Women and markets: a problem in the assessment of sexual inequality
Peasant marketplaces have enjoyed a reputation as institutions that free women from the sexual discrimination and sexual inequality found in other social contexts. Mintz (1971) argues that market work places a premium on intelligence and decisiveness instead of heavy manual labor, and therefore that market trade tends to be dominated by women. Boserup (1970) has demonstrated that the portion of women in trade is higher than in other occupations in less developed economies. In Bolivia, market women are both geographically and socially mobile, using their trade activities to finance either urban residence or multiple residences (Buechler 1976). Waterbury's (1968) account of the strength of the Oaxacan market union (many of whose members were women) indicates that marketers could depose high government officials and influence policy decisions on a state level. In Haiti, Bolivia, or Mesoamerica, middlewomen appear to have attained an independence and equality which, Mintz (1971) suggests, our own society might emulate. He (Mintz 1971:268) concludes: MWho is more modern, more western, more developed: a barefoot and illiterate Yoruba market woman who daily risks her security and her capital in vigorous individual competition with others like herself; or a Smith College graduate who spends her days ferrying her husband to the Westport railroad station and her children to ballet classes?" Anthropologists with a less optimistic view of markets as arenas of feminine achievement have seldom directly compared men and women in a marketing context. Bossen's (1984) study of women's work in Guatemala unites storekeepers and market vendors in a common category of "commercial occupations." Bossen (1984:78, 358) notes that the must successful stores are those run co-operatively by both spouses, with individual women enjoying less success. Only one male in her study ran his business as an individual, making it difficult for her to isolate sex as opposed to the number of persons involved in the venture as a factor in success. Babb's (1985) study of petty commercial ventures in Huaraz, Peru, stresses the predominance of women in a sphere that she regards as dependent on uneven capitalist development and offering little autonomy to individual vendors. The primary interest in Babb's article is the marginality of the petty commercial sector in the development process, not issues of sexual disparity within that sector. While both these studies present a picture considerably less optimistic than does Mintz, their findings do not directly contradict his suggestions that marketing opens opportunities to women unavailable in other sectors of the economy. This article presents data from an urban Guatemalan marketplace that contradicts an image of market-based sexual equality. Most women sell goods that carry the highest risks, the lowest profits, and the least potential for amassing wealth. While Guatemalan market women are probably more
Dyadic relation and market transaction in an environment of economic depression
RESUME ; Cet article etudie la signification des relations dyadiques entre acheteurs et vendeurs au cours des periodes de guerre et de paix, et evalue l'impact de la guerre sur les relations commerciales dyadiques du temps de paix. Il revele que ce type de relations loin d'englober l'ensemble de la vie commerciale ne concerne que certains dispositifs economiques et sociaux bien delimites. En examinant la facon dont ceux qui frequentent le marche utilisent ces relations pour pallier l'instabilite de la situation economique et politique, l'auteur decrit les conditions concretes de l'effectuation de ces relations. Il montre egalement la facon dont les vendeurs et les acheteurs sont confrontes a la guerre et a ses dangers immediats, et examine la maniere dont les marchands et les clients tentent de conferer un sens aux difficultes de leur vie quotidienne. Il met enfin l'accent sur le role facilitateur de ces relations dyadiques dans les echanges commerciaux en periode de guerre.
Automatic classification of TV news articles based on telop character recognition
The purpose of this study is to develop a multimedia database system for TV news video data. TV news video data consist of speech, characters and images. In this study, telop characters are recognized and given to the news articles as indices for classification. At first, telop frames which include telop characters are detected and then the telop characters are extracted and recognized. Through morphological analysis of the recognized telop characters, keywords are extracted which consist of more than two characters. Their keywords are used as indices to classify the TV news articles. We carried out experiments for 30 days of NHK 5 minutes news and obtained 95.4% telop character extraction rate, 81.4% character recognition rate and 83.8% article classification rate. We improved the article classification rate by 43.4% through character recognition improvement from 44.1% to 81.4%.