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.     

Bottom-up Nation-building: National Censuses and Local Administration in Nineteenth-Century Spain

It is customary to consider population censuses (and statistics in general) as exclusive to the modern State, appearing in the second half of the eighteenth century but being developed and spreading in the West during the nineteenth century. Indeed, censuses help to strengthen and legitimize such states. However, in Spain, just as in Europe and the United States, the first population censuses considered modern were the result of, on the one hand, the directives and general and provincial coordination provided by the new state statistical institutions, such as the Statistics Commission or the Institute of Geography and, on the other, municipal personnel and the previous knowledge of local conditions held by the councils and other agents, such as the clergy, intellectuals, and notables. The media were also availed of for the cause. Let us recall that the municipalities were an explicit part of the state apparatus, therefore their relevance in carrying out censuses is not an indication of failure or weakness on the part of the Spanish State regarding the process of “bottom-up nation-building”, but rather a way to imagine the nation through which collective involvement would build the nation from the locality.     

Polanyi’s two transformations revisited: a ‘bottom up’ perspective

ABSTRACT

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on the ‘liberal state’ which these made possible; and finally on how the system impacts ‘society as a whole’. The account which this analysis produces systematically underplays the social struggles which propelled and emerged from the rise of Europe’s nineteenth century system and which ultimately led to its demise. In revisiting the two periods that are the focus of Polanyi’s analysis, this article assumes that states and interstate systems reflect the interests of powerful social forces. Thus, working from the ‘bottom up’, it focuses on the class interests that produced Europe’s market system, the state and international structures which reflected and supported them, and the social struggles that ultimately brought about the collapse of the system. What this ‘bottom up’ account reveals is the centrality of a ‘double movement’, not of market expansion and a protective countermove on the part of ‘society as a whole’, but of dominant classes monopolizing economic opportunities from global expansion, and a rising ‘red tide’ of disaffected workers. This double movement, it argues, better explains the demise of the system and the changes that ensued from it.     

Lorist,reformist and romanticist: The nineteenth‐century response to Gypsy‐travellers

Gypsy‐travellers have always occupied an uncertain and contradictory position in sedentary‐based societies. Although performing significant economic and social functions this contribution was more usually overshadowed by the points at which they clashed with the structures and ideologies of the dominant and ‘host’ society. In the nineteenth century the Gypsy‐travellers were popularly presented in two distinct ways: as a Romany race and as degenerate itinerants. These varying perspectives originated from different sources and represented contrasting approaches to the Gypsy/nomadic ‘problem’. The validity, purpose and consequences of these apparently conflicting images form the subject of this article.     

‘A sort of whirlwind’: mapping the changing geography of Presbyterian religious observance in Ireland

Since the European Reformation and the colonisations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ireland has evolved a distinctive religious geography which had profound implications for its political development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leading ultimately to the division of the island along explicitly religio–territorial lines in 1921. Troubled Geographies, a major project funded under the auspices of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's ‘Religion and Society’ programme was the first attempt to seek to understand patterns of change in the island's complex geography of religious settlement in the period since the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century up to the most recent published censuses for both Northern Ireland and the Republic. This paper will present findings from a smaller spin-off project funded by the British Academy, which digitised records of attendance at Presbyterian churches across the island over the last 150 years, enabling us to assess how patterns of practice were affected by the momentous events of the period, including partition, civil war, two world wars, the vicissitudes of the global economy and the Troubles of the more recent past. In addition, the use of new quantitative materials such as those in the Presbyterian records enables us to reflect on how patterns of substantive religious practice reflect those on nominal religious affiliation available from successive censuses from either side of the border.     

The use of population‐level data to advance interdisciplinary methodology: a cell‐through‐society sampling framework for child development research

The authors argue that population‐level data should be used to advance interdisciplinary research about community effects on early development. These data permit the identification of neighborhoods in which development patterns deviate from predictions based on local socioeconomic status (SES). So‐called ‘off‐diagonal’ places signal where researchers are likely to discover processes that either deflect the risks of low SES or dampen the salutary impact of favorable SES. Since such neighborhoods will be best understood relative to nearby ‘on‐diagonal’ neighborhoods where macro‐economic and/or public policy factors are constant, the authors present a methodology for illuminating these regional clusters. The method is deployed in British Columbia, Canada, where a team has collected developmental observations from two censuses of kindergarten children (n = 82,632). The article discusses how these clusters can be used to coordinate sampling decisions among academics representing the range of disciplines needed to study child development from cell‐through‐society, as is recommended in the literature.     

