Paredes, Américo

Author(s):  
Héctor Pérez

The remarkably multi-faceted Américo Paredes Manzano attained the status of renowned scholar, teacher, author, and poet over his tumultuous and illustrious lifespan. Born in 1915 in Brownsville, at the southeastern-most corner of the state of Texas bordering Mexico, Américo Paredes passed away in Austin in 1999. His life and professional career spanned much territory, touched many lives, and affected areas of study and pedagogy as few individuals can claim. His impressive body of work is encyclopedic in range and awe-inspiring in its originality. Certainly, Paredes’s life circumstances must be read in their historical context. He was born at a time when the scent of revolution was strong in the air, declared in Mexico in 1910, and with the nascent organizing of the revolt to liberate south Texas from the rest of the state in 1915. Tensions among competing groups in the formation of Texas since the treaty of 1848 had not yet been resolved and the state of a negotiated pluralistic existence was still precarious at best. For generations, university students have first encountered the work of Paredes through his major work of scholarship on the border corrido (ballad), namely the fully contextualized and historicized analysis of “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez”/ “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.” However, those who look further into his work realize that Paredes had already started to make his mark in the area of ethnomusicology, a branch of anthropology. His contributions are not insignificant as a number of his students went on to carry and extend Paredes’s teachings to other institutions of higher learning. One might see the logical relationship between this scholar’s interest in and knowledge of the Texas-Mexico border corrido and the more global ethnomusicologist’s perspective. In the same manner, Paredes trained and inspired numerous cadres of scholars in cultural and literary studies. By extension, his mentees have likewise now trained generations of scholars who have applied variants of the critical model pioneered by Paredes, rooted in his observations and study of the clash of cultures. Not unlike the history of other major intellectuals, the history of Paredes’s influence is marked by scholars who emulate, extend, revise, and also critique earlier views and critical approaches in a variety of areas such as language and linguistics, gender, class, race and ethnicity, and regionalism.

Author(s):  
Eugenia Roldán Vera ◽  
Susana Quintanilla

The Mexican policy of state provision of standardized textbooks for all was instituted in 1959 and still ongoing. This is an overview of the previous history of state intervention in the production and distribution of school textbooks, an examination of the particular circumstances in which the 1959 policy was figured and implemented, and a description of the characteristics of the different generations of textbooks that have since been published, corresponding with several educational reforms. The arguments for and against standardized textbooks mobilized by different sectors of society throughout sixty years are discussed in their historical context. Far from this being a debate about the authoritarian intervention of the state in education, issues of social equality and teaching quality have been central.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110249
Author(s):  
Jamie Wong ◽  
Crystal Lee ◽  
Vesper Keyi Long ◽  
Di Wu ◽  
Graham M. Jones

This article describes how the Chinese state borrows from the culture of celebrity fandom to implement a novel strategy of governing that we term “fandom governance.” We illustrate how state-run social media employed fandom governance early in the COVID-19 pandemic when the country was convulsed with anxiety. As the state faced a crisis of confidence, state social media responded with a propagandistic display of state efficacy, broadcasting a round-the-clock livestream of a massive emergency hospital construction project. Chinese internet users playfully embellished imagery from the livestream. They unexpectedly transformed the construction vehicles into cute personified memes, with Baby Forklift and Baby Mud Barfer (a cement mixer) among the most popular. In turn, state social media strategically channeled this playful engagement in politically productive directions by resignifying the personified vehicles as celebrity idols. Combining social media studies with cultural and linguistic anthropology, we offer a processual account of the semiotic mediations involved in turning vehicles into memes, memes into idols, and citizens into fans. We show how, by embedding cute memes within modules of fandom management such as celebrity ranking lists, state social media rendered them artificially vulnerable to a fall in status. Fans, in turn, rallied around to “protect” these cute idols with small but significant acts of digital devotion and care, organizing themselves into fan circles and exhorting each other to vote. In elevating the memes to the status of celebrity idols, state social media thereby created a disposable pantheon of virtual avatars for the state, and consolidated state power by exploiting citizens’ voluntary response to vulnerability. We analyze fandom governance as a new development in the Chinese state’s long history of governing citizens through the management of emotion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik

Abstract This article addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects that were brought to the territory of present-day Slovenia by sailors, missionaries, travellers, and others who travelled to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, this territory was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; we will, therefore, begin with the brief historical context of the Empire and its contact with China, followed by a discussion on the nature of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenian territories at that time. We will further examine the status of the individuals who travelled to China and the nature and extent of the objects they brought back. The article will also highlight the specific position of the Slovenian territory within the history of Euro-Asian cultural connections, and address the relevant issues—locally and globally—of the relationship between the centres and peripheries with regard to collecting practices.


