‘My Dog is My Home’: multispecies care and poverty politics in Los Angeles,California and Austin,Texas

My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts’ testimonies on multispecies homelessness and an engagement with feminist care theory, we bring relational poverty studies into conversation with critical animal studies to reject this framing of homeless lives as disposable and to trouble the idea of property as the fundamental basis for value. We problematize these notions by highlighting the insights gained from witnessing the entangled empathetic relationships forged between homeless humans and dogs. These relationships are not only a window into the political economic material conditions and discourses that reproduce homelessness and the animal-as-property. We conclude that studying these bonds offers a collective politics of multispecies mutuality, care, and love.     

Heritage down the chute: the demolition of Saskatchewan’s grain elevators

Hailed as ‘cathedrals of the plains’ and ‘prairie sentinels’, grain elevators are iconic of Saskatchewan, Canada. Yet with fewer than four hundred and twenty of the original 3300 still standing, Saskatchewan’s historic grain elevators are disappearing at an alarmingly accelerated rate. The loss of historic grain elevators is twice the average loss in historic fabric in Canada in a third of the time despite their being the most widely cited heritage structure by Saskatchewanians. This paper deciphers this dilemma through Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional model of participatory parity, which serves to reconcile cultural, economic and political pressures on the heritage field and rebalances the field’s disproportionate focus on recognition. This model reveals how larger systems of representation and distribution are impacting official grain elevator recognition under Saskatchewan’s Heritage Property Act (1980) and proposes solutions to increase grain elevator preservation in Saskatchewan.     

清代地权交易形式的多样化发展

There were three kinds of financial transactions involving rights of land during the Qing Dynasty: debt financing through rights of land, the direct transferring of the rights of land, and the transaction of shares. This article attempts to clarify the confusion between several types of debt financing through rights of land. Ya 押 was loan through land as guaranty and repaying the interest and capital by the rent of land or harvest. Dian 典 was loan through temporary transferring of usage rights and harvest in a certain period of time. Dang 当 referred to various types of loans which involved the rights of land. Di 抵 meant using a certain portion of land right as repayment of debt. Similar with modern financial methods, these financial transactions in the Qing Dynasty allowed peasants to preserve their possessive rights over the land and also satisfied their financial needs. The direct transactions of rights of land and repayment of debt by harvest included juemai 绝卖 (finalized sale of land), huomai 活卖 (not finalized sale of land), dianquan dingtui 佃权顶退 (sell or purchase tenancy), zhaojia 找价 (price add-on after transaction), and huishu 回赎 (redemption). The main purpose of these transactions was to protect the land proprietors as far as possible. Share transaction and co-tenancy of land also appeared in the Qing Dynasty. Such diverse financial transactions not only were substitutes of modern financing tools which allowed peasants to weather financial hardship, but also promoted the changing ownership of land which further encouraged the combination of different production elements and reallocation of resources in the land market. This paper is the research result of the National Philosophy and Social Science Fund Project “Market of land rights and the evolution of its system, 1650–1950.”     

Generational transformation of Chinese families: A survey of the Republic period

Family division is the way of reproduction of Chinese families and the starting point of building new families. Reasons of family division in the Republic of China include bad terms among sisters-in-law, among brothers, between father and sons, between mother-in-law and daughters-in-law, or working outside. There are three patterns of family division: one-time thorough division, serial division, and special types of division. The circumstances of family division include: inheritance while parents are alive or after their death; equal inheritance among brothers hosted by their uncle (mother’s brother), inheritance rights attributed to the eldest son or grandson, and special principles of property distribution. The rite of family division is quite solemn; documents of family division definitely need to be made with specific regulations. There are three ways of supporting for the eldly, among which leaving some land to parents is popularly adopted in rural China during the Republic period. Translated into English by Luo Hui     

Chiefdoms and the emergence of private property in land

A prevailing characteristic of complex, stratified societies is unequal access to critical resources, and in most cases land is the most fundamental of those resources. Gaining an understanding how relations to land are transformed is viewed as integral to revealing the origins of social inequality. Recent scholarship has proposed an evolution of property rights in land from open access to private property, the latter condition having been attributed to nation states. However, some scholars have concluded from their examinations of Early Medieval Irish texts that land within Irish chiefdoms was regarded as a commodity. The analysis carried out in this paper reveals that in Early Medieval Ireland some land could be considered to be private property, but the holding and transfer of land was restricted to chieftains and their dependents, the lands of commoners being held communally. The closest counterpart to this mode of land ownership is the form of feudalism proposed for the Classic and Post-Classic Maya.     

2011 Cultural heritage legal summary

Abstract

This article summarizes the legal developments during 2011 that affect archaeological heritage. Among the more significant developments were advances in and challenges to the use of international law in deterring the trade in undocumented antiquities and questions of whether artifacts on loan to U.S. institutions from Iran could be used to satisfy judgments against Iran awarded to victims of terrorist bombings. Finally, the article presents a preliminary assessment of the impact of the "Arab Spring" conflicts on cultural heritage preservation.     

After Ethnic Violence in the Caucasus: Attitudes of Local Abkhazians and Displaced Georgians in 2010

The paper combines the results of two nearly simultaneous surveys in 2010 to provide a unique, rather comprehensive picture of the attitudes of (a) current residents of Abkhazia and (b) largely ethnic Georgian former residents of Abkhazia now living in forced displacement in Georgia following the 1992-1993 war. More specifically, it probes the views of these two groups about each other and the sensitive question raised by the disputed return of displaced Georgians to breakaway Abkhazia. Also investigated are the potential conditions for possible return in the future, including issues relating to property ownership. The authors conclude by discussing the policy implications of the survey results. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D740, I310, J600, O150. 13 figures, 24 references.     

制度变迁与人的经济价值——关于“模糊产权”的成因考察

长期以来,学界对模糊产权的形成原因的分析,集中于乡镇企业的外部制度环境的改变对制度形成的影响。文章从乡镇企业产生、发展的历史背景出发,对“模糊产权”的成因进行了另一角度的分析:认为乡镇企业“模糊产权”的成因主要是在政府经济改革背景下,人的经济价值的提高导致的一种产权要求的表现。     

基于社会属性和旅游经历的旅游者生态意识研究——以海南旅游者为例

本文以生态意识结构层次为理论基础,设计出符合海南省旅游实情的旅游者生态意识衡量指标,并对海南省的旅游者进行问卷调查。通过因子分析法得出生态意识的4个影响因子：生态认知、生态态度、生态评价和生态行为。运用描述性分析、因子分析和相关分析,考察社会属性和旅游经历两个外部因素对生态意识的影响程度,研究发现：海南省旅游者的生态意识水平整体低下,行为与态度存在不一致的现象。旅游者的性别、年龄、职业和教育程度对生态意识的不同层次存在着不同程度的差异影响,其中：旅游者的年龄对生态态度层次表现出负相关影响,旅游者的教育程度对生态意识的积极影响效应并不高,旅游次数与旅游者的生态行为存在一定程度的正相关关系,针对性的生态意识宣传能有效提高旅游者的生态意识。     

从农村合作化运动看国家构造中的集体及集体产权

集体产权不是一个主流经济学的产权概念,它只在中国才有财产和法律上的双重意义。伴随着农业合作化运动的互助组、初级社、高级社三个阶段,集体及集体产权也经历了一个萌芽、雏形、形成的过程。