This article explores Gypsy Travellers' changing views on their children's education. It highlights the positive means some schools use to encourage greater involvement of Gypsy Traveller parents. It argues that current educational policy needs to be re-developed to incorporate more effective and affirmative responses to interrupted and nomadic learning. It draws heavily on interviews with Gypsy Traveller families in an effort to give 'voice' to an under-represented community.

This paper examines understandings of community and safety for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) groups in schools in a metropolitan borough. One school in particular was identified as being the 'Gypsy school' and was attended by the majority of GRT children in the borough. The school was recognised as a model of 'good practice' reflecting its holistic approach towards the GRT community but it was also successful for wider reasons. A picture of the intersection of different communities emerged (...) from interview accounts in which a GRT community with strong local attachments, socially negotiated and maintained, figured very strongly. The GRT community was also identified as sharing racist attitudes towards other non-white immigrants. This article examines children's perspectives of their engagement with the education process and how the strong GRT community played an important part in their understandings of safety and belonging. (shrink)

Our age is trying in many ways to deal with the problem of the survival of ethnic minorities. Being confronted with a centralized political power which destroys cultural differences, many of these minorities have become conscious of their originality (which is often hidden away in folklore) and are in search of a new balance with the dominant culture. They try to achieve this new balance by bringing their basic characteristics up to date or even deliberately entering a phase of counter (...) acculturation and adopting an attitude of political liberation much like that of the formerly colonized peoples. (shrink)

Since their arrival in Europe in the Middle Ages the Gypsies have suffered from discrimination on the grounds of racial prejudice. In the 20th century the NAZI doctrine lead to Porrajmos - the Gypsy Holocaust. In the post-war communist countries, Gypsies were forced to give up their traditional ways of life and become productive. Persecution of Gypsies - those who stayed in the post-communist countries and those who migrated to the West - continued in Europe after the big changes (...) of 1989 and up to the present time. (shrink)

This paper is an analysis of comparative multiculturalisms. Starting from the historical reality that both the Roma and the African-Americans were reified through slavery and discriminated against because of their racial visibility, the author analyses the position of the two groups in the Romanian, namely, the American society. The lead of the African-Americans in overcoming the racial stigma is explained by the author through: the opportunities offered by a powerful and consolidated democracy, and by the existence of an elite of (...) the minority group. These factors should be envisaged by Romanian society when trying to make both the minority and the majority cooperate in order to avoid the transformation of the Roma into an under-class group, a great challenge with a view to Romania’s integration into the EU structures. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 115-157.

This article discusses the foundation of ideas for Vyacheslav Ivanov’s interpretation of Pushkin’s poem. In The Gypsies, Ivanov sees a conflict between personal freedom and sobornost’ as revealed b...

The Gypsies (a misnomer, derived from an early legend about Egyptian origins) defy the conventional definition of a population: they have no nation-state, speak different languages, belong to many religions and comprise a mosaic of socially and culturally divergent groups separated by strict rules of endogamy. Referred to as “the invisible minority”, the Gypsies have for centuries been ignored by Western medicine, and their genetic heritage has only recently attracted attention. Common origins from a small group of ancestors characterise the (...) 8–10 million European Gypsies as an unusual trans-national founder population, whose exodus from India played the role of a profound demographic bottleneck. Social and economic pressures within Europe led to gradual fragmentation, generating multiple genetically differentiated subisolates. The string of population bottlenecks and founder effects have shaped a unique genetic profile, whose potential for genetic research can be met only by study designs that acknowledge cultural tradition and self-identity. BioEssays 27:1084–1094, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Gypsy people are the most poorly considered minority in Spain. Their current circumstances in relation to growth rate and trend variation in this country are not well known. The main objective of this paper is to show what happens to a person's growth process in a transitional minority group affected by the process of globalisation. As target population and the articulation of social actions to have an implementation of quality of life is an additional objective. The research team, in (...) collaboration with “Apoyo”, an NGO, made contact with each Gypsy family. The sample comprised 189 boys aged 5 to 14 years. The boys and their families have been rehoused in two large buildings, named “Ruedo” and “Herradura”, in an attempt to accommodate the marginal Gypsy population following the disappearance of their shanties in Madrid. Morphological and physiological variables were considered as well as social situation and nutritional habits. Large family size (5–6 children), smoking and coffee- drinking habits and the intake of less than the internationally recommended number of calories after the age of 8 years endangers the healthy growth of these European Union citizens. (shrink)

