Believing Is Seeing: Perspectives on Political Power and Economic Activity in the Malay World 1700–1940

1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Political Power ◽  
European History ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
The West ◽  
Village Communities ◽  
Correct Path ◽  
Western Historiography ◽  
As If

Western historiography assumes a chronological linear unfolding of progress, and early Western commentators on Asian societies tended to see them as stagnant variants of earlier phases in European history, as feudal despotisms and passive, unchanging village communities. In assessing levels of “development” or “progress” such observers looked for recognizable specialist institutions in politics and the economy; finding few such institutions, they saw only “backwardness”. To most Europeans, trying to make sense of unknown societies and cultures, the alien could only be made comprehensible by identifying it with the familiar. It was then all too easy to proceed as if the unknown was simply a mutant or primitive version of the known. Ideas, social relationships and values which were literally beyond their ken, were often simply not seen at all. In their observations of both political and economic systems, they saw decline, corruption and confusion because they failed to recognize the patterns which structured society. So it seemed natural that the West should dominate such societies and guide them on the correct path.

scholarly journals Implications of market and political power interactions for growth and the business cycle

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tryphon Kollintzas ◽  
Dimitris Papageorgiou ◽  
Vanghelis Vassilatos
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Business Cycle ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Market Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Per Capita Gdp ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Business Cycle

In this paper, we develop a two sector DSGE model with market and political power interactions. These interactions are motivated by the politico-economic systems of several South European countries, over the last half century. In these countries the state permits the existence of industries, typically related to the extended public sector, where firms and workers employed therein have market power (insiders), unlike other firms and workers in the economy (outsiders), as insiders, that dominate the major political parties, cooperate to influence government decisions, including those that pertain to the very existence of such a politico-economic system. Consistently with stylized facts of growth and the business cycle of these countries, the model predicts: (i) large negative deviations of per capita GDP from what these countries would have been capable of, if their politico-economic system was not characterized by the above mentioned frictions; and (ii) deeper and longer recessions in response to negative shocks, as their politico-economic system reacts so as to amplify these shocks.

MARKETING THE TESTAMENTS: CANONGATE AND THEIR POCKET-SIZED BIBLES

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Positive Potential ◽  
Publishing Firm ◽  
Investment Promotion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
King James Version ◽  
As If

AbstractRecently the Edinburgh-based publishing firm Canongate has brought out the Bible in the form of single books in the King James Version. Each of these volumes is introduced by a writer not necessarily associated with the Christian tradition, thus inviting the readers to approach them as literary works in their own right. For long the Bible came with commentaries written by prominent religious scholars, but now it looks as if it needed an introduction by novelists, pop artists, scientists including and even by some who are outside the Christian tradition to make the once familiar texts now widely neglected in the West come alive again. The purpose of this essay is to look at the following: the positive potential of this Pocket Canon; the role of the interpreter's personal voice within the process of discovering meaning in a narrative; the marketing of the Bible and appropriation of religious themes by secular marketeers; the re-iconization of the Bible though the King James Version; the colonial parallels in the investment, promotion and dissemination of the Bible; and the challenge of personal-voice criticism to biblical studies. Put at its simplest, can this disparate group of essayists rescue the Bible, which is fast losing its grip and importance in the West, and discover fresh significance in it?

Die globale Dichtung des Orlando Furioso

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Federico Italiano
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Hybrid Vehicle ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Ludovico Ariosto ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
As If

AbstractThe epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516–1532), one of the most influential texts of Renaissance writing, shows not only a precise cognition of early modern cartographic knowledge, as Alexandre Doroszlaï has illustrated it in Ptolemée et l’hippogriffe (1998), but also performs a complex transmedial translation of cartographic depictions. The journeys around the globe of the Christian paladins Ruggiero and Astolfo narrated by Ariosto are, in fact, performative negotiations between literary and cartographic processes. Riding the Hippograph, the hybrid vehicle par excellence, Ruggiero and Astolfo fly over the Earth as if they were flying over a map. Their journeys do not merely transmedially translate the course to the West pursued by Early Modern Europe. Rather, by translating the map Ariosto performs a new geopoetics that turns away from the symbolic dominance of the East (or “Ent-Ostung”, as Peter Sloterdijk has usefully called it) and offers us one of the first poetic versions of modern globalization.

