Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Monday, June 23, 2025
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Friday, June 20, 2025
Thursday, June 19, 2025
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Monday, June 16, 2025
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Friday, June 13, 2025
Thursday, June 12, 2025
An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation (Version 1) From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315759470/anthology-chinese-discourse-translation-version-1-martha-pui-yiu-cheung-lin-wusun?refId=c0ca06d1-6d7e-4c5b-9d83-46e5a53eb21d&context=ubx
This is the initial title of what has now grown into a two-volume anthology on the subject of translation in China, from earliest times to the first decade of the twentieth century. This book offers readers a journey of the imagination, especially in the entries making up the second part. It covers a time-frame from roughly the fifth century BCE to the twelfth century CE, deals with what can loosely be called government translation, and with the monumental project, lasting some ten centuries, of Buddhist sutra translation. As far as an anthology of Chinese discourse on translation is concerned, achieving 'thick translation' entails several main considerations. The risks and the manoeuvres of thick translation are discussed in this chapter, which focus on Volume One of this anthology. The classical Chinese texts selected for translation in this volume have been taken mainly from A First Edition of the Four Categories of Books published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai.
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Monday, June 9, 2025
Sunday, June 8, 2025
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Saturday, June 7, 2025
The Creation of the Urban Commons, by David Harvey
https://mappingthecommons.net/blog/2012/11/13/the-creation-of-the-urban-commons-by-david-harvey/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#:~:text=The%20common%20is%20not%20to,physical%20environment%20deemed%20crucial%20to
CHAPTER THREE of Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
The city is the site where people of all sorts and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if per petually changing and transitory life. The commonality of that life has long been a matter of commentary by urbanists of all stripes, and the compelling subject of a wide range of evocative writings and represen tations {in novels, films, painting, videos, and the like) that attempt to pin down the character of that life (or the particular character of life in a particular city in a given place and time) and its deeper meanings. And in the long history of urban utopianism, we have a record of all manner of human aspirations to make the city in a different image, more “after our heart’s desire” as Park would put it. The recent revival of emphasis upon the supposed loss of urban commonalities reflects the seemingly profound impacts of the recent wave of privatizations, enclosures, spatial controls, policing, and surveillance upon the quali ties of urban life in general, and in particular upon the potentiality to build or inhibit new forms of social relations (a new commons) within an urban process influenced if not dominated by capitalist class inter ests. When Hardt and Negri, for example, argue that we should view “the metropolis as a factory for the production of the common,” they suggest this as an entry point for anti-capitalist critique and political activism. Like the right to the city, the idea sounds catchy and intriguing, but what could it possibly mean? And how does this relate to the long history of arguments and debates concerning the creation and utilization of common property resources?
I have lost count of the number of times I have seen Garrett Hardin’s classic article on “The Tragedy of the Commons” cited as an irrefuta ble argument for the superior efficiency of private property rights with respect to land and resource uses, and therefore an irrefutable justifi cation for privatization. This mistaken reading in part derives from Hardin’s appeal to the metaphor ofcattle, under the private ownership of several individuals concerned to maximize their individual utility, pas tured on a piece of common land. The owners individually gain from adding cattle, while any losses in fertility from so doing are spread across all users. So all the herders continue to add cattle until the common land loses all productivity. If the cattle were held in common, of course, the metaphor would not work. This shows that it is private property in cattle and individual utility-maximizing behavior that lie at the heart of the problem, rather than the common-property character of the resource. But none of this was Hardin’s fundamental concern. His preoccupation was population growth. The personal decision to have children would, he feared, eventually lead to the destruction of the global commons and the exhaustion of all resources (as Malthus also argued). The only solution, in his view, is authoritarian regulatory population control.
I cite this example to highlight the way thinking about the commons has all too often itself become enclosed within far too narrow a set of presumptions, largely driven by the example of the land enclosures that occurred in Britain from the late medieval period onwards. As a result, thinking has often polarized between private property solutions and authoritarian state intervention. From a political perspective, the whole issue has been clouded over by a gut-reaction (laced with hefty doses of nostalgia for a once-upon- a- time supposedly moral economy of common action) either for or-more commonly on the left-against enclosure.
Elinor Ostrom seeks to disrupt some of the presumptions in her book, Governing the Commons. She systematizes the anthropological, socio logical, and historical evidence that had long shown that if the herders talked with each other (or had cultural rules ofsharing) then they might easily solve any commons issue. Ostrom shows from innumerable exam ples that individuals can and often do devise ingenious and eminently sensible collective ways to manage common property resources for indi vidual and collective benefit. Her concern was to establish why in some instances they succeed in so doing, and under what circumstances they might not. Her case studies “shatter the convictions of many policy ana lysts that the only way to solve CPR problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation:’ Instead, they demonstrate “rich mixtures ofpublic and private instrumentalities:’ Armed with that conclusion, she could do battle with that economic orthodoxy that simply views policy in terms of a dichotomous choice betvveen state and market.
But most ofher examples involved as few as a hundred or so appropri ators. Anything much larger (her largest example was 15,000 people), she found, required a “nested” structure of decision-making, because direct negotiation between all individuals was impossible. This implies that nested, and therefore in some sense “hierarchical” forms of organiza tion are needed to address large-scale problems such as global warming. Unfortunately the term “hierarchy” is anathema in conventional think ing (Ostrom avoids it), and virulently unpopular with much of the left these days. The only politically correct form of organization in many radical circles is non-state, non-hierarchical, and horizontal. To avoid the implication that some sorts of nested hierarchical arrangements might be necessary, the question of how to manage the commons at large as opposed to small and local scales (for example, the global population problem that was Hardin’s concern) tends to be evaded.
