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.     

Currency and the Collective Representations of Authority,Nationality, and Value

Mainstream economics has consistently ignored the iconography of currency, describing money ‘just’ as a commodity. The paper is going to investigate the economic and political significance of the representations of authority and nationality in currency describing how these representation support its acceptability. The aim of the analysis is double: to decipher the visual identity of currency and its contribution to the acceptance of money in day-to-day transactions, as well as to discuss the operational principles of the monetary system as they are uncovered in the iconography of money. By answering these questions, the paper is going to trace the theoretical presuppositions and the cultural stereotypes that inform the representation of economic value and national identity as they are articulated in banknotes and coins with a specific emphasis on the European Monetary Union and the recent financial crisis that is still affecting its periphery.     

Middle East and other futurisms: imaginary temporalities in contemporary art and visual culture

This article focuses on recent contemporary art of Gulf Futurism and Arab Futurism with a specific geographical focus on the Near and Middle East. Still only occasionally addressed and analysed in contemporary academic discussions, these art discourses and practices can be understood as particular forms of counterfuturisms and cultural politics of imaginary times; they continue the earlier work of Afrofuturism in using an aesthetic repertoire to complicate normalised notions of time and technology but in an alternative geopolitical context. Some of the analysed works such as Larissa Sansour’s films outline political questions about territories and architectures of control but these are also other contexts that address how experience of time is being infrastructured in material media culture. The article analyses these post-colonial artistic practices in dialogue with contemporary theoretical debate about cultural politics of time including the discourses about cancellation of future (Berardi) as well as the idea of counterfuturisms as a form of audiovisual practice.     

Enacting Identity and Transition: Public Events and Rituals in the University (Mexico and South Africa)

On the basis of ethnographic and historical material this article makes a comparative analysis of the relationship between public events, ceremonies and academic rituals, institutional identity, and processes of transition and power at two universities, one in Mexico and the other in South Africa. The public events examined here play a major role in imagining and bringing about political shifts within universities as well as between universities and external actors. It shows how decisive local histories and constituencies are in mediating and transfiguring identity projects initiated from above.     

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.     

城市历史文化街区的空间调查与活化利用途径探析 ——以绍兴鲁迅故里历史文化街区、八字桥历史文化街区为主例

历史文化名城绍兴的历史文化街区代表为鲁迅故里历史文化街区.但是因过去对历史文化街区认知的局限性,鲁迅故里历史文化街区在近30年的保护利用中有一些不足.如何从规划设计的角度去思考探索优化该街区的空间质量,发现其中的问题,从而给出较好的应对方法与措施是当前值得考虑的议题.根据实地走访与调研绍兴市鲁迅故里历史文化街区、八字桥...     

Representing and Performing Businesses

This article investigates a segmentation model used by the Danish Tax and Customs Administration to classify businesses' motivational postures. The article uses two different conceptualisations of performativity to analyse what the model's segmentations do: Hacking's notion of making up people and MacKenzie's idea of performativity. Based on these two approaches, the article demonstrates that the segmentation model represents and performs the businesses as it makes up certain new ways to be a business and as the businesses can be seen as moving targets. Inspired by MacKenzie the argument is that the segmentation model embodies cleverness in that it simultaneously alters what it represents and then represents this altered reality to confirm the accuracy of its own model of the businesses' postures. Despite the cleverness of the model, it also has a blind spot. The model assumes a world wherein everything around it is in motion and can be shaped, however, it sees itself as stable. This assumption turns out to be problematic as the tax administration questions the model's ability to produce valid comparisons. The article presents a detailed analysis of the model's performativity, providing an example of a performativity study whose methodology differs from the methodological criteria set up by MacKenzie.     

Veterinary medicine and animal husbandry in Mexico: From empiricism to science and technology

Conclusion Foot-and-mouth disease was the event which led to the increased and improved training of veterinarians able to produce through their research new veterinary knowledge for practical application.It led to the transformation of the Mexican veterinary profession. It changed the kind of knowledge veterinarians received at university, and it also changed the work they did as professionals. Veterinarians gradually began to perform a much wider range of tasks: they did research, taught, worked as civil servants, or assumed positions as academic administrators and as high governmental officials with a large amount of influence on governmental agricultural activities. They also engaged directly in animal husbandry and in food production.In parallel with these changes, the National University, and within it the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Husbandry, underwent a concomitant series of changes which ran hand-in-hand with the growth of the Mexican state. The university provided training for specialised research workers by offering scholarships and programmes of graduate study. This consolidated the activities of an academic community working on applied veterinary medicine. The beneficiaries of these efforts take part in and influence, to varying degrees, the planning and programming of agricultural policies in a way that would not formerly have been possible.     

