Ethnopedology is the study of local knowledge of soil and land management in an ecological perspective. It is an emerging hybrid discipline that is a component of ethnoecology and stands to offer much for land-based studies. This paper reviews the field of ethnopedology in Latin America and compares some of the many case studies from that region. Various literature sources are considered, including the ethnographical, ethnohistorical, archaeological, geographical, agronomic, ethnoecological, and development studies. Our review invokes the theory of ethnoecology that (...) focuses on the linkages between kosmos, corpus, and praxis of local land-users. The main topics covered are the ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence of ethnopedology, local soil and land classification, local land management systems, local perceptions and beliefs of soil and land resources, and local soil fertility management. After analysing past and present research trends, recommendations are given on how ethnopedological studies can contribute to enhance sustainable land use and management in Latin America. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractNowadays, in the Internet databases era, certain knowledge is being progressively lost. This knowledge, which we feel is essential and should be acquired through education, is the understanding of how the pioneer researchers faced major questions in their field and made their discoveries.

Small GTPases in the Rho family act as major nodes with functions beyond cytoskeletal rearrangements shaping the Caenorhabditis elegans embryo during development. These small GTPases are key signal transducers that integrate diverse developmental signals to produce a coordinated response in the cell. In C. elegans, the best studied members of these highly conserved Rho family small GTPases, RHO‐1/RhoA, CED‐10/Rac, and CDC‐42, are crucial in several cellular processes dealing with cytoskeletal reorganization. In this review, we update the functions described for the (...) Rho family small GTPases in spindle orientation and cell division, engulfment, and cellular movements during C. elegans embryogenesis, focusing on the Rho subfamily Rac.Please also see the video abstract here. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that the Z.F. universe is not well-ordered, it behaves in some respects like the ordinals. It is possible to define on it the usual operations of addition, multiplication and exponentiation, which enjoy similar properties to those on the ordinals. Further when restricted to the ordinals, the operations coincide, so that ordinal arithmetic can be regarded as a restriction of the universe arithmetic. But more than that, rank which retracts the universe of sets onto the ordinals (...) is a homomorphism between the universe arithmetical structure 〈V,+,·,exp〉 and the ordinal arithmetical structure 〈Ord, +, ·,exp〉. (shrink)

En un libro de lógica de 1794, Salomon Maimon presentó una nueva tabla de categorías que debía sustituir la que Kant incluyó en su Crítica de la razón pura. Sostengo que esto es la última fase en la evolución de algunos aspectos fundamentales de su postura epistemológica. A partir de una comprensión general de su teoría, voy trazando el desarrollo de su pensamiento sobre las categorías desde su primera obra en alemán, la Filosofía trascendental de 1789, hasta su mencionada Lógica. (...) Lo divido en cuatro partes. En las dos primeras, describo la posición de Maimon como solidaria con el paradigma kantiano según el cual las categorías dependen de las formas lógicas del juicio. En la tercera, explico la inversión de este paradigma que Maimon acomete en su comentario a las Categorías de Aristóteles. En la última parte, expongo que la nueva tabla de categorías refleja una mejora general de su teoría del conocimiento. Por último, exhorto a ampliar la comprensión de alguna noción clave de su filosofía para propiciar una lectura más productiva. (shrink)

El Tratado de metodología de las Ciencias Sociales de Narciso Pizarro ofrece una visión coherente del campo de las ciencias sociales contemporáneas, cuya división en disciplinas, especialidades y subespecialidades hace difícil al estudioso de cualquiera de ellas el entender las conexiones existentes entre todas. Porque la lógica propia del desarrollo de las ciencias sociales en el mundo académico impulsa diferencias terminológicas que ocultan la homogeneidad conceptual, pero que sirven para establecer las lindes de cotos privados del saber. Sobrepasar esas (...) diferencias implica analizar los conceptos fundamentales de las ciencias sociales, tanto desde el punto de vista de la coherencia o sistematicidad del conjunto como desde el de la evolución histórica de los esquemas conceptuales. Por ello, la exposición del conjunto es inseparable de una crítica -en el sentido epistemológico del término- de los fundamentos de cada una de las disciplinas, desarrollada a lo largo de veinticinco años de trabajo. (shrink)

Over the past 30 years, the world has experienced a profound transformation, becoming both more open and more prosperous. Whereas in 1985 more than half of the countries worldwide were under authoritarian rule, most countries today are considered electoral democracies. Since 1990, more than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, while well-being indicators have improved dramatically on a global level, especially in terms of health and education.

A primeira fotografia conhecida foi capturada na França em 1826, por Joseph Nicéphore Niépce em chapas da Kodak. Fotografar é imprimir imagens numa face sensível, sob efeito da luz. A formalidade e a sisudez eram tradição no momento do retrato, assim, a língua de fora na foto icônica de Albert Einstein, feita aos 72 anos em 14 de abril de 1951, mostra como tudo foi mudando em relação a essa arte.

