The development of high-speed rail (HSR) infrastructure in the United States faces a great challenge given concerns of economic viability and political complexity. However, an in-depth investigation reveals that some of these challenges and complexities regarding high-speed rail mobility can be elucidated by historical and cultural characteristics that affect daily behavior, lifestyle, and public attitudes in U.S. society. This essay discusses the debate on the U.S. high-speed rail development policy from the perspective of American exceptionalism. Through an exploration of the four traits of American exceptionalism, the essay argues that the stagnation of U.S. federal high-speed rail initiatives can be explained by U.S. cultural constraints: individualism, antistatism, populism, and egalitarianism. Unless more solid evidence is provided to convince the public about the benefits of HSR mobility, the HSR debate is likely to continue in the United States.
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Culture Constraints of High-Speed Rail in the United States
A Perspective from American Exceptionalism
Zhenhua Chen
Assemblies and the struggle to diffuse power
Ethnographic examples and contemporary practices
Stefano Boni
The article is focused on the practical mechanisms of assembly management in egalitarian settings in a comparative perspective: on the one hand, I examine assemblies in what may be termed classic ethnographic settings (principally East African pastoralists); on the other hand, I turn to meetings in recent social movements (the Occupy movement in the United States and Slovenia; the 15M in Spain; Greece and Bosnia). I have two principal aims. First, I wish to identify and evaluate similarities and differences in the running of meetings with regard to processes of consensus building; the coordination of assemblies through the creation of roles and the menace of leadership; and the management of place, time, and speech. Second, I aim to evaluate current social movements' use of alterpolitics, intended as the practical and imaginary reference to group meetings of the historical, sectarian, or ethnic other.
City, Community, Nation, State
Participation and Spectacle
Judith Kapferer
The events and sites of a national holiday (17 May in Bergen, Norway) are the grounds from which to draw out meanings of nationalism and tradition, and analyze ideologies of egalitarianism and individualism in a social democratic welfare state. My project has two aims: to open up and deconstruct aspects of the material and symbolic life of the city, and to engage an examination of patterns of local and national community life in relation to shifting evaluations of localism and nationalism within the a changing state formation. Bergen can be thought of as a case study of social order and control, with women, children, and reverence for home life, highlighted in the town’s celebrations. The symbolism of the day discovers community and state in a difficult relation between domestic communities and nationalist ideology in the maintenance of governmentality, a relation mediated by the city itself.
In Social Analysis
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2004
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 108–125 (18 total)
Neither Reformers nor Réformés
The Construction of French Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
Gavin Murray-Miller
Modernity has typically been considered a process consisting of “modernizing” initiatives concerned with nation-building, industrial economic development, and new social and political practices associated with democratization. This article engages ongoing debates regarding the import and meaning of modernity for historians and argues in favor of an historically situated understanding of the modern based upon an examination of social power and identity in post-revolutionary France. In particular, it assesses the transformation of social and political relationships in the nineteenth century as France embraced mass democracy and overseas imperial expansion in North Africa, arguing that modernity became a convenient means of preserving elite primacy and identity in an age increasingly oriented toward egalitarianism, democratic participation, and the acquisition of global empires.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 44–67 (24 total)
Conservative Crossings
Bernard Faÿ and the Rise of American Studies in Third-Republic France
John L. Harvey
Perhaps no other French historian led such a sordid academic career as that of Bernard Faÿ, who held the first European chair in American history at the Collège de France from 1932 to his removal in 1944. Celebrated as the leading interwar specialist on America, Faÿ was a steadfast ally of the Catholic political Right. His conservatism, however, never threatened his international stature or his domestic academic standing until 1940, after which he led the Vichy regime's assault on Freemasonry. He succeeded as a historian by employing research on the United States to reject traditions of popular sovereignty, while also embracing new methodological trends that critiqued scientific positivism, often as an attack on the intellectual foundation of the Third Republic. His legacy suggests how the conceptual legitimacy of secular, egalitarian society could be contested through the very ideas that "cosmopolitan modernity" had sought to support.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2010
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 95–124 (30 total)
Margalit Shilo
At the turn of the twenty-first century, educated feminist religious Jewish women who regard themselves as obligated to observe Halacha and to adhere to the framework of patriarchal institutions feel torn and frustrated. They want to continue to maintain uncompromising loyalty to their families, congregations, and communities, and at the same time make exhaustive efforts to modify the Jewish religious system from within and invest it with new, egalitarian content. This article describes the emergence of Kolech—Religious Women's Forum, an organization founded by Israeli religious feminist women in 1998. Kolech aims at producing new answers to these pressing dilemmas. The article discusses the possibility of combining feminist concepts with patriarchal traditions, analyzes Kolech's strategy and newly adopted proposals, and examines Israeli attitudes toward this organization.
