Materials relating to East European Jewish history and culture in the archives of the former Soviet Union

The Kiev Institute of Jewish (from the early 1930s “Proletarian”) Culture (Institut Evreiskoi Proletarskoi Kul'tury, IEPK), based at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAS), was one of two such organisations in the inter-war period. This article discusses the fate of its archive, a rich source that included material from Leningrad and elsewhere, in the wake of two interventions; firstly, its sudden closure in 1936 by the Soviet authorities and, secondly, the Nazi occupation of Kiev in the Second World War. As a consequence, the archive was scattered to the winds, ending up in two continents.     

Theorizing with Archives: Contingency,Mistakes, and Plausible Alternatives

Qualitative Sociology - What are “good” kinds of archival evidence for theorizing? Surprisingly, the word archive and discussions of the archival process rarely appear in methods...     

Teaching and Learning Guide to Accompany Graffiti as a Form of Contentious Political Participation

The authors develop four exercises to further explore themes that are discussed in the Waldner and Dobratz article “Graffiti as a Form of Contentious Political Participation (Sociology Compass 7: 377–389),” including Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Madres de Plaza de Mayo), From Famous Political Speech (“Ich Bin Ein Berliner”) to Graffiti: “Ich bin Berliner”, “Protest, Violence, and Graffiti in Greek Politics,” and “Political Speech or Just Tagging: Billboards and Culture Jamming.” The authors encourage students to explore them such as motivations for graffiti, the difficulty in discerning writer intent, the use of graffiti as a form of political protest, and the historical and geographical context of graffiti. The authors provide links to YouTube videos and supplementary readings.     

Human Rights Matter

This article serves as a response to all those who commented on my original essay “Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and, Yes, from American Sociology.”     

Saving the Savior

This article begins with an autobiographical reflection about what sociology has meant to me as an Iranian intellectual. Sociology has enabled me to think critically about my country's politics and culture, appreciating its strengths without overlooking its unjust and injurious aspects. That experience shapes my answer to the question “Saving Sociology?” If there is anything in sociology that I would like to save–in both senses “to keep” and “to rescue”—it is sociology as a critical, reflective discipline, a discipline that not only studies society but also contributes to its change. As the contemporary world moves toward a “global” society, we are increasingly facing the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Sociologists often investigate other societies or (like myself) look back at their own from a spatial and cultural distance. This situation has created a dilemma for many scholars: Should we criticize problems stemming from “indigenous” beliefs and practices of other societies? Cultural relativism argues that different cultures provide indigenous answers to their social problems that should be judged in their own context. While this approach correctly encourages us to avoid ethnocentrism, it has led to inaction towards the suffering of oppressed groups. Reflecting on the relativist approach to sexual dominance, I question some cultural relativist assumptions. Discussing how “indigenous” responses to male domination in many cases disguise and protect that domination, I will challenge the “localist” approach of relativism and argue for a universalist approach.     

Post-abolition Angola in a post-colonial mission archive: a preliminary contextualisation of a photograph from the Spiritans’ mission in Malange,northern Angola, 1904

This essay is about issues of methodology when undertaking research in a post-colonial missionary archive. It is an attempt at recovering the local history of post-abolition Angola from the photographic holdings of the archive of the Spiritan Congregation by restoring the links of a photograph to its context and to contemporary historical discourse. The subject matter is a photograph taken in 1904 at the mission of Malange, in northern Angola. It shows catechists, men and women wearing European and African dress, and children, some of whom were born “free,” while others were “freed slaves.” They were grouped around a Marian shrine on the occasion of the inauguration of the first printed edition of Spiritans’ bilingual catechism in Portuguese and Kimbundu. By commuting between foreground and background, the essay traces the ramifications of the history of a cultural zone of confluence of different worlds. The project underlying the essay is to use historical photographs to recover the past seen from “the other side.”     

