Stanford university press jun 2000 (8 risultati)

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Based on the policy-making structures of Venezuelan government, this book examines the constitutionally allocated powers of the executive and legislature and shows how the powers of each branch are exercised given the incentives established by the electoral system and changing partisan strengths. Several institutional characteristics have led to a passive legislature and an activist chief executive. The advantages presidents enjoy as a result of their constitutional and partisan powers are demonstrated by a wealth of empirical evidence, including records of votes of censure, initiation of legislation, and the use of decree authority. Because of its dominance, the Venezuelan executive branch is the focus of interest-group pressure, which is institutionalized through consultative commissions and a decentralized public administration. The author analyzes memberships of more than 300 advisory commissions and governing boards, revealing the preponderance of posts filled by umbrella agencies for business and labor. The interaction of this limited version of civil society with policy makers in the executive branch has led to a highly protectionist development strategy and excessive government subsidies. The strategy and the political process that made it possible were both exhausted by the end of the 1980s. Venezuela was in political and economic crisis. The author places Venezuela in a comparative context with other Latin American states on three issues: the likelihood that executives will receive disciplined, majority support in the legislature; the constitutional powers of presidents; and the degree to which business and labor are formally incorporated through single peak associations. Participation and policy-making processes vary significantly across Latin American democracies, with few others reaching the level of centralization that has characterized Venezuela. At the other end of the spectrum, some Latin American institutional designs are characterized by diffusion and fragmentation. In conclusion, the author offers a blueprint to modify some of the counterproductive patterns associated with Venezuela, one of the longest-lived but now troubled democracies in Latin America.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Language and culture are often seen as unique characteristics of human beings. In this book the author argues that our ability to use a wide array of emotions evolved long before spoken language and, in fact, constituted a preadaptation for the speech and culture that developed among later hominids. Long before humans could speak with words, they communicated through body language their emotional dispositions; and it is the neurological wiring of the brain for these emotional languages that represented the key evolutionary breakthrough for our species. How did natural selection work on the basic ape anatomy and neuroanatomy to create the hominid line The author suggests that what distinguished our ancestors from other apes was the development of an increased capacity for sociality and organization, crucial for survival on the African savanna. All apes display a propensity for weak ties, individualism, mobility, and autonomy that was, and is today, useful in arboreal and woodland habitats but served them poorly when our ancestors began to move onto the African plain during the late Miocene. The challenge for natural selection was to enhance traits in the species that would foster the social ties necessary for survival in the new environment. The author suggests that the result was a development of certain areas of the primate brain that encouraged strong emotional ties, allowing our ancestors to build higher levels of social solidarity. Our basic neurological wiring continues to reflect this adaptive development. From a sociological perspective that is informed by evolutionary biology, primatology, and neurology, the book examines the current neurological bases of our emotional repertoire and their implications for our social actions.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Language and culture are often seen as unique characteristics of human beings. In this book the author argues that our ability to use a wide array of emotions evolved long before spoken language and, in fact, constituted a preadaptation for the speech and culture that developed among later hominids. Long before humans could speak with words, they communicated through body language their emotional dispositions; and it is the neurological wiring of the brain for these emotional languages that represented the key evolutionary breakthrough for our species. How did natural selection work on the basic ape anatomy and neuroanatomy to create the hominid line The author suggests that what distinguished our ancestors from other apes was the development of an increased capacity for sociality and organization, crucial for survival on the African savanna. All apes display a propensity for weak ties, individualism, mobility, and autonomy that was, and is today, useful in arboreal and woodland habitats but served them poorly when our ancestors began to move onto the African plain during the late Miocene. The challenge for natural selection was to enhance traits in the species that would foster the social ties necessary for survival in the new environment. The author suggests that the result was a development of certain areas of the primate brain that encouraged strong emotional ties, allowing our ancestors to build higher levels of social solidarity. Our basic neurological wiring continues to reflect this adaptive development. From a sociological perspective that is informed by evolutionary biology, primatology, and neurology, the book examines the current neurological bases of our emotional repertoire and their implications for our social actions. 208 pp. Englisch. …

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil: 'What does it matter what you say about other people ' The author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself She wonders why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject. She decides that some hesitations and awkwardness in inhabiting many categories of the person-including those celebrated by what is sometimes termed identity politics-need not evidence either psychological weakness or political lack of nerve. Neither an 'identity' nor a 'nonidentity' can quite convince. But if this discomfort inhering in self-characterization needs to be fully admitted and registered-as something that is simultaneously linguistic and affective-it can also be cheerfully tolerated. Here language is not treated as a guileful thing that leads its speakers astray. Though the business of being called something, and of being positioned by that calling, is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer effective therapy. Even if uncertain and volatile categorizations do trouble the politics that they also shape, they hardly weaken the empathetic solidarity that is distinct from identification. The verbal irony of self-presentation can be politically helpful. Questioning the received diction of the self cannot be dismissed merely as a luxury of those in secure positions, but instead can move toward a conception of a constructive nonidentity. This extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics also considers the lyrical 'I' and linguistic emotionality, the historical status of irony, and the possibilities of a nonidentitarian solidarity that is unapologetically alert to the affect of language. 