Peripheral Visions

Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life, is our guide on a fascinating intellectual exploration of lifetime learning from experience and encountering the unfamiliar. Peripheral Visions begins with a sacrifice in a Persian garden, moving on to a Philippine village and then to the Sinai desert, and concludes with a description of a tour bus full of Tibetan monks. Bateson's reflections bring theses narratives homes, proposing surprising new vision of our own diverse and changing society and offering us the courage to participate even as we are still learning.

The government of Yemen, unified since 1990, remains largely incapable of controlling violence or providing goods and services to its population, but the regime continues to endure despite its fragility and peripheral location in the global political and economic order. Revealing what holds Yemen together in such tenuous circumstances, Peripheral Visions shows how citizens form national attachments even in the absence of strong state institutions. Lisa Wedeen, who spent a year and a half in Yemen observing and interviewing its residents, argues that national solidarity in such weak states tends to arise not from attachments to institutions but through both extraordinary events and the ordinary activities of everyday life. Yemenis, for example, regularly gather to chew qat, a leafy drug similar to caffeine, as they engage in wide-ranging and sometimes influential public discussions of even the most divisive political and social issues. These lively debates exemplify Wedeen’s contention that democratic, national, and pious solidarities work as ongoing, performative practices that enact and reproduce a citizenry’s shared points of reference. Ultimately, her skillful evocations of such practices shift attention away from a narrow focus on government institutions and electoral competition and toward the substantive experience of participatory politics.

The title of this collection echoes Siegfried Kracauer's statement that the lavish movie palaces of 1920s Germany served to stimulate peripheral vision and thus prevent the audience from being absorbed by the spectacle itself. In consideration of questions concerning spatial transformations in and around Weimar cinema, the eight essays in this volume, though some more explicitly than others, have Kracauer as their interlocutor. The first major critic of classic German cinema, Kracauer is patron of the optics that seeks insight on the periphery, inviting the analysis of those other spaces that are implicated, if not present, in the films themselves. The films treated in this volume include such Expressionist mainstays as Lang's Metropolis and Murnau's Nosferatu as well as generally less familiar works, e.g., Ruttman's Berlin, Symphony of a City, Jessner's Backstairs, Berger's Day and Night, and the mountain films of Fanck and Riefenstahl. Among the "hidden stages" analyzed are amusement parks, carnivals, department stores, train compartments, city streets, the womb, the theater, the chamber, basement apartments-and ultimately Neubabelsberg, the gargantuan studio-complex near Berlin where so many of these peripheral spaces came to be simulated. With references that range from set architecture to Christmas celebrations, from the poetry of Rilke to chamber music, from the introduction of sound to Macy's parades, and from an "urban unconscious" to a "cinematic sublime," Peripheral Visions is a richly nuanced collection that will be of lasting interest to students and scholars of film and German cultural studies.

Thus, the United States became involved militarily in various Third World conflicts more to deter the Soviet Union than to protect any specific U.S. interest. Peripheral Visions argues that this policy was unnecessary and counterproductive.

Galician culture has experienced an unprecedented period of growth since the re-establishment of democracy and the development of its political autonomy. Audio/visual production (music and cinema in particular) has provided some of the privileged channels through which modern Galician cultural identities have been imagined, constructed, and consumed at home and abroad. Some of these include innovative animation features in the leading edge of international production, avant-garde non-fiction films winning accolades around the world, videos widely distributed through the Internet, Movida groups emerging from the periphery, and folk artists merging into the pan-Celtic music movement globally. This creative explosion has occurred in a productive dialogue with the global currents at large and with considerable projection beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the nation and the state, but these seismic changes are only beginning to be the subject of attention of cultural and media studies. This book aims to explore some of the dramatic changes which have taken place in the Galician cultural landscape and argues for a perspectival shift towards a postnational and interdisciplinary cultural studies approach based on a deterritorialization of the Galician cultural map. Book jacket.

Galician audio/visual culture has experienced an unprecedented period of growth following the process of political and cultural devolution in post-Franco Spain. This creative explosion has occurred in a productive dialogue with global currents and with considerable projection beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the nation and the state, but these seismic changes are only beginning to be the subject of attention of cultural and media studies. This book examines contemporary audio/visual production in Galicia as privileged channels through which modern Galician cultural identities have been imagined, constructed and consumed, both at home and abroad. The cultural redefinition of Galicia in the global age is explored through different media texts (popular music, cinema, video) which cross established boundaries and deterritorialise new border zones where tradition and modernity dissolve, generating creative tensions between the urban and the rural, the local and the global, the real and the imagined. The book aims for the deperipheralization and deterritorialization of the Galician cultural map by overcoming long-established hegemonic exclusions, whether based on language, discipline, genre, gender, origins, or territorial demarcation, while aiming to disjoint the center/periphery dichotomy that has relegated Galician culture to the margins. In essence, it is an attempt to resituate Galicia and Galician studies out of the periphery and open them to the world.

Peripheral Visions sheds new light on how today’s peripheries are made, lived, imagined and mobilized. Focusing on space, mobility and aesthetics, it argues that peripheries require more visibility, and are invaluable for creating alternative perspectives on the globalizing present.

This book explores peripheral visions on economic development, both in the sense that it deals with specific issues of economic development and underdevelopment in countries at the periphery of the world economy, and in terms of its exploration of the economic thinking developed in those regions, particularly in Latin America. Bringing together an international group of historians of thought, economic historians and development economists from Latin America, Europe and other parts of the world, this volume is highly credited and is an excellent contribution to development economic studies. This book is divided into four parts. Following the introduction, the first set of papers describes the evolution of core-periphery perspectives in key contributions by Raúl Prebisch, Oskar Lange, Albert Hirschman, Celso Furtado and Homero Cuevas. The second set discusses the links between unbalanced productive structures and external trade in peripheral countries. The third set contains papers on critical episodes in the development of monetary and financial systems in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries. The fourth set deals with geographical and institutional aspects of path dependence in the governance of external trade and in the development of liberties, property rights and economic education in Europe, Latin America and Africa. Several chapters make use of hitherto unexplored archival material. Other chapters draw attention to important episodes or literatures that have largely gone unnoticed in the English-speaking world. Yet others combine conceptual innovations with work on new historical data and other sources hitherto not utilized in such contexts. This book is ideal for those who study and research development economics, history of economic thought and economic history, especially in Latin America.