Seeing 'Karen' in the Union of Myanmar

Karen identity is problematic, as peoples known as 'Karen' do not share a common language, culture, religion or material characteristics. Most of the research on Karens has been conducted in Thailand, but the dominant 'pan-Karen' identity is a product of social and historical forces in Myanmar, where this study is focused. In the main part of this paper, I reveal the subjective criteria that have come to signify pan-Karen identity. My primary source material consists of internal literary discourses. In particular, I have drawn on the historical texts of two British colonial-era authors: T. Thanbyah and Saw Aung Hla. Three significant concepts appear in their works and subsequent internal discourses on Karen identity: that Karens are oppressed, uneducated and virtuous. In the latter part of the paper, I review contemporary Myanmar government policy on ethnic identity, highlighting the assigned role of 'Union Spirit' among all groups in the country towards overcoming superficial differences. State policies are designed--among other things--to emphasise a myth of common descent of all 'national races'; construct a unifying national culture, and concentrate administrative power at the centre. Both Karen identity and the Union of Myanmar are products of the same historical and social conditions. Both appeal to a supposed unity, but in other characteristics differ. State discourses suggest accommodation, but are directed towards social control. Karen identity is born of primordial statements but is manifest in structural opposition to the state. Ultimately, while the state seeks to assimilate all, Karen nationalists aim towards the assimilation of their own and separation from others.     

Women's entrepreneurship,neoliberalism and economic justice in the postfeminist era: A discourse analysis of policy change in Sweden

Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘postfeminist’ subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.     

Media use,social cohesion,and cultural citizenship: an analysis of a Chinese metropolis

The emergence of new social strata and plural identities are two of the most profound changes in China's social transition toward integration into the global economic system. Differentiating three dimensions of cultural citizenship identity (i.e., cosmopolitan, national, and local), this study seeks to depict the paths of influence in the formation of such identities that involve reality construction by the media and evolving patterns of social stratification. Analysing data from a 2009 Shanghai survey, we found a strong relationship between individuals' consumption of local media contents and their local identity. Further, their perceptions of media's centripetal and centrifugal forces have significant effects on their identities, and the Internet has different effects from the traditional media, although such influences vary across different social strata.     

Undercut

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider some representations of the figure of the indigene in contemporary Australia, and their implications for a range of issues and debates in cultural theory. In particular, I examine the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses that I term ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘hybridity’, or the discourses of happy hyphenation and happy hybridization, respectively. These discourses, I want to suggest, raise specific problems in an Australian historical context, where the effects of scientific racism are being confronted by indigenous peoples in relation to land rights claims and, more generally, the dominant culture's demands for an ‘authentic’, visible and unproblematic Aboriginality that can be both clearly marked and contained. The figure of Truganini has particular significance in these debates, precisely because her body has figured as the site of geneticist practices and discourses. Simultaneously I locate these representations in the context(s) of the monument year of 1993, contexts that encompass a mesh of interrelated cultural concerns sometimes simplified under the heading of ‘Australian national identity’.     

The Holocaust: Commemorated but not remembered? Post-colonial and post-traumatic perspectives on the reception of the Holocaust memory discourse in Poland

The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East-Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post-communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post-communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re-composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non-Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non-Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.     

An ‘unholy alliance’ of existential proportions: Negotiating discourses with men's experiences of cancer and aging

Little is understood about how experiencing cancer and aging together can disrupt people's socio-personal worlds and lead to existential questions about identity, life ambiguity, and death. Toward this end, we interpreted the metaphors that three aging men with cancer used in a focus group to describe their existential concerns. We also considered how two dominant cultural discourses around cancer and aging, generally referred to as discourses of “progress” and “decline”, figured into the participants' meanings. Finally, we compared the men's attitudes toward cancer and aging to dominant ideas about how men respond to these life events. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis, informed by critical phenomenology, we came to three conclusions. First, the men's interpretations of cancer and aging shared similar existential themes of tragedy and transcendence. Second, these existential concerns were informed by dominant discourses of cancer and aging, in that they followed the culturally constructed trajectories of decline and progress, respectively. The men's metaphors point to a negotiation of these two discourses. A third and related point is that the men predominantly contradicted gendered assumptions about dealing with life adversity but in some ways repeated them. This research indicates that people interpret cancer and aging in somewhat shared ways, via dominant cultural discourses, but also in individual ways depending on personal life histories. As discourses and life histories seem to influence how people make sense of aging life with cancer, it may be useful to be aware of these contexts when providing psycho-social care to aging cancer patients.     

