Economic and Social History

The paper looks at the impact of different IMF loan facilities on GDP growth in 22 developing countries. In the 70s the IMF began to work with stronger conditionality attached to his loans and to lend more to developing countries. At the time non-conditional and strongly conditional loan facilities coexisted. The paper tries to evaluate the performance of these facilities and finds that the non-conditional loans have a more positive impact on GDP growth than strongly conditional ones.

Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa have been criticised regularly for their ineffectiveness and market bias since their introduction in the early 1980s. While the aggregate macroeconomic performance of African countries has certainly been disappointing, it is important to understand the reasons behind the individual failures. Hence, this thesis presents a case study of two very similar countries: Tanzania and Kenya. By drawing on a wide range of sources from the WB Databank to the Kenyan Hansard, the thesis is developing a political economy narrative examining the two countries' experience with Structural Adjustment Programmes from 1979 to 1990. While familiar macroeconomic indicators, such as GDP growth and balance of payments, are taken into account, the reforms' effects on social indicators will also be accounted for. Moreover, the importance and interplay of ownership, conditionality and donor relations within the reform process will be discussed. I find that cooperation with the IMF and the WB were not decisive for adjustment. Key factors to successful reform were ownership and financial incentives in the form of reduced Official Development Assistance and Aid. Generally, the findings show that the Bretton Woods institutions got economic theory right and conditionality wrong, in the sense that adjustment programmes did not offer enough incentives to reform. My findings suggest that coordination between donors, the IMF and the WB concerning financial support are crucial to trigger reform processes in African countries.

Why do we find an image chocking? Here an answer is gradually elaborated around the concept of montage – a montage of different views and places, of different figures and times. An increasing distrust with regard to images portraying evil, the birth of the pornographic sensibility, the emergence of anti-establishment graffiti, the destruction of images by the authorities that commissioned them and the skilful construction of the unimaginable are so many events that illuminate our changing relationship to images in the Western world. Images and the idea of transgression jointly form a history that the authors place in perspective with the present time. By so doing, they proceed to decipher our belief in the power of images.

On capitals, on church stalls, in prayer book illuminations, we can see many ‘pornographic’ representations which, though commonplace at the time of their execution, to us appear transgressive, not ‘standard’. But that is because those images are viewed today by people who assume that a standard exists, a limit between the licit and the illicit. In the Middle Ages (13th-16th Centuries) in the West, a time when the production of images was closely linked to the sacred, there were in fact few texts defining what was decent or indecent in the image, and free invention was encouraged. The authors explain how the statutes of the image were established and place them in perspective with today’s world.

(4e de couverture) "Pourquoi une image choque-t-elle ? Une réponse s'élabore au fil des pages autour du concept de montage : agencement des regards et des lieux, des figures et des temps. La méfiance croissante face aux images du mal, la naissance de l'émotion pornographique, l'émergence du graffiti contestataire, la destruction d'images par l'autorité qui les a commandées, l'élaboration savante de l'inimaginable : autant de phénomènes qui éclairent la transformation du rapport aux images en Occident. Transgression et image forment ici un couple dont l'histoire est mise en perspective avec le présent. Ce faisant, c'est la croyance en un pouvoir des images qui est décryptée.

Flat contradictions appear when we confront social theories of constraint with each other. The only way to resolve these is to deny the descriptive sufficiency of the theories and to put forward more complex alternatives. Thus, the primary conditions for thinking about normative facts in all their complexity involve identifying the limits and conceptions imposed by theories on us as thinkers of constraint in society, and highlighting and putting into context the various factors participating in the observance of a rule or its transgression. However, the historian does not seem to have accomplished this "pragmatic turn." He/she has omitted, in a fit of paradoxically excessive sociologism dominated by false dualities, to historically investigate such things as interests and values, internormative situations, normative systems, individual sensibilities, life circumstances and spaces, socialization, and responsibility. A variable model, however, is all the more useful to the historian given his/her more indirect and partial access to the social. Prohibitions and constraints induce behavior–but the reality of the behavior is beyond his/her reach. This kind of inquiry, quite different from his/her colleagues’ study of living societies, nevertheless involves methods that can be of interest generally. I attempt to successively answer the following questions realistically: what is it that gives efficacy to a prescription, and how can we recognize the reality of behavior in history?

Before they signify, images simply offer themselves to the eye and act by their very apparition. Their action, their effect, and their intensity are more or less strong. Far from post-Platonic debates about the essence of the image and also from studies of a natural pseudo-universality of human reactions when faced with images, we propose a culturalist and pragmatic approach to their value. A value founded not solely on aesthetic criteria, but also on the different ways of performing that images have at their disposal.

