La typologie des nations et l’Espagnol mélancolique: Notes pour l’interprétation d’un cliché

Included in the traditional typology of nations, the image of the melancholy Spaniard is a cultural stereotype which appears with a remarkable continuity since the Spanish Golden Age. Developed by foreigners--particularly by the French--this stereotype is also adopted by the Spaniards themselves. It is then necessary to inquire about the persistance of this stereotype through-out the centuries and to examine how--and why--the Spaniards did adhere to the image given by foreigners and the typology of nations. The examination of this stereotype aims at analyzing its mechanism, at discovering its representations--sometimes very different--and the implications involved. The image of the melancholy Spaniard is deeply subjective representation which engages a complex work of the imagination: it concerns the representation of the other and the consciousness that every nation has of itself, revealing many elements about the one who produces it.     

Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen,A. E. Waite,and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominate fin-de-siècle studies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival.     

Simulating changes in tourism demand: a case study of two German regions

Travel behaviour is shaped by the complex interaction of a variety of societal, economic, ecological and political drivers that undergo rapid changes. This poses continually new challenges on destinations which need to adapt to altering conditions. Significant changes of influencing factors might lead to shifts in tourism flows in temporal and/or spatial dimensions. This study investigates how German tourists’ destination choices develop under changing framework conditions. It furthermore rates the impact of influencing factors such as socio-demographic and socio-economic aspects on changes in tourism demand using an agent-based model. The interactions among 15 million tourists and 109 European destinations are simulated under three different scenarios. Destinations included in the model develop in different ways in regard to tourist arrivals until 2030. The results indicate that the number of tourist arrivals will develop divergently in the investigated regions until 2030 and that some market segments will undergo changes in seasonality: the model shows a growth in arrivals for many city destinations, cultural as well as sports and active tourism destinations. It indicates a trend towards equalisation in the segments sun and sea tourism, city and cultural tourism with a shift from summer months to spring and autumn towards 2030. They furthermore imply that demographic change dominates altering tourism demand in the source market and that related changes in travel preferences are the most urgent challenge for destinations.     

The Changing Regime: Forest Property and Reformasi in Indonesia

This article explores the dominant explanations of the failure of forest management in Indonesia within the public discourse of the late New Order period. Drawing on a review of salient literature and relevant case studies, the major part of the article discusses the underlying historical, institutional and political causes of the failure of the state property regime. By taking a narrow view of the issues, public discourse during the New Order (1966–98) avoided discussion of the structure of property relations and the power relations that supported them. However, the forest fires of 1997–8 and the ensuing ecological crisis have revealed that the forest policy that allocated property rights over vast areas of the nation’s forests to well-connected conglomerates and politico-business families was inequitable and lacked legitimacy. While new legislative initiatives open up possibilities for co-management, the reforms so far barely engage with the underlying structure of property rights. These issues will need to be more thoroughly addressed if Indonesia is to tackle the bitter legacy of the Suharto period.