DEEWAANA (the mad one): the lover of music

The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of ‘publics’ in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody ‘social subjectivity’. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through Mumbai starting from the late nineteenth century. The affective response of musicophiliacs is forged not in solitude but in a space of sociality. This idea also encompasses the actual performance of the khayal genre which became prominent in the twentieth century. The khayal represented a sense of intimacy and interiority which also needs to be understood as ‘social’ and ‘public’.     

Sexual Relationships,Behaviors, and Experiences Among Bisexual Men in Mumbai,India

ABSTRACT

Objectives: This exploratory study attempted to assess a range of sexual behaviors, relationships, and related factors among a sample of bisexual men in Mumbai, India. Methods: Data collection occurred in two separate phases. First, focus group discussions were facilitated with local community members in order to finalize an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Afterward, structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 50 bisexual men using this questionnaire. Results: Participants reported a wide range of sexual behaviors and relationships with male and female partners. Conclusions: Findings have implications for future research and practice focusing on bisexual men in India,as well as their partners of all genders.     

Death,Modernity and Monuments: The Realities Expressed in the Monuments of the Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake*

Many monuments have been constructed to commemorate the Hanshin–Awaji earthquake. If a memorial represents the need to reaffirm one's ties to “a world,” each monument is supposed to provide an image of that “world.” An analysis of the monuments shows that they are greatly influenced by the character of the various organizations and groups that constructed them. Therefore, the monuments almost appear to be linked to the duties or functions of these groups. However, two realities appeared across these organizations. At first, there is a pattern in the monuments to mourn the death of those with whom one in familiar. It expresses a spiritual feeling about death. Second, we often find the word “we” in the monuments. The word “we” expresses reality in a homogeneous space. Although each reality does not correspond to a particular type of group or organization, they cannot be expressed simultaneously in the one monument. The result of the research shows that the two realities are constituted through different means.     

Survivalist Modernity and the Logic of Its Governmentality

In this article, I analyze the governmental discourses of Chung-Hee Park, drawing on Walter Benjamin's concept of the archeology of dreams. Following Benjamin, I argue that modern Korea has been shaped largely under the prevailing influence of survivalism, viewed as a principle of governmentality as well as a collective mentality. Since the late 19th century the Korean peninsula has been enmeshed in enduring geopolitico-economic threats. The Cold War brought about suffering through the Korean War, which was carried over into an authoritarian and developmental state. Finally, under the hegemony of neoliberalism at the end of the 20th century, Koreans once again underwent a collective crisis of survival. Here, I focus on Cold War survivalism and explore the discourses of Chung-Hee Park as representative texts exemplifying the logic and rationale of survivalist governmentality. Viewed as the most influential figure of 20th-century Korea, Park crystallized and implemented a survivalist governmentality, the fundamental logic of which can be delineated in the following four axioms: (i) the transcendental structure of problems, (ii) kairotic time, (iii) the praxeology of power, and (iv) the sovereign leader. These four constitute the specific narrative of national survival that functioned as a blueprint for building up the developmental Korean state.     

Reflexive Risk-Education and Cosmopolitanism in the Risk Society

Abstract

The extreme environment that students face, in terms of the global risk society, is the unintentional and high-risk consequence of the development of modern society. This paper, therefore, aims to discuss the possible strategies beyond traditional school practices for educators to think and act upon based on sociologists’ theoretical views of and empirical studies on the risk society. I will indicate that current education systems are an accomplice in producing modern risks, and will attempt to analyze the gaps between current education and reflexive risk-education. The gaps are: the experiential gap between individuals and the global society, the public-sphere gap between school and society, and the epistemological/cultural gap between eastern/nonwestern and western cultures. Three possible strategies to develop reflexive risk-education are discussed: developing an integrated curriculum through ‘critical glocal pedagogy’, assembling the social network through collaborations, such as with NGOs, and creating new social imaginations.     

National Symbols and National Identity: Currency and Constructing Cosmopolitans in Tunisia

This article examines the imagery on Tunisian banknotes and its role in constructing a state-sponsored vision of Tunisian national identity. In addition to analyzing the currency itself, the article embeds the symbols used on the money in a social and historical context by looking at other public uses of the historical figures pictured and drawing on ethnographic work conducted in Tunisia. The article suggests that the banknotes must be seen as part of a larger discourse about the nature of Tunisian identity. In particular, this discourse focuses on Tunisia as a cosmopolitan nation that is open to the modern world and posits that this openness is rooted in its history. Although the currency suggests the co-presence of modernity and tradition, tradition is relegated to the rural margins while the urban centers are celebrated as the modern future. Beyond looking at the historical figures represented, the article examines historical absences. Most notably, there are no pre-modern Arab figures on the banknotes, which reflects an ambivalent relationship with an Arab identity. This ambivalence is also reflected in the usages of French and Arabic, which tend to naturalize French in a manner not found in other North African currency.     

