Integrated pest management (IPM) has been widely promoted in the developing world, but in many regions its adoption rates have been variable. Experience has shown that to ensure IPM adoption, the complexities of local agro-production systems and context-specific folk knowledge need to be appreciated. Our research explored the linkages between farmer knowledge, pest management decision making, and ecological attributes of subsistence maize agriculture. We report a case study from four rural communities in the highlands of southeast Honduras. Communities were typified (...) by their agro-environments, IPM training history, and levels of infestation by a key maize pest, the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda Smith). Although variable, infestation levels generally did not justify pest management intervention. Consequently, crop losses from this pest were considered of low importance and most farmers proceeded in a rational fashion by refraining from action in their fields. Farmers attributed the low degree of pest infestation predominantly to abiotic causal factors (rainfall, temperature). The role of natural enemies in controlling this pest (i.e., biological control) was deemed of low importance by farmers; nevertheless, a broad array of such organisms was mentioned by farmers as operating in their maize crop. Farmers’ knowledge of natural enemies only partially matched scientific knowledge and was associated with the ecological features of their respective field settings. Local knowledge about natural enemies was mainly restricted to abundant and easily observable predatory species. Farmers who were knowledgeable about biological control were also familiar with a larger variety of pest management alternatives than uninformed farmers. Management options covered a wide range of curative techniques, including conservation biological control. Farmers who relied on insecticides to manage pest outbreaks knew less about biological control and pesticide alternatives. In contrast, farmers who received IPM training mentioned more types of natural enemies and were familiar with a broader range of alternative pest management tactics. Our research suggests that IPM training modifies local knowledge to better fit its environmental context. This paper provides insights in the environmental context of local agro-ecological knowledge and its linkage with pest management decision making. It also constitutes a basis for modifying IPM extension programs to deliver locality-specific technologies while strengthening the local knowledge base. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of professionalization in the life sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century through a survey of British entomological periodicals. It is generally accepted that this period saw the rise of professional practitioners and the emergence of biology. However, recent scholarship has increasingly shown that this narrative elides the more complex processes at work in shaping scientific communities from the 1850s to the turn of the century. This article adds to such scholarship by examining (...) the ways in which the editors of four entomological periodicals from across this time frame attempted to shape the communities of their readership, and in particular focuses upon the apparent divide between ‘mere collectors’ and ‘entomologists’ as expressed within these journals. Crucially, the article argues that non-professional practitioners were active in defining their own distinct identities and thereby claiming scientific authority. Alongside the periodicals, the article makes use of the correspondence archive of the entomologist and periodical editor Henry Tibbats Stainton, which has hitherto not been subject to sustained analysis by historians. (shrink)