L'image, avant de représenter, de signifier, agit et fait agir. La performance des images, dont ce livre entreprend l'exploration, est à comprendre d'abord comme l'évaluation de leur efficacité : quels sont les effets des images ? C'est ensuite leur agentivité : en quelle manière les images sont-elles des êtres vivants? C'est aussi leur performativité : comme il y a des actes de parole, il y a des actes d'image dont les modalités peuvent être détaillées. Enfin, c'est leur puissance : que peut une image, dont un texte, par exemple, serait incapable ? L'image chrétienne tient ici une place à part car, loin d'être une simple « Bible des illettrés » soumise au règne du texte, elle imprègne tous les aspects de la vie et de la pensée des sociétés chrétiennes, depuis leurs fondements théologiques et anthropologiques - Dieu créa l'homme à son image ; le Fils est l'image du Père - jusqu'aux utilisations les plus diverses des objets visuels. Mais en Occident ce n'est pas seulement au Moyen Age que les images sont actives : ce livre est aussi consacré aux nouvelles formes de performances visuelles qui sont apparues avec la Renaissance ou la société mass-médiatique.

Before they signify, images simply offer themselves to the eye and act by their very apparition. Their action, their effect, and their intensity are more or less strong. Far from post-Platonic debates about the essence of the image and also from studies of a natural pseudo-universality of human reactions when faced with images, we propose a culturalist and pragmatic approach to their value. A value founded not solely on aesthetic criteria, but also on the different ways of performing that images have at their disposal.

Les apparences humaines passionnent le public et sont désormais un thème classique en anthropologie et en histoire. Mais les sciences sociales ont rarement comparé leurs manières respectives de penser et de décrire ces apparences : on parle de parure ou bien de vêtement, les choix plastiques et matériels sont rarement discutés, et l’esthétique ne semble pas pouvoir s’appliquer à l’ensemble du vivant, auquel on reconnaît pourtant une expressivité inouïe. Les essais réunis dans cet ouvrage - dont "Faire de l'anthropologie esthétique" est l'introduction - cherchent à comprendre pourquoi. Ils tentent de démêler la complexité de nos savoirs et des phénomènes observés à travers le temps, l’espace et les espèces.

Les apparences humaines passionnent le public et sont désormais un thème classique en anthropologie et en histoire. Mais les sciences sociales ont rarement comparé leurs manières respectives de penser et de décrire ces apparences : on parle de parure ou bien de vêtement, les choix plastiques et matériels sont rarement discutés, et l’esthétique ne semble pas pouvoir s’appliquer à l’ensemble du vivant, auquel on reconnaît pourtant une expressivité inouïe. Les essais réunis dans cet ouvrage cherchent à comprendre pourquoi. Ils tentent de démêler la complexité de nos savoirs et des phénomènes observés à travers le temps, l’espace et les espèces.

The Call for Papers (2010) of "The Appearances of Man. Reflecting Upon Bodily Objects and Ornaments"- Issue coordinated by Gil Bartholeyns" was:

The present issue of Civilisations aims to rethink the aesthetic of the body by challenging several of the obstacles that stand in the way of its understanding in human societies in general.

The first of these obstacles, the silent opposition between “adornment” and “clothing” inappropriately separates ethnologists and historians, by attaching objects that are only apparently different to seemingly distinct disciplines. Besides, these notions account poorly for the categories actually used in different cultures and time periods. For example, cultus as used by Latin authors grouped together clothing and jewelry, and ornatus accounted for all beauty care treatments, makeup and hair care combined. A potential connection between specialists should not be associated with a global descriptive taxonomy of bodily interventions and artifacts, as it has already been attempted. It rather requires a higher conceptual level regarding the “cultures of appearance”, one which constitutes the aim of the present issue. This level of analysis becomes possible by overcoming a second obstacle.

Secondly, indeed, writings as varied as those of Claude Lévi-Strauss on nudity, or the issue of the Géo journal dedicated to Parures du monde (Adornments of the world, 2005) and passing through the universal Histoire des mœurs (1990) are marked by the interpretation of human appearances according to the pair nature-culture, and because of that based on oppositions like animal-human and naked-civilized. Such a reading situates most of the scholarship in the wake of the old European representations of the Other. Regarding the study of tattoos, markings, textile objects, masks and all physical transformations in general, this distinction, which is indeed absent in most of the societies, is better replaced by another, this time present all societies, that is the distinction between exterior and interior, body and intention, regardless of their names, faculties, and numbers. Thus we clearly situate ourselves in the lineage of the change of paradigm proposed by the anthropology of nature and figuration as developed, among others, by Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The intervention upon the body serves less to bring the individual out of a hypothetical natural state than to inscribe the person (and with it the whole society) into the world and into the universe. Both the order and the qualities that societies assign to beings and objects, including materials, largely explain local and historical practices, productions and conceptions of appearances. For instance, this fact is demonstrated as well by the Biblical order of the Creation, than by the mythical conception of ornaments of the Orokaiva in New Guinea, or the transformation masks of the Yupiit in Alaska.

