Indagaciones sobre alteridad e identidad: Puntos de contacto y puntos de partida en los estudios coloniales

Implicit Understandings. Observing, reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era. Edición de STUART SCHWARTZ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xv, 637.

Coded Encounters. Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America. Edición de FRANCISCO JAVIER CEVALLOS‐CANDAU, JEFFREY A. COLE, NINA M. SCOTT, and NICOMEDES SUAREZ‐ARAUZ. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Pp. 298.

Literatura fundacional americana: El Espejo de paciencia. Por JUANA GOERGEN. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1993. Pp. 142.

Cartas de relación. Por HERNAN CORTES. Edición de ANGEL DELGADO GOMEZ. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1993. Pp. 687.

Vitier, Cintio. 1970. Lo cubano en la poesía. La Habana: Instituto del Libro.     

Missionary hydrography and the invention of early modern Amazonia

Amazonia became an important laboratory of inquiry and evangelization for Franciscans and Jesuits in the early modern Spanish Empire. The missionary endeavours depended upon knowledge friars acquired and produced about the rivers, landscapes, and societies of their new home in the tropical lowlands of South America. Friars were particularly interested in finding and naming the axis of this new territory. ‘Amazonas,’ however, became an untameable fluvial entity that defied unitary conceptualization. Whereas the sixteenth-century concept of the river revolved around the dimensions of its estuary, seventeenth-century missionaries focused on length, volume, and headwaters to define Amazonia. The attempts to define the river produced a dispute between the two religious orders and indeed within each group, as Franciscans and Jesuits sought to make their ‘Amazonas’ normative. The present study explores this debate and asserts that hydrography became a language of authority and contention among early modern missionaries of Amazonia.     

Cruel and unusual

From early April to late June 2018, the nearly 2,600 immigrant children – mostly refugees fleeing violence and poverty in Central America – were forcibly taken from their parents at the United States’ southern border following implementation of the Trump administration's ‘zero tolerance’ policy. The policy took effect when the US Justice Department began aggressively prosecuting undocumented immigrants crossing the US‐Mexico border. Following a public outcry and growing protests, President Trump issued an executive order declaring an end to family separations on 20 June. Several days later, a federal court mandated that the government reunite those immigrant families affected by the ‘zero tolerance’ policy. In mid‐August, more than 550 children who had been detained following the implementation of the policy remained in federal custody. Thousands more ‘unaccompanied minors’ – typically teenagers who were caught crossing the border without adults –remain in indefinite detention. This editorial analyzes this situation from an anthropological perspective by reviewing relevant ethnographic literature on undocumented Latin American immigrants in the US.     

Urban size and KIBS vertical disintegration: the case of Milan

The literature shows that market size favours firms’ vertical disintegration because it reduces transaction and knowledge coordination costs. The existing evidence is based primarily on cross-sectional data and on the manufacturing sector, with little or no attention is given to longitudinal data and services. This paper estimates the effect of urban size on the purchase of service inputs by knowledge-intensive business service firms located in the metropolitan region of Milan. Relying on a rich panel dataset, and adopting different econometric techniques to overcome endogeneity, we find a positive and statistically significant effect of increased urban population on the degree of KIBS vertical disintegration only when urban size is measured at the province level. We also find that this effect holds particularly in the case of traditional professional- rather than technology-related activities.     

Do behaviours in cultural markets affect economic resilience? An analysis of Italian regions

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between the economic resilience and cultural behaviour, resorting to the evidence provided by 20 Italian regions at the time of Great Recession. We consider specific cultural behaviours, which provide a specific meaning of culture; its relation with the economic resilience of regions is analysed. We document that higher levels of supplied and demanded quantity of cultural goods in a region are associated with higher regional economic resilience as measured by the ability of limiting employment drop; the relation with the considered cultural behaviours is weaker in the case of economic resilience as measured by the ability of limiting income drop. We propose possible explanations for this asymmetry.     

A third road to the past? Historical scholarship in the age of big data

Is a third passage to the past possible, beyond Elton's and Fogel's two roads of narrative history and scientific/quantitative history? One that would combine narrative history's focus on the event, on individuals and their actions, at a particular time and place, to scientific/quantitative history's emphasis on explicit behavioral models based on social-science theories? That is the question this article addresses. It illustrates a computer-assisted methodology for the study of narrative—quantitative narrative analysis (QNA)—that does just that. Based on the 5 Ws + H of narrative—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—QNA quantifies events without losing the event itself, without losing people behind numbers, diachronic time behind synchronic statistical coefficients. When used in conjunction with dynamic and interactive data visualization tools (and new natural language processing tools), QNA may provide a third unforeseen road to the past.     

The Spatial Distribution of the Internet in the European Union: Does Geographical Proximity Matter?

This paper examines the spatial distribution of the Internet in the European regions. To achieve this aim, our analysis combines a set of non-parametric techniques proposed in the context of the economic growth literature, with various spatial econometric instruments. The results reveal that regional disparities in Internet adoption are greater than territorial inequalities in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. In addition, our findings show that the distribution under consideration is characterized by the presence of positive spatial dependence, which implies that physically adjacent regions register a similar degree of Internet adoption. Finally, the analysis carried out allows us to assess the role played by variables such as GDP per capita, unemployment rate, stock of human capital and population density, in explaining the spatial distribution of the Internet in the European Union.     

Does graduate human capital production increase local economic development? An instrumental variable approach

Using a survey on Italian graduates, we investigate whether universities' degree production affects the economic development of the regions where academic institutions are located. To deal with suspected endogeneity between human capital development and economic growth, we employ an instrumental variable approach, using a global lump sum transferred to each university as an instrument for human capital production. Once we control for the regional flow of mobile students and graduates, the findings reveal the beneficial effect of the university system on local economic development through the gain in human capital.