The article proposes a critical approach to the notion of interculturality in the context of the geopolitical and social transformations that marked the transition from the nation-state system to the birth of a common European identity.In the European society the demarginalisation of territorial and identification borders raises the question of cultural differences and the need to redefine the new criteria for social inclusion. In this perspective, the process of European integration finds its own testing ground in social policies designed to (...) cultural minority. The article focuses precisely on the case of Gypsy communities, exploring the symbolic and political mechanisms that have historically compromised public image of Gypsies through the ‘nomad theory’ by considering nomadism as part of an inherent identity. The reproduction of this stereotype is at the basis of a social stigma of Gypsy groups, perceived as a public order problem that is reflected in national and supranational politics according to the tendency to consider Gypsies as incapable of decision making and not interlocutors on issues such as health, education and housing. In this text, the author aims to examine these aspects of social exclusion of Gypsy communities and the fault lines of their Europeanisation process, emphasizing their deep roots in the historical and social structure of Europe and their political migration as a creative adaptation strategy to the historical-economic conjunctures. In this framework of reference, interculturality becomes an analytical and political tool that is capable of overcoming the conflicts between the majority society and minorities and a project able to oppose to the ideologies of difference that transform the cultures into abstract and incommunicable entities.El artículo propone un acercamiento crítico a la noción de interculturalidad en el cuadro de las transformaciones sociales y geopolíticas que han caracterizado el paso del sistema estado-nación al nacimiento de una identidad comunitaria europea. En la actual sociedad europea la desmarginalización de los confines identitarios y territoriales se eleva la cuestión de las diferencias culturales y la necesidad de redefinir nuevos criterios de inclusión social. En esta perspectiva el proceso de integración europea encuentra uno de sus bancos de prueba en las políticas sociales dirigidas a aquellas comunidades consideradas minorías culturales. El artículo se centra en particular en el caso de las comunidades gitanas, examinando los mecanismos simbólicos y políticos que han determinado históricamente una representación negativa suya por la teoría de un nomadismo consustancial a la identidad gitana. La reproducción de este estereotipo es la base de un estigma social de los gitanos, percibidos como un problema de orden público y se refleja en las políticas nacionales y supranacionales que continúan sin considerarlos interlocutores activos en la elección de estrategias pertenecientes a la esfera de la salud, de la educación y de la vivienda. En el texto se discuten estos aspectos unidos a la exclusión social de los gitanos y los puntos débiles de su integración europea, subrayando su pertenencia histórica a Europa y valorando su política migratoria como expresión de una modalidad creativa de adaptación a las coyunturas histórico-económicas. En este marco de referencia, la interculturalidad se convierte en un instrumento analítico y político capaz de superar los conflictos entre sociedad mayoritaria y ‘minoría cultural’ y a su vez en un proyecto capaz de oponerse a aquellas ideologías de la diferencia que transforman las culturas en entidades abstractas e incomunicables. (shrink)

In this paper we analyse the connection between the contested ethno-cultural labelling of Gipsy-Travellers in Wales and their position of social marginalisation, with special reference to spatial issues, such as the provision of campsites and public housing. Our main aim is to show how the formal and informal (mis)labelling of minority groups leads to a number of morally and politically questionable outcomes in their treatment on the part of political authorities. Our approach combines a close reading of official policy documents, (...) government-commissioned and independent empirical research with a theoretical framework drawn mainly from contemporary political philosophy, and especially from the debate on redistribution and recognition. (shrink)

