Le scandale statutaire sur lîle Saint-Martin (French Edition)

I was determined to be a shaman, hoping that in this way I would feel better. I wanted to know once and for all [what it was that made me suffer so much]. So I did the ceremo- ny boshine. But now I am a mother; I do not know anything an- ymore. I said that my ancestors pitra left me, but actually they still play me, they still are tormenting me, kut kut zir zir. We put our body at risk thinking no matter, even if our ancestors leave us… But why would they leave us in the first place? They do not leave us. I worship my ancestors regularly and I am not as sick as I used to be. Her speech is complex and contradictory.

She hesitates and expresses first the urge of a diagnosis in order to know the origin of her suffer- ing that seems to be as much physical as mental. Then, once she has complied with the ancestors, she feels better to the point that she is tempted to neglect them. But they remind her with their presence; they do not leave her alone. And why would she stop worshipping them when they brought her some relief? It is a rhetorical question, but the rest of the interview develops her predicament further: But for women like me it would not make any sense to ask for more teaching from the gurus.

I cannot concentrate on the chants. Instead I think, maybe the youngest of her children has not eaten yet… and who is going to put the hens into the basket tonight, work in the field tomorrow? I always worry about these things. So how can I learn? But it is a shame not to know the chants. Sometimes I think that I should learn properly. This is my destiny after all. I made the right predictions on the tree of life suwa. Sun Rupi needs to remind herself that she could be a good shaman and that she has visionary powers: Also the fact that her ancestors have not left her may be understood as the sign that her calling is still alive; she is still inspired by them.

What if we replaced the notion of ancestor by one of muse for the poet or the artist, and the notion of destiny by one of superego that we, Westerners, are implicitly using when we organise our experience? Village life does not give individuals many opportunities apart from being a farmer; and for young women who have not had the opportunity to be schooled, being a shaman is also one way to explore a more imag- inative path, and, last but not least, to receive respect and additional social status as a shaman.

Although human experiences are histori- cally and culturally shaped, they are never so different that they can- not be shared beyond these local specificities. Conclusion We have seen, first, that the Kham Magar shamans were central in the community and that the shamanic career was open to both men and women. This remarkable equality principle is contradicted in practice in the case of young female practitioners who, given their family responsibilities, cannot devote the necessary time to their ca- reer.

Women are left alone with responsibility for the survival of the community. We witnessed a rapid increase in the number of young female shamans, but also individual attempts to adapt their calling to their living conditions. These attempts, still marginal, seem to involve a radical simplifica- tion of shamanic rituals that are emptied of their fundamental core— the songs—and, therefore, of the necessary control by a master. If this trend continues, then the Kham Magar would be another example of a central shamanic institution yielding to peripheral possession.

This article has also shown that, insofar as they are the drivers of the transformations of shamanic practices women have in fact re- mained in line with the role they occupy in the chants. In the founda- tion myth of the Kham-Magar, they are cultural heroes responsible for the creation of life on earth, yet as unsung heroes; the songs en- sure that they depict their creations under the most trivial aspects of the human condition—that are nevertheless human for all that.

Final- ly, the biographies of female shamans show their own ambivalence towards the change that they bring, almost unwillingly, into the shamanic institution. Being unable to succeed as a proper shaman hurts their self-esteem, as if this were the price to pay for change. La religion des Magar du nord. Lewis, Ioan Myrrdin Ecstatic Religion.

Haitian Migrants in the French Overseas Territories of the Caribbean

Paul, Trench, Trubner, But during the s and s, the religious tradition that had dominated Mongolian life for centuries almost became extinct because of the purges of Stalin and his Mongolian henchmen. In all monasteries but a handful were destroyed, and in official figures listed a total of five functioning monasteries with only monks.

Totally unprepared, the population faced socialist modernity accom- panied by religious persecution, centrally planned economy, and secular education. During these last 25 years, Mongolian society and culture have once again changed dramatically. While most of the high Mon- golian religious masters perished during the purges in the s and ordinary monks were laicised, there were still many ex-monks alive when democratisation started in Official figures of the Mongolian government in listed five functioning monasteries with a total of monks, 80 of whom lived in Ulaanbaatar ibid.: Many young monks, who are today the spearheads of the Buddhist revival, had grandfathers or relatives who were monks in pre-Communist times.

After a steady growth of Buddhist institutions and increase in the number of clerics during the first decade or so of democratisation, the number of monks and temples stabilised, and even declined— particularly in the countryside. Gandan registration office stated that there were around 2, monks and monasteries and temples in Mongolia, while in , the office reported that the numbers had increased to 3, monks and monasteries and temples.

As a rule clerics do not live in the Buddhist institutions in Ulaanbaatar. Female Temple Founders, Ritualists, and Clairvoyants 37 they had no temples or regular incarnation succession of their own. She is reported to have wanted to become an oracle Mong. A number of women practised luijin in a few Red Tradition temples in Urga or as independent practitioners.

Some continued their practices in secret during Communism together with their partners or husbands. For example, Dashdorzh performed luijin in the lineage of Tangtong Gyalpo Thang stong rgyal po, fourteenth-fifteenth centu- ries that was brought to Mongolia by Jagar Monlam11 and transmit- ted by teachers such as Bavuu Jorvon late nineteenth century.

Tibetan terms were pronounced differently in Mongolia, and 70 years of religious repression resulted in the distortion of names and terms. For photos, see http: Also religiously inclined women, who after their childrearing and household duties were done, dressed in religious colours, sheared their heads, and spent time reciting prayers and worshipping at Buddhist temples.

They were named chavgants, and some carry out the tradition today. Baku- la Rinpoche — , a high reincarnation from Ladakh who served as Indian ambassador to Mongolia from to , started to offer novice Tib. The only other high reincarnation in Mongolia at that time, Gurude- va Rinpoche — from Inner Mongolia, followed suit.

While nunneries belonging to the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism are scattered over the Tibetan plateau and in the Himalayas, only since were religious institutions for Buddhist women estab- lished in Mongolia. Women were also active in the founding of new temples both in the countryside and in the city.

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Namdoldechenlin in Bayan Khoshuu, a ger14 district north of Ulaanbaatar, was jointly established by four men and three women in The temple still welcomes female ritualists, but finds it hard to recruit women today. About ten temples have accessed June and http: Female Temple Founders, Ritualists, and Clairvoyants 39 been started by women in Mongolia, but only three of them are ex- clusively for female practitioners. One of them, Janchiv Dechenlin khiid, was established by Dulamjav b. The temple had 18 monks in Although started by a woman luijin specialist, female ritualists are not recruited.

Some of the founders of Namdoldechenlin with Bakula Rinpoche in Female religious specialists in Mongolia are addressed as khandamaa Tib. Bakula Rinpoche, on his side, advised them to wear white Mongolian caftans deel with red edges and not the monastic robe used by celibate nov- ice nuns in the Tibetan tradition.

Presently, Mongol female lay ritual- ists wear red, maroon, orange, yellow, or pink deel made from fabrics such as wool, brocade, or cotton according to season and ritual occa- sion. Many carry a band tashuur orkhimj , often white with red edges, across their chest. Only Mongol novice nuns wear Tibetan style robes. They have committed themselves to follow some codes but not celibacy. The only celibate nunnery in Mongolia, Dolma Ling Tib. Despite the incessant work of the international organisation Sakyadhita to encourage Buddhist women to take full ordination, several of the Mongol nuns sent to India for training disrobed when they returned to Mongolia.

Currently Zopa Rinpoche hopes to enlarge Dolma Ling to make space for a hundred celibate nuns. Divination, astrology, and New Age practices While the number of celibate Buddhist monastics seems to be de- creasing worldwide, the rebuilding of Buddhist institutional life in Mongolia is also facing challenges.

The destabilising of the economy during the early s and the transition to a capitalist market econ- omy led to a proliferation of non-normative Buddhist practices where diviners, astrologers, and soothsayers established small businesses, either independently or in newly opened monasteries and temples all over the country. Since the introduction of Buddhism to Mongolia, the cosmology has been shaped by local as well as Tibetan beliefs in spirits as well as by normative Tibetan Buddhism. From the sixteenth century, local shamanistic deities were replaced by Buddhist ones and many of the shamanistic cults were lost.

Moreover, like Tibetans, Mongols believe that benevolent and malevolent spirits inhabit a sacred landscape, and through worship and offerings all religious specialists negotiate with these numina in order to obtain benefits such as prosperity and good health and to avert accidents, crises, and natural disasters. In there were 74 female temple ritualists in Ulaanbaatar, including 18 celibate nuns.

Norov in the second booth to the left , a retired math and physics teacher, specialises in helping divorced clients and those grieving a dead spouse to find new life companions. Norov uses palmistry and numerology as divination techniques, which she believes are scien- tific methods of prognostication, while Narantsetseg, who moved from western Mongolia to Ulaanbaatar in , claims that her clair- voyance and healing abilities are inherited from forefathers in nine generations.

Until she became a pensioner, she worked as a mechani- cal engineer. She usually has a few cus- tomers per day, and clients pay up to 5, Togrog USD 2. The woman, who is in her 30s, dresses like a fashion model wearing a deel-like skirt, high heels and fancily decorated nails. The new building combines Mon- golian temple and Christian church architecture. In the fenced com- pound are rooms for monks to make rituals, a food shop, a small can- teen, and toilets. The gate has a video camera surveilling visitors, and a poster saying that clients must come between Enkhsaikhan, whose family came to Ulaanbaatar from Ovorkhan- gai Province in the s, performs card divination for 5, Togrog, during which clients may ask three questions.

