(Un)settled states: Indian Ocean passages,performative belonging and restless mobility in post‐apartheid South African fiction

A number of post‐apartheid literary works revisit nineteenth‐ to early twentieth‐century Indian Ocean passages. Bringing into visibility South Africa’s other ocean – until recently largely occluded by the conceptual bedazzlement of the black Atlantic – they unsettle some of the paradigms through which it has been imagined. This article explores five such novels, which articulate or critique various citizenship claims through a poetics of (un)settlement. One strand from this cluster employs rhetorical strategies such as an ‘Atlantic register’ to translate oceanic routes into territorial roots, mobility into autochthony; the other registers a more unsettled state as it scrutinises the gendered politics of home‐making and national belonging, and issues a retort to the multicultural imagination.     

‘The Sunshine of Manly Sports and Pastimes’: Sport and the Integration of Jewish Refugees in Britain, 1895–1914

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish refugees arriving in Great Britain were exposed to an ‘anglicisation’ campaign designed to aid their integration into British society and their assimilation of British character traits and cultural values. Within this campaign, especially the element focusing on the children of the migrants, interest and participation in sport was consciously ‘transferred’ through the medium of youth and sporting organisations in order to help in their ‘anglicisation’. This essaywill show how physical recreation was promoted by the English Jewish establishment and how participation in sport amongst young Jews grew.     

Reflexivity, Ethnography and the Professions (Complementary Medicine). Watching You Watching Me Watching You (and Writing About Both of Us)

That reflexivity is a characteristic of high modernity is now a truism, but its ethical and practical implications for field research have not been explored. The article is based on research conducted among complementary medical practitioners, focusing on issues of professionalisation. This research revealed the problematic and permeable nature of boundaries in ethnographic work. For example, in the course of interviews and observation therapists vouchsafed information to us which seemed controversial, even indiscreet. Was this a matter of their own naivety, their failure to demonstrate the mature ‘professionalism’ to which they aspired? Or was it a conscious strategy, conducted in the expectation that we would make such material public without attributing it to them by name? We were obliged to reflect on the nature of our own ‘professionalism’ as researchers, the ways in which private and public selves interact in the course of research. The confessional nature of some ethnographic writing raises further issues about trust, privacy and the preservation of professional boundaries between researcher and researched. We conclude that social scientists are entitled to critique ‘professionalism’ as a historically situated ‘folk’ concept whose rhetoric often obscures material interests, but they would do well not to abandon it themselves if they are to claim a responsible and ethical form of practice.     

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’.     

‘Look at me! Oh Lord have mercy!’: images of roller-coaster riders and the work of self-recognition

The omnipresence of screens in contemporary life presents an unprecedented variety of ways of displaying as well as ways of seeing, reacting to and consuming images. This paper focuses on commercial and mediatised leisure spaces in the shape of theme parks and on on-site procedures of production and display of images of roller-coaster riders. Contemporary roller-coaster machines combine speed with high-resolution photography, to supply an enmeshed, mobile-cum-visual product, and the study asks how the images are displayed – by the corporations who run the theme parks and how they are received – by the consumers. First, the material settings in which images of roller-coaster riders are produced and displayed are explored, and then the ‘work’ that viewers engage in when they see themselves is addressed ethnographically in detail: What discursive actions and reactions are publicly performed when consumers face their images? I conceptualise the activities of viewing, and specifically of viewing images of oneself, as ‘work’, a concept which I borrow from Erving Goffman (as in ‘face-work’) and, more recently, from Mark Andrejevic (‘the work of watching’). By using qualitative and ethnographic methods, the study supplies up-close observations and analyses of the media spaces and logic in contemporary amusement parks, and the ‘work’ that viewers undertake when confronted with their images. This study contributes to our understanding of the proliferation of images of oneself in leisure and tourism, of the mediatisation of consumer publics, and of consumers’ activities of viewing their images and reacting to them when the latter are displayed commercially on public screens.     

Literary perceptions of the aborigine after 1838∗

This paper traces the emergence in nineteenth‐century ethnographic thought of a three‐tiered classification of society and history following the appearance of Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842). Adaptations of Comte's new formula to a variety of historical and social settings in fictional and other prose works paved the way for its eventual use by Achebe as the ground plan for his interpretation of the African past in Things Fall Apart. Works paving the way for this reconstruction include novels and other texts by D. H. Lawrence and various early twentieth and nineteenth century novelists as well as the ethnographic, critical and scholarly work of Matthew Arnold, Sir Edward Tylor, and Jane Harrison. Perceptions of the hunter‐gatherer phase of African social organization and the nineteenth‐century use of the term ‘aborigine’ to designate this ancient condition of society are suggested as the probable origins of a much used, versatile paradigm. Its applicability to the southern African situation in Bessie Head's Maru stems, it is suggested, from the origin of the three‐tiered system itself in early processes of communication between Europe and southern Africa.     

