This article focuses on the coverage of the murders of the young Shafia women. Based on an analysis of the coverage published in The Globe and Mail (July 2009 to March 2012), I argue that the young women were constructed as exceptional and worthy victims of a particularly heinous crime—honor killing—allegedly imported from Afghanistan by the Shafia patriarch. I interrogate the different threads that were interwoven to construct these young women's representations to make them intelligible as girls and young women. Within the coverage, the trope of culture clash anchored in an Orientalist framing worked to consolidate their representations as worthy victims and re-inscribe the national imaginary of Canadian society as egalitarian, tolerant and beyond gender violence. These different maneuvers served to accomplish a kind of posthumous rescue in a domestic context akin to the strategies of rescue implemented by Western powers in the War on Terror to save Afghan women.
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In Girlhood Studies
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 27–45 (19 total)
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.
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)
Culture Constraints of High-Speed Rail in the United States
A Perspective from American Exceptionalism
Zhenhua Chen
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.
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)
Neil Hibbert
This paper examines the prospects for social justice in a democratic community that is justified through the idea of contractual exchange as a cooperative scheme for mutual advantage. Common assumptions concerning the narrow institutional range of the mutual advantage framework are argued against, clearing away certain tensions between exchange and markets and equality and the welfare state. However, it is maintained that the principle of equality must further condition institutional formation beyond efficiency to satisfy the requirements of social justice. It is further advanced that the interest-based motivation in the idea of efficient exchange can be maintained in an egalitarian framework, when the shared interests and expectations of citizenship constitute an equal political baseline, from which universal social entitlement can be justified.
Alexander Motyl, Slavoj Zizek, Glyn Daly, Will Kymlicka, Nigel Gibson, and G.A. Cohen
Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities, by Alexander J. Motyl. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0231114311. Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires, by Alexander J. Motyl. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0231121105. Reviewed by Roger Deacon
Conversations with Zizek, by Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly. Polity: Cambridge, 2004. ISBN: 0745628974 Reviewed by Richard Pithouse
Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship, by Will Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0199240981. Reviewed by Laurence Piper
Frantz Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination, by Nigel Gibson. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. ISBN: 0745622615. Reviewed by Richard Pithouse
If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? by G.A. Cohen. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0674006933. Reviewed by Ben Parker
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)