This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a commitment to pluralism about epistemic stances, analyze the use of two Japanese knowledge (...) verbs in relation to knowledge how, explore the Confucian notion of justification, and surveys cultural differences about the testimonial knowledge. The second group of chapters defends "core monism"--which claims that despite the cross-linguistic diversity of knowledge verbs, there is certain core epistemological meaning shared by all languages--from both a Natural Semantic Metalanguage and skeptical perspective. The third cluster of essays considers the implications of cultural diversity for epistemology based on anthropological studies. These chapters explore real disparities in folk epistemology across cultures. Finally, the last two chapters discuss methods or perspectives to unify epistemology despite and based on the diversity of folk intuitions and epistemological concepts. Ethno-Epistemology is an essential resource for philosophers working in epistemology and comparative philosophy, as well as linguists and cultural anthropologists interested in the cultural-linguistic diversity of knowledge traditions. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how the twin forces of imperial and entomological power allowed Britain to shape locust research and control across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia from the 1920s to the early 1950s. Imperial power came from the size of the formal and informal empire, and alliances with other colonial powers to tackle a common threat to agriculture and trade. Entomological authority came primarily from the work of Boris Uvarov and his small team of museum and (...) fieldworkers based at the Imperial Bureau of Entomology (IBE), later the Imperial Institute of Entomology (IIE). I begin by discussing how Uvarov's phase theory of the origin of swarming changed the prospects for the control of locust plagues. The imperial gaze and networks of the IBE and IIE were suited to a problem that was transnational and transcontinental. In the 1930s, Britain was drawn into plans for international cooperation on locust organizations that met the needs of science, to give better sharing of knowledge, and the needs for science, to secure the resources for research and control. However, such organizations were only created during the Second World War, when new plagues threatened military operations, as I show in relation to the measures taken to control the red locust and desert locust. In the final section, I follow the fate of the wartime cooperation in initiatives to establish permanent control organizations. It is a story of the decline of British political power in locust affairs as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and regional agencies took over. My account of British locust research and control reveals a neglected aspect of histories of entomology and imperial/colonial science, especially their international relations and the continuing importance of metropolitan research centres. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ethno-biological expedition to the Amazon headed by Ettore Biocca between November 1962 and July 1963. Biocca, a parasitologist by training, assembled a multidisciplinary team to carry out an ethno-biological study of Amazon natives. The expedition work covered the natives' customs, myths, chants, diseases and the hallucinogenic compounds and curare they used, and took into account plants and animals common to the Amazon environment. This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the 20th-century (...) Western approach to the Amazon people and its cultural importance. It sets out to show how Biocca's encyclopaedic work related to the centrality of Amazonia and its peoples in scientific and cultural debates on modernity and Western culture in the 1960s, and how it connects to Cold War anxieties about the disappearance of ‘uncorrupted’ peoples. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical reading of Japan’s attempt to craft a modern identity. Eschewing the conventions of most scholarly writings, however, the essay builds on a personal history of political and intellectual engagement with key figures in post-war Japan to outline a counter-narrative about the ethno-politics of contemporary Japan. In distinction to both Orientalist and Occidentalist versions of Japanese modernity, the essay draws attention to the invidious return of notions of ethnic supremacy in Abe Shinzo’s con­temporary state project (...) and the occlusion of a long-standing tradition in Japan of pluralistic co-existence among diverse communities. In drawing attention to the occlusions shaped by the entanglements of Japanese colonialism and state-building with American hegemony, this essay attempts to locate practices of exclusion within Japan (and vis-à-vis its Asian neighbors) in an account of what the essay contends is a civilizational project, best thought of as “Smart Occidentalism”, dominant in in contemporary Japan. (shrink)

Aron Arthur Moscona was an Israeli-American developmental biologist whose name is associated with research on cell interactions during embryonic development. His appearance on the international scene dates back to a paper published in 1952, while he was working, together with his wife Haya Sobel Moscona, at the Strangeways Research Laboratory of Cambridge. Together they demonstrated that cells from previously dissociated chick tissues undergo histiotypical and organotypical aggregation in vitro. From 1952 to 1997, Moscona focused his research on cell recognition mechanisms, (...) ultimately demonstrating the role of transmembrane proteins in cellular adhesiveness, tissue segregation, and organ tridimensional assemblage during development. However, who was Aron Moscona before 1952 and what brought him to developmental biology? A Polish Jew who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933, Moscona belonged to the first generation of biologists formed in the newly established Zoology Department of the Hebrew University. With a particular focus on the Israeli context, the paper reconstructs the evolution of Moscona’s scientific thought by emphasizing the cultural and experimental context of his training and early research at the Hebrew University. The aim is to investigate how local scientific traditions influenced Moscona’s eventual research as well as enabled the relevant experimental innovation he contributed to the field of developmental biology and pathology. The paper can be read both as a scientific biography of Aron Moscona and as a preliminary contribution to the historiography of embryology in the Mandatory Palestine/Israeli context. (shrink)

This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a commitment to pluralism about epistemic stances, analyze the use of two Japanese knowledge (...) verbs in relation to knowledge how, explore the Confucian notion of justification, and surveys cultural differences about the testimonial knowledge. The second group of chapters defends "core monism"-which claims that despite the cross-linguistic diversity of knowledge verbs, there is certain core epistemological meaning shared by all languages-from both a Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and skeptical perspective. The third cluster of essays considers the implications of cultural diversity for epistemology based on anthropological studies. These chapters explore real disparities in folk epistemology across cultures. Finally, the last two chapters discuss methods or perspectives to unify epistemology despite and based on the diversity of folk intuitions and epistemological concepts. Ethno-Epistemology is an essential resource for philosophers working in epistemology and comparative philosophy, as well as linguists and cultural anthropologists interested in the cultural-linguistic diversity of knowledge traditions. (shrink)