Making Modernity in China: Employment and Entrepreneurship among the New Generation of Peasant Workers

China is experiencing urbanization and modernization at the largest scale in human history. An army of over 280 million “peasant workers” are an integral part of this great transformation to modernity. Drawing on different data sources, including national representative random samples and the authors' first-hand survey data, we provide systematic comparisons between the older and the younger generation of peasant workers and between young peasant entrepreneurs in cities and young returnee entrepreneurs. We found that, compared with the older generation, the younger generation of peasant workers is better educated, holds more stable jobs, has a higher income, lives a happier life and is more optimistic about the future. Our analysis of the two types of peasant entrepreneurs shows that they are the elites among peasant workers, running successful business and making handsome profits. We also note that discrimination and institutional obstacles, especially the hukou system, remain to be overcome in the peasant workers' transition to modernity.     

What the digitalisation of music tells us about capitalism,culture and the power of the information technology sector

This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. It has two main aims. The first is to provide a macro-historical, multi-causal explanation of changes in technologies of musical consumption, emphasising the mutual imbrication of the economic interests of corporations with sociocultural transformations. We identify a shift over the last twenty years from consumer electronics (CE) to information technology (IT) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced, and argue that this shift from CE to IT drew upon, and in turn quickened, a shift from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption, and from dynamics of what Raymond Williams called ‘mobile privatisation’ to what we call ‘networked mobile personalisation’. The second aim is to assess change and continuity in the main means by which recorded music is consumed, in long-term perspective. We argue that disruptions caused by recent ‘digitalisation’ of music are consistent with longer term processes, whereby music has been something of a testing ground for the introduction of new cultural technologies. But we also recognise particularly high levels of disruption in recent times and relate these to the new dominance of the IT industries, and the particular dynamism or instability of that sector. We close by discussing the degree to which constant changes in how people access musical experiences might be read as instances of capitalism’s tendency to prioritise limiting notions of consumer preference over meaningful needs.     

Max Weber and the Sociology of Music

The sociology of music has been an area largely left to European sociologists. In an effort to generate greater domestic interest in the field, an examination of Max Weber's methodology and an update to his study of music is proposed. Fewer occupations or cultural projects are more social than making music, and the domestic sociological community's absence from the debate is deplorable given the dominant position our country possesses regarding musical production. Weber's Sociology of Music, which combines urban theory, class/labor theory, rationalization theory, and even climatic changes, is an excellent place to begin a thorough discussion of the social components of music. Our present understanding of cultural theories, urban theories, and Habermas's Communicative Action Theory can be employed to improve on Weber's theory; toward a new approach for the study of the sociology of music.     

Employment,flexible working and the family

This paper assesses some of the implications of one of the major social changes to have taken place in the West during the second half of the twentieth century--that is, the increased employment of women, together with normative changes in gender relations and in women's expectations. These changes have been linked to an increase in individualism, which itself is associated with the transcendence of 'first modernity'. Thus it is suggested that new approaches to social analysis are required (Beck). Here it is argued that, rather than develop completely new approaches in order to grasp the changes that are under way, the 'economic' and the 'social' (that is, employment and the family) should be seen as intertwined, rather than approached as separate phenomena. Past debates in feminism, changes in the family, and flexible employment are critically examined. The growing tensions between employment and family life are discussed. It is argued that these changes are associated with the intensification of capitalist development, rather than reflecting a fundamental transformation of society. Existing approaches to the analysis of social change, including Polanyi's analysis of the development of 'counter-movements' against the 'self-regulating' market, will, therefore, still be relevant to our enquiries. In the concluding section, a programme of research that would examine these changes is outlined.     

Hook‐Ups and Train Wrecks: Contextual Parameters and the Coordination of Jazz Interactions

This article discusses the importance of several parameters of context integral to jazz musicians' ability to hear musical signs as meaningful, such as performers' individual backgrounds and the various other styles of music available in the aural landscape, and how those parameters influence what the musicians play. Several examples from an ongoing ethnography of jazz jam sessions suggest that context is constituted by several variables, that different variables may become salient at different times, and that different interactants vary in their ability to attend to these variables. This study thus extends and elaborates frame analysis by showing that, while an interaction frame of the sort described by Goffman (1974) may perdure, it is subject to change, and the nature of the context it provides for interactions can change whenever a new interaction is initiated.     

Constructing the nation: Ethnicity,race, modernity and citizenship in early Indonesian thought

This article examines the ways in which some early twentieth-century Indonesian thinkers conceptualised the state they had so recently imagined, and particularly how they attacked the vast problem of accommodating ethnic difference within the framework of that new state. Notwithstanding the highly promising beginnings of Indonesian self-appreciation in the early twentieth century and an extraordinarily successful cooptation and, as necessary, subjugation of local and regional expressions of ethnicity to the notion of a united Indonesia, there developed at the same time the new and strange concept of an ‘Indonesian race’. That concept represented a regressive reluctance to dispense completely with pre-modern notions of culture and belonging, and created a damaging feature of the understanding of Indonesian citizenship that endures to this day.     

