Thursday, June 04, 2015

This and that

1. One difference between Labour and Liberal governments in Victoria, Australia. My wife Jhansi sells some electronic stuff and some of the clients are schools. Whenever, there is a Labour government, school orders increase. This was our experience for about twenty years.
2. Boundary strategies. This is a story I heard from my friend Krishnaji long ago. His parents shared a mud wall with their neighbour. She would come around festival occasions to mend the wall with mud and cow dung and there very happy to let her do it. But after a few years, they found that the wall has moved to their side (apparently, she was thickening the wall on their side and scraping it on her side).

3. Australia is still a country for the underdog. Overwhelming response to story about  homeless schoolgirl Alicia living under a bridge

4. Peasants and professors- Neo-liberalism and peasantry's distress from India. Some professors were in the pay commissions and I knew some of them.

5. In World's best run economy, house prices keep falling...

6. Wondering and watching: What we can learn from Fredrik Barth from Savage Minds
"Part of what he argued for at the RSA is today taken for granted. He was skeptical of «deep structures», be they social, cultural or mental, as found in Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz or Levi-Strauss. He was one of the most vocal – but not the first – to depart with the notion of culture as a bounded entity. It was, Barth argued, the processes of social life that should be understood, not its hardened form. What meaningful strategies do people follow? What set of concrete opportunities and limitations influence their behavior? And out of this, what aggregate phenomena emerge?
These ideas lay behind his introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1968), which was for years on the top 100 on the social science citation index. "

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