Occupational health remains neglected in developing countries because of competing social, economic and political challenges. Ethical issues in the workplace related to the hazards and risks of becoming infected by Leishmania (Leishmania) mexicana , through the bite of naturally infected sand flies, is another area of concern that has been neglected as well. We report here the results of reviewing two entomological field studies carried out in our research center from 2003 to 2006. Eight students from our School of Biology (...) were invited to catch sand flies. A total of six of the eight (75%) developed a typical clinical picture of Localized Cutaneous Leishmaniasis (LCL) caused by L. (L.) mexicana . In this article we identify the ethical issues related to these kinds of studies and propose some guidelines for conducting them. (shrink)

Occupational health remains neglected in developing countries because of competing social, economic and political challenges. Ethical issues in the workplace related to the hazards and risks of becoming infected by Leishmania (Leishmania) mexicana, through the bite of naturally infected sand flies, is another area of concern that has been neglected as well. We report here the results of reviewing two entomological field studies carried out in our research center from 2003 to 2006. Eight students from our School of Biology were (...) invited to catch sand flies. A total of six of the eight (75%) developed a typical clinical picture of Localized Cutaneous Leishmaniasis (LCL) caused by L. (L.) mexicana. In this article we identify the ethical issues related to these kinds of studies and propose some guidelines for conducting them. (shrink)

For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others—of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography—as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural (...) being—has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography—and the human from society and culture—and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us. (shrink)

Identyfikacja z grupą etniczną lub narodową jest o tyle skomplikowanym zagadnieniem, że obejmuje szereg zjawisk decydujących o różnorodności kultur. Szczególnie istotny jest mechanizm oddzielający „swoich” od „obcych”, a więc konstytuujący wszelkie sfery aktywności, które z jednej strony są oczywistością kulturową, a z drugiej mogą być przyczyną wartościowania innych przez pryzmat tego, co jest możliwe do zaakceptowania. Stawiam tezę, że o tożsamości kulturowej decyduje ethnos, a dokładniej jego cztery elementy strukturalne : język, obyczaje, historia oraz religia. Stanowią one odrębne systemy, których (...) porządek wynika z korelacji zachodzących na poziomie interpretacyjnym. Szczególnie ważna w tej strukturze jest religia, która zabarwia emocjonalnie pozostałe elementy wierzeniami w istnienie rzeczywistości pozaempirycznej, a sądy i przekonania obowiązujące w grupie etnicznej lub narodowej czyni podstawowymi dla ukonkretnienia tożsamości kulturowej. (shrink)

Despite being far higher than, for example, Christianity, the claims of cosmopolitanism and universality, the desire to disassociate from national factors, Islam is still fully embedded in the conventional system of ethno-confessional syncretism, which, without disclosing in detail processes can be reduced to the following main components.

The processes of globalization, embraced with such eagerness in the 1990s, started being reviewed a decade later, having revealed a vicious underside. Behind the diverse masks of globalization hide murderous identities that promise different types of violence. During Brexit, the referendum in June 2016 that was to decide whether the United Kingdom left the European Union or stayed in it, Britain rejected what the EU represents—a common identity—to pursue a road on its own—a separate identity.1 Significantly, one of the elements (...) that analysts regarded as central to Brexit was immigration. According to a recent book by Nidesh Lawtoo, immigration is one of the main rhetorical tropes of the new political... (shrink)

