Fundamental Preoccupation Research Articles

FONOTECA ARHIVEI DE FOLCLOR „VASILE ADĂSCĂLIȚEI” – UN TEZAUR AL „CÂNTECELOR DE DEMULT”

Vasile Adăscăliței (1929–2007), ethnologist, professor at the University of Iași, was particularly interested, during his teaching, research and publishing activity carried out for half a century, in customs related to the New Year, more precisely to the 12-day period between Christmas and Epiphany, i.e. customs involving groups of masked people and, mainly, the folk theatre of scholarly influence, in which he did pioneering work, being the first to dedicate a study to the subject. He also approached other customs, like those related to deathwatch. Nevertheless, the fundamental preoccupation of his activity was the foundation of a folklore archive. For half a century, starting with 1950, while being a student, he had continuously enriched the archive of the Folklore Seminar within the University of Iași with more than 40,000 items, including ca. 400 magnetic bands of recordings made during field research and 4,000 files of manuscript notes from indirect surveys. These two collections were accompanied by ca. 1,000 black-and-white photographs and slides. Since 2014, we have digitized the audio recordings of this folklore archive and named it “Vasile Adăscăliței”, in memory of its founder. Between 2018 and 2023 eight volumes had been released, grouped thematically, each of them accompanied by a CD. The first volume, “Conscription Songs”, was dedicated to the Centenary of the Great Union, and it was followed by volume 2 - “Longing and Mourning Songs”, volume 3 – “Old Songs”, volume 4 – “Deathwatch Games and Songs”, volume 5 – “Wedding Songs and Customs”, volume 6 – “Old Songs and Customs”, volume 7 – “New Year’s Customs”; a new volume, issued this year, includes “Charms and Beliefs”. All eight volumes sum up almost 1,500 selections recorded between 1966 and 1983, stored in the folklore archive founded over half a century ago by Professor Vasile Adăscăliței.

The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes

The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes

Advancing Folkloristics

Advancing Folkloristics

Os desastres ambientais de Mariana e Brumadinho em face ao estado socioambiental brasileiro

O rompimento da barragem de rejeitos de mineração em Mariana, no estado brasileiro de Minas Gerais, no dia 13 de novembro de 2015, acendeu o alerta para as questões de segurança envolvendo a atividade minerária no Brasil. Mesmo após este acidente de proporções gigantescas, o país vivenciou novo evento dramático com o rompimento da barragem na cidade de Brumadinho, no mesmo estado de Minas Gerais. A partir destes dois episódios, o objetivo geral do presente estudo é analisar a incompatibilidade entre a preservação do meio ambiente e o desenvolvimento econômico do país, de maneira a identificar no Estado brasileiro o Estado Socioambiental de Direito que falha no seu objetivo de preservação ou o Estado desenvolvimentista que privilegia o crescimento econômico a qualquer custo. Depreendeu-se da pesquisa efetuada que as ações (e omissões) do poder público brasileiro em relação à atividade minerária demonstram uma preocupação fundamental com o desenvolvimento econômico do país em detrimento dos aspectos de preservação ambiental e qualidade social. A metodologia utilizada para o desenvolvimento da pesquisa foi o método indutivo.

The Centrality of Taxation to Social Policy

The article reviews the limited existing social policy literature on taxation and sets out a case for the incorporation of the study of taxation into the accepted remit of social policy. Social policy has historically been concerned with the services and benefits which flow from public expenditure, and people’s experiences of them, rather than with taxation, and the contributions by individual researchers have tended to remain marginal to the main focus of social policy. The article offers a speculative account as to why taxation has remained peripheral to social policy and presents three arguments for the mainstreaming of tax in social policy’s domain of study. These concern the role of taxation in shaping the distribution of resources, a fundamental pre-occupation of social policy; the contribution social policy scholars can make to shaping a new discourse surrounding taxation, foregrounding issues of equity and need; and how social policy’s engagement with taxation can influence the politics of the welfare state.

