A feminist revisiting of the insider/outsider debate: The “outsider phenomenon” in rural Iowa

This article draws upon findings from an ethnographic study of two towns in rural Iowa to examine the adequacy of the insider/outsider distinction as a guideline for evaluating and conducting ethnographic research. Utilizing feminist standpoint and materialist feminist theories, I start with the assumption that, rather than one “insider” or “outsider” position, we all begin our work with different relationships to shifting aspects of social life and to particular knowers in the community and this contributes to numerous dimensions through which we can relate to residents in various communities. “Outsiderness” and “insiderness” are not fixed or static positions, rather they are ever-shifting and permeable social locations illustrated in this case study by the “outsider phenomenon.” Community processes that reorganize and resituate race-ethnicity, gender and class relations form some of the most salient aspects of the “outsider phenomenon.” These dynamic processes shaped our relationships with residents as ethnographic identities were repositioned by shifts in constructions of “community” that accompanied ongoing social, demographic, and political changes.     

The search for community in modern society: An interpretation

Community theory, at present, gives little importance to communal character in modern urban settings. This “search for community” results from continually conceptualizing community rigidly in terms of the traditional social forms of kinship and rooted neighborhood. Recent interest in social networks has revealed that individuals characterized by mobility and high achievement may not participate in traditional community, but rather in primary friendship networks based upon other variables such as affectivity. A comparative analysis of such networks and traditional community is presented. The primary friendship network while containinggesellschaft characteristics is community-like. Community theory, therefore, must consider manifold forms of primary association to gain a fuller understanding of the communal elements present in modern urban society. This is a revision of an earlier paper entitled “Evolving Community, Friendship and Communion: Some Conceptual Notes” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August, 1976. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of several persons to the development of this paper. T. Dunbar Moodie, Judith-Maria Buechler, L. C. Young, James L. Spates, Lynn E. Crevling, and especially Jack Dash Harris have provided challenging, and therefore valuable, criticism.     

Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature). Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology. William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural biotechnology.     

Seen but unseen: Part-time faculty and institutional surveillance and control

This article examines surveillance techniques utilized by several metropolitan community colleges to manage part-time faculty. We find that with the increased use of part-time faculty, administrators at these organizations are relying less on direct, personal supervision of these instructors and are instead using more “remote” surveillance practices to certify that “acceptable educational standards” are being maintained. The use of these practices not only signals a decline in the professional status of college instructors, but also points to differences in social control techniques used in “productive” institutions versus those used in “disciplinary” institutions. We find that while surveillance techniques employed at these community colleges make the education process visible and controllable, they simultaneously render part-time faculty invisible but controlled.     

A Proposed ASEAN Disaster Response, Training and Logistic Centre Enhancing Regional Governance in Disaster Management

The Southeast Asian region is remarkably vulnerable to natural disasters which repeatedly cause devastations to both human lives and properties. However, current disaster relief efforts have not lived up to the high standards. Even worse is that humanitarian efforts have been frequently frustrated by the rejections from national authorities under the name of “sovereignty”. All these problems necessitate a widely accepted, politically neutral, well coordinated and effectively governed organization within the region. We, hereby propose a Disaster Response Training and Logistic Centre under the umbrella of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which aims to mitigate the devastation of disasters, to provide accurate relief assessment, and training for relief team on a regular basis, and to allocate and mobilize humanitarian aid. The Centre will be endorsed through an agreement by all ASEAN governments. The philosophy underpinning the organization reflects a regional approach whereby stronger government involvement and regional integration in disaster relief is indispensable in the context of the Southeast Asian region.      

Philosophy on the Ground: An Appreciation of a “Spirit Master”

This essay is an appreciation of Melvin Pollner’s distinctive sociological approach to topics that are usually associated with philosophy. Pollner’s dissertation and early writings took up the theme of “mundane reason,” which he defined as an incorrigible presumption of a real world that is implicit in everyday conduct. Pollner addressed mundane reason, and the reciprocal idea of “reality disjunctures”—momentary divergences between perceptual accounts of the “same” mundane reality—by describing routine exchanges in traffic court and confrontations between doctors and patients in psychiatric settings. Pollner’s work anticipated current enthusiasms for developing novel “ontologies” in social and cultural studies of science, medicine, and other subjects. Although he did attempt to locate metaphysics in the midst of everyday experience, this essay suggests that his “philosophy on the ground” radically transformed philosophical ontology into an original and imaginative way to investigate constitutive activities.     

