Suchergebnisse

Many have dismissed the military-controlled transition to "democracy" in Burma as a sham that will only further entrench military rule. Others, however, view it as an opportunity to break the army's long-standing stranglehold on power and start a process of gradual reform. The present article considers the transition from a strategic perspective. After briefly revisiting the history of military rule in Burma, it examines the politics of the transition and considers possible scenarios in the short, medium, and longer term. It concludes that, although the military clearly has no intentions of surrendering control of the government, new political leaders, institutions, and processes might open opportunities to improve governance and, over time, transform politics, especially if democrats play their cards right. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

The nearly 60-year-long fight by Burma's ethnic minorities for autonomy and ethnic rights lies at the root of the country's broader political and humanitarian crisis. Yet, in the outside world, this issue is often subsumed under the better-known struggle for democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. The present article seeks to redress this imbalance by directing attention to the numerous groups representing ethnic minority interests, the grievances and aspirations that motivate their struggle, and their own strategies for peace. It argues that in Burma's deeply divided society peace and democracy are two distinct challenges, even if in the long term they must go together, and it calls for the international community to help the country's ethnic groups prepare for future peace negotiations and overcome the debilitating legacy of war. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

AbstractWhat would an animist ontology look like if there were no mythology to prop it up? Based partly on the Darhad hunting lore about badagshin or 'half-people', this article argues that myth is not a precondition for perspectivism. It is possible to conceive of an animist cosmos that is thoroughlymultiple, but at the same time amythological. Thus the Darhads do not entertain ideas of an original state of undifferentiation, in the sense of a truer form of existence that people (such as shamans) aspire to become a part of. Instead, they operate with a different concept of virtuality, namely the great nomadic void that constitutes a background potentiality, which plays the role of an ontological trampoline making possible the ongoing jumping between different realms, which Darhad social life amounts to. In that sense, the Darhad perspectivist cosmos comprises not one unified whole containing all there is, but many parallel worlds, each containing the totality of relations enacted through a given point of view.

AbstractThis article1 explores different forms of social memory about the state socialist repression of Mongolian Buddhism in the 1930s. Based on two political anecdotes collected during fieldwork among Darhads in Northern Mongolia as well as on recent studies of social memory in Mongolia and Buryatia by Christopher Kaplonski and Caroline Humphrey, I identify three 'mnemonic tropes,' which are appropriated by people in recounting these tragic events of the past, namely, what I call the digital, the paranoid, and the comical mode of collective remembering respectively. In broad terms, these mnemonic attitudes seem to correspond to three scapes of remembering: a radically liberal, a mildly conservative, and a neo-authoritarian political climate respectively.

I skyggen af atombomberne over Hiroshima og Nagasaki i 1945, trådte Danmark som resten af verden ind over tærsklen til atomƯalderen og kort efter ind i den kolde krig. Denne kombination af atomteknologi og global ideologisk oprustning skulle vise sig at få en lang række konsekvenser i det danske samfund. I midten af 1950erne udviklede først USA siden Sovjetunionen begge brintbomber, også kaldet termonukleare våben. Brintbombens effekt er mange gange større end atomƯbombens, og måltes i megaton mod atombombens kiloton. Den største brintƯbombe, som blev prøvesprængt i oktober 1961, var en sovjetisk bombe på ca. 50 MT, nok til i givet fald at lægge en større by øde.I 1968 stod Regeringsanlæg Vest, i daglig tale REGAN Vest, færdig. Som en moderne Noas Ark blev anlægget designet med henblik på at give dets beboere de bedst mulige betingelser for at overleve den nukleare syndflod, som under den kolde krig og med den våbenteknologiske udvikling, blev et stadig mere realisƯtisk scenarie.Denne bog handler om reaktionerne i Danmark på den termoƯnukleƯare revolution i form af de forestillinger, både myndigheder og borgere gjorde sig om den mulige krig. En planlægning gik i gang for i videst muligt omfang at sikre statens og civilsamƯfundets overlevelse, hvis en krig skulle bryde ud. Perspektivet i denne udgivelse er civilƯsamfundets ? hvad ville der ske med stat, samfund og borgere ? og dermed føjer bogen et nyt og hidtil næsten uudforsket kapitel til den kolde krigs historie

The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of science, technology, and society, including in terms of how new large-scale social databases are currently changing the methods, epistemologies, and politics of social science. In this commentary, we address such epochal ("large-scale") questions by way of a (situated) experiment: at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen, an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, physicists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists (including the authors) is setting up a large-scale data infrastructure, meant to continually record the digital traces of social relations among an entire freshman class of students (N > 1000). At the same time, fieldwork is carried out on friendship (and other) relations amongst the same group of students. On this basis, the question we pose is the following: what kind of knowledge is obtained on this social micro-cosmos via the Big (computational, quantitative) and Small (embodied, qualitative) Data, respectively? How do the two relate? Invoking Bohr's principle of complementarity as analogy, we hypothesize that social relations, as objects of knowledge, depend crucially on the type of measurement device deployed. At the same time, however, we also expect new interferences and polyphonies to arise at the intersection of Big and Small Data, provided that these are, so to speak, mixed with care. These questions, we stress, are important not only for the future of social science methods but also for the type of societal (self-)knowledge that may be expected from new large-scale social databases.

An ethnography of the Mongolian capital city of Ulaanbaatar during the nation's transition from socialism to a market-based economic system. Urban Hunters is an ethnography of the Mongolian capital city, Ulaanbaatar, during the nation's transition from socialism to a market-based economic system. Following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Mongolia entered a period of economic chaos characterized by wild inflation, disappearing banks, and closing farms, factories, and schools. During this time of widespread poverty, a generation of young adults came of age. In exploring the social, cultural, and existential ramifications of a transition that has become permanent and acquired a logic of its own, Lars Hojer and Morten Axel Pedersen present a new theorization of social agency in postsocialist as well as postcolonial contexts

A new and often controversial theoretical orientation that resonates strongly with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory, the so-called 'ontological turn' is receiving a great deal of attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines at present. This book provides the first anthropological exposition of this recent intellectual development. It traces the roots of the ontological turn in the history of anthropology and elucidates its emergence as a distinct theoretical orientation over the past few decades, showing how it has emerged in the work of Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and Viveiros de Castro, as well a number of younger scholars. Distinguishing this trajectory of thinking from related attempts to put questions of ontology at the heart of anthropological research, the book articulates critically the key methodological and theoretical tenets of the ontological turn, its prime epistemological and political implications, and locates it in the broader intellectual landscape of contemporary social theory.