Sicily

Author(s):  
Alessandra Molinari

Sicily is a large and fertile island at the center of Mediterranean trading networks. Renewed public interest in its medieval past, a surge in research in recent years, and the richness of its archaeological and architectural heritage make it particularly fascinating for scholars of the Islamic world and beyond. While conquered much later than other regions, it saw an incomplete Islamization during the two and a half centuries of Muslim rule but an incredible economic growth especially during the 10th century. The fulcrum of the Sicilian social, economic, and cultural transformations was the great metropolis, al-Madina, Balarm (Palermo). Contrary to scholarly assumption, the arrival of the Normans in 1061 was not painless, and archaeological evidence points to gradual but substantial changes. Social and cultural tensions at the end of the Norman kingdom came to a head in Swabian times. Sicily in the late 13th century is a different world to 10th-century Sicily in every way: crops, culture, language and religion, settlement models, material culture, and networks of exchange.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-148
Author(s):  
Bhabani Shankar Nayak

This article evaluates the ‘impossibility theorem’ of ‘development studies’. It is imperative to reject the ‘impossibility theorem’ based on essentialist perspectives and performative indicators of economic growth and development. It is necessary to revive the radical promise of ‘development studies’ as a discipline to address the issues and predicaments of people and their societies around the world. A simple rejection of the ‘impossibility theorem’ is not possible unless ‘development studies’ reasserts itself as a critical discipline to analyse, understand and guide social, economic and cultural transformations based on historical experiences. The article argues that ‘development studies’ have to be free from the influences of economics and its model-driven logic and revive its emancipatory language of transformation in our society.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 35-42
Author(s):  
Kusnanto Anggoro

In a decade of reform, several changes had been occurred. Some adjustments could be considered as a success, while others potentially could trigger conflicts. Historical conflict remnants in Indonesia were hard to restrain. Hence, national integration remains crucial in the foreseeable future. Local autonomy could be an avenue to resolve the problem of national integration in a particular context. However, local autonomy could result in the reverse end. In the midst of conflict pattern change and development over the last decade, bureaucracy (local and national) has to be able to foresee any sign of conflict (early warning) in order to be able to anticipate. Conflict recognition could be observed through various indications, ranging from demographic changes, deterioration of the social-economic situation, and/or cultural tensions. Failure to do corrective action on such deviation would lead to a greater risk of conflict occurrence.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajiang Chen ◽  
Pengli Cheng ◽  
Yajuan Luo

The phenomenon of "cancer villages" has emerged in many parts of rural China, drawing media attention and becoming a fact of social life. However, the relationship between pollution and disease is often hard to discern. Through sociological analysis of several villages with different social and economic structures, the authors offer a comprehensive, historically grounded analysis of the coexistence between the incidence of cancer, environmental pollution and villagers’ lifestyles, as well as the perceptions, claims and responses of different actors. They situate the appearance of "cancer villages" in the context of social, economic and cultural change in China, tracing the evolution of the issue over two decades, and providing deep insights into the complex interactions and trade-offs between economic growth, environmental change and public health.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 374-377
Author(s):  
Tinni Goswami Bhattacharya

The essential theme of this paper is to highlight the condition of health and hygiene in the British Bengal from the perspective of official documents and vernacular writings, with special emphasis on the journals and periodicals. The fatal effects of the epidemics like malaria and cholera, the insanitary condition of the rural Bengal and the cultivated indifference of the British Raj made the lives of the poor natives miserable and ailing. The authorities had a tendency to blame the colonized for their illiteracy and callousness, which became instrumental for the outbreak of the epidemics. On the other, in the late 19 th and the beginning of the 20th, the vernacular literature played the role of a catalyst in awakening health awareness, highlighting the issues related with ill health, insanitation and malnourishment. More importantly, it became an active link between the society and culture on the one hand, and health and people on the other. The present researcher wants to highlight these opposite trajectories of mentalities with a different connotation. The ideologies of the Raj and the native political aspirations often reflected in the colonial writings, where the year 1880 was considered as a landmark in the field of public health policies. On the other, the dichotomy between the masters and the colonized took a prominent shape during 1930s. Within these fifty years; the health of the natives witnessed many upheavals grounded on the social, economic and cultural tensions.


