Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean
A long sequence of social, cultural, and political processes characterizes an ever-dynamic Caribbean history. The Caribbean Basin is home to numerous linguistic and cultural traditions and fluid interactions that often map imperfectly onto former colonial and national traditions. Although much of this contact occurred within the confines of local cultural communities, regions, or islands, they nevertheless also include exchanges between islands, and in some cases, with the surrounding continents. recent research in the pragmatics of seafaring and trade suggests that in many cases long-distance intercultural interactions are crucial elements in shaping the social and cultural dynamics of the local populations.The contributors to "Islands at the Crossroads" include scholars from the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe who look beyond cultural boundaries and colonial frontiers to explore the complex and layered ways in which both distant and more intimate sociocultural, political, and economic interactions have shaped Caribbean societies from seven thousand years ago to recent times.ContributorsDouglas V. Armstrong / Mary Jane Berman / Arie Boomert / Alistair J. Bright / Richard T. Callaghan / L. Antonio Curet / Mark W. Hauser / Corinne L. Hofman / Menno L. P. Hoogland / Kenneth G. Kelly / Sebastiaan Knippenberg / Ingrid Newquist / Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo / Reniel Rodriquez Ramos / Alice V. M. Samson / Peter E. Siegel / Christian Williamson"
The Zhoushan Islands, China, and Galapagos Islands, Ecuador: Island Sustainability and Forces of Change
We conceptualize islands along a resource conservation–economic development gradient that represents a diversity of island forms and functions, which are shaped and reshaped by exogenous and endogenous dynamics and social–ecological processes of change. Islands are increasingly linked to the expanding human dimension and tied to mainland forces, including population migration and tourism, through the processes of globalization. Conservation and development efforts, even for protected areas, require continued vigilance in monitoring social, terrestrial, and marine subsystems of islands that are acted upon by episodic events as well as continuous forces of change. Manifested at local to regional scales, islands support local people and communities, protected areas, iconic species and iconic landscapes/seascapes, regional development, and national and international tourism as well as residents who are attracted to islands for jobs in the burgeoning global tourism industry. We compare the Zhoushan Islands of China and the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador through examples drawn from both island archipelagos to describe a conceptual model of island development associated with the expanding human imprint on islands, local resource endowments, resource conservation, and economic development. We also describe the application of LANDSAT imagery to monitor land cover/land use change within the human use zones of the Galapagos Islands (i.e., coastal communities and the agricultural highlands) as well as MODIS data to assess changing conditions in the Galapagos Marine Reserve associated with El Nino conditions and the changing patterns of sea-surface temperatures and marine productivity over time and space as context to the challenges of economic development and resource conservation.
Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics
Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's political economy to be found in classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics. It provides a critical-historical survey of the theories of art's economic exceptionalism, of art as a merit good, and of the theories of art's commodification, the culture industry and real subsumption. Through an exacting critique of mainstream and Marxist theories of art's economics, the book arrives at a new and highly original Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.