Comparative projects and the limits of choice: ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay

In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond comparing credit in India and Paraguay in order to illustrate how comparison is actually central to the banking practices of microfinance. Moreover, it is the collaborative anthropological project that helps to show this, allowing not only for empirical grounds of comparison, but also raising theoretical and methodological questions of comparison itself. In juxtaposing microfinance in our two fieldsites, we find that as credit proliferates globally, so do the comparative projects both of borrowers and lenders in the disparate worlds of Kolkata and Ciudad del Este. At the same time, these were constrained by the global financial comparisons between countries made by investors. Ethnographic methods are vital for understanding how microfinance becomes part of a wider repertoire of financial strategies used by women while simultaneously offering the grounds for women to undertake their own acts of comparison.     

家族与地域风习之关系——以宋代宗泽及其家族为中心

地域风习的形成受着自然环境与人文环境的双重影响。在人文环境中,家族因其融合了政治、经济、社会文化等多种人文要素,尤其值得关注。家族迁徙、家族中的望族、望族中的名人,他们对地域风习的形成有着不同的作用;而地域风习相对固定后,又成为一种可以影响家族发展的文化控制力。本文以宋代宗泽家族为中心,对其与义乌风习的关系试做探讨。     

Showing and coding: venture pitching and nonmaterial production

ABSTRACT

This article explores practices of representation and role stabilization in an emerging innovation ecosystem in Beirut, Lebanon. With little local track record of software startup activity, any overt practices of venture or business process representation were of immediate utility. The two moments explored, a pitch session at a mentorship committee meeting and a startup founding competition, capture parts of the nascent topology of a venture development setting in the making. In both, pitches for software products were at the heart of the productive process, and this paper argues that these moments of performative representation were not surplus to the process of founding a startup, but rather are crucial productive elements in themselves. Early-stage software development consists of a constant oscillation between making and modeling. The interdependence of writing software code, stabilizing social platforms for work and industry development, and finding specialists who could relate these tasks was crucial to the development of this business ecosystem in Lebanon. It was a system in motion, built of code and confidence. The circulation of information crucial to decision making within a single project required distinct practices of publicity, which in turn required articulatory platforms.     

中国传统的文化与科技--兼评《儒家文化与中国古代科技》

近年来 ,学术界不断讨论中国传统科技问题。主要论题有 :中国古代有没有科学 ?为什么近代科学没有产生在中国 ?中国传统文化主要是儒家文化对科学有什么样的影响 ?是阻碍还是促进 ?关于这些问题 ,在讨论“李约瑟难题”时 ,则有较多的涉及。李约瑟在深入研究中国的科学技术史中发现中国古代科技相当发达 ,特别是在十五世纪以前 ,中国科技遥遥领先 ,是西方所望尘莫及的。但是在十五世纪以后 ,世界近代科学没有产生于中国 ,却产生于西方 ,觉得不好理解 ,成为他的难题。因此称为“李约瑟难题”。这个难题成为诸多科学史界以及文化界人士关注的问…     

科技创新与创新文化

科学的本质在于探索客观世界的结构、相互作用和运动变化的规律,在于发现新的现象、新的物种,创建新的理论和学说;技术的本质在于创造新的工具、工艺与方法,用以改造客观世界,实现人类自身确定的目标。 科学技术是人类创造性劳动的结晶,它改变了整个世界,也改变着人类自身和人类社会的文明进程。     

道义、滋味和技艺--中国古典文学思想与新世纪文学理念

站在新世纪的大门口来谈论文学理念这样的问题 ,似乎有点不合时宜 ,因为生活所赋予人们的对话热情已经不在这种非趋利性质的方面 ,而文学研究界本身也有点失去了对理论问题的兴趣 ,不管其原因是什么 ,事实就是这样。如果说当今的文学创作 (有时是制作 )形势和研究 (有时是操作     

