300 Sozialwissenschaften
Refine
Year of publication
- 2021 (7) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (5)
- Part of a Book (1)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Keywords
- Alpine area (1)
- Arrival and departure (1)
- Autorität (1)
- Buddhism (1)
- Credit constraints (1)
- Cultural mapping (1)
- Custom (1)
- Customary law (1)
- Digital age (1)
- Digital regional planning (1)
Institute
Cultural Mapping 4.0
(2021)
Cultural mapping aims to capture and visualize tangible and intangible cultural assets. This extend abstract proposes the consequent extension of analogue forms of cultural mapping using digital technologies, and its contribution is two-fold. First, the necessary theoretical basis is provided by a literature review of the still-young field of cultural mapping and the complementary disciplines of participatory mapping and digital story-mapping. Second, we propose a digitally enhanced Cultural Mapping 4.0 vision based on a case study from an ongoing research project in the Lake Constance region. Digital participatory mapping approaches are applied to capture data, and to validate and disseminate the results, story-mapping - a spatial form of digital storytelling - is used.
This paper examines the interdependencies of tourism, Buddhism and sustainability combining in-depth-interviews with Buddhism experts and non-participant observation in a mixed-method approach. The area under investigation is the Alpine region of Austria, Germany and Switzerland, since it is home to Asian and Western forms of Buddhism tourism alike. Results show that Buddhism tourism as a value-based activity on the one hand is not commercial, but since demand is rising, on the other hand tendencies towards more commercial forms can be observed. As a modest form of activity Buddhism tourism does not shape the landscape of the Alpine area and by its nature it incorporates sustainability.
Anthropologists’ arrival stories have long served to justify, naturalize, and domesticate—often through humor—the fraught moment of entering unasked into other people's lives. This textual convention has been thoroughly critiqued, but no comparable attention has been paid to the analogous moment of departure from the field. The digital age enables both sides to maintain contact, a shift that negates the finality of earlier departures. This article engages the changes wrought by digital media that allow us to remain connected to the field. While this seems a humane affordance, it also means that it is no longer feasible to cleanly sever ties established ‘there’. When anthropologists leave the field, the field will likely follow them—on Facebook or Instagram.
The State of Custom
(2021)
In our article, we engage with the anthropologist Gerd Spittler’s pathbreaking
article “Dispute settlement in the shadow of Leviathan” (1980) in which
he strives to integrate the existence of state courts (the eponymous Leviathan’s
shadow) in (post-)colonial Africa into the analysis on non-state court legal practices.
According to Spittler, it is because of undesirable characteristics inherent
in state courts that the disputing parties tended to rather involve mediators than
pursue a state court judgment. The less people liked state courts, the more likely
they were to (re-)turn to dispute settlement procedures. Now how has this situation
changed in the last four decades since its publication date? We relate his findings
to contemporary debates in legal anthropology that investigate the relationship
between disputing, law and the state. We also show through our own work in
Africa and Asia, particularly in Southern Ethiopia and Kyrgyzstan, in what ways
Spittler’s by now classical contribution to the field of legal anthropology in 1980
can be made fruitful for a contemporary anthropology of the state at a time when
not only (legal) anthropology has changed, but especially the way states deal with
putatively “customary” forms of dispute settlement.
Bittamo
(2021)
The Ethiopian state increasingly seeks to enlist putative ‘traditional authorities’ to lend legitimacy to policies and interventions in the southwestern peripheries of the country. The underlying assumptions do not accord with the perceptions of the local populations: among the Kara in the South Omo region, legitimacy is predicated upon duty and accountability, and higher degrees of public legitimacy are disconnected from authority and direct command over other people’s conduct. The office of the Kara bitti, the highest spiritual leader, thus proves intractable to such attempts at enlistment and has been little affected by the radical transformation of the Kara’s lives through increasing integration into the Ethiopian state over recent decades. But even as the office has changed little, the lives of those expected to assume the role of bitti has, and the duties of a bitti strongly constrain the office holder and limit their personal ambitions and participation in politics at the local, regional and national level.
Many countries offer state credit guarantees to support credit-constrained exporters. The policy instrument is commonly justified by governments as a means to mitigating adverse outcomes of financial market frictions for exporting firms. Accumulated returns to the German state credit guarantee scheme deriving from risk-compensating premia have outweighed accumulated losses over the past 60 years. Why do private financial agents not step in and provide insurance given that the state-run program yields positive returns? We argue that costs of risk diversification, liquidity management, and coordination among creditors limit the ability of private financial agents to offer comparable insurance products. Moreover, we suggest that the government’s greater effectiveness in recovering claims in foreign countries endows the state with a cost advantage in dealing with the risks involved in large export projects. We test these hypotheses using monthly firm-level data combined with official transaction-level data on covered exports of German firms and find suggestive evidence that positive effects on trade are due to mitigated financial constraints: State credit guarantees benefit firms that are dependent on external finance, if the value at risk which they seek to cover is large, and at times when refinancing conditions on the private financial market are tight.