Showing papers in "Comparative Studies in Society and History in 2014"
TL;DR: This article explored the prevalence of pro-army chants, graffiti, the mounting of military vehicles, physical embraces, sleeping in tank tracks and posing for photographs with soldiers in and around Midan al-Tahrir during the 25th January Egyptian Revolution.
Abstract: On 28 January 2011 the Egyptian army was deployed onto Cairo's streets following three days of escalating protests. Upon entering Midan al-Tahrir, a column of newly arriving army tanks and APCs was attacked by protestors. Throwing stones and dousing the vehicles in petrol before setting them alight, protestors pulled soldiers out of their vehicles and beat them. Seizing ammunition and supplies, protestors even commandeered a tank. Minutes later those same protestors were chanting pro-army slogans, posing for photographs with soldiers and sharing food. How protestors respond to the deployment of security forces assumed loyal to a regime determined to end protest is often summed-up in the dyad of “fight or flight.” In this paper, I consider a third option: fraternization. Through a social interactionist lens, I explore the prevalence of pro-army chants, graffiti, the mounting of military vehicles, physical embraces, sleeping in tank tracks and posing for photographs with soldiers in and around Midan al-Tahrir during the 25th January Egyptian Revolution. I draw on the contentious politics literature, as well as micro-sociologies of violence and ritual, to suggest that fraternizing protestors developed a repertoire of contention that made immediate, emotional claims on the loyalty of regime troops. From initial techniques of micro-conflict avoidance, protestors and their micro-interactions with soldiers forged a precarious “internal frontier” that bifurcated governance from sovereignty through the performance of the army and the people as one hand in opposition to the Mubarak regime.
58 citations
TL;DR: The authors suggest that Indonesia contains a common but overlooked example of "godly nationalism", an imagined community bound by a shared theism and mobilized through the state in cooperation with religious organizations.
Abstract: Since democratization, Indonesia has played host to a curious form of ethnic conflict: militant vigilante groups attacking a small, socially marginal religious sect called Ahmadiyah. While most scholars attribute the violence to intolerance by radicals on the periphery of society, this article proposes a different reading based on an intertwined reconfiguration of Indonesian nationalism and religion. I suggest that Indonesia contains a common but overlooked example of “godly nationalism,” an imagined community bound by a shared theism and mobilized through the state in cooperation with religious organizations. This model for nationalism is modern, plural, and predicated on the exclusion of religious heterodoxy. Newly collected archival and ethnographic material reveal how the state's and Muslim civil society's long-standing exclusion of Ahmadiyah and other heterodox groups has helped produce the “we-feeling” that helps constitute contemporary Indonesian nationalism. I conclude by intervening in a recent debate about religious freedom to suggest that conflicts over blasphemy reflect Muslim civil society's effort to delineate an incipient model of nationalism and tolerance while avoiding the templates of liberal secularism or theocracy.
56 citations
TL;DR: The authors examined how processes of Evangelical Christianization have transformed notions of the self in one Amazonian society (Wari') and two unrelated societies in Melanesia (Bosavi and Urapmin).
Abstract: The last several decades have seen both a renewed anthropological interest in the possibility of cross-cultural comparison and the rapid rise of the anthropology of Christianity. These two trends should be mutually supportive. One of the promises of the anthropology of Christianity from the outset has been that it will allow people to compare how processes of Christianization have unfolded in different parts of the world and to consider how the resulting Christian configurations are similar to and different from one another. But to this point, relatively little detailed comparative empirical work on Christianity has appeared. Our aim here is to contribute to remedying this situation. Drawing on recent theoretical work on comparison, we set comparative work on Christianity on a new footing. Empirically, we examine how processes of Evangelical Christianization have transformed notions of the self in one Amazonian society (Wari') and two unrelated societies in Melanesia (Bosavi and Urapmin). We define the self for comparative purposes as composed of ideas of the mind or inner self, the body, and relations between people. In our three cases, Christianization has radically transformed these ideas, emphasizing the inner self and downplaying the importance of the body and of social relations. While our empirical conclusions are not wholly unexpected, the extent to which the details of our three cases speak comparatively to one another, and the extent to which the broad processes of Christian transformation they involve are similar, are surprising and lay a promising foundation for future comparative work in the anthropology of Christianity.
48 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compare the strategies through which India and Indonesia have regulated religion and addressed questions of what constitutes "the religious" in the post-independence period, and argue that what determines the consequences of the policy toward religion is less the choice of the implementing institution (i.e., the judiciary or bureaucracy) than the mode of delegation (vertical versus horizontal) which shapes the relationship between the policymaker and the institution implementing it.
