scholarly journals Notes on a Rastafari Yard-Space in Urban Ethiopia

Author(s):  
Shelene Gomes

Abstract The significance of the yard or household in social reproduction within the diasporic Caribbean is the focus of this essay. I outline how a Rastafari yard-space is shaped through household production and family formation among diasporic Caribbean peoples within intercultural households and families. This discussion is foregrounded in Rastafari migration or “repatriation” from the Caribbean to the symbolic land grant in Ethiopia. Two intercultural households will be compared: one located in a local Ethiopian neighbourhood in the city of Shashamane and one in the predominantly Rastafari Jamaica Safar or Jamaica neighbourhood of Shashamane. Primarily drawing on my ethnographic observations, this discussion will situate Rastafari positionalities in terms of social, spatial and subjective articulations of inclusion and exclusion, adding to a discussion of the culture concept in the anthropology of the Caribbean.

Ethnography ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-495
Author(s):  
Sylvain Laurens ◽  
Julian Mischi

This paper retraces the journey of Learning to Labour in the French intellectual landscape, by examining the context in which we had this book translated in 2011. We first analyse the slow importation of Willis’s research in France (the originality of the counter-school culture concept is highlighted in light of Bourdieu’s theoretical emphasis on the role of cultural capital in social reproduction) and the conditions that made a French translation possible 30 years after the original’s publication. We then discuss the ways in which this 2011 translation, entitled L’école des ouvriers, collided with French debates on the role of school and the then prevalent postmodern theories. We end by discussing the uses of Willis’s work in contemporary French sociology.


Author(s):  
Regina Galasso

The cultural production of Spanish-speaking New York is closely linked to the Caribbean and to Latin America at large, but the city also plays a pivotal role in the work of a host of authors from the Iberian Peninsula, writing in Spanish, Catalan, and English. In many cases, their New York City texts have marked their careers and the history of their national literatures. Drawing from a variety of genres, Translating New York recovers cultural narratives occluded by single linguistic or national literary histories, and proposes that reading these texts through the lens of translation unveils new pathways of cultural circulation and influence. Looking beyond representations of the city's physical space, Translating New York suggests that travel to the city and contact with New York's multilingual setting ignited a heightened sensitivity towards both the verbal and non-verbal languages of the city, garnering literary achievement and aesthetic innovation. Analyzing the novels, poetry, and travel narratives of Felipe Alfau, José Moreno Villa, Julio Camba, and Josep Pla, this book uncovers an international perspective of Iberian literatures. Translating New York aims to rethink Iberian literatures through the transatlantic travels of influential writers.


Tsunami ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 151-160
Author(s):  
James Goff ◽  
Walter Dudley

Most Europeans do not worry about tsunami waves as much as those who live around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, but they should. On All Saint’s Day, 1755, a huge earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal, causing most stone buildings to collapse, including churches, monasteries, nunneries, and chapels, trapping the faithful inside the ruins, which votive candles quickly turned into burning pyres. Voltaire would write, “The sole consolation is that the Jesuit Inquisitors of Lisbon will have disappeared.” To add to the irony, among the few buildings safely left standing following the disaster were the lightly constructed wooden bordellos of the city. Most of Lisbon’s prostitutes but few of her nuns survived. Tsunami waves would not only kill thousands around Lisbon’s harbor but also travel south to Spain and North Africa, north to Ireland and Wales, and across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean, flooding the streets of Barbados.


2008 ◽  
Vol 79 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 239-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ad de Bruijne ◽  
Aart Schalkwijk

Analyses ethnic residential patterns, in terms of spatial segregation, in Paramaribo, as these developed historically, and their correlation to the changing socioeconomic position of the various ethnic groups. Authors first point out how Paramaribo is at present one of the most multiethnic and multicultural cities of the Caribbean, and discuss the continuing importance of ethnic identity and boundaries. They further describe the history of Paramaribo's development since the period of slavery and after abolition, when many Creoles migrated to the city. Hindustani started migrating in higher numbers to Paramaribo since the early 20th c., mainly to the urban periphery, and since the 1960s also more Javanese. More recently (since the 1980s) migrants to Paramaribo include Maroons, Amerindians, Chinese, and Brazilians. Authors examine in how far the residential patterns were determined by socioeconomic factors, and/or by ethnicity. They conclude that socioeconomic factors have overall become more influential in residential patterns than ethnicity. They point out that residential ethnic mixing has increased, as almost half of Paramaribo's neighbourhoods are mixed, with no dominant ethnic group, although some ethnic concentration continues, as a quarter of the neighbourhoods can be called Creole, one-fifth of them Hindustani, and Creoles (and Maroons) reside for a higher percentage in the city centre, and Hindustani and Javanese more in the urban periphery.


