Examining the Global North Migration Policies: A “Push Out – Push Back” Approach to Forced Migration

In this paper we focus on adapting the concept of push – pull factors to forced migration by proposing a “push out – push back” approach that underlines two most crucial elements of forced migrants’ experience. On the one hand, it stresses the reasons for leaving countries of origin or of temporary refuge that are not dependant on the will of people who flew those places, thus the “push out” factors. On the other hand, it represents the refusal of the countries of the Global North to accept forced migrants and their use of various practices, amounting to “push back” factors, to prevent them from entering or leaving their territory if they manage to reach it. These factors can be divided into three groups: passive, active, and symbolic.     

Citizen Alevi in Turkey: Beyond Confirmation and Denial

Abstract Critics of the current national citizenship models argue that, although it rests on claims to be inclusionary and universal, it can never eliminate exclusionary and particularistic practices when challenged by those identities excluded from the historical trajectory of "nation building." Turkish citizenship has been a form of anomalous amalgamation since its conception. On the one hand, the state insisted on the pre-emptive exclusion of religion and various communal cultural identities from politics, while, on other hand, it promoted a particular religious identity primarily as a means of promoting cultural and social solidarity among its citizens. Contemporary Alevi movements, representing the interests of a large minority in Turkey, provide a new source of energy for the revision of concepts of citizenship. Alevis have suffered from prejudice, and their culture has been arrested and excluded from the nation building process. They were not able to integrate into the form of national identity based on the "secular" principles that the republican state has provided as a means of promoting solidarity among citizens. What Alevis seek is a revised citizenship model in terms of a system of rights assuring the condition of neutrality among culturally diverse individuals.     

ANT and Politics: Working in and on the World

While it is possible to define ANT in a series of abstract bullet points to do so is to miss most of the point. Instead it explores and theorises the world through rich case studies. This means that, like symbolic interactionism, for ANT words are never enough: you need to practice it. In this paper we work empirically, drawing on an ANT-inflected ethnography of Norwegian salmon farming, and also dialogically. We do this because we want to show that for ANT theory is created, recreated, explored and tinkered with in particular research practices. Indeed, ANT is probably best understood as a sensibility, a set of empirical interferences in the world, a worldly practice, or a lively craft that cherishes the slow processes of knowing rather than immediately seeking results or closure. In particular it is sensible to materiality, relationality, heterogeneity, and process. At its best it understands itself as working in the world to create analytical contexts; but also on the world, to articulate and press particular contexts and their politics. As a part of this it explores the contingencies of power, generating tools to undo the inevitability of that power, while working on the assumption that other and better worlds are possible.     

Where is the British national press?1

Although globalization has highlighted the danger of conflating state, society and nation, sociologists remain insufficiently alert to such banal nationalism. Newspapers offer a strong test case of the extent of diversity in the construction of state, national and social boundaries, since Billig and Anderson have argued they comprise a special case where their orientation to an audience simultaneously located in a state, society and nation allows them to reproduce a sense of national identity. However, despite the commonsense obviousness of the term, it proves remarkably difficult to define what the 'British national press' might comprise. Circulation density of titles varies substantially across different parts of the UK and editorial copy is altered to address diverse 'national' readerships. 'British' newspapers also circulate in other states, especially the Republic of Ireland. After reviewing how newspapers might be defined as 'national' and/or 'British', we conclude that both Anderson and Billig over-estimate the congruence, relevance and obviousness of state, society and national boundaries. If the conceptualization of such boundaries is problematic in the case of the press, it follows that it must be still more so for most other objects of sociological analysis, including that of 'society' itself.     

Making foreign women the mother of our nation: the exclusion and assimilation of immigrant women in Taiwan

Citizenship awarding is politicised. Conceiving female marriage migration as a national threat, Taiwan's citizenship legislation is consciously designed and purposefully utilised to achieve exclusion and assimilation. Driven by a nationalistic impetus, it shows how Taiwan imagines itself as a modern, prosperous and homogenous nation and projects upon the immigrant outsiders as a threat to its self-identity. Examined through immigrant women's lived experiences, this citizenship legislation is biased by gender, class and ethnicity. The implementation of the legislation is not only an example of symbolic politics but also banal nationalism realised at grassroots level in the private domain. Immigrant women's lived experiences show that exclusion and assimilation stemmed from banal nationalism is not just an operation of symbolic politics but is also enmeshed with their everyday life.     