Schooling a European Identity: ethno‐cultural exclusion and nationalist resonance within the EU policy of “The European dimension of education”

This article aims to explore how the role of education as an aide in the process of “European” identity formation is being articulated in the European Union's (EU) policy of “The European dimension of education”. After having located the EU's views on education in the context of the neo‐liberal discourse on economic globalization, the article goes on to trace EU discussions of the European dimension of education historically. Subsequently, it deliberates on the understanding of European culture and identity which the European dimension of education endeavours to advance. Here a critique is developed of the policy's ethno‐culturalism, thereby excluding delineation of a collective identity in the EU. Basing itself on a notion of cultural identity which, implicitly, includes only those who fit certain versions of European historical “roots” and cultural “heritage”, the policy, it is argued, impedes a discussion of how a trans‐ethnic identity formation could be created in today's EU. Towards the end of the article, a scrutiny of the European dimension's perception of the so‐called “language diversity” in the EU seeks to illustrate this issue further.     

Rediscovering the social question

Neoliberal policies not only privatise formerly public services but also focus one-sidedly on discourses of individual autonomy and responsibility. This makes it difficult to raise ‘the social question’ (the question what constitutes social bonds) publicly since market principles are presented as allowing no alternatives. Social work owes its professional origins however to a shift from early capitalist individualism to policies recognising the need for social reconstruction and cohesion. It was mandated to reconcile the key principles of modernity, personal freedom and equality, although its methodology, often corresponding with social policy regimes, interpreted this mandate variably. Attempts in current social work to adjust to the cancellation of the social question through techniques of ‘activation’ and individualised care further the crisis of the project of modernity which manifests itself in a split between heightened public control measures and privatised concerns for ‘care’, thereby altering its core identity. Reflections on social work's historical position within varying political contexts help to promote a renewed critical examination of the profession's political role and highlight the need to turn interventions at the personal level into occasions that affirm social citizenship, ensure rights and promote social equality.     

Multiculturalism, “political correctness,” and the politics of identity

American society, in the course of its earlier history, was shaped by the competing visions of nativism and cosmopolitan liberalism. The first defined the American identity in restrictive fashion, and sought to curtail naturalization and immigration. The second, taking an expansive view of American identity, pressed opposing policies. In the period following World War II, new visions of American society have developed in the course of the struggles of people of color to overcome their historical exclusion from the American cultural identity. The latest of these visions are expressed in the movements of multiculturalism and political correctness, which are seen here as facets of a new, and morally assertive, view of American society, revolving around the efforts of previously excluded groups to construct new identities. All of these forms of consciousness—nativism, cosmopolitan liberalism, and multiculturalism—now compete on the American scene in the politics of identity.An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting, Arlington, Virginia, March 1992.     

Age and embodied masculinities: Midlife gay and heterosexual men talk about their bodies

This article integrates critical gerontology and masculinities theories to examine how midlife gay and heterosexual men experience their bodies in relation to cultural discourses of aging. Analyses of in-depth interviews with 15 gay and 15 heterosexual men ages 40–60 reveal that while both groups of men describe their bodies as deteriorating or declining in terms of functionality and are often distressed by these changes, midlife gay men also articulate a concern with a perceived decline in bodily appearance. Both gay and heterosexual midlife men frame their bodies as fundamentally different from women's, possibly in an attempt to protect a masculine identity in response to the threat that aging bodies pose to that identity. We argue that midlife men's embodied experiences are shaped by a discourse of midlife decline as well as inequalities between gay and heterosexual men. We also discuss the implications of embodiment for midlife men's well-being.     

