Civility and Humiliation under the French Flag: The Tensions of Colonial Liberalism in Pondicherry, 1871–86

This article explores the extension of political “liberty” and franchise – as well as the eventual extension of citizenship rights – to Indians during the decades of France's Third Republic (1870s–80s) in French colonial India. Not only does this example stand in stark contrast to the civil position of Indians in British India at the time, but it was also something of a unique situation in the French colonial world. How did the French attempt to apply a colonial policy of liberalism to Indian communities in Pondicherry, India, whose social world was constructed upon caste‐based rituals and rules? I argue that liberal policies that could violate caste rules concerning purity and lead to the loss of communal rights cannot be assessed without understanding how they were received and instrumentalized by the Indian population. Overall, the difficulty of transplanting liberalism in Pondicherry was not due just to the opposition of colonial society, but also due to the resistance of local Indians. Rejections of a more emancipatory agenda meant that the republican “civility” of liberty, equality and fraternity was compromised, and this illustrates one of the fundamental tensions in imperial/liberal discourse at the time.     

Religion and Incorporation: Islam in France and Germany

This article attempts to examine religion, particularly Islam, as an emergent type of corporate ethnicity in France and Germany and how Islam is represented and recognized in relation to the established principles governing the interaction of church and state both in the histories of each country and in comparison to the United States. Although religion constitutes one element of pluralism and diversity in which Islam would be the “religion of a minority” among other ethnic groups in the United States, in Europe Islam emerges as a “minority religion” in European nation‐states. Such a conceptual difference is reflected in the understandings and applications of multiculturalism and recognition in European countries and the United States. The question then is how to insure a historical continuity between principles and ideals of states on the one hand and how to integrate the religious diversity raised by Islam into the secularism of liberal European societies on the other.     

Cultures of Denial: Avoiding Knowledge of State Violations of Human Rights in Argentina and the United States

Why and how do individuals distance themselves from information about their government's participation in torture and other human rights violations? Such citizen (non)response implicitly legitimates and thus facilitates the continuation of abusive state actions. Drawing on a model of socially organized denial, we explore how sociocultural contexts and practices mediate individuals’ avoidance, justification, normalization, silencing, and outright denial of human rights abuses in two sites: Argentina during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983) and the United States during the “war on terror” post September 11, 2001. The study is based on 40 in‐depth interviews with members of diverse civic, religious, community, and political organizations in both countries (20 in each site). Comparing the political circumstances of a dictatorship and an electoral democracy, the analysis shows the roles of patriotic and national security ideologies and practices of silence and talk as organizers of cultures of denial.     

American Public Opinion on Immigration: Nativist,Polarized, or Ambivalent?

For Dauvergne (2016), one consequence of the “end of settler societies” is nativism, or what she calls “mean-spirited politics”: anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Multiculturalism. This accords with the prevailing tone of public opinion literature on the subject, which links anti-immigrant hostility in settler societies to influxes of diversity and associated racial threat. In this essay, we determine just how closely this stylized vision of anxiety-fuelled nativism resembles the true state of mass opinion about immigration. Using a variety of surveys fielded in recent years, we show that Americans: 1) hold generally positive views about immigration, though with a substantial dose of ambivalence about its consequences; 2) are not especially consistent in their policy attitudes over time; 3) express policy attitudes that readily depart from their underlying predispositions, and; 4) have only become more pro-immigrant in recent years, and whatever partisan polarization exists on the issue stems from the fact that Republicans are becoming more positive at a slightly slower pace than Democrats. All of this suggests that, while there is a hard core of ethnocentrism and "mean-spiritedness" in the U.S., the prevailing tone is much less negative than the standard portrayal assumes.     

The Power and Morals of Policy Makers: Reassessing the Control Gap Debate1

For more than 15 years, there has been a lively debate among migration scholars in Europe and North America about how to explain “why liberal states accept unwanted migration.” This paper assesses existent hypotheses in the “most‐likely” case of the making of Dutch family migration policies. This empirical test raises serious doubts as to the validity of the broadly shared assumption that national policy makers have lost the power to regulate migration flows. Accounts that focus on the mechanisms of domestic politics do yield valuable insights, but fail to capture the crucial role of immaterial values in the decision‐making process.     

