Contradictions of the ‘New Green Revolution’: A View from South America's Southern Cone

This paper is an examination of the social, economic, and environmental problems created by the search for and application of biotechnological solutions to global hunger that are also protected by a system of globally harmonized intellectual property rights. These contradictions are illustrated by the example of South America's Southern Cone region (Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay) where the ‘New Green Revolution’ has since 1996 been vigorously introduced, led by genetically modified (GM) soybeans. It is argued that the ‘New Green Revolution’ is not a solution either to the problem of agro-ecological sustainability or to that of hunger and malnutrition.

Este artículo examina los problemas sociales, económicos y del medio ambiente, creados en busca de soluciones biotecnológicas para el hambre global, soluciones que también son protegidas por el sistema global armónico de derechos de propiedad intelectual. Estas contradicciones quedan claramente ilustradas utilizando el ejemplo de la región del Cono Sur en Suramérica (Argentina, Brasil y Paraguay) donde la “Nueva Revolución Verde” ha sido fuertemente introducida desde 1996, liderada por la utilización de soya genéticamente modificada (GM). Se argumenta que la “La nueva revolución verde” no es la solución para el problema de la sustentabilidad agro-ecológica ni para el hambre y la desnutrición.

     

A ‘Minority’ on the Move: Boundary Work among Filipina Muslim Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

This article analyses the migration of a religious ‘minority’ that is largely invisible within migration studies, namely Muslim Filipina domestic workers. More specifically, this research shows that the category of ‘minority’ is not fixed and is always negotiated through transnational spaces and boundary work. In doing so, the article highlights how religious belonging, the status of minority and migration intersect and are negotiated during the period prior to these women leaving their country, during their time in the country of destination, and when they return to the Philippines. How boundary work affects the religious belonging of this Muslim ‘minority’ is underlined by presenting the Middle East as an opportunity to perform norms of ‘Muslimness’. The performance of these norms as an opportunity for these women to challenge the status of being a ‘minority’ in the Philippines is also examined. Finally, this article shows how these Muslim ‘minorities’ gain access to a certain symbolic capital by becoming hajji and balikbayan (returnees) when they return home.     

Whither Sociology? Some Reflections on the Ideas of ‘Globalization’ and ‘Social Capital’1

The history of the social sciences provides instructive instances of clairvoyance on the part of some of its principal luminaries as well as periods of general institutional myopia. The 30-year history of the ISA Research Committee on Sociotechnics itself is an interesting representation of the path sociology in its mainstream and less orthodox (or deviant—depending on the perspective of the observer—configurations has traversed in these last decades. I vividly recall meeting Adam Podgorecki first at the meetings of the International Sociological Association in Washington and again, in the spring of 1973, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. And I remember equally well meeting him again at the first meetings of the Research Committee on Sociotechnics at Loughborough University in England and at a later meeting in 1974, which was convened at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.     

‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Cancer in the South’: Discourses of Race,Nation and Anti-blackness in Early Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican Immigration

This article explores the flexible manner in which discourses of anti-black racism were employed within congressional debates on the proposed restriction of Mexican immigration at the end of the 1920s. I examine how both sides of this debate placed Mexicans within a particular historical narrative of race and nation, positioned in relation to a range of other populations, including Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Within these narratives, slavery and the imagined negro problem were particularly salient, being frequently used to orient racial interpretations of Mexican immigrants as well as the manner in which they were positioned in relation to other ‘racial elements’. Imprinted with US histories of slavery, conquest and empire, these discourses offer insight into the ambivalent interrelationships of American’s multiple trajectories of racism.     

“VY Mudimbe: from the ‘Nation’ to the ‘Global’ – ‘Who is the Master?' ”

This article examines Valentin Yves Mudimbe's work form the early 1970s, in the neo-colonial era, to the present day, a period marked by the advent of “Empire”, as conceived by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. The investigation appraises the way in which Mudimbe's epistemological excavation of African discourses and discourses about Africa serves wider ethical and political objectives resonating with critiques of anthropology as formulated by Benoît Verhaegen and Johannes Fabian in the 1960s and 1970s. Part I focuses on Zairian nationalism (“Zairianization”) and the ambition, on the part of the Mobutu regime, to develop an authentic national culture. This examination of the birth of a Zairian “community” is developed through a comparison between Mudimbe's little-studied Autour de la “nation” (1972) and Kangafu Kutumbagana's Discours sur l'authenticité (1973) and is argued on the basis of a number of propositions formulated by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community (1991). The second part of the article focuses on Mudimbe's On African Fault Lines (2013); it examines Mudimbe's attempts, in his analyses of contemporary works by Deepa Rajkumar and Geert Hofstede, to reflect on globalization and to assess the political and ethical relevance of critical tools developed in the neo-colonial period to denounce the unequal basis of anthropology.     

