An Anthropologist in Communist Romania, 1973-1988
Secret-police surveillance redirected one scholar's research projects in ways that ultimately yielded a changed understanding of cold war Romania and its past.
The Anthropologist Inversed Laudatio: for Distinguished Professor Katherine Verdery, City University of New York, Graduate Center, on the Occasion of the Award of the Doctor Honoris Causa Title of Babeş-Bolyai University
I have the special honour and great joy to pronounce the laudatio for Professor Katherine Verdery in the name of the Department of Sociology. For most of its members, grown as sociologists and anthropologists after 1989, her work has been constitutive. The professional field that we embraced, learning the power of ideas, the practical form of knowledge, and the relational and historical character of the social world, has been considerably shaped by the nuanced and complex understanding that she gave us through her studies. They have Romania as site of empirical investigation, and socialism and its successors as space of theoretical elaboration. Professor Verdery is Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 2005, and Acting Chair, Department of Anthropology, City University of New York. Her extraordinary professional trajectory developed in two of the core centers of American academic Anthropology, at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland and University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. She received a BA in Anthropology from Reed College, Portland, Oregon, and an MA in Anthropology from Stanford University, Stanford, California. In 1977 she is awarded a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, for a
Improving water use in agriculture : experiences in the Middle East and North Africa
Emerging water shortages are of great concern in many countries of the region. As the agricultural sector is generally by far the most important water consumer and higher priority is given to meeting domestic and industrial water demands, it is to be expected that gradually less water will be available for agriculture. An overview is given of present system and on-farm water use efficiencies and the potential for water savings and yield increases through the use of improved distribution networks and more appropriate irrigation technologies for smallholders. The water conservation efforts of Israel, Cyprus and Jordan are examined in detail with respect to institutions, the irrigation infrastructure, water charges and demand management, operation and maintenance, irrigation scheduling and extension, technology development and transfer, the role of the private sector, quality control on irrigation equipment, land tenure and land consolidation, and water users associations. The World Bank's experience with lending for the irrigation sector in the region is also described. The elements that would need to be considered for inclusion in a national program for water conservation in the agricultural sector are identified.