A Vertical World: The Eastern Alps and Modern Mountaineering

New sporting practices of modernity were products of complex dynamics of cultural remaking. Most accounts of the emergence of alpinism describe the new activity as part of modernization. As ways of seeing mountains changed, so did ways of moving in them. This involved a sharp break with the British gentlemanly preference for climbing without technical assistance. Modernists and alpinists found a new common ground in the Ostalpen of Tirol, a place commonly represented as one of the most traditional and Catholic locations in central Europe. In mountaineering, we may imagine a similar turn to that of artistic modernists. This article explores how the region pulled together two apparently oppositional cultural forces. In this process, there is no simple grand narrative of modernization that creates an international sporting culture of the mountains: on the one hand, in popular culture, the Ostalpen and the Dolomites in particular represented premodern forms of religiosity, from Orientalist aesthetics to the most conservative styles of Catholicism; on the other hand, the region served as a proving ground for the most technologically advanced and self-consciously modern forms of alpinism.     

Why the hyphen? Individual and collective memories of Italianness in the United States at the intersection of class and generation

This three-generation oral history study offers insight into why descendants of Italian migrants to the United States still choose hyphenated identities today. The research project shows how the meaning of Italianness shifts among the interviewees depending on class affiliation: among the middle-class offspring the use of the hyphen can be understood mainly as a reaction to the experienced pressure to give in to Anglo conformity. Among the blue-collar, urban progeny, Italianness expresses itself as a combination of an experienced ethnic environment on the one hand and a symbolic ethnicity on the other.     

Public Relations and Symbolic Politics

In German-speaking countries public relations scholars emphasize the role of public relations (PR) in society in their theorizing. These scholars seek to understand PR as a macro-level, or sociological, phenomenon in contrast to the micro-level, or management, emphasis of scholars in the United States. This article builds a sociological theory of PR by comparing it with the practice of symbolic politics as conceptualized in political science. The theory states that both PR and symbolic politics develop and use symbols—signs that influence and guide conceptions—to achieve their purposes. They also rely heavily on journalistic media. Media reality, however, frequently departs from extramedia reality. The difference between these two types of reality makes it possible for symbolic politics and PR to influence the gap and perhaps to separate the symbolic world from the external world. On the other hand, attention is a scarce resource, and increased activity in PR and symbolic politics eventually will have a declining marginal social utility.     

The Harmonization of Property Law

The property law is the most difficult part in the harmonization of private law because of its characteristics. At present, the efforts of unification and harmonization made in this field focus on two important aspects: transfer of ownership of movables and security in movables. The first involves the harmonization of two kinds of modes about the transfer of movables: the consensual systems and the systems based on tradition; the latter involves the confirmation of different kinds of security on movables and the harmonization of concrete regulations in different countries. On the one hand, the achievements which have been made in this field adopt “soft law” as the legislative technology, which is easier to be accepted by the national laws comparing with the international convention; on the other hand, they adopt flexible and practical attitudes on legislative policies. Some efforts have been made to harmonize the property law, for there is a need of harmonization in this field as well. But comparing to contract and commercial law, it is more difficult to establish an uniform regulation in this field. Maybe the time to harmonize the property law is not ripe.     

One cleans,the other doesn't

ABSTRACT

The title of this article conveys the idea which shapes it: that the positioning and identities of ‘the one’ and ‘the other’ are affected by the performance of different social practices. The highly symbolic activity of cleaning inverts the distribution of groups that would usually be divided according to the one/other dichotomy, in that gendered, class and racial others usually clean for their social ‘betters’. This redistribution allows for a look at the dynamics of social and psychic identification within an altered or inverted frame. In three different discursive locations — psychoanalytic theory, feminist film and theory, and advertising and popular culture — I examine diverse representations and implications of cleaning scenes. Each scene symptomatically collapses or merges sexual difference with other social distinctions conventionally marked by the labour involved in cleaning. As each of these discourses is concerned with articulations of identity, whether explicitly or critically (psychoanalytic theory and feminism) or implicitly (advertising and popular culture), these scenes reveal crucial links between social and symbolic practices and the vicissitudes of gender identity. In effect, gender emerges as a cleaning strategy, a representational system that masks or obfuscates the significance of other social differences.     

Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation–state building,migration and the social sciences

Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized mainstream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migration. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d’horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation–state building processes in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of ‘transnational communities’— the last phase in this process — was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodological nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory.     

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.     