From its very beginnings economic anthropology had to tackle a major obstacle: the very nature of its object of study. What in fact is meant by the use of the term ‘economics’ or its corresponding adjective? Does ‘economics’ refer to a specific relationship between ends and means, as some think, or is it defined, more prosaically, as the satisfaction of material needs? Is it a category of specific facts or a praxeology of goal-oriented action? Some interesting debates on the matter, (...) which have brought formalist, substantivist, and Marxist writers into conflict, have revealed marked ideological distortions, some reductionism, and finally epistemological positions that were difficult to reconcile. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study of reporting by UK national newspapers of Gipsies, Roma and Travelers offers a macro-analysis to complement existing discourse analyses. The results show a significant imbalance...

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the destruction of Serbian Jews during Second Wolrd War in the local and European context. Of all the sites in Serbia relevant to the destruction of the Serbian Jews, Sajmiste is the most important. After the consideration of the attitude of Germans and Nedic?s regime toward Jews and?Gypsies? in the context of the Final Solution, the author highlights that the Sajmiste internment camp was transformed into a local death camp-the only such site outside the (...) territories of Poland and the Soviet Union. Serbia was the one country outside Poland and the Soviet Union where all Jewish victims were killed on the spot without deportation. It was the first country after Estonia to be declared?judenfrei.? Moreover, in Serbia the German army was not only complicit in the Holocaust but was in fact the main instigator and executioner in the killing of the Jewish men. For this reason, in particular, Sajmiste is a unique site for Holocaust remembrance not only in the Serbian but also in the European context. Clanak analizira osobenosti unistenja srpskih Jevreja tokom Drugog svetskog rata u lokalnom i evropskom kontekstu. Od svih mesta u Srbiji koja su relevantna za unistenje Jevreja, Sajmiste je najvaznije. Nakon razmatranja stava Nemaca i Nedicevog rezima prema Jevrejima i?Ciganima?, autor istice da je od logora za internaciju, Sajmiste transformisano u lokalni logor smrti, jedini takav izvan teritorija Poljske i Sovjetskog Saveza: osim Poljske i Sovjetskog Saveza, Srbija je jedina zemlja gde su jevrejske zrtve ubijane na licu mesta, bez deportacije. Posle Estonije, prva je zemlja koja je proglasena za judenfrei. Stavise, u Srbiji nemacka vojska bila je ne samo saucesnik u Holokaustu vec i glavni podstrekac i izvrsilac ubijanja Jevreja. Posebno zbog ovih razloga, Sajmiste predstavlja jedinstveno mesto secanj? na Holokaust, ne samo u srpskom vec i u evropskom kontekstu. (shrink)

In this essay two photographs taken during the events at Dale Farm and at Meriden—both involving issues of gypsy and traveller settlement in rural areas—are analysed and interpreted in some depth. Use is thereby made of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler . This book, as is argued in this contribution, includes, in embryonic form, a whole imaginary of forms of sovereignty which, it could be said, is still to a significant extent structuring conflicts between gypsy and traveller communities (...) on the one hand, and rural residents on the other. The exploration of Walton’s imaginary in which supposed compleat contemplators are pitched against intransigent, dogmatic, pertinacious schismaticks, enables us to tease out images of nomadism and sovereignty and allows us to argue how the clash of imaginary sovereignties both at Dale Farm and at Meriden is, at the core, a clash of irreconcilable forms of life which, each, rest upon what existentialists would call an original, radical choice. We conclude with some notes on the need to acknowledge but also to interrogate, in and during conflicts between gypsies and travellers and rural residents, the radical nature of the existential choices that underpin such conflicts. Without any such acknowledgement, and without any meta-communicative interrogation of the choices that underpin imaginary forms of life, one may not hope to be able bridge the chasm between radically chosen, diametrically opposed forms of life. (shrink)

