scholarly journals FERNÁNDEZ GARAY, Ana; CENSABELLA, Marisa (eds.) (2009). Estudios fonológicos de continua dialectales: mapuche y wichí. Santa Rosa: Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, 224. Pp. 2

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
William Alfred Pickering

This book is a collection of articles dealing with the phonology and dialectology of Wichí (referred to in the past as Mataco) and Mapuzungun (also called Mapudungun or Mapuche), two unrelated Amerindian languages of South America. Published by the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, it is the end result of a three-year project funded by the Argentine government, the purpose of which was to study dialect variation in these languages. All of the authors are specialists in the indigenous languages of Argentina, and all but one are teachers or researchers at Argentine universities or research institutions. Adopting the “dynamic synchrony” approach of the French functionalist school as a methodological-theoretical perspective, the book pretends to give an overall view of the dialectical continua of the Argentine varieties of the languages under study and at the same time to provide some understanding of sociolinguistic variation and ongoing phonological change in both languages. The four articles on Wichí and the single article on Mapuzungun found in this volume, while falling short of constituting a systematic survey, make significant steps toward achieving these difficult and important goals.

1893 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 401-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl A. von Zittel

In a spirited treatise on the ‘Origin of our Animal World’ Prof. L. Rütimeyer, in the year 1867, described the geological development and distribution of the mammalia, and the relationship of the different faunas of the past with each other and with that now existing. Although, since the appearance of that masterly sketch the palæontological material has been, at least, doubled through new discoveries in Europe and more especially in North and South America, this unexpected increase has in most instances only served as a confirmation of the views which Rutimeyer advanced on more limited experience. At present, Africa forms the only great gap in our knowledge of the fossil mammalia; all the remaining parts of the world can show materials more or less abundantly, from which the course followed by the mammalia in their geological development can be traced with approximate certainty.


Significance European academic and research institutions have built increasingly close links with China over the past two decades. By doing so they have increased their incomes and research output, and reduced their costs. Benefits have been emphasised and the potential risks downplayed, both at the institutional and government levels. Impacts National governments will face calls to compensate for the reduction in funding and fees from China. European independent research on China will grow increasingly difficult. Researchers and institutions must prepare for potential Chinese sanctions in the future.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Robert Alexander Pyron

We live in an unprecedented age for systematics and biodiversity studies. Ongoing global change is leading to a future with reduced species richness and ecosystem function (Pereira, Navarro, & Martins, 2012). Yet, we know more about biodiversity now than at any time in the past. For squamates in particular, we have range maps for all species (Roll et al., 2017), phylogenies containing estimates for all species (Tonini, Beard, Ferreira, Jetz, & Pyron, 2016), and myriad ecological and natural-history datasets for a large percentage of species (Meiri et al., 2013; Mesquita et al., 2016). For neotropical snakes, a recent synthesis of museum specimens and verified localities offers a fine-grained perspective on their ecogeographic distribution in Central and South America, and the Caribbean (Guedes et al., 2018).


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 2277-2308
Author(s):  
R. de Jong ◽  
L. von Gunten ◽  
A. Maldonado ◽  
M. Grosjean

Abstract. High-resolution reconstructions of climate variability that cover the past millennia are necessary to improve the understanding of natural and anthropogenic climate change across the globe. Although numerous records are available for the mid- and high-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, global assessments are still compromised by the scarcity of data from the Southern Hemisphere. This is particularly the case for the tropical and subtropical areas. In addition, high elevation sites in the South American Andes may provide insight into the vertical structure of climate change in the mid-troposphere. This study presents a 3000 yr long austral summer (November to February) temperature reconstruction derived from the 210Pb and 14C dated organic sediments of Laguna Chepical (32°16' S/70°30' W, 3050 m a.s.l.), a high-elevation glacial lake in the subtropical Andes of central Chile. Scanning reflectance spectroscopy in the visible light range provided the spectral index R570/R630, which reflects the clay mineral content in lake sediments. For the calibration period (AD 1901–2006), the R570/R630 data were regressed against monthly meteorological reanalysis data, showing that this proxy was strongly and significantly correlated with mean summer (NDJF) temperatures (R3yr = −0.63, padj = 0.01). This calibration model was used to make a quantitative temperature reconstruction back to 1000 BC. The reconstruction (with a model error RMSEPboot of 0.33 °C) shows that the warmest decades of the past 3000 yr occurred during the calibration period. The 19th century (end of the Little Ice Age (LIA)) was cool. The prominent warmth reconstructed for the 18th century, which was also observed in other records from this area, seems systematic for subtropical and southern South America but remains difficult to explain. Except for this warm period, the LIA was generally characterized by cool summers. Back to AD 1400, the results from this study compare remarkably well to low altitude records from the Chilean Central Valley and Southern South America. However, the reconstruction from Laguna Chepical does not show a warm Medieval Climate Anomaly during the 12–13th century, which is consistent with records from tropical South America. The Chepical record also indicates substantial cooling prior to 800 BC. This coincides with well-known regional as well as global glacier advances which have been attributed to a grand solar minimum. This study thus provides insight into the climatic drivers and temperature patterns in a region for which currently very few data are available. It also shows that since ca AD 1400, long term temperature patterns were generally similar at low and high altitudes in central Chile.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Feline Freier ◽  
Marcia Vera Espinoza

The COVID-19 pandemic has put into sharp relief the need for socio-economic integration of migrants, regardless of their migratory condition. In South America, more than five million Venezuelan citizens have been forced to migrate across the region in the past five years. Alongside other intra-regional migrants and refugees, many find themselves in precarious legal and socio-economic conditions, as the surge in numbers has led to xenophobic backlashes in some of the main receiving countries, including Chile and Peru. In this paper, we explore in how far the COVID-19 crisis has offered stakeholders an opportunity to politically reframe migration and facilitate immigrant integration or, rather, further propelled xenophobic sentiments and the socio-economic and legal exclusion of immigrants.


2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Jelin

Opening the newspapers in South America at the beginning of the 21st century can feel like being caught in static time: so many of the contemporary news stories point to the persistence of a past which is definitely not "over". The attempts to try Pinochet, the continuing searches for the disappeared, or a child of murdered parents' struggle to discover their real identity, the Truth Commission in Peru - across the continent, societies continue to come to terms with the past. This book provides an introduction to the complexity of ideas and approaches which have been brought to bear on memory and its importance for understanding social and political realities. Elizabeth Jelin draws on European and North American debates and theories to explore the ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well social and political cleavages. The book exposes the enduring consequences of repression and enriches our understanding of the conflicted and contingent nature of memory.


Author(s):  
Charles Darwin

Introduction When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me...


Author(s):  
Tom Conley

Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the ‘other’ and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau’s writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing (écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.


Author(s):  
Grion Renato Stephan

This concluding chapter examines electric energy arbitration in Brazil. An appropriately developed electric sector is a key element for any country's economic and social growth. It requires an adequate volume of investment, either domestic or foreign, in order to meet the regularly increasing needs of all stakeholders involved in such market, including the population. Brazil's electricity sector is the largest in South America and plays an important role in the country's economy. Moreover, Brazil has its own and well-functioning electricity generation system. To keep up with the development and needs of such a system, the Brazilian legal and regulatory framework has undergone through important changes over the past 25 years or so. A well-established and complex set of rules and regulations is now in place; in this context, arbitration has been steadily introduced as an alternative method to resolve the disputes arising in that sector. The chapter then provides an overview of the electric energy market in Brazil, with some historical milestones and details on the steps taken for its modernization, as well as its current structure. It also analyses how arbitration has now become an important part of this complex system, in which a variety of actors operate at different levels.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document