Introduction: Enter the Sexagon

Sexagon ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehammed Amadeus Mack
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
Sensitive Questions ◽  
The West ◽  
As If

Among the sensitive questions involving Muslims living in the West, and in Europe most singularly, there is the position of Islam on homosexuality. In certain contexts, this question would be the sole and unique key to the possible “integration” of Muslims in Western culture. As if European cultures and values could be reduced to the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality....

scholarly journals Cosmopolitan Sophistry: Grounding Politics in Disorder and Uncertainty

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-223
Author(s):  
Jon Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Chaos Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Ecology ◽  
The State ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Moment ◽  
As If

Conceptions of the State, Nation and politics, which are actually in play in ‘the West’, usually descend from totalitarian models which are primarily Platonic and monotheistic in origin. They aim for unity, harmony, wholeness, legitimate authority and the rejection of conflict, however much they claim to represent multiplicity. By expressing a vision of order, such models drive an idea of planning by prophecy as opposed to divination, as if the future was certain within limits and the trajectory was smooth. Chaos theory and evolutionary ecology shows us that this conception of both society and the future is inaccurate. I will argue that it is useful to look at the pre-socratic philosophers, in particular the so-called sophists Gorgias and Protagoras and Heraclitus with their sense of ongoing flux, the truth of the moment, and the necessary power of rhetoric in the leading forth of temporary functional consensus within the flux. This ongoing oscillation of conflict provides social movement and life rather than social death.

Settling Up

Worldview ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 35-36
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Cottle
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Council House ◽  
As If ◽  
Settling Up

Beatrice Waters lives in the corner flat on the top floor of a council house in the Islington district of London. She spent four years of her life making the arrangements to rent a flat in this particular block of council houses. Four long years of speaking with this or that authority and arguing with her husband over whether they had made the right decision. At fifty, Henry Waters doubted he could survive still another move. He couldn't even remember all the places in which he had lived, as if immigrating from the West Indies to England wasn't significant enough. “Don't you think,” he would ask Beatrice, “there comes a time that people just settle down, no matter how good or bad a deal they've made for themselves? How long do you keep changing homes just to prove you're really getting somewhere in the world?’

State-Church Relations in Poland: An Examination of Power Configuration in a Noncompetitive Political System

1969 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanislaw Staron
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
General View ◽  
The West ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Power Configuration ◽  
Inherent Tendency

Until recently it has been taken more or less for granted by many students of the subject that totalitarian polities will not in the long run tolerate any form of pluralism in their power structure. Lucid and convincing arguments have been constructed to support this contention, in studies of the several historical manifestations of totalitarianism. Implicit in these speculations was the more general view that it is in the very nature of power, and especially political power, that it will not gladly suffer any rivals. In the West the very virtues of democracy have been defended precisely on the grounds that democracy tends through its procedural commitments to diffuse power, to counteract, as it were, the inherent tendency of power toward infinite selfaggrandizement.

Let’s get rich: Multilevel marketing and the moral economy in Siberia

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonie Schiffauer
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
Multilevel Marketing ◽  
Rural Part

Multinational multilevel marketing companies like Amway advertise the opportunity to get rich by selling their products and by recruiting further salespeople into their schemes. Multilevel marketing is a highly contested industry worldwide because of its predatory marketing strategies, exaggerated promises and the fact that only few participants are successful in their attempt to make money. This paper examines the moral logics of multilevel marketing in a rural part of Southeast Siberia, exploring how Amway manages to thrive on the basis of intimate social relationships. I argue that it is not only individual aspirations and the dream of great wealth which makes people join multilevel marketing schemes, but that feelings of obligation, expectations of support and intimate pressure are crucial for pushing people towards such economic activity.

Economy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Koch
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Allocation Of Resources ◽  
Exogenous Factor ◽  
Neoclassical Economic Theory ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Religious Economies

Religion is in many ways an economic phenomenon and can be analyzed as such. By economy most economists understand systems for the allocation of resources. In this light, this chapter notes various ways in which religious organizations are engaged in sectoral markets and produce private and public goods, entailing products and services. Religion and economy are interdependent and relate to each other in distinct ways across societal subsystems. Economy both permeates religious structures and is a co-system. This is generally studied by political economy: recent moves beyond neoclassical economic theory (which saw culture as an exogenous factor) emphasize the economy’s embeddedness in social relationships and its variation across cultures. The chapter considers ways in which religious phenomena reflect recent changes in capitalist systems and ways in which religious economies function as explicit economic systems.

African Diaspora in Asia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hideaki Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Political Power ◽  
European History ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
African History ◽  
African Migrants ◽  
Geographical Boundary ◽  
African Migration ◽  
Asian History

The presence of Africans in Asia and their migration around it is one of the least-studied subjects in all of Asian history. The same is true for studies of the African diaspora, but that does not mean that African migration lacks significance in either field. Existing scholarship reveals that Africans traveled to and settled in various regions in Asia, from the Arabian Peninsula to Nagasaki. While there were free African migrants in Asia, a larger number of them arrived as slaves, transported there by both local and European traders. Conditions for the forced immigrants varied and not all of them remained permanently un-free, with some even eventually coming to obtain political power. To understand their dispersal and presence in Asia does more than simply broaden our current understanding of the African diaspora; it also enables us to understand that the African diaspora is a global phenomenon. That improved understanding can in turn break down the geographical boundary of Asian history and connect it not only to African history but to European history too. To do that, the topic requires scholars to challenge the methodological limits of current historical studies.

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