Work In South America Research Articles

Jamie Macpherson's Fiddle: Decolonisation, and Representing Gypsy/Traveller Communities in the Clan Macpherson Museum

This article examines the representation of Gypsy/Travellers in Scottish museums using a decolonial perspective. Focusing on a case study of Jamie Macpherson’s fiddle and its re-interpretation at the Clan Macpherson Museum in 2021, this article explores the value of using decolonial ideas to frame and interpret Scottish Gypsy/Traveller experience. It argues that, both historically and in the present, Scottish Gypsy/Travellers have been subject to racism and discrimination that are the product of colonialism and its continuing legacies. This theoretical framework of coloniality informed a collaborative project to re-interpret Jamie Macpherson’s fiddle at the Clan Macpherson Museum, where the authors worked with activists and members of the Gypsy/Traveller community. The focal point of this re-interpretation was a piece of creative writing by Maggie McPhee, a Scottish Traveller, whose ‘Heartbreak Through Her Eyes’ re-imagined the story of Jamie Macpherson – hanged at Banff in 1700 for being an ‘Egiptian’ (Gypsy) – from the perspective of his mother. Centering the experience of both women and Gypsy/Travellers, Maggie McPhee’s story demonstrated different ways of knowing the past. Drawing on recent feminist work in South America on the epistemologies of the South, we argue that storytelling such as Maggie’s can become an act of decolonial resistance – a form of ‘poetic knowledge’ that can be an important part of broader efforts to decolonise museums. The enduring coloniality of anti-Gypsy/Traveller racism is challenged by the powerful and beautiful words of Maggie McPhee, centring the Gypsy/Traveller voice in ways that change our understanding of the past and fight racism in the present.

Nazi persecutee and opponent of racial hygiene: The extraordinary life of the “ethnopathologist” Max Kuczynski (1890–1967)

The pathologist Max Kuczynski (1890–1967) gained recognition for his bacteriological research but is also considered the founder of the so-called ethnopathology. As a “non-Aryan,” Kuczynski emigrated from Nazi Germany to Peru, where his elder son was later even to become president. However, the circumstances surrounding the end of Kuczynski’s career in Germany are hardly known. This article takes this research gap as an opportunity to reconstruct his life, the circumstances of his emigration, and his work in South America. Numerous archival documents serve as sources. In the mid-1920s, Kuczynski developed “ethnic pathology,” a new interdisciplinary approach that offered a counter-concept to the increasingly popular racial hygiene in Germany. But his career in Germany ended even before the Nazis came to power in 1933. He was dismissed from the Charité Pathological Institute in October 1932 at the instigation of its new director, Robert Rössle (1876–1956). Personal and financial reasons played a role, but Kuczynski’s rejection of racial hygiene may also have been a decisive factor: Rössle himself turned increasingly to questions of racial hygiene in the Third Reich and used the corpses of Nazi victims for his research. It can be shown that the circumstances of Kuczynski’s dismissal were already catalyzed by anti-Semitic and eugenic tendencies, which were to unleash themselves radically in Germany only a few months later – and even caught up with him in Peruvian exile.

What is the benefit of membership in farm producer organizations? The case of coffee producers in Peru

AbstractEmpirical evidence of the benefit of farm producer organizations (FPOs) in the developing world is mounting. There is, however, no work in South America on the relationship between FPO membership and farm‐level performance. We address the gap by estimating the treatment effect of FPO membership with respect to three outcomes: quantity produced, quantity sold, and price received. The empirical application focuses on the Peruvian coffee sector, where FPOs may have played an important role during the recent price crisis. A sample of approximately 9,000 survey responses from Peruvian coffee producers during the 2015–19 period is used in the analysis. Results show a positive treatment effect of FPO membership on all three farm‐level outcomes. Compared to non‐FPO members, FPO members produced 120–295 kg/ha more, sold 118–296 kg/ha more, and received 0.42–1.53 PEN/kg more. We also find evidence of heterogeneity in the estimated effect of FPO membership across time, farm size, and membership probability. The findings yield novel implications in terms of policy support for FPOs.

Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas ed. by Ernesto Capello and Julia B. Rosenbaum

Reviewed by: Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas ed. by Ernesto Capello and Julia B. Rosenbaum Joseph L. Scarpaci Ernesto Capello and Julia B. Rosenbaum (Eds.) Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. Routledge: New York and London, 2022. maps, photographs, ill., indices, references, xvii, 250 pp. (ISBN 9780367333263, hardback, $160.00; ISBN 9781000228793 ebook $44.05). Spawned from an interdisciplinary symposium held in 2013, this book examines the territorial claims, scientific and artistic methodologies, and aesthetic interpretations behind the exploration of exotic places from the North Pole to the far reaches of South America. Contested and imagined spaces captured the world’s imagination through cartography, sketches, photographs, and travelogues in the nineteenth century. In this volume, art historians, a geographer, curators, and literary scholars pen eleven chapters that are parsed into three sections: Seeing and Not Seeing; Lines and Tracings; and Art and the Expeditionary Impulse. Readers from geography, art history, political science, data visualization, landscape architects, and other fields will appreciate how the reportage aboutthe western hemisphere was enhanced by visual aids. This edited book vividly captures how explorers and artists melded science, thick description, exploration, and aesthetics to portray faraway places. Alicia Lubowski-Jahn integrates these perspectives in her review of Humboldt and landscape pictures emerging from the Prussian’s South American trips. James R. Akerman takes on scientific endeavors in the early 1800s in Yellowstone and frames them with ancillary depictions of the park’s wonders and the imprint of tourism on the park’s subsequent design. Julia B. Rosen-baum explains why critics bemoaned how Frederic Edwin Church’s drawings were too [End Page 203] accurate or because they lacked a romantic aesthetic. Rejected by some painters as well as surveyors and cartographers, Church’s work in South America and upstate New York did not lack critics. Thick description, artistic renderings, and beauty surface in Joni L. Kinsey’s chapter about triangulation in explorations of the American west. Mirroring surveying and cartographic techniques derived from Cartesian geometry, the surveys of the pre-state-hood American west became a metaphor (e.g., rugged individualism as an example) to validate elements of the natural environment. Federal patronage of artistic renderings became a harbinger of the New Deal sponsorships some half a century later. Kinsey shows how the singularities of many outstanding western viewsheds were portrayed from multiple perspectives and technologies. Art was a strong ally of science as much as the field of data visualization today reflects that symbiosis. Kenneth Haltman’s contribution focuses on a single map –the area drained by the lower Mississippi (1822) —and discusses what is observed and left out. In a similar vein, Katherine G. Morrissey documents bi-national efforts to place monuments on the U.S.-Mexican border, in what today would be stellar bilateral cooperation. Katherine Manthorne’s contribution on Maria Graham’s journaling and painting in pre-photographic Brazil offers insight into the rare female gaze of a western (British) woman. She debunks the myth that women travelers dwelled on just floral paintings and focused on other dimensions as well such as commerce, customs, and architecture. Five chapters cover the tropics. They emphasize the paradisical abundance in the maps and pictures created by temperate-zone observers. This is well illustrated in the editors’ opening chapter where Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s Géographiqie des Plantes Equinoxiales: Tableau Physique des Andes et Pays Voisins (1805), which “privilege[d] snapshots over processes” and “individual effort over a collaborative enterprise, silencing the multitude of figures that guided Humboldt’s journey.” Said tableau “points to the difficulties, choices, and complexities that characterized efforts to compile and process materials generated by expeditions” (p. 3). Like the nearly five dozen other illustrations in this book, it also served up national legitimacy of freshly mapped and remapped landscapes. Crisp and engaging writing highlights how paintings and sketches became visual allegories that moved fortunes, lives, and governments. Visual expressions promulgated stereotypes and ‘otherings’ of [Eskimos] and other Native Americans that still linger [still linger in the popular imagination today. Ernesto Capello traces the career of painter Albert Operti who depicted the sublime setting of light and color...

