Ethnic Identities under the Tourist Gaze

This paper examines the construction of Bai ethnicity and Bai identity on the tourist market in Dali, Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China. Focusing on how the social landscape of Dali has changed in response to the development of tourism, this paper explores how Bai ethnicity is advocated as a product loaded with potential economic values. The author discovers that ‘commerce of authenticity’ (T. Oakes, Tourism and modernity in China. London, Routledge, 1998 Oakes, T. 1998. Tourism and modernity in China, London: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]), and different forms of ethnicity and artefacts promoted in the tourist market have not drowned out the sense of being ethnically Bai. Instead, the tourist industry has become a daily reminder of ethnicity to both insiders and outsiders by making people more self-conscious and reflexive about the ‘cultural stuff’ that they may have previously taken for granted, or may have left unattended. This paper demonstrates how locals actively appropriate state-defined categories and reshape them into the repertoire they desire.     

Photographs of disasters. An ethnomethodological approach

The essay analyses the photographs produced and circulated during the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake disaster in Japan, which show destroyed buildings, flooded landscapes, desperate people. Disaster destroys existing order. On first sight, the photographs of disaster depict this dissolution of order. The empirical analysis shows that the disastrousness of disaster is (also) created through the pictures of the disasters. The paper discusses why and in what way certain pictures reveal themselves to be iconographic of disaster and how they enter the visual memory as its representative. To achieve this, the study will invoke ethnomethodology. At the centre of the analysis is the question of the particular means with which these images illustrate the destructive force of the disasters and how pictures showing destruction and pain (‘pictures of pain’) turn into pictures effecting pain in the viewer (‘painful pictures’). The empirical study demonstrates: the photographs show the destruction of order; however, they do this in an orderly manner.

for Jörg Bergmann’s 70th birthday     

The Aripae o's Landscape: Local Control Within Global Reality

The Aripae o are maroon descendants living in the Lower Caura region of Bol var state, Venezuela. A product of an earlier process of globalization that gave rise to the Atlantic slave trade, present-day Aripae o continue to resist any outside influence, intervention, or penetration that could spur sociocultural relations of inequality and (in)difference. Although they are consciously aware of the sociocultural disparities inherent in the modern world capitalist system, this does not imply that they are necessarily against the globalizing tendencies of modernity. Rather, their desire is to have direct participation and control over the resources that they consider important for their cultural production, representation, and reproduction. Through the utilization of the concept of "landscape" as an integrated and yet polysemic cultural repertoire, the aim of this article is to demonstrate that the Aripae o's commitment to their traditional way of life still incorporates their appreciation of modernity and globalization.     

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.     

Gender,race and global modernity: A perspective from Thailand

Abstract

This paper draws from cultural studies, postcolonial studies and political economy to track the trafficking in racism and sexism in the cultural economy of contemporary globalization. It approaches this by looking at how global modernity is enacted by Thais and Westerners in Thailand. The author argues that the pursuit of global modernity in Thailand leads Thais to invite and embrace global modernity's racist and sexist core, thereby constituting their self-orientalization. Globalization's racist and sexist economy of desire is shown to be manufactured and retailed by both global and local corporations and to operate in international education, public health, the mass media and public culture. The paper is based on a decade of participant observation and field research.     

Remembering Lucky Dragon,re-membering Bikini: worlding the Anthropocene through transpacific nuclear modernity

This paper examines two recent Godzilla-themed cultural artefacts that highlight the entanglement between nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy: first, the 60th anniversary Godzilla exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Daigo Fukuryū Maru Exhibition Hall; second, the 2014 American Godzilla directed by Gareth Edwards. This paper frames these two distinctive post-Fukushima cultural texts as memory work that mediates post-WWII genealogies of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power as constitutive elements of U.S. militarism and transpacific technological modernity. Specifically, this paper foregrounds how these two recent cultural texts, produced at different Pacific shores, bring the complexity of the often-absented Pacific back into focus. By enacting what Rob Wilson and Chris Connery call ‘worlding’ to make sense of divergent representations of the tragic Lucky Dragon/Bikini incident that decidedly informed the creation of the original Japanese Gojira [1954. Film. Directed by Honda Ishiro. Japan: Toho Co., Ltd.], this paper analyses geopolitical figurations of the Pacific and its peoples in both the specific context of this tragic incident and the broader formation of transpacific nuclear modernity. In so doing, this paper unravels the ways in which these divergent representations grapple with nuclear modernity’s reordering of necropolitics and biopolitics and its effects: specifically, the ways in which the renarration of death-making nuclear technology as a technology of good life conveniently erases the victims of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and nuclear waste that the reproduction of U.S. nuclearism depends on and continues to produce.     