Thirdly, once the ethnocentrism is put aside, we are left with a fundamental anthropocentrism. This angle consists in the arbitrary vision of clothing as “human’s own”, traditionally articulated around such criteria as reason and shame, whereas no technical or functional definition (protection, adornment, camouflage…) leaves aside all the animal cases, while in the meantime remaining viable for human beings in general. It is then justified to conceive and study the ornamental and clothing acts of man on an ethological, comparative level. In this respect we should recall that André Leroi-Gourhan regarded human adornments and clothes within the context of a zoological reflection on relational devices used between species and between individuals of the same species.

By bringing together the outlooks of historians and anthropologists, this volume aims towards such a rethinking of the theme, by proposing case studies alongside with more epistemological oriented contributions. The texts shall bring a critical view of the present day manner in which bodily objects and ornaments are conceptualized, be it in the historical discipline or in social sciences.

Ce ouvrage abondamment illustré est destiné aux étudiants et chercheurs en anthropologie, histoire, sociologie, histoire de l'art, archéologie et à tous ceux qui oeuvrent dans les domaines des techniques, du travail, de la communication ou de la psychologie. Ce large spectre est le produit de 35 années de recherches et de méthodes testées au fil des ans sur les terrains ethnographiques et historiques les plus divers. Ce manuel comble une lacune sous une forme originale en regroupant des textes parfois inédits et introduits par les auteurs qui en expliquent l'actualité et le chemin parcouru depuis lors.

Historical anthropology has been defined as a history of the collective as opposed to a political and elitist narrative history. The advent of “a history of the ordinary” has exposed a paradox because the conditions of historical knowledge, such as documentary evidence or transmission, as well as the writing of history, are focused on discontinuity and the exceptional. While there is a historical knowledge that one might call homologous (where the object of study conforms to the means of its examination), the historical anthropologist himself engages with a counter history, or an asymmetrical knowledge. This brings with it a formidable epistemological leap. A number of recent reflections on history directly result from this constitutive inversion: for example, the way a corpus or isolated cases may be or may not be representative; the investigation of the object of historical understanding, be it neither singular nor universal; the consequence of “political” decentralization towards a history from the outside. The opposition between these two historiographies, one considered traditional, investigating dates and institutions, and the other more egalitarian and anthropological – is not this gap, at least conceptually, already a thing of the past? Have we not, for several decades, entered into a third paradigm, in which historical anthropology plays a part, already visible at the fore? We would say that presently, we are dealing with symptom-events, the structures at work, and the individual as a civilization. Beyond the givens provided by the fact of not limiting oneself to the conscience aspects, or to talk about Others, this scientific regime is as inexhaustible as the research itself: our categories, vocabulary, and practices are themselves the subjects of study.

Goods are deeply essential to life and to the reproduction of society. In Medieval times, people had a specific vocabulary for this fact. The irreplaceability of certain objects was acknowledged at a symbolic level in two domains. One of these was the domain of the sacred : certain objects seem to have been indispensable for the performance of rituals (but what objects were they, and how can we know?), while others were made “special”, or different from their fellow objects, through ritual processes. The original uniqueness of relics, on the other hand, was prejudiced by the countless examples that existed of them. The other domain for the symbolic acknowledgement of objects’ uniqueness was the economic domain. At the end of the Middle Ages, a new kind of non-substitutable goods appeared : certain objects became products. Quite early on, in the textile industry, they became endowed with strong “personalities” and reputations, and were branded as a guarantee of their authenticity. These objects could not be replaced by other goods with the same function. This medieval novelty became the order of things that we know today, making us attend to the model over the singular occurrence, the original over the copy.

Certains biens sont indispensables à la vie ou à la reproduction de la société. Le monde médiéval avait des mots particuliers pour exprimer cela, et le caractère irremplaçable d’une chose s’y posa symboliquement dans deux domaines en particulier. Celui tout d’abord du sacré. Certains objets semblent nécessaires au bon déroulement des rituels (mais quels objets et comment le savoir ?), tandis que d’autres sont rendus « spéciaux », inaliénables ou différents de leurs semblables par une opération rituelle. Les reliques, elles, étaient d’emblée uniques, mais cette originalité était inlassablement trahie par d’innombrables exemplaires. Dans l’univers économique cette fois, à la fin du Moyen Âge, apparaissent des biens non substituables d’un genre nouveau. Certains objets sont désormais des produits. Ils se caractérisent, précocement dans l’industrie textile, par une « personnalité » forte, une réputation, et des marques qui garantissent leur authenticité. Si bien qu’ils ne peuvent plus être remplacés par d’autres qui s’acquittent pourtant des mêmes fonctions. Nouveauté médiévale, nous connaissons par coeur cet ordre des choses qui nous fait choisir un modèle plutôt qu’une occurrence, et préférer l’original à la copie.