Abstract: This article compares the strategies through which Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Indonesia have regulated religion and addressed questions of what constitutes “the religious” in the post-independence period. We show that the dominant approach pursued by the Indian state has been one of judicialization—the delegation of religious questions to the high courts—while in Indonesia it has predominantly been one of bureaucratization—the regulation of religious issues by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Contrary to the expectation that judicialization devitalizes normative conflicts while bureaucratization, more frequently associated with authoritarian politics, “locks” these conflicts “in,” we show that these expectations have not materialized, and at times, the effects have been reverse. Engaging the literatures on judicialization and on bureaucratization, we argue that what determines the consequences of the policy toward religion is less the choice of the implementing institution (i.e., the judiciary or bureaucracy) than the mode of delegation (vertical versus horizontal) which shapes the relationship between the policy-maker and the institution implementing it. Bureaucrats, judges, and elected politicians in multicultural societies around the world encounter questions of religious nature very similar to those that authorities in India and Indonesia have faced. How they address the challenge of religious heterogeneity has a profound impact on prospects of nation-building and democratization. It is therefore imperative that the consequences of the policy toward religion, and even more so the consequences of political delegation, be studied more systematically.
31 citations
TL;DR: The concept of "nation-state science" was introduced by as discussed by the authors to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state.
Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of “nation-state science” to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the “Lapps” (today's Sami/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.
28 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze the historical foundations of the regulation of religion and name changes in Turkey by fully and explicitly engaging with law as a site where minority difference is constructed, authorized, and challenged.
Abstract: Over the last fifteen years, hundreds of Muslim citizens claiming Armenian descent have submitted petitions to Turkey's secular legal authorities asking for changes to both their name and religion in the public record. In this article, I discuss the name-change cases of Armenian return converts to further the debates on Turkish secularism and to critique the body of scholarship that welcomes the governing Justice and Development Party's legal reforms as a measure of growing religious tolerance. In the article's first part I analyze the historical foundations of the regulation of religion and name changes in Turkey by fully and explicitly engaging with law as a site where minority difference is constructed, authorized, and challenged. The article's second half offers an alternative reading of how tolerance functions as an aspect of the Justice and Development Party's reforms. Based on my investigation of specific legal forms of argument that converted Armenians and their lawyers put forward in today's secular courts, and how legal officers of the state respond to them, I demonstrate that legal reform has shifted the definition of religion as a marker of minority difference in legal space. I argue that the historical context of name change and religious conversion forces the limits of existing understandings of freedom of religion in Turkey, and that this renders visible historical injustices that cannot be resolved simply through the notion of “religious tolerance” in the courts.
27 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use qualitative research in Uttarakhand, India to highlight the vitality of civil society and the involvement of young people in everyday "civic" politics, and show that a new generation of educated, underemployed youth in the village of Bemni serve their community in key ways.
Abstract: This paper uses qualitative research in Uttarakhand, India to highlight the vitality of civil society and the involvement of young people in everyday “civic” politics. Much recent academic literature emphasizes the ubiquity of narrowly self-interested patronage politics in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as captured in the saying sometimes attributed to politicians in Cameroon: “I graze therefore I am.” But in specific moments or conjunctures, more “civic” forms of politics come to light, perhaps especially among youth. Building on intensive, qualitative field research, we show that a new generation of educated, underemployed youth in the village of Bemni serve their community in key ways. They also make strong arguments about the nature of “politics” and how it might be re-imagined as “generative”—concerned with building resources—rather than “allocative”—a zero-sum game of competition for power. We draw attention to the potentials of this practice and discourse of politics as well as its limits, particularly that it is dominated by young men and tends to reproduce caste and gender inequalities. We also call for more concerted study of youth community activism in contexts of predatory clientelism.
24 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the workings of kinship and marriage idioms in transnational political imaginary in the central Mediterranean to challenge current academic reliance on the notion of fraternity as the symbolic building block of both national and global political relations.