She also offers ritual protection for a family for one year for 80, Togrog c. Since so many demand her services, Enkhsaikhan receives only 30 to 40 visitors per day. Her enterprise is effectively organised by a female assistant who carefully instructs customers to behave well and keep money ready in hand. Clients asking questions about health are transferred to five monks performing dice divinations.

Sarandavaa explains religion from the point of science and energy. The room has altars with the South Korean, American, and Canadian flags, where customers may pray to obtain visas to foreign countries. Kubera , the God of Wealth, and from here she monitors the healing activities in each therapy room on closed-circuit television. Sarandavaa has composed 30 works, she explains, and her qualifications are attested on walls full of diplomas.

Since Sarandavaa started her activities in , more than , customers have consulted her. At present her centre has 20 employ- ees, including three monks; she has made three trips around the en- tire country and gives five lectures per year. The first floor contains a large labyrinth said to re- move the sins of those who pass through it and make childless wom- en fertile. In an adjacent room, the ceiling is decorated with planetary constellations. Khulan Bagsh Khulan Bagsh, a woman in her forties claiming clairvoyance and healing power, has for several years counselled 40 to 50 clients per day in her office in Ulaanbaatar.

She is a devout Buddhist with strong faith in her deceased monk teacher from northern Mongolia. Each session has a fixed price, but now she offers deep guidance for life. The NGO she has recently founded has four main activities: She does not worry about the finances, saying that the God of Wealth, Namsrai, will take care of that. Female religious leaders between rationalism and re-mystification After democratisation in , Mongols quickly started to revive their Buddhist tradition in order to create a new national identity.

At the same time, many were taken aback by the rapid religious pluralisa- tion brought about by religious freedom stipulated in the new consti- tution of After a decade with open borders, the Mongolian Evangelical Alliance reported that its churches in Mongolia were among the fastest growing in the world, and the International Reli- gious Freedom Report estimated in that there might be more than , Mongolian Christians. The Mongolian Buddhists, there- fore, were faced with stark competition in their revivalist efforts. Although present also during pre-Communist time, soothsaying and various divination methods became a highly visible part of Buddhism during the religious revival after Although women did not, as a rule, serve as religious specialists in old Mongolia, the spiritual vacuum that surfaced after 70 years of religious repression created a market where they, too, seized the opportunity for professional careers.

In the modern city of Ulaanbaatar, religious businesswomen started to combine traditional Buddhist elements with private entrepreneur- ship. They use modern information technology, marketing models, and publicity strategies and hire assistants, including monks, and marketing agents to make their undertakings efficient. Alt- hough monasticism is strictly controlled by the government, many Tibetan women from the countryside, some with a rudimentary edu- cational background, chose to become celibate nuns.

Though there is strong pressure in Mongolian society on women to marry, they want professional reli- gious lives as well as families; they embrace feminine codes of dress and makeup, and they want to support themselves and their chil- dren. As Mongolian Buddhism has no central religious authority to control religious development, women, as well as men, are free to fashion their own religious professional roles. As long as a religious institution is registered and religious tax is paid, there is no govern- mental interference.

Some of these new female religious entrepreneurs legitimise their activities by referring to Buddhist teachers of the past, displaying their photos in their temples and counselling rooms along with imag- es of Tibetan and Mongol Buddhist deities and ritual objects. In their selective approach to religion, they also act like followers of New Age religions by using, recycling, combining, and adapting existing reli- gious ideas and practices according to their needs.

For segments of urban Mongols, praying for the well- being of clients and generating economic profit in the name of Namsrai, the God of Wealth, are seen as legitimate goals. In the rapidly changing religious life of Mongolia several influen- tial Buddhist masters attempt to influence religious development in a normative and modernist direction. Even though some of them try to include women in their visions for a Buddhist future in Mongolia, organised religious life for Mongol women has been neglected.

In recent years, after Mon- golia became one of the most rapidly growing economies in the world, the income increased also in the ger towns. Still, many feel disappointed because of failed expectations of upward social and 27 http: A substantial undertaking is presently made at the Kalacakra Centre, established by the Mongolian monk Buyandelger, where the entire Tibetan canon will be trans- literated from classical Mongolian into the Cyrillic script and carefully modern- ized by , making the canonical texts available for educated laypeople. Female Temple Founders, Ritualists, and Clairvoyants 49 economic mobility and because of the loss of their traditional life- styles on the steppe.

Tales of an Old Lama: Buddhism in the Modern World, London, Routledge, , pp. Traditions and Transformations, London, Routledge, [] , pp.

Religion and Ritual in Society: To date, only the life and work of Khandro Yangga and of Lobsang Dolma have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Khandro Yangga was a laywoman from Kham who—next to her wide-ranging medical expertise—became particularly famous for her skill in cataract surgery, and also, for being the first woman to be employed at the Mentsikhang sMan rtsi khang , the prestigious 1 I use this term broadly, to refer to Tibetan biographies or namthar rnam thar , memoirs, short sketches, reports and the like.

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She spent much of her working life in exile in India, where she ran a flourishing private practice while also publishing 5 and teaching students, including her own daughters. The latter maintain their own clinics in India to this day. A book-length study was published on Lobsang Dolma and her lineage and several short sketches have also been provided elsewhere. She learned medicine from her mother and from other, eminent male teachers during the s and s.

After considerable hardship during the reforms, she was allowed to work as a village doctor and later became a professor of Sowa Rigpa at the Sichuan Tibetan Language School STLS in Kham and later in Dartsedo Dar rtse mdo , where it was moved. She practices to this day as both a physician and a Buddhist master. Her student Thubten Choedar wrote a namthar rnam thar , or biography of her, which also discusses aspects of her medical career. See also the translation of Thub bstan chos dar by Schneider We barely even know their names, and not even two handfuls of those born prior to the reform era have been mentioned in writing.

This lack of any or more detailed information on their lives and work also pertains to Phurpa Dolma, and to a number of female doctors in Central Tibet, of whom I had heard about incidentally or through hearsay. This article suggests that medical practice, even outside of the Buddhist or government institutions known for being particularly male-dominated, was still governed by the wider male-dominated and androcentric social order that allowed very little room for talented women to prosper. We have come up a steep and winding path, walking between wooden, brightly-coloured two-storey houses.

Below us we see the famous eighteenth-century Derge Printing Press, or Parkhang, with its golden roofs and imposing stone walls painted in dark red. As we are led into the kitchen, I notice the entrance hall has its walls stacked high with books and wood. After having carried out a number of oral history interviews with doctors in Central Tibet who happened to be mostly men I had embarked on a Paldron bKra shis dpal sgron, died c.

In the winter of , this project was now extending to Amdo and Kham. Phurpa Dolma left and her daughter Palden Dolma right at their home in Derge. Her birthplace was the village of Ngul Punong dNgul phu nong , located a short walk above Derge town. It was a loose collection of farmhouses, lying between partly terraced fields and overlooking the tightly-packed houses of Derge town below.

Since the eighteenth century Derge town itself had been characterised by a string of three large buildings of secular and religious significance: The houses of the laity were located around the Print House, while the residences of monastic dignitaries and monks surrounded the monastery, lying at the geographically and symbolically highest position in Derge Figure 2.

Thanks also to Barbara Gerke for her close reading and comments on previous versions of this article, to Ann Jones for writing inspirations and discussion of feminist topics, and to Thea Vidnes for continued support and her help with copy-editing. I am especially grateful to Heidi Fjeld and my other colleagues in anthropology and Tibetan studies in Oslo, as well as the editors of this special issue for their insightful comments and constructive critique over the past years. He initially studied reading, writing and the medical texts with his own father and became a medical practitioner, in the thirteenth generation in his family.

He was also ordained for some time at the Great Derge Monastery, complementing his medical training by studying Buddhism. On the only depiction I found of him, he is painted wearing his monastic robes Figure 3. Lay and monastic residences in Derge, with part of the roof of the Parkhang to the right. Starting from an early age, Phurpa Dolma was taught by her father, first the Tibetan alphabet. We had to learn to write on a wooden board, on which we put butter and ash. Then we used a stick to write on it and afterwards we cleaned it to start again.

His image is painted on a large mural at the Derge Tibetan Medicine Hospital, below Yuthog Yontan Gonpo the younger and as part of a group of five famous male physicians. To his sides we see medical instruments and a medical bag. Gender and Medicine in Kham 59 instruments were confiscated, temporarily ending their practice.

After a while, however, the new leadership presented Dramang Lhaje with two options: Similar choices were offered to Phurpa Dolma and her brother. In the current context, these were comparatively benign options, given the tragic fate of many other medical and Buddhist practitioners, which included the deportation into labour camps and prisons, among others. From a Tibetan perspective, it was probably considered a good place for the practice of or Sowa Rigpa, which was a branch of scholarly Buddhist training for centuries and since the Parkhang had held a number of medical texts and block prints.

Only few medicines and raw materials could be recovered after the confiscation. Having no financial support from the authorities, the first obstacles to be overcome were the acquisition of raw materials and the making of medicines. Phurpa Dolma and her colleagues went out to pick medical herbs and her brother secretly acquired 20 to 30 large bags of medical raw materials from Pelpung Monastery dPal spungs , which had a famous College for the Five Sciences16 that also taught medicine but lay now in rubble.

These few practitioners then set about transforming the Parkhang into a clinic-cum-pharmacy. Consultation rooms were established in the front courtyard near the entrance doors. One room was given over to medicinal baths, which Dramang Lhaje supervised, and the upper floors and the roofs were used for the drying and production of medicines. Patients had to pay a tiny sum 14 Gerke ; Holmes On the political situation in Kham during the s and s, see McGranahan ; Shakya ; and Jamyang Norbu One of her activities while working at the Parkhang was to look after the building itself.

