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.     

Toward a Decolonial Alternative to Development? The Emergence and Shortcomings of Vivir Bien as State Policy in Bolivia in the Era of Globalization

There is an urgent demand for the examination of the critical perceptions of new kinds of ‘development’ which are emerging in the Global South in response to—and often opposed to—the global capitalist political economy. This article discusses the case of contemporary Bolivia in which indigenous political alternatives have emerged as the resistance to economic globalization and the powers of capital accumulation, as well as to the cultural and epistemological commitments of the Western order. Through an ethnographic approach, it examines the emergence and shortcomings of the notion of vivir bien—a local, decolonial, indigenous concept of good life—as state policy. It argues that despite its transformative potential, the translation of vivir bien discourses into state practices has not been, to a large degree, achieved.     

Identity Constructions and Dayak Ethnic Strife in West Kalimantan,Indonesia

This article discusses the construction of Dayak identity in the context of a violent conflict between local indigenous Dayaks and migrant Madurese in West Kalimantan province between late 1996 and early 1997. The conflict was widely regarded as an ‘ethnic’ conflict and, especially for the Dayaks who were involved in the violence, the idea of a fixed, Borneo-wide, (pan-)Dayak identity versus a common Madurese enemy was crucial. This notion of a unified, homogenous Dayak category was invoked notwithstanding the fact that Dayak groups differ greatly in many respects and that ‘Dayak’ ethnic identity is highly dynamic and fluid. This paper discusses the ways in which Kanayatn Dayaks perceived and invoked their ethnic identity during the conflict and how they later interpreted the events with a particular focus on ‘Dayakness’.     

Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)

This article considers how the study of youth cultural practice in Eastern Europe informs theoretical and empirical debate about youth culture. It charts the trajectory of academic writing on East European youth cultures and suggests the region’s state socialist past (which made social inequalities relatively insignificant at a time when, elsewhere, youth cultural studies were dominated by class‐based readings) combined with the explosion of inequality in the post‐socialist period (by which time class‐resistant post‐subcultural theories led anglophone academic discussion), makes it an interesting vantage point from which to reconsider academic paradigms. Drawing on empirical examples of youth cultural practice in (post)‐socialist Eastern Europe, it argues for a perspective that integrates structural and cultural factors shaping young people’s lives. It suggests moving forward western theoretical debates – often stymied in arguments over nomenclature (‘subculture’, ‘postsubculture’, ‘neo‐tribe’) – by shifting the focus of study from ‘form’ (‘subculture’ etc.) to ‘substance’ (concrete cultural practices) and attending to everyday communicative, musical, sporting, educational, informal economy, and territorial practices. Since such practices are embedded in the ‘whole’ rather than ‘subcultural’ lives of young people, this renders visible how cultural practices are enabled and constrained by the same social divisions and inequalities that structure society at large.     

A Jew,and coloured too! Immigration of ‘Jews of middle east origin’ to Australia, 1949–58

In 1949, Jews classified by the Australian Department of Immigration as being of ‘Middle East Origin’, were a prohibited import, which had not been the case previously. The antipathy was far from aberrant in the annals of Jewish migration to Australia, and was a consequence of the meshing of two influences. The racial angst of the ‘White Australia policy’, buttressed by a finely tuned public paranoia, held across the political spectrum, and serviced by enthusiastic bureaucrats. All this was set in an ephemeral cultural and mystical anti‐Semitism endemic to Western culture. This article argues that this policy of exclusion was eroded only when the administrative props on which it relied were reluctantly removed.     

Nationalities,pedagogies and media

ABSTRACT

This article examines the implications of the language of ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘difference’ for syllabi, curricula and educators in academic institutions. The author suggests an intellectual orientation which moves away from the social vocabulary of ‘inclusion’ to that of ‘multivocality’. Such an approach requires an interdisciplinary model whose departure point anticipates the need to teach students the skills of interrogating the relationship between power and knowledge and the political implications of this link.

It is argued that such a perspective would encourage a more careful consideration of bibliography and presentations which take into account the complex diversity in the backgrounds of students — the target audience. This would simultaneously diffuse the tendency to depoliticize and domesticate race relations under the labels of ‘culture’ and ‘multiculturalism’ and require educators to assume that more than a few have family histories which mirror heterogeneity and pluralism. The embodiment of difference, however, may not always be visible. As a pedagogical strategy, thinking explicitly about the assumptions behind who, what and how one teaches will further the epistemological and political objective of educating students to develop informed opinions as well as help to cultivate a heightened sense of personal accountability to their responsibilities in the multiple communities to which they belong.     