Author(s):  
Alfonso Ippolito

Architectonical artefacts are in many ways one of the most extraordinary legacies that past civilizations have left to us from a cultural, technological and functional standpoint, because of the impact that the development of the material culture and building techniques had for ancient communities. The definition of a protocol designed to achieve an understanding of the object of Cultural Heritage consents the realization of various models. These models are the bases for all the critical, selective, specialist next analyses and elaboration. This work discusses the possibilities offered by the integration of heterogeneous method, traditional and innovative, for massive surveying and digital representation technologies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 01008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Sokola-Nazarenko ◽  
Kristine Martinsone ◽  
Sandra Mihailova ◽  
Jelena Levina ◽  
Karsa Elina

Values may change during life because a person obtains new life experience and competencies. In the past decade, many Latvian psychologists studied people's values and their connections with different factors like cultural, political, social, economic changes and other factors [1, 2, 3 and other]. Since 1994 Latvia has gone through different social-economic changes like crisis, economic growth, assumption to NATO and EU, and acceptation of euro currency. These changes can influence participants’ values. The aim was to conduct a comparative longitudinal research in individuals’ values in 1998 and 2015, at the beginning of their youth and then in adulthood, in order to answer the following questions: what values were in 1998 and 2015; what differences in values had appeared comparing 1998 and 2015 in same persons. Results showed that the most important values in 1998 and 2015 were “Family”, “Love”, “Responsibility”, “Honesty” and “Cheerfulness”. Significant changes appeared in “Health” that became significantly important in 2015 and replaced the importance of “Love”. Most achievable values in 1998 and 2015 were “The beauty of nature and art” and “Cognition” but in 2015 also “Active life” which replaced “Self-confidence” that was important in 1998. Significant changes appeared in “Self-confidence”, “Wisdom”, “Active life”, “Freedom”, “Interesting job”, “Learning” and “Friends” as well, where importance of some values increased and some decreased in 2015.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 323-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Launaro ◽  
Ninetta Leone

There can hardly be any doubt that goods moved in large quantities and over great distances under the Roman empire. This awareness is borne out of a long tradition of archaeological research attesting to the widespread distribution of specific categories of material culture across the full expanse of the Mediterranean and beyond. This phenomenon has been interpreted as a more or less direct result of Rome's military expansion and the fundamental political unification which came with it, bringing about unprecedented conditions which favoured trade and exchange. Scholarship has often stressed the rôle played in this by ‘institutions’: the spread and adoption of a common set of laws, currency and units of measure, fostered by a relatively long period of internal peace and political stability, would have boosted the economic performance of the empire to levels that had not been witnessed before and would not be seen again for many centuries. Indeed, the notion of ‘efflorescence’ has sometimes been employed to describe and explain the kind of economic growth to which this process might have contributed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhamad Nizam Jali ◽  
Zakaria Abas ◽  
Ahmad Shabudin Ariffin

The current knowledge-innovation led economy requires a new paradigm of innovation to address critical issues, among others, namely: poor social health, poor living conditions, poor education systems, public income inequality, massive unemployment, poor economic growth and lack of new technological advances. Thus this paper explores the concept of social innovation in the context of strategic knowledge management processes.  This paper suggested that social innovation is an outstanding solution in addressing social, economic and technological issues highlighted above, because the outcome of social innovation encompasses social, economic and technological payoffs concurrently. Strategic knowledge management processes, creates superior knowledge resource that is regarded as a new and novel solution that can be embedded into products, processes and services which in turn leads to the outcome of improving the quality of people’s life, stimulate economic growth and enhance technological advances i.e. social innovation. The old paradigm of innovation that refers to technological innovation is seen inadequate and obsolete in dealing with aforesaid social, economic and technological issues because it is very much focused and centred in fulfilling private needs. Therefore, social innovation and strategic knowledge management processes must be seriously considered by the policy makers, private sectors and also public institutions given the massive contribution that it might bring forward to many nations’ core aspirations.  


2013 ◽  
Vol 749 ◽  
pp. 110-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao Juan Zhang

The ecological footprint demand and ecological capacity for the six types of productive land during 2005~2010 are calculated using the ecological footprint model in this paper by taking Dongying City as the example, and the ecological deficit of Dongying City is thereby figured out. Based on this, the indicators such as the ecological footprint of 10k yuan GDP, the ecological pressure index, the ecological diversity index, and the social economic development index, etc representing the sustainable development are calculated and analyzed, to learn that it is not allowed to be optimistic about the ecological environment in Dongying in recent years, as the ecological deficit has increased year after year, and the ecological pressure has become heavier and heavier. However, it is learned through analysis of the ecological footprint of 10k yuan GDP and the social economic development index that under the situation when the ecological pressure on economic growth in the ecological economic system of Dongying is increased, a tendency exists for the consumptive and extensive economic growth pattern to gradually step towards the ecologically intensive pattern, but it is still required to make more efforts in the aspects of reducing the ecological footprint demand and improving the ecological capacity.


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