Schizocapital and the branding of American psychosis

Abstract

This essay reads Deleuze and Guattari's Anti‐Oedipus, somewhat perversely, as a radical Lacanian means of conceptualizing hypermodern capitalism. If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is psychoanalysis that rediscovers and retraces the death instinct in classical, nineteenth‐century capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis better exemplifies the ways in which the deterritorializing flows of twenty‐frrst‐century global capitalism have overcoded and overwritten that classical, nineteenth‐century order of things. Taking Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho as its symptomatic text, this essay discusses the implications, raised hysterically in the novel, of an unrestricted economy in which the ‘subject’ is no longer held in place by a governing (master or paternal) signifier in relation to a traditional symbolic order. The essay shows how Lacan's notion of ‘the Other’ has been reconfigured, in relation to consumer capitalism, such that it takes the form of a purely machinic imperative that turns the subject into an economically dividuated producing/product. The subject has become a little machine hooked up to the big machine that maintains it in debt in a continual process of consumption‐production of commodities, brands and identities.     

Why ‘class’ is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality at the beginning of the twenty‐first century

We can distinguish four positions on the continuing, or maybe even increasing, relevance of the category of class at the beginning of the twenty‐first century depending on the extent to which they accord central importance to (1) the reproduction or (2) the transformation of social classes with regard to (3) the distribution of goods without bads or (4) the distribution of goods and bads. One could say that Dean Curran introduces the concept of ‘risk‐class’ to radicalize the class distribution of risk and charts who will able to occupy areas less exposed to risk and who will have little choice but to occupy areas that are exposed to the brunt of the fact of the risk society. As he mentioned it is important to note that this social structuring of the distribution of bads will be affected not only by class, but also by other forms of social structuration of disadvantage, such as gender and race. In order to demonstrate that the distribution of bads is currently exacerbating class differences in life chances, however, Curran concentrates exclusively on phenomena of individual risks. In the process, he overlooks the problem of systemic risks in relation of the state, science, new corporate roles, management the mass media, law, mobile capital and social movements; at the same time, his conceptual frame of reference does not really thematize the interdependence between individual and systemic risks. Those who reduce the problematic of risk to that of the life chances of individuals are unable to grasp the conflicting social and political logics of risk and class conflicts. Or, to put it pointedly: ‘class’ is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality in world risk society.     

‘A Pest to Society’: The Charity Organisation Society's Domiciliary Assessments into the Circumstances of Poor Families and Children

This article examines the work of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) in assessing applications for children's admission to care in the late nineteenth‐century. It is based on an archive study of records kept by the ‘Waifs and Strays’ Society in England and Wales between 1882 and 1899, in particular 270 family assessments conducted by the COS. The focus was on parental behaviour rather than children's needs, with a strong narrative of taking children away to relieve parents of a burden. The research illuminates contested assumptions about childhood in the period, with resonance for current issues in policy and practice.     

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.     

Whatever happened to the human altruism gene? A service user’s view of the Welfare Reform Bill

This article draws on the relationship between the scientific development of social biology and the political development of the British welfare system. It concludes that although the present Welfare Reform Bill is beginning to move to a state of ‘conditional altruism’, social biology has shown, mathematically, that within nature the ‘selfish gene’ can pursue its own interest through acts of true ‘unconditional altruism’. The author concludes that by concentrating on ‘the cost’ of welfare, rather than its ‘value’, the present Welfare Reform Bill has confined the British welfare state to the time frame of 19th century Utilitarianism; and treated disabled people as mere commodities of a system akin to the Poor Law. True altruism allows society to see both the intrinsic and extrinsic value of others which through cooperation and deferment enables society to develop and survive.     

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.     