The aim of this study is an analysis of the possible adaptive consequences of delivery of low birth weight infants. We attempt to reveal the cost and benefit components of bearing small children, estimate the chance of the infants’ survival, and calculate the mothers’ reproductive success. According to life-history theory, under certain circumstances mothers can enhance their lifetime fitness by lowering the rate of investment in an infant and/or enhancing the rate of subsequent births. We assume that living in a (...) risky environment and giving birth to a small infant may involve a shift from qualitative to quantitative production of offspring. Given high infant mortality rates, parents will have a reproductive interest in producing a relatively large number of children with a smaller amount of prenatal investment. This hypothesis was tested among 650 Gypsy and 717 non-Gypsy Hungarian mothers. Our study has revealed that 23.8% of the Gypsy mothers had low birth weight (<2,500 g) children, whose mortality rate is very high. These mothers also had more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths than those with normal weight children. As a possible response to these reproductive failures, they shortened birth spacing, gaining 2–4 years across their reproductive lifespan for having additional children. Because of the relatively short interbirth intervals, by the end of their fertility period, Gypsy mothers with one or two low birth weight infants have significantly more children than their ethnic Hungarian counterparts. They appear to compensate for handicaps associated with low birth weights by having a larger number of closely spaced children following the birth of one or more infants with a reduced probability of survival. The possible alternative explanations are discussed, and the long-term reproductive benefits are estimated for both ethnic groups. (shrink)

"Race" is so highly charged and loaded a concept it often hampers critical thinking about racial practice and policy. A philosophical approach allows us to isolate and analyse the key questions: What is race? Can we do without race? What is racism and why is it wrong? What should our policies on race and racism be? The Philosophy of Race presents a concise and up-to-date overview of the central philosophical debates about race. It then builds on this philosophical foundation to (...) analyse the sociopolitical questions of racism and race-relevant policy. Throughout, the discussion is illustrated with a wide range of examples: Afro-American 'blackness'; British-Asian racial formation; Aboriginal identity in Australia; the racial grouping of Romany-Gypsies and Jews in Europe; categories of race in Brazil; and the concept of model minorities in the US and UK. (shrink)

Hilde Lindemann Nelson focuses on the stories of groups of people--including Gypsies, mothers, nurses, and transsexuals--whose identities have been defined by those with the power to speak for them and to constrain the scope of their actions. By placing their stories side by side with narratives about the groups in question, Nelson arrives at some important insights regarding the nature of identity. She regards personal identity as consisting not only of how people view themselves but also of how others view (...) them. These perceptions combine to shape the person's field of action. If a dominant group constructs the identities of certain people through socially shared narratives that mark them as morally subnormal, those who bear the damaged identity cannot exercise their moral agency freely.Nelson identifies two kinds of damage inflicted on identities by abusive group relations: one kind deprives individuals of important social goods, and the other deprives them of self-respect. To intervene in the production of either kind of damage, Nelson develops the counterstory, a strategy of resistance that allows the identity to be narratively repaired and so restores the person to full membership in the social and moral community. By attending to the power dynamics that constrict agency, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair augments the narrative approaches of ethicists such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor. (shrink)

A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already (...) crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? Lydia Goehr explores these narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red? (shrink)