Author(s):  
Tatiana Lavrova ◽  

The author covers the question of the stability of competitive authoritarianism in Malaysia. In this case, such a regime is particularly stable, possibly due to the developed and institutionalized model of interaction between the dominant party and ethnic groups, implemented in the conditions of the polyethnic composition of the state. It was crucial to take into account the historical context of the British colonization of Malaysia, which had led to the influx of migrants, and the presence of a political party in power for 61 years, which was practically merged with the state apparatus and fully represented only one ethnic group. "Ethnic outbidding" implemented by the dominant party UMNO provided a numerically greater population with benefits in exchange for support of the ruling party. Simultaneously, the incorporation of ethnic groups into the state's political structure and the use of the power-sharing model allowed UMNO to act as an umbrella party and to maintain the status quo. The unspoken Treaty, first, was based on granting the privilege to the indigenous Malay population, and, second, protected the interests of non-Malays. Thus, granting bumiputera and non-Malays certain privileges, the establishment was able to consolidate a non-democratic regime and control over complex Malaysian society.


Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly

This book offers a broad-ranging re-interpretation of the understanding of politics and the state in the writings of three major German thinkers, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. It rejects the typical separation of these writers on the basis of their allegedly incompatible ideological positions, and suggests instead that once properly located in their historical context, the tendentious character of these interpretative boundaries becomes clear. The book interprets the conceptions of politics and the state in the writings of these three thinkers by means of an investigation of their adaptation and modification of particular German traditions of thinking about the state, or Staatsrechtslehre. Indeed, when the theoretical considerations of this state-legal theory are combined with their contemporary political criticism, a richer and more deeply textured account of the issues that engaged the attention of Weber, Schmitt and Neumann is possible. Thus, the broad range of subjects discussed in this book include parliamentarism and democracy in Germany, academic freedom and political economy, political representation, cultural criticism and patriotism, and the relationship between rationality, law, sovereignty and the constitution. The study attempts to restore a sense of proportion to the discussion of the three authors' writings, focusing on the extensive ideas that they shared rather than insisting on their necessary ideological separation. It is a detailed re-appraisal of a crucial moment in modern intellectual history, and highlights the profound importance of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann for the history of European ideas.


Author(s):  
Vladimir Il'ich Shubin

This article is dedicated to examination of the history of emergence of Greek mercenaries during the riling time of XXVI Sais Dynasty. The author reviews the status and role of Greek mercenaries in the armed forced of Sais rulers, organization of their service and living conditions. Considering the fact that the use of Greek mercenaries in Egypt army was a part of the traditional policy of Sais rulers and carried mass character, the author refers to the problem  of social origin of the phenomenon of mercenarism in the Greek society of Archaic era. The research applies comparative-historical method that allows viewing the phenomenon of mercenarism in the historical context – based on the comparative data analysis of ancient written tradition. By the time of Sais Dynasty, control over regions that traditionally provided mercenaries to the Egypt army was lost. Under the circumstances, in order to compensate such losses, Egypt conscripted into military service the hailed from the Greek world. Mercenaries became the first Greeks settled on the Egyptian land. The conclusion is made that the Greek colonization, in absence of other ways to enter the formerly closed to the Greeks Egypt, at its initial stage manifested in such distinct form.


