Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin\u27s photographs for The Bantu Tribes of South Africa (1928-1954): The construction of an ambiguous idyll

The collection of A.M. Duggan-Cronin photographs at the University of Cape Town has experienced mixed fortunes since it was acquired some seventy years ago, being displayed proudly at one moment and stowed away in embarrassment at the next, only to be exhibited again for some new purpose. This paper looks at the original context of Duggan-Cronin\u27s The Bantu Tribes of South Africa in political, anthropological and aesthetic terms; and it examines the first volume on The Bavenda (1928) in some detail. The paper argues that Duggan-Cronin may be shown to have constructed his photographs of African subjects in certain ways apparently to create a specific image of Africa that had obvious political connotations. This primitivising image made a forceful contribution to the \u27Native Question\u27, which was the most important single issue of South African politics of the mid-twentieth century. However, given the openness of visual communication, on the one hand, and change in political circumstances, on the other, the Duggan-Cronin photographs show that, over time, the same image can serve apparently quite contradictory purposes

Asymmetric Error Correction Models for the Oil-Gasoline Price Relationship

The existing literature on price asymmetries does not systematically investigate the sensitivity of the empirical results to the choice of a particular econometric specification. This paper fills this gap by providing a detailed comparison of the three most popular models designed to describe asymmetric price behaviour, namely asymmetric ECM, autoregressive threshold ECM and ECM with threshold cointegration. Each model is estimated on a common monthly dataset for the gasoline markets of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK over the period 1985-2003. All models are able to capture the temporal delay in the reaction of retail prices to changes in spot gasoline and crude oil prices, as well as some evidence of asymmetric behaviour. However, the type of market and the number of countries which are characterized by asymmetric oil-gasoline price relations vary across models. The asymmetric ECM yields some evidence of asymmetry for all countries, mainly at the distribution stage. The threshold ECM strongly rejects the null hypothesis of symmetric price behaviour, particularly in the case of France and Germany. Finally, the ECM with threshold cointegration finds long-run asymmetry for each country in the reaction of retail prices to oil price changes