Marginal Places Research Articles

Czernowitz, Lincoln, Jerusalem, and the Comparative History of American Jurisprudence

Recent histories of American jurisprudence tend to ignore the fact that ideas that appeared in the United States often appeared simultaneously in Europe. Even those works that do not ignore the European context are content with tracing the influence or reception of European thought in America. This article suggests that another possible approach is to compare jurisprudential developments in the United States, Europe, and other places in order to reach more general, sociology-of-knowledge-like insights into the reasons why certain ideas appear at certain times and places. One concrete example is discussed: the rise of an interest in the distinction between formal and living (or between law in the books and law in action) in American and European jurisprudence in the first decade of the twentieth century. This distinction was central to the work of Roscoe Pound in the United States and the work of the Austro-Hungarian legal thinker Eugen Ehrlich. Pound and Ehrlich shared similar personal backgrounds. When they began advocating the study of informal law, both Pound and Ehrlich were teaching in provincial towns (Czernowitz and Lincoln) situated on the frontiers of empires. Both towns were marginal places where different cultures clashed and where the legal culture of the center of the empire had only a tenuous hold. Scholars working in such an environment, it is argued, would tend to be more aware of the gap between formal state and the actual norms governing the daily lives of people than scholars working at the center of an empire. The article offers additional support for this argument by looking at the scholarship of Guido Tedeschi, an Italian-Israeli legal scholar who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1940s. The article concludes by calling for the study of the history of American jurisprudence from a comparative perspective, taking into account such issues as the interaction between center and periphery and between empire and provinces in more than one national context.

Czernowitz, Lincoln, Jerusalem, and the Comparative History of American Jurisprudence

Recent histories of American jurisprudence tend to ignore the fact that ideas that appeared in the United States often appeared simultaneously in Europe. Even those works that do not ignore the European context are content with tracing the influence or reception of European thought in America. This article suggests that another possible approach is to compare jurisprudential developments in the United States, Europe, and other places in order to reach more general, sociology-of-knowledge-like insights into the reasons why certain ideas appear at certain times and places. One concrete example is discussed: the rise of an interest in the distinction between formal and living (or between law in the books and law in action) in American and European jurisprudence in the first decade of the twentieth century. This distinction was central to the work of Roscoe Pound in the United States and the work of the Austro-Hungarian legal thinker Eugen Ehrlich. Pound and Ehrlich shared similar personal backgrounds. When they began advocating the study of informal law, both Pound and Ehrlich were teaching in provincial towns (Czernowitz and Lincoln) situated on the frontiers of empires. Both towns were marginal places where different cultures clashed and where the legal culture of the center of the empire had only a tenuous hold. Scholars working in such an environment, it is argued, would tend to be more aware of the gap between formal state and the actual norms governing the daily lives of people than scholars working at the center of an empire. The article offers additional support for this argument by looking at the scholarship of Guido Tedeschi, an Italian-Israeli legal scholar who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1940s. The article concludes by calling for the study of the history of American jurisprudence from a comparative perspective, taking into account such issues as the interaction between center and periphery and between empire and provinces in more than one national context.

Aide d'urgence et notions locales d'équité: Analyse d'un programme d'aide nutritionnelle comme une interface sociale

ABSTRACT In order to better understand the dynamics involved in emergency food aid programs, this paper analyzes the case of Kinshasa (1992–1995). The interaction between local health personnel engaged in the programme and the—potential, legitimate, and unintended—beneficiaries of the aid is central to this paper. The classical concepts of moral hazard and adverse selection, often cited in the current literature on target poverty programs, only partly capture the reality of the situation on the ground. An intervention such as a food aid program should be judged on its capacity to open up spaces of action and negotiation to actors who traditionally occupy only marginal places in them.