In the article, the vocabulary related to the wedding ceremony in the Pamiri languages is discussed. In particular, vocabulary reflecting the wedding ceremony in Ishkashimi language is almost unknown. In the Pamiri languages are still preserved all the traditional wedding ceremonies. The vocabulary associated with them is well-kept in full and is indigenous and sometimes borrowed. For the most, the terminology applied in the ritual is borrowed. Often the term is borrowed from Badakhshan dialect of the Tajik language. At the (...) same time, some Tajik words are used in specific meaning that is typical only to the dialect of Badakhshan and Dari language of Badakhshan in Afghanistan. This is mainly the vocabulary associated with traditional ways and procedures of the wedding ceremony. Some other words, such as sarbьzьrg ’to give respect, attention to mourners’, can be observed only in classical Persian literature. In view of the Islamization of the region the Arab terms are frequently used in rituals; they are associated with official terminology applied during the marriage process and designate its legal aspects. There are also Turkic lexis that was included into the dictionary because of language and cultural contacts in the region. It is significant that in the lexicon predominate metaphorical and descriptive ways of designation of the ceremonies. Remarkable specific vocabulary with original meaning is of particular use in the local minor Iranian languages in comparison with such major written national languages as Tajik language of Tajikistan and Dari Afghanistan. For example, in Ishkashimi language the word dumod is used only in the sense of ‘son-in-law‘, and in the meaning of ‘bridegroom‘ - only Å¡amard. Since the marriage and wedding ceremony has a special place in the spiritual culture of the people, the symbolic function is included into almost all the rites and ritual objects of it. During the ceremony, people wish of fertility, happiness, coming together and family well-being for the whole family and for the newlyweds. Thus, the terminology associated with these rites is preserved for a long time in the language; equally strong are numerous ritual prohibitions related to marriage. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the interaction that language and economy have in society versus an ethnocentric approach that sees other languages as challenges instead of an opportunity. The paper analyses the role that bilingualism has in the economy and how economy can impact the promotion of flexible language policies in order to open new markets. Throughout the discourse a strong focus is placed on the dilemma: can language impact and make economy beneficial? The study aims to explore how multicultural societies (...) which often have one dominant language can benefit by opening language diversity to the business habitat with a specific focus on particular linguistic and economic developments in the Balkans after the fall of Yugoslavia. In the second part this global issues are analyzed in the local context. The study brings examples from Macedonia on how the private sector is much more advanced and innovative compared to the state institution. During this discourse few corporations active in Macedonia are analyzed in order to size the positive impact that flexible usage of language has on the economy and how state institutions can replicate this positive model. Other factors such as culture and the neurolinguistics studies have been considered as well. (shrink)

This article examines the extent to which ethno-religious conflicts have affected sustainable development in Nigeria. The destruction of lives and property by reckless ethnic and religious extremists has been a challenging key factor to sustainable development in Nigeria. This article aims to reflect on the ethno-religious conflicts in Nigeria from an epistemological point of view, ascertain the major causes of these conflicts and seek solutions to address the root causes. The article concludes that religious intolerance among Nigerians from (...) different religious groups is the result of the misinterpretation of religious teachings of the leaders of terrorist groups to their followers and that ethno-religious conflicts in Nigeria affect sustainable development as they lead to loss of lives and destruction of property, among others. It is also indicated that the effects of ethno-religious conflicts in Nigeria lead to an increase in the unemployment rate, withdrawal of foreign investments and education imbalance. The article concludes by arguing that ethnicity and religious crises are unhealthy for the nation’s sustainable development and that no price paid in the direction of resolving these conflicts can be considered to be too much. It is recommended that religious leaders form the minds of Nigerians with the teaching of love and peace, as it is proclaimed in their various religious books and beliefs.Contribution: This article brought to light the major factors instigating continuous ethno-religious conflict in Nigeria that has led to much social unrest. Theological reflection of the influence of religion in promoting peaceful coexisting environment was analysed. This work would be of immense benefit to religious bodies, government, civil society and students. (shrink)

A retrospect into ethos, this study examines the impact of individualism, collectivism, ethical idealism and interpersonal trust on negotiators' attitudes toward questionable negotiation tactics in Greece. A thousand survey questionnaires were administered to Greek employees, of which 327 usable responses were collected. Our findings empirically corroborated a classification of three groups of negotiation tactics, namely, pretense, deception and lies. Individualism–collectivism and ethical idealism were found to be related, and interpersonal trust was found to be unrelated, to attitudes toward questionable negotiation (...) tactics. Emphasizing the non-US and non-Western European nature of the empirical data collected, the originality of this research further stems from the development of a comprehensive research framework about questionable negotiation tactics in Greece. (shrink)