How Borges Wrote by Daniel Balderston

MLR, .,   Petrarch is, for the Goritian, above all the author of the Triumphi, and primarily a philosopher, whose fundamental preoccupation is to locate the ubi consistam: the stable place where authentic ‘persuasion’ can be achieved. e difference between Petrarch and Michelstaedter (according to Caliaro) is that, for the former, stability can be projected only in the dimension of religious transcendence, whereas for the latter it is only in the complete possession of the present that absolute value can be found. e fih and final chapter of the work is devoted to a thematic comparison between Michelstaedter and the Triestine writer Scipio Slataper (–). It is not known whether the two knew each other, although both attended, in partially coinciding years, the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence, and the latter reviewed the first volume of Michelstaedter’s writings when it was published in . One point of contact between the two is, once more, the interpretation of Christianism and, in particular, of the figure of Jesus and his teaching, seen as attributing value to a life deemed good precisely because it embraces the present, transcending itself not towards a distant future, but in the absolute immanence of giving to the other. Both reject the enslavement of man to society; but, if Michelstaedter comes to a complete rejection of society, Slataper instead maintains his commitment to practical activity and engagement for the common good. In Slataper’s words: ‘Quello che è stato disastro per Papini, Michelstaedter — felicità per noi. [. . .] Ci siamo accorti che nel lavoro, nell’esprimerci nel sodo, c’era una felicità.’ Michelstaedter had killed himself on  October . He was barely twentythree years old. U  O G S How Borges Wrote. By D B. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. . ix+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Jorge Luis Borges is one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To know how he wrote would be fascinating. is book by Daniel Balderston does not disappoint. It is about the method of writing, the manuscripts and other written evidence, not the motivation. e one-word chapter titles set the framework for this volume of Genetic Criticism based on the study of more than  Borges manuscripts: Reading, Jottings, Notebooks, Possibilities, Copies, Typescripts, Revisions, Fragments. ere are no genes or chromosomes present, but rather an attempt to analyse the metaphorical DNA of Borges’s creations, to explain his compositional practices and the genesis of his masterpieces. Techniques include analysis of Borges’s handwriting and of markings he made on his own manuscripts, as well as marginalia he le on his reading material. Borges donated hundreds of books, written by many different authors, to the Argentine National Library, of which he was a former director. He had le notes in the margins and on the backs of many of these, oen with precise references to other  Reviews volumes including page numbers. For instance, in his edition of e Essays of Oscar Wilde he writes ‘Carlyle once . . . ’, referring to a particular page from Wilde’s essay on Coleridge (p. ). is is a source for Borges’s own essay on William Beckford’s Vathek, where he recounts a joke attributed to Carlyle about the nature of biography. Balderston stresses the importance of the work of the two librarians Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez, who previously deciphered bibliographical references that Borges le in his reading material. Balderston examines many important Borges manuscripts and notebooks, particularly from the years –, consulting both originals and facsimiles or photocopies . ese include some of his most canonical works. I made ample use of my magnifying glass while examining the facsimiles, but Balderston provides either linear or diplomatic transcriptions of many excerpts. His book is dense, sometimes stylistically complex, but it is full of fresh insights into the relationship between Borges’s reading material and the multiple versions of the texts he created. He sees Borges’s use of notes in the margins of manuscripts and on the covers of reading material as part of a mnemonic exercise, a sort of ‘art of memory’ (p. ). Balderston mines the vast amount of visible information—handwriting, symbols, and other markings le by Borges—for evidence. e invisible, the motivation, the secrets, are not his main focus. ‘Sentirse en...

