Explaining,and explaining with,economic nationalism

This article rejects the widely held view that economic nationalism is an anachronistic economic doctrine in the age of globalisation. Rather than being the opposite of economic liberalism, as the conventional view maintains, economic nationalism is better understood as a generic phenomenon that can accommodate almost any doctrinal content, including economic liberalism. Economic nationalism is not so much about the economy as it is about the nation, as illustrated by literature on economic nations and national economic cultures. Such a broader conception of economic nationalism is then placed in the context of a larger ‘nationalising mechanism’ that sheds new light on a variety of phenomena discussed in the globalisation debate, such as economic performance, state disintegration, or cultural conflict, and success or failure in post-communist systemic change.     

Elites in Local Development in the Philippines

For many Philippine provinces, decentralization and more autonomous local development planning did not lead to the desired outcomes. This article examines the experiences of the two provinces of Cebu and Leyte. While Cebu became a centre of trade and industry, Leyte is still struggling with its local economy oriented to natural resources. A main reason for the divergent development paths of the two islands can be found in the emergence of different elite structures, which resulted in different path‐dependent patterns of economic specialization. Despite this different historical experience, both provinces today suffer from similar institutional infirmities in their planning system for promoting local development. Local planning capacity constraints, such as regional and local co‐ordination and co‐operation patterns, local finances, human capital and knowledge are analysed. The Cebuano elites used the room for manoeuvre provided by decentralization reforms more successfully than elites in Leyte. This created pockets of efficiency in Cebu leading to more development‐friendly investment policies. In order to increase local and regional planning capacity, short‐term interventions and policy reforms at the local, regional and national level are discussed.     

The Sound of a Person

Konggap, sung melodic motifs that last only a few seconds embody the acoustic representation of a person among the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea and are a unique phenomenon in the Pacific. The konggap forms a very complex system of personal identification and expression of social relationships; at the same time it connects the singer to the ancestral world. Every person in Yupno society possesses his or her own konggap, and Yupno people are able to identify a large number of konggap, some men even up to three hundred. Nobody would sing his or her own konggap during the day. When crossing Yupno land, a person has to sing the konggap of the respective landowner to identify himself as an insider, a local person ? unlike strangers (and possible enemies) who remain silent. But at nightly dances each dancer sings his own konggap and during mourning at funerals groups of women simultaneously sing the konggap of the deceased person. An interdisciplinary ethnographic‐musicological‐cognitive fieldwork study was conducted in order to find out how it is possible that the Yupno are able to identify and distinguish between this staggering amount of very short sung motifs.     

Ways In and Out of Vulnerability to Climate Change: Abandoning the Mubarak Project in the Northern Nile Delta,Egypt

Abstract: Climate change is already exerting significant pressure on humanity, but some people have the resources to cope, while others do not. What, then, determines vulnerability to climate change? This article presents a case study of one site of vulnerability in Egypt, known as the Mubarak Project villages on the shores of the Mediterranean. The soil of these villages is now undergoing rapid salinization, forcing farmers to apply sand to “elevate” their fields above the rising salty water table—but not all farmers can afford to buy the requisite sand. Accumulation by dispossession under the Mubarak regime has pushed some people towards the frontline of climate change, while at the same time denying them the resources to stay there. Using our case, we explore the connection between accumulation by dispossession and vulnerability to climate change and ask if an end to the former could reduce the latter in Egypt.     

Between Monoculture and Cultural Polarization: Agent-based Models of the Interplay of Social Influence and Cultural Diversity

Social influence is one of the most important processes in human social interaction. Very often in human social interaction, influence is assimilative in that individuals become more similar to others they interact with. Nevertheless, cultural differences continue to remain in many realms of human life, for example, in the form of technological boundaries. Research on social influence points to a range of possible reasons for persistent cultural diversity, but there is much less clarity about the interplay of various factors and conditions for cultural influence with fundamental processes of social interaction at the micro-level. In this article, I show how agent-based computational modeling can be used as an approach for unraveling the complex interplay between simple first principles of interpersonal social interaction and emergent societal outcomes. I give a brief overview illustrating some of the main approaches agent-based modelers have developed in recent decades to understand conditions and processes of the emergence of cultural diversity. Models will be discussed that generate mainly cultural consensus as long-term behavior, but also models that generate clustering of cultural attitudes in geographical or social space, and models that imply cultural polarization with sharp cultural boundaries between emergent factions. It will be discussed how model dynamics depend on further assumptions, for example about random events, or the scaling of cultural attitudes, and what are further developments in the literature, possible future directions and challenges for the application of computational agent-based modeling in archeological research on cultural boundaries.