The epistemic basing relation is the relation occurring between a belief and a reason when the reason is the reason for which the belief is held. It marks the distinction between a belief's being justifiable for a person, and the person's being justified in holding the belief. As such, it is an essential component of any complete theory of epistemic justification. ;I survey and evaluate all theories of the basing relation that I am aware of published between 1965 and 1995. (...) These include causal theories, , theories involving pseudo-overdetermination relations , theories involving what a person would appeal to in defense of her beliefs , and doxastic theories , involving an appeal to meta-beliefs. My discussion of these theories includes a detailed analysis of variations of Lehrer's case of the gypsy lawyer which, I show, can be reformulated to pose a decisive objection to causal theories, if not causal analyses, of the basing relation. ;Rejecting all published theories, I present a new kind of causal analysis of the basing relation which I call the causal-doxastic theory. This theory states that a belief is based on a reason if the reason bears an appropriate causal relation to the belief, or, it does not bear such a causal relation, but an appropriate meta-belief is present. A causal analysis of which meta-beliefs are appropriate is given, so as to count as inappropriate rationalizations, mistaken meta-beliefs, etc. In developing the causal-doxastic theory, I present a solution to the problem of deviant causal chains, a discussion of the causal sustaining of beliefs, an account of rejecting reasons, and a partial analysis of showing that one is justified. I then discuss implications of my theory regarding foundationalism, inference, basic and non-basic belief, holistic and linear coherentism, process reliabilism, internalism and externalism, and various closure principles. (shrink)

This chapter shows that taboos erected around crimes inhibit individuals and nations' work of mourning for the victims of crimes. The work of mourning is the precondition that individuals and nations take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims and their descendants, and make sure that such crimes are not repeated. I bring Theodor W. Adorno and Sigmund Freud in conversation to explain the connection between taboos and the failure to mourn. I further detail this connection with Antigone (...) as an example of taboo and denied mourning. I also explain that the taboos erected around the National Socialist genocide on Roma and Sinti ("gypsies") do not allow Austrians to mourn the loss of this population. As a result, their taking responsibility for this crime remains stifled, and they fail to show solidarity with the Roma and Sinti genocide victims. (shrink)

