65 research outputs found
Senses of spring: Local enactments of the Valborg bonfire festival in Sweden
No full textValborgsmässoafton (St. Valborg\u27s Mass Eve), or Valborg, is a nationally observed calendar custom in Sweden which marks the beginning of spring with communal gatherings, bonfires, speeches, songs, special dress, and fireworks. It is simultaneously local and national, since its enactments take place in local neighborhoods and town gatherings all over Sweden virtually at once. But it is “national” only as a sum total of prevalent local enactments. Field data from tape-recorded interviews with ritual participants and the author\u27s participant-observation show heterogeneity and multiplicity of meaning, whereas the calendar custom heretofore has been studied mainly in an idealized or typified way. The field site is a cluster of neighborhoods in Umeå, a northern town distant from national cultural and political centers in central and southern Sweden. Though ritually prescribed in structure and influenced by national models, the ways in which Swedes in Umeå celebrate Valborg are emergent and contingent on issues of gender, age, and class consciousness. They are also characterized by participants\u27 views of nature and the localized symbolic environment around the bonfire. The human senses bring out the intensified experiential aspects central to the festival\u27s performance and key to its ideational process. Large human themes regarding the influence of history on the present, views of the future, change, social relationships, the links between local and national identities, and environmentalism are ritually encoded and thereby given order in the localized festive gathering
Norwegian cultural policy: a civilising mission?
No full textThis dissertation aims to explore the extent to which what has been termed „the civilising mission‟ has been a central rationale behind Norwegian cultural policy.
In order to contextualise the research the German term Bildung, which refers to human growth processes, is used as a conceptual framework. Bildung can be achieved in two different, albeit related, ways: firstly, through an object approach, which takes great works of arts as its point of departure and where personal growth can be achieved through exposure to these and which endorses clear cultural hierarchies, and secondly, through a subject approach, which emphasises each individual‟s own preferences and desires and where a much greater range of cultural activities can facilitate personal growth.
In addition to an historical analysis of the ideas that have informed Norwegian cultural policies dating back to 1814, this project draws upon „green papers‟ published by the Norwegian government through its Ministry of Culture. This is supplemented by a more detailed analysis of a key cultural policy initiative of the 2000s: den kulturelle skolesekken (DKS)1, which is a major programme initiated to enable children in primary school to be exposed to art-works produced by professional artists.
The project concludes that although a subject and an object approach to Bildung have co-existed throughout the period charted here there has since the 90s been an increased focus on the object oriented approach. This appears evident both in the general cultural policy discourse but articularly through the disciplining aspect of DKS and its strong focus on, what is being referred to as, the „professional arts‟ as a vehicle for Bildung
Does money matter?
No full textThis paper was prepared for the Home Jones Lecture, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, March 28, 2001. The author addresses the influence of monetarism and the role of money in making monetary policy. The monetarist idea that monetary policy has primary responsibility for inflation is now conventional wisdom. However, monetary aggregates are largely absent from models used by policy analysts and from current monetary policy debates (at least in the United States). The author concludes with a discussion of whether current models and current practice undervalue the role of money, specifically noting how monetary aggregates may become important again if market interest rates are driven to zero, as they have been recently in Japan.Monetary theory ; Monetary policy
Ethnic identity, political identity and ethnic conflict: simulating the effect of congruence between the two identities on ethnic violence and conflict
No full textThis thesis outlines and presents an alternative hypothetical process to the emergence of ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflicts, rather than being dependent upon pre-existing 'ancient hatreds', are instead the result of a congruence between ethnic and political identity which grants individuals the ability to use ethnicity to identify and eliminate political threats. This hypothesis is formed by the examination of three case studies of ethnic conflict: Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Croatia. This hypothesis is then formalised and tested using an agent based simulation in which agent interactions are dependent upon ethnic and political identity and the congruence between the two. As predicted there was a strong positive correlation between how accurately ethnic identity reflected political identity and the level of ethnically motivated violence in the simulation, although the relationship was not linear. Furthermore the effect of a shift in congruence was found to be roughly comparable to the effect of initialising agents with a moderate level of pre-existing ethnic antagonism
Optimal monetary policy rules : theory and estimation for OECD countries
No full textZhang W. Optimal monetary policy rules : theory and estimation for OECD countries. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2004.This dissertation focuses on monetary policy rules in the OECD countries at both theoretical and empirical levels. It is divided into seven chapters.
Chapter 1 presents some recent literature on monetary policy rules and introduces the goal and organization of this dissertation.
Chapter 2 explores some empirical evidence of IS and Phillips curves, because these two equations have become baseline framework of monetary policy. Both backward- and forward-looking behaviors are considered. A time-varying Phillips curve is also estimated.
Chapter 3 discusses two important monetary policy rules: the money supply rule and the interest rate rule. Advantages and disadvantages of these two rules are explored.
Chapter 4 explores time-varying monetary policy rules with Chow break-point test and Kalman filter. The estimation results indicate that there are some structural changes in the monetary policy in the countries studied. The author also simulates the Euro-area economy under the assumption that the Euro-area had followed the time-varying US monetary policy in the 1990s and concludes that the monetary policy seems to be too tight in the Euro-area in the 1990s.