A Canadian rejoinder: Sociology north and south of the border

In response to the recent The American Sociologist special issue on Canadian sociology, this rejoinder dialogues with some of the perspectives offered there on the discipline north of the border with an eye towards lessons that American sociologists might learn from the Canadian experience. My reflections build on a larger analytic piece entitled “Canada’s Impossible Science: The Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis of Anglo-Canadian Sociology” to be published soon in The Canadian Journal Sociology. Particular attention is paid to the different institutional arrangements of higher education in Canada and the United States, Anglo-Canadian reliance on the particularly English “weakness as strength” strategy for sociology, tensions between the cultural values of populism, egalitarianism, and excellence, and the trade-offs between professional and public intellectual work. A critique is offered of the “origin myth” of Canadian sociology as a particularly vibrant “critical sociology,” with discussion of Dorothy Smith's influence on sociology in Canada. His research interests are in sociological theory, the sociology of culture, and the study of intellectuals from the perspective of the sociology of organisations and professions. He is studying Edward Said as a “global public intellectual” as part of a Canadian government-funded interdisciplinary grant on “Globalization and Autonomy” at McMaster University. He is also working “Canadian professors as public intellectuals,” a project also funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Inequality, new directions: full ethical foundation and consequences

Deriving comparisons and measures of inequality from full ethical foundations was a main innovation of the 1960s and pursuing it is still a most fruitful direction. This implies using “equal equivalents” and some principles particularly rich in meanings. Multidimensional inequalities can be measured and compared thanks to the “equal-equivalent manifolds”. The “equal-equivalent utility function” defines individual “welfare” cleaned of differences in sui generis individual tastes and hedonic capacities deemed irrelevant for “macrojustice”. Then, equal allocation is a deeper end-value than equal welfare but has to be complemented by free choice for freedom, Pareto efficiency and a demanded partial self-ownership. The result is the richly multi-meaning “equal-labour income equalization”.     

Blame analysis: Accounting for the behavior of protected groups

When a group is not doing as well as other groups on some dimension, group members and sympathizers give accounts that attempt to minimize the group’s blame for its predicament. These accounts reflect concerns about prejudice, as well as policy concerns. This approach to social science may be called “blame analysis,” because it evaluates theories according to the extent to which they blame protected groups. Blame analysis treats cause and blame as the same, and rejects theoretical arguments that posit any causal role for the protected group because they “blame the victim.” As a result, discussions of proximate causes and mediating variables are avoided in explanations of outcomes for these groups. The author argues that this approach violates scientific principles and discourages the investigation of important issues. He is a social psychologist who does research on interpersonal violence and on the determinants and consequences of self-appraisals.     

Editorial

The continuing struggle over the meaning and purposes of ‘community’is at the centre of this issue of the Journal. Practitionersand theorists of community development have for some time beencautious about the global resurgence of government interestin the concept and its potential for mobilization in the pursuitof a range of policies, including the re-invigoration of democracy.Typically the concern is the extent to which such policies thatpromote ‘community’ benefit the disadvantaged, excludedand minority groups or whether they signal a withdrawal of publicprovision and government abdication of responsibility for themeeting of basic needs and the incorporation of activists andorganizations concerned with social justice. Alternatively thereare those that continue to see the potential in such inclusivestrategies or those that promote ‘community’ provision     

“This Ain’t My School!” Criminality,Control, and Contradictions in Institutional Responses to School Truancy

While previous research has explored the causes and consequences of school truancy, few studies have considered the meanings of institutional responses. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of a pilot program promoted as a “progressive” form of truancy intervention. Midvale Truancy Center claimed to focus on education, rather than punishment. In practice, however, the crime control tactics used to capture, isolate, and discipline truants often overshadowed the Center’s educational objectives, locating the Center in a liminal space between school and detention facility. The Center’s competing goals—revenue creation, truancy deterrence, and organizational survival—resulted in rehabilitation being pushed aside in favor of normalization and behavioral control. These findings illustrate a recent larger cultural turn toward control and punishment (Garland 2001), and the encroachment of crime control tactics into the civil sphere.     

Mental Health of Non-gamblers Versus “Normal” Gamblers Among American Indian Veterans: A Community Survey

Goal This analysis was undertaken to assess the demographic and mental health characteristics of “normal” or non-problem gamblers versus non-gamblers in a representative community sample. Sample Study participants consisted of 557 North Central American Indian veterans. Data collection included a demographic and trauma questionnaire, a computer-based Diagnostic Interview Schedule for DSM-III-R, and a treatment history algorithm. Findings Univariate analyses revealed that gamblers had greater social competence (i.e., higher education, living with a spouse) and higher lifetime psychiatric morbidity. Binary regression analysis revealed that, compared to non-gamblers, gamblers were older, more highly educated, and more apt to be married. More gamblers showed evidence for lifetime risk-taking as evidenced by Antisocial Personality Disorder and Tobacco Dependence. Conclusions Social achievement and disposable income function as prerequisites for “normal” gambling in this population, although “externalizing” or “risk-taking” disorders also serve as independent contributors to at least some gambling. The increased rate of “internalizing” or emotional disorders are only indirectly related to gambling, perhaps through increasing age or through the “externalizing” disorders.     

