酋邦的演化

在文明与早期国家探源的战略性课题中,酋邦理论具有十分重要的意义。酋邦作为对19世纪摩尔根社会进化理论的发展和20世纪新进化论的重要概念,赋予了平等的部落社会与作为阶级社会象征的国家之间这个过渡阶段以明确的科学定义,使这方面的探索有了一个有用的分析工具。至于这个概念的具体内涵和分析视野,则是始终处于发展之中的。酋邦概念最早是20世纪50年代奥博格在对南美印第安人的研究中提出的,60年代塞维斯根据夏威夷群岛原始文化的资料提出了相对比较系统的酋邦理论。此后酋邦问题引起学术界越来越多的重视和关注,很多学者参与到这方面的研究和讨论之中,使研究深度和广度都达到了很高的水平。本文是美洲研究学会1988年1月举行的一个酋邦研讨会的纪要,曾发表在1989年2月号的《当代人类学》(Current Anthropology)上,稍作修改后又收入厄尔主编的《酋邦:权力、经济和意识形态》(Chiefdoms:Power,Economy,andIdeology)(1991年出版)一书中。这个研讨会是该领域一流学者们的一次集会,对酋邦问题进行了非常深入全面的探讨。会上所提出的一些问题,不仅仅是对当时酋邦研究成果的一次总结,而且对于后来包括今天在内的国家文明起源研究都有十分重要的意义。会议不仅探讨了酋邦的概念,更着重探讨了酋邦产生和存在的动力机制。首先,酋邦被认为具有极大的多样性。从规模上可分为简单酋邦和复杂酋邦;从财政基础而言,根据支付媒介的特点,可以区分为产品经济型酋邦和财富经济型酋邦;从结构上,酋邦可以分为集体型酋邦和个体型酋邦。其次,伴随对当时盛行的人口压力是社会演变主要原因学说的反思,学者们全面探讨了酋邦权力起源可能存在的所有动力,主要从三个方面(对经济、战争和意识形态的控制)总结为十项策略。与会者的一种共识是,权力的三个组成部分某种程度体现了不同的策略,而有效的统治似乎有赖于多种不同策略结合使用,以便集中权力并克服单一权力来源的局限性,这是各地案例中较为普遍的现象。另外,会议还讨论了环境在酋邦发展中的作用、酋邦的规模与层次、以及酋邦的轮回等等其它一些重要问题。酋邦概念在1980年代引入中国后也引起了我国学界的关注和讨论,然而由于对国外文献理解上的不足,一些介绍酋邦的文章难免传递一些误导性的观点。本文作为酋邦专题讨论的纪要或综述,体现了当今国际学界对酋邦概念的认识和研究,为我们了解酋邦探究的意义提供一个比较准确和全面的认识。     

FIRM SIZES AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: ESTIMATING LONG‐TERM EFFECTS ON U.S. COUNTY GROWTH, 1990–2000

This paper investigates the role of the business size distribution on income and employment growth in U.S. counties from 1990 to 2000. We measure the business size distribution as the share of employees across nine establishment size categories that range from microfirms (one to four employees) to large firms (1,000+ employees) and using three indices similar to a Gini coefficient. Results show that the business size distribution has a significant impact on county‐level growth patterns. Employment shares in small firms increase employment growth, but decrease income growth. One possible conclusion suggests policies emphasizing small firms and entrepreneurship during times of high unemployment.     

Against (White) Redemption: James Cone and the Christological Disruption of Racial Discourse and White Solidarity

In the early 1970s, James Cone delivered a profound Christological critique of whiteness as a project of redemption. This critique has often been missed because of the confusion regarding Cone's theological account of race. Drawing especially on the recent work of Nahum Chandler, this article develops the way African diasporic identity becomes “a problem for theological thought.” By way of conversation with Chandler, the article shows how Cone's deliberately ambiguous use of racial language effectively disrupts standard discourses on race and theology, which come to be seen as projects to regulate and control human life. White efforts at solidarity – asking how to help, seeking to a good ally or destroying their own whiteness – often become subtle quests to regain control over white identity and thereby contain or incorporate this disruption, this freedom as “revolt” (Cone). Against these projects of white redemption, James Cone offers a deeply Christological critique, pointing to the way they refuse to linger within movements they cannot control, particularly the movement “between,” the appositional or side-by-side joining of the particular God, Jesus of Nazareth, and particular contemporary struggles for black survival and freedom.     

Shared Social License: Mining and Conservation in the Peruvian Andes

Over the last two decades financial relationships between conservation and extraction have become conspicuously close. Both sectors unabashedly publicized these business deals as a form of greening extraction and marketizing conservation. This essay uses a case study in Perú to propose a tentative theory of how this seemingly incompatible but very profitable union unfolds on the ground. The development of fictitious commodities in nature for each sector is examined and the labor theory of value is combined with the labor of persuasive work to expose a fundamental shared need in both sectors: in Perú's contemporary political and economic context extractive and conservation actors increasingly must persuade landowners—usually indigenous communities—to allow for specific forms of capital to flow through their territory. In some cases this need to secure the “social license” is shared across sectors and the labor to secure the license can be undertaken together.     

Renaissance Humanism and Its Discontents

Abstract

The essay explores humanism’s modernity by inquiring into the way the fifteenth-century humanist cultural program posited moral values and, at the same time, contributed to a sense of moral confusion. While Niccolò Niccoli, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Leonardo Bruni associated ethical enlightenment with learning and even social acclaim, Leon Battista Alberti criticized these assumptions not only for their susceptibility to political manipulation but also for their failure to cultivate the attributes they promised: virtue, and by extension happiness and tranquillity. The tensions in humanist culture between conformity and dissent, rational certainty and sense of mutability, generated the creative energy that we, as moderns, have come to attribute to this culture.