Scissors, Surveys, And Psycho-Prophylactics: Prenatal Health Care Campaigns And State Building In China, 1949–1954

This paper examines how the Chinese state's prenatal health care campaigns of the early 1950s attempted to redefine women's social and political roles. The replacement of local midwifing practices with a uniform birthing method in order to radically reduce infant and mother mortality entailed complex ramifications regarding the relationship of women vis-a-vis the state. Campaigns involved demonizing "traditional" midwifing, promoting a statistical vision of female reproductivity and children as national resources, and the isolation of individual mothers as directly responsible to the state for managing reproduction for the national interest. In sum, a physiological definition of gender was used to open women's bodies to state management. Utopic visions of painless childbirth and of the socialist nation as a giant new family were used to promote participation in grassroots campaigns, but the sources also point to forms of local resistance to the micro-level reorganization of power these campaigns intended.     

A "Scientific Revolution": Sociological Theory in the United States, 1930–1945

Between 1930 and 1945 the sociological profession suffered an identity crisis. Its origin and resolution were compounded of both academic realpolitik and theoretical dilemmas: generational conflicts and university power blocs on the one hand, and persisting intellectual obsessions on the other. Contemporary sociologists may find our current situation to be both derivative and parallel.     

"The Whole Extent of the Evil": Origin of Crime Statistics in the United States, 1880–1930

Abstract  This article traces the origin and the development of crime statistics in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to the federal nature of the polity and decentralization of state power, the historical process of "governmentalization" of the state in the US differed markedly from other Western European nations. The path to the establishment of a national archive of crime statistics in the US was especially tortuous, and its trajectory was shaped by strategic alliances as well as conflicts between various institutional actors involved in the process.     

The Constraints on Civil Society beyond the State: Gender-based Insecurity in Meghalaya,India

The role of civil society is vital for politicizing, contesting, and addressing human insecurity, yet there is very little analysis of the ability of civil society actors to do so. Recent critical approaches to the concept have questioned the tendency to view civil society as an unequivocal good, yet the majority of these critiques still focus on civil society at a global level or on the enabling and disabling capacity of the state at the national level. This paper argues that civil society is constrained not only by the state but by local government and other actors from within civil society. Identity politics, power relations, and existing inequalities between and within communities affect the ability of formal and informal organizations to contest the causes of insecurity. This paper examines the role of civil society in addressing gender-based insecurity in the Indian state of Meghalaya to demonstrate the influence of these factors on civil society and concludes by arguing that civil society is a much more dynamic and contradictory sphere than is often recognized by both advocates and critics. These dynamics must be understood if the constraints on civil society are to be transcended.

Colonial Legacies and Repertoires of "Ethnic" Violence: The Case of Western India, 1941–2002

The post-colonial state is held to be a weak state whose ease of capture reduces its capacity to suppress violence. The focus on the state, however, risks neglecting the ways in which violence is deployed to render the state weak in popular perception. This perception in turn legitimates claims for a foundational shift in the basis of power. In this paper, the concept of "repertoire" as first used by Charles Tilly, is used to analyze continuities and discontinuities in the development of the "ethnic riot" in urban, western India. As an "extreme" case in which riots have shown considerable durability over time, it highlights a key point, namely, that riots can form part of a strategy of power by simultaneously projecting themselves as popular insurrection and constructing a perception of the state as weak. The persistence of this repertoire, it is further argued, derives from the historical specificities of colonial state formation which promoted an ethnically imagined and hierarchized polity, as well as political struggles which weakened alternative forms of community.     

