Performing race in the Barranquilla Carnival: the case of the Negritas Puloy de Montecristo

ABSTRACT

In the city of Barranquilla, Colombia, carnival is a main source of identity. Since the 2003 UNESCO proclamation of this carnival as an Intangible Cultural Heritage, the celebration has gained national and international attention, while the city has developed a whole cultural market around it. This essay traces the evolution of a popular costume and street performance that carries racial stereotypes and as such, has become almost emblematic of carnival time itself. La Negrita Puloy de Montecristo is now the only female symbol of the Barranquilla Carnival. It is argued in this essay that as long as blackness is performed during the regulated time of carnival, lived by the city as an illusion of racial integration and black pride, the consciousness of inequality stays dormant and inequality continues being a quotidian practice in a supposedly tri-racial nation that was funded on the principles of mixture. This essay is the product of a research project that lasted a year and combined ethnographic and archival work. Las Negritas Puloy de Montecristo perform exclusion annually, as they intend to paradoxically perform inclusion. This very popular carnival manifestation seems to be a sign that only as stereotype can the sexualized black woman participate in the public sphere. As the mulata, she is a sexual object. As a slave, she is forgotten. Thus, she can dance.     

Universal and Local Reconciled: Exploring Satisfaction with Universal and Local Goals in Thailand and Bangladesh

This paper explores factors affecting individual goal satisfaction in Bangladesh and Thailand. Analysing the determinants of goal satisfaction in two countries at different levels of development enables the paper to address the broader question of whether the common practice of classifying goals as ‘universal’ (e.g. health) or ‘local’ (e.g. community relationships) has any empirical support. The study uses data from communities in Thailand and Bangladesh that were researched from 2002 to 2007 by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group at the University of Bath. Results from the study based on regression analysis show that universal and local goals have the same determinants, supporting the view that they are interdependent. The implications of this finding are that both types of goals should be given equal priority and need to be taken into account to better understand people’s wellbeing. This finding is, however, moderated by the second finding of the paper, which is that socio-economic variables and the extent of need satisfaction play different roles in explaining goal satisfaction in countries at different stages of development. For example, whilst in Bangladesh wealth only contributes to goal satisfaction if it increases needs satisfaction, in Thailand it has an independent effect. The implications of both findings for global frameworks such as the Millennium Development Goals are addressed in the conclusions.     

Development of a New Approach to Guided Self-Help via the Internet: The Swedish Experience

ABSTRACT

This article describes the development and empirical status of guided Internet-delivered self-help. The treatment approach combines the benefits of bibliotherapy with book-length text materials and the support given online via web pages and e-mail. Interactive features such as online registrations, tests, and online discussion forums are also included. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) guided the research and clinical implementations of this approach, as it lends itself more easily to the self-help format compared with other presently available psychotherapy approaches. We include an overview of the research, current issues and research in service delivery, lessons learned through a program of research, and directions for future investigations.     

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM: A CRITICAL COMPARISON OF TEMPORAL ORIENTATIONS*

For some time, sociologists have called for the study of the temporal characteristics of social life. Ethnomethodology and Symbolic Interactionism are two sociological theories which have begun to develop analyses of social timing. In this report, exemplary research efforts from each perspective are examined and evaluated along the temporal dimensions of the past, order, sequence, and the future. It is shown that research methods are key in elaborating or hindering the study of temporality. Specifically, Symbolic Interactionists' strategies have allowed a rich temporal orientation to be developed and specified whereas strategies employed by Ethnomethodologists have resulted in research that is confined to the immediate realm of experience and thereby have been narrow in temporal scope.     

ADVANCES IN COACHING: FAMILY THERAPY WITH ONE PERSON

This paper describes the process of "coaching" individuals in their efforts to change themselves in the context of their nuclear and parental family systems. Although this approach is regarded as one of the major modes of intervention in family therapy, the actual methods and techniques for intervention are not widely understood. Moreover, we have expanded the Bowen approach to address powerful cultural and family life cycle influences. The goal of coaching is to help clients define themselves proactively in relationship to others in their families without emotionally cutting off or giving in. Coaching begins by training clients to become observers and researchers of their own role in the family and of family patterns of behavior. Coaching then moves to help them bring their behavior more in line with their deepest beliefs, even if this means upsetting family members by disobeying family "rules."     

Maintenance of community change: enforcing youth access to tobacco laws

Youth access to tobacco remains a significant problem for this nation. Methods have been developed to reduce youth access to commercial outlets and these involve enforcement efforts of monitoring and fining merchant offenders. In the present study, over a three year period of time, readiness to participate in these types of enforcement programs were assessed in 11 communities. Several years after the research study was completed, enforcement activities were re-assessed. Findings indicated that those communities that had made the largest changes in community readiness to enforce youth access laws during the three year intervention were the ones most likely to continue enforcement activities into the follow-up period. There is a need to better understand how youth access to tobacco community-based interventions can be maintained.     

Individual differences in expressive style as a mediator of expectancy communication

This study investigates the role of nonverbal expressiveness and self-monitoring as mediators in the communication of teachers' expectations for student performance to a third party observer. Undergraduates were recruited to be videotaped while teaching a brief lesson to a high school student who was presented as either very bright and motivated or not. Videotapes showing only the teacher were later shown to observers who were asked for their impressions of the student who was being taught. It was hypothesized that teachers who were highly nonverbally expressive would communicate their expectations to the observers, and would thus elicit from them responses quite similar to their own. On the other hand, it was predicted that unexpressive teachers would not communicate their expectations, eliciting observer responses unrelated to their own. The predictions were supported but with a major qualification: it was found that spontaneous expressiveness interacted with self-monitoring in determining expectancy communication. The findings point towards new directions in understanding the occurrence and mediation of expectancy effects.A portion of this paper was presented at the American Psychological Association meetings in Anaheim, California, August, 1983. The research was supported in part by a University of California intramural research grant to the second author, by a UCR minigrant to the third author, and by an NIH biomedical research support equipment grant.     

Minimum Scoring Rule Inference

Proper scoring rules are devices for encouraging honest assessment of probability distributions. Just like log‐likelihood, which is a special case, a proper scoring rule can be applied to supply an unbiased estimating equation for any statistical model, and the theory of such equations can be applied to understand the properties of the associated estimator. In this paper, we discuss some novel applications of scoring rules to parametric inference. In particular, we focus on scoring rule test statistics, and we propose suitable adjustments to allow reference to the usual asymptotic chi‐squared distribution. We further explore robustness and interval estimation properties, by both theory and simulations.     

The Entrepreneurial Establishment of a Nonprofit Organization

The purpose of this paper is to offer an analysis of the nonprofit sector from the entrepreneurial point of view in order to show why the organizational form of nonprofit has arisen and, more precisely, why rational entrepreneurs choose to incorporate their business enterprises under the nonprofit regulation. Since nonprofit associations were formed before the emergence of the tax code, the favorable tax-status alone cannot explain an entrepreneurial preference for the nonprofit form. Tax considerations have then to be combined with other elements. The alternative view proposed in the paper is that the supply of factors such as capital and entrepreneurship provides the motivation for the rise of nonprofit enterprises. The entrepreneur and the managers enjoy control of the activity and see to it that service are produced in such a way as to maximize their net income. They do not ignore nonmonetary income in the sense that they find it rewarding to seek pecuniary gains as well as nonmonetary profits in any given period. To explain why an entrepreneur organizes his business as a nonprofit entity we investigate a theater production process.