Abstract: This paper examines the workings of kinship and marriage idioms in transnational political imaginary in the central Mediterranean to challenge current academic reliance on the notion of fraternity as the symbolic building block of both national and global political relations. Since the 1960s, the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo and its fishing fleet have become entwined in intensifying interactions with Tunisia and the wider Maghreb. These interactions—specifically the Tunisian-Italian “Fish War” and construction of a trans-Mediterranean natural gas pipeline between North Africa and Europe—rejuvenated the old geopolitical imagination of the Mediterranean and helped produce the central Mediterranean as a spatio-temporal field of political action. Italians and Tunisians perceived each other as related, and staged the trans-Mediterranean infrastructural project as a sort of European-African (cross-cousin) marriage. I begin by examining the tensions between two central kinship idioms—fraternity and cousinage—in current understandings of transnational relations. I then discuss the growing prevalence of a transnational political cosmology of affinity across difference over that of shared descent and sameness that characterize national alignments. I conclude by examining how Tunisians and Sicilians in Mazara today cast each other in roles deriving from segmentary schemes they share, but on the content of which they disagree. By applying concepts associated with kinship and marriage studies to recent Mediterranean history, I show how segmentation, a concept anthropologists abandoned when they crossed the Mediterranean on their way into Europe, can help us understand transnational politics.
24 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the history of the concept of civilization and argue for the continuing importance and relevance of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History within that tradition, arguing that, whatever the weaknesses of the general approach, the civilizational perspective he adopts allows him to cast an illuminating light on many important historical questions.
Abstract: After a period of neglect, civilization as a concept seems once more to have regained popularity among a number of historians and social scientists. Why? What is the appeal of civilization today? And might the return of civilization also herald a return to the work of Arnold Toynbee, once regarded as the towering figure of civilizational analysis? This paper considers the history of the concept of civilization, and argues for the continuing importance and relevance of Toynbee's multi-volume A Study of History within that tradition. The claim is that, whatever the weaknesses of Toynbee's general approach, the civilizational perspective he adopts allows him to cast an illuminating light on many important historical questions. Moreover his belief in the “philosophical contemporaneity” and equal value of all civilizations should make him peculiarly attractive to those many today who reject Eurocentrism and who are increasingly persuaded of the need to consider the total human experience from earliest times up to the present.
23 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a reinterpretation of the origins of the Cold War from a novel point of view: Soviet foreign economic policy is presented, arguing that an immensely powerful liberal world order acted on the Soviet Union in ways that should be familiar to scholars of global capitalism.
Abstract: This paper is a reinterpretation of the origins of the Cold War from a novel point of view: Soviet foreign economic policy. It questions two fundamental concepts that have formed the basis for our understanding of that conflict: Soviet autarky, and bipolarity. Soviet autarky has been the basis for an understanding of a “war” that, although never fought on military terms, needed two sides to be so conceptualized. Just as enemies in war can have no areas of meaningful cooperation, so did academics require of these Cold War rivals an all-encompassing enmity. To do so they came to consider the Soviet Union a camp apart, unconnected and hostile to the capitalist order. Scholars required a Soviet Union politically committed to autarky. Using archives from Moscow, however, the article argues that the Soviet Union was not autarkic by political choice and, at length, not autarkic at all. It followed a similar trajectory in international economic engagement as that of the countries in the so-called free world, and what's more, sought to do so. In other words, when one looks at the political economy of Soviet economic relations, the conceptual framework of bipolarity that sustains much of the work on the Cold War becomes difficult to maintain. Instead, I argue, an immensely powerful liberal world order acted on the Soviet Union in ways that should be familiar to scholars of global capitalism.
21 citations
TL;DR: Srivichai's treason charge was in fact a charge of treason as discussed by the authors, and the treason charge should be understood within the context of Buddhist millenarianism, which is consistent with apocalyptic omens in the Buddhist repertoire portending the advent of Maitreya.
Abstract: Despite a growing literature revealing the presence of millenarian movements in both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist societies, scholars have been remarkably reluctant to consider the role of messianic beliefs in Buddhist societies Khruubaa Srivichai (1878–1938) is the most famous monk of northern Thailand and is widely revered as a tonbun, or saint Although tonbun has been depoliticized in the modern context, the term also refers to a savior who is an incarnation of the coming Maitreya Buddha In 1920 Srivichai was sent under arrest to the capital city of Bangkok to face eight charges This essay focuses on the charge that he claimed to possess the god Indra's sword Although this charge has been widely ignored, it was in fact a charge of treason In this essay, I argue that the treason charge should be understood within the context of Buddhist millenarianism I note the saint/savior tropes in Srivichai's mytho-biography, describe the prevalence of millenarianism in the region, and detail the political economy of the decade of the 1910s prior to Srivichai's detention I present evidence to show that the decade was characterized by famine, dislocation, disease, and other disasters of both natural and social causes Such hardships would have been consistent with apocalyptic omens in the Buddhist repertoire portending the advent of Maitreya Understanding Srivichai in this millenarian context helps to explain both the hopes of the populace and the fears of the state during that tumultuous decade
TL;DR: This article argued that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.