Social persons routinely tell themselves and others richly elaborated autobiographical stories filled with details about deeds, plans, roles, motivations, values, and character. Saul, let us imagine, is someone who once sailed the world as a young adventurer, going from port to port and living a gypsy existence. In telling his new acquaintance, Jess, of his former exotic life, he shines a light on his present character and this may guide to some extent their interaction here and now. Perhaps Jess (...) also spent time at one of these port locations; perhaps their paths might even have crossed. They might be drawn into recounting some common events that indeed do establish a common link. Did they visit a certain famous landmark? Did they meet up at the same bars? And so on. When we open up to friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and close others through the stories we tell them, we do so by revealing bits of ourselves. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Modern Song: curious title, a curious book. If you bought it, as I did, because you are a devoted Dylan fan, hoping to find new Dylan songs inside, or at least new Dylan prose, you will be disappointed. In the photo of three musicians on the cover, none of them is Dylan. The one on the left is Little Richard. Who are the other two? Nowhere are we told their names, nor the names of the people in (...) any of the other photos, except for the sixty-six featured artists, though we will recognize many. The photo on the back cover might or might not be of the interior of Izzy Young's “Folklore Center,” reminiscent of Dylan's early days in Greenwich Village in the Sixties, when, together with my guitarist husband, I got to hear him perform after hours at the Gaslight and knew him well enough to say Hi when passing on the street.The basis for selecting the sixty-six songs anthologized and commented on is not immediately obvious. This is not a collection of Dylan's underappreciated favorites, though the taste represented is certainly eclectic and the choices are often surprising. The title does not help the reader who has not yet got her bearings... Philosophy? As if to justify his use of the word, Dylan eventually offers a lengthy comment on Albert Camus, but how relevant is that comment to these songs? And the word modern, too, means so many things—a sudden divergence from the past in the arts and literature; up-to-date and therefore good. These songs are not that kind of modern. If anything, the book looks backward, across the years of Dylan's long life to his musical awakening. Because we are almost the same age, I recognize the hodgepodge of styles and influences assembled here as belonging mostly to the early Fifties, when, like Bob, I was entering my teens by listening to, even dancing to, songs on the radio before I fell asleep at night. Enough about me! But no more apt basis for classifying these songs is suggested. They are not arranged alphabetically or chronologically.As for the anthologized songs, each one, once named, receives a commentary, and every commentary is called a chapter, and every chapter is divided into two parts, spelled out in letters as bold as a movie marquee. We are given the title of each song, the date of its release, and the name of the songwriter. The first part of each commentary consists of a paraphrase of “events” in the song, told almost exclusively in the second-person you rather than the more conventional I or the third-person he or she. Here is a passage from Dylan's paraphrase of “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins: You get on well with most people, and you put up with a lot, and you hardly get caught off guard, but your shoes are something else. Minor things may annoy you, but you rise above them. Having your teeth kicked in, being pounded senseless, being dumped on and discredited, but you don't put any weight on that, none of it is as real to you as your shoes. They're priceless and beyond monetary worth.The paraphrase goes on for almost six pages, and to what end? The second half of each commentary, indicated by changes in the type, takes a few steps back to consider the sociological implications of the song in the context of its time. For instance, from the second half of the commentary on “Blue Suede Shoes”: “Shoes reveal character, station, and personality.” But Dylan does not use the opportunity to talk about his own character, station, personality. His associations with Carl Perkins and “Blue Suede Shoes” morph into an anecdote about a man called “Iron Felix, trusted consort to Lenin and Stalin.”A lengthy list of all required photo credits fills the two back pages but is printed in type so small it is almost illegible. If you want more information, and more importantly if you want to experience the songs discussed, your best bet is to search for the recordings on YouTube and to follow along, reading Dylan's commentary, one song at a time, while listening. Or, I hear rumors that we will need to purchase another book, the audio version of Philosophy of Modern Song, not yet released.Every song has its commentary, but nothing about this organization is stable, and as soon as the reader/listener thinks she has discovered a rationale for the order of the works selected, she is met with an exception. Basically, these seem to be songs about which Dylan has something anecdotal to say. More usefully, perhaps, they are organized around certain themes—those that have always preoccupied him: man's inhumanity to man, injustice, self-deception, the human situation. The anonymous author of the blurb on the jacket promises a master class in songwriting, but, if it exists at all, that lecture is exhausted in one or two observations, such as: “ ‘El Paso’ is built on five stanzas, each one two verses and a bridge and then returning to the next stanza.... ”It was almost fifty pages into the book that the sense of something missing overcame me. It was not only the words of the songs and the music that were missing; it was the author, the central intelligence that I love, the singer and songwriter whose name is credited on the cover but who never appears in the book, not even in a photograph. What I missed was Dylan. He had removed himself from his book's pages, except perhaps for a single instance: “You're an eighty-year old man, being wheeled around in a home for the elderly, and the nurses are getting on your nerves.... ”Has Bob Dylan grown weary of himself and all of his creations? The commentaries are not about Bob. In the whole book, the line quoted above may be the only exception. Does he refuse the “first person singular in the hopes of transcending ego”? Maybe; but we want to hear our master's voice. As for the philosophy of song? Besides the remarks on Camus, there is only one commentary in which Dylan explicitly states anything like a philosophy, and that is the one on “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me,” written and performed by Joe Shaver. The song has a philosophical point of view: “Keep moving, it's better, let the train keep on rolling.”. (shrink)

