Facilitation in Community Development. Twenty-Five Years of Experience in Rural Territories in Cuenca,Spain

The process of facilitation aims to solve community problems by encouraging the exploitation of skills through different tools implemented by the facilitator. Facilitation has been analysed in the context of advanced and established groups with well-defined objectives, but not at the start of these groups. This article analyses the facilitation process carried out by the Institute of Community Development over 25 years with four work groups in rural areas of Cuenca, Spain. The leadership role taken on by the facilitator is crucial when it comes to identifying and managing the initial efforts required to start the group work. During the facilitation process, training and information tools are essential. It is also important to see a suitable transfer of roles between the facilitator and the stakeholders as they acquire new skills. This transfer is crucial for the continuity of the group and can cause difficulties if it does not happen.     

Evolution of Innovation Policy in Emilia-Romagna and Valencia: Similar Reality,Similar Results?

This paper examines the evolution of regional innovation policy in Emilia-Romagna and Valencia, two regions with similar economic features that implemented close innovation policies in the 1970s and 1980s. We investigate whether their similarities have led to parallel targets, policy tools and governance developments. We show that innovation policy in both regions suffered from the effects of privatization, budget constraints and changes to manufacturing during the 1990s and we highlight the consequences. Although Emilia-Romagna experienced deeper changes to its innovation policy, privatizations and/or the replacement of public funds promoted commercial approaches and induced market failures in both regions. The worst effects of these policies were the implementation of less-risky innovation projects, the shift towards extra-regional projects and markets, and the favouring of large firms.     

Regional Scientific Production and Specialization in Europe: The Role of HERD

This paper analyses the effects of R&D expenditure in the higher education sector on the scientific production across regions in Europe 15. Our research questions relate to the regional production of science and the role of academic R&D expenditures on regional scientific output. The results show that money affects the production of scientific results in regions. On average, we found different impacts and lags of R&D expenditure according to the level of regional development. Our findings also suggest that scientific specialization is a significant factor affecting scientific outputs, although its effects differ across disciplines and regions.     

Conflicto político en el Poema de Fernán González

This article deals with the ways in which different political conflicts surrounding the emergence, independence, and consolidation of Castile as a political agent are managed and solved in the Poema de Fernán González. It shows how internal conflicts within the Castilian community are settled by favoring an authoritarian vision of leadership, discouraging consensus and shared decision making. Regarding conflicts with other political domains, the poem legitimizes Castilian independence by means of a narrative that makes natural Castilian claims on Visigothic heritage, while at the same time presenting Castile as following legal procedures and as a victim of external aggression.     

A Distorting Mirror: The Sixteenth Century in the Historical Imagination of the First Hispanic Liberals

Summary

Both Iberian and Spanish American liberals in the early decades of the nineteenth century based their political stances upon a particular vision of Spanish history. This vision, nourished by the stereotypes of the so-called ‘black legend’, correspond to an extremely gloomy picture of the main events and processes that had been taking place in the Hispanic monarchy since the late fifteenth century, such as the discovery and conquest of America and the outcome of the Comunidades of Castile war. This essay shows how those first Hispanic liberals, many of whom spent several years in exile, hoping to make sense of that period of uncertainty and revolutionary crisis, sought inspiration in the philosophies of history which were beginning to spread from Northern Europe regarding the decisive role of Protestantism in the origins of modernity. In endorsing such a derogatory vision of the history of their own countries, which included an evaluation of Catholicism as a retrograde factor, those liberal writers and politicians bequeathed to their descendants an interpretative framework that would prove to be very long lasting. In fact, much of the political and intellectual historiography on the Iberian world would be conditioned for a long time by a paradigm which described its past as an anomaly in the Euroamerican context, and assumed the subordinate and peripheral position of the region, portrayed as a kind of ‘interior Orient’—that is, as an aberration of Western civilisation.     

Metal Use and Production among Coastal Societies of the Atacama Desert*

In this paper, we focus on the study of metal objects associated with populations living on the northern coast of Chile in the Late Intermediate and Late periods (c. ad 1000–1550). Our contribution is based on morphometric and physico‐chemical (ICP–AES, PIXE and metallographic sections) analyses of the quintessential coastal metal object: the fish‐hook. This study is part of a broader investigation that seeks to understand the organization of mining – metallurgical production systems and their relation with coastal economies and ways of life. We distinguish at least two different traditions, one associated with the Western Valleys area and one with the Arid Desert Coast. These findings expand our understanding of Andean metal making. Furthermore, the presence of a metallurgical tradition within the highly mobile hunter–gatherers of the most arid coast of South America is of great anthropological significance.     

Una relectura de la cronología de los incas de la Miscelánea antártica de Miguel Cabello Valboa (1586)

El presente artículo propone una lectura de la cronología de los incas presente en la Miscelánea antártica (1586) de Miguel Cabello Valboa a la luz de nueva evidencia histórica y textual. La crónica de Cabello ofrece años concretos asociados a la duración y expansión del Tawantinsuyu, razón por la cual fue utilizada por John Rowe (1945) para construir una cronología absoluta para el incario. No obstante el trabajo de Rowe ha sido cuestionado en las últimas décadas por la arqueología, la cronología de Cabello nunca ha sido abandonada del todo. El presente artículo postula que la comparación de fechas entre el registro arqueológico y etnohistórico no es correcta, puesto que parten de premisas distintas. Proponemos que los cálculos de Cabello se basaron en supuestos no empíricos los cuales, más que retratar el pasado verdadero de los incas, buscaban posicionar su historia dentro del providencial esquema que Dios había trazado para la Monarquía hispánica.     

Celebrating victory on a day of defeat: commemorating the First World War in Portugal, 1918–1933

In Portugal, the development of a memorial project commemorating the First World War, from the treatment of physical bodies to their more or less symbolic (or more or less doctrinal) representations, did not achieve its intended results, in the sense that it did not succeed in consecrating Portugal as a participant of recognized standing and a victorious Allied nation. The memory of the war was clearly shaped by a dimension of tragedy and not by victory. This article will provide, via the dialectics between official and public memory, an in-depth analysis of the politics of memory as it manifests in official commemorative projects. It will examine the forms, pace of implantation and rituals carried out to renew the meaning of memory, as well as the underlying play of forces it is subject to, along with the way in which it establishes cultural and even political rupture or continuity. Through the observation of elements that constitute a war culture – images, language and practices – which emerged during and after the conflict, this study seeks to clarify the First Republic’s successes and failures in delineating and consolidating an official memory of the First World War in Portugal.