Abstract: Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how accusations of cannibalism in post-conflict Mozambique, which were leveled in the context of individually driven and protracted struggles, have contributed to ongoing and contested forms of social transformation in the country.
Abstract: This article explores how accusations of cannibalism in post-conflict Mozambique, which were leveled in the context of individually driven and protracted struggles, albeit with cultural spinoffs, have contributed to ongoing and contested forms of social transformation in the country. The accusations were accentuated by the mobilizing effects of memories of violence and interventions of the mass media, which in turn highlighted the enduring struggle over the politics of local recognition and authority and its dynamic and broader links to state-building and legitimacy in Mozambique. This analysis traces the origins of cannibal accusations in culture and politics and, through a discussion of the biographies of concrete social actors and their open and discreet struggles, has wider repercussions for the study of the role of indigenous beliefs about, and fears of, cannibals and witches on state-building in post-conflict countries.
TL;DR: The history of Islamic law in Russian Central Asia defies many of the categorizations offered by both global and Russian imperial history as discussed by the authors, and it is argued that Russians, from the outset of their rule in Central Asia, initiated Muslims into colonial forms of legality by overcoming the jurisdictional separation they had themselves put in place.
Abstract: The history of Islamic law in Russian Central Asia defies many of the categorizations offered by both global and Russian imperial history. Recent studies of law in the age of colonialism have concluded that the attainment of legal hegemony in the colonies was consequent upon the initiative of indigenes that strategically manipulated jurisdictions; as colonial subjects increasingly involved the state in their private conflicts, they effectively pushed their masters to consolidate the institutional arrangements through which the state dispensed justice. Historians of the Russian Empire have reached a diametrically different conclusion: under tsarist rule, they argue, Muslims continued to access the services of the “native courts,” which remained mostly untouched following Russia's southeastward expansion. As the empire promoted a policy of differentiated jurisprudence, Russians effectively safeguarded the integrity of Islamic law. I argue that both of the aforementioned approaches are confined to the level of institutional history, and thus fail to consider that the creation of colonial hegemony rested on ways in which colonial subjects understood law and viewed themselves as legal subjects. I show that Russians, from the outset of their rule in Central Asia, initiated Muslims into colonial forms of legality by overcoming the jurisdictional separation they had themselves put in place. In allowing the local population to file their grievances with the military bureaucracy, the Russians effectively pushed Central Asians to reify colonial notions of justice, and thereby distance themselves from the tradition of Islamic legal practices.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the role of public ethics and morality in Botswana as reflected in key notions used by High Court judges, such as the duty to act fairly and legitimate expectations.
Abstract: This paper analyses the significance of the Botswana High Court and Court of Appeal judgments of a case in which the Manual Worker Union, a blue-collar public sector union, challenged the Botswana Government to reinstate dismissed workers with all their past benefits. I examine the role of public ethics and morality in Botswana as reflected in key notions used by High Court judges, such as “the duty to act fairly” and “legitimate expectations,” and argue that legal anthropologists have neglected such ideas, despite their having become a bedrock of contemporary judicial reasoning. While anthropology has shown a renewed interest in ethics, issues of public ethics and morality remain relatively unexplored in contemporary legal anthropological debates. One has to go back to the work of Max Gluckman on reasonableness in judicial decision-making among the Barotse to find foundational anthropological insights into the morality and ethics of law in non-Western societies. In the legally plural context of Botswana, notions of equity and fairness, this paper argues, “permeate” the legal landscape.
TL;DR: This article examined the shifting trajectories of the classification struggles over Korean migrants in Manchuria during Japan's occupation of Korea and argued that the colonial state's extensive and intensive trans-border engagement provided a critical institutional scaffolding for the imagined community of the Korean nation.