What we talk about when we talk about ‘walking in the city’1

Originally published. in France in 1980 (and translated. into English in 1984), Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life has assumed. the status of an ur-text for many cultural studies academics and students. In particular, his chapter on ‘Walking in the City’ is often cited. as a blueprint for understanding key terms in the cultural studies repertoire such as ‘power’ and ‘resistance’. This article revisits ‘Walking in the City’ in order to supplement some of the established. understandings of his work circulating in the field of cultural studies, as well as the intersecting fields of cultural geography and urban studies. The paper begins by suggesting ways in which established. understandings of Certeau's work might be usefully rethought and extended. through a consideration of differentiated. instances of walking. Critiquing the account of body-subject relations posited. by Certeau through reference to the writings of Marcel Mauss on techniques of the body and self, the author calls, in particular, for a greater consideration of the role of assemblages and affect in understanding everyday urban practices. By the conclusion of the article, the author arrives at a more nuanced. understanding of the feedback loop between the body-subject and the city, and suggests ways in which Certeau's writing on walking remains productive for those strains of cultural studies interested. in the practices of an increasingly virtualized. urban space.     

Where the mystical meets the market: creativity and commerce in the production of popular music

Taking as my theme the familiar opposition between commerce and creativity, this paper contrasts different sociological approaches to the production of popular music and questions some of the assumptions about the rational nature of the market and mystical character of creative inspiration, that are often implied when these terms—‘creativity’ and ‘commerce’—are used in this binary oppositional manner. In arguing for a sociology of the mundane practices that produce‘commercial’ and ‘creative’ texts, I suggest that the production of popular music does not so much involve a conflict between commerce and creativity, but a struggle over what is creative, and what is to be commercial.     

Special theme introduction: methodological cosmopolitanism across the socio‐cultural sciences

The cosmopolitan sociology of Ulrich Beck has been widely recognized as making vital contributions to crosscutting conversations on globalization and transnational studies, including these debates that are being played out on the pages of Global Networks. Beck's impassioned critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ in his own discipline of sociology, in particular, has often served as a springboard for programmatic calls to attend more closely to transnational actors, issues, and processes. However, beyond the occasional acknowledgement, comparatively less attention has been paid so far to the potentialities, specificities, and practicalities of Beck's affirmative alternative vision for the socio‐cultural sciences, that of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. Building on and extending out from research experiences obtained in Beck's East Asia and Europe‐focused Cosmopolitan Climate Change (Cosmo‐Climate) project, this special theme brings together experts from across a range of socio‐cultural research fields to discuss and critically interrogate the challenges and capacities of doing methodological cosmopolitanism.     

WHAT ABOUT THE OLD CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES? AN HISTORICAL REVIEW OF ADVERTISING PRODUCERS

Critical work on advertising is underscored by a teleological conception of its object. This often emerges in the form of an emphasis on advertising as an evolving, hybrid institutions that increasingly mixes the ‘economic’ with the ‘cultural’. It is in this vein that advertising practitioners have been characterized as ‘new cultural intermediaries’ deploying distinctive aesthetic sensibilities. Similar patterns of knowledge and behaviour, however, can be traced amongst early producers of advertising suggesting a generation of ‘old’ cultural intermediaries. This unexpected phenomenon, it is argued, arises for two reasons. The first is that much critical work addressing the nature of contemporary advertising lacks historical context. The second is that culture and economy are normatively conceptualized as separate spheres. This separation underplays the multiple interconnections between the cultural and the economic in instances of material practice. Accordingly it is proposed that advertising be reformulated as a constituent practice that has historically relied upon the juxtaposition of ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ knowledges.     

Integration of immigrants in France: a historical perspective

This article seeks to identify the different factors that have facilitated or impeded the integration of immigrants in France from a historical perspective. Its aim is to shed light on the contemporary debates on the alleged failure of the republican integration model. First, we will show that – with the formation of the nation state – the integration of migrants was a constitutive element of the social cohesion of French society. Later, and during periods of xenophobia in particular, immigrants were classified according to their ability to assimilate into the French society. Since the 1970s, the double-barrelled integration question – concerning migrants and social cohesion – has reappeared. Within this context, the ‘colour-blind’ French republican model has been challenged, primarily from an economic perspective, not only by persistent social inequalities, but also, in its quintessence, by demands for cultural recognition. These factors have reinforced racial discrimination, the success of the populist extreme right and recurrent assimilation pressure.     

