muddled the jurisprudence of representation, voting rights and racial equality because of its inability to treat politics and geography with consistency, depth, rigor and judgment — will be explored in connection with five questions. First, can compact and regular shape provide the courts with a concept to properly assess the legal issues without involving the courts in intractable and injudicious political questions? Second, does a bizarrely shaped district “broadcast” such an invidious racial message as to constitute a “stigmatic harm” which provides plaintiffs with standing to challenge the district? Third, is a district's bizarre shape critical evidence of the districters' intent to discriminate? Fourth, is “community of interest” a significantly richer criterion than shape for evaluating racial gerrymandering claims and defenses? Fifth, what is the proper legal role of traditional criteria of territorial representation as the benchmarks for distinguishing permissible from impermissible race-conscious districting?     

Chieftaincy in Transition:

Secularisation and Tribute in Pre-cession Fiji     

FOCUS: Bone Needles in Mallorcan Prehistory: a Reappraisal

A review of bone needles from the Mallorcan earliest prehistory is presented. They are not artifacts, but actually represent natural items, identified as Myotragus balearicus fibular diaphysis. The corpus fibulae ofM. balearicus is here illustrated by first time. Archaeological and paleontological implications of this diagnosis are discussed in this paper.     

Evaluierung in der Diskussion:

Insbesondere in Zeiten knapper ?ffentlicher Finanzen haben Politik, Wirtschaft und Privathaushalte ein Interesse daran zu erfahren, ob die in zahlreichen F?rderprogrammen gebundenen Steuermittel effektiv, zielgenau und erfolgreich eingesetzt werden. über die Erfolgskontrolle von staatlichen Interventionsprogrammen hinaus werden zunehmend auch Institutionen, Instrumente und Beurteilungskriterien auf ihre Wirkung hin untersucht. Daher hat in jüngster Zeit nicht nur in den technischen Disziplinen, sondern auch in den planungsbezogenen und sozialwissenschaftlichen Fachrichtungen verst?rkt die Diskussion um Evaluierungen, ihre wissenschaftliche Genauigkeit, gesellschaftliche Akzeptanz sowie politische Brisanz eingesetzt. Verb?nde und Einrichtungen versuchen, die wissenschaftlichen und ethischen Standards für die Evaluation zu verbessern und neue angepa?te Evaluationsrichtlinien zu entwickeln. Um so erstaunlicher ist es, da? bis heute kaum ein wirklicher Durchbruch einer ausgepr?gten Evaluationskultur in Deutschland zu erkennen ist. So gilt es zu fragen, welche Erfahrungen es in Deutschland diesbezüglich gibt, welche St?rken und Schw?chen sich in der Vergangenheit erkennen lie?en und welche Methoden angesichts ver?nderter Rahmenbedingungen bei welchen Problemstellungen geeignet sind. Schlie?lich empfiehlt es sich, auf die Erfahrungen anderer L?nder zu blicken, um zu lernen, wie wir eine neue Evaluationskultur entwickeln k?nnen. Die Begriffe Evaluation und Evaluierung werden in diesem Text synonym verwendet, wie es auch sonst üblich ist.     

Thoughtlessness: Rumsfeld in Washington

This review article considers the case of Donald Rumsfeld and his disastrous tenure as US Secretary of Defense (2001–2006), as recounted by Rumsfeld himself in his memoirs and other writings, and in interviews with the celebrated documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, for The unknown known (2014). In all of these works he appears completely unreconstructed; indeed, remarkably self‐satisfied. The article reflects on Rumsfeld as operator and courtier, and Morris's pursuit of a man without qualities, with reference to Hannah Arendt's notion of ‘the banality of evil’.     

上海 食尽奢华

虽然有了环球金融中心，金茂大厦依然是上海的地标性建筑。上海金茂君悦大酒店就位于这座大厦的第54至87层。     

Arrival: Anthropology in Hollywood

The recent Hollywood science fiction film Arrival features as its main character a linguist who explicitly references the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativism. Unusually for a mainstream film, Arrival presents the insights of linguistic anthropology as a key to the human‐alien encounter and combines these concerns with other key anthropological insights, particularly in relation to notions of time and the embodied nature of writing/drawing. In this article, the author argues that the film can be useful in thinking about anthropological debates on ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of Sapir‐Whorf and suggests that a careful parsing of the anthropological concepts drawn on in the film provides food for thought about the possible usefulness of popular fictional concoctions for thinking through contemporary issues in anthropology and conveying them to a wider audience.