City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain

{Excerpt} Unpacking and applying the concept of structural violence is one of the principal tasks of this book. To be clear from the outset, however, in lodging the experiences of the men and women I encountered in the larger rubric of structural violence, I do not intend to imply that we should ignore the agency exerted in the scenario I\u27ve just described, or in the scenarios that litter this book: we ought not ignore the basic fact that these scenarios are composed of humans choosing to abuse, exploit, maim, and dominate other humans. Rather, I seek to couple that basic fact with an analysis of the structural forces that cause, permit, encourage, or are in some other way involved in the production of violence between citizen and foreigner in Bahrain. In the final accounting, the episodic violence levied against foreigners in Bahrain becomes one facet of the more comprehensive structural forces that govern foreign labor in the Gulf states. The central mission of the anthropologist remains explication, and typically the explication of lives distant and different from those of the intended reader. The conceptual framework of structural violence, which I explore in detail, provides an analytic foundation from which I work outward in scope and, to some degree, backward in time. From that foundation I peer at the decisions and contexts that brought the men and women I came to know from India to the Gulf, at their experiences upon arrival in Bahrain, and at the strategies they deploy against the difficulties they face while abroad. I also examine the contours of the Bahraini state itself, the ongoing articulation of a particular idea of modernity in the Gulf, and the intricacies of the concept of citizenship as they have evolved in dialectic with the extraordinary flow of foreign labor to the island

How is mortality affected by money, marriage, and stress?

It is believed that the length of a person’s life depends on a mixture of economic and social factors. Yet the relative importance of these is still debated. We provide recent British evidence that marriage has a strong positive effect on longevity. Economics matters less. After controlling for health at the start of the 1990s, we cannot find reliable evidence that income affects the probability of death in the subsequent decade. Although marriage keeps people alive, it does not appear to work through a reduction of stress levels. Greater levels of psychological distress (as measured by General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) stress scores) cannot explain why unmarried people die younger. For women, however, we do find that mental strain itself is dangerous. High GHQ stress scores help to predict the probability of an early death

Does Money Buy Happiness? A Longitudinal Study Using Data on Windfalls.

The most fundamental idea in economics is that money makes people happy. This paper constructs a test. It studies longitudinal information on the psychological health and reported happiness of approximately 9,000 randomly chosen people. In the spirit of a natural experiment, the paper shows that those in the panel who receive windfalls -- by winning lottery money or receiving an inheritance -- have higher mental wellbeing in the following year. A windfall of 50,000 pounds (approximately 75,000 US dollars) is associated with a rise in wellbeing of between 0.1 and 0.3 standard deviations. Approximately one million pounds (1.5 million dollars), therefore, would be needed to move someone from close to the bottom of a happiness frequency distribution to close to the top. Whether these happiness gains wear off over time remains an open question.

Competition Between Payment Systems: Results

This paper is the second of two companion pieces. In the first we developed a model of competition between payment systems which extends that of Chakravorti and Roson (2006). Here we turn to the results which can be obtained from the Chakravorti and Roson model, from our extension of it, and from a third family of models which we develop in this paper. We obtain two main sets of findings. First, we shed further light on how competing platforms will set their price level and pricing structure when endogenous multi-homing is allowed on both sides of the market. Our results challenge the general finding in the literature that the greater the propensity of one side of the market to single-home, the more attractive will be the pricing offered to its members by competing platforms. Our results confirm that while this finding generally holds when platforms charge both consumers and merchants on a purely per-transaction basis, it need not hold in the more realistic situation where platforms instead levy flat fees on consumers. Second, we extend findings of Hermalin and Katz (2006) showing that, in certain circumstances, platforms may offer less attractive pricing to the side of the market which holds the choice of payment instrument at the moment of sale.payments policy; two-sided markets

Is it Money or Marriage that Keeps People Alive?

It is believed that the length of a person's life depends on a mixture of economic and social factors. Yet the relative importance of these is still debated. We provide evidence in this paper that marriage has a much more important (positive) effect on longevity than high income does. For men, it almost exactly offsets the large negative effect of smoking. Economics, however, plays little or no role. After controlling for health at the start of the 1990s, we find no reliable evidence that income affects the probability of death over the subsequent decade.mortality, health, income, marriage

What Has Been Happening to the Quality of Workers’ Lives in Britain?

This paper studies workers’ lives in modern Britain. It uses longitudinal data to examine stress and job satisfaction through the decade of the 1990s. The results are disturbing. On both measures, the wellbeing of British public sector workers worsened sharply over the decade. The size of the deterioration was between one half point and one full point on a standard GHQ mental stress scale. This is remarkably large. Stress levels among private sector employees also rose. Job satisfaction in the private sector ran approximately flat through time. These findings may be of interest to nations who are thinking of adopting the British government’s policies towards the public sector, and to those who have conjectured that working life is becoming more pressurised.

Money and Mental Wellbeing : A Longitudinal Study of Medium-Sized Lottery Wins

One of the famous questions in social science is whether money makes people happy. We offer new evidence by using longitudinal data on a random sample of Britons who receive medium-sized lottery wins of between £1000 and £120,000 (that is, up to approximately U.S. $200,000). When compared to two control groups -- one with no wins and the other with small wins -- these individuals go on eventually to exhibit significantly better psychological health. Two years after a lottery win, the average measured improvement in mental wellbeing is 1.4 GHQ pointsPsychological health ; Happiness ; GHQ ; Income

Rome post-coloniale, et au-delà: Religion, pouvoir et identité

Roman archaeology is one of the major subfields of archaeology in which post-colonial theory has flourished, and not just in relation to the role of the past in the present, but also as a means to approach the interpretation of the Roman world itself. The region of North Africa was a major focal point for some of the earliest post-colonial studies on the Roman Empire, and has remained an arena of investigation for scholars influenced by the Anglophone debate on post-colonial theory, which emerged in the 1980s and flourished in the 1990s, often with a focus on Roman Britain. Religion is both a key source of evidence and an obviously important theme in understanding cultural change, interaction and power, and thus it has likewise been of interest to scholars from within and beyond the region. Here, I give an overview of the work of some of the influential Roman archaeologists working within the post-colonial tradition. I also consider the complex intersections of ancient and modern, and of Britain and North Africa, found in this body of work, and evaluate the impact this tradition of thought continues to have on Roman archaeology going forwards.L’archéologie romaine est l’un des sous-domaines majeurs de l’archéologie dans lequel la théorie postcoloniale s’est épanouie, et pas seulement en relation avec le rôle du passé dans le présent, mais aussi en tant que mode d’aborder l’interprétation du monde romain lui-même. L’Afrique du Nord a été une région d’intérêt importante pour certaines des premières recherches postcoloniales sur l’empire romain, et a par la suite été une arène d’investigation pour les chercheurs influencés par le débat anglophone sur la théorie postcoloniale, qui s’est développé à partir des années 1980, et en particulier dans les années 1990, souvent avec un accent sur la Grande-Bretagne romaine. La religion est à la fois une source essentielle de matériel et un thème manifestement important pour comprendre le changement culturel, l’interaction et le pouvoir, et elle a donc également intéressé les chercheurs de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur de la région. Dans ce chapitre, je donne un aperçu du travail de certains des archéologues romains influents travaillant dans la tradition post-coloniale. Je considère également les intersections complexes de l’ancien et du moderne, de la Grande-Bretagne et de l’Afrique du Nord, trouvées dans ce travail, et j’évalue l’impact que cette tradition de pensée continue d’avoir sur l’archéologie romaine à l’avenir