Navigating institutional pressure in state-socialist and democratic regimes: The case of movement brontosaurus

Using the case of Movement Brontosaurus, a Czech organization founded in state socialist times, this article investigates how civic associations and nongovernmental organizations seeking to promote alternatives to the status quo respond to institutional pressures in different political and social contexts. The case shows that under state socialism, Brontosaurus appeared to conform to state mandates and societal expectations. However, its formal structure was decoupled from many activities to obscure its oppositional intent.After the transition to democracy, the organization was only able to maintain its place in society after it aligned its structure and practices with each other and openly expressed its alternative agenda. The findings demonstrate how social change and alternative lifestyle organizations vary their responses to institutional pressure in ways that enable them to realize their values and pursue their missions while accounting for the political and social contexts in which they are embedded

Skin, paper, tiles: a cross-cultural history of Kadiwéu art

This article focuses on the global traffic in images relating to Kadiwéu culture in South America, analyzing the extent to which they are entangled in the group’s continuing sense of presence. It begins with Kadiwéu designs as they appeared in the sketchbook of the artist-explorer Guido Boggiani in the late nineteenth century. It then explores the mapping of Kadiwéu territory and the practices and protocols informing a politics of land rights, cultural property and economic survival, looking in particular at the commissioning of Kadiwéu designs for a housing estate and an associated exhibition in Berlin early in the twentieth-first century. By developing a cross-cultural history of Kadiwéu art that considers the transnational networks across different times and spaces, including the case of a transcultural history of copyright, the article seeks to contribute to the ongoing re-thinking of the colonial archive and its afterlife

Rings of maps: sequential convergence and completion

summary:The ring $B(R)$ of all real-valued measurable functions, carrying the pointwise convergence, is a sequential ring completion of the subring $C(R)$ of all continuous functions and, similarly, the ring $\mathbb{B}$ of all Borel measurable subsets of $R$ is a sequential ring completion of the subring $\mathbb{B}_0$ of all finite unions of half-open intervals; the two completions are not categorical. We study $\mathcal L_0^*$-rings of maps and develop a completion theory covering the two examples. In particular, the $\sigma$-fields of sets form an epireflective subcategory of the category of fields of sets and, for each field of sets $\mathbb{A}$, the generated $\sigma$-field $\sigma (\mathbb{A})$ yields its epireflection. Via zero-rings the theory can be applied to completions of special commutative $\mathcal L_0^*$-groups