Athletic Involvement,Academic Achievement,and Aspiration

Abstract

Prior to World War II, religion in America was characterized by a tripartite system of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups. More recently, Robert Wuthnow (1988), James Davison Hunter (1991), and others have argued that religion in America has been “restructured” into a two-party system, consisting of liberals within these religions on one side and conservatives on the other. Most empirical research examining the restructuring of religion in America focuses on the two-party division within Protestant religious advocacy groups, noting how some Protestant groups are politically more similar to Catholics than to other Protestants. Little work has examined the extent to which this phenomenon applies to Washington offices, which are formally tied to parent religious bodies, particularly Jewish groups. By conducting interviews with Washington office leaders and examining office materials and websites during the 108th Congress, this study seeks to answer the question: How does the thesis of the restructuring of religion in America apply to 15 Washington offices? Results suggest the thesis applies to both Protestant and Jewish Washington offices. The priorities of liberal offices, such as social welfare and economic justice issues, differ from those of conservative offices that focus on life and morality concerns.     

Conservative Apostles of Objectivity and the Myth of a “Liberal Bias” in Science

An article recently published in The American Sociologist argued that social scientists are biased because of their liberal views, and that this social activism might in turn explain the growing distrust of conservatives in the scientific community observed in the General Social Survey. Although I do agree that social scientists in the United States are mostly liberal, which is hard to contest given the accumulated evidence, this does not necessarily mean that liberal scientists are biased. It is one thing to adopt liberal views, but it is quite another to let these views distort scientific productions to the point that they are not scientific anymore. Since no systematic evidence currently exists to support this claim, the “liberal bias” remains a myth. Moreover, the authors do not report any statistical correlation between the purported increase in social scientists’ activism and conservatives’ growing distrust in science, let alone a causal relationship. I hypothesize that the authors, as conservatives, are more concerned with liberalism than with the politicization of science per se, and that their critics are aimed at challenging liberals’ domination within academia by depicting liberal scholars as pseudo-scientists.     

Etzioni’s new theory: a synthesis of liberal and communitarian views

There has always been a rather strong contrast between liberal and communitarian views. The liberal doctrine of “irreversible plurality of philosophical and moral ideas” for instance does not only mean that consensus about social values is difficult. “A public consensus about the necessary conception of the good cannot be obtained,” says Rawls. On the other hand, communitarians such as MacIntyre, Sandel, and Walzer, are deeply convinced by the idea of an “immanent telos” of societies, which in their opinion have the utmost influence on the development of individuals. A similar strong contrast exists between the liberal universalism of values and the communitarian particularism. Etzioni’s New Theory now tries to overcome these unsatisfactory “tyrannies of dualism” (A. Gutmann) Instead of the traditional and hostile either- or, Etzioni puts a reconciliatory as well as. “As many other dichotomies the dualism between universalism and particularism stands in the way of the development of a social Paradigm,” he regrets. Therefore Etzioni wants to combine instead of dividing. For example, social order (communitarian value) and personal autonomy (liberal value). So he proposes to install more personal autonomy in states with strong social order, as for instance Japan, and he demands more social order in traditional individualistic states like the United States (“Inverse Symbiosis”). Such “combining and balancing solutions” coincide with the theory of a “Flexible System of Private Rights” created and proposed by the famous Austrian Legal Scholar Walter Wilburg. On the level of “value principles” in the sense of Ronald Dworkin (instead of “rules” of law), Wilburg combines the differing “weights and strengths” of values (elements). An example of this is negligence, dangerous behavior, and economic capacity of risk spreading to more or less far reaching compensations of private damages, instead of the traditional either-or. The underlying idea is that of proportion. In terms of Etzioni, “The more social order within a state or society—the more individual autonomy has to be promoted.”     

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.     

