1,943 research outputs found
Borcherds Forms and Generalizations of Singular Moduli
We give a factorization of averages of Borcherds forms over CM points
associated to a quadratic form of signature (n,2). As a consequence of this
result, we are able to state a theorem like that of Gross and Zagier about
which primes can occur in this factorization. One remarkable phenomenon we
observe is that the regularized theta lift of a weakly holomorphic modular form
is always finite
What\u27s Behind the Billboard: Dead Men and Private Parts. Object? Sign? Thing?
It is a truism that objects and visual sign systems convey meaning. But the meanings shift radically according to the viewer and how the signs are read. Several years ago I asked an American student to photograph scenes which either shocked her or perplexed her upon her arrival in France. One photo is of a publicity panel at the entry to Le Père Lachaise cemetery. The panel consisted of nine magazine covers, including covers for magazines on children, cooking, hunting, and computers, as well as two pornographic magazines. The young student focused on just the last two covers, thus masking out the others to create her shocked meaning. Other viewers, such as a housewife, would have been expected to mask out the pornographic magazines and be enticed by the magazines centered on the home. A more global reading of the billboard reveals rhetorical links, narratives, and ironical juxtapositions between the magazines, thus creating dispersed and contradictory meanings drawn from this miniature map of contemporary France
Political Structures and Political Mores: Varieties of Politics in Comparative Perspective
We offer an integrated study of political participation, bridging the gap between the literatures on civic engagement and social movements. Historically evolved institutions and culture generate different configurations of the political domain, shaping the meaning and forms of political activity in different societies. The structuration of the polity along the dimensions of “stateness” and “corporateness” accounts for cross-national differences in the way individuals make sense of and engage in the political sphere. Forms of political participation that are usually treated as distinct are actually interlinked and co-vary across national configurations. In societies where interests are represented in a formalized manner through corporatist arrangements, political participation revolves primarily around membership in pre-established groups and concerted negotiation, rather than extra-institutional types of action. By contrast, in “statist” societies the centralization and concentration of sovereignty in the state makes it the focal point of claim-making, driving social actors to engage in “public” activities and marginalizing private and, especially, market-based political forms. We test these and other hypotheses using cross-national data on political participation from the World Values Survey
Political space and the space of polities: Doing politics across nations
What makes political life in the United States so different from political life in France, Hungary or Argentina? This paper considers why societies “do politics” differently. We draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s criticism of substantialist thinking in sociology and on his conceptualization of the social space to propose a new way of relating methodological to theoretical claims in comparative political sociology. We do this by exploring and
constructing a “space of polities” based on data from the 2004 World Values Survey, using relational statistical techniques (e.g., geometric data analysis). The main insight is that any single form of political action (e.g., joining a voluntary association, or a demonstration, or a boycott) only takes its meaning in the context of its objective relationship to other forms of political action and non-action that have currency in each particular society. We explore the diversity of polity types that actually exist and discuss how they emerge from similar configurations in countries’ spaces of political practices. We suggest that the reason for
such clustering lies in similar political–historical trajectories. We conclude by arguing for a comparative approach that is sensitive to differences in overall systems of relationships
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