Encountering Hindutva,interrogating religious nationalism and (En)gendering a Hindu patriarchy in India's nuclear policies

This article explores the consequences of a gendered nationalism under India's recent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government that has relied on the discourses of Hindu women's violence and protection as elements of its discursive arsenal to pursue nuclearization as an aggressive policy of the Indian state. To this extent, the article interrogates a discursive relationship between a cultural patriarchy, its quest for Hindu nationalism and gender and the ways in which this patriarchy has both used and (ab)used the images of Hindu women to establish Islam/Pakistan as a threat to the supposedly Hindu India, and justify a nuclear policy for India. The article's contribution to international feminist politics lies in its attempts to stitch the localized politics of Hindu nationalism with its broader geo-political aspirations and implications, namely the role of the Indian state, under the BJP, in maintaining a communalized, militarized and a Hindu patriarchal violence at three inter-connected levels – between gender, communities and nations.     

Remembering Vasco da Gama: Contested histories and the cultural politics of contemporary nation‐building in Lisbon,Portugal

The quincentennial year of Vasco da Gama's arrival in India, 1998, was pivotal in new efforts to reimagine and represent Portuguese national identity, as Lisbon hosted the country's first international exposition, Expo ‘98. The iconography of Da Gama and the golden age of the Portuguese maritime “Discoveries” permeated new urban development and official cultural events at the fair, calling attention to the relevance of Portugal's past to its present and future roles in emerging European and global economies, claiming special national expertise in brokering cross‐cultural exchanges, especially between Europe, Africa, and Asia, and highlighting cosmopolitan Lisbon's historic and continuing importance in such encounters. Newer liberal reinterpretations of Portuguese history were challenged by leftist and anti‐imperialist elements within Portugal, by critics in India, and by the Portuguese right wing. This controversy over historical commemoration also offered implicit commentary on the quality of Portuguese democracy, especially over how much Portugal has superseded the ideologies of the right‐wing Salazarist “New State,” which officially ended in 1974.     

Desiring nature: Identity and becoming in narratives of travel

Abstract

This paper explores the cultural value of desiring nature through reading the travel narratives of Val Plumwood and Alphonso Lingis with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). As Game (1991) suggests this textual practice produces different ways of writing the social that undoes the nature/culture opposition informing popular discourses and much cultural theory. Rethinking the value of nature/culture relations has tended to be the domain of environmental philosophy. Yet a cultural analysis also has much to contribute to current debates around value and identity, embodiment and representations of desire. Such a shift requires rethinking the sensory relation between self and nature through the mediation of language. Two quite distinctive experiences of awe provide texts for this analysis. In the desire to know non‐human nature as other, Lingis and Plumwood are moved by a wish to become nearer, to move beyond the bounds of an identity premised on a cultural relation of mastery over nature. These are compelling narratives, for they do not simply indulge the reader in a romantic appreciation of nature's wildness, as if nature was simply an object of aesthetic contemplation and background to the unfolding drama of human identity. These journeys involve disturbing transformations of self; Plumwood travels into the dangerous waters of the crocodile's territory in Kakadu National Park, Australia, while Lingis encounters the uninhabitable terrain of the Antarctic. The reverberating effects of awe produce a movement of becoming ‐ becoming‐animal, becoming‐nature, which contests the Hegelian desire for mastery of nature and the teleological structure of desire itself aimed at unity. Awe as a profoundly disturbing relation, threatens to undo the dominant fantasy of human identity as pure culture, separate from the realm of nature, body and materiality.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

Cultural Education: Redefining the Role of Museums in the 21st Century

In this paper, I argue that in the face of a crisis about the value of culture, cultural education has been represented by some of its advocates as a new way of legitimising the cultural sector. It enables museums, for example, to appear more inclusive and democratic, more relevant to young people and others who do not normally visit museums, and more responsive to the needs of the society. However, defining the value of culture through an emphasis on cultural education, paradoxically, has the potential to undermine the basis of the museum's existence as a public institution. With reference to my research into New Labour's cultural policy, particularly in relation to museums, this paper highlights discourses that have given cultural education a more significant role in the cultural sector. I show how cultural education, with ‘cultural inclusion’ as its main objective, has evolved in the context of an existential crisis in the museum sector over the past 30 years, appearing to offer a means through which they can redefine their role and value in the society as anti‐elitist organisations supporting social change. I then go onto show how this apparent solution to the problem might further undermine the unique value of museums.     