In Israel Studies Review
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2006
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 81–95 (15 total)
Giving them the slip
Israeli employers' strategic falsification of pay slips to disguise the violation of Thai farmworkers' right to the minimum wage
Matan Kaminer
In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel’s then Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett (2013; my translation) wrote: 'If an Israeli employer knows that he has to pay every worker the minimum wage, give him one day off a week, pay overtime and produce pay slips – he just won’t employ infiltrators and foreign workers. He will choose an Israeli worker. This is how we dry the main fuel which sets fire to the problem of infiltrators in south Tel Aviv and across the country, and at the same time do justice to workers who are exploited in substandard conditions.' Bennett posits the equal protections of labour law as primarily informed not by a universalist concern for the welfare of all workers but by a desire to exclude both documented ‘foreign workers’ and undocumented ‘infiltrators’ from the labour market. A document – the pay slip – serves in Bennett’s plan as an icon of legality and a tool in the hands of this policy of exclusion through egalitarianism.
In Journal of Legal Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Other
- Pages:
- 124–127 (3 total)
Militant collectivity
Building solidarities in the Maoist movement in Nepal
Dan V. Hirslund
A stubborn, anticapitalist movement, Maoism has persisted in the global periphery for the many past decades despite its tainted image as a progressive alterpolitical platform. This article seeks to ponder why this is the case by looking at a recent and popular example of leftist radical politics in the MLM tradition. I argue that contemporary Nepali Maoism is offering a militant, collectivist, antiliberal model for confronting capitalist and state hegemony in an effort to forge new class solidarities. Responding to a changed political environment for continuing its program of socialist revolution, I trace how the Maoist party's efforts at building a mass movement become centered on the question of organization, and in particular the requirements of what I term an ethical organization. Through an analysis of how caste and gender equalities are institutionalized within the movement, and the various ways in which collectivity becomes linked to concrete practices, the article offers an ethnographic analysis of contested egalitarian agency within a movement undergoing rapid change.
Slavery as the commodification of people
Wa "slaves" and their Chinese "sisters"
Magnus Fiskesjö
In the 1950s, teams of Chinese government ethnologists helped liberate “slaves” whom they identified among the Wa people in the course of China’s military annexation and pacification of the formerly autonomous Wa lands, between China and Burma. For the Chinese, the “discovery” of these “slaves” proved the Engels-Morganian evolutionist theory that the supposedly primitive and therefore predominantly egalitarian Wa society was teetering on the threshold between Ur- Communism and ancient slavery. A closer examination of the historical and cultural context of slavery in China and in the Wa lands reveals a different dynamics of commodification, which also sheds light on slavery more generally. In this article I discuss the rejection of slavery under Wa kinship ideology, the adoption of child war captives, and the anomalous Chinese mine slaves in the Wa lands. I also discuss the trade in people emerging with the opium export economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which helped sustain, yet also threatened, autonomous Wa society. I suggest that past Wa “slave” trade was spurred by the same processes of commodification that historically drove the Chinese trade in people, and in recent decades have produced the large-scale human trafficking across Asia, which UN officials have labeled “the largest slave trade in history” and which often hides slavery under the cover of kinship.
Beyond Failure
Bureaucratic Labour and the Will to Improve in Kenya's Experiments with Universal Health Care
Ruth Prince
Abstract
In a radical move that recalled the egalitarian promises of Kenya's post-independence years, the Kenyan government recently made all public health care free, for residents in four counties, for a period of one year. Drawing on ethnographic research on these ambitions for ‘universal health coverage’, this article follows civil servants tasked with the delivery of public services as they attempt to translate an experimental policy into practice and encounter repeated and ongoing failure. These officials had long experiences of health system failures and did not expect success this time either. Yet, they planned and delivered interventions in a hopeful mood, maintaining a sense of purpose and bracketing a sense of doubt and cynicism. Utopian projects like universal health care offer interesting sites for ethnographic research – not only because of what they set out to achieve, but because of what they generate along the way, including hopeful engagements. I study how bureaucracy may be a site of hope and optimism in the post-colonial state's capacity to improve lives, even while bureaucrats have ample experience of its failures. I explore how bureaucrats sought to engage failure and success as partial and productive, allowing a space in which they could deliver some form of public good.
Dans un geste radical qui rappelle les promesses égalitaires des années post-indépendance du Kenya, le gouvernement kenyan a récemment rendu tous les soins de santé publics gratuits pour les résidents de quatre comtés, pendant un an. S'inspirant d'une recherche ethnographique sur ces expériences ambitieuses de « couverture sanitaire universelle », cet article suit des fonctionnaires chargés de fournir des services publics alors qu'ils tentent de mettre en pratique une politique expérimentale et se heurtent à des échecs répétés et constants. Ces fonctionnaires ne s'attendaient pas à la réussite et avaient une longue expérience des échecs du système de santé ; pourtant, ils ont planifié et réalisé des interventions dans un état d'esprit marqué par l'espoir, en maintenant un sens de l'objectif et en mettant entre parenthèses leurs doute ou leur cynisme. Les projets utopiques comme les soins de santé universels offrent des sites intéressants pour la recherche ethnographique, non seulement en raison de ce qu'ils visent à réaliser, mais aussi en raison de ce qu'ils génèrent en cours de route, y compris des engagements pleins d'espoir. J'étudie comment la bureaucratie peut être un lieu d'optimisme dans la capacité de l'État post-colonial à améliorer les vies, même si les bureaucrates ont une longue expérience de ses échecs. J'explore comment les bureaucrates ont cherché à engager l'échec et le succès comme partiels et productifs, permettant un espace dans lequel ils pourraient fournir une certaine forme de bien public.
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 56–80 (25 total)