The Personal,the Sociological,and the Intersection of the Two

Qualitative Sociology -     

Fashion,the passage,the body

Studies on transnational cultures have shown that local, national identities are not necessarily subordinated to, or erased by, the globalizing forces of the economy. Rather, the local mediates transnational cultures as well as it is transformed by the crossing of cultural boundaries. Likewise, emerging interdisciplinary and cultural studies approaches to Latin(o) popular music examine the ways in which musical production, circulation and reception create cultural spaces that challenge hegemonic notions of national identity and discrete cultural boundaries. This article examines the figure of the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, and the tensions among the multiple, transnational subjectivities that are constituted through her musical repertoire, her performances on stage, the aesthetics of her body, and her public statements in interviews. Having spanned more than sixty years of performances and recordings, Celia Cruz's diverse repertoire and musical selections have served as a performative locus for the negotiations of her Cubanness (her exile and national identity) and a hemispheric, Latin American identity that also includes the United States. Likewise, her construction of blackness as an Afro-Cuban woman transforms and is transformed by her collaborations with African-American musicians and singers, from jazz to hip-hop. Celia Cruz has also crossed racial and cultural boundaries by collaborating with Anglo musicians and by tropicalizing rock music. Her staged persona and her body aesthetics also reveal the fluidity with which the Queen of Latin music assumes diverse racial, national and historical identities while she simultaneously asserts her Cubanness through the use of Spanish on stage. Celia Cruz serves as a complex and intriguing icon of the relational nature of nationalism and transnationalism.     

Female Adolescents, the Experience of Violence, and the Meaning of the Body

Female adolescents who have experienced violence often struggle to maintain a sense of agency and control over their own bodies—bodies that have been objectified through direct physical assault. In order to understand more fully the impact of direct violence on the meaning of the body for female adolescents, the author discusses normative aspects of the meaning of the body and their relationship to the developmental processes of individuation and connectedness as well as subjectivity and objectivity. Case vignettes are used to explore the intersection of violence and the meaning and use of the body for female adolescents. Implications for intervention are proposed.     

Houellebecq,or, the Carnival of Spite

Despite their significance in social reality and in fiction, ressentiment and especially spite are surprisingly under‐researched topics. As the repressed other of the contemporary post‐political society, they often combine political impotence and enjoyment in passivity, two experiences that are closely related to the increasing transformation of the “city” into the state of nature, of politics to bio‐politics (or post‐politics) and of the “social” into the simulacra (the society of spectacle). The article discusses ressentiment and spite in Houellebecq's fiction, by taking point of departure in the way he depicts the contemporary society, combining this with a discussion of his artistic position and the affective economy of ressentiment and spite in his work. Finally it asks whether it is possible to imagine a sociality, a “city,” without spite.     

Scientists,the Media,and the Public Communication of Science

The relationship between scientists and journalists has evolved in recent years with the advent of numerous sociocultural changes and drastic shifts within the media ecosystem. Media professionals have traditionally been the gatekeepers of scientific information, but new media technologies grant scientists more power than ever before to be proactive about their public communication. In this article, I provide an overview of the science–media relationship and scientists as public communicators. Specifically, I recount the relationship that has traditionally existed between scientists and media professionals, explain how this relationship has evolved over recent years, and highlight what I believe are some of the most salient and exciting areas for future research examining scientists' efforts to engage with the public.     

The judge,the cop,and the queen of carnival: Ethnography,storytelling, and the (contested) meanings of protest

Theory and Society -     

Digitization,the Internet,and the Arts: eBay,Napster, SAG,and e-Books

Via four case studies we explore the extent to which digitization is transforming how people access and engage with the arts. The first case study is the online auction house eBay. We focus on a unique system whereby millions of users rate each other's integrity and reputations in a digital venue via a transparent system open to all users and visitors alike. The second case study examines the Screen Actors Guild strike against the advertising industry, which drew attention to the potential for and limitation of the replacement of human actors by digitized replicas. Third, we focus on e-books in the context of the prediction that most books, music and film entertainment will eventually be distributed electronically to the average household. The fourth case study analyzes the Napster debate over file sharing and duplication of online music. We focus on the ability of Napster to create a huge community of users sharing their own copies of digital music. From this point of view Napster represented a uniquely efficient and large-scale dream, a modern form of the cooperation and sharing of property envisaged by classical anarchist philosophers of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, and as always in anarchistic uprisings, another class claimed proprietary ownership in the material being shared and saw in Napster mostly collective theft on the part of ordinary citizens. Three of these four case studies centrally involve ordinary people using the digital media in creative and innovative ways. We conclude by arguing, against those who are skeptical about the transforming power of digitization, that even in the short time that it has been widely available digitization has so increased people's ability to interact creatively with products that this amounts to a qualitative change which, over the next few decades, is likely to develop so far as to justify the label revolution.     

