Search results for "State."
showing 10 items of 8943 documents
Screening of Foreign Direct Investment and the States’ Security Interests in Light of the OECD, UNCTAD and Other International Guidelines
2021
AbstractThis chapter analyses the concept of the “national security interest”, which is widely recognised as allowing a state to determine which areas of its economy are restricted or prohibited to foreign investors. This chapter seeks to identify what constitutes a threat for a state and how that threat is managed both domestically and internationally. Despite the recognition of a state’s right to take measures it considers essential to its security, there are limits. The rules established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and other international instruments are non-binding but can serve …
Professionalization as Status Adaptation: The Nobility, the Bureaucracy, and the Modernization of the Legal Profession in Finland
1991
In contrast to Anglo-American lines of professional development, the central agent of professionalization in many Continental countries was the state bureaucracy. However, this article proposes that an understanding of the class structure of traditional society is also needed to explain the privileged position of lawyers. An historical study of lawyers in the 19th century, after Finland was annexed by Russia, demonstrates that the legal profession provided the nobility an important medium of adaptation to the new society. The importance of the legal profession initially to the state bureaucracy, and subsequently to the nobility, explains its social prominence and its future development. An …
On some difficulties of putting in dialogue animal rights with anthropological debates: a historical view in three episodes
2018
In this paper, I try to identify the reasons why the dialogue between sociocultural anthropology and animal rights theories and movements continues to be difficult and scarce. At first sight this weakness of communication is surprising, if one looks at the amount of anthropological studies on human/animal relationships, in most cases pointing to how animals are considered in many cultures as non- human subjects or persons. For understanding the roots of this state of affairs, I compare the ways anthropologists and animal rights theorists and activists have engaged with the issue of the differences and commonalities between human beings and nonhuman animals. For this aim, I contrast the sear…
The social embeddedness of hydraulic engineers in the regulation of water and infrastructure in Peru
2019
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Majes-Colca watershed in Peru, this article explores some of the questions posed by Wittfogel regarding the management of hydraulic infrastructure and its eff...
Commentary: ethnography, critique and the state. Some thoughts on “fiscal anthropological insights into the heart of contemporary statehood”1
2018
This commentary explores the assets and liabilities of anthropology for the study of core functions of statehood (such as taxation) that increasingly become a matter of transnational negotiation an...
How to study bureaucracies ethnographically?
2019
We propose a short epistemological and methodological reflection on the challenges of doing ethnographical research on public services (‘bureaucracies’) from the inside. We start from the recognition of the double face of bureaucracy, as a form of domination and oppression as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails. We argue that, in classical Malinowskian fashion, the anthropology of bureaucracy should take bureaucrat as the ‘natives’, and acknowledge their agency. This means adopting basic anthropological postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their seemingly ‘absurd’ (or arbitrary) practices, once you underst…
Expecting justice: struggling with the indeterminate between ideals and practices
2018
This commentary contextualizes Jacobs’ study as a contribution to a body of anthropological research concerned with theorizing the state, and more importantly concerned with closing the analytical ...
The New Soviet Man With a Female Body: Mother, Teacher, Tractor Driver…
2020
Naujojo žmogaus sukūrimo idėjos užuomazgų galima rasti senovės Graikijoje ir Romoje, taip pat utopistų, švietėjų kūriniuose, teologiniuose tekstuose, tačiau ši ideologema galutinai susiformavo XIX a. pabaigoje, o bandymai ją realizuoti praktiškai sietini su (para)totalitarizmo įsigalėjimu. Vienas iš žinomiausių tokių bandymų pavyzdžių – siekis sukurti Naująjį sovietinį žmogų. Šis bandymas nuo kitų skiriasi komunistine ideologija, kuri kiekvienam reiškiniui suteikia „papildomų reikšmių ar funkcijų“ (Prozorov, 2013, p. 210). Kitaip tariant, visus dalykus SSRS galima suprasti ir paaiškinti tik diktatūros tikslu – utopinė ateities visuomenė „komunizmas“, kurios vardu valstybė viską ir visus reg…
Varieties of State Aid and Technological Development: Government Support to the Pulp and Paper Industry, the 1970s to the 1990s
2018
Countries promote the development of pulp and paper industry through industrial, technology and innovation policy measures. Direct interventions and regional and environmental policies, together with more general governmental measures on trade negotiations, taxation, labour policies, and infrastructure development (e.g. roads, energy) have also had an impact on shaping the geographical location of and investments in the pulp and paper industry. This chapter presents an historical overview of government support on pulp and paper industry in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from roughly the 1970s to the 1990s. As the earlier literature suggests, in c…
Four Potential Meanings of Double Negation
2016
The figurative use of double negations (not uninteresting, not unhappy) has been described by linguists and rhetoricians with regards to the rhetorical figure litotes. Both mitigation and strengthening have been proposed as aims of litotes (Horn, 1989; Krifka, 2007; van der Wouden, 1996). An analysis of the construction nicht un-adjective (not un-adj.) on the basis of German corpora leads to a coherent system of pragmatic functions for this sort of double negations. The construction can function as denial, potential presumption denial, mitigation or understatement. Nevertheless, litotes exemplifies the “indeterminate nature of figurative meaning” as suggested by Colston/Gibbs (2012: 259) in…