Complexity ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vinicius M. Netto ◽  
Joao Meirelles ◽  
Fabiano L. Ribeiro

How can individual acts amount to coherent systems of interaction? In this paper, we attempt to answer this key question by suggesting that there is a place for cities in the way we coordinate seemingly chaotic decisions. We look into the elementary processes of social interaction exploring a particular concept, “social entropy,” or how social systems deal with uncertainty and unpredictability in the transition from individual actions to systems of interaction. Examining possibilities that (i) actions rely on informational differences latent in their environments and that (ii) the city itself is an information environment to actions, we propose that (iii) space becomes a form of creating differences in the probabilities of interaction. We investigate this process through simulations of distinct material scenarios, to find that space is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the reduction of entropy. Finally, we suggest that states and fluctuations of entropy are a vital part of social reproduction and reveal a deep connection between social, informational, and spatial systems.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 999-1030 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Soehl

This paper compares two aspects of the social reproduction of religion: parent-to-child transmission, and religious homogamy. Analysis of a survey of immigrants in France shows that for parent-to-child transmission, immigrant status/generation is not the central variable — rather, variation is across religions with Muslim families showing high continuity. Immigrant status/generation does directly matter for partner choice. In Christian and Muslim families alike, religious in-partnering significantly declines in the second generation. In turn, the offspring of religiously non-homogamous families is less religious. For Muslim immigrants this points to the possibility of a non-trivial decline in religiosity in the third generation.


1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
E A Vasconcellos

The adaptation of urban spaces to cope with increased automobile traffic has been called the ‘building of automobile cities’. This is a vague and otherwise politically naive interpretation of these important changes in capitalist societies. Cars do not run on their own and one has to ask who is behind the wheels, and for what purposes. I argue that these spatial transformations are definite economic and political undertakings related to capitalist modernization processes, in which the middle classes, as preferential partners of ruling classes, play the most important role. In these contexts, the automobile turns out to be an essential means for the reproduction of the middle classes in their pursuit of social mobility. Therefore I argue that these large transformations should instead be seen as the ‘building of middle-class cities’. This paper is about how São Paulo was transformed into a middle-class city. In it I emphasize the period from 1960 to 1980, when the city population increased from 3.6 million to 8.5 million, and 1.6 million new automobiles were put into circulation. In this period Brazil experienced a highly dynamic capitalist modernization process, with high rates of GNP growth, under authoritarian (and often repressive) political rule. New middle-class sectors were generated, supported by the concentration of income and by their ideological commitment to the new regime. The city space was physically transformed to allow for a new pattern of circulation which was directly related to the new economic activities and the new lifestyle of these middle-class sectors, for whom the automobile became a vital means of social reproduction. The middle classes were represented, inside the state, by transportation planners who promoted the ideology of modernization. The space was then reshaped in a way which favored the circulation needs of the middle class population, in its prime role of driver, rather than the needs of the majority of the population, in their primary roles of pedestrian and captive public transportation user. Moreover, the mobility and fluidity needs of these selected middle-class sectors were pursued regardless of the safety and environmental consequences of the new circulation pattern. Similar processes can be identified in the developing world where other middle-class cities have been created. In spite of social and political differences, these processes share the objective of readapting space to ease the circulation of the social sectors which are relevant to economic accumulation and political legitimation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (27) ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Cardona ◽  
William Cuadrado

This work studies the attenuation by rain that occurs in the Caribbean region, specifically, in high frequency bands, considering that modern communication systems make greater use of satellite bands. In this sense, the methodology of the recommendation ITU 838 was used to calculate the radio attenuation by rain in the city of Cartagena (Colombia), for the range of 1-100 GHz, and the data provided by the Center of Oceanographic and Hydrographic Research - CIOH were used as atmospheric information sources. As a result, the attenuation for the first quarter of the analyzed years was observed to be low (2.0x10-2 dB/km), growing in the following months until October (1.0x10-1 dB/km), when it decreases again. This information is particularly useful in the naval field, especially, in relation to the use of these frequencies for information exchange.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandro Parrinello ◽  
Francesca Picchio ◽  
Anna Dell’Amico ◽  
Chiara Malusardi

The walls of Cartagena de Indias through methodological experimentation and survey systems protocols. Digital tools comparison for the study of the Antonelli’s defense systemCartagena de Indias, one of the main Spanish commercial ports in the Caribbean Sea, was strategically built on a system of islands and peninsulas that formed a lacustrine system along the coast of Tierra Firme, known today as Colombia. For several centuries, Cartagena fortifications have been at the fore-front of Spanish military technologies. This site became the scene of action of the main military engineers at the service of the Spanish crown. In 1586 Battista Antonelli received from King Philipe II the task to design this monumental defensive system. The first project for the Cartagena wall enclosure (1595) is due to Battista and it was continued and modified by his nephew Cristoforo Roda. Nowadays, Antonelli walls still fit into the urban fabric of the city and delineate the perimeter of the historic city. The research project follows the previous research experiments conducted by the Lab DAda-LAB of the University of Pavia in the territory of Panama for the study of the Antonelli fortifications systems of Portobello and San Lorenzo del Chagres. It concerned an extensive action aimed at the documentation and to the study of the entire fortified system of the historic center of Cartagena. The perimeter walls of the old city and the fort of San Felipe de Barajas have been documented through the use of a mobile laser scanner that uses SLAM technology, evaluating the most effective performed strategies for fast survey activities. In parallel, a more specific action was conducted on the portion of the Baluarte of Santa Catalina walls, where it was possible to give a comparison between different methods and instruments, in order to verify the reliability of the 3D databases. Analysis protocols have been developed for the documentation and study of the defensive system. The paper will highlight the construction technologies that qualify the fortresses of Cartagena de Indias and the results obtained by the comparison between different data acquisition technologies to evaluate the quality of the models for the development of documentation strategies for heritage enhancement and protection.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document