Whither pogromshchina – historiographical synthesis or deconstruction? 1

This historiographical discussion piece on the implication of Simon Petliura and the Directory in the pogroms during the ill‐fated struggle for Ukrainian independence between 1917 and 1920 focuses on four core issues. Firstly, it suggests that those committed to the current Ukrainian nation‐building agenda face a crucial paradox: for the Directory’s endeavours to qualify as a precedent in nation building, one has to talk up its ability to influence the developments in the territory under its control. Yet to get Petliura and the Directory off the hook as far as the pogroms are concerned, one has to talk down their ability to influence those same developments. Secondly, it fundamentally questions the juxtaposition of “Ukrainian” and “Jewish” approaches on which Henry Abramson’s claim to have achieved a new synthesis between these two positions hinges. Thirdly, it demonstrates just how crucial conceptual transparency is for any useful debate on the significance of antisemitism in this context. Finally, it revisits the contention that it is a priori implausible to hold Petliura and his colleagues responsible because their attitudes towards Jews were generally positive as demonstrated not least by their commitment to Jewish autonomy rights.     

The image of the Warsaw Pogrom of 1881 in late nineteenth‐century Polish literature

This article interprets how the Christmas 1881 Warsaw Pogrom was depicted in Polish literature, using novels and short stories written soon after this incident as the source. It considers Eliza Orzeszkowa's “O ?ydach i kwestii ?ydowskiej,” written soon after the pogrom, in which she tried to analyse the reasons for what had happened in Warsaw. Other sources it examines are Konopnicka's short story “Mendel Gdański” and Boles?aw Prus's Lalka, which is often considered the best Polish novel of the nineteenth century. In analysing these sources, the article considers the varying responses to the pogrom, which was a kind of shock, since Polish liberals considered their part of the tsarist empire exempt from the anti‐Jewish excesses that had occurred in earlier months in southern Russia. However, the outbreak of violence in the Polish capital inevitably meant a closer re‐examination of the Polish context and its often complex Jewish–gentile relationship.     

Racist humor: then and now

While recent scholarship has examined the capacity of race‐based humor to “upend” racial inequalities, or has focused on comedic “heroes” who use humor “subversively” to challenge racism, less attention has been paid to the evolution of racist humor and its continued role in supporting dominant racial ideologies. This article reviews key works on the historical and current functions of racist humor in the United States, in order to situate racist humor as a social practice that has contributed to the development, maintenance, and contestation of an ideology of white supremacy. First, I review the historical role of racist humor in supporting pro‐slavery ideology, in order to see that racist humor played a critical role in racial formation and domination. I focus on literature that examines the way racial ridicule operated in the pre‐civil rights era (e.g., blackface) and the way such race‐based comedy was used as a cultural form of racialization that supported the development of an ideology of white supremacy throughout this period. Then, I point to how the widespread use of racist humor of the pre‐civil rights era was challenged by the civil rights movement, and how this changed the ways in which racist humor was perceived/operated, in public and private, in the post‐civil rights era. Finally, I conclude by suggesting some areas where an examination of racist humor is in need of critical attention and analysis in the current era of “color‐blindness.”     

Ideological Primary Groups in Contemporary Cultural Movements

Abstract

This paper argues that “post-modern” societies generate movements for cultural change in models “of” and “for” identity and consciousness, rather than traditional kinds of social movements aiming at structural changes in institutional arrangements. The distinctive and crucial unit in comtemporary cultural movements is what we have termed the “ideological group.” These groups are similar to the “ideological informal groups” which recruited members of traditional social movements on the basis of personal contacts and confidence, and which rested on shared “inner convictions.” Like other, earlier, ideological groups, they focus on the construction and legitimation of a shared symbolic interpretation, and ideology of a dissatisfying reality as well as their own personal and collective identity in relation to it. However, contemporary movement groups have been influenced considerably by the sensitivity training-encounter-group dynamics techniques associated with the intensive group movement. The result is a new interest in artificial primary relations among sociologically homogeneous peers for joining socio-cultural analyses with psychological interpretations of common personal experiences. The processes generated in these ideological primary groups lead to the collective construction of new or modified ideological interpretations of reality which contain different, more satisfying, models “of” and “for” personal and group identity, and “consciousness.”     

