The question of land access and the Spanish Land Reform of 1932

Spanish land reform, involving the break-up of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and justified for economic and political reasons. We employ new provincial data on landless workers, land prices and agrarian wages to consider if government intervention was needed because of the failure of the free action of markets to redistribute land. Our evidence shows that the relative number of landless workers decreased significantly from 1860 to 1930 before the approval of the 1932 Land Reform during the Second Republic (1931-36). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy land plots, and structural change that drained rural population from the countryside. Given that shifts in factor prices were helping workers gain access to land, the economic arguments for reform by the 1930s remain unclea

Red Aesthetics, Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract: This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptua- lised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or con- structs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s

Balanços energéticos agropecuários: uma importante ferramenta como indicativo de sustentabilidade de agroecossistemas.

No Brasil, pouca atenção se tem dado às formas e caminhos com que os fluxos energéticos se distribuem nos sistemas produtivos. Na agropecuária, a atenção tem sido voltada a novas fontes de energia (biomassa) ou em tecnologia alternativa, visando a racionalização do uso de energia fóssil ou elétrica. Entretanto, a agricultura tem se desenvolvido baseada fortemente na utilização intensiva de máquinas agrícolas, com conseqüente uso de combustíveis fósseis. Um fator de estrangulamento muito forte no consumo energético geral tem sido a utilização massiva de fertilizantes derivados do petróleo nos agroecossistemas. Estudos de Balanços Energéticos visam determinar os pontos de estrangulamento energético fundamentando a busca por tecnologias poupadoras de energia, especialmente aquelas de origem fóssil (combustível, fertilizante, agrotóxicos, energia despendida na fabricação das máquinas e implementos, etc.). No Brasil, a Região Sul, é onde se encontram vários trabalhos buscando uma agricultura mais auto-sustentável, do ponto de vista da utilização da energia. Em vista da possibilidade de eventuais futuras crises energéticas, o presente trabalho procura analisar o estado-da-arte dos estudos em Balanço Energético, no Brasil e no Mundo, como uma ferramenta de indicação da sustentabilidade dos sistemas agropecuários