ILO Convention 190 and the fight against Harassment at Work in South America

This study analyzes the legal confrontation of harassment at work considering the South American countries, especially Brazil, and taking as a paradigm ILO Convention 190 on harassment and violence in the world of work. The research starts by analyzing the concepts of harassment at work. Next, the paper examines Convention 190, as well as the regulations in South America concerning work harassment, in order to analyze the system to fight against this social phenomenon in the Brazilian legislation. The study suggests that the approval of the Convention has the potential to change the reality work, through the ratification of the treaty and by the conformity of national law with the terms of the Convention. The research methodology is pure in type and its approach is qualitative, us bibliographic and documentary sources.

An Apostolic Journey: Stephen L Richards and the Expansion of Missionary Work in South America

An Apostolic Journey: Stephen L Richards and the Expansion of Missionary Work in South America

Modelling urban cyclists' exposure to black carbon particles using high spatiotemporal data: A statistical approach

This is a pioneering work in South America to model the exposure of cyclists to black carbon (BC) while riding in an urban area with high spatiotemporal variability of BC concentrations. We report on mobile BC concentrations sampled on 10 biking sessions in the city of Curitiba (Brazil), during rush hours of weekdays, covering four routes and totaling 178 km. Moreover, simultaneous BC measurements were conducted within a street canyon (street and rooftop levels) and at a site located 13 km from the city center. We used two statistical approaches to model the BC concentrations: multiple linear regression (MLR) and a machine-learning technique called random forests (RF). A pool of 25 candidate variables was created, including pollution measurements, traffic characteristics, street geometry and meteorology. The aggregated mean BC concentration within 30-m buffers along the four routes was 7.09 μg m−3, with large spatial variability (5th and 95th percentiles of 1.75 and 16.83 μg m−3, respectively). On average, the concentrations at the street canyon façade (5 m height) were lower than the mobile data but higher than the urban background levels. The MLR model explained a low percentage of variance (24%), but was within the values found in the literature for on-road BC mobile data. RF explained a larger variance (54%) with the additional advantage of having lower requirements for the target and predictor variables. The most impactful predictor for both models was the traffic rate of heavy-duty vehicles. Thus, to reduce the BC exposure of cyclists and residents living close to busy streets, we emphasize the importance of renewing and/or retrofitting the diesel-powered fleet, particularly public buses with old vehicle technologies. Urban planners could also use this valuable information to project bicycle lanes with greater separation from the circulation of heavy-duty diesel vehicles.

Correction: Fall armyworm migration across the Lesser Antilles and the potential for genetic exchanges between North and South American populations

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171743.].

International networks of production and distribution of scientific instruments in eighteenth-century Europe

Abstract The eighteenth century met a growing interest in the production of scientific instruments (mathematical, astronomical, nautical and philosophical) offering the means to achieve new physics concepts and greater precision, offering answers to some of the big questions, such as the shape of the Earth and longitude at sea. International scientific programmes promoted the production, acquisition and perfection of instruments and the progressive dissemination of experimental physics education set the tone for these instruments. The connections between instrument makers and the gentry in relation to these instruments produced or constituted important influences that were previously almost unthinkable. The spread of scientific instruments developed in close connection between producers and recipients, with the global spread of major scientific quests to solve and naturally with the impact Newtonian physics and experimental philosophy acquired at the time. J. H. de Magellan, who had a particular interest in and knowledge of scientific instruments, was actively engaged in this process of dissemination across Europe. After spending twenty years in London he could accept the demands of the Iberian courts for instruments that would allow them to carry out their work in South America.

Fall armyworm migration across the Lesser Antilles and the potential for genetic exchanges between North and South American populations.

The fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (J. E. Smith)(Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), is an important agricultural pest of the Western Hemisphere noted for its broad host range, long distance flight capabilities, and a propensity to develop resistance to pesticides that includes a subset of those used in genetically modified corn varieties. These characteristics exacerbate the threat fall armyworm poses to agriculture, with the potential that a resistance trait arising in one geographical location could rapidly disseminate throughout the hemisphere. A region of particular concern is the Caribbean, where a line of islands that extends from Florida to Venezuela provides a potential migratory pathway between populations from North and South America that could allow for consistent and substantial genetic interactions. In this study, surveys of populations from Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Trinidad & Tobago expand on previous work in South America that indicates a generally homogeneous population with respect to haplotype markers. This population differs from that found in most of the Lesser Antilles where a combination of genetic and meteorological observations is described that indicate fall armyworm migration from Puerto Rico to as far south as Barbados, but does not support significant incursion into Trinidad & Tobago and South America. Air transport projections demonstrate that the wind patterns in the Caribbean region are not conducive to consistent flight along the north-south orientation of the Lesser Antilles, supporting the conclusion that such migration is minor and sporadic, providing few opportunities for genetic exchanges. The implications of these findings on the dissemination of deleterious traits between the two Western Hemisphere continents are discussed.

Uncovering the diversity of the neotropical genus Elaphopsocus (‘Psocoptera’: Psocidae: Amphigerontiinae): from one to ten species

For 75 years, the genus Elaphopsocus was considered a monotypic lineage of neotropical psocids. As a result of recent work in South America, this genus presently includes seven species from Brazil and Colombia. We here describe three new species from the East Colombian high Andes.

Politics, Paternalism, and Progressive Social Evolution: Observations on Colonial Policy in the Scientific Travels of Alfred Russel Wallace

Politics, Paternalism, and Progressive Social Evolution:Observations on Colonial Policy in the Scientific Travels of Alfred Russel Wallace Jeremy Vetter (bio) This article examines the case of Alfred Russel Wallace, the famed British naturalist and co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of evolution by natural selection. In many ways, a study of Wallace provides the best means to examine an alternative tradition within nineteenth-century scientific travel that critiques conventional Victorian assumptions about culture and race. Wallace was a radical, unconventional thinker, and his early moral beliefs about social progress were heavily influenced by Owenite socialism at the Halls of Science in late-1830s London (Durant; Jones). Kind-hearted and open-minded, Wallace remains one of the most sympathetic Victorian scientific travellers, and his work “disrupts the conventions concerning the representation of tropical nature” (Stepan 60). He was also an emphatic opponent of the “demarcation between ethical and scientific ideas,” as Roger Smith recognized over four decades ago (177–78). By the 1880s, Wallace would become a leading opponent of the biologists’ strategy of ideological neutrality (Fichman, “Biology and Politics”). If anyone of his era could serve as a model for present-day critiques of Victorian-era assumptions of European cultural and racial superiority masked by purportedly value-free science, it might seem to be Wallace. Yet, despite all this, the case of Wallace is not as simple as it first appears. Egalitarian thinker though he may have been, Wallace’s work in South America and the Malay Archipelago was decisively influenced by his (temporary) position in the colonial social structure. Despite his willingness to criticize many aspects of western European culture, especially the pernicious effects of free-market capitalism, Wallace assumed that Western culture was ultimately superior to all others. And like his contemporaries, Wallace freely used the language of “superior” and “inferior” races without seriously questioning the attitudes underlying such conceptual deployments. Wallace’s adherence to widely held Victorian assumptions about racial and cultural differences should be evident throughout this essay.1 In sum, Wallace refracted his factual observations about human societies in colonial settings through an [End Page 113] unconcealed lens of moral value: the imperative to push non-European societies through progressive social evolution. The role of science in European imperialism and capitalism is by now well established. The powerful contours of these crucial economic, social, and political processes will be obvious in what follows. But in this paper I focus on how that context shaped Wallace as a scientific traveller constructing knowledge of human societies encountered alongside non-human nature in the colonial periphery. His observations took place in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone”—“the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (6–7). In her classic study of travel writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pratt identifies the “seeing-man” as the main protagonist of “anti-conquest,” by which bourgeois Europeans attempted to “secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert[ed] European hegemony” (7). Ascribing such an identity to Wallace might seem problematic given his self-proclaimed radicalism and decidedly anti-capitalist point of view. Yet despite his vigorous critique of the impact on the lives of the colonized peoples of a market economy based on free trade, his own observations endorsed colonial policies that expanded systems of labour and commerce in the modern capitalist world-economy, though based on a coercive paternalism rather than markets alone. Indeed, this is the central theme of my analysis of Wallace’s observations on human social development in the colonies: how an avowed critic of conventional British capitalist values nevertheless articulated a colonial philosophy founded on a paternalistic relationship between Europeans and native peoples. the amazon voyage Wallace’s first overseas collecting voyage took him to the Amazon Basin in South America. As a European scientific observer in the Americas, Wallace followed a line of predecessors who constituted what Pratt calls the “capitalist vanguard”: Subsistence lifeways, non-monetary exchange systems, and self-sustaining regional economies are anathema to expansive capitalism. It seeks to destroy...

