“Their debts follow them into the afterlife”: German Settlers, Ethnographic Knowledge, and the Forging of Coffee Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala

German coffee planters in nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala were also ethnographers, archaeologists, and geographers who published their works in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. Their published works, as well as coffee plantation records, government correspondence, judicial records and other archival materials reveal how German coffee planters-cum-ethnographers drew upon ethnographic knowledge and representations to forge a reliable labor force. Like ethnographers in Britain's colonies, German settlers in Alta Verapaz understood the potential symmetry between ethnography and the governance of indigenous peoples. Their ethnographic knowledges also push us to reconsider distinctions drawn between German cosmopolitan ethnographic traditions and British functionalist ones and demonstrate how ethnographic knowledge and cultural difference could be deployed to forge new kinds of racial capitalism. In Guatemala, the intimate relationship between the rise of capitalism and ethnography shaped the anti-communism of mid-twentieth-century anthropology in the region.

Symmetry and asymmetry nonlinear modes in dual cylinder waveguide shells coupled by a rotating double-well connection

We study the fundamental nonlinear modes in a dual-cylinder waveguide shell, which features a self-focusing Kerr effect, coupled by a double-well connection. This double-well connection is twisted by a pitch rate and creates a spatial dependent linear mixing, which plays the role of an effective rotating double-well potential. Symmetry transition between the waveform and the power distribution of the fundamental nonlinear modes in this system can be induced both by the total power and by the rotation speed of the connection. Four types of modes — wave symmetry and power symmetry (WSPS), wave symmetry and power asymmetry (WSPA), wave asymmetry and power symmetry (WAPS) and wave asymmetry and power asymmetry (WAPA) — are found from the system. The dependence of these modes on the total power of the light field, the rotation speed and the coupling strength of the connection are systematically studied through the paper. The finding of this paper may offer potential applications in fabrication of new types of nonlinear all-optical devices.

Potential Symmetry Studies on a Rotating Fluid System

A rotational fluid model which can be used to describe broad vortical flows ranging from large scale to the atmospheric mesoscale and the oceanic submesoscale is studied by the symmetry group theory. After introducing one scalar-, two vector-, and two tensor potentials, we find that the Lie symmetries of the extended system include many arbitrary functions ofzand{z,t}. The obtained Lie symmetries are used to find some types of exact solutions. One of exact solutions can be used to qualitatively describe the three-dimensional structure of hurricanes.

Nonlocal Symmetries of Systems of Evolution Equations

We prove that any potential symmetry of a system of evolution equations reduces to a Lie symmetry through a nonlocal transformation of variables. This fact is in the core of our approach to computation of potential and more general nonlocal symmetries of systems of evolution equations having nontrivial Lie symmetry. Several examples are considered.