‘The Girl About Town’: discussions of modernity and female youth in Drum magazine, 1951–1970

This article examines the trope of the ‘modern miss’ in Drum magazine 1951–1970 as a locus for debate over South African urban modernity. At the centre of Drum’s African urbanity was a debate between a progressive, positively ‘modern’ existence and an attendant fear of moral and social ‘breakdown’ in the apartheid city. The trope of the ‘modern miss’ drew upon both discourses. Drum’s fascination with the ‘modern miss’ reached a peak in the years 1957–1963, during which time she appeared prominently in the magazine as a symbolic pioneer of changing gender and generational relationships. However, this portrayal continued to coexist alongside the image of young women as the victims of moral degeneration. The ‘modern miss’ was increasingly differentiated from adult women within Drum’s pages, which distanced her from the new space won by political activists. By examining constructions of young womanhood, this article points to the gendering of ‘youth’ at the intersection of commercial print culture and shifting social relations in mid‐twentieth‐century South Africa. It is also suggested that understanding the social configurations of Drum’s modernity illuminates the gendered and generational responses of formal political movements as they conducted their own concurrent debates.     

Threading meaningful lives: respectability,home businesses and identity negotiations among newly immigrant South Asian women

This article investigates how women who have come to the United States as brides of South Asian professionals use threading, a hair removal method, as a home business to negotiate new challenges they face as newly immigrant women. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, the article focuses on how these young women combine their expected roles as wives and mothers in a new country with their own aspirations to win the respect of spouses, in-laws and children via threading. The article demonstrates how these women find meaning and identity through threading and evidences how they negotiate respectability by stressing their connections to home and domestic roles even as they dissociate themselves from beauticians who work at salons. Although they disrupt extant notions of ‘good wives and mothers’, these women nevertheless articulate this disruption within existing models and, more often than not, desire to be the bahu that their mothers-in-law admire.     

Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside: Modernity and Mobility in Rural,Ethnic China

Studies of internal migration in contemporary China frequently focus on the movement of rural people to urban centers, while studies of Chinese tourism concentrate on the mobility of urban travelers. These approaches to mobility coincide neatly with established understandings of modernity, despite the fact that the Chinese government has tried to promote certain forms of rural modernization without mobilization–hence the national slogan “leave the fields without leaving the countryside.” This article complicates the relationship between modernity and mobility in China by examining mobility from the perspective of returned migrants in rural, ethnic minority tourism villages. Through the analysis of five migrants' stories of travel, I explore the ordering of mobility, or how differing types of mobility come to be re-signified in times of immense social change and the consequences of these symbolic shifts on local understandings of ethnic identity and rural livelihoods. My argument builds on analytical frameworks of mobility in post-reform China by examining how mobility itself has been ordered in ways that reveal particular desire, inequalities, and power relations. By exploring how mobility both orders social relationships and how different forms of mobility, such as tourism or migration, come to be ordered in relation to each other, I draw attention to how mobility, and by extension immobility, generates the conditions of possibility for tourism village residents to make sense of the potential and paradoxes of rural, ethnic tourism development in contemporary China.     

Retheorising Emile Durkheim on society and religion: embodiment,intoxication and collective life

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory – including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes – as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in ‘abnormal’ forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism.     