What Does a “Thank you” Cost? Informal Exchange and the Case of “Brift” in Contemporary Russia

Qualitative Sociology - The following article addresses the complex nature of informal exchange in contemporary Russia. I borrow the term “brift” from Abel Polese in order to analyze a...     

Tropic Knights and Hula Belles: War and Tourism in the South Pacific

Through the discussion of a collection of photographs, this paper explores aspects of the relationship between tourism and war in the Pacific islands. These unpublished photographs were taken by a US naval officer stationed on Saipan and Tinian in 1944 and 1945 and are now held in an archive which contains other material from the Pacific War. A brief history is given of the photographer’s military career and of the circumstances in which the images were taken.

The body of the paper considers the politics of representation through which military and tourist sensibilities overlap. Drawing upon the work of John Urry and Teresia Teaiwa and with close reference to the Yeagar collection I demonstrate the symbiosis between the scopophilic gaze of the first world tourist and the gaze of military surveillance. Simultaneously relying upon tourist stereotypes to distract from military violence while using military force to fulfill touristic fantasies, the Yeagar photographs exemplify the complex looking relations of the soldier‐tourist. This hybrid gaze structure offers a conceptual model for more clearly understanding the development of “militourism” in the Pacific islands during, and since, World War II.     

American Sociology: History and Racially Gendered Classed Knowledge Reproduction

The purpose of this paper is to explore how racially gendered classed power‐relations structure history, knowledge and American Sociology's historical memory and disciplinary knowledge production. In order to do so, this paper will 1) utilize Cabral's (1970) theory of history to center humanity as historically developed into a racially gendered classed capitalist world‐system, 2) employ intersectionality as a heuristic device to see how knowledge is manipulated to normalize dehumanization as well as to perpetuate exploitation and privilege by denying “Othered' ” knowledges, and lastly 3) sociologically imagine this racially gendered classed process in the “institutional‐structure” of American Sociology by exploring the ancestry of the concept of “intersectionality.” In all this paper argues 1) American Sociology under theorizes history, a central aspect of the sociological imagination and production of new sociological knowledge, 2) American Sociology reproduces a dehumanized theory of history per Marx's “historical materialism” and 3) the structure of American Sociology's knowledge is racially gendered classed, as illustrated in the collective memory of the concept of “intersectionality.”     

Emotional Landscapes of Risk: Emotion and Culture in American Self-sufficiency Movements

Qualitative Sociology - Americans who identify as “homesteaders” and “preppers” seek to live “self-sufficient” lifestyles by distancing themselves from...     

Negotiating Personal Experience over the Lifetime: Narrative Elasticity as an Analytic Tool

Sociology and neighboring disciplines have produced different analytic tools to examine the dialogical relationship between individuals and society (“narrative work,” “identity work,” “moral career,” “moral breakdown”). However, the question of how individuals negotiate the interpretation of personal experience over their lifetimes in a changing cultural context remains unexplored. This article introduces narrative elasticity as a feature of narrative work and as a time‐sensitive analytic tool for conducting inquiries into processes of temporal retraction and expansion of what storytellers conceive as the normal order of significance. The application of this tool to the analysis of mature and elderly Chileans' life stories shows how cultural change occurs at the individual level, considers factors that motivate and inhibit processes of reinterpretation of personal experience, and identifies different levels at which it operates.     

The U.S. Economic Polity,Social Identity,and International Human Rights

In this essay, I provide some complementary perspectives on certain themes that emerge in Judith Blau's (2016) timely and insightful article, “Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and, Yes, from American Sociology.” In response, I offer some very brief reflections structured through two prisms by which we might think further about the United States and human rights. These perspectives pick up on the core issue of Blau's article, the U.S. rejection of socioeconomic rights, and how this issue in turn relates first to the “social identity” of the United States as a whole, and second to the role of the political economy in states' recognition of human rights.     

Beyond Triangulation: Reconstructing Mandela’s Writing Life through Propulsive Facilitation at the Archive

Qualitative Sociology - Multimethod studies generally fall under what are referred to as “confirmatory” or “complementary” approaches. Yet in addition to these two...     

