scholarly journals The persistent conditions of plantation economy and the fraught spaces of encounter in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110337
Author(s):  
Travis K Bost

This article examines how social and economic structures of historic plantation development manage to persist over time and to rearticulate over space. In the early 1900s, the historic plantation sugar economy in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana, suddenly collapsed. Despite efforts by local elites to seize this moment to finally launch a diversified industrial development path, the parish nevertheless sank again into a new cycle of plantation domination and dependency. The dominating sugar sector was broken up only to be rapidly replaced by a vast new monopoly—in, of all things, systematized fur production—whose land tenure and labor regime nearly replicated that of the earlier plantation estates. I examine this folding-over-anew of the plantation, from sugar to fur, in two ways that contribute to recent growing literature on persistent plantation geographies. First, I draw upon theories of Caribbean underdevelopment to identify three persistent conditions of plantation economy. Upon the collapse of sugar in St Bernard, the conditions of estate-based land monopoly, racialized extra-economic labor coercion, and external market/primary commodity dependency constrained the possibility of structural transformation and rearticulated in a new commodity regime based in fur. Second, I turn to consider the experience of workers bound up in the new fur economy who were not, in the main, the debt-bound black workers from the old sugar plantations but a racially and spatially marginal group known as isleños. I draw on a unique set wry folk ballads that isleños maintained as part of local oral tradition to examine the voices of trappers themselves as they negotiated the rearticulating structures of the neo-plantation regime. Thinking with McKittrick's concept of plantation “spaces of encounter,” I find these neo-estate workers forged fraught spaces of discursive and material autonomy that at times resisted, and at times reproduced, the ongoing plantation regime.

GRUPPI ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 61-68
Author(s):  
Flavio Nosč ◽  
Silvia Anfilocchi

- After reflection upon the role of narcissism - of the pupil as well as of the teacher - as an obstacle to knowledge, we are now reflecting upon the function of writing and its relationship with the oral transmission of psychotherapeutic "knowledge", in that oral learning has always played an important role. It is observed that oral transmission is nurtured by a dialogic context made of emotional confirmation and disconfirmation and takes advantage of the richness of the context, while writing needs to build a sort of dialog with that which is absent. Furthermore, we are now living in a historical moment in which web communica- tion also exists, and although it is in written form, it may be that it has such peculiarities of simultaneity and such a broad dimension that it is closer to oral tradition, and online journals themselves undoubtedly play an important role. The group feels it needs to keep identity and possibility of change together, so as to create a strong theoretical basis, with elements of stability which can be passed on. This theoretical basis can be split up but should remain in contact with the transmission of experience. The group also feels that behind the apparent dichotomy between online writing and traditional writing there is the idea of a culture that is changing over time, and that through this change it is building a tradition in which the group can recognize itself. It is necessary to keep the space devoted to the COIRAG Journal, a space in which a more pondered and processed exchange can be fostered, where the understanding of-and not only the description of-events has its own room. What we need is a space that can collect the consolidated aspects and the strong theoretical core of our reality, and that can build the identity with which we present ourselves to the exterior. .Parole chiave: conoscenza, apprendimento, formazione, comunicazione orale, comunicazione scritta, rivista. .Key words: knowledge, learning, training, oral communication, written communication, magazine.


Author(s):  
Daniel Veidlinger

Different media have been used to spread the teachings of Buddhism, and they have exerted a significant influence upon the development of Buddhist ideas and institutions over time. An oral tradition was first used in ancient India to record and spread the Buddhist Dharma, and later the Pali canon was written down in the 1st century bce. Writing was also conspicuously used to transmit Mahāyāna texts starting in the first centuries of the first millennium. Printing was developed in medieval China probably in connection with the Buddhist desire to create merit through copying the texts. Efforts to print Buddhist texts in Western languages and scripts began in earnest in the late 19th century, and Western printing methods were later adopted by Asian Buddhists to publish the texts in modern times. It is important to appreciate the intricate relationship between the medium that is used to transmit a text and the form of the text itself, as well as the commensurate effects of the texts and their ideas on the medium and its uses in society. The oral medium has many constraints that forced the early texts to assume certain forms that were amenable to oral transmission, and institutions arose to assist in the preservation of these texts as well. Even once writing came to be used, the common people generally did not read but rather heard the text recited by learned monks. Private reading is for the most part a modern invention and it, too, had a distinct influence on the development of Buddhism, leading to modern reformist movements that demanded less superstition, more meditation, and a closer adherence to the teachings found in the canonical texts. The Internet is also shaping the popular reception of Buddhism, as Buddhist teachings and texts proliferate on thousands of websites in a dizzying array of languages.


