Between 1935 and 1943, the city of Salvador, Bahia, received the attention of numerous foreign scholars and intellectuals, all of them impressed – if not seduced – by its “magic”, largely the result of its black popular culture. They included Donald Pierson (1900–1995), Robert Park1 (1864–1944), Ruth Landes (1908–1991), Lorenzo Dow Turner (18…
The 2018 presidential election result in Brazil surprised many. Since then, numerous debates and a growing body of texts have attempted to understand this result and unearth the seeds that sowed what was understood by different analysts as the country’s ‘conservative turn’. In this introduction, we will not elaborate on all the factors that const…
“We have fulfilled our mission; the humanitarian dismantling operation is over,” announced Fabienne Buccio, Préfète of Pas-de-Calais, on Thursday 27 October 2016.1 Her words described the completion of an episode, a supposed end to the ‘Jungle’. But in reality this speech marked the end of neither the ‘Jungles’ of Calais nor the ongoing experience of displaced people in H…
What ought we do about the bomb? The official answer given by effectively all the world’s states is abolition. To be sure, the current nuclear-armed states are for all intents and purposes resolved to retain and renew their arsenals for the foreseeable future. Disarmament rhetoric has persistently been belied by enormous investments in warheads, missiles, bombers, and submarines. Yet, on the …
In the past decade, Southeast Asia’s economic and geopolitical profile in the worldhas risen dramatically. It is one of the fastest growing markets and least well-knownregions in the world. Countries in this region are important because they are large inaggregate, strategically located, exceptionally diverse, and intellectually interesting.This book on Demographic and Family Changes in Southe…
Humans increasingly perform like dressaged animals since the second half of the twentieth century. As it seems impossible to live, move, and work to-gether without harming other animals under competitive capitalism, there has been a trend to increasingly include animals—whether human imita-tions, real, or mediated—in the visual and performing arts since the late 1960s. …
Over the last 60 years several major historical databases with reconstructed life courses of large populations have been launched. The development of these databases is indicative of considerable investments that have greatly expanded the possibilities for new research within the fields of history, demography, sociology, as well as other disciplines. At the annual meeting of the S…
For over 60 years, decentralisation has been one of the most powerful reform movements in the world, affecting all of its regions and most of its coun-tries. This marks a major inversion of the much-longer-term global pattern, which featured centralised public administrations and the gradual march of the bureaucratic instruments of centralisation across large parts of the world ove…
Adoption entails the permanent transfer of legal rights and responsibili-ties for a child from birth parents to adoptive parents. Inevitably, such a procedure can be controversial, for adoption has a profound and perma-nent impact on the lives of all the parties involved—the child, the birth parents and the adoptive parents, as well as grandparents, siblings and other relations on …
Maori people make up about 15 per cent (or almost 565 500) of New Zealand’s population of close to 4.2 million (Statistics New Zealand 2007a, 2007b). In 2006, 87 per cent of the Maori population lived on the North Island, with a quarter living in the Auckland region. In the 1950s, nearly 70 per cent of Maori lived in rural areas but by 2006 almost 85 per cent lived in urban areas. The Maori…