Per una vita che sia vita: studi su Carlo Michelstaedter by Ilvano Caliaro

 Reviews is is a very interesting book not only for scholars of d’Annunzio and Pascoli, but for anyone interested in fin-de-siècle Italian culture and in the ways in which philosophical debates impact on artists’ aesthetics. U  Z S B Per una vita che sia vita: studi su Carlo Michelstaedter. By I C. Florence: Olschki. . vii+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. [e following review was inadvertently printed in an uncorrected state in the April issue of this volume, and is here repeated with the required alterations in place.] e starting point for this book is the idea that Carlo Michelstaedter (Gorizia, –) represents at the same time a solitary voice, speaking ‘a se stesso e per se stesso’ (p. ), and an original synthesis of many voices coming from the past, some very ancient and some more recent. ese voices resonate in La persuasione e la rettorica, but also in a vast mass of diverse materials which the premature and tragic death of the author le in various stages of incompleteness. Among these voices, Ilvano Caliaro identifies in particular those of Socrates, Jesus, Petrarch, and Tolstoy as being more salient in the composite polyphony of Michelstaedter’s thought. Within the cohort of the philosophers, a privileged place is reserved for Socrates, whose teaching is fundamentally a reawakening of the consciousness, aimed at achieving not only a new capacity to understand, but also a transformation of the way of living itself. It is the role of the (true) philosopher to lead the interlocutor to become aware of himself, to generate his own wisdom, and to identify the individual value on which a life worth living may be built. is is the meaning of ‘persuasion’ for Michelstaedter: that is, the state of someone who, first of all, refuses to create or accept for reality a meaning that it does not have, and then—guided by reason— pursues the absolute good, namely justice. ‘Man is, as opposed to merely existing, when he is “just”’ (p. ). e genuine philosopher is in unavoidable antithesis to the ‘professional’ philosophers (best represented by Aristotle), the ‘builders of systems’ or encyclopedias who, by pursuing a false and mercenary semblance of wisdom, create a model of a man who does not ask why, does not reason, but obeys, and avoids the challenge of truth. Tolstoy represents for Michelstaedter, at the same time, the ultimate proof that there should be no difference between art, life, and thought, and the example of someone who slowly and painfully manages to free himself from all social, ideological , and emotional constraints to reach a state of personal freedom, coinciding with universal love for the whole of humanity. For Tolstoy what made this transformation possible was the encounter with Jesus, not a figure of transcendence but a ‘maestro di vita’, an educator on the path from ‘rettorica’ to ‘persuasione’. Similarly profound is the impact of Jesus on Michelstaedter, probably mediated via the reading of Tolstoy (in particular What I Believe); the message that he extracts from Christ’s teaching, and even more from his life, is uncompromising: only those who are prepared to lose their (inauthentic) life will find their (true) life. MLR, .,   Petrarch is, for the Goritian, above all the author of the Triumphi, and primarily a philosopher, whose fundamental preoccupation is to locate the ubi consistam: the stable place where authentic ‘persuasion’ can be achieved. e difference between Petrarch and Michelstaedter (according to Caliaro) is that, for the former, stability can be projected only in the dimension of religious transcendence, whereas for the latter it is only in the complete possession of the present that absolute value can be found. e fih and final chapter of the work is devoted to a thematic comparison between Michelstaedter and the Triestine writer Scipio Slataper (–). It is not known whether the two knew each other, although both attended, in partially coinciding years, the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence, and the latter reviewed the first volume of Michelstaedter’s writings when it was published in . One point of contact between the two is, once more, the interpretation of Christianism and, in particular, of the figure of Jesus and his teaching, seen as attributing value to...

The Environmental Disasters of Mariana and Brumadinho and the Brazilian Social Environmental Law State

The disruption of a mining tailings dam in Mariana, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, on November 13, 2015, ignited the alert for safety issues involving mining activity in Brazil. Even after this accident of huge proportions, Brazil experienced a new dramatic event with the rupture of a dam in the city of Brumadinho, in the same state of Minas Gerais. From these two episodes, the general objective of the present study is to analyze the incompatibility between the preservation of the environment and the economic development of the country in order to identify the Brazilian Social Environmental Law State that fails in its objective of preservation or the developmental state that favors economic growth at any cost. It emerged from the research carried out that the actions (and omissions) of the Brazilian public power in relation to the mining activity show a fundamental preoccupation with the economic development to the detriment of the aspects of environmental preservation and social quality. The methodology used to develop the research was the inductive method operationalized by the reference technique, categories, operational concepts and bibliographic research.

Disrupting Nineteenth-Century Dichotomies of Gender: Reading and Imagination in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La madre Naturaleza

This essay contends that Emilia Pardo Bazán’s novel La madre Naturaleza (1887) reflects the author’s fundamental preoccupation with the state of women’s education in Spain. I argue that the narrative portrayal of the novel’s central character, Gabriel Pardo de la Lage, unravels nineteenth-century gendered assumptions of what—or who—constitutes an ideal reader. Despite his extensive rational education, Gabriel Pardo possesses an overactive imagination that, when read in conjunction with contemporary social commentaries of women’s education, emasculates the artilleryman. The novel demonstrates that neither reason nor imagination is indelibly linked to gender, thus problematizing nineteenth-century discourses precluding women from male-coded rational education, or instrucción .