Abstract: Studies of European colonialism have long documented how colonial states served as incubators of nationhood, yet the literature has limited its analytic scope largely to the encounters and ethnic mixings that took place within the territorial boundaries of colonies. This article examines a hitherto understudied phenomenon, the colonial state's trans-border engagement with its subjects who left the territorial unit of the colony and its impact on the contested development of diasporic nationhood. My empirical focus is the shifting trajectories of the classification struggles over Korean migrants in Manchuria during Japan's occupation of Korea. I identify the tumultuous and uneven development of specific legal, organizational, and bureaucratic infrastructures that helped the colonial state extend its trans-border reach and define and identify these migrants as “its own,” often against suspicion, sabotage, hostility, and resistance on the part of other states, indigenous populations, or migrants themselves. I argue that the colonial state's extensive and intensive transborder engagement provided a critical institutional scaffolding for the imagined community of the Korean nation, which came to be conceived as transcending the geographical boundary of the colony. This article contributes to the comparative studies of empire, migration, diaspora, and nationhood formation by challenging the prevalent sedentary bias of the existing literature, by elucidating the critical infrastructural underpinning of the formation of diasporic nationhood, and by extending the horizon of comparison to the political dynamics and long-term ramifications engendered by the migration of, not only metropolitan settlers, but also colonial subjects, within and beyond the ambit of the empire.
TL;DR: The history of the PNG repugnancy clause from its colonial origins and through the relevant case law since the country's independence is investigated in this article, where the authors ask how the clause acquired its non-legal meaning through legal usage, and why it has been retained in its original form in PNG when so many postcolonial legal regimes have discarded it.
Abstract: The Constitution of Papua New Guinea (PNG) features a peculiar artifact of colonial-era law known as a repugnancy clause. This type of clause, used elsewhere as a neutral mechanism to identify conflicts between legal provisions, has in PNG become a tool for the moral-aesthetic evaluation of “customary law.” In this article, I follow the history of the PNG repugnancy clause from its colonial origins and through the relevant case law since the country's independence in order to ask both how the clause acquired its non-legal meaning through legal usage, and why it has been retained in its original form in PNG when so many postcolonial legal regimes have discarded it. Comparative material from Indonesia, sub-Saharan Africa, and especially Australia is used to contextualize the durability of the PNG repugnancy clause, and theoretical material on the affect of disgust and shame is brought to bear in order to understand the use of repugnancy in its moral-aesthetic sense. The article concludes with a meditation on the way the repugnancy clause has enabled the judiciary of PNG to distance the law of the country not simply from an uneducated or inadequately Christian general populace, but also from a history in which all Papua New Guineans were regarded as a contaminating threat to the European colonizers whose legal system the country has inherited.
TL;DR: The role of history in modern African society vis-a-vis the developmental agendas and notions of economic growth against which African "progress" and prospects for stability are currently measured.
Abstract: The public and professional significance of precolonial History as a discipline has declined markedly across much of sub-Saharan Africa over the last forty years: History has been both demonized—depicted as deeply dangerous and the source of savagery and instability—and portrayed as irrelevant when set alongside the needs for economic modernization and “development.” This paper explores this trend in the context of Uganda, with a particular focus on the kingdom of Buganda, chosen for its particularly rich oral and literary heritage and the thematic opportunities offered by its complex and troubled twentieth century. The paper aims to explore how “the past”—with a focus on the precolonial era—has been understood there in several distinct periods. These include the era of imperial partition and the formation of the Uganda Protectorate between the 1880s and the 1910s; competition for political space within colonial society to the 1950s; decolonization and the struggle to create new nationhood in the mid-twentieth century; and political crises and partial recovery since the 1970s. Ultimately, the paper seeks to assess the role of History in a modern African society vis-a-vis the developmental agendas and notions of economic growth against which African “progress” and prospects for “stability” are currently measured.
TL;DR: In this article, the dialectic of remembering and forgetting within larger processes and transformations of the postwar order in East Asia, in particular the American occupation and the emergence of the Cold War, is discussed.
Abstract: Between 1895 and 1945 Japan assembled one of the largest empires in modern world history. It vanished abruptly in the summer of 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and seemed to leave no trace in public consciousness. Historians, too, have portrayed postwar Japan as characterized by a virtual erasure of the imperial past. This article draws on recent scholarship to argue that things were more complicated than that. While references to the imperial past indeed dwindled after about 1960, immediate forgetting did not exhaust the reactions by individuals and interest groups. Some social milieus experienced the dissolution of the empire much more profoundly than official discourse would suggest. Since the mid-1990s, Japan's imperial past has reemerged as a major field of historical inquiry and a more general concern in public debate. In this article I situate the dialectic of remembering and forgetting within larger processes and transformations of the postwar order in East Asia, in particular the American occupation and the emergence of the Cold War.
TL;DR: In the summer of 2008, I accompanied the people of Ox Horn, a village of the Mazu islands, on a direct-sailing (zhihang) pilgrimage from Taiwan to China.