240 pp. Englisch.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Since the Weimar era, German cinema has played a leading role in the innovation of gay and lesbian cinema, with the tantalizing sexual illegibility and gender instability of German films of the 1920s anticipating the queer sensibilities of the 1990s. From such cross-dressing Weimar comedies as Viktor und Victoria to the transgender fantasies of Ulrike Ottinger, Monika Treut, and Hans Scheirl, this filmic tradition explores the unconventional erotic, its directors inventing a visual language that goes beyond the trivialization and sensationalism of mainstream representations of gays and lesbians. This cinema crosses the boundaries between such classifications as male and female, gay and bisexual, normal and pathological, insisting that such transgressions cannot be entirely tamed, regulated, or closeted. Previous scholarship, reading this national cinema as sociopolitical commentary, has tended to ignore what falls outside a realist, hetero-normative paradigm. In this book, the author aims to rectify this neglect by rewriting German cinematic history queerly. She reexamines the Nazi movie star Zarah Leander via her gay fandom, showing how this actress haunts the drag performance of femininity in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She argues not only for the persuasiveness of the gay underground in the New German Cinema but also for cinema's pivotal role in German gay liberation. Other topics include the queering of nationality in the films of Monika Treut and Rosa von Praunheim, the fetishistic medium of experimental filmmaking in the works of Michael Brynntrup and Matthias Müller, and the androgynous appeal of 'dyke noir animation.' In conclusion, The Queer German Cinema juxtaposes the voices of several German filmmakers as they reflect on their art in terms of a counter-politics. 328 pp. Englisch.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Between 1560 and 1620, a thousand or more people left the town of Brihuega in Spain to migrate to New Spain (now Mexico), where nearly all of them settled in Puebla de los Angeles, New Spain's second most important city. A medium-sized community of about four thousand people, Brihuega had been a center of textile production since the Middle Ages, but in the latter part of the sixteenth century its industry was in decline-a circumstance that induced a significant number of its townspeople to emigrate to Puebla, where conditions for textile manufacturing seemed ideal. The immigrants from Brihuega played a crucial role in making Puebla the leading textile producer in New Spain, and they were otherwise active in the city's commercial-industrial sector as well. Although some immigrants penetrated the higher circles of poblano society and politics, for the most part they remained close to their entrepreneurial and artisanal origins. Closely associated through business, kinship, marital, and compadrazgo ties, and in residential patterns, the Brihuega immigrants in Puebla constituted a coherent and visible community. This book uses the experiences and activities of the immigrants as a basis for analyzing society in Brihuega and Puebla, making direct comparisons between the two cities by examining such topics as mobility and settlement; politics and public life; economic activity; religious life; social relations; and marriage, family, and kinship. In tracing the socioeconomic, cultural, and institutional patterns of a town in Spain and a city in New Spain-in all their connections, continuities, and discontinuities-the book offers a new basis for understanding the process and implications of the transference of these patterns within the early modern Hispanic world. 272 pp. Englisch.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Why did the social sciences become an integral part of Jewish scholarship beginning in the late nineteenth century What part did this new scholarship play in the ongoing debate over emancipation and assimilation, Zionism and diasporism, the nature of Jewish identity, and the problem of Jewish continuity and survival. To answer these questions, this book traces the emergence and development of an organized Jewish social science in central Europe, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other social science modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and in the United States. The author locates the initial impetus for an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science in the Zionist movement, as Zionists looked to the social sciences to provide them with the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. In particular, the social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of Jewry in the diaspora. Social science also charted emancipation and assimilation, which were viewed as disintegrative agents for the dissolution of Jewish identity, and hence as a threat to the Jewish future. For Zionists, nationalism offered the means to reverse the process of dissolution. Yet Zionists were not alone in turning to the social sciences to advance their political agenda. This study also examines the involvement of non-Zionists in Jewish social science, focusing on the way liberal, assimilationist scholars utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance. 352 pp. Englisch.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Since the Weimar era, German cinema has played a leading role in the innovation of gay and lesbian cinema, with the tantalizing sexual illegibility and gender instability of German films of the 1920s anticipating the queer sensibilities of the 1990s. From such cross-dressing Weimar comedies as Viktor und Victoria to the transgender fantasies of Ulrike Ottinger, Monika Treut, and Hans Scheirl, this filmic tradition explores the unconventional erotic, its directors inventing a visual language that goes beyond the trivialization and sensationalism of mainstream representations of gays and lesbians. This cinema crosses the boundaries between such classifications as male and female, gay and bisexual, normal and pathological, insisting that such transgressions cannot be entirely tamed, regulated, or closeted. Previous scholarship, reading this national cinema as sociopolitical commentary, has tended to ignore what falls outside a realist, hetero-normative paradigm. In this book, the author aims to rectify this neglect by rewriting German cinematic history queerly. She reexamines the Nazi movie star Zarah Leander via her gay fandom, showing how this actress haunts the drag performance of femininity in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She argues not only for the persuasiveness of the gay underground in the New German Cinema but also for cinema's pivotal role in German gay liberation. Other topics include the queering of nationality in the films of Monika Treut and Rosa von Praunheim, the fetishistic medium of experimental filmmaking in the works of Michael Brynntrup and Matthias Müller, and the androgynous appeal of 'dyke noir animation.' In conclusion, The Queer German Cinema juxtaposes the voices of several German filmmakers as they reflect on their art in terms of a counter-politics. 328 pp. Englisch.…