The political ecology of shaded coffee plantations: conservation narratives and the everyday-lived-experience of farmworkers

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esteli Jimenez-Soto
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Political ◽  
Coffee Plantations ◽  
The Everyday

scholarly journals Written with seed: the political ecology of memory in Madagascar

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Osterhoudt
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Smallholder Farmers ◽  
Environmental Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Productive Capacity ◽  
The Everyday

In this article, I bring together work in political ecology and environmental anthropology to examine how smallholder farmers in Madagascar articulate and embody political and economic histories through the everyday interactions with the commodities cultivated in their fields and forests. I ask: how does the work of cultivating land connect with the art of cultivating memory? In considering this question, I draw from ethnographic research in the agrarian village of Imorona, located in Northeastern Madagascar. In Imorona, smallholder farmers turn towards the materials in their agroforestry fields to reference the more painful political epics of their collective pasts – memories that otherwise remain largely silent within everyday realms of Malagasy culture. I show how the stories people tell of their shifting relationships to commodities including rosewood, vanilla and cloves bring together political and economic 'histories writ large' with more personal and intimate 'histories writ small.' Overall, I argue that the analytical approach of a 'political ecology of memory' offers the productive capacity to look both outward towards others, and inwards towards self. In the process, it elucidates the ways that people render global histories personal.Key words: Political ecology; memory; agroforestry; commodities; Madagascar; Indian Ocean.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

A Renaissance Marriage

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn James
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Spousal Relationship ◽  
Prescriptive Literature ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Princely State

Drawing extensively on unpublished archival sources, this book analyses the marriage of Isabella d’Este, one of the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance, and her less well-known husband, Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of the small northern Italian principality of Mantua (r. 1484–1519). It offers fresh insights into the nature of political marriages during the early modern period by investigating the forces which shaped the lives of an aristocratic couple who, within several years of their wedding, had to deal with the political challenges posed by the first conflicts of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) and, later, the scourge of the Great Pox. The study humanizes a relationship that was organized for entirely strategic reasons, but had to be inhabited emotionally if it was to produce the political and dynastic advantages that had inspired the match. The letter exchanges of Isabella and Francesco over twenty-nine years, as well as their correspondence with relatives and courtiers, show how their personal rapport evolved and how they cooperated in the governance of a princely state. Hitherto examined mainly from literary and religious perspectives and on the basis of legal evidence and prescriptive literature, early modern marriage emerges here in vivid detail, offering the reader access to aspects of the lived experience of an elite Renaissance spousal relationship. The book also contributes to our understanding of the history of emotions, of politics and military conflict, of childbirth, childhood, and family life, and of the history of disease and medicine.

Mafalda: Middle Class, Everyday Life, and Politics in Argentina, 1964-1973

2014 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Cosse
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
State Terrorism ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Modernization ◽  
Methodological Approaches

Abstract In this article I reconstruct the history of Mafalda, the famous comic strip by the Argentine cartoonist Quino that was read, discussed, and viewed as an emblematic representation of Argentina’s middle class. With the aim of contributing to discussions on the interpretation of the middle class in Argentina and Latin America, I examine the emergence, circulation, and sociopolitical significance of the comic from its first strips in 1964 until Quino stopped producing new installments in 1973, making use of two conceptual and methodological approaches: a perspective situated at the intersection of the everyday and the political, as well as a consideration of humor as a way of exploring social identities. I argue first that Mafalda’s ironic and conceptual humor worked with the contradictions of the middle class as it faced social modernization, cultural and political radicalization, and a weakening democracy. Second, I suggest that the strip contributed to a representation of a heterogeneous middle class marked by ideological differences but nonetheless conceived as one. Third, I claim that such a representation lost its relevance with the political polarization and violence of the 1970s, as portraying a middle class—or a society—united despite differences was no longer feasible in that context. To illustrate this, the article closes by noting that, shortly after Mafalda was discontinued, state terrorism would brutally demonstrate just how little space there was in Argentina for the young, antiestablishment generation depicted in the strip.

Goods and States: The Political Logic of State-Socialist Material Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 426-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Fehérváry
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
The City ◽  
State Socialist

In the two decades since the fall of state socialism, the widespread phenomenon ofnostalgiein the former Soviet satellites has made clear that the everyday life of state socialism, contrary to stereotype, was experienced and is remembered in color. Nonetheless, popular accounts continue to depict the Soviet bloc as gray and colorless. As Paul Manning (2007) has argued, color becomes a powerful tool for legitimating not only capitalism, but democratic governance as well. An American journalist, for example, recently reflected on her own experience in the region over a number of decades:It's hard to communicate how colorless and shockingly gray it was behind the Iron Curtain … the only color was the red of Communist banners. Stores had nothing to sell. There wasn't enough food… . Lines formed whenever something, anything, was for sale. The fatigue of daily life was all over their faces. Now… fur-clad women confidently stride across the winter ice in stiletto heels. Stores have sales… upscale cafés cater to cosmopolitan clients, and magazine stands, once so strictly controlled, rival those in the West. … Life before was so drab. Now the city seems loaded with possibilities (Freeman 2008).

The Lived Experience of Financialization at the UK Financial Fringe

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
LINDSEY APPLEYARD ◽  
CARL PACKMAN ◽  
JORDON LAZELL ◽  
HUSSAN ASLAM
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Financial Services ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Credit Market ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Dramatic Decline ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The financialization of everyday life has received considerable attention since the 2008 global financial crisis. Financialization is thought to have created active financial subjects through the ability to participate in mainstream financial services. While the lived experience of these mainstream financial subjects has been the subject of close scrutiny, the experiences of financial subjects at the financial fringe have been rarely considered. In the UK, for example, the introduction of High-Cost, Short-Term Credit [HCSTC] or payday loan regulation was designed to protect vulnerable people from accessing unaffordable credit. Exploring the impact of HCSTC regulation is important due to the dramatic decline of the high-cost credit market which helped meet essential needs in an era of austerity. As such, the paper examines the impact of the HCSTC regulation on sixty-four financially marginalized individuals in the UK that are unable to access payday loans. First, we identify the range of socioeconomic strategies that individuals employ to manage their finances to create a typology of financial subjectivity at the financial fringe. Second, we demonstrate how the temporal and precarious nature of financial inclusion at the financial fringe adds nuance to existing debates of the everyday lived experience of financialization.

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