For example, she made sure to remove grass and herbs from the roofs and replace any damaged parts with waterproof materials to stop damage in the rooms below. From the mids onwards Maoist fervour reached its alleged highpoint in the retrospectively so-called Cultural Revolution. The work of the Parkhang Menkhang also became more and more disrupted by revolutionary youths, as Phurpa Dolma recalls: Then we got big problems and it became increasingly difficult to compound the medicines.

There was always someone who came to disturb our work. A group of people would arrive and start hitting the doctors and then fights broke out. At that time, we started to sleep on the roof of the Print House and took stones with us. When those people came back again, we threw the stones at them.

Our main aim was to protect the Print House and the medical clinic. The central government had ordered to protect the Print House from destruction. But local revolutionaries did not care. The doctors stayed inside the Print House and locked the doors from the inside. They distributed the drying herbs and other raw materials throughout the whole building so that if any Red Guard came inside they would argue that the drying herbs had to be left undisturbed, for the masses to be treated. If during that time nobody had been inside the Print House and protected it, it probably would have been destroyed.

I have collected a range of accounts that will be discussed in future work. Gender and Medicine in Kham 61 Following on from these grave troubles in summer and having succeeded in protecting the Parkhang from destruction much of the content of Derge Monastery in the meantime had been burnt and the building razed to the ground , the clinic was sometimes open and operating, sometimes not. During the late s and until , her daughter Palden Dolma worked as a barefoot doctor but was mostly stationed in more remote villages.

The post-reform period With several clear signs indicating the imminent relaxation of official policies towards the end of the s, local political and former Buddhist leaders, among them Jetsunma Do Dasel Wangmo, were eager to start printing Tibetan books at the Derge Parkhang. This meant, however, that the Parkhang Menkhang had to move. New policies were meanwhile drafted to improve and update medical facilities and eventually the Parkhang Menkhang was relocated to a newly constructed building to the east of Derge town.

It became fully integrated into and funded by the government. Phurpa Dolma, her brother, and the other senior doctors, Aden and Thamka Lhaje, gave patient consultations, while the latter two were also acting as directors. Phurpa Dolma was still responsible for providing and organising herb collection trips and arranging the materials for compounding but a doctor named Sangye became head of pharmaceutical production.

We had no time to sit around and read books, we were on our feet all day 18 Thub bstan chos dar Her daughter, who had worked at the Parkhang Menkhang for two or three years after her barefoot doctor assignment, also moved over to the new hospital. From a photo exhibit at the hospital. Phurpa Dolma retired in the late s and began to receive a government pension.

She could finally rest her tired limbs. Some patients still came to her home for consultations during which she read their pulses and prescribed medicines but due to her age and physical condition she stopped producing her own medicines. There are several reasons why Phurpa Dolma should have followed the footsteps of the likes of Khandro Yangga, Lobsang Dolma and Do Dasel Wangmo who built up a good reputation and independent medical careers. This means that she was part of a family lineage and medical house, as such publically recognised for the transmission of medical knowledge and authority.

It is possible that her pharmacological expertise helped her to continue and even develop her knowledge and experience further within the officially legitimated space of the Parkhang Menkhang in the years following , as large volumes and a wide range of medicines were produced. Moreover, during the Cultural Revolution despite the upheavals, interruptions and simplification of Tibetan medical compounds common for the time , she was able to continue her work. Despite these favourable circumstances and her evident dedication to Sowa Rigpa, Phurpa Dolma currently remains a largely peripheral figure and her story so far unrecorded in writing.

There are no modern biographies of her, nor is her name even mentioned in any of the collections of short biographies or the historical sketches detailing the development of Tibetan medical institutions in Derge written and published, by and large, since the s. In what follows, I aim to illustrate three ways in which Phurpa Dolma was either excluded or sidelined within Sowa Rigpa.

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How, compared to her brother, other male doctors of her generation, and compared to the high-ranking Nyingma Buddhist nun Do Dasel Wangmo who also remained in Kham during the reform period and established herself as an independent medical doctor and teacher she was disadvantaged. These instances will highlight several significant challenges faced by Phurpa Dolma in the medical field, despite her having had some of the best possible circumstances for a a woman to enter and succeed in the medical profession.

Usually, the first element in the formation of doctors of her generation has been their study and memorisation of parts or the whole of the Four Tantras. Although Phurpa Dolma read its first two volumes during her early years of training, she never made a serious attempt to memorise them, nor was she seemingly encouraged to do so. Instead, she recalled her early medical formation in the following way: From the age of about 13, I needed to do a lot of work, picking medicine, making medicines, etc. I learned all about the plants while doing the work and picking medicines.

It was like this: I had no time to read books, I simply needed to go and work lots for father— this is how I learned. Only sometimes, for one day or so my father would teach me from the pecha [dpe cha; a Tibetan-style book], and then the next I had to go and work again. Not even half of my studies were from books, most was based on experience.

She thus climbed the hills and pastures surrounding Derge to collect relevant herbs, learning how to identify, prepare and compound them. She also developed her skill in taste, a prime means to ensure the required effect and quality of raw materials and finished medicines. The same was true for Menpa Soepa, who although having started this process under his own father, continued memorising the Four Tantras when he became a monk at the Great Derge Monastery and thus student of Dramang Lhaje. Although much younger than her, both of these men studied hard, excelling in their memorisation of the Four Tantras.

But did only men study the medical texts so thoroughly? It would appear not. Also see Kleisath In addition, her education was also not abandoned due to any belatedly born younger brothers, as was the case with Phurpa Dolma. Phurpa Dolma, on the other hand, as a laywoman was expected to run a household, bring up children and also carry out medical practice, rather than to be mainly involved in textual study and scholarly erudition. What seemed to have mattered most in her situation was the practical knowledge and skill in making medicine. The family practice required multiple, experienced hands in order to run smoothly and medicine making was at first the only domain of medicine where Phurpa Dolma was told to apply herself in.

Without continued training and exposure to the texts, which her younger brother enjoyed, her literacy and textual knowledge remained relatively limited. According to some texts, women are not supposed to participate in the preparation of tsotel, and although not in practice necessarily having been the case, 26 Phurpa Dolma did not learn it neither from her father nor during the early s when the making of tsotel was taught at her own Derge Tibetan Medicine Hospital by Troru Tsenam Khro ru tshe rnam, , a famous physician originally from Kham.

At the very beginning, she went out for several days to collect herbs and then dried them at the Parkhang. Medicines benefitting cold disorders were placed onto the roofs and into direct sunshine, those treating hot disorders were dried in the shade underneath the roof. She also washed the newly arrived raw materials her brother had brought from Pelpung in order to make sure they were clean.

These herbal and precious medicines were then processed and compounded into pills and powders. From the available materials Phurpa Dolma recalled making Agar 35, which contains 35 ingredients and is a complex medicine to make, as well as others such as Agar 25, Agar 15, Agar 8, Tsenden 18, Dashel Dutsima and Truthop Rilkar.

While her father was still alive he died in either or she also procured all the necessary ingredients for two kinds of medicinal baths, which he prepared for patients. One involved the boiling of 25 different herbs and another, five herbs. As the reforms wore on during the s, the medical compounds became simplified. This was due to the lack of imported ingredients available, and also due to the great demand for medicines. The clinic only had a limited work force, it took time and was hard work to pick herbs and staff had to deal with the disturbances due to changing political demands.

At times of need, the clinic staff also diverged from their remit to treat patients individually. From the point of view of contemporary doctors, some practices in medicine production during that period as recounted by Phurpa Dolma appear as highly unusual and even unprofessional. One of these was that staff used a part of the Parkhang that had previously been used as pit-toilets and re-purposed it for medical production.

They freshly covered and sealed the area with earth and then used the space to grind medicines. Another unusual practice was the grinding of the medicines, which was done with the help of small stone mortars—a common method—but also by doctors using their feet to break down ingredients. It seems to me that these practices might have been the only way to overcome the challenging circumstances under which they were operating, or there were other reasons to work this way, possibly connected to the then politically correct way to turn traditional customs on their head.

Nevertheless, she could name in remarkable detail many of the treatments she prescribed, for example to women with pregnancy complications, those experiencing difficult labours, for disorders of the male and female genitals, and facial paralysis. Unlike in Central Tibet, this was fully implemented in Amdo and Kham, and is one of the reasons for the much earlier and more violent resistance to Chinese reforms there.

Gender and Medicine in Kham 69 menpa were often assigned this aspect of medical practice, also in the new Communist regime. A solid grasp of pharmacology was essential to be considered a good doctor and vice versa. Why was Phurpa Dolma mainly collecting and processing herbs, sometimes compounding them and not also consulting patients to the same extent as her colleagues? She explained this in the following way: I was the only woman working in the Parkhang.

I needed to take care of the Parkhang, keep everything in order and clean. And, I was away a lot, picking medicines. Father had taught me about the medicines, so I had lots of experience with the medicines and also the pulse, urine and treatments. But there was very little time for further study; we had so much work to do. This statement implies a social hierarchy of and between knowledge and practice between her and male colleagues, and especially her and her brother.

The lopsided assignment of hard labour is still very common today in the lives of ordinary women and female doctors in eastern Tibet. Together with the hard work of herb collection, this left little time for further study and the more sedentary consultations with patients. As we shall see, her lesser textual medical knowledge together with more limited opportunities to see patients, through no fault of her own apart from being a woman, were all likely to have negative consequences for her subsequent prospects as a menpa.