Wind,coal, and copper: the politics of land grabbing,counterinsurgency, and the social engineering of extraction

ABSTRACT

The multiplicity of violent techniques employed to impose land control and extraction remains under acknowledged. This article reviews research conducted between the years 2014 and 2018 and draws on three case studies: wind energy development in Mexico, coal mining in Germany, and copper mining in Peru. The idea of 'engineering extraction' is advanced through counterinsurgency to acknowledge the extent of extractive violence, arguing that the term ‘land grabbing’ is indeed a more appropriate term than ‘land deals’. Engaging with the land grabbing literature, the three cases seek to advance discussions around ‘the political reactions “from below”’ by emphasizing ‘insurrectionary’ positions with resistance movements fighting land deals and extractive projects. This is followed by offering a typology of ‘hard’ coercive techniques and ‘soft’ technologies of social pacification that surfaced in each case. The conclusion reflects on the social technologies of resource extraction, recognizing how social discord, ecological and climate crises are engineered and enforced.     

Textbooks, the History of Sociology, and the Sociological Stock of Knowledge

Textbooks increasingly reflect changes in our sociological stock of knowledge about the founders of the discipline. Richard Hamilton is unaware of this research and its documentation of the flaws in earlier accounts of the history of the profession. In an effort to expand his disciplinary understanding, I briefly review the extensive scholarship on the sociology of Harriet Martineau which has been published over the last quarter of a century.     

Ghostly Images,Phantom Discourses,and the Virtuality of the Global

The central premise of this article is that the conceptual terrain of the global is fundamentally unstable, that its content is far from determined. This opens the door to many different interpretations and uses of the term, where the referent is not so much to a pre-given reality, or even a tangible geographical space. Rather, the global constitutes its own content in the various fields in which it gets deployed, selectively affirming particular images and representations, while denying, repressing, or otherwise excluding others. I draw on the early history of film to argue that the global is a virtual distribution of value and intelligibility, where its images and signs no longer ‘represent’ an independent reality, but actually shape and transform the inter-subjective experiences of its virtual subjects. I use a recent documentary film on call centers in India to demonstrate how distinct regimes of cinematic images enable different kinds of interventions into these virtual distributions, revealing the global as a richly imagined terrain of discourses and representations, which are always already subject to re-distribution.

El argumento principal de este artículo es que en el ámbito conceptual, lo global es fundamentalmente inestable, aún falta mucho para determinar su contenido. El término global tiene muchas interpretaciones y usos variados, dado que el referente no aplica a una realidad preestablecida ni corresponde a un espacio geográfico tangible. El término global constituye su propio contenido en los diferentes campos en los cuales es utilizado, aseverando imágenes y representaciones particulares selectivas, mientras que a la vez niega, reprime, o excluye otras. Me inspiro en los comienzos de la historia del cine para argumentar que lo global es la distribución virtual del valor y de la ininteligibilidad, donde las imágenes y los letreros ya no “representan” una realidad independiente, sino que forman y transforman las experiencias inter-subjetivas de sus sujetos virtuales. Utilizo un documental fílmico reciente sobre los “call centers” de la India para demostrar cómo diferentes regímenes de imágenes fílmicas permiten diferentes tipos de intervenciones a estos distribuidores virtuales, que revelan lo global como un rico imaginario de discursos y representaciones que siempre han sido y son sujetas a una re-distribución.

     

Preferences,the Agenda Setter,and the Distribution of Power in the EU

In this paper, we present a generalization of power indices which includes the preferences of the voters. Using a Multilinear Extension perspective (Owen in Manage Sci 18:p64–p72, 1972a) we measure the probability of the players’ voting “yes” for a particular political issue. Further, we randomize the issues and show the influence that the Agenda Setter can have on a player’s power. We demonstrate these results using data from the European Union to show how the power distribution may shift after enlargement and under the new Constitutional Treaty.     

Empiricism, Symbolic Realism, and the Mystique of the Extreme*

The empiricist/symbolic realist debate in the sociology of religion, as well as the broader objectivist/subjectivist controversy in social science, suffers from the mystique of the extreme. Emphasis has been placed on the two approaches as opposing alternatives, an either-or choice. This paper suggests that the mystique of the extreme prohibits perception of the necessary, dialectical complementarity of the two approaches. Neither alone can succeed in understanding religion scientifically. Research efforts must bring together the two perspectives by using what social anthropologists refer to as the emic and etic levels of analysis.     

Artisanal Cooperation, Forms of Labor, and the Global Economy, Chachapoyas, 1930s to the 1990s

Abstract Since the 1960s students of agrarian society have interpreted the existence of putatively "capitalist" economic practices and relations (e.g., commoditization, wage capitalist nature of the economies concerned. The present paper challenges this interpretation. Based on an analysis of artisanal production in the northern Peruvian Andes, the paper shows that purportedly "capitalist" economic practices may be fully commensurable with "non-capitalist" relations (e.g., forms of cooperation in the production process, kin ties, etc.), and may even act as an obstacle to capital accumulation. "Non-capitalist" forms of organizing the production process and of remunerating labor, on the other hand, may be essential to the accumulation process.