The article traces Nietzsche’s references to insects in his published and unpublished writings against the backdrop of his study of the entomological research of his time (esp. through his reading of Alfred Espinas’s Die thierischen Gesellschaften). The first part of the article explores how Nietzsche’s entomology allows us to add a posthumanist perspective to the more familiar poststructuralist readings of Nietzsche, as the entomological research he consulted offered him a model for understanding how rudimentary processes can lead to the (...) formation of structures and higher organizations with emergent properties. The second part of the article revisits Nietzsche’s conceptions of the will and the will to power against the backdrop of his references to insect sociality and the influence of Wilhelm Wundt. It shows that Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the will as an umbrella concept and his will to power are attempts to model the emergence of complex edifices from simple operations under which physical, psychological, and social phenomena must be thought to arise. The article concludes with a reflection of the social and political relevance of what Nietzsche identifies as modernity’s “disgregation of the will.”. (shrink)

Born in 1918, Poland - the Second Commonwealth - was a multinational and multi-denominational state. In 1931, out of 32, 1 million of its Poles were 65%. The largest national minority was Ukrainians, followed by Jews, Belarusians, Germans. Other national groups accounted for about 1% of the total population.

In the course of his short literary life, Liu Na'ou travelled across four geographical areas: Taiwan, Japan, Shanghai and Beijing, as well as five cultural domains: Taiwanese, Japanese, French, English and Chinese. The transnational facet of Liu's modernist writing is not merely literary or cultural but political and historical. The earliest modernist writing in China was initiated on the basis of the colonial experience of Taiwan and the semi-colonial modernity of Shanghai. It became a “contact zone” in which various cultural (...) and political influences to contest with each other, signaling a process of power shifting in East Asia in the early 20th century. This article aims to reflect on theoretical issues ranging from nationalism, cosmopolitanism, colonialism and semi-colonialism, to the colonial modernity of East Asia, drawing upon Liu's modernist writings in 1928. (shrink)

Islam in the Ukrainian territory has more than a thousand years of history. The first Muslims who systematically lived or roamed the lands of present-day Ukraine were the steppes. Thus, the burial of the ancestors of modern Ossetian-Apans according to the Muslim rite in the eastern Ukrainian archeologists date from the VII-VIII centuries. Initial knowledge of Islam was also learned from the neighboring Bulgaria. The first written mention of the permanent stay of Muslims in Ukraine dates back to the XI (...) century, when the princes of Kiev had a cavalry of Muslim Pechenegs. Having established itself in Crimea in the XIII century, the Tatar ulus for Khan Uzbekistan officially recognized Islam as the state religion. During the entry of Kievan Rus into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, many Muslim Tatars were brought from Crimea under martial law by order of Prince Vytautas. (shrink)

Flags are conceptual representations that can prime nationalism and allegiance to one’s group. Investigating children’s understanding of conflict-related ethno-national flags in divided societies sheds light on the development of national categories. We explored the development of children’s awareness of, and preferences for, ethno-national flags in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and the Republic of North Macedonia. Children displayed early categorization of, and ingroup preferences for, ethno-national flags. By middle-childhood, children’s conflict-related social categories shaped systematic predictions about other’s group-based preferences (...) for flags. Children of minority-status groups demonstrated more accurate flag categorization and were more likely to accurately infer others’ flag preferences. While most Balkan children preferred divided versus integrated ethno-national symbols, children in the Albanian majority group in Kosovo demonstrated preferences for the new supra-ethnic national flag. We discuss the implications of children’s ethno-national flag categories on developing conceptualizations of nationality and the potential for shared national symbols to promote peace. (shrink)

For some thirty years, a handful of architects has been trying to call into question the primacy that the history of architecture has given to monumental buildings. The representatives of this trend want to get away from the short chronology, common since the Italian Renaissance, and react against the dominant international functionalism that has too little respect for the local cultural contexts. It is under the influence of this “vernacular” approach that the small traditional structure became as legitimate an object (...) of research as the well-known buildings. This approach, innovative and audacious as it was, broke with a Utopian vision of a large part of modern architecture. It led the architects concerned to turn toward non-European countries and to focus their attention on the connections between indigenous housing patterns and cultures. From this decentralization ethno-architecture was born by which we understand the study of preindustrial, “traditional” habitats and housing. Inspired by Panofsky, Eliade, and Lévi-Strauss and familiar with the social sciences, these researchers appropriated the conceptual tools of anthropology. They opened up important fields of research in Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, and Africa and reaped a rich harvest of ethnographic materials. It quickly became clear to them that the so-called “traditional” house developed, in imitation of palaces and temples, from the culture of a given population and that it was informed by the religious images of the inhabitants as much as by its most sacred buildings. (shrink)

Department of Philosophy and Religions, Faculty of Arts, University of Benin, Benin City. Nigeria.

