Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Even though Scheler was twenty-seven years older than Voegelin both of them had witnessed a radical cultural, social and political change in the intellectual context that had crossed German intellectual life, in particular, and European in general after the First World War. The precarious situation of human beings reawaken the search for a foundation of spiritual life in reality and led several intellectuals to try to reorganize the knowledge about human existence, after the incredible flourishing of positivistic science that had marked the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper intends to discuss the metaphors and other linguistic strategies used in an anthropological paper which aims to explore the relationships between space and culture. I will show how the authors destabilize conventional culture-place linkage and offer a new set of terminology, which implies a different imaginary of cultural space. The spatial metaphors, such as map, boundary, and border, are largely exploited to serve the goal. By discussing an academic paper metadiscursively, I hope this paper can shed some light both on the cultural practice of English-writing in an academic field and on the objectification of “culture” in the process of textualization (Bauman and Briggs, 1990). Also, by pointing out the key discursive devices employed by the authors, I also open a door to criticize their conceptualization and gain an opportunity to explore other theoretical alternatives.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Discussions of cultural problems raised in 9/11 report, WMD commission and frequent editorial comments all stress the problems of culture within the Intelligence Community. A few comments selected from recent commentary:? Information sharing is blocked by culture. ? The culture of the Directorate of Operations impedes cooperation with law enforcement organization.? There is a general conflict between civilian and military cultures within the Intelligence Community. ? The Director of the Intelligence Community lacks the authority to direct the community.Sociology and organizational theory dominate the discussion of Intelligence Community reform but the tools of anthropology ? especially those from political and cultural anthropology ? may help us see more clearly the problems that impede effective integration of Community. Among the tools we might take from our anthropologist tool kit are linguistic analysis, organization and concepts of primordial identity, study of status, authority and hierarchy, boundary maintenance and exclusivity of belonging, group responsiveness to external changes, the role of shamans and soothsayers, etc.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) lies at the interface between the growing fault lines between
expressive and intellectual property rights coming into conflict through the broad and extensive application of intellectual property devices in various industries but especially in the context of digital technologies. While free speech and property rights are often imagined as linked and essential parts our American liberal heritage, in fact the story of FOSS and this larger historical conflict complicates this connection while providing a window into how liberal values such as free speech take on specific forms through cultural-based technical practice. Whereas traditionally censorship and state intervention were seen as the primary threats against the
realization of free speech, now FOSS within a larger field of academic computing has raised the idea that forms property itself can be antithetical to the goals of free speech. Not only has FOSS changed the dynamics of software development but is changing the very understandings of what constitutes protectable speech.

This paper examines the dual "character"
of the language of expressive rights among FOSS hackers and increasingly among other computer professionals. The language of freedom and free speech has been collectivized and culled out in such sites as FOSS and made more potent as a vector to assert political rights against such laws as the DMCA. Yet is also a conceptualization formed through and out of a particular habitus based on the pragmatics of writing software, the aesthetics of technical architectures, and the social context of Internet use. American liberal
values such as free speech are a type of accessible cultural material by which a local subcultural world is objectively constituted but reposed and redirected to challenge other American values, in this case the neoliberal drive to propertize knowledge.

I will argue that connections made between freedom, free speech, and source code are neither purely historical nor purely obvious and essential. Ideas of freedom and the equation that source code is speech are firmly anchored in programmers practical, technical experiences; its more accentuated collective expression is due to socio-historical and technological conditions such as the rise of a hacker public sphere and a political challenge to the criminalization of writing source code.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The maintenance of social security and the rule of law in Africa is not only threatened by conflicts arising at the critical interface between state law and folk law but also by a growing influx of law coming from across the borders. Not only the UN-conventions of international human rights but also economic and political regulations and international agencies such as the WTO, the World Bank, bilateral development organisations or transnationally operating NGOs play an increasing important role in social and economic relations in small-scale settings within non-western nation-states.
This presentation focuses on one aspect of this wide range of problems, i.e. programmes on the promotion of the rule of law and democracy in Africa, as they have been labelled by many international development agencies since the mid 90ies. On the basis of a case study referring to the planning process of distinct epistemic communities within two international development agencies, the German and the Swiss development agencies, the normative framing of political projects and its impact on the legal and political decision-making in two African countries shall be analysed.