Even if this latter habit is also quite a common way of speaking among many knowledgeable Tibetan men, I have never before heard the phrase repeated so many times as in her case. In the area of health care and medicine, the official institutionalisation of Tibetan medicine within the Chinese state bureaucracy began. Prefectures and selected counties built up Tibetan medical institutions and turned former physicians into government-employed practitioners.

In Derge this shift manifested with the co-operative Parkhang Menkhang in the Print House being moved to the freshly constructed Derge Tibetan Medical Hospital to the west of the town and it becoming fully state- funded. It was organised by departments and the work ranged from clinical care to pharmaceutical production and teaching.

There were now clearly assigned positions and titles available. Aden and Thamkha Lhaje took the positions of director and vice-director respectively, while a new recruit named Sangye became the head of pharmaceutical production. Phurpa Dolma and her brother were initially employed as doctors, yet after a few years he moved to Dartsedo Tibetan Medicine Hospital to work as head of the outpatient department. When Aden retired in , Menpa Soepa joined the hospital and became the new director. It was he, who suggested that Phurpa Dolma could retire early a few years later.

The exact reasons for this proposition are unknown to me. Yet she admitted that it came as a relief to her and her joints—she had by then suffering badly from her herb collection trips in all kinds of weather and also had been working hard on often wet ground. It is striking that Phurpa Dolma in her almost 15 years at the new hospital was not promoted to and or perhaps desired a leadership role. This can either be explained by her generally modest attitude towards her own skills and knowledge as mentioned above, or indeed attributed to the perpetuation of extant androcentrism and discrimination against women in the work place and elsewhere.

That her textual knowledge and literacy was limited might have also counted against her. When the school moved from Dzogchen Monastery Rdzogs chen to Dartsedo, she was further promoted to become professor of Tibetan medicine. In many other government Tibetan medical facilities that I have visited over the years and that had newly appointed doctors at the start of the post-reform period, I have never yet met or heard of a woman in leadership positions prior to the late s.

This somewhat reflected the gender relations common during the pres Tibetan society and that in some cases still persist today. Mutig 70 precious pill produced at the Derge Tibetan Medicine Hospital in The small inserted photograph to the right shows the Derge Print House. Another type of exclusion of female Tibetan medical practitioners that continued in the post-reform period and largely today, is their exclusion from the production of tsotel.

Doctors flocked from all directions to learn this technique from Troru Tsenam and to participate in the 45 day long processing 32 The nun students of Dragkar Lama are known to make rinchen rilbu, but I am not sure whether they make the tsotel used in these themselves. Personal communication with Nicola Schneider, September Yet, they do not make their own tsotel, but instead procure it from the pharmacy of the Dzongsar Medical College. Yet neither Phurpa Dolma nor Palden Dolma participated in these events or even mentioned them to me.

Conclusions By comparing extant written and oral materials on female doctors in twentieth century Tibet, including new insights gained into the lives of Phurpa Dolma and other women doctors, we can conclude that Tibetan medicine per se does not appear to have been a field in which talented women prospered.

Rather that the particular social backgrounds and networks of the three well-known women doctors, Khandro Yangga, Lobsang Dolma and Do Dasel Wangmo, made all the difference to their becoming outstanding medical practitioners and teachers. They were fortunate enough to have enjoyed the following three distinct circumstances. Firstly, they were born or grew up as the only daughter, or among daughters, in families with no sons.

They were therefore groomed as inheritors to the family medical lineages and the medical house. Secondly, they were allowed enough time and space to devote themselves to their studies and their medical work; none of them was impeded by time- and energy-consuming household and family chores. The laywomen, Khandro Yangga and Lobsang Dolma, had sufficient outside help with bringing up children and running the household due to their relatively prosperous backgrounds.

Do Dasel Wangmo, being a nun, never had to look after children, partners or households, and was encouraged to pursue her Buddhist and medical studies and work once she had been ordained. Third and finally, all three women came from high-ranked families with vast and influential social and religious networks. They could thus draw on teachers from outside of the family and on means of support inherently linked to these circles. In other words, on this last point we could say that social class overrode gender norms and prejudice.

In their senior years, they received official recognition and written acknowledgements, earned leadership positions, and were given professional rewards. All three women have also, at some point in their careers, either edited or themselves written medical treatises. In contrast, the stories of Phurpa Dolma and other women like her, such as Sonam Dolma of the Nyekhang House in Tsarong, demonstrate the countless obstacles many women encountered in the medical field and how difficult it was to overcome these despite their considerable efforts, dedication, expertise and relatively favourable circumstances.

They tended to receive a less comprehensive education than men and often lacked extended exposure to and instruction in the medical texts. They had to manage the workloads of the home as well as in the healing profession, and, regarding the latter, often spent a lot of time collecting medicinal ingredients at the expense of other medical work and training.

In addition, they suffered discouragement from family and colleagues, worked in all- male environments and lacked female role models. In numerous cases they were not allowed access to the Tibetan medical institutions set up in the post-reform period, or if they were, they do not seem to have been promoted according to their experience and in ways similar to men. And finally, the stories of their lives and work are usually absent from written biographies and other records, either written by others or from their own pens. The experiences of Phurpa Dolma were likely more common among women in medicine during the twentieth century than those that have come to us through the few cases of written accounts of Khandro Yangga, Lobsang Dolma and Do Dasel Wangmo.

The career trajectories of several Central Tibetan female medical practitioners whose lives I researched support this, some of whom have been mentioned above. Most of the times both sons and daughters were born into medical houses, in which case due to male-dominated social organisation, only boys tended to be groomed for the medical profession. It is simply not enough that, with less than two handfuls of names of Tibetan medical doctors and sometimes their dates and the names of their fathers, we can deduce that the Tibetan medical domain has offered women greater opportunities to prosper than other fields.

Another important task will be to systematically compare accounts by and of women in professional medicine with those dedicated to religious life, as it seems that at least some of the obstacles encountered by female religious specialists were also blocking the way for women in medicine. Tradition and Modernity — Special Issue, vol. Gerke, Barbara — Taming the Poisonous: A Global Commodity in Transition, vol. Tradition and Modernity, special issue by Barbara Gerke ed. Mercury in Ayurveda and Tibetan Medicine, , vol.

• The Code of the Hills: An Ozarks Mystery?
• Antiquités;
• Gods Bible Code ELS Equidistant Letter Spacing by Rabbi Sollog.

Hofer, Theresia — Medicine on the Margins: Studies in Religion, History and Culture. Jamyang Norbu Warriors of Tibet: Heavey Earth, Golden Sky: Printed by and available at Self Publishing, Lulu. McGranahan, Carole Arrested Histories: Schneider, Sarah Luminous Moonlight: Nevertheless, observing her daily activities and listening to her life narrative underscores the im- portance of a dense network of relationships with other humans, dei- ties, and sacred lands that make her position as an autonomous fe- male religious specialist possible. Thanks also to Chogtul Rangrig Dorje for sharing his perspectives.

Britt Marie-Alm helped me re- discover Khandro Rinpoche in Serta after our ini- tial busride acquaintance, and Antonio Terrone made research at Vairotsana Cave much more feasible. See also Westlund Jacoby history in South Asian religions who permeate the lines between hu- man and divine, worldly and wise.

In Tibet, they can be ethereal god- desses adorning frescos on temple walls, or they can materialise at key moments in Buddhist hagiographies to jar the protagonist into pristine awareness. She is not to be confused with the fa- mous daughter of Mindroling Trichen sMin grol gling khri chen of the same name who has Buddhist Centres around the globe. She was not brought up in an openly religious environment, was mar- ried at a young age to a local government official, and had five chil- dren before she redirected her energies towards religious pursuits.

Relational Autonomy 81 po Township, the bus careened around a Buddhist reliquary stupa and halted on the side of road by the riverbank. The Tibetan bus driv- er beckoned me to join the file of passengers walking up the steep hillside to a cave complex that I later learned was called Vairotsana Cave. Inside the cave, I briefly met a distinctive-looking middle-aged Tibetan woman dressed in a maroon cloak with long black hair.

She offered blessings and short prayers to the bus passengers and other devotees lined up at her door. After this short but fascinating inter- lude, we all packed back onto the bus and headed for Serta. Serendipitously, the following year I rediscovered Khandro Rinpoche in a shop in downtown Serta. I noticed her because of her distinctive composure and also because of the unusually beautiful and large coral and turquoise earrings and necklace she wore. She also remembered me from the bus ride encounter the previous year. She allowed me to record our conversations and later I asked Tibetans from Golog to transcribe them in Tibetan, which helped refine my understanding of her strong Golog-dialect Tibetan accent.

The namesake of the Vairotsana Cave was a renowned eighth- century Tibetan translator who traveled to India to import state-of- the-art Buddhist scriptures into Tibet. A second famous imperial Tibetan personage also distinguishes the history of Vairotsana Cave, namely Lhalung Pelkyi Dorje Lha lung dpal kyi rdo rje. He was a ninth-century monk who allegedly mur- dered the Tibetan Emperor Lang Darma Glang dar ma , whom Tibet- an histories remember as one who persecuted Buddhism.

Intending to reinstate royal sponsorship of Buddhism by ousting the heretic em- peror, Lhalung Pelkyi Dorje fled the murder scene and, according to local lore, sought refuge at the Vairotsana Cave in Gyalrong, where a stupa memorialises him. Relational Autonomy 83 ss, during which time Tibet experienced extreme hardships along with other parts of the PRC, in particular as a result of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution Guoluo Zangzu Zizhizhou comprising the southeastern corner of Qinghai Province.