Chapter 5 explores monetary policy rules under uncertainty. The author first explores empirical evidence of model uncertainty with a state-space model with Markov-switching. Based on this evidence, the author then explores monetary policy under uncertainty with two approaches: the adaptive learning and the robust control. The results indicate that uncertainty does not necessarily require caution and that state variables do not necessarily converge even in a deterministic model with the adaptive learning.
Chapter 6 then explores monetary policy with financial markets. The author endogenizes the probability for the asset price bubble to increase or decrease in the next period and derives a nonlinear policy rule. The author also simulates the economy with financial asset in the presence of the zero-interest-rate bound and concludes that monetary policy should not ignore financial markets.
Chapter 7 presents some concluding remarks of the dissertation
Neither Arbitrary nor Artificial:Chiefs and the Making of the Namibia-Zambia Borderland
No full textIn the late 1990s a separatist movement emerged in Namibia's northeastern Caprivi Region. In the aftermath of an armed uprising in 1999 speculation emerged regarding a possible link between the Caprivi secessionists and Lozi separatists across the border in Zambia's Western Province. The Lozi heritage certainly has continuing relevance for Caprivi's population. Through language, kinship relations and economic exchange it serves as an integrative factor of everyday life in the Namibia/Zambia borderland. But the Caprivi secessionists had no intentions of re‐creating a united Lozi kingdom. The present‐day positions of authority by the “traditional” leaders of the Fwe (the support base of the secessionists) and other groups in Caprivi were, in fact, created by the territorial separation and system of indirect rule imposed by the German colonial authorities. Thus, the colonial border served vested interests in Caprivi from the outset. Rather than reverting to an imagined pre‐colonial past, the secessionists’ territorial claim emerged from a more recent legacy of pre‐independence state formation: The apartheid regime's attempt to create a Caprivi Bantustan. As in the case of the colonial boundary, this legacy caused new political realities and vested interests to emerge on the ground in Caprivi. Today, informal cross‐border business ventures in the Namibia/Zambia borderland are flourishing. The border is once again at the center of vested interests of those who live in its proximity. To call this border “arbitrary” or “artificial” therefore ignores the fact that in nearly 12 decades it has very much become part of the socioeconomic and political landscape of Caprivi
Literature Review of Frameworks for Macro-indicators
No full textThere has been an explosion of interest in recent years in Canada and other countries in macro-indicators and composite indexes of economic and social well-being. This reflects growing recognition of the important role macro-indicators can play as a tool for evaluating trends in and levels of economic and social development and for assessing the impact of policy on well-being. This report provides a literature review of conceptual/operational frameworks for the development of macro-indicators that give an assessment of economic, labour market and social conditions or states of well-being. The report provides an analysis of frameworks for macro-indicators by discussing general framework issues; identifies and describes six specific frameworks for macro-indicators which the author regards as particularly important or relevant, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of these sets of indicators/composite indexes; and provides a description of an additional 31 sets of indicators and composite indexes broken down into economic, social, economic/social, and labour market areas. The report concludes that no existing framework currently includes all important concepts and linkages and that it is unlikely that one ever will. As the survey of the macro-indicators literature reveals, the development of a framework for macro-indicators involves choices related to the domains of interest, the purpose for which the indicator is designed, and the population to be covered, among others. Choices or tradeoffs must be made and a balance struck between conceptual sophistication and transparency and between complex linkages that could potentially confuse the user and simplicity.Well-being, Wellbeing, Well Being, Indicators, Indexes, Indices, Methodology, Economic Well-being, Economic, Social, Societal, Labour Market
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Author Correction: Study of 300,486 individuals identifies 148 independent genetic loci influencing general cognitive function
No full textChristina M. Lill, who contributed to analysis of data, was inadvertently omitted from the author list in the originally published version of this article. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the article
The fuzzy theory and women writers in the late eighteenth century
No full text'Fuzzy Theory and Women Writers in the Late Eighteenth Century' contends
that women writers require more careful critical treatment, and suggests that critics
are still bound by the outdated logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle. This law,
first formulated by Aristotle, and developed by Gottfried Leibniz in the early
eighteenth century, indicates that where there are two contradictory prepositions, one
must be true and the other false; a female writer must, therefore, either be feminine or
masculine, conservative or radical. The twentieth century concept of Fuzzy logic,
however, helped mathematicians and engineers to manage reasoning that was only
approximate, rather than exact. Borrowing from this, the thesis will employ the
Fuzzy Set Theory, which permits the gradual assessment of elements in a set, rather
than relying on elements that are assessed in binaric terms (the principle of bivalence,
or, contradiction). Put simply, the Fuzzy Set Theory does away with binaries, the Law
of the Excluded Middle, and the Law of Contradiction, allowing subjects to be
imprecise, and changeable. Thus, each chapter will construct a Fuzzy Set by which a
variety of eighteenth century debates, with which women writers engaged, can be
examined. The thesis will show that all such concepts are subjective and unstable—
changeable and open to personal interpretation, and will discuss such writers as Mary
Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary
Hays, Lucy Aikin, Hannah More and Joanna Southcott
Author correction: Study of 300,486 individuals identifies 148 independent genetic loci influencing general cognitive function
No full textChristina M. Lill, who contributed to analysis of data, was inadvertently omitted from the author list in the originally published version of this article. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the article
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