Dilemmas and Delusions Bernard Shaw and Health

Beguiling a Victorian public obsessed with the pursuit of fitness, the International Health Exhibition opened in South Kensington in May 1884. Its expressed intent, to educate the public on a broad range of wellness topics, was greatly overshadowed by its dazzling display of proprietary medical commodities, salutary appliances, and faddish cures. While there were legitimate exhibits that dealt sincerely with issues of sanitation, hygiene, food, drink, and even child care, the event illuminated the extent to which personal and systemic therapeutic remedy and indeed health itself had become a lucrative industry. Less than three weeks before he joined the Fabian Society, the fledgling novelist Bernard Shaw visited one of the exhibition’s prominent attractions, Francis Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory, to be quantified and measured. Chart 3655, created on 16 August 1884, contains the following collected data:

Ugly Feelings (review)

SIANNE NGAI Ugly Feelings Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. x + 422 pp. M elville stands—not unlike the democratic god in “Knights and Squires”—at both the center and circumference of Sianne Ngai’s stunning and original study of the negative affects she terms “ugly feelings,” providing the book’s point of departure, the focus of its afterword, as well as a significant portion of the eclectic archive in between. Neither a book about Melville nor a series of readings in Melville, Ugly Feelings is in many ways a sustained reading-through Melville, a book that has less to do with Melville’s body of writing, as such, than with what that writing does and—more to the point—with what one can do with it. From its opening pages, Ugly Feelings unfolds “in Melvillean fashion,” in Ngai’s phrase, seeking out “affective gaps and illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity,” which she first roots in the affective and political “equivocality” of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Ngai 1). Naming both a “Bartlebyan affect” and a “Bartlebyan aesthetic,” Ngai then tracks what becomes a kind of Bartleby-effect through a wide-ranging archive of modern and postmodern fiction, poetry, film, television , and philosophy, all of which shares a fundamental preoccupation with the “suspended agency” and “emotional negativity” of the small subject: a figure epitomized in both Bartleby himself and in the Sub-Sub Librarian of Moby-Dick’s “Extracts.” In taking up the cause of “the administered world’s many Sub-Subs” (10), Ngai passes over the “rage-driven” Moby-Dick for what she describes as Melville’s more emotionally ambiguous works—Pierre, The Confidence-Man, “Bartleby”—to identify in them the thematic fixations and formal features that unite the affective and aesthetic registers of Melville’s work, while also developing out of these texts something more. Writing “in Melvillean fashion,” Ngai ultimately finds in Melville, not only her study’s chief aesthetic model, but also one of its principle theorists of affective ambiguity and—crucially—the unexpected political efficacy to be found in constructions of feelings that appear improper, fake, or simply ugly. Envy, irritation, anxiety, paranoia, and disgust, along with two feelings she names herself—“animatedness” and “stuplimity”—make up what Ngai calls her “bestiary” of weak and petty affects (Ngai 7). Distinguished by their nastiness as well as their seeming impotence, she argues, these feelings c 2012 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 70 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S R E V I E W nonetheless mediate in a significant way between the aesthetic and the political , providing something like an allegory for the shared passivity of the modern “administered” subject and of art in general in its “increasingly resigned and pessimistic relationship to political action” (3). Ngai bypasses better-known aesthetic emotions (sublimity, catharsis, sympathy) in pursuit of feelings which would seem far less productive, but which remain for her fundamentally social and material, bearing with them “a certain kind of historical truth” (5) as well as a particular political significance, however ambiguous and equivocal. For example, in Ngai’s analysis, envy is a feeling structured by fundamental inequalities that ought to disclose real historical conditions, but more often than not, envy ends up discrediting its subject politically— particularly when that subject is female—by turning back on the envious charges of pettiness and lack (35). Irritation, by contrast, initially appears as a feeling of weak intentionality and basic impropriety (irritation is always either more or less feeling about a situation than it demands), but linked in Ngai’s nuanced analysis to the physical experience of racialization that Frantz Fanon terms “epidermalization” (184), irritation emerges as a politically charged and strategically resistant affect in minority discourse (208). Ngai draws deeply on the work of theorists of aesthetics and politics— principally Fredric Jameson, along with Theodore Adorno and Raymond Williams—taking seriously their claims that both affective and aesthetic forms carry with them political and historical content. But even as she relies heavily on Jameson...