Crossing the Border: Encounters Between Homeless People and Outreach Workers

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessCrossing the Border: Encounters Between Homeless People and Outreach WorkersDeirdre Oakley, M.A.Deirdre OakleySearch for more papers by this author, M.A.Published Online:1 Sep 2000https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.51.9.1188AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Michael Rowe's Crossing the Border documents the complex interactions between outreach workers and homeless individuals with serious mental illnesses. The book is based on an ethnographic study of 15 outreach workers and 50 homeless persons in New Haven, Connecticut. Rowe, who is a sociologist by training, conducted the study while he was director of the New Haven ACCESS outreach project. ACCESS (Access to Community Care and Effective Services and Supports) was a national research demonstration project operating at 18 sites, under the direction of the federal Center for Mental Health Services, to test the effectiveness of systems-integration strategies for services to homeless people with serious mental illnesses.The primary focus of the book concerns what Rowe calls "boundary encounters." Boundary encounters are meetings between outreach workers and homeless individuals. They occur on the streets, in shelters and soup kitchens, under bridges, and in other marginal places not frequented by those in mainstream society. Rowe first examines these encounters from the perspective of each party involved and then turns to the institutional context in which they occur. According to Rowe, it is within this context that the opposing goals of individual care and institutional "people-processing" are carried out.Boundary encounters involve numerous transactions in which services and identities are negotiated by both provider and potential client. The homeless individual bargains with the outreach worker for tangible goods. Likewise, through the promise of meeting the homeless person's basic needs, the outreach worker attempts to engage that person in more sustained treatment and services. For the homeless individual, the offerings have to be flexible, as do the expectations of engagement. Yet although the outreach worker is dedicated to helping these individuals escape homelessness, he or she can offer only a full package of assistance to those who will accept treatment.The principal strength of the book is its detailed documentation of these encounters from multiple perspectives. Through this documentation, the flexibility necessary for effective outreach work and the potential conflicts such flexibility can pose to administrators, outreach workers, and the homeless people being served are clearly illustrated.While Rowe's examination highlights efforts that should be made to help people at the margins, it also raises questions about where those efforts should stop. Indeed, the book provides some valuable insights into the benefits and limits of outreach work to homeless people with serious mental illnesses. Yet it falls short in terms of offering any concrete solutions to the inherent dilemmas embedded in outreach work that are so clearly articulated by the author.Thus the only weakness of the book is one of omission. An additional chapter on policy implications and recommendations would have made this valuable piece of work more complete. Nevertheless, as one of the only in-depth qualitative studies of outreach work, Crossing the Border makes a noteworthy contribution to the field. It should be considered an essential read for everyone—from administrators to those on the front line—working with the most marginalized among the homeless.Ms. Oakley is a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany.by Michael Rowe; Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999, 193 pages, $45 hardcover, $17.95 softcover FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 51Issue 9 September 2000Pages 1188-1189 Metrics History Published online 1 September 2000 Published in print 1 September 2000

Reworking the Geography of the Long Boom; The Small Town Experience of Restructuring in Reefton, New Zealand

During the postwar long boom, the economic, political, and cultural configurations adopted to regulate the crisis tendencies of capitalism in New Zealand were broadly those of social democracy. Key features of social democratic policy in this period were the assistance of primary production through subsidies, the protection of domestic industry, a well-developed welfare state, and the promotion of economic development in marginal places and regions. These regulatory arrangements found expression as a distinctive geography of the long boom. In small towns this was typified by clusters of agencies associated with the state's intervention in production and its provision of infrastructure. Local employment was often concentrated in these agencies. We examine the nature of such a geography during the long boom in Reefton, a small town on the West Coast of the South Island, and its subsequent reworking during the restructuring of the 1980s. This reworking is explored through a focus on the major state and private sector workplaces within the town's economic base and their employees. As key influences upon the newly emerging geography of the town, the forms of local governance that are being adopted in order to attract the spending and investment lost during restructuring are examined.