A internet nos joga imagens que chegam de mau jeito. No Facebook, pode-se deparar com um carro vermelho, parecendo esportivo, e olhando melhor, vê-se que é um carro sem capota, rasgado num desastre, com cinco passageiros decapitados. Mas boas coisas também chegam de forma inesperada. Achei uma relíquia, um filme de 1936/37, sem áudio, com duração de 14 minutos, gravado por Benjamin Abrahão, retratando Lampião, o Rei do Cangaço em carne e osso. Hoje é Cult, mas naquela época os cangaceiros (...) barbarizaram por todo o nordeste, exceto Piauí e Maranhão. Ver a sua rotina, de há 84 anos, foi despir um mito. (shrink)

Quando alguém está se comportando de maneira inadequada, usando drogas, cometendo crimes, a família explica o fato, garantindo não ser defeito de caráter, mas o resultado da convivência com más companhias, estas sim, causadoras do mal. Muitos defenderão o lado bom do transgressor. E não será apenas sua mãe. Claro que a boa influência existe forte e algumas pessoas dirão que se decidiram estudar ou seguir determinada profissão por incentivo de alguém. Muitos começaram a fumar para copiar personagens de filmes (...) ou de novelas, sem contar que a televisão tinha pelo menos um comercial de cigarro em cada intervalo. (shrink)

Como é difícil para você não apenas ouvir a verdade, mas ter de degluti-la, digeri-la e incorporá-la ao seu dia a dia. Não apenas a verdade do outro lhe incomoda, mas sua própria verdade, que costuma ficar oculta em locais obscuros da mente. [...].

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Iberia?María Rosa Menocal (bio)My first instinct was to correct the title and rename this essay “Why Medieval Spain?” rather than “Why Iberia?” After all, I never say I work on or teach about “Iberia.” And yet the editors have got it just right to signal—using the geographic Iberia instead of the national Spain—that the terrible difficulty of finding worthy names is at the heart of the matter (...) here, at the heart of why it is that the study of the cultures and peoples of the Iberian peninsula during the medieval period is as exacting, as stimulating, as important as it is. It is easy enough, and accurate enough too, to point out that the study of all premodern cultures brings with it comparable difficulties, that, for example, before there was a France or an Italy, it is also misleading to talk about what might have been French or Italian, and yet medievalists in those areas, as well as the man on the street, regularly do so. But in the case of the Iberian peninsula the misprisions reflected in the confusion of terms—when we call a Christian kingdom “Spanish” but an Islamic one “Moorish,” to take only one of dozens of egregious examples—are confusions both more severe and more meaningful. It is true that Dante is not an Italian, but rather a Florentine, and the distinction is far from trivial—indeed, for Dante, central. And yet the comparable distinctions in the Iberian peninsula are likely to be more searing, because they involve not just political but religious and ethnic distinctions. If we call Rodrigo Diaz, the Cid, a Spaniard, why not his contemporary Judah Halevi? And why do we so often—even among those of us who “know better”—persist in calling the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula “Moors” or even “Arabs”—thus grossly confusing religion and ethnicity and suggesting, every time we do, that to be a Muslim was always not to be a Spaniard, in the way that being a Christian was, or that confession is equivalent to ethnicity?Of course, at this late date we all know the largest answer to these and other comparable questions: Spain defined itself as a modern nation through the expulsion not only of its Jewish and Muslim citizens but especially through the expulsion of the memory that they had ever been a part of the real body politic of “Spain.” It is not merely that after 1492 and 1609 (and everything in between) to be a Spaniard was aggressively defined as those who were not (and, better still, had never been) Christian; it is that this early modern definition of the national identity was transferred to the medieval past, and the medieval past rewritten and reimagined accordingly, as if the twelfth century were already longing for the sixteenth. This obliteration of the historical memory of the cultural and religious complexities of the medieval Iberian universe has long meant that the parameters that define how we talk about its languages and cultures are profoundly misshaped, which I mean not as a moral but as a historical statement: Alfonso X would no doubt have been startled by the suggestion that Arabic was not a vital part of the Castilian cultural universe or that Jews were not Toledanos or Sevillanos, nor citizens of his “Spain.” [End Page 7]It is of course the singular fact in European history—and now the word is out, almost everyone knows it—that the three Abrahamic religions long coexisted, in highly complex and always-shifting ways, in the Iberian peninsula. This has for some years now been both the distinction and the bane of “our” medieval studies, since not only the terminology but the most fundamental epistemological categories at our disposal—things as basic as the languages that are considered the legitimate or necessary ones for a medievalist to study in a department in which Spanish medievalists are trained—are still almost invariably at odds with what, explicitly echoing Americo Castro, we might call la realidad historica. Thus part of the answer to the “Why Iberia” question is that the moment is clearly at hand to begin to undo the damage... (shrink)

Argues that academics’ intellectual engagement with a public beyond the walls of their own specialties, and even beyond the walls of the academy, was long a commonplace and significant part of the work of professors and writers in the humanities.

O presente estudo propõe-se a analisar as medidas e os limites de precaução adotados pelos Poderes da República. Pretendem-se investigar as premissas em que estão fundamentadas as ações do Poder Judiciário, resultando no ativismo judicial. Ponderam-se, ainda, os limites do ativismo judicial e a harmonia entre Poderes. Ressaltam-se a importância atual da temática e a necessidade de exploração de suas repercussões para a construção social. A pesquisa, de viés qualitativo e de cunho exploratório, será lastreada em levantamento bibliográfico e dados (...) estatísticos obtidos através de fontes diversas. (shrink)

Romanization implies, from a religious point of view, a Roman interpretation of indigenous deities by means of a syncretic process. The clearest example is to be found in the indigenous gods of ways, whose existence is known to us through numerous epigraphs and who are assimilated to Roman Lares Viales. Their numbers increase on Asturian soil daily (Tineo, Allande, Lugo de Llanera...) despite the fact that the monuments do not count with «foculi» (holes) for offer deposits.