At Yesenia’s House…

This paper explores the multiple expressions of Central American immigrant Pentecostalism in the Pico Union district of Los Angeles. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in three temples and informal conversations with over 30 active Pentecostals, this paper shows that Central American immigrant Pentecostals tend to congregate on the basis of “congregational homophily,” or shared social and cultural characteristics, especially in terms of age, marital status, presence of infirmities or ailments, and national/regional origin. This paper also explores the ways in which Central American immigrant Pentecostals tailor their religious practices to reflect their “congregational homophily” through the differential inclusion/exclusion of practices such as healing, “roommating,” and formal and informal discussions of shared histories. By focusing on “congregational homophily” and the active constructions and reconstructions of Central American immigrant Pentecostalism, we gain more insight into the ways some Central American immigrants negotiate their lives and experiences in the increasingly fettered social, cultural, and political topography of contemporary Los Angeles.

“Don’t Argue with the Members”

Mel Pollner regularly cautioned researchers not to argue with the members of settings under consideration. He warned against substituting the researcher’s meaning for the meanings of those being studied. This article discusses facets of the caution as they relate to the research process. Seemingly simple, the tenet is nuanced in application. The article adds to the nuance by distinguishing what is called the “replacement” of meaning with the “displacement” of meaning, providing a way of understanding what members could mean if the contexts and settings of their accounts were taken into consideration.     

Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language

Expressions of basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) can be recognized pan-culturally from the face and it is assumed that these emotions can be recognized from a speaker’s voice, regardless of an individual’s culture or linguistic ability. Here, we compared how monolingual speakers of Argentine Spanish recognize basic emotions from pseudo-utterances (“nonsense speech”) produced in their native language and in three foreign languages (English, German, Arabic). Results indicated that vocal expressions of basic emotions could be decoded in each language condition at accuracy levels exceeding chance, although Spanish listeners performed significantly better overall in their native language (“in-group advantage”). Our findings argue that the ability to understand vocally-expressed emotions in speech is partly independent of linguistic ability and involves universal principles, although this ability is also shaped by linguistic and cultural variables.

Debating the Burqa in France: the Antipolitics of Islamic Revival

In 2009 a French national commission was created to issue recommendations against “the burqa” and raise the possibility of a ban on the practice in certain public settings. This paper explores the different normative stakes of politicizing the burqa and the form of Islamic Revival with which it is associated. Recent scholarship has sought to overturn orientalist depictions of Islamic movements but has insisted that bodily ethical practices, such as Muslim women’s veiling, constitute forms of politics. Based on ethnographic research in a women’s mosque community in a poor suburb of Lyon, France, I argue that these women are not engaged in a form of politics but rather, antipolitics, a movement originally conceptualized in the 1970s and 80s as a rejection of politics and a valorization of private life. Three components define their antipolitics: a reconfiguration of the private sphere against an intrusive state, a retreat into a moral community, and emphasis on spiritual conditions and achievement of serenity. In interrogating different meanings of politics and antipolitics, this paper suggests a rethinking of the relationship between “political Islam” and piety movements.     

The power of the intelligentsia: The Rywin Affair and the challenge of applying the concept of cultural capital to analyze Poland’s elites

This article aims at integrating the phenomenon of the Central and Eastern European intelligentsia into the application of the theory of cultural capital of Pierre Bourdieu to the analysis of societies of that region. This is done by critically reevaluating the model of evolution of the post-communist countries of Central Europe proposed by Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelényi, and Eleanor Townsley, in their “Making Capitalism without Capitalists.” The present article argues for supplementing their approach with an analytical distinction between the concepts of intellectuals (as masters of the critical discourse culture) and the intelligentsia, which in countries like Poland have an important component of post-gentry culture. The identity and images of the intelligentsia are analyzed as important though highly contested aspects of cultural capital in Poland. Wide implications of discursive battles on the status of intelligentsia in contemporary Poland are exemplified in the case of the debates over the so-called Rywin Affair in Poland and the role played in that affair by the major Polish intellectual Adam Michnik. The political discourse related to the affair and to the status of Michnik are studied in context of the structure of the Polish political scene and related to the academic debates on the intelligentsia, whether it is a “really existing” and significant social group or merely a marginal one and “outdated discourse.”     

Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and collective emotions in contentious politics

We aim to show how collective emotions can be incorporated into the study of episodes of political contention. In a critical vein, we systematically explore the weaknesses in extant models of collective action, showing what has been lost through a neglect or faulty conceptualization of collective emotional configurations. We structure this discussion in terms of a review of several “pernicious postulates” in the literature, assumptions that have been held, we argue, by classical social-movement theorists and by social-structural and cultural critics alike. In a reconstructive vein, however, we also lay out the foundations of a more satisfactory theoretical framework. We take each succeeding critique of a pernicious postulate as the occasion for more positive theory-building. Drawing upon the work of the classical American pragmatists–especially Peirce, Dewey, and Mead–as well as aspects of Bourdieu's sociology, we construct, step by step, the foundations of a more adequate theorization of social movements and collective action. Accordingly, the negative and positive threads of our discussion are woven closely together: the dismantling of pernicious postulates and the development of a more useful analytical strategy.