This chapter considers two broadly contemporaneous developments in India's aid policies during the early 2000s. The first was a clear effort by the Indian government to signal the country's diminished need for external assistance, crystallized in a 2003 announcement by Minister of Finance Jaswant Singh that India no longer wished to receive bilateral aid from 22 donor countries.

When I first came to Bagëtia in June 2004, I felt like I was entering a ghost-village. Klodian and I had accompanied two friends from Kodra who were visiting relatives in Kumbull, the village next to Bagëtia. On the way to Bagëtia, we had passed extensive mountain pastures and a few, fenced-off hayfields. Except for one or two shepherds in the distance, we had not seen any people along the way. When we reached Bagëtia, we found the village practically empty. Many of the picturesque, natural stone houses with their slate-shingled roofs lay abandoned in the sun. The village's cultural center (vatra e kulturës), which had been built under socialism, was a crumbling ruin. There were no shops or bars in sight. The few children of the village were in school, and the men had taken their sheep and goats to graze on the alpine slopes. Only an occasional old lady carrying a bucket of water home or spinning wool in the shadows of a dilapidated cooperative building reminded us that there were still people living here.

The contrast between Bagëtia and Kodra, where we were living at that time, could not have been any starker. Kodra was a bustling agricultural village in the lowlands where Klodian and I spent most of our time talking to full or parttime farmers. Kodra had a functioning irrigation system, a farmers' and a credit association, a garage to repair cars and agricultural implements, and even a small agricultural pharmacy, where one could buy pesticides and chemical fertilizer.

The third pattern of land use change I examine is the intensification and extensification of land use within villages. As I have shown in Chapter 3, land use within villages had become more intensive in areas close to the village centers and less intensive towards the village fringes since socialist times. In this chapter, I argue that this pattern is the result of a widespread lack of access to capital and labor.

I begin the chapter by highlighting households' dependence on access to land, capital and labor in agricultural production systems in Kodra, Bagëtia and Dardha. I then examine how households gained access to the three production factors in 2004. I suggest that rental arrangements kept access to land flexible. However, access to capital and labor was scarce because, in agriculture, they were merely residuals from other, non-farm, economic activities such as employment in the local service sector or wage labor abroad. I argue that that since the collapse of socialism land users have concentrated capital and labor in areas generating the highest land rents. As a result, they began to cultivate areas near the village centers with more capital and labor intensive crops than under socialism. At the same time, they de-intensified production on their more distant plots.

The Dependence on Land, Capital and Labor in Agricultural Production

In 2004, agricultural production in Albanian villages was characterized by a mix of complementary and interrelated land use practices. Many farming households, for example, grew grapes and onions to generate cash income but produced other vegetables for subsistence consumption.

Ever since The Promise in 1996, the prospect of a new film from Belgian siblings Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne has been cause for rejoicing. The Silence of Lorna, their latest portrait, which premiered in Cannes, has failed to elicit the rapturous response received by some of the earlier work, such as the 2005 Palme d'Or winner The Child. Yet despite an exposition that some found lengthy, the Dardennes bring great resonance to this fable of a young Albanian immigrant caught in a terrible dilemma who struggles to redeem herself. As in The Promise, the film focuses on the illegal maneuvers of “aliens” hoping to share in the material affluence of the European Union – in this instance by obtaining citizenship through false means. This time the brothers have placed their camera in the more gentrified city of Liège, rather than their grimy industrial hometown of Seraing. Lorna has become a Belgian citizen through her sham marriage to junkie Claudy (Dardenne regular Jérémie Renier). A local mobster who engineered the union is planning to kill Claudy with a staged overdose so Lorna can remarry a Russian Mafioso, who himself will then gain Belgian citizenship. But when the now clean Claudy threatens to start using drugs again, the two have passionate sex and form a sudden bond.

Introduction

This chapter examines the role of the OAS in the regional promotion of democracy from 1991 to 2005. The key question is to determine the role and influence of the OAS in the democratic consolidation efforts of its member states. Democratic consolidation is only one dimension among many within the good governance multifaceted issue-area. In addition to democratic consolidation, the achievement of good governance includes: 1) the strengthening of the constitutional framework, and legal and party systems; 2) judicial reform; 3) the protection of minority rights; 4) the protection of private property and intellectual property rights; 5) the confrontation of corruption; 6) a free press, and many others.

When considering democratic consolidation and good governance, it is important to point out that the issues enumerated here should not be considered as necessarily sequenced or directly linked to each other in any specific order. They are listed here only as examples of some very important aspects, but certainly not the only ones, that need to be considered when thinking about this issue. Also, the issues listed above should not be seen as the only matters of concern that need to be contemplated when exploring how democratic consolidation and good governance are achieved. As Felipe Agüero (1998, 4) correctly points out, the primary angle or dimension of analysis chosen for the study of one or more cases is one of the factors influencing the analysis of democracy.

Throughout history, two factors have formed people's taste in any art, their valuing of it, that is: knowledge of that art and knowledge of life. Obviously this is still true, but the function of taste seems to be altering. As formalist aesthetic canons have come to seem less and less tenable, standards in art and life have become more and more congruent, and as a result the function of taste is increasingly the selection and appraisal of the works that are most valuable to the individual's very existence. So our means for evaluating films naturally become more and more involved with our means for evaluating experience; aesthetic standards don't become identical with standards in life but they are certainly related – and, one hopes, somewhat braver.