Summary The author of the paper studies the ethical views of Matthias Bel expressed in his Preface to Johann Arndt's treatise and in Davidian-Solomonian Ethics, which contain a critique of false Christianity and ancient (especially Aristotle's) ethics. Bel refuses any philosophical ethics based on human nature, since man, in his very essence, is sinful and vicious. This leads to the general moral downfall of the young and mankind. He only recognises ethics whose source and the highest good is God. He (...) accepts ancient ethics as long as it is useful for achieving Christian moral values. Bel was a vociferous critic of the morality of the time; he adopted a highly negative stance towards the Jews and Gypsies living in the then Historical Hungary. The author considers Matthias Bel a confident, or enthusiastic, Pietist in the early period of his life and work; later, he rates him as a moderate Pietist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 2-15 [Access article in PDF] Economic Aspects of Social and Environmental Violence John B. Cobb Jr. Claremont School of Theology I When we think of violence, what first comes to mind are violent acts by individuals or groups against other individuals. We think of rapes and murders, lynchings and muggings, beatings and armed robberies. We want the police to protect us from this violence. Unfortunately, (...) we know that police are tempted, in turn, to employ their power in violent ways, chiefly against those guilty of crimes, but sometimes against the innocent. The cycle of violence on the part of individuals and groups goes on.Bad as this violence is, it is worse when the state, instead of restricting it, supports and requires it. Political authorities have always exercised violence against their own people, especially those they suspected of being threats to their power. But in the twentieth century, state violence reached previously unheard of levels. For the sake of building a communist society, Stalin killed millions and imprisoned millions more. The Nazis undertook to purify Germany of Jews, gypsies, and other undesirables through extermination undertaken through bureaucratic processes.We Americans do not think of ourselves as having employed state power in any such way. We know that national power was used violently to drive Native Americans off their land down through the nineteenth century. We know that southern states used their power to enforce segregation and protect whites who engaged in violent acts against blacks in order to maintain total white domination over them. But we now think of the national government much more as the protector of human rights. This is not entirely false.We tend not to recognize, however, the amount of violence the national government is exercising in the wars against crime and drugs. In order to reduce individual violence as well as drug use, we have created a prison population of two million. One-fourth of all the prisoners in the world are in the United States, most of them jailed for nonviolent crimes. Although drug use is more or less equally spread among ethnic and economic groups, most of those imprisoned for this crime are poor and ethnic minorities. In the name of law and order, enormous violence is inflicted by the United States against the people of its ghettos. [End Page 3]In this same century war also took on new dimensions. It has been waged against entire populations instead of armies. The aim at total destruction came to its fullest expression when twice the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan.World War II has made all of us sadly aware of the horrors of state violence. It has turned us against nationalism. We are appalled as we see nationalism raise its ugly head again in the former Soviet Union and especially in the former Yugoslavia. When ethnic groups undertake to destroy each other, our moral condemnation is unambiguous. Personal, group, and state violence remains a problem, but at least the wrong involved in this is widely understood.In all civilization there has been another kind of violence—economic. In much of history economic violence has been closely related to the forms noted above. The rich have been able to impose their will on the poor because they could employ persons to exercise violence for them and they could influence state action. We see this glaringly in the "goon squads" employed by the wealthy in some Latin American countries to intimidate and kill those who protest their actions. These goon squads often work closely with the military power of the state.We know that in this country as well, wealth reduces the chance of conviction for crimes. It also buys influence in government. On the whole the United States government throughout history has supported the interests of those with money. Today the power of wealth in the political process is clearly evident. We recognize that this situation is corrupt, but we do not ordinarily think of it as a form of violence. This is because the violent consequences are indirect, and we are... (shrink)