Enigmatic Oscar Prager: the California years

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsThe author acknowledges the pioneering work of Marta Letelier Viveros on Prager’s work in South America. Susanne Lehmann's translations and sleuthing illuminated the landscape architect's German origins.

Aktualne zaangażowanie misyjne diecezji tarnowskiej w kontekście 225-lecia jej istnienia. Kościół, który jest w Tarnowie – posłania misjonarzy i ich konsekwencje

In the above presentation the Diocese of Tarnow has shown its commitment to the missionary work at the time of celebrating its 225 jubilee. It covers the last 38 years because during that time the bishops of Tarnow have regularly sent forth the missionaries to different countries. This commitment by reading the spirit and intentions of Vatican II, had been started by archbishop George Ablewicz and then continued by successive bishops of Tarnow: namely by bishop Joseph Życiński and the bishop Victor Skworc. So far they have sent forth 118 priests to three different continents. This act harmonizes with the fourth Synod of the Diocese of Tarnow which took place in 1986. Its main motto was “Ad imaginem Ecclesiae universalis”. This life of the particular Church which in Tarnow is following the example of the universal Church is mainly expressed by sending forth the missionaries and then in cooperation with them. Their work is a huge contribution to the evangelization of the few countries in Africa, South America and more recently Kazakhstan in Asia. Upon this commitment has been placed a seal of the martyrdom of one of the sons of the Diocese of Tarnow – namely the priest John Czuba, the fideidonist, who was killed in the Republic of Congo in 1998. The missionary cooperation of the Diocese is both spiritual and material. It is done thanks to the Diocesan Missionary Work. It is expressed in constant prayer for the missionaries undertaken especially by the rosary groups, but also by maintaining the missionaries, purchase of the means of transport for them or making investments, among which are: hospitals, schools, kindergartens or home for the street children. They are used by children and adults and the priest of Church of Tarnow tend them. At present in the Diocesan Missionary Work there are 46 missionaries from Tarnow region. They work in different parts of the world: 14 of them stay in Africa, 27 work in South America and 5 in Kazakhstan. This represents approximately 15 per cent of all fideidonists in Poland. To this number we may add the secular missionaries who work in the following countries: Cameroon – there is one missionary, the Central African Republic – there are two missionaries and two other volunteers in this very country.

À la lisière de l’ « autre monde » Le Pérou dans la Relatione breve de Diego de Torres Bollo (1603)

In 1603, Diego de Torres Bollo (1550–1638), Jesuit procurator of the province of Peru, published in Rome his Relatione Breve, one of the first printed accounts of early Jesuit missionary activities in South America. The work was an instant success: in 1604 a second Italian edition was published in Venice, as well as translations into Latin (Antwerp) and French (Paris). The Relatione was typical of many Jesuit accounts of the period, that is, it consisted of a skillfully arranged montage of letters from the missions, written for the express purpose of attracting new vocations to missionary work in South America. To the detriment of this editorial success, with the exception of the major bibliographical repertories, de Torres Bollo’s text is rarely used and seldom cited by historians, and is even paradoxically absent in historical undertaking such as Rubén Vargas Ugarte’s Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en el Perú; furthermore, there is no modern edition, not even a diplomatic transcription, in the important Monumenta Peruana. With this contribution, I intend not only to inform those who read a little-known work, but also to demonstrate how it constitutes a decisive moment in the genesis of the “relation” genre in the first decades of written Jesuit communication.

