Heterodox Groups Research Articles

Accounting for e-commerce: abstractions, virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital

This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics, consultants, journalists and practitioners, abstractions demonstrated considerable agency in the construction of e-commerce, and were used in an attempt to demonstrate that a new, and potentially hyper-profitable, form of capitalism was being born. This paper undertakes a critical evaluation of these processes and draws attention to the neglected role of the cultural circuit of capital and a range of practical knowledges that are continually being revised and which we argue are equally constitutive of e-commerce. While it is easy to dismiss the promises of e-commerce as so much hyperbole, particularly in the wake of the dot.com crash, we argue that the success of e-commerce is signaled by the fact that it has lost much of its rhetorical power and has faded into the business background. E-commerce now constitutes an increasingly ambient set of technologies and practices.

Mission as Factor of Change in Turkey (nineteenth to first half of twentieth century)

This article explores the complex role Protestant missionaries played in late Ottoman Asia Minor. For several generations they were important, even if today almost forgotten, actors of social and mental change. They succeeded in establishing autonomous schools, hospitals and factories not only in the capital, but also in the provinces. They had a vision of integrating minorities into an egalitarian pluralist society which was diametrically opposed to the ideas of the ruling groups and the nationalists. Instead of homogenizing society and strengthening its (Turco-)Muslim unity, missions were differentiating society in religious, ethnic and social terms. Protestant missions supported religious minorities such as the Armenians and Assyrians, heterodox groups such as the Alevis and Yezidis and the poorer classes, but could not win over the state, which was based on the support of the Sunn I majority and saw the missions' successful puritan and liberal modernity as a threat. Even if during and after World War I the missionaries' human networks and social visions tragically broke down, their strong contribution to modern education in Turkey remained.

Secta : de la ligne de conduite au groupe hétérodoxe

From opinion to heresy : the semantic evolution of the word « secta », from its origins to the Early Middle Ages The word "secta", originally devoid of negative connotations, long referred to a line of intellectual or moral conduct, particularly in philosophy. Christians gave the term a religious overtone by using it, adjoined to the calque "haeresis", to translate the Greek "hairèsis", used even in the New Testament to mean dissenting or heterodox groups. "Secta" suggested the deviation and indiscipline of a circle placing itself outside the Catholic Church. This semantic shift towards the modern idea of a « sect » was for a long time incidental, until the adoption of Christianity as a State religion (391-392) officialized it. Classical pluralism, which considered the variety of « sects » as a sign of intellectual health, was thus replaced by an exclusive religion imposing an indisputable dogma. "Secta" tended to become a synonym of "haeresis", and its use in a non-pejorative sense was limited to science.

Communalism and the state in Iraq: the Yazidi Kurds, c.1869–1940

The Yazidis are a Kurdish heterodox group settled in the province of Mosul. They represent an interesting case study for the development of communalism in the heterogeneous social fabric of northern Iraq. This article analyses cultural difference, intergroup relations and processes of nation building as they affected and articulated various manifestations of Yazidi identity under the political modernization of the late Ottoman and mandatory periods.' The Iraqi Yazidis constituted the second largest non-Muslim group living in the Mosul province. They were settled in the two main enclaves of Jabal Sinjar and Shaikhan: the former is a mountainous area located in the middle of the northern Jazira south-west of the city of Mosul, the latter is a transitional zone between the Mosul plain and the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. As a community the Yazidi Kurds functioned within several often overlapping frames of reference: they were a tribe, a religious community, and an economic group whose members were mainly agriculturalists and cattle breeders. They also shared language and racial affiliation; all the Iraqi Yazidis were Kurds and spoke Kurdish as their first language. Thus individuals operated within a variety of contexts which served different types of action: the family, the clan, the tribal group, the religious polity and the wider ethnic community.2 This article concentrates on Yazidi tribal, religious and ethnic identities as sources of communal mobilization which provided a continuous interaction between the members of the group and the surrounding environment. The development of socio-economic and political solidarities that crossed communal boundaries was an important dimension of a continuous process of exchange and strategic negotiation which occurred between the Iraqi Yazidis and the cultural, socio-economic and political spheres within which they operated. In particular, the complex patterns of socio-economic and political identification which developed among the community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were closely related to the impact of state power. After the appointment of Midhat Pasha to the

The English school on the frontiers of international society: a hermeneutic recollection

. . . it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Hannah ArendtIt is almost two decades ago that the Review published Roy Jones' famous ‘case for closure’ against what he christened the English school of international relations. While that case was couched in an anxious foreboding that the school was ‘still in its prime’, that its bonds ‘are proving much too strong’, and that ‘young recruits are constantly coming forward’, it arguably registered a growing sense at the time that its target was a safe one, a spent force — one whose attraction defied explanation. For the work of the English school was a ‘sterile regime’. It lacked intellectual coherence, rigour, passion, and acquaintance with such important social-scientific fields as economics. Whether Jones had cast his polemical net too widely over a heterodox group, or missed the mark with his criticisms, the absence of any spirited, sustained reply along these lines seems, in retrospect, to reinforce the impression that the approach identified most closely with Martin Wight and Hedley Bull had run out of steam. It had made little impression in the United States. In British circles it had become the faintly embarrassing traditionalism which scholars were obliged to overcome, a synonym for scholarly provincialism, one that engaged the world from such insular vantage points as the common room of the London School of Economics. It stood accused of inhibiting access to the fruits of American social science while inclining, at bottom, to the same political realism that had predominated in the U.S. The mostly unspoken accusation of anachronism has never gone away.

