Austrian Academy of Sciences
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Looking for Urban Agency in a City of Memorials: Tomb Towers of Late-Thirteenth-Century Ahlat. Medieval Worlds|Urban Agencies: Reframing Anatolian and Caucasian Cities (13th-14th Centuries) & Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean: Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century, II - Volume 14. 2021 medieval worlds Volume 14. 2021|
No full textIn the medieval period, the city of Ahlat was an important urban center in the Lake Van region. The medieval city suffered serious depredations in the form of military assaults and earthquakes between the 13th and the 16th centuries that caused the urban center to be rebuilt at least twice at some distance from the medieval location. While only meager traces of the medieval urban fabric remain, Ahlat preserves a remarkable medieval funerary landscape of cemeteries and tomb towers that attest to the dynamic workings of local urban agency. This essay focuses on a discrete set of tomb towers of the late thirteenth century built by Muslim amirs of the Ilkhanate in order to explore the relationship between these new urban actors and the physically elusive urban stage of medieval Ahlat, in tandem with contemporary political circumstances. These tomb towers – built in the outskirts of the medieval city in the aftermath of much destruction witnessed in the course of the thirteenth century – represent some of the earliest indications of Islamization among Ilkhanid amirs but have hitherto been studied from a purely formalistic angle. In order to situate these monuments in their historical context, the essay is grounded in an extended summary of the medieval (7th-13th centuries) political and military history and the attendant demographic changes that significantly impacted the urban structure of Ahlat. The construction of tomb towers is investigated in the light of the compromised nature of the thirteenth-century urban settlement and the contemporary emergence of nodes of Sufi inhabitation in the peripheries of Ahlat as can be deduced from Ottoman-period tax registers. Amounting to a spatial externalization of urban agency, the tomb towers and Sufi lodges represent distinct but complementary claims to reconstitute social and political influence in the face of a ruptured urban center
Vorwort. Akten der Gesellschaft für Griechische und Hellenistische Rechtsgeschichte|(28) Symposion 2019 Akten der Gesellschaft für griechische und hellenistische Rechtsgeschichte Band 28|
No full textDo Egalitarian Societies Boost Fertility?
No full textIn general, the spreading of egalitarian family values has often been associated with adecline in fertility. However, recently a rebound in fertility has been observed in severalindustrialized countries. A possible explanation of this trend may be the spread ofegalitarian values that induced institutional changes - such as expansion of child carefacilities and father leave – fostering the combination of parenthood and the egalitarianlifestyle. In our paper we build up a formal model to study the diffusion from traditional toegalitarian gender-behavior and its impact on fertility. We find that the long-rundevelopment of the total fertility within a population not only depends on the pace ofdiffusion of egalitarianism and the extent to which social interactions affect theegalitarians’ birth rates, but also on the initial number of traditionalists and egalitarians.We show under which conditions a fertility decline is followed by a subsequent recovery
The Effects of Age Structure on Economic Growth: An Application of Probabilistic Forecasting in India
No full textDuring recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the explanatory powerof demographic variables in economic growth regressions. We estimate a new model ofthe effects of age structure change on economic growth. We use the new model andrecent probabilistic demographic projections for India to derive the uncertainty of predicted economic growth rates caused by the uncertainty in demographic developments
The Contributions of Diseases to Increasing Educational Mortality Differential in Austria
No full textThis paper examines how much changing educational disparity for specific causes of deathcontributed to the change in overall educational mortality disparity between 1981/82 and1991/92 among Austrian adults aged 30–74 years. Besides specific causes of death, thestudy also examines educational differentials for both avoidable causes of death andmortality amenable to medical intervention. The data source is based on a one-yearmortality follow-up of the total Austrian census population. The data for the examinedpopulation is made up of individual records for people aged 30–74, totaling 3,805,208 for1981/82 and 4,064,184 for 1991/92, from which 34,218 and 29,443, respectively, were ondeceased persons. The study uses a new approach for decomposing the change in overallmortality differentials into contributions of specific causes to the change. For this purpose,it extends the regression-based Slope Index of Inequality. The findings suggest thateducational inequalities in overall mortality have widened significantly in Austria, butmore among men than among women. However, without the increase in the disparity forischemic heart disease, between 1981/82 and 1991/92, there would have been a decline inabsolute educational disparity in overall mortality among Austrian men and women. Alsostriking are the rising absolute and relative disparities for diabetes among females as wellas the increasing disparities for colorectal cancer and digestive diseases among men.Increasing differentials in avoidable mortality essentially contributed to increasededucational disparities in overall mortality. With regard to mortality amenable to medicaltreatment, the differentials increased considerably for men but not for women
Local residents’ place attachment and the perceived benefits for them of the UNESCO Wienerwald Biosphere Reserve. eco.mont (Journal on Protected Mountain Areas Research and Management)|eco.mont Vol. 13 special issue 2021|
No full textUnderstanding local residents’ perceptions of changes triggered by the creation of a biosphere reserve (BR) is important for a reserve’s successful management. This study asked 383 local residents of the Wienerwald BR, Austria, about their perceptions of changes, at individual and regional levels, nine years after the creation of the BR, and correlated these perceptions with place attachment. The vast majority of respondents perceived either no changes or positive ones in the region and for themselves. They saw the most positive impact of the BR as being the preservation of threatened landscape types and cultural landscapes. Study results revealed that local residents with stronger emotional, functional and social ties to the region perceived more positive impacts of the BR. The BR management could make use of the positive relationship between place attachment and perceptions of change, as high place attachment can be beneficial for the preservation of natural and cultural landscapes, and can contribute to greater involvement in participation processes by, and quality of life of, the local population
Do the More-Educated Prefer Smaller Families?
No full textThis study investigates the relationship between education and desired family size in Western Europe.Using rich individual-level data from West Germany we find that more-educated men and women aremore likely to prefer a family of three (or more) children over a family of two children compared toindividuals with average schooling. We also find some evidence that the more-educated are less likelyto favor childlessness or the one-child family over having two children. Replication of the analysis withmultinational data indicates that this novel relationship holds more broadly in Western Europe. Sincehigher education is associated with lower realized fertility, we confirm that the gap between desired andactual fertility is largest for the more-educated. We argue that these individuals deserve more attentionin the current policy debate since their fertility may be particularly responsive to interventions that helpthem remove the obstacles to having the family of two or more children that many of them still desire
Climate Change and Reproductive Intentions in Europe
No full textAim of this paper is to investigate the effects of environmental conditions on humanreproductive behavior in the highest industrialized countries. We discuss the hypothesisthat individuals fearing for a foreseen unhealthy environment tend to delay or forgochildbearing, thus contributing to a reduced ecological footprint. The empirical analysis isbased on the Eurobarometer survey carried out in the 27 EU countries in 2011. Multilevelordinal regression models on additionally intended number of children are used. A randomintercept is considered to take into account the clustering of individuals within countries.Results indicate that people’s intended number of children is not very strongly correlatedwith people’s concerns about climate change, but if a statistically significant relation isdetected, this is positive: the stronger the concern, the higher the intended number ofchildren. This result suggests that the desire to pass an enjoyable and healthy environmentto the future generations does not refrain people to plan large families and that the parents’environmental concern can be instrumental in stimulating parents’ responsible behavioursand proper policies at institutional level