Placing economies: lessons from the Inuit about economics, time, and existence

Although geographers have recognized that economic systems are embedded in the particularities of place, much of the work on place in contemporary economic geography has limited itself either to the study of Western monetized economies or to the ways non-Western monetized economies are enmeshed in those of the West. Underlying such work is a preoccupation with the power of money to dissolve local economies and render them vulnerable to global forces. Although the local and global are entwined, in recognizing and exploring this relationship, economic geography has tended to privilege the global at the expense of the local, while in tandem demonstrating a fundamental preoccupation with Western, monetized economies. In this article I argue that a careful phenomenological analysis of places with distinctive economic practices can make significant contributions to our understandings of the assumptions that underpin global economic processes. Using the case of the Inuit, this article discusses some of the implications of presuming that economics and money are synonymous. The article explores how economic processes may be understood as manifestations of deeper spatio-temporal orderings that ultimately reflect embedded existential understandings. Through an exploration of the interrelations amongst the experience of place, perceptions of existence, and collective temporal orderings, it becomes apparent that existential notions of control are deeply inscribed within, and reproduced by, people's economic behaviors.

The Journal as a European Space in Post-War Paris: the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes and <i>Cahiers universitaires</i>, 1961-1963

This article examines the Federation des etudiants nationalistes (FEN) and its journal Cahiers universitaires between 1961 and 1963 in the context of post-war Parisian political and intellectual life. These dates encompass the launch of the journal and the loss of French Algeria - a fundamental preoccupation of the group. The group's militancy on behalf of the maintenance of France's three North African departements was interwoven with its far right political orientation and its striking conceptualisation of Europe . This article analyses five strands of discourse about Europe that recur in the journal: a Europe of nationalism, a Europe of imperialism, a Europe of hierarchy, a Europe defined against materialism, and a Europe of youth. I will argue that these different conceptions of Europe are closely interconnected.

RANDAL MAURICE JELKS. African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. xvii, 217. Cloth $60.00, paper $25.00., EMILYE CROSBY. A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill:

These two works represent the latest phase in scholarship on black communities in the twentieth century, both suggesting the continuing engagement of scholars with the problem of race in twentieth-century America. One is a study of a small black community in a medium-sized northern city during the first half of the century, and the other examines black activism in a predominantly black southern county during the second half of the century. Each was a successful dissertation at a leading university, and each is published by a respected university press—arguably the two academic presses that have contributed the most to the large number of historical monographs on American race relations in the last generation. But together the two books reflect some of the more serious shortcomings of scholarship and publishing on race in the past decade or so. Randall Maurice Jelks examines a tiny black community—less than 3,000 people for most of his period—from the perspective of “respectability,” a concern that Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham identified in 1993 as a fundamental preoccupation within turn-of-the-twentieth-century black communities. Focusing on respectability depends heavily on examining the behaviors of African Americans in churches, and Jelks seems most interested in what black congregations in Grand Rapids did. He says from the outset that he is not much interested in the issues raised by Joe W. Trotter on Milwaukee; John Bodnar and others on Pittsburgh; Kenneth Kusmer on Cleveland; Allan Spear, James Grossman, and Arnold Hirsch on Chicago; Gilbert Osofsky on New York; or August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and Thomas Sugrue on Detroit. One puts this book down without a clear sense of exactly where blacks in Grand Rapids lived in relation to their white neighbors, what they did for living and how their economic lives might have evolved over time, and how the precise nature of race discrimination unfolded in Grand Rapids. Jelks surely has the right to present the book he wants, but he has done so at the expense of connecting what he knows about Grand Rapids to the issues that scholars who went before him have identified as the salient contexts for the northern black experience. What a curious reader might give for a map showing where blacks lived and worshipped or a table or two profiling economic realities. Even if the pursuit of respectability is worthy of being a dominant theme in the history of Grand Rapids, informed readers need to know how respectability shaped blacks' economic opportunities, political rights, and the use of space. This thin effort fails to meet that need, and the underanalyzed content of the commitment to respectability is insufficient to teach us much about black Grand Rapids. Jelks vaguely suggests that the Grand Rapids black community underwent dramatic alterations as a result of the post–World War II migrations, but he does not pursue the specifics, which means he does not connect to the work of Hirsch and Sugrue.