Narrating Nursing Jurisdiction: “Atrocity Stories” and “Boundary‐Work”

Sociologists have long recognized that the division of labor is, at its root, a process of social interaction. Although “negotiations” figure centrally in symbolic interactionist studies of work, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which the structure of workplace talk contributes to the social constitution of occupations. Drawing on the insights of discourse and conversation analysis, this article examines occupational atrocity stories and considers how they accomplish boundary‐work in the hospital setting. I focus on the stories British nurses told about doctors and use data generated in ethnographic research into the routine accomplishment of nursing jurisdiction. I conclude with some general observations about how the detailed analysis of stories and storytelling can contribute to the wider study of social group formation.     

The Politics of Memory in Annexed Lorraine: The Conflicts between Germanification and French Stalwarts at the beginning of the 20th Century

The article examines how the uses of memory in turn‐of‐the‐century Lorraine structured political discourse and presented enduring difficulties for the actions of German administrators and local community leaders. In this border region, memory was always contested and challenged, and thereby unstable. This paper approaches “the politics of French memory” through the examination of various pro‐French “memory societies” and networks such as the Souvenir Français. The central question is how did conflicts over memory impact Lorraine's political life and its place in the German Empire in the years leading up to the Great War? Regarding this point, the growth of nationalism is analysed as a phenomenon that reached far beyond French nationalist circles.     

The primacy of mediated action in sociocultural studies

After a brief overview of the reasons for using “sociocultural,” as opposed to “cultural‐historical,” “sociohistorical,” or some other term, it is argued that an adequate account of the agenda for sociocultural research must be grounded in the notion of “mediated action.” Drawing on the writings of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and others it is argued that mediated action must be understood as involving an irreducible tension between the mediational means provided by the sociocultural setting, on the one hand, and the unique, contextualized use of these means in carrying out particular concrete actions, on the other. In this view, any attempt to reduce the basic unit of analysis of mediated action to the mediational means or to the individual in isolation is misguided. It is suggested that by using mediated action as a unit of analysis the human sciences will be in a better position to address some of today's most pressing social issues.     

Danger Talk in Psychoanalysis: Things I Learned From Muriel Dimen

Danger talk is a symbolic elaboration of our sense of otherness as we perceive it in ourselves or others (to the extent that these can be distinguished). It can be wonderfully creative and sexy; but it can also serve the aim of mass stultification, as in the recent shutting down of American psychic life in order to accommodate 1 ridiculous man and the criminal sycophants who invented him. Unfortunately, the destructive form of danger talk is inherent in our concept of ourselves as “the human species.” It mobilizes signifiers that “sublimate” fight-flight-freeze responses into fancy discourses about our superiority to animals, vegetables, and minerals. Among the many things Muriel Dimen taught me, she helped me to understand how this variation on the absurdity of human self-love has contributed to the ethical failure of the psychoanalytic profession to take responsibility for the exploitation of patients.     

Racial Salience and the Consequences of Making White People Uncomfortable: Intra‐Racial Discrimination,Racial Screening,and the Maintenance of White Supremacy

Most sociological research on racial discrimination has had an “inter‐racial” focus. That is, researchers have been principally concerned with the disparate treatment that people of color receive relative to Whites in different social contexts. However, recent theoretical work emerging from legal studies suggests that an alternative conception of “intra‐racial” discrimination exists that extends beyond colorism. This theory of intra‐racial discrimination stipulates that many organizations in the “post‐racial” era desire some measure of racial diversity. Yet, in their efforts to achieve this racial diversity they screen people of color based on their degree of racial salience. Whether a given person of color is hired, promoted, or in the case of college admissions, accepted, is a function of whether or not Whites within the organization consider them racially palatable, or not overly concerned with race. This creates an incentive for people of color to work their identity to allay any concerns among Whites that they may be too racially salient. In this paper I critically review this work and attempt to further buttress its claims by highlighting how this process has clear historical precedent. I conclude by showing how the audit method can be used to empirically examine this practice contemporarily.