Ultimate concerns in late modernity: Archer,Bourdieu and reflexivity

Through a critique of Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, this paper explores the theoretical contribution of a Bourdieusian sociology of the subject for understanding social change. Archer's theory of reflexivity holds that conscious ‘internal conversations’ are the motor of society, central both to human subjectivity and to the ‘reflexive imperative’ of late modernity. This is established through critiques of Bourdieu, who is held to erase creativity and meaningful personal investments from subjectivity, and late modernity is depicted as a time when a ‘situational logic of opportunity’ renders embodied dispositions and the reproduction of symbolic advantages obsolete. Maintaining Archer's focus on ‘ultimate concerns’ in a context of social change, this paper argues that her theory of reflexivity is established through a narrow misreading and rejection of Bourdieu's work, which ultimately creates problems for her own approach. Archer's rejection of any pre‐reflexive dimensions to subjectivity and social action leaves her unable to sociologically explain the genesis of ‘ultimate concerns’, and creates an empirically dubious narrative of the consequences of social change. Through a focus on Archer's concept of ‘fractured reflexivity’, the paper explores the theoretical necessity of habitus and illusio for understanding the social changes that Archer is grappling with. In late modernity, reflexivity is valorized just as the conditions for its successful operation are increasingly foreclosed, creating ‘fractured reflexivity’ emblematic of the complex contemporary interaction between habitus, illusio, and accelerating social change.     

An alternative discourse of modernity in a Chinese monster film: The Great Wall

ABSTRACT

The rapid development of Chinese cinema in the twenty-first century has witnessed a blossoming of genre films with frequent references to Hollywood. The Great Wall (2016), the monster blockbuster by the Fifth Generation auteur Zhang Yimou, tells a peculiar story of a westerner helping the valiant army to defeat the ravenous hordes of Tao Tie and save humans from annihilation in medieval China. Compared to the western cinematic tradition in which monsters incarnate popular concern of the impacts of techno-scientific development, the Chinese film bestows the ancient monster with allegorical meaning of greediness. The bending of Hollywood genres into the Chinese context illuminates the intricate dynamics between the local and the global in cross-cultural encounter. By tracing the development of monster films and the changing notions of modernity in Chinese historiography, the paper examines the re-invention of Hollywood vernaculars in The Great Wall to construct an alternative vision of modernity.     

Low-income young people's problematic relationship with individualised policy in England

There is much debate within youth studies regarding whether or not, or to what extent, young people subjectively experience individualised life-pathways. This article suggests that alongside these debates, it might be fruitful to also explore if young people are being institutionally individualised ‘from above’. Using the current UK Government's child poverty policy as a case study, it explores the extent to which this policy individualises low-income young people, arguing that it strongly pushes them towards the project of self-making and choice-biographies. This is regardless of whether or not they subjectively see themselves as self-makers, or whether or not they are equipped for the task. Working with 38 young people around England, who were some of targets of this policy, this article then goes on to document how this individualisation ‘from above’ was actively rejected. Given the opportunity to write their own, ideal child poverty policy, created as part of this research, these young people instead underscored the importance of structural inequalities in shaping the problems of poverty as they saw them. Their policy highlighted a desire for collective, universalistic interventions to correct for these inequalities, rather than individualised solutions imposed ‘from above’.     

GOOD PEOPLE DOING DIRTY WORK: A STUDY OF SOCIAL ISOLATION*

Everett Hughes (1964), in his essay “Good People and Dirty Work”, implies that those who engage in dirty work may be defective in some way, a view that reflects society's perception of dirty workers. However, many of them perceive themselves to be good people doing dirty work. In this paper we examine the consequences of this disjunction between the audience's and the self's perception. We examine members of a dirty work occupation: bailbondsmen. Many of these individuals are found to be socially isolated. This isolation is the result of their belief that they have been unjustly accused of corrupt and corrupting behavior and their desire to be seen and accepted as respectable. Rejected by members of respectable society and rejecting association with like others who may taint their attempts for respectability, they become socially isolated. Ironically, by proclaiming their innocence they, unlike their truly accused counterparts, find little social support or possibility of becoming integrated into respectable society.     