"The Scholar-Gipsy" and the Continuous Life of Victorian Poetry

My title alludes to one of the most compelling volumes of poetry published in the last quarter century, Mark Strand's Continuous Life (1990). Strand has in common with Matthew Arnold a fundamental preoccupation with the sheer presence and persistence of poetic discourse as a sign of the continuity of human culture even in periods vertiginous change seems dominant. But trust in this continuity does not go unshaken in either poet. In Arnold's case--and also in Strand's--it is the very experience of shaken trust that seems to generate rehabilitated confidence in the poetic enterprise. question I want to address in this essay is elementary: does Arnold's The Scholar-Gipsy constitute such a reaffirmation? Certainly, the critical commentary that has developed around the The Scholar-Gipsy sees the poem, at worst, as a defeat of the poetic spirit, or, at best, a deferral of its claims. (1) These views seems to me to occlude much that is important in the poem and much that underscores its celebration of the continuous life of poetry. Though I do not mean to pursue any extended comparison of Arnold and Strand in the development of this essay there are some moments of focus and foregrounding in Strand's poetry that provide useful perspectives on how The Scholar-Gipsy envisages the life of poetry. Strand's Continuous Life includes a poem called The History of Poetry. Strand, of course, is not dealing with the academic subject but with whatever creative action, at some point, made language a tuned instrument and kept in tune, according to our best knowledge, ever since. But, like Arnold, Strand can imagine calamity impending in the history of poetry: Our masters are gone now and if they returned Who among us would hear them ? (11. 1-2) (2) Strand adopts a shimmering irony in his poem through his suggestion that our very performance as readers of the poem we are looking at retrieves the life of poetry even in the absence of our masters. Strand's ultimate faith in poetry's continuous life is elaborated in one of his other brilliant books, A Blizzard of One (2001). There he recounts an evening when a snowflake, a blizzard of one, enters his room and makes him look up That's all / There was to it (ll. 4-5), except the feeling that this piece of the storm, despite melting, is full of meaning. It intimates That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say: 'It's time. air is ready. sky has an opening.' (11. 10-11) (3) same volume, in an elegy for Joseph Brodsky, imagines a place where the unsayable, / Finally, once more is (ll. 5-6). As with Arnold, Strand seems especially moved to affirm the continuous life of poetry in moments of mourning for a deceased poet. Though the poet in question might be a contemporary, there is always some suggestion that the elegiac words are also uttered in commemoration of poets whose words reach us from the far past. In what may be the single most powerful poem in Continuous Life, Strand imagines the very origin of poetry in Alone. He pictures Orpheus sitting in sunken silence, nearly felled by grief. He at last utters, like the tricked Tithonus, both the pain of his loss and the wonder of his beloved Eurydice as he remembers The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything / Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come (ll. 1112). His words attempt to make the air clear just enough for her, the lost bride, To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light. As everyone knows, this was the first great poem. (ll. 18-20) sense of poetic history conveyed by both Arnold and Strand suggests that the first great poem, whatever was, echoes and re-echoes through all great poems in a continuous and imperishable utterance. No matter the unpoetic contingencies of a particular time or place. …

THE GREAT DEBATE AND THE ORIGINS OF SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The fundamental preoccupation with race in later historical writing in South Africa has its origins in the Great Debate between liberals and their enemies in the early nineteenth century. Standard overviews of South African historiography date the emergence of racially structured histories to the second half of the nineteenth century. For Saunders, the making of the South African past and its thematic ordering in terms of race only began in the 1870s ‘when the first major historian [G. M. Theal] began to write his history’. Prior to Theal's monumental efforts, ‘only a few amateur historians had turned their hands to the writing of the history of particular areas or topics’. Likewise, in Smith's analysis, also published in 1988, the construction of South African history in terms of race is seen almost exclusively as the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a very brief introductory section, Smith suggests that what little historical writing there was before the middle of the nineteenth century is scarcely to be taken seriously, and his study offers no more than a bare outline of historiographical developments before Theal and his heirs.

Optimal Asset Allocation Towards the End of the Life Cycle: To Annuitize or Not to Annuitize?