Modernity and Globalization: The Local and Global Sources of Individualistic and Materialistic Values in Shanghai

Sociological research has arrived at an intellectual crossroad where it faces the challenge of understanding how the dynamics of globalization have joined the forces of modernization in inducing social change. In this paper, using a survey conducted in Pudong, Shanghai, in 2001, which had captured conditions of the area's rapid transformations in a globalizing city, first, we have uncovered two distinctive dimensions of individualistic vs. materialistic values via factor analysis. Second, we have shown strong bivariate relationships between these two dimensions of values and several demographic and socioeconomic variables, as well as personal global connections (PGCs). Third, we have found that PGCs have uneven significant effects on the emergence of individualistic and materialistic values net of the demographic and socioeconomic variables. Finally, we discuss how modernizing and globalizing conditions are conducive to the formation of individualistic and materialistic values in Shanghai, heralding this process in other rapidly modernizing and globalizing cities in China and elsewhere.     

Systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia: activities of theater and radio station during the Soviet era

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia during the Soviet era in Bayan-Ölgiy Province, focusing on the music collection and preservation activities led by a theater and radio station. Bayan-Ölgiy is located far from Ulaanbaatar; adjacent to Kazakhstan, Xinjiang (China), and Russia. Using three–years participation observation, this study identified three activities in promoting the systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia: importing musical knowledge and technology from the Soviet Kazakh Republic (1950–1960s); establishing a radio station and audio archive following the Sino-Soviet split (1960s–1980s); collections of Kazakh music in Mongolia (1960s–1980s). These activities were driving forces for Kazakhs to claim their identity in the post-socialist period in Mongolia. Diener found that Kazakh culture in Mongolia was preserved thanks to the geographic isolation of Bayan-Ölgiy. However, this study clearly identifies international relations and Bayan-Ölgiy’s strategic location as drivers of systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia.     

Uncertain identities and health-risking behaviour: the case of young people and smoking in late modernity

This paper argues that 'uncertain identities' are a distinct contributing factor to the residual and intractable level of smoking among young people. Further, it argues that the significance of this factor is increased by the specific social/historical context of late modernity. Findings from research with 15 to 16 year olds in the East Midlands of England are used to explore the role that smoking is perceived to play in constructing a self identity. A voluntaristic perspective is adopted on the use of tobacco, reflecting both the focus on young people's motivation to smoke and the tendency for many young people to perceive smoking as a matter of personal choice. Smoking was found to have a symbolic significance not only in terms of the presentation of self to others but also in terms of the reflexive construction of the self by those involved. The paper analyses the role of smoking in relation to self-image, self-empowerment and self-affirmation and it is concluded that for many young people smoking has certain benefits in terms of coping with uncertain identities.     

The Defeat of the Guitar Army: Don DeLillo,John Sinclair,and the Rock Revolution

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street is seldom analysed as a serious engagement with the rock music and countercultural politics of the 1960s, yet these constitute its historical context, its subject matter, and its central concerns. An historicized reading positions the novel as an intervention into contemporary debates about the causes and consequences of the defeat of the 1960s ‘rock revolution’. These debates were most thoroughly synthesized by the rock culture’s chief agitator and organic intellectual John Sinclair in his 1972 book Guitar Army. Like Guitar Army, Great Jones Street dwells on the connections between the political failure of the rock revolution and the provenance and validity of rock’s anti-rational aesthetic. Sinclair finds political hope in re-emphasizing rock’s anti-rationalism, rooted equally in black music and the psychedelic experience. More sceptical, DeLillo offers a very different reading of the rock culture’s view of African American aesthetics and its use of psychedelics.     

Nomadictates: Staging Roots and Routes in The Essaouira Gnawa Festival

The aim of this paper is to study Moroccan music festivals, especially the Essaouira Gnawa festival, against the existing theories on globalization, while contributing new concepts (nomadictates, recurrents and exclusives, wes-turn/eas-turn modernity) aimed at overcoming the reductionism and totalitarianism of the cultural imperialism thesis with regard to artefacts and cultural texts. The grotesque circulation of western cultural artefacts is justifiably judged to be agonizing for cultural theorists who want to be sure that the unequal transmissions of products across the world will not harm the local cultural, linguistic, and economic capital of the less dominant other (Hall, 1992 Hall, S. (ed.) (1992). Encoding/decoding, Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79 (London: Routledge). [Google Scholar]). We will examine music and festivity in relation to world flows, while holding the argument that the appropriation of western artefacts locally has always been part of a not-so-novel process of mobility of what we call world cultural nomadictates (nomadic dictates). To drive this idea home, we will open the discussion at hand on to existing controversies around notions of place, authenticity, and circulation. The Essaouira festival of Gnawa music and the cosmopolitan Gnawa artist Hakmoun are employed as examples to cover the translocal dynamics of cultural nomadism, whereby humans and objects vacillate constantly between roots and routes.     

Sweeping the world clean of capitalism: Samir Amin,Abdullah Ocalan and the world of autonomous regions

ABSTRACT

This paper will attempt to rethink Samir Amin's concept of delinking in terms of selective delinking and selective engagement. The notion of delinking is perhaps Samir Amin's most distinctive contribution to alternative development, as well as to a vision of a new kind of politics. Inspired by the ideas of Abdullah Ocalan, this talk will focus on stateless (con)federalism seen as an active dialectical engagement with the modern capitalist world-system, an active process of (dis)engagement capable of modifying the conditions of capitalist world-economy.