Abstract: In the summer of 2008 I accompanied the people of Ox Horn, a village of the Mazu islands, on a direct-sailing (zhihang) pilgrimage from Taiwan to China. It was the first pilgrimage that the villagers had ever organized. When the ferry sailed into port in China, there was a great tumult in the cabin. The pilgrims hurried to the deck with their cameras and excitedly started photographing the scenery along the shore, their expressions a mixture of curiosity and wonder at coming to a place they had only imagined before. Pilgrimage (jinxing) is an important topic in the study of Chinese religion and has attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines (Chang 2002; Dott 2004; Naquin and Yu 1992; Sangren 1987). Sangren’s seminal work, History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (1987), took this subject to a new level by investigating the underlying cultural logic of pilgrimage and challenging previous, structural-functionalist approaches in the study of Chinese religion. His book is rich in its discussion of yin/yang cultural ideas and how they operate in pilgrimage and other rituals. However, if we look at contemporary pilgrimages, particularly the recent popular cross-strait ones between China and Taiwan (Lin, Chang, and Tsai 2003; Stewart and Strathern 2007; 2009), we find the picture has taken on new tones and
TL;DR: The authors analyzes discourses of assimilation concerning Japanese emigrants as a case study of how the ways in which members are understood to leave the national community delimits the bases of belonging for those who remain.
Abstract: Assimilation makes new members of a group by changing particular characteristics of non-members to reflect the fundamentals of collective belonging. Gaining the qualities for inclusion in one community typically involves losing at least some features that confer acceptance in another. However, scholars have generally not acknowledged assimilation as a process of loss. In part, this gap bespeaks a larger tendency to overlook the influence of emigration on national identity in population-exporting states (compared to the vast literature on immigration and national identity in population-receiving countries). This article analyzes discourses of assimilation concerning Japanese emigrants as a case study of how the ways in which members are understood to leave the national community delimits the bases of belonging for those who remain. Historically, Japanese ideologies of assimilation have been most contested in Brazil, where the largest Japanese diaspora in the West sought to reconcile patriotism and the expectations of the Japanese government with local nation-building agendas. After World War II, many emigrants and their descendants in Brazil refused to acknowledge Japan's surrender. This crisis inspired the first study of the Japanese diaspora ever conducted by a Japan-based social scientist. Izumi Seiichi's work in cultural anthropology helped to build Japan's new identity as a “peace state.” Subsequent generations of Japanese scholars continued to study the assimilation of the diaspora, recategorized as “Nikkei,” as a foil for “Japaneseness.” Their ethnic conception of national membership remains influential today, even as Japan transitions from a population exporter to a land of immigrants, including the Nikkei.
TL;DR: The organization of revolutionary guerrilla movements by the Latin American left came in two largely discrete waves as mentioned in this paper, the first was triggered by the success of the Cuban 26th of July movement against the late 1950s regime of Fulgencio Batista.
Abstract: The organization of revolutionary guerrilla movements by the Latin American left came in two largely discrete waves. The first was occasioned by the success of the Cuban 26th of July movement against the late 1950s regime of Fulgencio Batista. Within less than a year it was triggering imitative efforts across Latin America via the cultural diffusion of its “foco model” both indirectly and directly, as indicated by the timing, internal movement evidence, direct training, and other sources concerning the 1960s guerrilla movements. A clear dampening of such efforts followed upon the multiple failures of the imitators, the late 1967 death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, the withdrawal of Soviet-line communists in Latin America from their previous support for insurgency, and finally Cuba's own rapprochement with the USSR. At this juncture, “surviving” movements from the earlier period were few—notably in Colombia, less true in Guatemala and Nicaragua—but a second, narrower cluster of far larger, more intensive and active movements developed by the later 1970s. Such strong survivors or newcomers can be best understood, not as imitations of Cuba 1959, but via their new strategies of long-term patient organizing and by the types of “closed regimes” they were confronting in the 1970s–1980s. They, too, then mostly faded away in the face of national-level experiences of massive military repression or ever-more-competitive electoral democracies.
TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic examination of images of Ratu Kidul across a range of media, attending to their material qualities as mediums by which the spirit queen appears and circulates.