Most individuals must decide how much, if any, of their wealth should be annuitized at about the time they retire. For many people a large portion of wealth is forcefully annuitized, for example pensions and government social security. In other cases and with remaining marketable wealth consumers have discretion in the matter. In its most general form, purchasing an immediate life annuity involves paying a non-refundable lump sum to an insurance company in exchange for a guaranteed constant life-long consumption stream that can not be outlived. The natural alternative to annuitization is individual strategic asset allocation amongst the various investment classes, such as equity, fixed income and real estate, together with a fixed periodic consumption from capital, dividends and interest. Unfortunately, this do it yourself strategy runs the financial risk of under-funding retirement in the event of long-run inferior investment returns in conjunction with unexpected human longevity. This paper develops a normative model that will provide a relevant framework for the choice between asset allocation and discretionary annuitization at retirement. The paradigm will be rich enough to accommodate the altruistic desire for bequest as well as the fundamental pre-occupation with consumption security. Our methodology deviates somewhat from the traditional financial economic approach to asset allocation and insurance, where the investor in question is assumed to maximize a well defined microeconomic utility function over all states of nature. Rather, we focus on the probability of consumption shortfall as the implicit risk measure and operational objective function. Our model allows individuals to input their own parameters for stochastic market performance and obtain the optimal age at which to annuitize, based on a probabilistic tolerance level. As a byproduct, using our own estimates, we are able to confirm the intuition shared by many in the financial planning community. Namely, given the empirical evidence on the cost structure of annuities, the adverse selection implicit in annuity mortality tables together with the long- run propensity for equities to outperform fixed income investments, otherwise known as time-diversification, it makes very little sense for consumers under the age of 80 to annuitize any additional marketable wealth. In essence, the rate of return from a life annuity can easily be beaten using alternative investment assets. The exception to this rule is the event in which (mean reverting) interest rates are extraordinarily high or when consumers have private (asymmetric) health information that would lead them to believe that they are much healthier than average, both of which rarely occur.

The Center Cannot Hold: Historians and the Suburbs

In 1962 Sam Bass Warner, Jr., published an important book about suburbanization in late nineteenth-century Boston. Like most influential books, it was timely in its subject, and Warner's scholarly study might be supposed to have built upon the interest that was being generated by numerous popular analyses of contemporary suburbanization and suburban life in post—World War II America. One can indeed find in Streetcar Suburbs the same fundamental preoccupation with the shallowness of communal life and similar diagnoses of the sprawl of single-family homes in homogeneous and militantly residential areas on the periphery of the city, as one finds in say, William H. Whyte's 1956 critique, The Organization Man.' Yet Warner's book was not part of, and did not initiate, a new genre of historical suburban studies. Instead, it served as one of the essential founding texts of what came to be known as the “new urban history”—a large number of scholarly attempts to examine the character and structure of life at the center of the developing big cities of industrializing America. Not the “crabgrass frontier” but the “urban frontier” defined the territory of historical adventure during the 1960s. The metaphor is not, and was not then, entirely an academic one. In 1961 the new President of the United States had called for a “new frontier” of public initiative, and planner Charles Abrams helped his immediate successor expand and locate that initiative with his book, The City Is the Frontier. Without entirely losing interest in the suburbs, scholars, policymakers, and citizens of various kinds suddenly realized the importance of understanding the city and its history.

Genealogical Archeology: Black Women Writers in the 1980’s and the Search for Legacy

This essay endeavours to assess the role of black women writers on the American literary scene, and the distinctive quality of their voices. It examines the claims they are making, the way they define their tasks and their artistic strategies. The search for the legacy is seen as a fundamental preoccupation. Alice Walker's In Search of their Mother's Gardens is chosen to illustrate the quest, enunciating as it does the principles of an inquiry into the past and into the dialectics of womanhood and blackness.

Wittgenstein on Doubting and Groundless Believing

Wittgenstein is recorded in the published Lectures on Religious Belief as having once said, It might come out in Mr. Lewy saying: 'Wittgenstein is trying to undermine reason', and this wouldn't be false (1967:64). This is heady. That is radical. Therefore, it is difficult to accept. Of course, that remark has a context-a context of where such questions about the nature of reason, the claim to reason, and the claim of reason arise. Yet, this is a theme which emerges strongly in the last notebooks of his life, now published as On Certainty, and the implications for understanding religious belief are unmistakably important. While a fundamental preoccupation of the Philosophical Investigations is How can I know that I mean something when I speak, a fundamental preoccupation of On Certainty is How can I realize lived knowledge, reasonableness, and belief?