春秋礼乐文化的解体和转型

本文叙述了春秋前期礼乐文化的一般状态 ,而后集中讨论春秋后期礼乐文化的危机和演变。论文强调 ,在春秋后期的政治危机中 ,人对礼的关注从形式性转向合理性 ,礼文化的重点由“礼乐”转向“礼政” ,礼作为政治秩序原则的意义在政治理性化的过程中突出出来。而思想家的关注的焦点 ,不再关注那些华丽典雅的仪典文化 ,而更关注现实生活世界的混乱与安宁。     

地图工具与意大利生态博物馆实践的经验及启示

景观地图与社区地图作为生态博物馆的实践工具,能够帮助人们阅读本地景观、展示地方价值、识别发展问题,同时增强社区凝聚力,促进乡村遗产价值传播。地图工具伴随生态博物馆实践在欧洲得到了广泛应用。对意大利实践中的地图工具进行理论研究与案例解读,总结经验要点,并结合国内实践相关问题,提出促进国内生态博物馆建设以及乡村遗产保护和乡村振兴的启示:地图工具能够有效增强居民对本地景观价值的意识;生态博物馆的实践不能忽略乡村社会经济发展议题;生态博物馆实践中应有更多文化景观视角研究的介入。     

Selection processes and appropriability in art,science and technology

Recently, there has been a mutually beneficial interchange of models and ideas between the sociology of science and the economics of technological innovation. Concepts such as the paradigm and the network seem to lend themselves to useful application in both fields. To these is added the concept of the selection system. The major aim of this paper is to show that the development of the arts can be described using the same conceptual framework. This allows the development of hypotheses concerning the relationship between art, science and technology, and also about the effect of appropriability conditions.     

Character and organization

In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in ‘character’ as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this ‘turn’ suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity – not simply in relation to questions of ‘character formation,’ but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other – that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power.     

Monetary organization and national identity: a review and considerations

This article develops a detailed overview of literature on the relationship between monetary organization, understood as currencies and central banks, and issues of national identity and nationalism. It demonstrates how the literature on this subject for the past 20 years has developed into a distinct research field and the article sketches a set of different methodological approaches as well as geographical and thematical variations within the field. In particular, the overview points to a recent shift in focus from a preoccupation with the identity-cultivating qualities of monetary organization to an emphasis on how collective identities legitimize monetary organization. Based on the literature review, the article points to two underdeveloped themes for future research to investigate: (1) further studies on the interrelation between the legitimacy of monetary organization and national identity, (2) an increased focus on central banks and monetary authorities, as well as the historical development in which monetary organization evolved in concert with ideas of the national identity and nationalism.     

Culture and Commerce

The cost aspects of supplying cultural goods and services have raised many basic questions concerning the economic activity of cultural institutions. There is more or less a consensus that the same criteria that apply to the cost aspects of any business also apply to cultural institutions. The nature of the products supplied and the stress on revenues earned are different. A key question to be asked by each society is how to balance the product mix offered by its cultural institutions taking into consideration both the societal valuation of the public goods provided and the earning potential of the institution. This essay examines some of the questions that occur at this intersection of culture and commerce.     

The Peters Projection and the Latitude and Longitude of Recolonization

In 1973, German historian Arno Peters unveiled the “Peters projection,” a map that challenged the Eurocentric Mercator style by redrawing the so-called “Third World” to appear more prominent on the global landscape. The projection sparked intense debate among cartographers about the overt use of ideology in mapping, while simultaneously championed by international groups (from the UN to church organizations) as a corrective against the marginalization of developing nations. This essay addresses how the Peters map became a rhetorical emblem for an internationalist identity within the contentious spatial conceptions constraining the Cold War. Ultimately, the Peters projection, despite its radicalism, constituted a “recolonization” that supported logics of Western liberal development in the Third World.     