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。     

Rap as a Social and Political Revealer: Diam's and Changes in French Value Systems

Abstract

In 2006, a young female rapper named Diam's released an album that became the best‐selling CD in France: her CD and its reception is treated as a social phenomenon and examined against the backdrop of political arguments which developed in France in 2006–2007. Musical analysis shows that the sonic backgrounds of Diam's rap illustrated the importance of combinations and hard work in the symbolical production of a new order. Her texts manifested new combinations of social values which brought into the public debate changes in value systems that were just becoming developed enough to be taken up by political organisations and leaders. This is why the main themes in Diam's CD converged with topics engaged by the two main candidates in the French 2007 presidential election. This paper, combining the resources of musicology, literary analysis and political sociology analyses how Diam's put in aesthetic and emotional forms combinations of values that had been brewing underground for the past 30 years. It invites a reconsideration of the interpretation of rap as an expression of rebellion, or even as an element of counter‐culture, and apprehends it as a ‘social revealer’ that brings new values and representations into public debate and stimulates discussion around them. Diam's album was an ‘unidentified political object’ that shed original light on the way politics and politician are perceived by ordinary citizens, or specific groups among them, such as the youth.     

Smooth new world: Agency and Utopia

The New World Embassy was created by Dutch artist and activist Jonas Staal and Tuareg activist Moussa Ag Assarid in 2014 as an art installation to represent the recently established state of Azawad. This new state, currently unrecognised, seceded from Mali in 2012 after a brief armed struggle. An analysis of the spatialities of the New World Embassy, and of the region it represents, enables its interpretation as a critical utopia, a heterotopia, and as an example of smooth space. Such an analysis furthermore clarifies the underlying sociopolitical dynamic in the region, and in its newly established Embassy, as the contestation, by the other, of the oppressive geopolitical practices and institutions of the same. Lastly, the spatialities of the Embassy exemplifies a particular mode of agentic worldmaking.     

A Multitude of Hopes: Humanism and Subjectivity in E.P. Thompson and Antonio Negri

E.P. Thompson's work on working-class formation is widely recognized as one of the crucial contributions to Marxist historiography in the twentieth century. His emphasis on notions of agency and subjectivity is intimately linked to a radical recasting of the socialist agenda against the objectivism of an earlier, ‘orthodox’, Marxism and of a later, and more theoretically sophisticated, structuralism. Thompson's conception of working-class agency as the primary element in historical materialism parallels Antonio Negri's theorization of proletarian subjectivity as an expansive process of collective self-constitution. In particular, Negri's analysis of ‘power’ as an autonomous dynamic of social creation offers an essential development of Thompson's ideas and a fresh theoretical template for the political re-actualization of radical humanism.     

Invisible Presences and Visible Absences

Since 2008, Valenza, one of the World's largest jewellery production centres, has experienced a period of profound economic uncertainty. In four years, about a third of the jobs and workshops of the city were lost. The paper investigates the practices and the form of knowledge Valenza people used to speak and understand the crisis. While economic data were marginally known by the population, the crisis emerged in the words of Valenzani as a visual experience of the city landscape. ‘Invisible presence’ and ‘visible absence’ emerged as the fundamental keywords used by the community to describe the industry, its normality and change. The paper investigates these concepts, indicating the analysis of the sensorial experience and its rhetoric expression as a rich ground for an alternative, human understanding of economy. In so doing, it aims at aim at providing an example of a possible different way of writing economy that does not starts from econometric data, but from the very perception of the social life and space as experienced by its actors.     

(De)politicising and Ecologising Bicycles

Self-service bicycle systems are today being set up in a number of cities across the world. Seen as a means to promote a sustainable city and new forms of ecology, and valued for their ‘planet friendly’ character, these systems have become a hallmark for cities that want to become part of the so-called green culture. Drawing from the experience of the Vélib’ programme in Paris and adopting a pragmatist perspective, this paper analyses the controversies which developed as this transportation infrastructure was implemented, as well as the definitions of ‘ecology’ which were at the centre of the dispute. In doing so it shows the capacity of the private firm involved in the system, JCDecaux, to ‘hijack’ and integrate the ecological critique, its rather powerful capacity to persuade other actors, and the popularity that the project achieved through a hard-won process of justification. At the same time, this paper argues that the mobility turn played a performative role in the justification and the definition of this new transport project.     

