Psychoanalyzing Iran: Kennedy's Iran Task Force and the Modernization of Orientalism, 1961–3

Between 1961 and 1963, a political crisis in Iran prompted U.S. foreign-policy makers to briefly consider supporting political reform that would have pushed the Shah toward a more constitutional role and moved Iran toward democracy. Yet Washington instead decided to bolster the Shah's regime to carry out social and economic reforms that coalesced as the Shah's White Revolution in 1963. Policy-makers relied in part on a psychological profile of Iran to shape their decisions, believing that the Iranian people were psychologically unprepared to rule, and that the Shah was psychologically unprepared to give up power. This article encourages diplomatic historians to explore how the language and ideas of psychology influenced the modernization theories and policies that U.S. policy-makers applied to Iran, the Middle East, and the wider ‘Third World.’ After briefly exploring the history of U.S. racial, religious, and cultural perceptions of Iran - many of which fit traditional stereotypes of Orientalism - the article examines the influence of political and developmental psychology at a time when racial and religious bias were increasingly taboo. Psychology offered more acceptable, scientific ways to understand Iran and the Middle East, though it led to familiar conclusions. While attempting to modernize Iran, policy-makers modernized Orientalism.     

不平衡的发展:20世纪与现代化

20世纪历史的主题是现代化,20世纪重大历史事件都围绕现代化展开。就不发达国家而言,现代化对他们的冲击逼迫它们做出回应,于是就出现众多的革命、改良、和民族独立战争。就发达国家而言,经济大萧条和两次世界大战似乎表明它们的“现代化”已经出现问题了,于是它们进入“修正”现代化的阶段。一方面是现代化的全球扩张,一方面是“修正”现代化的努力,这两种相反趋势造成20世纪历史的矛盾发展,“不平衡”引发出无数的“多元化”。     

罗斯福“新政”的农业政策

富兰克林·罗斯福上台执政后,面对美国的严重农业危机、农民悲惨处境和反抗浪潮,实行了以<农业调整法>为主要内容,以国家干预为重要手段,以控制农产品产量为目标的农业政策.罗斯福政府的农业"新政",是在维护资本主义制度的前提下,对这种制度进行改革的重要组成部分.这种改革虽然只是一种农业资本主义的结构改革,而非革命性的改革,更未促成一场社会革命,但它保护和促进了美国垄断资本主义,使美国的农业和工业一样进入了国家垄断资本主义阶段.     

新时期小城镇建设的回顾与思考

改革开放以来,我国小城镇的建设问题从作为“大问题”提出,到形成经济社会发展的“大战略”,其间经历了艰苦的探索、创新过程,最终实现了一个发展思路上的飞跃,积累了极为宝贵的经验。在中国城镇化的进程中,小城镇的恢复和发展占有十分重要的地位。建设小城镇的主要目的并不仅仅在于建设一批现代化的城镇,而且在于通过城镇发展过程中资本的聚集和人口的集中逐步解决“三农”问题。     

The landscapes of professional farms in mid‐sized cities,France

In this paper, we provide a spatial analysis of agriculture in three mid‐sized French cities, with a particular focus on professional farms. The existence of important agricultural spaces inside the cities is confirmed. We reveal the persistence of a field‐based, market‐oriented agriculture in French mid‐sized cities, often ignored in studies on urban agriculture, and usually made invisible. Our results highlight the farms' diversity, as well as a diversity of farmers' viewpoints on the relations between urban and agricultural places. We emphasise the importance of three main determinants in the observed dynamics: the cities' geographies; the impact on farmers of land speculation and urbanisation; and the implementation of resistance and adaptation processes by some farmers. These results are discussed in relation to the literature on urban and peri‐urban agriculture.     

THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL: ON THE SHARED METHODOLOGICAL LIMITS OF MODERNIZATION THEORY AND ITS CRITICS

This article argues that critical scholarship in historical studies has not overcome the methodological limits of modernization theory for failing to question the ontological principles that construct its object of analysis. I call these principles the “ontology of capital” and explicate them through Bourdieu's conceptualization of the field and capital. I argue that this ontology is established according to a distribution model in which social entities come into the analysis with the amount and value of the capital they hold. This model grasps all social relations in the form of competition, and actors and actions enter into the analysis only when they are involved in such relations. I then analyze Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey, which is written explicitly from a modernization perspective, to show how the principles of the “ontology of capital” operate in this text. The analysis focuses on how sociohistorical facts are constructed through selection and articulation of empirical evidence that become meaningful only on the basis of this ontology. The aim of this analysis is to show the ontology of capital that constructs the object of analysis in Lewis's text rather than the Eurocentric, teleological, and elitist character of his analysis of history that critics in recent decades have addressed as problems of the modernization paradigm. Based on this, I argue that for a productive critical approach, relational analysis, which characterizes critical scholarship in contrast to essentialism, also has to consider the ontological principles in a historical work to overcome methodological limits. The failure to interrogate this ontology leads to an analytical separation in critical scholarship between the analysis of historical reality and of alternatives to this reality. This separation not only produces a dehistoricized analysis of the present from a critical perspective, but also turns the alternatives into utopian models.     

Cluster-internal and external drivers of cluster renewal: evidence from two German agricultural engineering case studies

The question on how regional clusters renew themselves and start a new cycle of prosperity is of vital interest for affected companies, politicians and regions. Recently, the idea of renewing clusters has been conceptualized within the cluster life cycle (CLC) literature. CLC approaches generally assume that cluster renewal is widely driven cluster-internally through agent capability building processes and the systemic utilization of novelty. Critique from other authors highlights the neglected role of the external environment in the CLC literature. This article sheds light on renewal processes in two German agricultural engineering clusters. It is shown that in the case of a farm trailer cluster renewal can be widely explained cluster-internally, while in the case of a stable technology cluster that diversified into the field of biogas technology, internal factors played a less significant role and much of the development was driven externally by political decisions on the national level. Possible explanations for diverging roles of cluster-internal and external factors lie in the differences in the stage of the novel technologies’ development and the complexity of the novel technology.     

Betwixt and between in the intermediate area

The great diversity in early subsistence practices and in the later development of complex patterns of social, political, and economic organization is one of the Intermediate Area's greatest riches for comparative anthropological study. Archaeological research there is now in the midst of the conceptual shift needed to take full advantage of the opportunities offered.     

Qenja: child fostering and relocation practices in the Amhara region,Ethiopia

In this article we discuss temporary relocation and informal labour of children in rural Ethiopia. We respond to the call ‘to understand the wider logic underlying child relocation and non-parental residence among populations experiencing poverty’ (Boyden, J. 2013. “We're Not Going to Suffer Like this in the Mud: Educational Aspirations, Social Mobility and Independent Child Migration among Populations Living in Poverty.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 43 (5): 580–600. 582). Drawing on the perspectives of children and families involved in the practice of qenja (meaning ‘teaming’ or ‘forming a coalition’) we examine how – in contexts of uneven distribution of rural labour – children's involvement in transient agricultural labour outside the home is a fundamental feature of social reproduction. We argue that qenja is a social coping strategy that co-exists alongside gendered and generational relations of household production and reproduction. An understanding of the practice as merely transactional and exploitative ignores long-standing community strategies of labour acquisition and redistribution. We stress that child protection campaigns by non-governmental organizations and national legislations that intend to criminalize the practice are not in the interest of children, families, and communities.     

Archaeometrical characterization of pigments and paintings on Pre-Hispanic pottery from the regions of Fiambalá and Chaschuil (Catamarca,Argentina)*

The results of an analysis of pigments used in slips and designs deployed in ceramic assemblages recovered from archaeological sites located in different environments, expressing the socio-historical process developed in the regions of Fiambalá and Chaschuil (Catamarca, Argentina) during the last 1500 years are presented. The sample, formed by fragments of different ceramic styles and natural pigments, was analysed via Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. Results indicate the continuity in use of certain pigments (mainly hematite for red hues and Mn oxides in combination with magnetite for black paints) within the different socio-political organizations that inhabited the region from the first to the 14th centuries ce , in spite of the diverse shades of colour, which suggests an intentional search linked with their cultural conventions. For the Inca Period, this scenery of continuities in minerals employed for reds and blacks is complemented by the use of new compounds (Ti oxide, apatite and gypsum) in order to generate the ‘cream’ tones applied as slips, all of which have not been identified for previous moments.