Conversations in a Monastery

Monasticism is one of the key institutions of western civilization, and yet contemporary monastic communities, popularly regarded as faded relics of medieval religiosity or as marginal places of retreat or escape, have not figured heavily in recent research. Traditional historical studies of monasticism of course abound (Decarreaux 1964, Wynne 1988), as do monographs devoted to the architecture, art, or library holdings of the great monasteries (Butler and Given-Wilson 1979, Fermor 1957, Hobson 1970, McCrank 1983). There are also some sociological studies of the phenomenon of religious life in modern society (Beha 1970, Clarke 1973, Cunningham et al. 1983, Ford 1964, Greeley 1977, Hall and Schneider 1973, Levi 1987, Wombacher 1984). Such studies, conducted largely through the use of surveys, present a portrait of general trends in religious organizations, and of attitudes about church renewal, vocations, ministries, and such controversies as celibacy or the ordination of women. What is lacking in this literature is a sense of what it is like to live in a monastic community, and how insiders perceive the relevance of such a community in a changing world. As Levi (1987:171) puts it:

The Arts and the Knowledge of Religion

The seriousness and sheer quantity of attention given by the Encyclopedia of Religion to the arts, music, literature, and aesthetics of all the world's religious and cultural areas is testimony that the arts are not merely marginal places in the study of religion. Or, as is the fashion now, we might say that they are indeed among the most marginal, if religion is understood to entail limit and liminality. The Encyclopedia treats the various literary, plastic, and performing arts as primary sources of religious knowledge and modes of religious experience-along with histories of communities, mythic traditions and ritual practices, sacred writings and doctrinal thought. Likewise, varieties of art and literary criticism are not ancillary but primary methods for the study of religious knowledge, beside the human, social, and natural sciences and other hermeneutical disciplines intrinsic to religious traditions themselves. All this, of course, is to be expected of a work nurtured by the imagination of Mircea Eliade, whose own researches required as much of the disciplines of fiction and mythmaking as of historical method. This extraordinary tool gives the reader access to a vast body of authoritative description, comparison, theory, and bibliography. Ease of crossreferencing is enhanced by the synoptic outline of contents (in vol. 16), which effectively transforms the Encyclopedia into a circuitous gyre of religions and religious ideas-a meander as rich as might be imagined in stories of encyclopedias, libraries, and labyrinths by Jorge Borges or by Eliade himself. I sampled articles on architecture, plastic arts (premodern and modern), drama and performance, dance, music, cinema, poetry and novel, biography and autobiography, and calligraphy and on the interrelation of art and religion discussed in entries on language, aesthetics, hermeneutics, imagination, performance and ritual, iconography, sacred

Regional and azimuthal dependence of phase velocities of mantle Rayleigh waves in the Pacific Ocean

The lateral heterogeneity and azimuthal anisotropy of the upper mantle in the Pacific Ocean are investigated by analysing Rayleigh wave phase velocities in the period range 60–200 s. Rayleigh waves at periods below 150 s travel fast in the direction parallel to the present-day plate motion. Rayleigh wave velocities at longer periods show a similar azimuthal dependence in most parts of the Pacific. The average magnitude of the velocity-anisotropy in the Pacific Ocean changes from 1% at 60 s to 0.4% at 200 s. The azimuth-independent phase velocities increase with the increase in age of the sea floor in the period range 60–120 s, but the correlation is weak at longer periods. The trade-off between the lateral variation and the azimuthal variation is weak except for marginal places of the studied area.

Anthropogenic influence on the natural vegetation in coastal North Norway during the holocene. Development of farming and pastures

Four localities between south‐west Lofoten and north Troms have been studied by means of pollen‐analysis combined with C14‐datings. Introduction of animal husbandry in Lofoten c. 4400 calendar years B.C. is suggested. The earliest Hordeum‐growing at the Lofoten site was established c. 2200 calendar years B.C. Probable colonization of marginal farm places and farming areas has been dated to resp. c. 100 calendar years B.C. and A.D. 200 and 430, at different localities. Animal husbandry based upon leaf foddering was probably dominant during Neolithic times, and was also important during later periods. Grassland pastures probably became established during Bronze Age (south Scandinavian terms), especially during the Later Bronze Age. Establishment of farms in the Early Iron Age were characterized by a rapid formation of grassland, probably due to more advanced agricultural methods.