The iemoto system and the avant-gardes in the Japanese artistic field: Bourdieu's field theory in comparative perspective

The conceptual framework of ‘field’ proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and his model of the literary and artistic fields in nineteenth‐century France are widely applied to studies of the development of the literary and artistic fields in other regions and the fields of other cultural practices. These researches, while showing similarities to Bourdieu’s model, reveal the distinct forms of nomos which those different fields developed through localised contingencies. In other words, their findings highlight the cultural specificity of the cases on which Bourdieu’s field theory is based. The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the field theory can be beneficially applied to cross‐cultural cases provided that its culturally specific elements are clearly identified. For this purpose, I focus on one particular aspect associated with the nomos of Bourdieu’s model – the orientation toward autonomy – to argue for its cultural specificity, which becomes clearer when it is compared to a distinct case of the artistic field in early‐twentieth‐century Japan. My case study shows that the Japanese artistic field did not develop the same form of autonomy as Bourdieu’s model, but it also discloses the processes in which a certain form of nomos was shaped through the struggles between the artistic field and other fields.     

Buying and selling breasts: cosmetic surgery,beauty treatments and risk

This paper is concerned with the ways in which women are sold cosmetic surgery, and how they ‘make sense of’ their own participation in this market. It draws on ongoing ethnographic research to explore how a group of young women who have paid for breast augmentation surgery narrate their decision to undergo surgery, the choices they make as consumers of cosmetic surgery, and their experience of having surgery. These narratives are compared with the ways in which breast augmentation surgery is sold to them by the companies and medical professionals involved in the rapidly expanding market for breast augmentation surgery. The paper shows how this particular group of young white working‐class women shift between imagining the breast augmentation operation as a simple beauty treatment and recognizing it as medical surgery, and explores how this shapes their perceptions of the risks and benefits of buying new breasts. It also shows how those who market such procedures manage and manipulate perceptions of the process of breast augmentation surgery and the risks that attend on it in an effort to encourage this form of consumption.     

The thanatic strain. Kojève and Rosenzweig as two readers of Hegel

In my essay, I focus on Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit as a peculiar thanatic interpretation of Hegel. Kojève’s apology of death is so powerful that it can only suggest a new form of a religious cult, a new philosophical theology which, because of its semi-secular appearance, we should rather call a cryptotheology. I want to demonstrate that, indeed, we deal here with a cryptotheological divinisation of Thanatos where the so-called ‘frontier experience of death’ replaces the Judeo-Christian revelation. Kojève claims that this tendency already begins in Hegel in whom revelation, albeit a central notion of phenomenology, is given a characteristic, thanatico-immanentist twist. In the first part, I concentrate on Hegel and his interpretation given by Kojève; then, I present a brief overview of the thanatic strain in Kojève’s French pupils; and finally, in the second part, I return to Hegel, but his time read through the lenses of Franz Rosenzweig who dared to oppose the thanatic tendency of twentieth century philosophy. The Star of Redemption inaugurates this opposition – a distinctly modern Jewish ‘vitalistic strain’ – by returning to the original idiom of revelation and offering us a neues Denken, a ‘new thinking.’ But this new vitalism, grown out of the polemic with the ‘thanatic strain,’ does not constitute a simple repetition of the nineteenth century Lebensphilosophie; equally critical of the Kojèvian ‘overestimation of death’ and of the old forms of vitalistic thinking, it paves the way to a highly innovative late-modern philosophy of finite life which – as I will argue here – is something we very badly need today.     

Power and identity: the exhibition of human beings in the Portuguese great exhibitions

This article reflects on the inclusion of human beings in the colonial representations of the great exhibitions that Portugal organised or took part in during the first half of the twentieth century. It analyses the role played by the natives (from the Portuguese colonies), as well as the way they were represented and treated, based on various documents and interviews and on the study of the exhibition creation process. These exhibitions revealed some underlying tensions. On the one hand, they provided evidence of the differences between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘uncivilised’, of the diversity of ‘races’ and of their places in a hierarchy of civilisation. On the other, they extolled the way colonised peoples adopted Portuguese models. The ways those human beings have asserted their existence, under the power of the exhibition’s organisers, provides a means to understand how they forged and assumed their identities in a context of rules.     