About a decade ago the concept of chaos burst upon scientific community as a new paradigm for viewing the certain of the workings of nature and the structures of mathematics. It embodied two key concepts: (1) that certain systems that are classified as "chaotic", while completely determined by initial conditions and the laws of physics, are nevertheless so unstable as to be inherently unpredictable; and (2) that the behavior of chaotic systems is not arbitrarily random, but instead shows regularities, repeating (...) patterns, and self-similarities. The new science of chaos thus staked out its territory in the middle ground between order and randomness, a ground that in the real world is occupied by systems ranging from energy levels in nuclei, to turbulence in plasmas, to the spread of gypsy moths, to weather patterns of Earth and Jupiter, to the stock and commodities markets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanian Cultural and Political IdentityDonald R. KelleyThe Journal of the History of Ideas, in collaboration with other institutions, including the Universities of Bucharest and Budapest and the Soros Foundation, recently sponsored the second in a series of international conferences being planned on topics in current intellectual history. (The first, “Interrogating Tradition,” was held at Rutgers University, 13–16 November 1997.) The Romanian conference, which was held in the Elisabeta Palace (...) in Bucharest (27–31 May 1998), was devoted to “Culture and the Politics of National Identity in Modern Romania.” Over forty scholars, mainly from Romania but some also from the U.S., France, Germany, and Hungary, gathered to discuss a variety of questions about Romanian society, past, present, and speculative future; and they were joined by at least as many visitors, especially students, from the local area and beyond.Topics discussed included politics, language, economics, historiography, religion, education, philosophy, ideologies, intelligentsia, particular intellectuals, minorities, and women (though not Gypsies or gays). Under this riot of rubrics a wide range of questions were posed in interdisciplinary fashion, with frequent, sometimes impassioned interventions. What is—was, might have been, can be—Romania? Who is a Romanian (and who not)? What is Romania’s relation to the West and the East? (And what are the “West” and the “East”?) To modernity, to modernism, to modernization? What is—has been, should be—the function of intellectuals, of political and cultural elites, in understanding the Romanian past and in setting a course for the future? What, more generally, is the role of history in answering such questions? Or is history perhaps (as Karl Krause remarked of psychoanalysis) the disease for which it claims to be the cure?Keith Hitchens’s keynote address suggested that rehashing old essentialist debates might not be productive at millennium’s end, but the conference itself could not avoid some excursions down the paths of memory and myth. For historians, Western historians anyway, Romania seems to have too many pasts. Located at the juncture of four previous empires, Romania is a mosaic, or perhaps a pandemonium, of ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological groups that can only imagine, or invent, a nationality. Geographically (and in many ways culturally) remote from the West, Romania for a long time (as Sorin Antohi remarked) lacked both a public sphere and a civil society; and suffering “a Counter-Reformation without a Reformation” (Alexandru Dutu’s phrase), it has not enjoyed a tradition of religious or ethnic toleration. Nor have either the Germans or the Jews (as Glass said) found their own unity within the changing borders of the modern Romanian state. Not until the nineteenth century did Romania develop, out of its Boyar background (as Siupiur argued), an intellectual elite that could create a modern national history and help turn “peasants into Romanians” (Antohi’s phrase); and even then this elite seemed more attracted to conservative [End Page 735] (Herder, Savigny, Burke) than to liberal views of autochthonism. Many features of Western modernity, such as Newtonian science, reached Romania late, and indeed there was a retrograde movement against liberalism under the aegis by orthodox religion. In any case this intelligentsia has been as fragmented and multiform as the Romanian past itself. True, some Romanian scholars like to posit a mainstream tradition, “excesses aside,” as one speaker put it—but how, asked another, can historians put “excesses” aside from the devastating perspective of this century?Political and cultural self-examination was the dominant theme of this conference. Nationality, said Pippidi, depends on three factors, viz., name, language, religion, and territory. The Romanian name dates from the tenth century, indicating a separation of the Roman from the Greek tradition in Wallachia; and from the seventeenth century the idea of a mainly Roman provenance was given privilege. As a language, “Romanian” was spoken in the late Middle Ages, but the first written document is dated 1521. The principal religion in Romania was and is Greek orthodox, although there are also Roman Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and German Protestant communities, as well as the Uniate church created in the eighteenth century. As for the territory, this has been a matter of change, conflict, and confusion throughout the tragic course... (shrink)

In Prapanch Kanya the history of the last millennium gets re-written, with segues into Indian Philosophy, network theory, the issue of the Gypsy Diaspora, South East Asian history and genetic research. The various aspects of Indian Philosophy Vyakarana, Mimansa, Nyaya, Dharmashastra, Alankar and the Sciences are brought together holistically. Highlighting the contributions of the Indic civilisation to contemporary science and culture, this book draws parallels between the principles of Indian philosophy and the findings of advanced biology and genetics.