1840 research outputs found
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Wagering the land: ritual, capital, and environmental degradation in the Cordillera of northern Luzon, 1900-1986
No full textNomad: a year in the life of a Qashqa'i tribesman in Iran
No full textBorzu Qermezi was the headman and political leader of a group of nomadic pastoralists who were part of the Qashqa'i confederacy of southwest Iran. Proud, complex, strong-willed, witty, and cunning, Borzu successfully led his people on their annual migrations for many years. He regulated their travel; mediated conflicts; intervened in (and sometimes exacerbated) tense situations between his people and other nomads; and dealt with the government police agency. Structuring the account around the four seasons, Lois Beck recounts the day-to-day activities of Borzu during the year she spent traveling with his people. She describes the rigors of nomadic life and the consequences of decisions made in haste.During 1970 to 1971, Borzu and his people were faced with many difficulties. When the expected winter rains did not fall, pastures and crops shriveled. Unable to sell their starving livestock for any profit, Borzu's people saw their debts to urban merchants and moneylenders increase. At the same time, Iran exercised more bureaucratic control over the Qashqa'i by applying new policies over migratory schedules and the allocation of scarce pastures, and by introducing non-Qashqa'i agriculturalists and livestock investors as legitimate land users. All these measures threatened the nomad's way of life and eventually undermined the role of headmen such as Borzu. Lois Beck details the vicissitudes endured by Borzu's people and the strategies he devised to cope with them.Blending ethnographic and historical material, this book contains information unavailable for other tribal and nomadic pastoral groups in the Middle East and central Asia. Through Beck's deft analysis, we come to understand why nomadic pastoralism was once an important part of this vast region, and why tribal society has endured
Japan's administrative elite
No full textA major player in Japanese society is its government bureaucracy. Neither Japan's phenomenal track record in the world marketplace nor its remarkable success in managing its domestic affairs can be understood without insight into how its government bureaucracy works - how its elite administrators are recruited, socialized, and promoted; how they interact among themselves and with other principal players in Japan, notably politicians; how they are rewarded; and what happens to them when they retire at a relatively young age. Yet, despite its pivotal importance, there is no comprehensive and up-to-date study of Japan's administrative elite in the English language. This book seeks to fill that gap.Koh examines patterns of continuity and change, identifies similarities and differences between Japan and four other industrialized democracies (the United States, Britain, France, and Germany), and assesses the implications of the Japanese model of public management. Though many features of Japanese bureaucracy are found in the Western democracies, the degree to which they manifest themselves in Japan appears to be unsurpassed.Koh shows that the Japanese model of public management contains both strengths and weaknesses. For example, the price Japan pays for the high caliber of its administrative elite is the stifling rigidity of a multiple track system, a system with second-class citizens and demoralized "non-career" civil servants who actually bear a lion's share of administrative burden. The Japanese experience demonstrates not only how steep the price of success can be but also the enduring effects of culture over structure
Shoshaman: a tale of corporate Japan
No full textAcknowledging no god but the corporate good, the shoshamen - high-powered professionals within Japan's integrated trading companies - serve as the unrelenting cogs of an economic machine. Or do they? Shoshaman takes us inside the world of Japan Inc. to explore the daily lives of the people who inhabit it. Written by a senior executive in a major sogo shosha, this absorbing novel reveals, as no textbook can, the strategies required to win the race to the top. It also makes painfully clear the ethical and psychological choices that such a race demands. The cast of characters is as varied as the corporate world itself, from the devoted Ojima, who has been passed over by the company, to the spirited Masako, who strikes out on her own. The hero, Nakasato Michio, finds that the road to success is long and perilous, as he tries to satisfy his ambitions while remaining faithful to his values.First published as Kigyoka sarariman in 1986 and made into a prize-winning television miniseries in 1988, the book has been acclaimed in Japan for the verisimilitude of its characters and situations. It offers a clear understanding of what it is like - in human terms - to survive and perhaps succeed within the confines of the Japanese corporation
From the fat of our souls: social change, political process, and medical pluralism in Bolivia