Globalization as the ‘Pulping’ of Landscapes: Forestry Capitalism's North–South Territorial Accumulation

Abstract

The article presents the findings of a long-term incorporated comparison of forestry capitalism's globalization process. Primary data was collected by participant observation in pulp investment areas in Brazil between 2004 and 2011 and semi-structured interviews with key industry personnel, particularly in Finland. It is argued that the key cyclic change in industrial forestry from innovation–capitalization to material–territorial accumulation explains why and how the industry has globalized to the south via industrial tree plantations. The interlinked northern (Finnish) and southern (Brazilian) cases reveal that industry trajectories are influenced by who controls the supply chains of commodities. The findings are relevant for theorizing about the globalization of natural resource exploitation sectors. Changes in agrarian political economies and agency of state, business, and social movement actors—that is, socio-ecological relations and landscapes—help to explain how and why national and global capitalism and its developmental–environmental impacts are transformed.

Este artículo presenta las conclusiones de una comparación incorporada a largo plazo sobre el proceso de la globalización de la silvicultura capitalista. Los datos primarios fueron recopilados mediante la observación participante en áreas de inversión de celulosa en el Brasil entre el 2004 y 2011 y entrevistas semiestructuradas con el personal clave de la industria, particularmente en Finlandia. Se sostiene que el cambio cíclico clave en la silvicultura industrial desde la innovación–capitalización a lo material–acumulación territorial, explica el porqué y cómo la industria se ha globalizado hacia el sur vía plantaciones de árboles industriales. La interconexión entre los casos del norte (finlandeses) y del sur (brasileño), revelan que las trayectorias de la industria están influenciadas por quien controla las cadenas de suministro de productos básicos. Las conclusiones son pertinentes para teorizar sobre la globalización de los sectores de explotación de los recursos naturales. Cambios en las economías políticas agrarias y los actores de las agencias de estado, negocios y movimientos sociales—es decir, relaciones y paisajes socioecológicos—ayudan a explicar cómo y por qué el capitalismo nacional y global y sus desarrollos—impactos medioambientales, están transformados.

本文演示对森林资本主义的全球化过程的公司化比较研究的一些发现。在2004至2011期间在巴西的纸浆投资领域的原始数据通过研究人员的观察收集,并且,对相关工业界人士,尤其是在芬兰,进行半结构性的采访。在森林工业的从创新-资本化到物质的-领土的积累关键的周期变化解释了这一产业通过产业化的种植园为什么和如何在南方实现了全球化。南（巴西）北（芬兰）相互联系机制的案例说明,工业的发展趋势受制于谁控制商品的供应链。此项发现与关于自然资源开采部门的全球化的理论是相关的。在土地开发的政治经济的变化,以及国家机构、商业和社会运动的行动者——也就是社会-生态关系和风景——帮助解释了国家和全球资本主义以及其发展-环境影响如何与为什么受到转型的。

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В статье представлены результаты долгосрочного объединенного сравнения процесса глобализации капитализма лесоводства. Первичные данные были собраны путем включенного наблюдения за целлюлозно - инвестиционным направлением в Бразилии с 2004 по 2011 год и частично структурированных интервью с ключевыми сотрудниками промышленности, в частности в Финляндии. Утверждается, что ключевое циклическое изменение в индустриальном лесоводстве от капитализации инноваций до материально-территориального накопления объясняет, почему и как промышленность глобализировалась на юг через индустриальные плантации деревьев. Взаимосвязанные северный (финский) и южный (бразильский) случаи показывают, что промышленные траектории находятся под влиянием того, кто управляет каналами поставок товаров потребления. Выводы важны для теоретического осмысления глобализации сектора эксплуатации природных ресурсов. Изменения в аграрной экономике и государственных органах, бизнесе и субъектах общественных движений, то есть в социально-экологических отношениях и ландшафтах, помогают объяснить, как и почему национальный и глобальный капитализм и связанные с их развитием последствия будут преобразованы.     