Political satire and its disruptive potential: irony and cynicism in Russia and the US

When cynical distance and ironic posturing have become the prevalent means of relating to public life, political humour is no longer considered subversive. It has been argued that both in Russia and the United States, ideology has co-opted satire, meaning that citizens can consume outrage passively through various satirical media products, thereby displacing outrage and abstaining from more active forms of resistance. This articles explores the twenty-first century potential of irony and cynicism to disrupt and subvert through parody, be it in the form of political satire or ironic protest, examining how similar paradigms are expressed across different geographical contexts.     

Price and the person: markets,discrimination, and personhood

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons and how the ability to ‘personalize’ price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others are novel and likely to be contested. We argue that many newer pricing techniques make it harder for consumers to identify themselves as part of a recognized group. We conclude that contemporary price personalization should be understood in terms of the intensification of individualization in combination with dividualization, and as such, contributes to novel and consequential forms of classification.     

48 million configurations and counting: platform numbers and their capitalization

Platforms are important actors in contemporary cultural economic processes. They include social network sites, online content management systems, streaming media platforms, mobile communication infrastructures, supply chain logistics solutions, and cryptocurrencies. Analysis of platforms and their capitalization should take into account the ways they structure social practice as assets and the constitutive opacity of platforms as configured realities. It explores capitalization by focusing on the problems of counting people and things on platforms. Via a case study of the software repository platform [Github.com] (https://github.com), it analyzes how 'platform numbers’ participate in capitalization. It describes attempts to enumerate the elements of the platform by counting, mapping or listing them. The paper shows how attempts to enumerate people and things encounter forms of association, duplication, combination, imitation and configuration that are crucial to the ensemble but remain refractory to capitalization. It proposes configurative enumeration of the platform numbers as a way of conceptualizing these un-enacted excesses. In a configurative enumeration, the composition, the rhythms of imitation, variation and commutation, and constant relating, repairing and adjusting of configurations crucial to the ongoing formation of platforms come into view. Configurative enumerations engage the inventive realities of platformization, realities that precede and sometimes overflow their capitalization.     

国内外文化创意城市建设对比研究

文化创意城市发展模式对全球城市应对后工业化困境功效卓著。首先,描绘国外文化创意城市概念从“萌生”到“成熟”的路径衍化。其次,总结了国内外著名文化创意城市,维也纳、哥本哈根、巴黎、伦敦、北京、上海、深圳和杭州的发展经验。再次,从目的、方向、路径等方面通过比较视角梳理国内外文化创意城市建设的差异。最后,总结对我国文化创意城市建设的启示,认为应将文化创意城市发展融入城市总体发展规划,大力促进当前“双创工作”深入开展,并在充分尊重城市历史文化基础上凝聚市民大众共识,形成文化创意城市发展方向,来促进我国文化创意城市的发展。     

Trust,reputation and ambiguous freedoms: financial institutions and subversive libertarians navigating blockchain,markets, and regulation

This article departs from the post 2008 financial crisis context, from its intersection with technological developments, and from the socio-technical arrangements configured by this conjuncture. It explores plans and actions – of mainstream financial institutions, and of a community seeking for alternatives to centralised economy and governance – for the use of digital platforms supported by blockchain infrastructure. In particular, it explores how such plans and actions relate to conceptions of public and peer trust and how they appear to produce, or reinforce, reputational imaginaries and quantification practices within added value philosophies. By illuminating a tension between the two identified case examples, I seek to render alternative communities’ and financial institutions’ conceptions, imaginaries and practices (more) visible and to analyse their organisational marketing strategies – where there is a pragmatic and discursive operationalisation of technology as well as of trust as means to gain more self-sovereignty in action, while navigating markets and regulated actual world contexts.     

鲁迅与中西艺术文化——以《野草》图像为例

本文通过对《野草》封面图像语言符码的考释,探寻鲁迅与中西艺术文化的历史关联性。文章认为:最早阐释《野草》意义内涵的是与这本书共时存在的书面图像,颜色和构图成为文本精神的象征表达和形象展示。在启蒙事业中鲁迅与中西艺术文化发生广泛的历史联系。经由鲁迅参与制作的书籍图像传播广远,是建构现代中国思想和艺术文化的宝贵资源。