After that she took on the rebuilding of Sera Monastery in the Serta region of Kandze, and most recently the Vairotsana Cave in Gyalrong. For a synoptic history of Golog, see Jacoby The supreme Khandro Rinpoche was born in the wood horse year of the sixteenth cycle in Chagmo Golog, eastern Ti- bet. Before long a foreign army came to the fore and instituted democratic reforms.

On account of the various disturbances of the times such as the need for manual labor, those who practised the holy dharma became as rare as stars in the daytime. Never- theless, from the time she was small, she felt renunciation in the form of disgust for cyclic existence and had the altruistic inten- tion to strive to benefit others.

She was renown for possessing the complete characteristics of a female bodhisattva such as per- ceiving all that appears and exists as pure. Her father was born in the late s. Even so, I had one hundred percent faith in the dharma in my mind, but when I was young, due to Chinese oppression, we were not al- lowed to hold a rosary in our hands. Lamas and tulkus who had not committed any crime were put in prison. Then even if you thought you wanted to be a nun, there were no lamas or tulkus in the region.

Khandro Rinpoche attended school for about two years in Darlag County, where she studied both Tibetan and Chinese languages. She explained to me several times that When I went to Chinese school, I held the workbook and pen in my hand and with my voice I had to recite the material.

But while I was reciting with my mouth, in my mind I was reciting the refuge prayer. I yearned for dharma as a thirsty person desires water. Aside from me, all my siblings work. I did not want to do that. I did not listen to my parents; I left. Not lis- tening to what my father said, not listening to what my mother said, I left. They said they would give me money. I said I did not want it and left. The others wanted the money! After she gradually grew up, she abundantly possessed all the good qualities of being a capable woman in terms of worldly af- fairs, so several households requested her as a wife.

Later I will be able to take care of myself. They dispatched her to be a bride for a good family that she had never met before who possessed wealth and power in the worldly sense. Though she had abundant worldly pleasures and wealth such as cotton, woolen clothing, and jew- elry made of gold, silver, turquoise, and coral, she felt perpetu- ally exhausted by the suffering of cyclic existence and her mind became shrouded in the darkness of misery.

At that time during the Cultural Revolution, since it was forbidden to hold a rosary, when it was time to thrash the barley, she counted the grains 11 Specifically, The Bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo Krang dbyi sun , vol. She narrates, I was young when I got married. My husband and I did not know each other; we had never met. Our parents arranged the marriage. For about a month I was depressed and got sick. For a Tibetan laywoman such as Khandro Rinpoche, the relentless labor that followed marriage came in many forms, one of which was rearing five children.

In addition, her husband held a position as a Chinese official in Darlag, which kept him busy working outside of the home and kept Khandro busy cooking and entertaining the Chinese officials he fre- quently brought home as guests. For a time her mother-in-law also lived with them, needing care at the same time as her five children did. Perhaps her recollection of the long days of endless housework coloured her response to a question I asked her about whether or not it is harder to practise dharma as a female than a male.

They are controlled by others. Even if they want to do a dharma practice, they are powerless to go. Jacoby not have the full eighteen freedoms and advantages like an or- dained monastic does If in the past you did not practise dharma, you will not be reborn in a central land. If you are, you will not have the power to practise the dharma. To explain the reason for this, cause and effect have been mixed up. For me, cause and effect have been mixed up a lot.

Because of this, I took birth as a lay- woman like this. Then I cast it away. Then I again became a householder. The reason I did not practise the dharma is that in a past life I accu- mulated some bad [karma]. The fruition of that is this [female non-monastic] body. Judging from the frequency and detail with which she mentioned it, a highlight of her life is the recognition of her son Thubten Shedrub Thub bstan bshad sgrub, b. According to Khandro Rinpoche, Thubten Shedrup is the in- carnation of two great lamas of the past: Apang Terchen 13 The eight freedoms and ten advantages include eight conditions that afford one with freedom to practise the dharma including not being born: The ten advantages include five individual advantages: For an explanation of these freedoms and advantages, see Patrul Rinpoche Reference to Sera Khandro is particularly salient because Khandro Rinpoche is widely believed in eastern Tibet to be one of her reincarnations.

Her third child, a son, is a bus driver. Migrant and Post-national Membership in Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, A New Cultural Battlefield? Institutions, Interests and Identities, Basingstoke: Alianza Editorial, , The emphasis in the Otherness of the CEECs has also been defended by Anthony Smith who has distinguished between the basis for the Western and Eastern model of political community: Regarding the new question of the delimitation of what a European identity implies, we can also observe another differentiation between Western and Eastern European approaches.

Smith, National Identities, Penguin: Harmondsworth, , Editorial Trotta, , Moving on from the question of the Europeanness-Otherness of the CEECs, I will now concentrate on the debates on the much related issue of a European Citizenship and on how they affect the CEECs re-elaboration of the meaning of physical space in contemporary Europe. The technical introduction of the concept, generically entitled European Citizenship, took place in Maastricht in , on the occasion of the adoption of the Treaty of the European Union. According to this document, any citizen of a member state is considered also to be a citizen of the EU.

The stated goal of such a concept was to consolidate a new European identity through a more active involvement of citizens in the integration process. Beginning with the addition of civil rights stipulated by the Amsterdam Treaty, the EU appeared to make a concerted effort to fulfil a closer and coherent self- conscious understanding of its subjects, the European citizens Council of Europe, [ REC , 1.

Council of the European Union, 1 30 Avram and Zamfirescu. This derives from a decoupling between the citizens as equals among equals in the public sphere, and citizens as private persons in the market sphere. In this sense, Eriksen and Weigard provide a very optimistic perspective about the scope of European citizenship as an instrument for an egalitarian balance. Citizenship status is based on the idea that all members of a society function in two capacities: This is the quintessence of modern democracy.

The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, of constant division between citizens and those considered as barbarians, poses again a challenge for the legitimacy of the progressive construction of a European citizenship. The search for a common European identity is attached to a context marked by the study of the so-called globalisation process, where European integration could be seen a reaction to this process and its most advanced expression.

In this way, ethnic identities appear as sources of symbolic affirmation, as safe refuges in escaping from ontological insecurity and contingency and configuring what has been 33 Eriksen and Weigard, Phenomena like international investments, multinational production, migrations, mass tourism and mass media, contribute to eroding the frontiers that nineteen-century powers constructed between the national and the foreigner.

It is precisely this decline in the state capability of managing national politics and the internal social order that has generated a new search for identities based on regional, ethnical and religious perspectives or even on those leaning towards extreme nationalism. Those barbarians are not necessarily uneducated, but they bring new traditions and new worldviews. They can penetrate with violence, because they want to appropriate wealth that has been denied of them, or they can infiltrate in the cultural and social body of the dominant Pax, making new faiths and ways of life circulate.

The problem will be not to scientifically preserve the past but to elaborate hypothesis about the use of chaos and to engage in a logic of dispute. A culture of continuous re-adaptation, fed by utopia, will be born The heritage of the past was only an immense operation to find a balance between nostalgia, hope and desperation. Alianza, , Casa Editrice Valentino Bompiani and Co. This void lies in the essential base for survival and evokes again the need for continuous reinventions in our contemporary Europe.

Hence, in this situation, the consensus, fundamental for the democratic state, appears from this perspective, to be devaluated, or reduced to an opinion acquired under pressure and used as a decision. At the end of such a process, that decision is as irrelevant as a consultative comment and as a private point of view. Despite fragmentation, some authors consider that new forms of tolerance and acceptation can be guaranteed. Those political agents able to reason from the point of view of the others will be better equipped to solve new and challenging trans-national affairs which create overlapping identities.

It is possible that the future of the EU will include an inner circle of powerful member states, which will make the most important decisions without paying significant attention to their own citizens and the other smaller and less powerful member states. In this sense, some scholars, like Sedelmeier have maintained that this is a potential danger that European citizenship could resolve, as it could bind the Europeans with a common interest and could take power from the strong nation states and their political elites and shift it to the European citizens.

Sedelmeier also upholds the valorisation of the CEECs role in the building of the principles of an European Citizenship. Eastward Enlargement has contributed to the formation of an EU collective identity as a promoter and protector of human rights, fundamental freedoms and democracy. European Paper Series 13 Last but not least, one of the most interesting analyses on the issue of Eastward enlargement as an identity challenge is once again provided by Sedelmeier, who defends the idea that the discourse on the Otherness on the CEECs is an instrumental and fluctuant frontier that is modified according to successively changing priorities, interests and objectives of also changing political and mental contexts.

The increase or decrease of its presence in the academic debate, the media or the political debate depends on the degree of convergence between Western and Eastern European objectives. When they converge, the discourse remains latent and turns to emphasise the obvious Europeaness of the CEECs.

But the argument of the difference continues to exist beneath the surface of consensus and mutual recognition, always ready to enter the scene if any uncomfortable divergence arises. In Eurolink-House of Europe, , http: New Left Review March-April Berezin, Mabel and Martin Schain. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.

Moskow [English translation, Russia and Europe].

Georgetown University Press, Enlarging the European Union. Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies. Eriksen, Erik Oddvar and Jarle Weigard. International Affairs 66, 3 July Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge, Polity Press, Achievements and challenges, Florence: European University Institute, 23rd of March , 1. European Council Meeting in Laeken, 14 December Council of the European Union.

Landau, Alice and Richard Whitman. Rethinking the European Union. Institutions, Interests and Identities. Sonetos del amor oscuro. Innovation 3, 3 Le Temps des Tribus: Alternatives 23, 3 July-September Journal of Political Philosophy 6, 2 American Sociological Review 58, 3 June Recommandation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Its theory and History. Innovation 5, 1 Shute, Stephen and Susan L. De los derechos humanos. European University Institute Working Papers. American Sociological Review 58, 5 October Migrant and Post-national Membership in Europe. British Journal of Sociology 52, 2 Sources of the Self. International Affairs 67, 4 October Accordingly, European Union has set higher education and scientific research as steering elements in promoting and achieving these purposes, along with the establishment of European Higher Education Area.