1978 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy

At a time when coastal West Africa was responding to the growth of ‘legitimate’ trade, the Sokoto Caliphate was experiencing dramatic expansion in the plantation sector. Plantations (gandu, rinji, tungazi), which used slaves captured by the Caliphate armies, were established near all the major towns and were particularly important around Sokoto, Kano, Zaria and other capitals. Plantation development originated with the policies of Muhammad Bello, first Caliph and successor to Uthman dan Fodio, who was concerned with the consolidation and defence of the empire. Besides promoting the economic growth of the capital districts of Sokoto and Gwandu, Bello's policy encouraged the expansion of the textile belt in southern Kano and northern Zaria. Similarly, the desert-side market in grain also benefited from the emphasis on plantations. The result was the greater integration of the Central Sudan region into a single economic zone. The role of plantations in the economy differed from that of plantations elsewhere in the world. Market forces tended to be weaker, and no single export crop dominated production. Rather, the orientation towards the desert-side sector indicates that opportunities for expansion were limited, while the importance of textile manufacturing reflects the relatively weak links with European and other textile production. Other differences included a system of Islamic slavery which encouraged emancipation, a close connexion with slave raiding and distribution, and a system of land tenure which often resulted in fragmented holdings. Stronger links with the world economy did develop in parts of the Caliphate towards the end of the nineteenth century. Nupe and Yola were drawn more closely into the world market through the greater use of the Niger and Benue rivers, but these changes only marginally affected the wider Caliphate economy.


Author(s):  
Bettina Mahlert

Abstract The concept of basic human needs can be employed for avoiding a danger that arises from the perspectivity of development knowledge, namely, the use of overly narrowing cognitive and evaluative frameworks that obscure relevant contextual realities. Drawing on existing literatures, the paper proposes to use three features of needs satisfiers as a tool for discovering such narrowing effects: (a) satisfiers for the same needs vary across groups and over time; (b) a candidate satisfier can enable or hamper the fulfillment of a need, depending on which other potential satisfiers it connects with; (c) a satisfier can simultaneously fulfill some needs and fail to fulfill other needs, and this holds both for the needs of one person and of different groups. In order to illustrate, the paper analyses three development reports, addressing needs for food and physical security as well as identity and recognition, and taking African land-tenure regimes as empirical example.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leela Viswanathan ◽  
Scott L. Morgensen

The year 2015 marked the bicentenary of Sir John A. Macdonald’s birth and sparked renewed interest in his legacies and the contested histories of race and racialization in Canada. One version of a monolithic history of Canada venerates Sir John A. Macdonald for his role as Canada’s first Prime Minister, a paternal figure of Confederation, and a nation builder who implemented projects of infrastructure and industrial development (i.e., Canadian Pacific Railway) and systems of land tenure and ownership. This dominating story of Macdonald’s legacies reflects a historical canon of biographies, dramatic plays, musicals, guided tours and monuments such that Macdonald’s history is conflated with a founding history of Canada. By contrast, diverse and different stories about human erasure, physical and cultural displacement, and assimilation—notably, of Black, Asian, and Indigenous peoples—are made marginal by the dominating discourse of so-called Canadian national progress. The essays presented in this issue of the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry (JCRI) (Volume 3, Number 1) contest dominant interpretations of the legacies of Sir John A. Macdonald by offering theoretical, performative, and experiential analyses of Canadian history, race, colonialism, and Indigenous cultural resurgence.