Football ‘fanzines’ and football culture: a case of successful ‘cultural contestation’*

‘Fanzines’– magazines produced by fans for fans on photocopiers or small presses and circulated by other means than through mainstream commercial channels – provide an alternative to the products of mass publishing and the mass entertainment industry, although often in ‘dialogue’ with these. In England fanzines – like Sniffin’ Glue or When Saturday Comes– have proliferated over the last fifteen years or so, dealing especially with rock and pop music and also, most recently, with football. Fanzines can be seen as enabling a ‘users’ view’ and -sometimes – a radical reinterpretation (or defence) of popular cultural forms to be expressed by people who would otherwise be excluded from any usual means of written expression about, or control over, mainstream institutions in the production of mass culture. This article focuses on the phenomenon of football fanzines (and the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) – a movement closely associated with fanzines), suggesting (i) that football fanzines and the FSA can be viewed as a particularly potent example of the existence of continued ‘contestation’ over cultural institutions of the kind suggested in relation to sport by Gruneau (1982 and 1983), Donnelly (1988) and others, including ourselves (Jary and Horne 1987 and Horne, Jary and Tomlinson 1987), (ii) that a consideration of football fanzines and the FSA illustrates the value of moving to a wider substantive and theoretical focus in the sociological analysis of football culture than that which has been uppermost in recent years.     

Moving images: world cities,connections and projects in Sydney's TV production industry

World city research concerned with connectivity has tended to focus on advanced producer service firms and on selected North American and European cities; the prevailing methodology has been quantitative. In this article I answer the call to ‘go beyond counting’ by bringing together a project‐based enquiry — on a TV mini‐series Mary Bryant— with a more conventional assessment of network connectivity. The inclusion of a practice‐centred approach to this case study adds the performative data to the network, highlighting the actions and processes of those involved in maintaining the city networks. Furthermore, I demonstrate how this method of analysis is more suited to the study of project‐based cultural industries and highlight the role of Sydney in the global television industry — a city hitherto under‐explored in world city literature.     

Management in/as Comic Relief: Queer Theory and Gender Performativity in The Office

Our discussion here focuses on gender performativity — the evocation of gender through stylized modes of interaction and the recitation of particular cultural norms — in the BBC comedy series The Office. We suggest that The Office can be read as a cultural text that brings sedimented ways of thinking about and enacting gender into relief, a technique that effectively ‘queers’ management and organization as gendered phenomena. In doing so, we argue that not only does The Office parody the ways in which management is configured according to the terms of what Judith Butler has described as the ‘heterosexual matrix’, but that it also represents a parodic critique of the gendered ways in which this configuration is enacted in everyday organizational encounters. We also suggest that, in addition to its capacity to be read as a parody of gender performativity, The Office reflects queer theory's concern, particularly as the latter has been articulated in Butler's writing, to reveal something of the pathos inherent in the desire for recognition that underpins the hegemonic performance of gender. In this respect, our reading of The Office emphasizes that, as a popular cultural text, it throws into (comic) relief the extent to which the desire for recognition underpins the organizational performance and management of gender in accordance with the terms of the heterosexual matrix.     

Narratives of ‘mixed race’ youth in South Korea: racial order and in-betweenness

South Korea has long been regarded as a country with a single ethnicity. Honhyeol, which literally means ‘mixed blood’ in Korean, exemplifies this orientation. In recent years, the number of ‘mixed race’ children in the country has been on the rise due to the increase in international marriages, particularly between Korean men and foreign women. Drawing on the personal narratives of 56 youths (aged between 9 and 17) obtained from three essay contests, this article examines how, why, and in which contexts the racial hierarchies of ‘mixed race’ children in Korea are constructed. Narratives of ‘mixed race’ children and their peers show that a ‘hierarchical racial order’ – characterized by a color-coding system that simultaneously operates along the lines of national origin – is channeled into ‘mixed race’ people’s everyday lives, thus shaping their identity constructions.     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

Rereading David Morley’s The ‘Nationwide’ Audience

This article intends to revisit David Morley’s work, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding, by reanalysing his findings in a way of revealing some distinct decoding patterns. While The ‘Nationwide’ Audience has been acclaimed as one of the most influential empirical works in audience studies, it has been often misunderstood as if the work failed to find out systemic and consistent influences of viewers’ social conditions on decoding practices. On the contrary, by using a statistical method, this paper demonstrates that the audiences’ decodings of the programme presented by Morley are in fact clearly patterned by their social positions. The findings reveal the over-determined effects of various social conditions such as class, gender, race and age. Particularly, the results seem to restore the importance of social class on the interpretive process, which has been displaced and ignored in many current media studies. Highlighting audiences’ structural social positions, the reading patterns rediscovered here allow us to rebut not only the traditional Marxist view of class determinism but also any relativist accounts of cultural activity.     

On the relation between ‘visual research methods’ and contemporary visual culture

One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated. This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterized by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images. Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.