Of course the whole process means that human beings feed on themselves, on their own lives variously rearranged by art, as a source of values. But despite other prevalent beliefs about the past connected with theology and religion, we are coming to see that people have always been the source of their own values. In the century in which this responsibility, this liberation, became increasingly apparent – the twentieth – the intellect of man simultaneously provided a new art form, the film, to make the most of it.

That art form is obviously still with us, and now, in the twenty-first century, more than ever, it seems.

We live in a secular, narcissistic, even hedonistic age. Is there anyone out there who still doubts this? If you do, have a look at a film made by Ingmar Bergman over forty years ago – Winter Light (1962) – and you'll see what I mean. This is not to say that something like Winter Light couldn't be made now. We're dealing here with the rule and not the exception, the middle, not the extremities. Obviously, none of this is intended to denigrate Bergman's film as a mediocrity, or a priori to privilege contemporary films over it. Still, “men are as the time is,” as Edmund declares in King Lear, and no artist in any medium – particularly one so popular, or immediate, as the cinema – can claim exemption.

Winter Light takes place on what used to be a day of rest and devotion – the Sabbath, in this case one wintry Sunday in a rural clergyman's life, between matins and vespers. The middle entry in Bergman's “faith” trilogy, Winter Light suffers far less from the defect of the other two parts, Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963): such an excess of symbolism that each picture breaks down into a series of discernible metaphors for spiritual alienation rather than an aggregation of those metaphors into an organic, affecting work. Though, apart from its literary-like piling up of symbols, Through a Glass Darkly relied on almost none of the arty legerdemain that marred The Magician (1958) and The Seventh Seal (1957), Winter Light is even starker and more circumscribed.

Landscape Perception and the Visual Imagination

Today's tourists are part of a global culture increasingly dominated by television and computer screens. They often carry electronic devices in their pockets with which they can take pictures when not making phone calls. It may come as something of a surprise, therefore, to realize that by the late eighteenth century British tourists may have possessed an even more acute visual awareness than their modern-day counterparts.Without the benefit (or hindrance) of a camera, these travelers knew how to recognize, frame and even analyze the scenery they encountered. Many could sketch, paint or write detailed descriptions of what they had seen.

Within the context of tourism this visual acuity represented a relatively new phenomenon. The idea of travelling to “see” scenery had only begun to emerge late in the seventeenth century. Up to that time the early modern traveler sought education rather than pleasure. As discussed in the “Introduction,” the Grand Tour originally enabled young aristocratic males to prepare themselves to serve the state. In search of knowledge and social polish, young travelers went abroad, writes Judith Adler, “for discourse rather than for picturesque views or scenes.” Young men toured with a tutor, a.k.a. “bear leader,” with whom they inspected great buildings and fortifications, met learned men, practiced their social skills, and admired works of art. (They also did other things as well whenever they managed to lose the bear leader.)

Remember the name Bahman Ghobadi, whose “children's film” Turtles Can Fly (2004) I have finally had the opportunity to see. As I watched this picture, I thought of two of its cinematic relatives, each of which shall frame my discussion of Turtles Can Fly. The first is Roberto Rossellini's neorealist film Germany, Year Zero (1947), in which a twelve-year-old boy, trying to feed his family amidst the destitution of occupied Berlin, poisons his sickly father (played by the only professional in the cast, Franz Kruger) to lessen the burden. Unable to live with the deed, however, he throws himself from the ruins of a tall building – but not before poignantly finding a moment to play (yes, play, not pray) before killing himself.

The second work I recalled, as I screened Turtles Can Fly, is the “new” neorealist West Beirut (1998), a film by Ziad Doueiri about two Muslim boys and a Christian girl (all played by young people who had never before acted) growing up in the war-torn Lebanon of 1975. Here they manage to tease, quarrel, idle, snack, and bicycle like their youthful counterparts everywhere, at the same time as they take risks – amidst bombed-out buildings, rubble-strewn streets, military checkpoints, and frequent sniper fire – that even the most intrepid of schoolchildren would have trouble imagining.

Terrifying monsters and semi-human creatures had traditionally inhabited the imagined underworld of hell throughout centuries of artistic representation in painting, sculpture and scripture. Through long-established mythologies, the undiscovered worlds of the southern hemisphere came to be associated with that underworld. The first examples of imaginary voyages to the antipodes appearing from the start of the seventeenth century deliberately blurred distinctions between Christian beliefs, pure fantasy and tentative facts, reflecting fascination with the idea that there may actually be a hell on earth or, indeed, a heaven on earth, in the unexplored southern regions. Some considered such expressions to be heretical. They were trespassing into the moral and spiritual spaces that had long been claimed by religious iconography. These literary works were not merely whimsical extravaganzas of the imagination; they were arenas for critical comment on politics, the church, social systems and customs of the day and, perhaps initially by chance, they also began to construct a moral framework for colonial expansion into the antipodes. At the same time, these early imaginary voyages laid the foundations for the literary genre's development, closely linked to real exploration but fundamentally a form of fiction.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, geographical discoveries in the region of present-day Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific added a new dimension to the myths and associations attached to the great southern continent of Terra Australis and its antipodean inhabitants.