Do nations have stomachs? Food drink and imagined community in Africa

This paper takes a rhetorical question posed by Ernest Gellner and reframes it to ask whether a sense of national identity can be forged through everyday acts of consumption – in particular, that of food and drink. The article finds value in Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation as an imagined community, but argues that it makes little sense to privilege the printed word over other forms of consumption. The article goes on to suggest that there have been significant convergences at the level of consumption, but that not all of this has led to reflection about what it means to be a member of the nation. Some lessons are drawn from literatures about music and dress, following which the attention turns to alcoholic drinks and everyday foodstuffs. The history of the consumption of beer and wine in South Africa is used as a case study for convergence in a least likely scenario. The discussion on food observes that while cuisine is not a matter of debate in many African countries, in some countries, like Ethiopia and Senegal, it is taken very seriously indeed. In South Africa, there are ongoing efforts to posit food preferences as something distinctively South African. Although the braai is often discussed in a lighthearted manner, the promotion of a sense of awareness about what all South Africans share in terms of eating habits also has a more serious side to it.Ausgangspunkt des Beitrags ist eine abgewandelte rhetorische Frage von Ernest Gellner. Gefragt wird, ob alltägliche Akte des Konsums, insbesondere Ess- und Trinkgewohnheiten, zur Identifikation mit der eigenen Nation beitragen. Der Beitrag hält Benedict Andersons Konzeption der Nation als Imagined Community für hilfreich, argumentiert aber, dass es wenig Sinn macht, das gedruckte Wort gegenüber anderen Konsumbereichen besonders hervorzuheben. Der Autor beobachtet im Hinblick auf Konsumgewohnheiten signifikante Konvergenzen, die allerdings nicht immer zur Reflexion über nationale Zusammengehörigkeit führen. Er stellt Beiträge zu Musik und Kleidung vor und wendet sich dann der Bedeutung des Konsums alkoholischer Getränke und alltäglicher Nahrungsmittel zu. Mit einer kursorischen Geschichte des Bier- und Weinkonsums in Südafrika greift er einen auf den ersten Blick besonders unwahrscheinlichen Fall von Konvergenz auf. Die nationale Küche ist in afrikanischen Staaten zumeist kein Gegenstand von Debatten, wird in Ländern wie Äthiopien und Senegal allerdings sehr ernst genommen. Auch in Südafrika gibt es Bemühungen, die Bevorzugung bestimmter Lebensmittel als spezifisch südafrikanisch darzustellen; und auch wenn über die in Südafrika gebräuchliche Variante des Grillens (braai) oft eher scherzhaft gesprochen wird, hat doch die Förderung des Bewusstseins, welche Essgewohnheiten alle Südafrikaner miteinander teilen, auch eine ernstere Seite

Cyclical history in the Gambia/Casamance borderlands:Refuge, settlement and Islam from c.1880 to the present

This article begins with a quotation from a local informant highlighting a perception in the Gambia/Casamance borderlands that there is a pattern linking the violence of the later nineteenth century with more recent troubles. It argues that there is some merit in this thesis, which is encapsulated in a concatenation of events: systematic raiding by Fodé Sylla led to the creation of a relatively depopulated colonial border zone which was later filled by Jola immigrants from Buluf to the southeast. In the perception of some, it is these immigrants who attracted the MFDC rebels. Mandinkas and Jolas of Fogny Jabankunda and Narang, and Karoninkas from the islands of Karone have therefore been largely unreceptive to appeals to Casamance nationalism. The article also argues that there are more twisted historical connections. Whereas in the later nineteenth century, the Jolas associated Islam with violent enslavement, they later converted en masse. Their attitude towards Fodé Sylla remained negative, whilst the Mauritanian marabout, Cheikh Mahfoudz, was credited with the introduction of a pacific form of Islam that valorized hard work and legitimated physical migration. This legacy has posed a further barrier to militant nationalism. Islam and violence remain linked, but the signs have been reversed

Clustering student skill set profiles in a unit hypercube using mixtures of multivariate betas

<br>This paper presents a finite mixture of multivariate betas as a new model-based clustering method tailored to applications where the feature space is constrained to the unit hypercube. The mixture component densities are taken to be conditionally independent, univariate unimodal beta densities (from the subclass of reparameterized beta densities given by Bagnato and Punzo 2013). The EM algorithm used to fit this mixture is discussed in detail, and results from both this beta mixture model and the more standard Gaussian model-based clustering are presented for simulated skill mastery data from a common cognitive diagnosis model and for real data from the Assistment System online mathematics tutor (Feng et al 2009). The multivariate beta mixture appears to outperform the standard Gaussian model-based clustering approach, as would be expected on the constrained space. Fewer components are selected (by BIC-ICL) in the beta mixture than in the Gaussian mixture, and the resulting clusters seem more reasonable and interpretable.</br> <br>This article is in technical report form, the final publication is available at http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article &id=doi:10.1007/s11634-013-0149-z</br&gt

Explaining the EU's Policy Portfolio: Applying a Federal Integration Approach to EU Cohesion Policy. Bruges Political Research Paper No. 20, December 2011

This paper engages with the debate about why the nature of the EU's policy portfolio is as it is. It does so by taking cohesion policy and asking the question, why has it come to occupy so important a position in the EU‟s policy portfolio? It is argued that the two most common conceptually-based approaches applied to cohesion policy – intergovernmentalism and multilevel governance – do not adequately explain either the timing or the dynamic of cohesion policy. A model that combines economic integration approaches and federal approaches is developed in the paper to provide a basis for a new explanatory framework for the prominent position of cohesion in the portfolio. We suggest that our approach – which we call a federal integration approach – has the potential to be applied to other policy areas