Borrowing from the Rural to Help the Urban: Organic Farming Exemplars in Postsocialist China

This article examines an alternative food movement in China called exemplary agriculture. A key characteristic of the movement is its recuperation of legacies of state socialism including exemplary morality (leadership by example and the emulation of role models) and the pervasive urban/rural dichotomy (a dichotomy that privileges the urban over the rural economically, politically and culturally). Adopting practices derived from rural culture and putting a positive spin on them, movement protagonists promote alternative urban lifestyles they believe will improve the experience of city living and the malice of modernity. Drawing on ethnographic research across organic farms and farmers’ markets, this article examines some of the tensions revealed when these legacies of socialism interact with processes of globalisation such as consumer culture. It offers insights into the changing nature of activism in postsocialist China and how new economic classes are attempting to reconfigure the cultural and moral landscape of the city.     

A Rewriting Experiment of Modernity from the Perspective of Connected Histories: Taiwan as a Laboratory of Modernity

This paper aims at a new understanding of modernity from the perspective of connected history. It demonstrates that with the case of Taiwan, so‐called ‘modernity’ emerged from the interactions and connections among the various regions, cultures, and civilizations. Thus, modernity has been entangled since its birth, and has had diverse variants. When we combine this reconceptualization of modernity with the concept of functional differentiation as the most essential structural condition of modernity, a theoretical escape from the trap of Eurocentrism emerges; additionally, we are able to integrate sociological theoretical reflections with the advancements of world history study.     

The relationship between sex guilt and sexual desire in a community sample of Chinese and Euro-Canadian women

Many studies have documented significant differences in sexual desire between individuals of European and Chinese descent, but few have examined the mechanisms that underlie these differences. A recent study of university students found that sex guilt is one mechanism by which culture influences sexual desire among Chinese and Euro-Canadian women. The goal of this study was to examine whether sex guilt also mediates the relationship between ethnicity and sexual desire in a sample that is more representative of women in the general population. Euro-Canadian (n = 78; mean age = 42.1 years) and Chinese (n = 87; mean age = 42.8 years) women were recruited from the community. Euro-Canadian women reported greater sexual desire and less sex guilt. In the entire sample, sex guilt mediated the relationship between ethnicity and sexual desire such that the Chinese women reported greater sex guilt, which, in turn, was associated with lower sexual desire. Among the Chinese women, sex guilt mediated the relationship between mainstream acculturation (degree of Westernization) and sexual desire such that more Westernized Chinese women reported less sex guilt, which, in turn, was associated with greater sexual desire. These results support recent findings and further suggest that sex guilt may be one mechanism by which ethnicity affects sexual desire.     

The experience of sexual desire: Psychological correlates in a college sample

In order to elaborate on available models of sexual desire, we administered a sexual desire questionnaire to 144 college students, ages 18 to 54. Included in this measure were questions concerning the frequency of sexual desire, whether the respondent had participated in sexual activity without desire, or vice versa, experienced desire without sexual behavior, and a question assessing which cues are used by the subject to gauge sexual desire (e.g., frequency of intercourse, sexual dreams). Subjects also completed the Passionate Love Scale, Sexual Arousal Inventory, and Crowne‐Marlowe Social Desirability Scale. The results indicate that as a group, males report experiencing sexual desire more frequently than females. Males appeared to rely on similar indicators of desire as females, specifically genital arousal and sexual daydreams. For both males and females, sexual desire was significantly correlated with sexual arousal (r = 0.50, females; r = 0.44, males) while the correlation of desire and love was nonsignificant for both sexes. However, desire and sexual behavior did not necessarily co‐occur, as both males and females reported engaging in sexual behavior without desire. These data suggest that greater attention be paid to the definitional features of sexual desire in nonclinical samples, in an effort to clarify current diagnostic categories and to provide population base rates.     

Adolescents' Need to Talk About Sex and Sexuality in an Urban Mental Health Setting

Summary

For many adults, adolescent sexuality is problematic. For adolescents, it may be problematic, powerfully alluring, or simply a part of becoming an adult. Either way, and irrespective of whether they have ever had sex, young persons seeking mental health counseling in an urban mental health clinic express a strong desire to talk about sex and sexuality. Significant gender and age differences are noted in desire to talk about sexuality and mediated by involvement in sexual risk behaviors. Having experienced forced sex is directly related to desire for counseling about sex and sexuality. The findings presented in this article compel clinicians to engage all adolescents in meaningful dialogue about sex and sexuality.