Author(s):  
Margaret Peteraf ◽  
Haridimos Tsoukas

This chapter discusses the development path of the dynamic capabilities construct, calling attention to two ways in which the path has become bifurcated. In particular it pays attention to the widening chasm between Teece’s original conception of dynamic capabilities and his revised conception, as expressed in some of his more recent works. The roots of these divergent, and yet theoretically consequential understandings are explored, as are the ways they have developed in the literature: the need to reconcile the routine nature of dynamic capabilities on the one hand with the need to account for the ability of organizations to intentionally alter their resource base on the other. The chapter argues that such a reconciliation is possible, once a process (or performative) approach is adopted. In particular, the authors argue that in so far as capabilities fully exist in performance, each particular performance may enact capabilities differently over time and in particular contexts.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 47-77
Author(s):  
John M. Cinnamon

I can claim no direct pedigree from African Studies at Wisconsin, but one of my own graduate school mentors, Robert Harms, benefitted from David Henige's and Jan Vansina's influence; all three have profoundly marked my own approaches to the historical anthropology of equatorial Africa. In this paper I draw on David Henige's illuminating and still relevant insights into the problem of “feedback,” in light of a key methodological preoccupation in my own discipline of anthropology – “fieldwork.” In particular I want to suggest how ethnographic fields are formed over time through a layering process that involves ongoing cycles of intertwined oral and written traditions.Henige's 1973 article, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition,” prefigures by a full decade Terence Ranger's highly influential essay on “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In that 1973 article, Henige argued that given traditions were “dynamic over time.” British Indirect Rule had led the Fante of the Gold Coast to devise new oral traditions in order to take advantage of opportunities of British Colonialism. In particular, he cites the ways printed sources, especially the Bible, but also the Qur'an, colonial sources, publications, and later scholarly works, have all found their way back into oral accounts. Henige also suggests that pre-colonial oral traditions also would have been continually reworked; present practices suggest considerable adaptability and flexibility in the past.


2020 ◽  
pp. 131-150
Author(s):  
John A. Jillions

This chapter introduces Jewish approaches to divine guidance. Corinth was a leading community of the Jewish diaspora and maintained close connections with Jews elsewhere, especially in Jerusalem and Rome. There was a variety of “Judaisms” in this period, but their common focus was on the written Torah and the oral tradition of interpretation. God’s guidance is therefore closely linked to the community’s understanding of how God speaks over time through the Hebrew Bible and the oral law. Most Jews did not see the scriptures as having a life independent of the community’s inspired guidance in the present. This allowed for a degree of fluidity and changing interpretation, as witnessed in the Greek Septuagint and the books of mixed canonical status that came to be known as the Apocrypha. Of these, Tobit, Judith, and Susanna give particular insight into Jewish understanding of divine guidance.


Circulation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 143 (Suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Junxiu Liu ◽  
Stella Yi ◽  
Rienna Russo ◽  
Donglan Zhang ◽  
Janani Rajbhandari-Thapa ◽  
...  

Introduction: Cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs), which include coronary heart disease (CHD), hypertension (HTN), type 2 diabetes (DM) and obesity, are an interrelated set of highly preventable conditions. Food insecurity, another pervasive public health issue, is associated with CMDs. We aim to characterize the prevalence of CMD by food security (FS) status over time. Hypothesis: Prevalence of DM and obesity increased while that of HTN and CHD decreased over time, with pervasive disparities among FS status. Methods: Adults ≥20 years from the 1999-2016 NHANES were included in this analysis. CMD outcomes included DM (prior diagnosed or FPG≥126 mg/dL or HbA1c ≥6.5%), CHD (prior diagnosis of myocardial infarction, angina or any other type of CHD), obesity (BMI ≥30 kg/m 2 ) and HTN (≥1 of the following: systolic blood pressure (BP) ≥130 mmHg, diastolic BP ≥80, or currently taking BP medications). FS status was measured through the US Household Food Security Survey Module and recategorized into three levels (full, marginal and low). All estimates were age-standardized to the 2010 US census population. All analyses accounted for the complex survey design. Logistic regressions were conducted to calculate P-values. Results: Our sample included 46,879 adults (79.5% of full, 7.67% of marginal and 12.8% of low FS). HTN prevalence decreased from 50% to 44.4% among the full FS group and from 54.9% to 50.4% among the marginal group (P-trends<0.001, P-interaction=0.009). CHD prevalence decreased from 6.33% to 4.81% (P-trend<0.001) among the full group. Obesity prevalence increased from 31.0% to 38.0% among the full group and from 38.3% to 50.5% among the low group (P-trend<0.001, P-interaction=0.02). DM prevalence increased from 8.30% to 11.3% for the full group, from 14.9% to 21.8% for the marginal group and from 14.8% to 20.1% for the low group (P-trend<0.001) ( Figure ). Conclusion: From 1999 to 2016, the prevalence of CMDs were lowest among participants who were in full FS group and disparities by FS status persisted or worsened.


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