Understanding Social Performance: A ‘Practice Drift’ at the Frontline of Microfinance Institutions in Bangladesh

This article examines the role of microfinance staff and procedures in enabling microfinance's social mission. It does so primarily through studying institutional ruling relations and practices in rural Bangladesh. Attempting to move away from the linear and deterministic approaches of impact studies, it ethnographically scrutinizes the everyday practices of implementers. Findings point to the emergence of systemic practices that jeopardize microfinance institutions’ potential to perform their social mission. These include low client‐selection standards, hard selling of loans and forceful loan renewal, little follow‐up on loan use, and abusive and violent client‐retention and repayment‐collection strategies. This is conceptualized as a ‘practice drift’ as distinct from the commonly reported ‘mission drift’. Rather than stemming from planned, top‐down changes in institutional mission and strategy, practice drift emerges from a displacement of decision‐making processes to the branches. The article argues that observed changes in microfinance practice are enabled by decentralized structures and management systems that leave the choice of tactics used to achieve targets to the discretion of field staff.     

Didactic translation: The first Scandinavian translation of the Eclogues: Peder Jensen Roskilde,Bucolica (1639)

The very first translation of the Eclogues into a Scandinavian language, Peder Jensen Roskilde's Bucolica (1639), is concerned with interpretative closure. Following the tradition of reading Virgil's poetry allegorically the translation supplies names and circumstances where the text is unspecific. More than that, however, the translation also includes glosses, thus making the translation a hybrid between a commentary and a translation, a didactic translation. This article offers an analysis of this translation with a special focus on the relationship between the historically oriented allegorical interpretation and this unusual format.     

Dietary changes and millet consumption in northern France at the end of Prehistory: Evidence from archaeobotanical and stable isotope data

Diachronic changes of dietary human habits between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age are mainly identified through archaeological artefacts and archaeozoological and archaeobotanical studies. This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach for palaeodietary studies and to identify the food changes between Neolithic and Bronze Age human groups in northern France. These changes are probably linked to the introduction of new crops, such as millet, and the use of stable isotope analysis on bones and teeth proves to be an effective method for assessing the role of this specific cereal in the diet and the economy. Stable isotope analyses were performed on bone and tooth collagen and apatite from eight humans and five domestic animals from a Late Bronze Age site (LBA; Barbuise; 15th–13th c. BC; Aube). The studied corpus is compared with isotopic data from human and animal bones from a nearby Neolithic site (Gurgy; 5th mill. BC; Yonne) and regional Neolithic to Iron sites located in northern France. Moreover, Barbuise data are supplemented by information from an important archaeobotanical study carried out on 21 LBA and Early Iron Age sites in the region. Neolithic and LBA human collagen isotopic ratios (δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N) differ statistically, as do those of some animals. Carbon isotopic ratios of human apatite corroborate collagen results indicating the consumption of ¹³C enriched food by LBA humans and animals compared to Neolithic samples. The high number of occurrences of plant remains in the Bronze Age settlements near the site points to the consumption of C₄ plants, such as millet, and would account for these results.     

Globalisation and memory

Abstract

We live in the ‘era of disparition’, in Paul Virilio's words. Globalisation causes our common markers to disappear: time is worldly and instantaneous. Perception of space is modified; everything can be in the same place at the same time; places tend to standardise. Communities are baffled by wars, ethnocide, emigration. In the midst of all this, collective memory fights for existence. The motto of museums could be, as Virilio says, ‘searching for signs rematerialising the world’. To counter the deleterious effects of disparition, museums should stress the importance of territory and history. Ecomuseums in particular can become the archetype of social places for meetings, for common elucidation resulting in exhibitions, for remembering collective memory. The museum must help the community undertake not so much a duty of memory as a work of memory. The function of the museum is awakening consciousness in many dimensions.     

Living in an Egyptian Oasis: Reconstruction of the Holocene Archaeological Sequence in Kharga

Within the Egyptian Western Desert, the Kharga Oasis was a particularly favourable and highly frequented area during the Holocene thanks to a permanent ground water supply. The high concentration and accessibility of archaeological sites here allows the cultural and economic changes to be documented at a local scale, when northeastern Africa was experiencing strong climatic variations and the transition to a food production economy. An expansive program led by the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO) which included systematic survey, sampling collections, tests and stratigraphic excavations has dramatically increased the amount of data available concerning the prehistory of the Kharga Oasis. Typo-technological analyses focusing on the lithic industries, and other aspects of material culture, plus a series of ¹⁴C dates have led to the definition of four main successive cultural phases: Kharga A, B, C and D. This paper describes this proposal of a new archaeological sequence for human occupation in the Kharga Oasis and discusses its integration in the wider frame of Egypt and the Eastern Sahara.     

Contingent Coalitions in Environmental Policymaking: How Civil Society Organizations Influenced the Chilean Renewable Energy Boom

This article analyzes the role of social movements and environmental organizations in crafting contingent coalitions to advance renewable energies in Chile. Until recently, Chile presented several conditions predicting the continuation of an arm’s-length energy policy and a deregulated energy market heavily concentrated on environmentally and socially unfriendly sources. However, gradual but transformative policy change in the last decade has made the country a world leader in renewable energy development. Studying two key moments in energy policy reform, we argue that the contingency of the coalitions that social movements and environmental organizations forged was crucial to the advancement of renewable energy policy and the transformation of the energy sector in the country. The paper advances our understanding of policy change in contexts of high path dependency and status quo bias, and builds the concept of “contingent coalitions,” unifying similar but scattered and under-theorized notions that capture the fluid dynamics of coalition formation and policy change in environmental policymaking.     

Entre Littérature Et Religion Les Pratiques D’Auteur De Jean Goulu

The activities of Jean Goulu in the 1620s, an author and superior of a religious order, the Catholic congregation of the « Feuillants », are a good example of the conflicts over the uses of print in France in the early xvii ^th century. An erudite translator of Greek philosophy and author of anti-protestant pamphlets, spiritual books, but also of a polemical book on eloquence, Goulu was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of the political, religious and literary debates of his time. On one level, his books obviously serve to advance his very successful career within his religious congregation, but they also represent a moral and political attempt to control the publications intended for the growing number of non scholarly readers. Goulu’s books aim to guide this relatively uneducated public. He hopes to satisfy these inexperienced readers’ request for novelty with attractive, but moral, writings. Last but not least, his books seek to fashion good reading and interpreting habits. This study thus makes it possible to understand how one can use books to build one’s social identity as well as to act concretely upon the society in which they are published.