Benthamism in the Countryside: The Architecture of Rural Space, 1900–1930

Historians of state formation have increasingly recognized what Foucault has described as the 'dark side' of the enlightenment institutional principles of representation, transparency and accountability and explored the parallel principles of legitimation, surveillance and discipline. In this paper, I pursue these themes in a neglected area, the institutional architecture of rural space. I do so by examining ideologies for rural planning in western Canada and the American midwest in the early twentieth century. These ideologies were linked to state projects, and found institutional expression in Canada in the 'town planning movement' attached to municipal and provincial planning offices, and in the United States in agricultural extension services and the 'county agent' system—the local 'inspectorate' of the Federal Department of Agriculture. The aim was a restructuring of rural space in the interests of rationalizing agricultural production and controlling large populations of settlers, recently displaced, and disturbingly 'isolated' and inaccessible in the vast spaces of the great plains. Despite common aims, American and Canadian reformers adopted fundamentally different principles of spatial design. Town planners inherited the European assumption that community networks and class relations were embedded in particular spatial arrangements, so that rural reform required re-drawing the boundaries of fields and settlements. As early as 1915, American reformers developed the idea that networks of sociability and domination were defined first by abstract structures, formal organizations and the cash nexus, and could, using modern media of communication, be 'disembedded' from particular locales and distributed spatially.     

From White to Western: "Racial Decline" and the Idea of the West in Britain, 1890–1930

Abstract Drawing on British works of imperial and social commentary, this article shows how a literature of white crisis emerged between 1890–1930. It was a literature that, whilst claiming to defend and affirm white identity, in fact exposed the limits of whiteness as a form of social solidarity. It is shown how these studies drew together a variety of challenges deemed to be facing the white race and, more specifically, how they exhibited a contradictory desire to defend white racial community whilst attacking "the masses". The idea of the West, developing alongside, within and in the wake of this crisis literature, provided a less racially reductive but not necessarily less socially exclusive identity.     

Race, 'Culture,' and Mestizaje: The Statistical Construction of the Ecuadorian Nation, 1930–1950

This article analyzes two statistical projects carried out in Ecuador: social reformer Dr. Pablo Arturo Suarez' 1934 study of peasant and worker living conditions, and the first national census of 1950. These projects are analyzed to reveal the cultural and political conceptions of those who produced them, anxieties about the prospects for national development, and new categories of social identity under construction. They were instrumental in constituting specific notions of the nature of the national population, in which problems of race were simultaneously accentuated and denied. As such, they were part of the process of constructing a national ideology of mestizaje in Ecuador.     

The Rise of the Information State: the Development of Central State Surveillance of the Citizen in England, 1500–2000

This essay examines existing sociological explanations of the development of the central surveillance of citizens in the light of the English experience, and finds them wanting. Sociologists see the state using surveillance for the benefit of capitalist elites, to reimpose social control over the society of strangers created by industrialisation. But surveillance pre-dated industrialisation, and the development of information gathering by state elites had more to do with their own need to preserve their position both within the English polity, and international geo-politics.     

The Social Limits of State Control: Time, the Industrial Wage Relation, and Social Identity in Stalinist Hungary, 1948–1953

The article argues that the Stalinist state in post-war Hungary aimed to use the wage relation as a central component of its policies to rationalise the organisation of production in industry. It attempted this by trying to discipline workers through the introduction of a form of payment by results which subordinated the workforce to the discipline of clock time. In complete contrast to state intentions, the planned economy developed its own rhythms and it was to these that the workforce came to respond. These responses led to a high degree of informal conflict on Hungarian shop floors, a process which re-shaped worker identity, making it more particular in its nature. The implication behind this argument is that the Stalinist state was less powerful than many have suggested, and that research should focus more on the economy if the roots of social change under state socialism are to be found.     

"The Learned Brāhmen, Who Assists Me": Changing Colonial Relationships in the 18th and 19th Century India

Abstract  This article examines the process through which the varied and fluid relationships between English East India Company servants and Indians in the eighteenth-century transformed into rigidly racist ones in the nineteenth. At the outset, the Company's position in India was precarious and impossible to sustain without intensive help from various Indian elites and experts. Relationships created through these collaborative ties were often (but not always) accompanied by prejudice. Prejudice was frequently expressed as mistrust on the part of the Company servants who complained about Indians' untrustworthiness. Yet for decades prejudice was only one possible modality for relationships between Company servants and Indians; relational fluidity was the default. However, the steps that the Company took on to solve their "mistrust dilemma"– namely, codification of Indian knowledge and modification of Indian institutions in terms of their staffing and methods – set in motion processes that eventually eliminated relational fluidity and replaced it with prejudice as a binding social norm, thus creating a rigidly racist regime.