Frankenstein journalism

Confronted with circumstances altered by the Internet, professional working practices have the option to change or to stay the same. This paper looks at how newsworkers in the new form of digital newsrooms have adapted the old location- or topic-based ‘beat’ system; now that they are called upon to curate or aggregate news stories which arrive fully formed from legacy news websites or emerge from social media. Stories like these are often valued for their virality – that is, how far and fast they have already spread – and their power to attract clicks from readers. Today, a growing number of news websites aggregate or curate such stories as part of their own news offerings. Yet curating these stories bring challenges to journalists’ identities and work practices, which demands a response. Based on an ethnographic study of eight digital newsrooms, we report how newsworkers use journalistic rituals to legitimise these second-hand stories flowing into the newsroom. We observed the use of rituals of objectivity, multiple sourcing and comparison with other news outlets as mechanisms that newsworkers used to validate and justify their use of second-hand content.     

The great trasformismo

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the commonalities and differences between Karl Polanyi and Antonio Gramsci in their assessment of the origins of fascism as located within the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century and its structural impasse in the twentieth century. Specifically, the aim is to trace a set of associations between Polanyi and Gramsci on the transformations wrought across the states-system of Europe prior to the crises that engulfed capitalism leading to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century. Focusing on the class structures that emerged out of the expansion of capitalism across Europe in the nineteenth century reveals that there was less a ‘great transformation’ in terms of a rupture with the past through the rise of liberal capitalism. Rather, there was more a slow and protracted process of class restoration known as passive revolution, or a ‘Great Trasformismo’, referring to the molecular absorption of class contradictions marking the consolidation and expansion of capitalist social relations. In sum, it is argued that The Great Transformation is understood better if read through the epoch of passive revolution, or The Great Trasformismo, which entailed the restoration and maintenance of class dominance through state power. This approach therefore opens up questions, rather than forecloses answers, about the historical geographies constituting the spaces and places of the political economy of modern capitalism.     

Moral accounting as field foundation in an early modern empire: the English East India Company in the late eighteenth century

Field analysis and the relational approach to historical social-scientific explanation of which it is an instance – helps illuminate the administrative dynamics of empires. While most studies of imperial dynamics emphasize the ‘high imperialism’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article extends field analysis to a crucial case from the second half of the eighteenth century: the English East India Company's transition from a (largely) merchant trading company to a territorial power. In this disordered space of administration, officials struggling with one another for metropolitan recognition provided moral accounts of themselves which, on the one hand, explained their behaviour in terms drawn from abstract, purportedly universal social spaces, and, on the other hand, claimed credibility through a personal ‘interest in disinterest’. I argue that these moral accounts helped delimit the boundaries of and shape the dynamics within a distinctively imperial administrative field. To analyse this transformation, I suggest a synthesis of three varieties of relational analysis: Bourdieu's field theory, Fligstein and McAdam's analysis of strategic action fields, and Padgett and Powell's work on network folding and robust action.     

The problem of early English sociology

A brief survey is attempted of the recent literature relating to the ‘problem’ of early English sociology, i.e. its apparent failure to produce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a body of thought comparable to the ‘classical’ sociological tradition which emerged in France and Germany during the same period. It is argued that the absence of such a tradition in England cannot be linked to the supposed failure of the English middle class to develop a corporate identity, as certain contemporary Marxist theorists have suggested. If the continental ‘classical’ tradition reflects the ideology of any social stratum, it is that of the educated middle class, linked to the central state apparatus, which developed in a number of European countries during the nineteenth century. The failure of such an intelligentsia to emerge in England in the same period is reflected in the specific development of English social thought.     

The politics of fear and empathy: emotional ambivalence in ‘host’ children and youth discourses about migrants in Cyprus

This article looks at the emotion discourses among 30 Greek-Cypriot children and youth interviewees when they describe their feelings about migrants in Cyprus. It looks at how migrant representations and narratives are highly emotional constructions that children and youth utilize to make sense of their views about how migrants are different or similar to themselves. In particular, the article focuses on the simultaneous contradictory positions and feelings of fear and empathy. Two important implications for intercultural education are discussed. First, it is suggested that it is valuable to acknowledge that the emotion work required from ‘host’ children and youth in their interactions with migrants should not be taken for granted. Second, rather than painting a ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ image of children and youth’s responses to migrants – which categorizes children and youth in simplistic ways – it might be more productive to examine how their emotions are linked to ambivalent discourses and inform actions in negotiating the presence of the other and one’s sense of belonging.     