The objective of this article is redefining European borders in the context of the European Education Area with focus on higher education and research. The EU process of integration aimes at providing a common framework for designing policies and forging economic and social development at European Union level. In achieving these goals, EU takes education, and mainly higher education, as constitutive elements in creating and developing a competitive knowledge-based society in which human capital plays a crucial role. The higher education field, with its focus on research and innovation policies, becomes the engine that steers economic and social development within the European Union framework.

As such, the main question that arises is to what extent education has created a common European space of shared interests, goals and values, transpassing continental borders. Therefore, in this paper I argue that by creating the European Higher Education Area the Bologna process has reshaped and redefined both the notion and the way of understanding European borders in terms of forging transnational cooperation and communication.

First of all, Bologna mobility initiatives and programmes designed especially for students, but also for academic stuff, have played a major role in over-coming cultural frontiers. Another issue disscussed here reflects the idea that the policies embedded in the Bologna process and translated into EHEA have put forward the convergence of European countries to a convergence of higher education governance models.

These two ingredients, mobility and education governance, which rendered education a highly international dimension for the past two decades, have challenged the notion of border by introducing a new feature, education internationalisation. European borders The concept of border is intimately linked to national ethos and, as such, to that of a shared cultural identity. Nevertheless, the steady element making up Europe is mainly culture and the cultural infrastructure of the continent2. For this reason, Europe is being characterised by a cultural diversity strengthened by its local, regional, and national identities and entities3.

But the idea of a European unification is not of such a recent date. The project of a unified Europe can be traced back in time in the Middle Ages5 when we could encounter a European community of culture based on a common language, Latin language, and a shared religion, chrystianity. According to other authors, such as Georges Contogeorgis, the growth of the European idea and its elements, as well as its stages, has been confronted with two great elements favouring division: Apart from reaching a consensus, in realising a convergence of different European cultures in the context of the European Union the need for national policies harmonisation in the cultural domains has to be stressed.

The solution stressed by Habermas regarding this issue is embedded in the concept of a European-wide public sphere designed as a network that gives all citizens the opportunity to take part in an encompassing process of focused social and political communication.

All along, this European public sphere rather emerges from the mutual opening of existing national universes to one another, yielding to an interpenetration of mutually translated national communications. But within the framework of coexistence of parallel cultures, either national or ethnic or local, inside the European common space, national specificity and identity would have to be redefined and should also be open to the new configurations — geo-political, historical and cultural9.

The current challenges of the European cultural project have their origins in antagonisms that will only be overcome in favour of human meetings and exchanges that are indispensable to a joint project Nevertheless, the European cultural dimension is made explicit in the EU Treaties along the years. Before initiating any further discussions regarding the European Education Area, first, the concept of border has to be analyzed and clarified. In general, the concept of border is usually associated with the hard concept of physical frontier According to them, the concept of border has had a long and still developing history and beside the classical physical frontier, there can also be identified other types of borders whether within or at the border of European Union.

Moreover, Delanty even talks about the absence of European borders, sustaining that Europe cannot be defined by territory because there are no clear geographical markers, specifically on its eastern boundries. From Europeanism to nationalism, from ethno-religious to cultural identities and social gaps, the wide range of approaches of these frontiers may continue in the context of implementing efficient European neighbourhood policies In addendum, Walters15 argues that the emergence of European Union can be regarded as a moment of deterritorialisation due to its emphasis on a common polity characterised by multiple, fluid spaces of regions, markets and cities connected by networks of communication, transportation and traversed by flows of goods, people, information and capital.

The idea of a borderless world can be also sketched from a geostrategical point of view16 which favors the elimination of barriers enhancing the free movement of people, goods and services but keeping a certain degree of common border control. On the other hand, the European project which aims at creating a European polity bears a broader concept of borders in the way that it envisions not only the member states but also countries like Russia or Turkey. Right after the fall of the socialist system, the political Europe sees its understanding with the United States as a great opportunity to reject the Soviet Empire and expand its vital space to the Russian borders and the integration of Eastern countries largely responds to this geopolitical priority Following this line of argument, the article focuses on European borders defined in terms of educational cooperation in the field of higher education at EU level.

Accordingly, this legal framework applied in the field of higher education across both EU member and non-member countries enabled, to an extent, the emergence of a European public sphere by establishing an educational networking, thus steering institutional cooperation and communication. For example, the Erasmus student mobility programmes have created along the years an extended social community shaped by usage of a common language, rituals and practices Hence, the implementation of this specific educational framework is being translated into national education policy reforms.

In this respect, European assisstance has been offered to target countries for reaching an education system convergence and the result is now reflected through the establishment of European Higher Education Area. The contextual framework for European higher education convergence 2. The Bologna Process An important foundation stone in the Bologna process can be traced back to , when university leaders of Europe came together in Bologna to sign the Magna Charta Universitatum which extolled certain fundamental values of the University: In , the ministers of education of France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom signed the Sorbonne Declaration expressing their commitment to the progressive harmonisation of the overall framework degrees, aiming at improving external recognition and facilitating student mobility and employability Moreover, it is also argued that the novelty of this initiative refers to the fact that it was explicitly taken without EU institutions being involved, other countries being invited to join it, irrespective of EU membership.

The hard core of the Bologna process at European level is represented by a series of intergovernmental conferences of European education ministers at which programmatic declarations and communiques were passed For the proponents of the Bologna Process reforms and those in HE institutions, the fragmented and disclosed nature of European higher education was perceived as responsible for the lack of progress and thus a threat to the future competitiveness of institutions In reaching these general objectives, there have been drawn six action lines: Twenty-nine countries signed the declaration, with two signatures each from Germany and Belgium to account for their federal structure: Fifteen of these countries were EU members at that time.

University of Twente, , http: Towards a European Classification of Higher Education, ed. Van Vught Springer Science, , Apart from these countries, Russia, Ukraine, Republic of Moldova, Albania, Armenia, Turkey and Azerdbaijan have also included the European dimension in their statutes and expressed their will in promoting and pursuing cooperation in the Higher Education Area From the beginning, not only the chosen approach but also the regional reach clearly differentiated the Bologna process from regular EU activities As Reichert25 stressess, so far, the Bologna reforms have focused on transparency by producing more readable degree structures compatible Bachelors and Masters as well as introducing the Diploma Supplement and more compatible Quality Assurance methodologies, standards and guidelines.

Along with the Bologna process, the EU Lisbon Council in highlighted the importance of education and training in forging economic competitiveness and development within European Union. This created a Europe with three parallel paths towards a European higher education area: Moreover, Veiga and Amaral argue that the Open Method of Coordination is designed as a soft law procedure assuming policy implementation as a logical and rational top-down linear process from Commission to states, institutions and citizens.

Furthermore, apart from being a soft law expressing the European vision in higher education, the Bologna process has been used as a lever by national governments for the promotion and implementation of national policy agendas On the other hand, the Bologna process has not only rendered a European dimension regarding higher education governance in the common European space, but has also introduced the internationalisation dimension of education.

The internationalising dimension is refleted by five action lines embedded in the Bologna process: These lines of action belong to the category of joint system reform Inside this process, the internationalisation of education can be better captured by joint programmes as well as the emergence of different local associations which are designed for steering cooperation between European universities. For example, the Association of the Carpathian Universities, an international association which gathers 29 universities and colleges from 6 countries belonging to the Carpathian region: It was established in 23 Malitza, Priorities and challenges for higher education in the next decade, ed.

Lemmens, , It also enhances the coordination of various activities in the field of international university relations, to the development of specific mechanisms for the transmission of information and knowledge, and to the exchange and support of contacts between member universities and interested third parties. The Black Sea Universities Network is another local initiative aiming at enabling cooperation and communication among neighbour countries pertaining to a certain region, here the Black Sea region. As such, this network was established in and nowadays it includes over countries from the 12 member countries of the Economic Cooperation from the Black Sea region: Its lines of actions refer to the organisation of summer schools and regional conferences with focus on academic cooperation and tracing guidelines for developing it inside the region.

The establishment of these networking activities through universities associations and organisations has led to the erosion of the concept of border33, thus forging a process of opening and widening the space of communication in the field of higher education. In this case, higher education becomes a powerfull tool in linking EU and non EU countries holding different cultural backgrounds. In Romania, the legal framework for implementing the Bologna process was adopted between and Since the London meeting in the main developments in the Romanian higher education system are related to the implemention at university management level of the new legal provisions and the monitoring of this process by the Ministry of Education, Research and Youth and its consultative bodies As a consequence, the Law No.

The Law stated the introduction of the new type of first cycle and the reorganization of doctoral studies in the form of third cycle. On the other hand, the new reglementations relating university management stipulated the implementation of quality assurance system. In this respect, there has been created a specialized public body, the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance, which elaborates institutional evaluation methodologies and acreditates both public and private higher education institutions.

In spring , eight major projects concerning various aspects of the impact of the Bologna process on university management were aproved, involving different national agencies as well as he is and local and international experts which will continue and enhance the on-going transformation process in the Romanian higher education National Report Romania The project aims at strengthening the link between learning outcomes and quality management in the learning programmes of all the 3 cycles; - developing an operational system of qualifications in the Romanian higher education.