Bridging the Americas: Humboldtian Legacies

(2006). Bridging the Americas: Humboldtian Legacies. Geographical Review: Vol. 96, No. 3, pp. vi-ix.

A world in which women move freely without fear of men: An anthropological perspective on rape

In western scholarly debate, there is nearly universal acceptance of rape as a male trait typical of all time periods and cultures. However, cross-cultural data provide insight into societies where rape is rare or unknown and can therefore be helpful to develop strategies for prevention. The paper focuses on the question why men do not rape in these societies with rape being understood as a crime that reflects male dominance and entitlement. An earlier finding by Sanday [J. Soc. Issues 37 (1981) 5] that such “rape-free” societies attach importance to the “contributions women make to social continuity” is further analyzed by taking an in-depth look at matrilineal societies. The category “matrilineal” is chosen because these cultures recognize women's contributions to social continuity, and absence or rareness of rape has been repeatedly reported. Data from matrilineal cultures from the relevant literature including my own work in South America are compared with a select body of data discussing western rapists. As the discussion demonstrates, the specific gender dynamics in matrilineal cultures reduce the significance of man's sexual persona and thus male heterosexual authority which mitigates the potential of male dominance and rape.

A Reconsideration of the Systematic Position of Jonesiobryum

Jonesiobryum is removed from the Funariaceae and placed in the Rhachitheciaceae. The names Jonesiobryum Bizot & P6cs ex Allen & Pursell, J. cerradense, Vital ex Allen & Pursell, J. sphaerocarpum Bizot ex Allen & Pursell, and J. termitarum Vital ex Allen & Pursell are validated. A key to the species is provided. The paleotropics of Africa and the neotropics of the Americas share a number of physical and cli- matic features. Furthermore, these areas are histor- ically linked, formerly having been contiguous regions of the southern supercontinent, Gondwana- land. Thus it is reasonable to suppose that the con- tinents should be floristically similar. Unfortunate- ly, early floristic work in South America and Africa was neither pragmatically nor theoretically coor- dinated. These circumstances have obscured the ex- tent of the floristic relationships between the two continents. A summary of the floristic relationships of the hepatics between these two areas was provided by Gradstein et al. (1983), while Buck and Griffin (1984) and Reese (1985) did the same for the mosses. More recently Reese and Orbain (1986) emphasized the need for continued investigations into the relation- ships of the bryophytes found on the two continents. The distribution of Jonesiobryum documents a typ- ical floristic pattern between Africa and South America. Indeed, Egunyomi and Vital (1984) con- sidered Jonesiobryum an important link in under- standing the bryofloristic relationship between the tropics of Africa and South America. However, the systematic position of Jonesiobryum has not been critically examined since its original description. New information on the genus now necessitates a reexamination of the systematic affinities of the ge- nus. In addition, there have been persistent prob- lems with the nomenclatural validation of the genus and its species.

The Isthmus of Panama as a Crossroad for Prehistoric Migration of Domesticated Plants

For thousands of years, Indian tribes have gathered, selected, domesticated and spread useful plants over the whole American continent while mostly practicing shifting forms of horti-agriculture. It has been argued that origin and domestication of New World crops could be traced back to essentially two independent, narrowly circumscribed core regions, (i.e. Vavilov's genecentres) one in the highlands of Mexico and the other in the Andes of Peru. Those alleged centers of origin and genetic diversity have been synchronized with the main cradles of American agriculture. Based on long periods of research work in South America, we disagree with this opinion which is maintained primarily by anthropologists, sociologists and ethnologists. Except for marginal desert and mountain environments, there are no real biogeographical restrictions for plant domestication. Apparent geographical barriers, like the Darien gap, did not represent insurmountable hindrances for the diffusion and migration of useful species in the hands of indigenous peoples.

Critique of Hypothesis of Continental Drift--Discussion: Evidence for Continental Drift: DISCUSSION

Critique of Hypothesis of Continental Drift--Discussion: Evidence for Continental Drift: DISCUSSION