Four Documents,a Non‐Citizen,and a Diplomatic Controversy: The Documentation of Identity in the Mid‐Nineteenth Century

A forgotten diplomatic controversy centered on the claim to U.S. protection by a yet‐to‐be‐naturalized citizen is analyzed to offer insights into the mid‐nineteenth century understanding of the status and function of the documentation of individual identity. It makes clear the documentation of identity had a contested and gradual development. Documentation was contested in that people (both officials and members of the public) struggled to understand how it was that a document identified a person. This uncertainty centered not only on who had the authority to document identity, but how that authority was represented on a document. Beyond its mid‐nineteenth century and U.S. focus this essay is intended to provide the context for an understanding of the administrative, bureaucratic, and social developments that had to occur before identification documents could play a pivotal role in the development of the twentieth century state. In this way it suggests that official identification is an important object of analysis for debates about the articulation of information and governing in state formation.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

The British,Persecuted Foreigners and the Emergence of the Refugee Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain

For most of the nineteenth century, there were no barriers to immigration into Britain, and hence little need for the British to distinguish one foreigner from another. Despite this fact, philanthropists, officials and public commentators identified some foreigners as ‘refugees’, a designation that called for national sympathy. How and why did this category emerge? What were its inclusions and exclusions? This essay traces the expansion of the refugee category in the context of British commitments to European liberals and foreign slaves in the second quarter of the century. It argues that, by the 1840s, would-be refugees and their British supporters established a standard narrative from which audiences were meant to recognise particular foreigners as refugees and respond accordingly.     

Lost in Transitions? Feudalism,Colonialism, and Egypt's Blocked Road to Capitalism (1800–1920)

We revisit the transition debate to capitalism through the historical case of nineteenth century Egypt and the theoretical lens of uneven and combined development. We argue that the twin concepts of formal and real subsumption of labor under capital offer a necessary methodological device to study capitalist transitions. We conclude that nineteenth century Egypt was not a society experiencing an ‘indigenous’ transition to capitalism that was blocked by colonial intervention. Instead, colonialism warped the ongoing formation of a commercial-absolutist state, which led to a combination of feudal and capitalist social forms that lingered well into the middle of the twentieth century. Through a long-term historical analysis of the Egyptian social formation as a complex ensemble of political power relations and ongoing cycles of articulations of multiple mode of productions we problematize the dominant ‘modernization’ thesis. The modernization paradigm presupposes that economic growth will take place due to globalized markets, transforming, in turn, existing social and political practices and institutions along modern lines. This idea has been reiterated by neoclassical and neo-institutionalist economists who understand economic backwardness as a simple lack of market-efficient behavior of local economic agents. As such, we also emphasize that the gradual integration of the Egyptian social formation into the capitalist world market did not automatically lead to the establishment of a dominant capitalist mode of production within this formation.     

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’.     

‘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.     

Durkheim and individualism

Durkheim endorses moral and rejects methodological individualism. But he arrives at this ‘general position’via a particular development of it that runs into serious sociological, apart from any philosophical, trouble. It depends on an ethical relativism that in turn depends on an idea of society qua harmonious system, generating more or less practical aspirations, and a single appropriate, ‘normal’ morality. Yet modern society generates ideals quite unrealisable in it, and continuing, fundamental conflicts between moral doctrines and beliefs. To uphold central humanist, individualist ideals, we cannot rely on Durkheim's particular sociology or on his ethical relativism, and to defend his general position must unhook it from both.     

Gendered and classed activist identity in the Russian oppositional youth movement

This article examines how activist identity is constructed in the Russian opposition youth movement Oborona. The research is based on fieldwork among youth activists in Moscow and St Petersburg. The author analyses how activist identity is classed and gendered, as well as its relations to the Russian civic field. The article suggests, first, that the activist identity is marked by an affiliation with the intelligentsia: activists have grown up in intelligentsia families and articulate their activities through the intelligentsia's ‘markers’, such as intelligence, discussion skills and education. Secondly, activists follow a dissidents' cultural model, by emphasizing the importance of non‐conformism and traditional dissident values, and draw parallels between the contemporary government and the totalitarian Soviet state. Thirdly, this traditional intellectual dissident identity is associated with cosmopolitanism through the movement's international connections and appropriation of the forms of action of global social movements. Sometimes the activist practices and aspirations conflict with the group's ideals. Furthermore, the activist identity is gendered and embodied in the right activist ‘look’, which is defined by masculinity. Regardless of the movement's liberal ideals in regards to democracy, questions of gender and sexuality are not discussed, and activists do not question traditional understandings of gendered divisions of labour.