There is, dearly, an analytically difficult “scale problem” at work here that needs (but does not receive) careful evaluation. The possibilities for sensible management of common property resources that exist at one scale (such as shared water rights between one hundred farmers in a small river basin) do not and cannot carry over to problems such as global warming, or even to the regional diffusion of acid deposition from power stations. As we “jump scales” (as geographers like to put it), so the whole nature of the commons problem and the prospects of finding a solution change dramatically.4 What looks like a good way to resolve problems at one scale does not hold at another scale. Even worse, patently good solutions at one scale (the “local;’ say) do not necessarily aggre gate up (or cascade down) to make for good solutions at another scale (the global, for example). This is why Hardin’s metaphor is so misleading: he uses a small-scale example of private capital operating on a common pasture to explicate a global problem, as if there is no problem whatso ever in shifting scales.
This is also, incidentally, why the valuable lessons gained from the collective organization of small-scale solidarity economies along common-property lines cannot translate into global solutions without resort to “nested” and therefore hierarchical organizational forms. Unfortunately, as already noted , the idea of hierarchy is anathema to many segments of the oppositional left these days. A fetishism of organizational preference (pure horizontality, for example) all too often stands in the way of exploring appropriate and effective solutions.; Just to be clear, I am not saying horizontality is bad-indeed, I think it an excellent objective but that we should acknowledge its limits as a hegemonic organizational principle, and be prepared to go far beyond it when necessary.
There is much confusion also over the relationship between the commons and the supposed evils of enclosure. In the grander scheme of things (and particularly at the global level), some sort of enclosure is often the best way to preserve certain kinds of valued commons. That sounds like, and is, a contradictory statement, but it reflects a truly con tradictory situation. It will take a draconian act of enclosure in Amazonia, for example, to protect both biodiversity and the cultures of indigenous populations as part of our global natural and cultural commons. It will almost certainly require state authority to protect those commons against the philistine democracy of short-term moneyed interests ravaging the land with soy bean plantations and cattle ranching. So not all forms of enclosure can be dismissed as bad by definition. The production and enclosure of non-commodified spaces in a ruthlessly commodifying world is surely a good thing. But in this instance there may be another problem: expelling indigenous populations from their forest lands (as the World Wide Fund for Nature often advocates) may be deemed necessary to preserve biodiversity. One common may be protected at the expense of another. When a nature reserve is fenced off, public access is denied. It is dangerous, however, to presume that the best way to preserve one sort of common is to deny another. There is plenty of evidence from joint forest management schemes, for example, that the dual objective of improving habitats and forest growth while maintaining access for traditional users to forest resources often ends up benefiting both. The idea of protecting the commons through enclosures is not always easily broached, however, when it needs to be actively explored as an anti-capitalist strategy. In fact a common demand on the left for “local autonomy” is actually a demand for some kind of enclosure.
Questions of the commons, we must conclude, are contradictory and therefore always contested. Behind these contestations lie conflict ing social and political interests. Indeed, “politics;’ Jacques Ranciere has remarked, “is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious:’6 At the end of it all, the analyst is often left with a simple decision: Whose side are you on, whose common interests do you seek to protect, and by what means?
The rich these days have the habit, for example, of sealing them selves off in gated communities within which an exclusionary commons becomes defined. This is in principle no different than fifty users divvy ing up common water resources among themselves without regard for anyone else. The rich even have the gall to market their exclusionary urban spaces as a traditional village commons, as in the case of the Kierland Commons in Phoenix, Arizona, which is described as an “urban village with space for retail, restaurants, offices;’ and so on.7 Radical groups can also procure spaces (sometimes through the exercise of private property rights, as when they collectively buy a building to be used for some pro gressive purpose) from which they can reach out to further a politics of common action. Or they can establish a commune or a soviet within some protected space. The politically active “houses of the people” that Margaret Kohn describes as central to political action in early twentieth century Italy were exactly of this sort.
Not all forms of the common entail open access. Some (like the air we breathe) are, while others (like the streets of our cities) are in principle open, but regulated, policed, and even privately managed in the form of business improvement districts. Still others (like a common water resource controlled by fifty farmers) are from the very start exclusive to a particular social group. Most of Ostrom’s examples in her first book were of the last sort. Furthermore, in her initial studies she limited her inquiry to so-called “natural” resources such as land, forests, water, fisheries, and the like. (I say “so-called” because all resources are technological, eco nomic, and cultural appraisals, and therefore socially defined.)
Ostrom, along with many colleagues and collaborators, later went on to examine other forms of the commons, such as genetic materials, knowledge, cultural assets, and the like. These commons arc also very much under assault these days through commodification and enclosure. Cultural commons become commodified (and often bowdlerized) by a heritage industry bent on Disncyfication, for example. Intellectual prop erty and patenting rights over genetic materials and scientific knowledge more generally constitute one of the hottest topics of our times. When publishing companies charge for access to articles in the scientific and technical journals they publish, the problem of access to what should be common knowledge open to all is plain to see. Over the last twenty years or so there has been an explosion of studies and practical proposals, as well as fierce legal struggles over creating an open-access knowledge commons.