This project is focussing on the improvement of transparency and accountability of university management in the dynamic interface offered by local and international higher education providers active in the market as well as in the context of improved interaction of universities with businesses; - doctoral studies and doctoral schools in Romania. The project assists financially and methodologically institutions and persons in their endeavor to develop the Bologna third cycle study programmes; - evaluating quality of research in universities and increasing visibility of scientific output.

Emergence of European Higher Education Area As such, both Bologna Declaration, as well as Lisbon Council has traced the guiding lines for creating a European Area of higher education systems in order to put at work their common settled agenda. The EHEA was designed as an education network linking higher education institutions across European countries and involving them in joint education programmes and research projects. In one of his aticles on this subject, professor Beerkens35 outlines the fact that the Europeanisation can be seen as the emergence of a new layer of governance, a layer with a wide range of interactions, and that layer is the European Higher Education Area.

Accordingly, EHEA consists of a set of transnational activities, among which the most important would be the mobility of individual students and academics, and the collaboration and exchange between academics. For example, the European cooperation programmes have not only encouraged mobility, they have also stimulated cooperation. International mobility has been even more spectacular, with the EU programmes playing a fundamental role in this area due to the fact that they allowed teachers to co-operate with colleagues from other European universities and to undertake research and to participate in specialization internships abroad.

The creation of European Credit Transfer Systems aiming at systemic compatibility and intercomparability was initially launched in as a mere experimental process and in it was introduced as a European initiative in the field of higher education Furthermore, Erasmus mobility programme has gained the greatest success and impact in terms of enhancing and enabling transnational cooperation and communication in the space of European education.

It was first promoted in under Jacques Delors presidency and by 2. From governance perspective, this higher education programme has played a key role in creating a convergent European university model through the uniformization of mobility evaluation methods Inspired by Erasmus mobility 35 Beerkens, The main objectives set by Erasmus Mundus programme relate to issues such as improving higher education quality among European partner universities, enhancing academic mobility and promoting institutional cooperation among countries All universities are concerned even if some do not achieve the same level and are not ranked as top research universities; - European higher education institutions must progress by working together and by building networks and joint programmes; - culture of quality within European higher education institutions must be promoted.

In this sense, it is necessary to identify certain ways of rewarding or of defining good practice; - higher education must continue to be a public service. Thus, it must be open to all and be able to deal with the diversity of learners without discrimination. It must also be able to provide services to the whole of society: Performance in higher education 3. Assessing performance in higher education field In the last past three decades there has been a worldwide research focus on developing performance indicators in the education sector due to a general widespread wave of public management reforms with a specific emphasis on performance management and instruments of measurement.

For instance, the new public management themes such as disagregation, competition and incentivization have influenced government reforms in many parts of the world. In Central and Eastern Europe, the focus on measuring and assessing public performance is of a more recent date starting with the fall of communist regimes that led to a process of transition from a centralised economic and political system to a market economy and a liberal-democratic state and like other institutions, universities have regained their autonomy Consequently, the emergence of the knowledge society, demographic developments, economic growth and increased competitive presurres for globalization have stimulated an array of reforms to contemporary HE systems As result, there is a strong international science policy trend that emphasizes the research performance of the university sector due to an increase of both public and private financial dependence which led to a performance-based budgeting strategy.

The concept of performance has led to a major change of vision for the governance of EU universities in particular based on steering competition among institutions and enhancing accountability. Consequently, in a growing number of countries, governments and public agencies are more and more involved in systematic evaluations of assessing the outputs of universities, rationalising research organizations, or augmenting research quality and productivity These types of evaluations serve two main objectives: In the last few years, the Shanghai ranking system has been heavily criticized because of its emphasis on measuring scientific research productivity in terms of number of papers published in Science and Nature journals and citations by paper, diminishing or even ignoring the importance of social and art sciences or by eliminating books and conference papers as significant publications though they may well contain valuable scientific information The problem of measuring research performance represents a highly debated issue, for policy makers, administrators, academic community and various stakeholdres involved in the academic processes.

Assessing higher education research performance is possible by creating and using a set of indicators that measure both the impact and the productivity of scientific research. Scientific research is considered to be the most important field in higher education because of its main function of creating and developing new knowledge and technologies. Research performance indicators are designed to highlight the productivity of researchers from different education fields and the impact of their products, respectively the number of published papers and the number of citations per paper Bibliometric indicators and peer review are regularly used for this purpose, and the most popular rankings are those that use publications and citations as indicator of scientific worth.

Efforts have been made to include quality aspects in rankings such as introducing recursive field-normalization bibliometric indicators that try to correct for the fact that the density of citations differs among fields Another proposal consists of an indicator based on membership of the scientific board of academic journals that consider the reputation and recognition of scholars among their peers Governance and performance in the European Higher Education Area In the last past thirty years the concept of governance in the education field, and mainly inthe field of higher education, has suffered structural changes with the redefinition of the roles of the state and universities in designing education policy strategies.

In this respect, the European Commission has put forward a clear vision for the governance of European HE institutions, which includes, among other things, a diversification of funding resources, an intensification of ties between universities and industries and a closer match between the supply of qualifications and labour market demands Furthermore, EU Commission has competence over higher education research developing several Framework Programmes along with mobility programmes for the academia such as Erasmus Mundus.

Thus, the classic model of public sector governance has been replaced in time by a new one which puts emphasis on managerialism, public accountability and quality in public service delivery. Along with these public sector reforms, the changing role of universities, the rapid growth of higher education markets and massification has led to an international concern for quality in higher education. To a certain extent, reforms of university governance are reflecting the more general reform trend in the political- administrative system and society Following this line of argument, in higher education, these new visions set through public sector reforms took the shape of a larger university autonomy in domains like funding and and hiring policies.

Talking about the autonomy universities enjoy, Christensen argues that this type os autonomy is rather more formal and less real because this new formal autonomy is having many strings attached, both structural and financial. Moreover, public management reforms introduced quality management systems in higher education, thus performance becoming an end in itself. In consequence, I argue that performance assessment and quality assurance systems express the duality nature of the concept of university autonomy.

On the one hand, quality assurance is regulated and operated by state organisms through national agencies. University ranking systems are an important and useful tool in comparing universities and in stimulating competition among them. But these rankings offer only one side of a larger picture, thus favoring research-centered higher education institutions and leaving aside universities with traditional teaching cultures for example, thus affecting institutional diversity. In the European Higher Education Area there have been designed two main university ranking systems.

One is U- Map, an ongoing project in which the European classification of HE institutions is further developed and implemented Overall, it can be said, and this is considered as appropriate for a classification system, that the U-Map indicators are more closely linked to the focus and intensity, rather than to the quality of the various activities of HEIs.

The second project has a multidimensional character — U-Multirank — and is aimed at creating a global ranking of universities. The objective of the project is to develop a feasible transparency instrument that can contribute to enhancing the transparency of institutional and programmatic diversity of European higher education in a global context and test its feasibility The U- Multirank project produces two rankings: The Focused institutional ranking enables comparisons of institutions according to a single dimension of institutional activity, such as education, research, internationalisation or knowledge transfer.

The Field-based ranking will be designed as a multi-dimensional ranking of a set of study programmes in a specific field or discipline, provided by institutions with a comparable profile. These two European Ranking project are part of the European Higher Education Area and both are aiming at providing strategically relevant comparative data on institutional performance. Concluding remarks The changes in modes of public governance occured in the past thirty years on both European landscapes as well as at international level have had an even greater impact on higher education policies.

In the European context, the Bologna process, along with the establishment of European Higher Education Area, have forged a series of national policy reforms aiming at a policy convergence of European HE systems which are different in mission, strategies and organizational culture. Accordingly, the argument stressed in this article points at the fact that the establishment of European Higher Education Area has led to rethinking and redefining the concept of border in the European context.

In present, education borders, which were once separeting different European higher education systems holding different education cultures and traditions, are reshaped as well as redesigned by the usage of a common language of compatible and comparable degrees and programmes, and also by creating regional and local networking activities. Along with these initiatives, European borders are also transpassed by the provision of a common framework for assessing quality and performance in higher education across European countries. Eurolimes 7, Europe and the Neighbourhood, eds.

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Journal of Higher Education 3, 1, Change of Degres and Degrees of Change: University of Twente, , online at: The main aim of the paper is to investigate the factors for a successful FDI inflow into the South East Europe media market for western investors. The data sample includes 16 countries and provides several important results of comparative analysis of major macroeconomic factors such as government consumption to GDP, market size, corporate tax rates, ICT, business, economic, financial and monetary competitiveness as well as innovation capacity in order to determine the potential for FDI in SEE countries.

In summary, the author states that countries that provide most profitable business solutions for FDI inflow in both printed and broadcasting TV and radio media are Turkey, Bulgaria and Hungary. On the other hand, the most concentrated, oversaturated and at the same time least profitable SEE printed and broadcasting media markets to enter are those of Greece, Montenegro, Romania and Malta.

Investing in radio stations is the least profitable business because of the low consumption of this media as well as high market concentration in SEEC market. The only country that is recommended for market entry in the radio media industry is Hungary. The data sample includes 16 countries: This paper is structured as follows: Section 1 analyzes the economic importance of Southeast Europe market and reasons for prospective FDI, Section 2 provides a brief literature review and discusses the conceptual understanding of the topic of strategic directions for foreign direct investments and media market entries into Southeast Europe media business; Section 3 discusses common characteristics of the South-East European media markets in order to more effectively outline the holistic nature and state of social and economic factors influencing business operations of media companies.

Economic importance of South East European market for prospective FDI inflow Despite a marked lack of high level of technological readiness, business efficiency, productivity, state of cluster development and innovative capacity the region of SEE presents promising economic market looking from a global point of view. With the population of approximately million this region covers the area of almost 1,7 million square kilometers. FDI has increasingly been viewed by policy makers in developing and emerging market economies EMEs as a tool to finance development, increase productivity and import new technologies2.