Abstract: Ratu Kidul is a legendary spirit queen who plays a significant role in Javanese political ontologies and has come to be an icon of Indonesian public culture. In this paper, I trace the history of her mediation as image via paint, photography, television, film, and the Internet in order to ask how this queen of the unseen world came to be so visible a feature of the postcolonial landscape and to interrogate the nature and effects of this visibility. I argue that becoming accessible via the image was necessary to her continued political agency within a mass-mediated national public sphere in which visibility and circulation are preconditions of political recognition. Yet popular reception of images of Ratu Kidul as auratic conduits of her spiritual power reveal the continued presence of a visuality within Indonesian national modernity that runs counter to dominant logics of transparency. I offer an ethnographic examination of images of Ratu Kidul across a range of media, attending to their material qualities as mediums by which the spirit queen appears and circulates. Broadly, the essay argues that national political orders and their public spheres cannot be understood apart from a history of visual mediation.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine critically the constitution of photographic heritage in the region ethnographically and historically and examine key actors currently involved in shaping photographic heritage: the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, and private collectors in Egypt.
Abstract: The past decade and a half have seen the founding of new archival initiatives in the Middle East devoted to collecting and preserving photographs. This article examines critically the constitution of photographic heritage in the region ethnographically and historically. I look first at how historical photographs are understood in Egypt by their custodians old and new. Publics and institutions overwhelmingly see photographs as “images of something,” and appreciate them for their visual content rather than as social and cultural objects. This facilitates their transfer from public collections into private hands in Egypt and abroad. I examine in detail key actors currently involved in shaping photographic heritage: the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, and private collectors in Egypt. I look at how these actors assign value to historical photographs in their custody and their strategies for collecting and curating them. They often define their actions negatively, “against others,” historically against a state that they believe has failed to care for national heritage. Yet these very actors, and their rivals, often perpetuate such narratives and associated fears. Two models of photographic heritage-making are currently emerging in the region: a “digital” model that destroys artifacts in order to produce data, and a model of private cultural institutions that provide unclear and selective access to their collections.
TL;DR: The authors examined the conditions of book accumulation in two places in the world economy, California and Peru, through the narratives left by book collector Hubert Bancroft and librarian and historian Jorge Basadre.
Abstract: The essay examines the conditions of book accumulation in two places in the world economy, California and Peru, through the narratives left by book collector Hubert Bancroft and librarian and historian Jorge Basadre. A reading of these reveals the complex interrelations between socioeconomic development and cultural accumulation. In California, Bancroft turned his fortune accumulated through business into a unique book collection and this, in turn, was placed at the service of a “factory of history” that produced a multivolume “History of the Pacific States of North America.” In the Peruvian case, after a fire destroyed most of the collections of the National Library of Lima, historian Basadre directed an effort of reconstruction that led him to reflect upon the state's neglect of cultural patrimony, popular disdain for high culture, and Peru's long tradition of exporting books and documents to foreign collectors and libraries. Basadre's reflections speak of the position of a peripheral intellectual within a context of underdevelopment. I examine the centripetal logic of book accumulation and call for further engagement with this neglected side of cultural history.
TL;DR: In this paper, a study of Inner Mongolian land reform undertaken by the Qing government in the last decade of its rule is presented, where the authors examine the metamorphosis of the multi-ethnic governing relationships enabled by the reform.
Abstract: This article is a study of the Inner Mongolian land reform undertaken by the Qing government in the last decade of its rule. Instead of portraying land reform as a state process of taming and transforming nomads, I examine the metamorphosis of the multi-ethnic governing relationships enabled by the reform. The frontier governance system on which I focus consisted of coalitions and conflicts among four key players: Mongol banners, neighboring Han Chinese provinces, the Court of Dependencies, and frontier military governors. By elucidating the changing relationships that bound these players together, I pinpoint the most significant agendas of land reform, how the Mongols' position vis-a-vis state agencies changed throughout the reform process, and to what extent these changes resulted in state centralization. My study illuminates a variety of topics, including nomad sedentarization, frontier politics, and modern state expansion.
TL;DR: A case study from war-torn Sierra Leone in 1994, in which a rumor galvanized violent public action and only dissipated when a seemingly unrelated issue was resolved, was examined in this article.
Abstract: This article examines a case study from war-torn Sierra Leone in 1994, in which a rumor galvanized violent public action and only dissipated when a seemingly unrelated issue was resolved. I argue that the circulation of rumors can foment the emergence of political narratives focused on topics that are otherwise taboo, and creates the space to act on them without overtly disturbing the status quo. I analyze the content of interview material with residents of the town of Makeni and eight months of articles printed in national newspapers to illustrate the subtle emergence of tribal accusations in the context of military mutiny. The rumor itself concerned an imminent attack by mutinous, criminal soldiers (called sobels) on the town they were meant to defend. This instigated a mass demonstration, shooting into a crowd, political mudslinging, and accusations that some politicians were trying to “tribalize the war.” Responding to the distress, the government removed the offending “tribalist” administrator from Makeni, and all talk of sobel fears dissipated, even as the reality of sobels was borne out in confirmed attacks and a high profile court-martialing. That tribal favoritism was the real issue was illustrated by residents' embrace of their new military administrator and the town's unprecedented move towards development in the midst of renewed security threats.