Yellowing effect and discoloration of pigments: experimental and theoretical studies

Two issues of great interest in the field of lasers in artwork conservation are the so-called yellowing effect and the discoloration of pigments. We have viewed these issues from a comprehensive point of view, considering all our present experimental results as well as ongoing modeling and theoretical calculations. The first concern to be discussed is the yellowing effect in laser cleaning of marble or stone artifacts. Although, in most cases, a yellowish layer exists underneath the black encrustation, the so-called ‘patina’, it has become clear that there are situations where yellowing cannot be attributed to an existing layer. In the present study, a light scattering model that may account for the yellowing is presented. This model considers a thin absorbent layer and the surface roughness and/or created voids and accounts for the reflectance spectra measured by (i) hyper-spectral imaging and (ii) integrating sphere. Additional experimental data, such as the absence of yellowing when the third harmonic of a Q-swihed Nd:YAG laser is used, support this model. A thorough understanding of the quantitative characteristics of pigment discoloration, on the other hand, has been attempted by means of X-ray diffraction and theoretical studies. The model developed suggests a nucleation process for cinnabar resulting in a structural modification within the volume of a pigment’s crystal or particle close to the ‘ablation front’, which extends for a few nanometers from its surface.     

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.     

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.     

Trans-illumination and trans-irradiation with digital cameras: Potentials and limits of two imaging techniques used for the diagnostic investigation of paintings

During the past two decades, thanks to the rapid development of solid-state-based sensor technology, digital imaging emerged as one of the most attractive research areas for the noninvasive investigation of paintings and flat artworks. In particular, the commercial availability of high-performance digital cameras opened up new perspectives to transmitted imaging techniques, such as trans-illumination and trans-irradiation, which are based on the acquisition of the visible (Vis) and near infrared (NIR) radiation, respectively, transmitted through the object. Until recently, these techniques were indeed considered to be unsuitable for applications on artefacts, because of the risks of overheating and overexposure to the light of the object under analysis. Nowadays, with the new-generation digital cameras, transmitted imaging can be reconsidered as a possible tool for noninvasive diagnostics on paintings on canvas. These techniques have been proven to be effective for the examination of hidden details, such as underlying drawing, for a study of the pictorial style or the executive techniques, as well as for assessing the state of conservation of the supports. Both trans-illumination and trans-irradiation can be easily implemented by means of professional photographic digital cameras, and therefore offer a valuable alternative to the more expensive well-established methodologies, such as X-ray radiography. In some cases, they are found to be complementary to the conventional techniques in revealing details of the underlying paint layers. Potentials and limits of transmitted imaging techniques are discussed in this paper, starting from three case studies of oil-paintings on canvas that belong to the permanent collection of the Gallery of modern art at the Pitti Palace in Florence.     

Neoliberalism and Natural Disaster

A substantial recent literature has examined insurance as a mechanism for economizing uncertain but potentially catastrophic events. Less attention has been paid to how insurantial techniques for economizing catastrophe have been deployed as political technologies. Focusing on discussions of US flood policy in the 1960s, the present article examines how insurance was used to forge new articulations and accommodations between political government and processes of rationalization. On the one hand, insurance provided a technical solution to problems that had long confronted US policy-makers: How to reduce losses from floods? How to fully compensate individuals who suffered losses? On the other hand, insurance was a device for reshaping the aims and objects of government, and for reframing questions that are more frequently situated at the level of political philosophy: What are the respective responsibilities of individual citizens and government in providing security? What tradeoffs must be made between the provision of security and economic rationality? What values are relevant in orienting public policy? In examining these issues, the article raises questions about standard narratives about the changing relations among risk, responsibility, and security in recent decades, particularly as they relate to neoliberalism.     

Changing Governance and Authority Relations in the Public Sciences

Major changes in the governance of higher education and the public sciences have taken place over the past 40 or so years in many OECD countries. These have affected the nature of authority relationships governing research priorities and the evaluation of results. In particular, the increasing exogeneity, formalisation and substantive nature of governance mechanisms, as well as the strength and extent of their enforcement, have altered the relative authority of different groups and organisations over research priorities and evaluations, as well as creating some new ones. These shifts in authority have occurred to different degrees in differently organised public science systems. As a result, the diversity and longevity of many research projects, the intensity of competition for disciplinary reputations and the coordination of research goals and outcomes across universities and national boundaries have changed to different degrees in different countries.