LOCAL CHALLENGES TO GLOBAL AGENDAS: CONSERVATION,ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION AND THE PASTORALISTS' RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN TANZANIA

Since the mid-1980s, “democratization” and structural adjustment, have been transforming domestic political economies throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, these processes could significantly alter the terrain in the conflict between local land rights and state wildlife conservation. The situation has become increasingly complex as the parties involved - land-holders, state and international conservation agencies - are joined by land rights political organizations, domestic conservation groups and foreign capital. The paper focuses on struggles over land and resource rights, specifically on new forms of grassroots political action which has emerged on the question of wildlife conservation in national parks. At the same time, tourism is expanding with an influx of foreign capital. The paper explores the implications of the interactions between these forces.     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.     

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: BOUNDED RATIONALITY APPLIED TO UNBOUNDED ECOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

The interaction among myriad species and chemicals in the food chain often yields potential outcomes which are difficult to foresee. In policy terms, these interactions comprise an information load beyond human cognition, resulting in unexpected side effects. The clearest examples are seen in the invasions of species and epidemics, air pollution, toxic substances, and endangered species. The policy process attempts to deal with the information problem by using (1) an incremental approach, (2) a bounding approach, or (3) an uncertainty approach. Unfortunately, the bounding approach excludes all data on interactions outside the apparent cause/effect hypothesis. Possible approaches to augment and improve environmental policy, beyond the bounding approach, are to inquire into uncertainties and side-effects, choose complex ecologies over simple ones, and sample for uncertain risks by probability assessments.     

HISTORY AND THE MANIFEST IMAGE: HAYDEN WHITE AS A PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY1

To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White's influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be worthy of any philosophical attention at all. For what makes his emphasis on narrative structure and its associated tropes of philosophical relevance? What, it may well be asked, did (or could) any theory that draws its categories from a stock provided by literary criticism contribute to explicating problems with regard to the warranting of claims about knowledge, explanation, or causation that represent those concerns that philosophy typically brings to this field? Robert Doran's anthologizing of previously uncollected pieces, ranging as they do over a literal half‐century of White's published work, offers an opportunity to identify explicitly those philosophical themes and arguments that regularly and prominently feature there. Moreover, White's essays in this volume demonstrate a credible knowledge of and interest in mainstream analytic philosophers of his era and also reveal White as deeply influenced by or well acquainted with other important philosophers of history. White thus invites a reading of his work as philosophy, and this volume presents the opportunity for accepting it as such.     

THE LAST RIGHTS: MORE ON ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE DEAD

Summary. In a recent paper, one of us (Bahn 1984) made a preliminary sketch of the main issues involved in the question of whether archaeologists have the right to disturb the dead. Since then, a number of important new case studies have featured prominently in the media, and more literature on the subject has started to appear—most notably a collection of papers (Green 1984) which, though focused on the particular problems of North America, contains much food for thought for archaeologists elsewhere. In this article we propose to look at the new data and consider what light moral philosophy can throw on the problem as a whole.     

CARTER AND HUMAN RIGHTS: ADMINISTRATIVE IMPACT OF A SYMBOLIC POLICY

Analyses of foreign policy impact seldom take into account the domestic and symbolic consequences of implementation. This study begins with the assumption that since President Carter's human rights policy is largely an exercise in symbolic politics, the criteria for understanding its impact have more to do with the impression than with substantive improvement in human rights. Implementation to date has been felt primarily in administrative adjustments and revisions, not on concrete achievements in human rights around the world. While in terms of substantive criteria the impact of the policy has been minimal, in terms of increased bureaucratic visibility and other symbolic responses, the policy's implementation can be considered successful.     

ECONOMIC RIGHTS AND THE WELFARE STATE: THE QUEST FOR POLICY INTEGRITY

Leslie Dunbar. 1988. The Common Interest: How Our Social Welfare Policies Don't Work and What We Can Do About Them
Charles Lockhart. 1989. Gaining Ground: Tailoring Social Programs to American Values     

LOCAL STATUS AND NATIONAL SOCIAL WELFARE

Perceptions of individual well-being are influenced by local status, i.e., one's place in the income distribution of one's reference group. In general, reference groups are smaller than the entire nation. If national social welfare is an aggregate of individual's well-being, then it is not symmetric with respect to all individuals. A geographical interpretation of reference groups means that the welfare of a family living in one region is only influenced by other families in that region. An empirical application, using states, shows that a Gini index modified to reflect local status showed much less improvement 1949-1979 than did the standard Gini.