Hegemonic Masculinity and Globalization: ‘Transnational Business Masculinities’ and Beyond

In recent years masculinity studies writers, in particular R. W. Connell, have focused on the relationship between globalization and ‘hegemonic’ forms of masculinity. This paper provides an assessment of this scholarship and argues that whilst Connell and others have usefully identified the gendered nature of globalization, masculinity scholars have also provided a somewhat limiting account of the global hegemonic role of a monolithic top-down ‘transnational business masculinity’. By contrast, we suggest a demassification of this notion of hegemonic masculinity. Such a demassification enables the opening up of a dialogue between masculinity studies and feminist and other critical globalization scholars, allowing for a more nuanced analysis that can attend to both the unevenness of globalization in different settings and more detailed awareness of interactions between global and local/cultural/state imperatives. Our aim here is to move away from conceptualizations of globalization and hegemonic masculinity that are exceptionally top-down towards an analysis of the contested and shifting nature of gender identity at the global as well as the local level, to highlight the ways in which different hegemonic masculinities are negotiated, and even resisted. We argue that by understanding ‘transnational business masculinity’ as a discursive ideal that legitimates the workings of global capitalism, there is scope for a greater level of engagement between critical globalization scholarship and gender studies. This might also open the door to an account of globalization that entails more detailed reference to women and femininities.

En años recientes, los escritores sobre Los Estudios de la Masculinidad, y en particular R.W. Connell, se han enfocado en la relación entre la globalización y las formas ‘hegemónicas’ de la masculinidad. Este artículo proporciona una evaluación de esta beca y sostiene que mientras Connell y otros han identificado de manera útil la naturaleza del género de la globalización, los académicos sobre la masculinidad también suministraron un reporte de cierta manera limitado, sobre el rol hegemónico global monolítico del más alto al más bajo, de ‘una masculinidad en los negocios transnacionales’. Por el contrario, nosotros sugerimos una desmasificación de esta noción de masculinidad hegemónica. Tal desmasificación hace posible la apertura de un diálogo entre Los Estudios de la Masculinidad y de Feministas y otros académicos críticos de la globalización, permitiendo un análisis más matizado que puede acudir tanto a la disparidad de la globalización en diferentes escenarios como a una mayor conciencia detallada sobre las interacciones entre los imperativos locales/culturales/estatales. Nuestra meta es separarnos de las conceptualizaciones de la globalización y de la masculinidad hegemónica que son excepcionalmente jerárquicas hacia un análisis de los controvertidos y trasladar la naturaleza de la identidad del género tanto a nivel global como al local, para resaltar las formas como las masculinidades hegemónicas diferentes han negociado, e incluso resistido. Sostenemos que al entender ‘la masculinidad en los negocios transnacionales’ como un ideal discursivo que legitimiza el funcionamiento del capitalismo global, existe un propósito para un nivel mayor de participación entre la investigación crítica de la globalización y los estudios del género. Esto también puede abrir la puerta a un informe de globalización que conlleve una referencia más detallada de mujeres y feminidades.

     

‘A frog in a well’: the exclusion of disabled people from work in Cambodia

Based on ethnographic research conducted in north‐west Cambodia in 2000–2001, this paper examines why disabled people experience systematic marginalisation in the labour market. Although there are no official data on the relationship between disability and employment status in Cambodia, this research suggests that disabled people are more likely than their able‐bodied counterparts to be unemployed, in low status occupations, earn less or be out of the labour market altogether. Consequently, disabled people are more likely to live in poverty, experience social isolation and poor mental health. I argue that disabled people’s social status effectively shapes their work patterns through (mis)conceptions that associate ‘disability’ with ‘inability’ to work and to be employable. This paper illustrates how geographical processes fix disabled people in their socio‐spatial place, which together with ideological and structural inequalities distinguish and entrench their poverty from that of other social groups.     

Global Transformations but Local, ‘Bubble’ Lives: Taking a Reality Check on Some Globalization Concepts

Several concepts and arguments have become an indispensable part of the standard discourse shared by globalization theorists and they point convincingly to real and deepening processes in global life. The paper suggests, however, that it is misleading and ultimately unproductive to assume that the vast majority of the world's non-elite population possess an equal grasp of these concepts, and the processes which they are designed to illuminate, or that they are able or willing to take appropriate actions in response. With this in mind, and drawing on some recent theoretical critiques and empirical studies, the discussion interrogates ideas about interconnectivity, mobility, de-territorialization and globality. In doing so it argues that we need to pay much more attention to the everyday subjective lives of ordinary people since these continue to be locked into affiliations and obligations constructed, inevitably, as much around place as flows and which remain partly dependent on co-present, primordial socialities despite their exposure to multiple globalizing influences.