Author(s):  
Svitlana Ivanova

The study on archaeological sites has some peculiarities when undertaken inside the territories of modern cities. And the reason behind it is not only the usual situation when parts of a site are covered by present-day constructions or cut by communication trenches. Sometimes a stratigraphic position and/or a level of recovery for ancient artefacts are blurred by inherent ambiguity. This is exactly the case, which can be traced for the settlement of ancient times on the Primorsky Boulevard of Odessa. The variability of the level of occurrence of the cultural layer and the virgin soil can be explained by referring to historical documentation. During the design and preparation of the territory for the landing of trees and construction, preparatory work was carried out. The area was cleared and leveled down. In addition, one should keep in mind the relief of the terrain, the presence of slopes, the elevation drop, the leveling of which led to the present ambiguous stratigraphic situation. The cultural layer was also damaged when some soil was withdrawn from its original position from the territory of the former military barracks, which were located here at the beginning of the XIX century in order to strengthen the slopes of the boulevard. These works are recorded in archival data stored in the State Archive of Odessa region. The construction of numerous communications also contributed to the inevitable alterations in the state of the settlement's preservation. Given the available historical information, it is possible that individual archaeological sites can be discovered during the reconstruction of existing buildings located on Primorsky Boulevard. The history of construction and subsequent re-building on the Primorsky Boulevard is linked with the material remains that are stored underground. Consideration of this aspect provides the necessary information on the identification of objects that can be found in archaeological sites situated underneath the modern buildings. There is an obvious and urgent necessity of archaeological supervision for all types of reconstruction or building works, in accordance with existing legislation. This conclusion is relevant not only to the territory of the ancient settlement, but also to its surveillance zone. The construction works should be suspended until the final archaeological research, if archaeological sites would be identified. Key words: Classical age, city archaeology, cultural layer, Prymorskyj Boulevard.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørn Hansen ◽  
Thomas Skovgaard

This article takes a closer look at both the historical context and the political and economic orchestration of the Olympic Games in London – 1908, 1948 and 2012. By comparing the three events, a number of differences and game specific circumstances are demonstrated. On this basis the article concludes with a discussion of the status of the three London Games within the overall history of the Modern Olympics.


Te Kaharoa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael Ka'ai-Mahuta

By 1979, merely 139 years after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi), the loss of te reo Māori was so great that it was believed it would suffer language death (Walker 1990: 147-148). This can be attributed to colonisation and the State policy of assimilation which eroded the status of the language. The mechanism of the Government’s agenda of assimilation and language domination was the State education system. This was, therefore, the primary cause of Māori language loss. In some cases the legislation regarding the State education system can be directly linked to language loss. However, in many cases the education system has negatively affected te reo Māori indirectly through aspects of Eurocentric education. These include assimilation, cultural invasion, cultural subordination, language domination, hegemony, the curriculum, class structures, racism, meritocracy, intelligence testing, and negative teacher expectations.   In the study of Māori language decline one must critically review the New Zealand State education system, including a discussion of the key events and legislation in the history of Pākehā colonisation and assimilation in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This will form the chronological map of the deterioration of the status of the Māori language.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 482-491
Author(s):  
V. Dorzheeva

The article examines the history of the administrative–territorial division of the Russian Northeast in the first half of the twentieth century. The importance of this research stems from the need to analyze the historical experience information of administrative divisions against the background of developing modern federated relations. Chronology wise, the article deals with the period from the year 1917 until the establishment of the present-day boundaries of Magadan Oblast. The article analyses specific aspects of administration in the constituent territories of Magadan Oblast, based on their remoteness from the central authorities, and their economic value. Development of territorial public authorities in the Northeast during the said period was politically motivated. The Civil War saw territories being transferred to the jurisdiction of opposing forces, which affected the administrative division and the system of government authorities. The Institute of the administrative–territorial structure was aimed at the implementation of state functions in connection with certain goals and objectives of a specific historical period of development. The implementation of national policies mediated the creation of national districts. The need of the state for mineral raw materials during the period of industrialization and during the Great Patriotic War led to the creation of special extraterritorial education — Dalstroi. A special period in the history of the region was the Dalstroy era — so-called “Special Combine”, during which a two-level authority system was developed. The administrative–territorial structure was defined by functions of the state, and goals and objectives of the specific historical period. The territorial model of public authority in the Northeastern region fit within the historical context of the country’s contemporary situation.


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