In addition, the relative stability of FDI inflows constitutes a buffer against sharp reversals in portfolio inflows during periods of crisis, such as the one experienced in Moreover, SEE countries feature a versatile type of media industries and companies that includes daily newspapers, TV stations and radio stations.

Literature review European media scholars and researchers have dominantly analyzed media through two mirrors: The rise of neoliberal and global capitalism and the collapse of Soviet-style communism in the Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe started to dictate more dynamic capitalist rules. However, only a few pertinent works have been published in the field of SEEC media business, market and entrepreneurship studies. Middle East and Central Asia Department , http: Analysis and Approaches, London and New York: There are at least two valid reasons for apparent absence of profoundly systematized and holistic longitudinal, comparative and analytical as well as focused conceptual or case study analysis: The tradition of capitalist liberal and free market has been very scarce as twelve out of sixteen countries used to practice the communist system of socio-economic production for several decades - until ; 2.

The SEE countries with the exception of Turkey and Romania are a relatively small in territorial and demographic size and are b ethnically and culturally very diverse. It is the ethnic, linguistic and cultural fragmentation that made their prospective economic and technological co-operation more challenging to maintain. Accordingly, it is advisable to point that high ethnic diversity is particularly present in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia, FYR Macedonia and Moldova while only five countries in the entire region Malta, Slovenia, Hungary, Greece and Cyprus maintain low ethnic diversity.

This notion is apparently evident in the number of published books and articles that cover the issue of European media from Thus, the predominant concentration of scholarly literature concentration on the European media was based on the analysis of digital switchover in Europe5; media rights6; European media policy7; media ownership8; media regulation9. Other significant aspects of the European media research that have been the focus of researchers included: Structures, Politics and Identity, Cambridge: Threats on the landscape.

The European Federation of Journalists Brussels: Politics, Regulation, and the Public Sphere, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; Michael Holoubek et. Kluwer Law International, Scholars were also interested in the examination of the following themes in European media: Film and Media in European Context, Cambridge: From Unification to Coordination, Lanham: Franz Steiner Verlag, Mediacentar, , http: Nissen, Making a Difference: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Performance, Media, Identity, London: Berghahn Books, ; Meyer.

Central European University Press, Media Discourse and Political Contention. Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, Routledge, ; Venturelli; eds. Lawrence Erlabaum Associates, ; eds Anna Triandafyllidou et. Europe in Crisis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ; Stylianos Papathanasopoulos,Politics and media: The case of Southern Europe, Athens: Public Policy and the Mass Media: Trends in media accountability and viewer participation, Bristol: Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities, Eastleigh: Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing media systems: All these characteristics have made the state an autonomous and dominant factor, yet the capacity of the state to intervene effectively is often limited by lack of resources, and clientelist relationships which diminish the capacity of the state for unified action.

All these information will assist prospective media investors in terms regard to making a prospective market entry into SEE countries. National and Regional Dimensions, Bristol: London and New York: Routledge, ; Hallin and Papathanassopoulos. Quantitative analysis of print media and TV and radio stations Number of Number of Number of Number Number of Number of TV radio Country daily of TV radio newspapers stations stations newspapers stations stations per million per million per million Albania 23 76 31 8. Mini-Case studies of SEE countries- media markets 5. Albanian media market Main findings: Bosnian and Herzegovinian media market Main findings: Firstly, the media market remains poor and fragmented, with a large number of small broadcasters Secondly, the level of professionalism and the quality of journalism remains weak, with spread self-censorship, low reporting quality, lack of investigative journalism, and disrespect for basic standards as defined in the Press Code.

Bulgarian media market Main findings: This includes the channel Nova TV and also the Diema channels and MM channels , which in had a market share of The foreign investors own almost 20 radio stations, most of them in Sofia. The daily circulation of Trud currently it stands at between 70, and , copies.

Thus, this demographic niche market is becoming increasingly important. Croatian media market Main findings: Cyprus media market Main findings: In other words, the market remains relatively concentrated in comparison with other European markets, which is partly a result of the small number of homes that subscribe to multi-channel packages.

Greek media market Main findings: Demand in Greece for foreign publications corresponds to the number of tourists in Greece on holiday. There are news agents and subagencies in the Greek provinces for the distribution of printed media. Within Greece there are 12, places where the print media is sold. Hungarian media market Main findings: Kosovo media market Main findings: FYR Macedonian media market Main findings: Malta media market Main findings: Moldova media market Main findings: Montenegrin media market Main findings: Romanian media market Main findings: Serbian media market Main findings: In , Most people read Blic , copiest , Alo!

Swiss company Ringier owns three dailies in Serbia Blic, Alo! Their dailies are the first Blic and second Alo! NIN is the first among political and economic magazines; in March Ringier bought 70 percent stocks of the old Serbian newsweekly NIN, and in April the company purchased an additional The company claims a 25 percent increase in circulation, now 16,, since it has become the majority owner. In March Ringier and German publishing concern Axel Springer formed a joint venture that unites their business activities in the east and southeast of Europe, including Serbia.

In spring , the company reported five million euros profit for their Serbian businesses in , percent more than in The WAZ Group holds 50 percent of the shares in the company. They include but are not limited to: Slovenian media market Main findings: Gross value of the advertising pie in Slovenian media in was More than half of the advertising income goes to television 55 percent , print media share of advertising pie is Pop TV audience share: Turkey media market Main findings: For the first time in Turkish history, newspaper circulation at the weekend achieved a distribution of 6m copies.

In summer Antalya is used as a second hub. The public channels of the broadcaster TRT are a long way behind their private competitors, with the first public channel TRT 1 only recording a 3. This shows that Turkey has quite a young reader population; the majority of readers are between the ages of 16 and Summary of main findings After detailed analysis of the SEE countries media market, the author points out that the region features a versatile type of media industries including daily newspapers, TV stations and radio stations.

The quantity of different media as well as the author summarizes the most important economic, social and technological data, information and points that can potentially provide better, more balanced and sustainable analysis of the region for prospective media investors. Thus, in terms of the technological readiness, media market competitiveness, audience structure and advertising revenues the media market of SEE countries is dominantly characterized by the following features: National and regional dimensions, ed.

Intellect Books, , Turkey, Croatia, Serbia; - high TV viewing time per viewer: Cyprus, Bulgaria, Slovenia; - high audience share of commercial TV: Hungary, Albania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Moldova; - high market concentration of radio stations: Moreover, the report of Heritage Foundation on the Economic freedom shows that with the exception of Greece, the region is economically sustainable in terms of the macroeconomic stability as the inflation is very low and the fiscal and monetary freedom is well established.

Corporate tax is much lower as compared to other regions in Europe, Africa and Asia which makes the region more competitive in the eyes of prospective foreign corporate investors. A Better Future for All. Scientific and innovation capacity in SEEC In terms of the innovation and scientific potential, capacity as well as the development of its infrastructure it is apparent that Slovenia is the leading country in the region while four other: Hungary, Greece, Croatia and Cyprus are positioned globally in the top In addition, if we take into consideration the number of researchers, headcounts per million people , , three countries from SEE are placed among 30 most competitive in the world Slovenia, Hungary and Greece , while another three Croatia position, Cyprus and Bulgaria are positioned amongst 40 globally most productive.

Macroeconomic, financial, fiscal, business, and monetary benefits and barriers for foreign investors in SEE countries It is advisable to point out that the most competitive macro-economic benefits in SEEC include trade and fiscal freedom, while the major business barriers are business and monetary freedom. Moreover, the major business barriers for prospective foreign investors in the media market of SEE are: In regard to the economic freedom as analyzed by The Heritage Foundation 10 out of 16 countries are moderately free while 2 countries are mostly free.

On the other hand, SEEC macroeconomic, financial, fiscal, monetary, business and competitive markets benefits are: Entrepreneurial, financial and monetary macroeconomic competitiveness in SEE The table clearly shows that only three countries Cyprus, Malta and Montenegro received more than euros of FDI inflow per capita. In addition, the macroeconomic and financial situation in the region remains generally stabile and satisfactory with the exception of Greece. London, ; World Investment Report Conclusions The most important conclusions that can be drawn from this comparative and quantitative analysis implies that countries that provide most profitable potential for FDI in both printed and broadcasting TV and radio media is present in Turkey, Bulgaria and Hungary.

Moreover, the most concentrated, competitive, oversaturated and hardest to enter printed and broadcasting media markets are those of Greece, Montenegro, Romania and Malta. The quantitative analysis clearly shows that printed media in SEE countries are much less concentrated and competitive as opposed to broadcasting media TV and particularly radio media. Investing in radio stations is the least profitable business as prospective investments in this particular media might be profitable only in the case of Hungary.

Conversely, the high level of rural population Moldova and Albania connotes a low level of newspaper readership. Thus, more rural population increasingly favors watching television program as it is evident in high TV viewing time in FYR Macedonia and Turkey. In the period of , Turkey achieved the largest annual increase in real GDP growth rate in Europe - 8. Together with Romania, Turkey provides foreign media corporations with the largest market size in the region SEE that is still considerably untapped.

Turkey together with Croatia and Serbia features very low free newspaper distribution so it provides less competition to the circulation of daily newspapers. Also, very low audience share of Public Service broadcasting implies that barriers to entry on the Turkish television market are considerably lower as opposed to other competitive markets. Moreover, the major barriers for prospective foreign investors in the media market of SEEE are: Middle East and Central Asia Department Baldi, Paolo and Uwe Hasebrink.

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