Varios conceptos y argumentos se han convertido en parte indispensable del discurso convencional compartido por teóricos de la globalización, los cuales señalan en una manera convincente los procesos reales y cada vez más profundos en la vida global. El documento sugiere, sin embargo, que no es productivo asumir que la gran mayoría de la población que no pertenece a la élite posea un entendimiento equivalente sobre estos conceptos, así como de los procesos que se diseñaron para ilustrarlos, o que sean capaces o deseen tomar las acciones apropiadas como respuesta. Con esto en mente, y basándose en algunas críticas teóricas recientes así como en estudios empíricos, la discusión interroga sobre interconectividad, movilidad, desterritorialización y globalidad. Al hacerlo, argumenta que debemos prestar mucha más atención a la vidas diarias subjetivas de la gente común, puesto que éstas continúan ligadas a afiliaciones y obligaciones elaboradas inevitablemente, tanto alrededor del lugar como de los flujos y que continúan permaneciendo parcialmente dependientes a socialismos copresentes y primordiales a pesar de su exposición a diversas influencias a favor de la globalización.     

A ‘Lost Crowd’: Reconfiguring the Harlem Renaissance as a Post-War ‘Lost Generation’

Abstract

Traditionally for black Americans, World War I did not signify the traumatic removal of traditional Victorian ideals, the end of any romantic notions of battle, or, as it would for white American literature, the disillusionment and alienation of a literary ‘Lost Generation’. Although experiencing continued racism upon their return, the recognition that black Americans had received in wartime France came to characterize a budding enthusiasm for the social prospects of the post-war era. Yet many novels of the Harlem Renaissance certainly resonate with the disillusionment of the Lost Generation and similarly grapple with notions of war trauma and traumatic post-war (re)integration into a chaotic American society. This article considers the endeavour to reconcile feelings of post-war national unity with the African-American struggle for racial equality in the early twentieth century. By evaluating the analogous themes of alienation, masculinity, and place represented by both the Lost Generation and Harlem Renaissance, this article seeks to highlight traumatic parallels between post-war literatures of two divergent ‘lost’ generations.     

‘Ghost in the Shell’: Reflections on Fieldwork in Kazakhstan

After independence from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan proclaimed Kazakhs the title ethnic group, and the Kazakh language the national language. This deprived the Russian-speaking population of its former dominant social position. Being a Russian-speaking citizen of Kazakhstan, the daughter of a half-Korean half-Russian father and a half-Kazakh half-German mother, I did my field work as a presumed ‘native’ anthropologist at Kazakhstan State University with linguistically divided groups of students. The relations between the field and the researcher disclosed different geopolitical realities of knowledge production and challenged the legacy of relativist methodology. I reflect on this experience and examine different conceptualisations of the native positionality in the post-Soviet context. Reflections in this paper raise new questions about nation-building in post-socialist states and about ‘nativeness’ itself, and contribute to the criticism of postmodern theory.     

A semiotic approach to ‘ethnicity’. An example from Taiwanese ‘Chineseness’

For a few decades, socio-cultural as well as linguistic anthropologists have worked hard to construct a reliable semiotic paradigm to study linguistic, cultural and social interactions. These subfields – linguistic, cultural and social – are often analytically tackled asunder, though they are intimately interconnected, intertwined and overlapping. The semiotic theory of culture is not a novel discovery in itself, but it can also be applied to the study of society and ethnicity. Culture, society and ethnicity are systems of communication, that is systems of signs; society is a system of signs whose meaning emerges from social interactions and ethnicity a system of signs whose meaning is strategically imposed by a specific society through a specific culture. Moreover, those three systems of communication, of signs, are interconnected in various ways. This essay will analyze ‘Taiwanese Ethnicity’ in its semiotic dimension, and explore how society, culture and ethnicity interact in constructing an ethnic identification.     

Lights of disenchantment: a study of Max Weber’s thesis on the ‘disenchantment of the world’ from the perspective of visual studies

At the end of 1917, during a conference at Munich University, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) made a bold announcement: ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”.’ In this article, I provide an interpretation of the notion of ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Subsequently, I present visual material that might further illuminate Weber’s idea. In the third part, I strictly concentrate my attention on one argument suggested by Weber: in ‘disenchanted’ societies ‘mysterious incalculable forces do not come into play anymore.’ Through two exemplary sculptures by the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1884), I continue my visual excursus on the ‘disenchantment’ thesis by connecting Weber’s account on the intellectualisation of religious world-views with the autonomisation of the aesthetic sphere. The overall ambition of this article lies in providing an introductory account to an important intellectual problem and historical process through visual and textual analysis.     