The Idea of a Cosmopolitan Europe: On the Cultural Significance of Europeanization

The idea of a cosmopolitan Europe is defined against a ‘national Europe’, on the one side and on the other, ‘global Europe’ where an internationalist EU-led Europe plays a major role in the world. A cosmopolitan Europe is a more accurate designation of the emerging form of Europeanization as a mediated and emergent reality of the national and the global. It is possible to conceive of European identity as a cosmopolitan identity based on a cultural logic of self-transformation rather than as a supranational identity or an official EU identity that is in a relation of tension with national identities. As a cosmopolitan identity, European identity is a form of post-national self-understanding that expresses itself within, as much as beyond, national identities.     

Beyond essentialism: negotiating Alevi identity in urban Turkey

In Turkey, the Alevi cultural ‘revival’ of the 1990s has been followed by a multifaceted identity-formation process that involves conflicting religio-cultural agendas, intersecting discourses and differing politico-ideological affiliations. Lacking a focus, this process continues to trigger an enriching public debate on Alevi identity, which has been coined an ‘enigma’ and is considered to be associated with ‘ambiguity’ and ‘ambivalence’ by many. What lies beneath the veil of ambiguity has to do with the ‘anti-essentialist’ transformation of Alevism, which reaches beyond religious, cultural and political orthodoxies. As a result of diverse political loyalties, contestation of discourses on Alevi culture and identity and the equivocal character of the Alevi subject, the Alevis seem to be resisting essentialism. In urban Turkey, an anti-essentialist discourse potentially influencing Alevism, I argue, enables the Alevi self to act with a sense of reflexivity and to search for ways to avoid political, cultural or religious orthodoxies.     

Leave policy in the Nordic welfare states: a ‘recipe’ for high employment/high fertility?

Predicted population decline and labour shortages in European welfare states are directing attention to policy strategies that might increase women's employment and fertility rates. In this context, the Nordic welfare states’ blend of high female employment rates and relatively high fertility levels stands out from others. These patterns are accompanied by comprehensive work–family policies indicating that policy reform is a main explanation. A core element in Nordic work–family policies is generous leave of absence arrangements for parents. In scrutinising leave policy in a Nordic context, the analysis in this paper emphasises that the current situation is a result of processes that have taken a long time to unfold, and that leave policy reforms interact with labour market developments and cultural institutions of family formation in shaping women's social practices.     

Assimilation,multiculturalism, hybridity: The dilemmas of the ethnic chinese in post-suharto Indonesia 1

The dominant discourse in accommodating the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia during Suharto's regime was one of assimilation, which forcefully aimed to absorb this minority into the national body. However, continuous official discrimination towards the Chinese placed them in a paradoxical position that made them an easy target of racial and class hostility. The May 1998 anti-Chinese riots proved the failure of the assmilationist policy. The process of democratization has given rise to a proliferation of identity politics in post-Suharto Indonesia. The policy of multiculturalism has been endorsed by Indonesia's current power holders as a preferred approach to rebuilding the nation, consistent with the national motto: ‘Unity in Diversity’. This paper critically considers the politics of multiculturalism and its efficacy in managing cultural diversity and differences. It deploys the concept of hybridity to describe as well as analyze the complex identity politics of the ethnic Chinese in contemporary Indonesia.     

‘Now,We Have the Same Rights as Men to Keep Our Jobs’: Gendered Perceptions of Opportunity and Obstacles in a Mexican Workplace

Drawing on extensive qualitative data at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation, this case study investigates professional employees’ perceptions of changes to a prohibitive work policy requiring women to quit working upon marriage and having children. Employees believed the policy change meant working women were valued employees, but how this translated into opportunity highlighted distinct views of the types of positions professional women could occupy at the company, reinforcing sex‐segregated job allocation. Whereas women's narratives pointed to cultural resistance, men's narratives attributed the dearth of women in higher level positions to their lack of professionalism and commitment to work. The work policy change only guaranteed the right for women to work as the company modernized to fit the neoliberal demands of the global marketplace. Now women faced the challenge of turning that right into career advancement in a traditionally masculine‐defined company. I argue that even with the policy change, gendered discourses on women in professional occupations constructed and maintained gender inequities in the workplace. This study contributes to the scholarly discussion on gendered discourses within the context of global restructuring by showing how mechanisms at work maintain gender inequity in the workplace.