Efficient Markets, Fundamentals, and Crashes

Abstract .Economists have struggled to characterize and model the dynamic evolution of economic phenomena throughout this century. For at least eight decades, American economists have faced the persistent choice between structural or formal models of evolving dynamics and those alternative portrayals that focused on historical narratives or qualitative features. In this article we compare the models and methods used by representative authors who have sought to address the swings in stock prices. Our rather terse comparison between the orthodox theorists and those we label heterodox demonstrates the wide divergence between the foci of approaches adopted. Their methods, conclusions, and implications differ markedly. Where the orthodox approaches focus all but exclusively on statistical issues, the heterodox group stresses the importance of incomplete information and markets in an institutional and historical context. Such fundamental differences prohibit any meaningful dialogue between proponents of the two basic approaches. Moreover, substantial deficiencies–technical and otherwise–of contributions within the two groups limit ability to discriminate between rival views within each group. The clearer identification of transparent roles for credit, technology, and institutions in the heterodox approaches, however, makes the awkward translation from theoretical model to social commentary much easier.

HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

DESCRIPTION: This course is a survey of the history of world Christianity from its GrecoRoman background to its challenges in the 21 century. Topics such as the development of theology, the growth of Christian institutions, popular piety, sects and heterodox groups and the relationship of Christianity and culture are covered. While examining an extensive collection of primary sources, attention is given to key movements like Gnosticism, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Monasticism, Scholasticism, Protestantism, Pentecostalism and Post-modern Christianity as they have developed in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and North and South America. Throughout the course students will be introduced to the methodologies of critical-historical analysis. To complement their readings, students will watch the library documentary series, Christianity: The First Two Thousand Years, and compose an analytical review. Furthermore, students will compose a couple of analytical papers based on assigned readings from an excellent web site called, The Hall of Church History: Theology From A Bunch of Dead Guys.

Spain's Restless Golden Age - The Collapse of a Dream

The student of Spanish letters is aware that the Golden Age was a period of great writers and intensive cultivation of literature; not always is he equally familiar with the fact that the period underwent a series of numerous and profound changes both literary and social. This paper aims at explaining some of these changes. The few decades which immediately preceded her Golden Age had seemed to promise a future of increasing power and wealth for Spain. With the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1469 unified rule was established in the nation for the first time in centuries. Control of the Aragonese possessions in Italy gave the country important foreign outposts. The expulsion of the Moors in 1492 paved the way for the discovery of America with its potentialities for great wealth as well as political and religious expansion. When young King Carlos, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabel, became Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, optimistic views that the nation had been chosen by Providence to assume the leadership of the Christian world seemed to be justified., The Golden Age was a period of change and upheaval, characterized by animation, restlessness and instability. The development of such heterodox groups as the alumbrados, who rejected the sacraments and other precepts of the Church, and the erasmistas, who cared little for the supernatural element in religion, during the reign of Carlos V, and the Baroque art of a few decades later are manifestations of the prevailing restlessness of spirit. One phase of this spirit was positive in nature, and expressed itself in an outburst of great intellectual activity. One need only mention four of the outstanding writers of the age-Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo and Calder6n-to give an indication of the productiveness and excellence which can be noted in its men of letters. Dramas were written by the hundreds, realistic fiction experienced a remarkable development, and writers on mystic subjects alone are said to have numbered more than three thousand. Between 1472 and 1572 twenty universities were founded in the nation. Equally impressive were Spain's contributions in geography, astronomy, mathematics, navigation and allied fields. The Golden Age began just when a change of major proportions was taking place in Spanish literature-the naturalization of the Italian eleven-syllable verse by Boscain and the introduction of such new Italian strophes as the sonnet, cancidn, octava real and tercetos. With the passage of time, other changes in literary style and taste can be noted. The five acts of Torres Naharro had been reduced to three by 1600. The picaresque novel and the pastoral romance developed in the sixteenth century, while the seventeenth century saw the wide acceptance of culteranismo and conceptismo, with their cultivated obscurity of style and thought. Especially striking were the changes that took place in the strophes used by dramatists starting with the year 1575. We are now on the threshold of a decade which witnessed abrupt and complete revolution in dramatic versification. The suddenness of these changes is indeed amazing and apparently without due preparation.2 The desire for change in this dynamic,

News Notes

Professor David Leib of the Connecticut College for Women addressed a mathematics section of the Connecticut State Teachers’ Association, at New London, October 24th, on the topic, “Pitfalls in Algebra.” Professor Leib pointed out that while high school teachers were forced to produce, from a heterodox group, a group of students of intelligence, with which the college teacher could go on, that there were defects, in students and in the teaching, which from the standpoint of the college teacher ought to be remedied.