Polish-Jewish Relations 1903–1914: The View from the Chancellery

This article discusses Wajda’s discourse on class. First it identifies the most important problems the concept raises when applied to Wajda’s characters and narratives. Next, it discusses the director’s representation and evaluation of three types of characters: the intelligentsia, the working class, and individuals who fall in between these two groups. In addition, the article analyzes how the representation of class is influenced by Wajda’s attitude toward gender and ethnicity. It concludes that his attitude to the class system in Poland is conservative and identifies some of the factors that influenced him. This article is an exploration of these issues, rather than an analysis of his films. Priority is given to films set during and after the second World War.     

Exploring the ‘craftedness’ of multimedia narratives: from creation to interpretation

This paper emerges from a comparative study of two community-based multimedia storytelling projects in Toronto and Montreal, and the multimedia narratives participants produced in those projects. Following current scholarship in visual methods that acknowledges the significance for research of the medium’s formal qualities, the authors offer the concept of ‘craftedness’ as one which might help researchers grapple with the significance of the processes of both creating and interpreting visual data. Through a study of the visual data produced in these two projects, they examine three qualities of this aesthetic experience captured in the notion of craftedness, which seem to both complicate and enable processes of self-representation and interpretation: aesthetic distance, visual excess and the visualisation of the unrepresentable. Taking seriously the craftedness of multimedia works highlights the complexities of interpreting visual data and the dilemmas of representing ourselves and others.     

Nonverbal Emotion Priming: Evidence from the ‘Facial Affect Decision Task’

Affective associations between a speakers voice (emotional prosody) and a facial expression were investigated using a new on-line procedure, the Facial Affect Decision Task (FADT). Faces depicting one of four basic emotions were paired with utterances conveying an emotionally-related or unrelated prosody, followed by a yes/no judgement of the face as a true exemplar of emotion. Results established that prosodic characteristics facilitate the accuracy and speed of decisions about an emotionally congruent target face, supplying empirical support for the idea that information about discrete emotions is shared across major nonverbal channels. The FADT represents a promising tool for future on-line studies of nonverbal processing in both healthy and disordered individuals.The author gratefully acknowledges the service of Elmira Chan, Sarah Addleman, and Marta Fundamenski for running the experiment, and for helpful comments received from M. Harris, K. Scherer and anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of the paper. This research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

A Scandinavian Model? Gender Equality Discourses on Multiculturalism

Along with the other Nordic countries, Sweden, Denmark, andNorway are often perceived of as gender equality pioneers withcomprehensive gender equality policies. But how does the governmentalgender equality policy of today reflect that their populationshave become more culturally diverse during the last decades?My analysis, based partly on governmental action plans for genderequality 2000–2005, including the related parliamentarydebates, points to some similarities but also to major inter-countrydifferences. In all three countries, there is expressed a clearconcern for the agency of women and girls of ethnic minoritybackground, centered on violence and oppression. But, whileethnic minority and gender equality is highly prioritized inthe Danish gender equality policy, the same is not true forthe Swedish equivalent in the period studied. Also, the Danishcase gives the clearest example of what is believed to be conflictbetween minority cultural traditions and "Danish" equality norms,whereas the Swedish governmental rhetoric is dominated by theoriesof ongoing patriarchy, seemingly indifferent to cultural diversity.While Norway is characterized by a lack of overall gender equalityaction plans and parliamentary gender equality debates duringthis period, its policies towards gender and multiculturalismhave been managed largely as discrete issues.     

Understanding health inequalities: from ‘Transmitted Deprivation’ to ‘Social Capital’

This article examines the conceptualisation and use of memory in the social sciences, both as a methodological tool and as an object of research. The article situates memory as a vast potential resource for the social sciences in the exploration of relations between public and private life, agency and power, and the past, present and future. It goes on to recognise that the methodological issues surrounding the use of memory have, with few exceptions, rarely received sustained attention. The article argues for, and moves towards, developing a coherent account of the variety of practical techniques of using memory in data collection and analysis, and their appropriate use within a clear epistemological framework which distinguishes itself from conventional historiography and it’s criteria of validity. It is argued that without this attention to method, memory will remain on the margins of social science research.