No full textFrom the Fat of Our Souls offers a revealing new perspective on medicine, and the reasons for choosing or combining indigenous and cosmopolitan medical systems, in the Andean highlands. Closely observing the dialogue that surrounds medicine and medical care among Indians and Mestizos, Catholics and Protestants, peasants and professionals in the rural town of Kachitu, Libbet Crandon-Malamud finds that medical choice is based not on medical efficacy but on political concerns. Through the primary resource of medicine, people have access to secondary resources, the principal one being social mobility. This investigation of medical pluralism is also a history of class formation and the fluidity of both medical theory and social identity in highland Bolivia, and it is told through the often heartrending, often hilarious stories of the people who live there
Vanishing points: Dickens, narrative, and the subject of omniscience
No full textIn traditional narrative theory, the term "omniscience" refers to a narrator's absolute knowledge and authority. Narrative theory provides no social, historical, or psychological context for omniscience, nor does it attempt to explain the predominance of omniscient narration in nineteenth-century British fiction. Audrey Jaffe uses Dickens's novels and sketches to redefine narrative omniscience as a problematic that has implications for the construction of Victorian subjectivity, giving us new insights into Dickens and into other fiction as well.Jaffe demonstrates that omniscience is the effect of a series of oppositions - between narrator and character, knowledge and its absence, sympathy and irony, privacy and publicity. Showing how these oppositions participate in and enforce Victorian ideas about family, the subject, and private life, this study illuminates connections between ideology and narrative form
Big business and industrial conflict in nineteenth-century France: a social history of the Parisian Gas Company
No full textFounded in 1855, the Parisian Gas Company (PGC) quickly developed into one of France's greatest industrial enterprises, an exemplar of the new industrial capitalism that was beginning to transform the French economy. The PGC supplied at least half the coal gas consumed in France through the 1870s and became the city's single largest employer of clerical and factory labor. Representing a new form and scale of capitalistic endeavor, the firm's history illuminates the social tensions that accompanied the nation's industrialization and democratization.To study the company over its fifty-year life is to see industrializing France writ small. Using previously untapped company archives, Lenard R. Berlanstein has written a rich and detailed study that skillfully bridges the divide between business, social, and labor history
University of California Press eScholarship editions in process
No full textChinese calligraphy has traditionally been an emblem of the ruling class and its authority. After a century of mass revolution, what is the fate of this elite art? Richard Kraus explores the relationship beween politics and the art of writing in China today to explicate the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Chinese culture. His study draws upon a wide range of sources, from political documents, memoirs, and interviews with Chinese intellectuals to art exhibitions and television melodramas.Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders gave calligraphy a revolutionary role, believing that their beloved art reflected the luster of authoritative words and deeds. Calligraphy was joined with new propagandistic mass media to become less a private art and more a public performance. It provided politically engaged citizens with subtle cues to changing power relationships in the People's Republic.Claiming neither that the Communists obliterated traditional culture nor that revolution failed to relieve the burden of China's past, this study subtly examines the changing uses of tradition in a modernizing society
Russia's women: accommodation, resistance, transformation
No full textBy ignoring gender issues, historians have failed to understand how efforts to control women - and women's reactions to these efforts - have shaped political and social institutions and thus influenced the course of Russian and Soviet history. These original essays challenge a host of traditional assumptions by integrating women into the Russian past. Using recent advances in the study of gender, the family, class, and the status of women, the authors examine various roles of Russian women and offer a broad overview of a vibrant and growing field
Gregory the Great: perfection in imperfection
No full textGregory I (590-604) is often considered the first medieval pope and the first exponent of a truly medieval spirituality. Carole Straw places Gregory in his historical context and considers the many facets of his personality - monk, preacher, and pope - in order to elucidate the structure of his thought and present a unified, thematic interpretation of his spiritual concerns