The linear imagination,stalled: changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys

In this article, I engage with a growing interest in questions of time in the study of migration to consider how changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys play an important role in shaping multilocal migration imaginaries. I draw on two ethnographic cases with migrant care workers from the Philippines, of different generations and at different points of their migration journeys, to examine how initially held linear imaginaries of migration become confounded and stuck over time. Snapshots of migrant lives at these different points of the journey – ‘(pre)‐departures’, ‘stepping stones’, ‘settling’ – reveal how migrants’ temporal horizons shift as a consequence of changing state and political‐economic conditions, as well as migrants’ own dynamic subjective and affective engagements. New uncertainties, possibilities and dilemmas unfold and initial linear imaginaries give way instead to those that are open‐ended and asynchronous. A temporal perspective reveals that mobilities are not marked by a beginning and an end but rather involve ongoing, multiple and provisional journeys across locales and over time and the life course.     

WOMEN,DOMESTICITY AND THE FAMILY: RECENT FEMINIST WORK IN IRISH CULTURAL STUDIES

This article examines recent feminist work on the modernization of the Irish family which occurred during the twentieth century. It argues that social agencies, including prominently the Catholic Church, encouraged women to introduce ‘enlightened’ notions of order and hygiene into the family, while seeking to inhibit the development of individualist aspirations to personal pleasure, domesticity and romance. It also considers the development of literacy and reading habits in Ireland in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, as a clue to the changing forms of women's experience and subjectivity. The article concludes that a balanced account of the benefits and drawbacks for women of Irish family patterns, and of their investment in them, must take full account of tensions and ambiguities in both the traditional and the modernized family.     

Futurelessness,migration, or a lucky break: narrative tropes of the ‘blocked future’ among Serbian high school students

ABSTRACT

This article uses ethnographic discourse analysis to understand how Serbian high school students at ‘Belgrade Professional’ (BP) respond to coursework and discussions about their individual futures. Contextualizing the conversations at BP within broader local and international social forces, the paper shows how students’ perceptions of their future chances are mediated by both the school’s outdated promises of secure skilled employment and a broad understanding of Western liberal democracies as ‘meritocratic’. In short, I argue that BP students recognize the elective ‘choice biography’ as a real pathway to adulthood. However, they primarily imagine the choice biography as existing outside of Serbia, while feeling constrained by – even hostile to – such an idea within the country. To counter choice biography framings of futures in Serbia, students mobilize a discourse I call the ‘blocked future’, comprised of three related narrative tropes informed by the decades-long recession: domestic futurelessness, meritocracy abroad, and local chance. These narrative tropes illuminate the emerging cultural structures in Serbia which reflect how people cope with and processes the conflicting structural demands and unfulfilled promises of the post-socialist transition in everyday life.     

Architectural history of Ilorin mosques in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Although mosques worldwide serve the same spiritual purposes, they are significantly different in structure from one area to another within and among localities, countries and continents of the world. Muslims used whatever was available to them in their environment and their limited experience in building mosques resulted in structural differences in mosques until the age of globalisation, when some world-class mosque structures were popularised among Muslims. This paper is an attempt to produce a historical survey of the architectural designs of mosques in Ilorin in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through exploratory research, the paper gives a thematic history of Ilorin mosques’ architecture that started as a simple structure in the nineteenth century reflecting the immediate cultural setting, to become edifices in the twentieth century reflecting outside cultural influences, for the purpose of meeting the spiritual, social, physical and psychological needs of Muslims.     

From ‘temporary migrants’ to ‘permanent residents’: Indian H-1B visa holders in the United States

Literature on international migration from India in the past has focused on the formation and development of ‘Indian diasporas’; that is, Indians who have moved to various parts of the world and maintain socio-economic, cultural and political lives in India as well as other countries. However, little attention has been paid toward ‘temporary migrants’ who have migrated to different countries with a temporary visa and in the course of time extended their visas to become ‘permanent residents’. Temporary migration from India has become a common trend over the last two decades, especially since the acceleration of globalisation and the developments in the fields of information and communication technologies. Although it is argued that this type of migration took place in the past – for instance, Indians migrated to British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonies during the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries as indentured labourers for a period of three to five years and later extended their stays – what is new about the current trend is the new state policies of different host countries and the socio-economic and cultural background of the immigrants. This paper is an exploratory study of this contemporary phenomena of movement from ‘temporary migrant’ to ‘permanent resident’, a phenomena which has not been given much attention by academicians and policy makers in India. The present paper outlines this trend with an illustration of Indian H-1B visa holders in the United States.