TL;DR: This article explored how Peruvian immigrants in Spain experience new notions of belonging and alterity as they tack between official Spanish discourses about difference and otherness and distinct notions of unity and sameness that circulate within the country's wider Latin American community.
Abstract: This article uses commentary on and consumption of popular music as a lens to explore how Peruvian immigrants in Spain experience new notions of belonging and alterity as they tack between official Spanish discourses about difference and otherness and distinct notions of unity and sameness that circulate within the country's wider Latin American community. I examine the uneven, tentative emergence of a local Latino identity, and how this formation compares to the tenets that accrue to the formation found in the United States. I explain how the naturalization of this new and alien way of organizing national difference, in concert with native Spanish ideas about European modernity and the need to suppress ethnicity tout court , tends to marginalize distinctive experiences valued by indigenous and mestizo Peruvians from the country's Andean region. I show how they evade the homogenizing tendencies of Latino discourse, bypass native Spanish opposition to the very notion of deep difference, and seek out spaces for asserting difference. Considered also are challenges faced by a country that has undergone rapid and recent multicultural change, even as it seeks to become part of a European project that citizens view widely as an effort to transcend divisive particularity.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine multidirectional migrations of workers between Russia and the United States that underlay but sometimes collided with Ford's system and suggest that rather than separate and alternative projects, Ford's burgeoning system to transform manufacturing and workers' lives in Detroit was linked to the Soviet revolutionary project to recreate life and work.
Abstract: The expansion of the Ford Motor Company into Soviet Russia has been understood as part of a unidirectional spread of American economic power and cultural forms abroad following the First World War. This essay looks beyond the automobiles and manufacturing methods sent from Ford facilities in Detroit to the emerging Soviet automobile industry to examine multidirectional migrations of workers between Russia and the United States that underlay but sometimes collided with Ford's system. Workers, managers, engineers, and cultural, technical, and disciplinary knowledge moved back and forth between factories in Soviet Russia and the United States. Efforts to define, track, and shape workers in both countries as Americans, Russians, or Bolsheviks were integral to the construction of the products and methods that Ford sold. But many workers fell in between and contested these classifications and they often defied company attempts to create an efficient and homogeneous American workforce. In Russia, too, more than Soviet and American automobiles were produced: people and ideas were created that crossed and blurred boundaries between “American” and “Soviet.” There, “Fordizm” became a popular watchword among Soviet commentators and workers as a near-synonym for industrialization, mass production, and efficiency. Many saw it as a potentially valuable component of a new socialist world. These multidirectional movements, recorded in Ford Motor Company archives and related documents, suggest that rather than separate and alternative projects, Ford's burgeoning system to transform manufacturing and workers' lives in Detroit was linked to the Soviet revolutionary project to recreate life and work.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the emergence of outgroup political elites in confessionally defined societies and demonstrate that the status of minority elites was related to concrete political circumstances grounded in the particular environment of the region, and that, despite cultural differences that might have distinguished them, these societies developed near-identical strategies for engaging with minority elites.
Abstract: One of the most salient features of the medieval Mediterranean is that it was a zone of intense interaction and long-term cohabitation of members of various ethno-religious communities whose relations are usually conceived of as fundamentally adversarial. Yet Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived amongst each other in both the Christian- and Muslim-ruled Mediterranean, even during the era of the crusades. Typically, such relationships have been presented as either fundamentally hostile, or cordial, and as related to the “tolerance” that host cultures were inclined to demonstrate as a consequence of their own religious orientation. This paper takes a different, phenomenological approach by focusing on a specific manifestation of this interaction: the emergence of out-group political elites in confessionally defined societies. Through the medium of three case studies—a powerful Jew in Islamic Spain, a powerful Muslim in Norman Sicily and a powerful Coptic Christian in Fatimid Egypt—I demonstrate that the status of minority elites was related to concrete political circumstances grounded in the particular environment of the region, and that, despite cultural differences that might have distinguished them, these societies developed near-identical strategies for engaging with minority elites. The language of religious polemic, exclusion, and marginalization was present, but it tended to serve as a post factum rationalization for repression rather than its cause, and tended to be deployed decisively only in certain circumstances. This provides new insights not only into Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations, but the fundamental nature of Mediterranean history and society.