If Human Rights Mattered

This article is a response to Judith Blau's ( 2016 ) essay, “Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and, Yes, from American Sociology.” Here, I argue that if human rights mattered, then liberty could be assured. And absent human rights, liberty is a sham.     

Measures and Their Countermeasures: Reflexivity and Second‐Order Reactivity in Quantifying Immigrant Integration

Sociology is inherently reflexive. It deals with actors who themselves are constantly engaged in sociological reasoning. Concepts from academic sociology are thus prone to enter and affect the very dynamics they describe. The sociology of quantification is particularly attuned to such paradoxical effects of “reactivity,” that is, measurements and categories altering observed realities. The article builds on these insights but extends them by adding one more iteration of reflexivity. Examining administrative integration departments in Germany that have implemented statistical indicators for measuring immigrant incorporation, it attends to a case where bureaucrats are themselves anticipating “reactivity” of the measurements they use. Integration officers fear that integration indicators may inadvertently reify and stigmatize the statistical category of first‐ to third‐generation immigrants, or “persons with a migration background.” Consequently, they engage in various counterstrategies to offset such effects. Most notably, they launch a counter‐campaign against negative connotations of migration background that their own measurements are reinforcing as they frame migration background as an asset for society. The article argues that this is an example of second‐order reactivity, a phenomenon as yet neglected in the literature: Officers alter reality in reaction to an anticipated reactivity of their own integration statistics.     

David Goldblatt’s making visible: photographic strategies of rumination,orchestration and circulation

This article seeks to understand David Goldblatt’s innovations within the ‘documentary’ photography genre. Arguing that his photographic projects seek public intellectual engagement, it proposes that an understanding of the circulation of Goldblatt’s photographs is critical to grasping the public intellectual engagement of his photographic practice. The article tracks the material forms of photographic circulation, including the texts that accompany the photographs and the texts that flow from them, and argues that photographic public discursive interventions are at once visual, but in exceeding the boundaries of the visual also material and textual. This draws together the forms of circulation and the kinds of publics they address and call into being, not only at the time of the initial production and circulation of the photographs, but also in their archive and its impact on subsequent public discursivity about these photographs.     

Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA

The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an “objectification machine” that endeavors to transform and to stabilize artworks as meaningful “objects” that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the extent to which the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks and, more specially, on whether these behave as “docile” or “unruly” objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduction. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new “material sensibility” that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology.     

Ecstatic things

Abstract

This article addresses the orchestration of domestic lighting as an object of anthropological study. It takes Bedouin domestic architecture in southern Jordan as a starting point in an analysis of how light is used as means of safeguarding spaces as part of hospitality practices central to Bedouin culture. By arguing that things are “ecstatic” in the sense that they transcend their own tangibility, the article shows how objects, such as tinted windows, impose themselves on other objects to shape the particular visual presence of the world that informants opt for. Such a presence of the world is analyzed through the notion of “atmosphere” as a contemporaneity of subjective emotions, cultural ideals, and material phenomena. Thus, while boundaries between interior and exterior may be upheld by tangible material strategies, such as walls, these boundaries may also simultaneously be permeated by the ecstasy of material things, which aim to safeguard other aspects of life through less tangible strategies.     

“Embodying” dirty work: A review of the literature

This article reviews the growing literature on dirty work, i.e., work that is seen as disgusting or degrading and argues for a more “embodied” understanding of such work. It points to a tendency in the literature to focus on the nature of the task or role and on social and moral dimensions of the work at the expense of its material and embodied aspects. The latter are discussed through three, interrelated themes: “embodied suitability” whereby forms of dirty work are seen as suitable for some “working bodies” and not for others; “staining” which is presented as both a material and a symbolic process; and the role of work practices in both supporting and undermining ideological constructions around the work. The article concludes by arguing for a more comprehensive approach which includes both the material and the symbolic into accounts of such work.