The Resilience of the Común and Its Legacy

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-220
Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry

Although colonial Spanish- and Republican-era governments tried to undercut comuneros’ political philosophy of popular sovereignty, the común has persevered. Racist conclusions about Indians tarred comuneros as backward and pre-modern. To “modernize” them, comuneros’ lands were privatized and auctioned off, and laws officially eliminated ayllus. Comuneros gained the right to vote with the 1952 Bolivian revolution, many moved to cities, but most failed to prosper economically. They were officially “campesinos,” or peasants—a euphemism for race. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century anthropologists’ ethnographies show that reducción towns and annexes still exist, and the cabildo and civil-religious hierarchy still function. In 2005 Evo Morales, a self-identified Aymara, was elected president of Bolivia with comunero support. Bolivia’s 2009 constitution incorporates Aymara ideas of gender complementarity, gave legal personhood to Pachamama (Mother Earth), promotes collectivities as ethically superior to capitalist individualism, and recognizes legal pluralism. Many of these ideas echo the late colonial comuneros.

Author(s):  
Lisa Heldke

John Dewey’s record as a feminist and an advocate of women is mixed. He valued women intellectual associates whose influences he acknowledged, but did not develop theoretical articulations of the reasons for women’s subordination and marginalization. Given his mixed record, this chapter asks, how useful is Dewey’s work as a resource for feminist philosophy? It begins with a survey of the intellectual influences that connect Dewey with a set of women family members, colleagues, and students. It then discusses Dewey’s influence on the work of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century pragmatist feminist philosophers. Dewey’s influence has been strongest in the fields of feminist epistemology, philosophy of education, and social and political philosophy. Although pragmatist feminist philosophy remains a small field within feminist philosophy, this chapter argues that its conceptual resources could be put to further good use, particularly in feminist metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory.


Author(s):  
Linda Freedman

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.


Author(s):  
Alfred L. Brophy

This chapter discusses the role of historical analysis in property law. The history of property has been used to offer support for property rights. Their long history makes the distribution of property look normal, indeed natural and something that cannot or should not be challenged. However, historically in the U.S there have been competing visions of property. From the Progressive era onward especially, the history of property has been used to show the unequal distribution of property and to offer an alternative vision that expands the rights of non-owners of property. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the history of opposition to feudalism and protection of the rights of non-owners was used to protect the rights of non-owners. Thus, the history of property has been a tool of judges and legislators to support property rights and it has also been, less frequently, a tool of critique.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Morlino

This chapter addresses two final questions. First, what are the specific and more general perspectives of the democracies we studied in terms of implementation of the two democratic values? The three patterns developed in Chapter 8 cover almost all the existing empirical possibilities in Europe. Moreover, the external challenges faced by democracies in the early twenty-first century directly affect not only the goods to be delivered (possibly a mix of freedoms and equalities) but also resilience and de-consolidation. We can accept action in defence of rights and institutions and the limits of protest lie in the fact that the related actions cannot violate existing laws. A parallel question is how much the repeal of constraints, legal or of another sort, on the incumbent authorities can be pushed. No doubt, interinstitutional accountability is the necessary cornerstone of a working democracy. Second, what could we do to promote a better, doable, reasonable implementation of the two values? The formula of pursuing broader social cooperation would recall neo-corporatist past solutions, today unfeasible, but still appears as the right social recipe that has not yet been overcome. As seen in Chapter 8, we have to restate that there is a close connection between interinstitutional accountability and protection of freedoms, and, although indirectly, of equalities. Among the rights, the most important one in a democracy is the right to vote, which is grounded on other freedoms that concur to form the voter’s own political opinion. The commitment to combat different forms of disinformation needs to continue in order to provide further meaningfulness to the right to vote. Finally, to craft solid majorities in favour of the strengthening of the welfare state beyond the protection of poverty, we do need to promote a European Union able to complement national and European solidarities.


Author(s):  
Drew Massey

The chapter introduces the general perspective from which I consider the music of Thomas Adès from the beginning of his career up until The Exterminating Angel. Broadly speaking, I frame a consideration of his work as a dialectic, but also synthesis, of a variety of different themes in music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In particular, I orient the reader by briefly considering Adorno’s notion of a Musique Informelle, alongside a theory of cultural production for the twenty-first century known as “metamodernism.” While neither one of these frames of reference totally captures the dynamics of the music that I seek to explore in the chapters that follow, they provide a useful point of departure for considering why Adès’s music has attracted the attention that it has.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 875-876
Author(s):  
Erik Jones

The “borderless world” is an early twenty-first century cliche, particularly in Europe. Overlapping processes of globalization and regional integration have done much over the past decades to alter the political and economic nature of geographic boundaries. As a result, the tendency is to anticipate a fundamental deterritorialization of politics and economics. However tempting, it would nevertheless be hazardous to rush to judgment. Through a series of overlapping case studies—essays, really—Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort demonstrate that frontiers remain important both within the European Union (EU) and without. Politics and economics continue to be rooted in geography despite the transformations of the late twentieth century. This is true not only in practical terms but also in relation to individual and group identities. As the authors suggest, “there remains in Europe a highly developed sense of territoriality” (p. 11).


Tempo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (289) ◽  
pp. 30-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunter Coblentz

AbstractThis article serves as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical practices that have made use of glass instruments and objects. Emphasis is placed on those practices that use glass in a raw, acoustic manner, and those that take advantage of the precision with which glass can be tuned. First, a general history of glass music is presented, followed by an overview of the physical and acoustic aspects pertaining to the material that are relevant to those composers wishing to integrate glass into their works. Finally, the composers, performers and instrument builders who have made significant use of glass in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are surveyed.


Author(s):  
Camille Bégin

This concluding chapter argues that the New Deal food writing does not provide lessons on how to eat better, nor a cause to dismiss it as a bigoted or failed nation-building attempt. Rather, it offers a reminder that contemporary anxieties about the sensory, political, environmental, social, and moral consequences of the global industrial food system, as well as the drive toward the celebration of local traditions and knowledge, are not a late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century affair but part of a longer historical trend. New Deal food writing offers tools to better understand the challenges of establishing sustainable, pleasurable, and equitable food systems. This is not to disparage efforts at changing industrial foodways, but to emphasize how social and sensory histories of food can create spaces for debates about social, cultural, and environmental equity challenges.


Author(s):  
H. Patrick Glenn

For much of the twentieth century, comparatists have divided the world into ‘legal families’ (such as the civil law, the common law, socialist law, etc.) and assigned each (national) legal system a place in one of them. The chapter argues that this taxonomic enterprise has largely remained at the descriptive state, entailed a misleading division into fixed categories, and that is has failed to produce real comparison between laws. It is also too static, state-centred, and Euro-centric to be workable under conditions of late twentieth and early twenty-first century globalism. It should be replaced by the paradigm of ‘legal traditions’ which not only emphasizes the evolving nature of law, but also avoids dividing the world into clearly separated groupings. Instead, a ‘legal traditions’ approach focuses on the fluidity, interaction, and resulting hybridity of laws, thus facilitating their comparison. As it is not tied to Western-style national legal systems, it can easily capture the laws of the whole world, including the increasingly important non-state forms of legal normativity. Since the chapter was written by the late H. Patrick Glenn over a decade ago, the editors added a postscript bringing the reader up to date on the scholarship on, and the debate about, legal families and traditions.


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