Enhancing the environmental soundness of agricultural practices, particularly in high input systems, is of increasing concern to those involved in agricultural research and development. The Integrated Pest Management Farmer Field School, which is based on farmer participatory environmental education, is compared to the No Early Spray intervention, which is a simple rule approach. A research methodology was developed and tested in the Philippines to document farmers' pre- and post-intervention knowledge of rice field insects, insect/plant interactions, and pesticides. The results indicate (...) that increased knowledge from education is linked to better pest management behavior. It is proposed that the methodology may also be useful for documenting other areas of knowledge, in the design of educational interventions for farmers and in assessing their impact. (shrink)

Ethno-pragmatics as device to understand the culturally Other is essential when we believe that there is a nexus of intimate relationships between languageand culture. The whole idea of ethno-pragmatics is to understand local life-worlds in the wake of celebrating particularism in inter-cultural communication. Ethnopragmatics basically appreciates language practices in terms that make sense to the people concerned, whether in terms of indigenous values, beliefs, attitudes, social categories or emotions, and so on. Understanding cultural keywords is pertinent in (...) class='Hi'>ethno-pragmatics. These living words provide the best key to a culture’s values and assumptions, and they are embedded in the cultural scripts of the society/community. With the above positioning, we suggested that ethno-pragmatics be the device for intercultural communication intelligence (ICQ). In this work we employed a cultural script quest in order to capture/understand the tapestry of Malay culture. Bahasa (“language”) is one of the main Malay cultural keywords. The Malays relate bahasa to various norms and beliefs that encompass their life-world. Bahasa is molecularly related to their emotions, sense-making and aesthetics. As an illustration, we provide ICQ-at-work with halus as a technique of utilizing bahasa for successful speech-acts. Specifically, we narrate on Malay “indirectness” as a way of having conversation with the culturally Other. (shrink)

This paper is intended to contribute to the discussion of the differential level of adoption of Big Data among research communities. Recognising the impracticality of conducting an audit across all forms and uses of Big Data, we have restricted our enquiry to one very specific form of Big Data, namely general purpose taxonomies, of which Mosaic, Acorn and Origins are examples, that rely on data from a variety of Big Data feeds. The intention of these taxonomies is to enable the (...) records of consumers and citizens held on Big Data datasets to be coded according to type of residential neighbourhood or ethno-cultural heritage without any use of questionnaires. Based on our respective experience in the academic social sciences, in government and in the design and marketing of these taxonomies, we identify the features of these classifications which appear to render them attractive or problematic to different categories of potential user or researcher depending on how the relationship is conceived. We conclude by identifying seven classifications of user or potential user who, on account of their background, current position and future career expectations, tend to respond in different ways to the opportunity to adopt these generic systems as aids for understanding social processes. (shrink)

This is an advocacy essay that documents the undignified and inhumane conditions of social inequality to which the members of "Al-Akhdam" minority group are subjected in the Republic of Yemen. By focusing on the interaction between culture and collective violence, it examines the exclusionary socio-cultural and economic practices by which Al-Akhdam are denied basic human rights. In so doing, the article locates the root cause of such practices in ethnic prejudices; the Al-Akhdam are persecuted on account of their being of (...) African-descent in a country with an Arab-majority. Finally, the article advocates the protection of the collective human rights of the Al-Akhdam minority and proposes cogent measures for restoring social justice through the implementation of specific actions, including international condemnation of their persecution; official recognition of the violence meted to them; national international recognition and promotion of their rights; cessation of Yemeni government-supported policy of Al-Akhdam forced labor; formal extension of constitutionally-guaranteed economic and social rights and the establishment of a program designed to integrate them into the mainstream of Yemeni society. This list of concrete steps represents a practical advocacy plan for fostering changes in the conditions of Al-Akhdam in Yemen through numerous venues, including the Yemeni government, the United Nations, and local and international human rights NGOs. It is hoped that this documentation will significantly elevate international awareness of, and instigate responses to, the ethno-cultural violence being perpetrated against Al-Akhdam in Yemen. (shrink)