Nation in Market Times: Connecting the National and the Commercial. A Research Overview

This article provides an overview of the growing body of research pertaining to different forms of mediated nationhood. In particular, it focuses on the relatively recent trend toward increasing articulations of national identity with the language of consumerism and neoliberal market ideology. It argues that the process is twofold; on the one hand commercial entities employ nationalist appeals in order to sell their commodities, a process which is called “nationalizing the commercial”. On the other hand, nation states make advantage of advertising agencies to create attractive and competitive nation brands which is a process of “commercializing the national”. The article argues that this double logic is a result of the growing importance of the economic power in societies which can be named as " economization of the social" . In the context where the political articulations of nationhood are subsumed by the commercial ones, the link between the national and the commercial is seldom challenged or questioned.     

Incorporation as an Interactive Process: Cherokee Resistance to Expansion of the Capitalist World-System, 1560–1763*

Like capitalism itself, incorporation is a dialectical historical process that involves both social structure and human agency. On the one hand, transformations are determined by hegemonic forces in the capitalist world-system itself. Incorporation is the long-range civilizational project of capitalist colonizers. This historical process is best understood not as a cultural conflict between indigenes and European invaders, but as an economic conflict between precapitalist or communal modes of production and capitalist modes. Driven by the cultural logic of historical capitalism, the intruders mythologize their economic domination as a lofty mission to implant civilization on savages. On the other hand, indigenous people are not passive recipients of Western civilization. In sharp contrast to the imperialistic goals of the interlopers, the indigenous group seeks to safeguard its established way of life. The devastating effects of change are ameliorated because the impacted people act, react, and resist. As a result, the dominated disrupt the agenda of the colonizers and create a historical window by which they prevent their cultural annihilation.     

Formulating worker consciousness

A study of history presupposes a set of concepts. This paper elaborates one such concept, ‘worker consciousness’. It sets out to formulate worker consciousness through first of all specifying a method of conceptualization and then applying this to the derivation of worker consciousness.

The part on method makes a distinction between the material object and its representation in thought and argues that there is no one to one correpondences between these two. This implies that there is no simple correlation between concepts and reality.

In deriving worker consciousness it is argued that a clear analytical distinction needs to be made between on the one hand, individual consciousness and on the other hand, collective consciousness, of which worker consciousness is but one form. The paper then relates worker consciousness to economic struggle, distinguishing this from class consciousness which embodies political struggle.     

Parsons' Concept of "Generalized Media of Social Interaction" and its Relevance for Social Anthropology

The concept of "generalized symbolic media of social interaction" was introduced by Parsons five years ago in his two articles on the concepts of power and influence.¹ I believe that it represents a theoretical development of the first importance, which has received much less attention—particularly in my own field of social anthropology—than it deserves. The purpose of the present paper is to review and criticize the concept itself and to point out its relevance to certain problems in social anthropology.     

Race and class revisited - conceptualising race and racisms1

This paper casts a critical eye on the ‘race’ and class debate in the British literature on race. It begins by arguing that ‘race’ derives its analytical status from its location within the wider category of ‘ethnos An exploratory framework is provided that defines racism’ and distinguishes it from race’ A number of central positions on the links between race and class are then reviewed and their theoretical and empirical difficulties discussed. The paper concludes by arguing that race and racism cannot be located as emanating essentially from specific class interest Racism is considered as a form i)f discourse and practice that can be harnessed to different political projects including those of class and nation building. Race on the other hand derives its ontological and analytical status from modes by which communal difference and identity are attributed and proclaimed.     

Networks and the philosophy of noise

Although in communication the message replaces noise, noise is an integral part of the message itself. The post‐war period is one of an intensified attempt to think of communication and noise together, so that the latter does not appear only as the source of disorder but also as the material part of communication. Noise is thus absolutely necessary for communication. On the other hand, in order to make a shared meaning possible, a remarkable part of this noise has to be excluded. Furthermore, communication has to be given a form in order to be distinguished from noise. Yet communication itself cannot be given any single form, for it escapes all formalizations. This movement of sharing and excluding, form‐giving and fleeing from organization, is what determines the field of communication. This article investigates the ways in which this movement has found expression in the writings of Serres, Girard, Latour and Callon.     

Extending the Symbolic Interactionist Theory of Interaction Processes: A Conceptual Outline

This article outlines the elements of a more robust symbolic interactionist theory of interpersonal processes. I argue that George Herbert Mead's conceptualization of interaction processes can be extended to explain not only micro‐level social processes but also key elements of meso‐ and macro‐level dynamics. By expanding Mead's and more recent symbolic interactionist theorizing, and incorporating key ideas from other theoretical traditions outside symbolic interactionism proper, it becomes possible to develop a theory of interaction that fills in important conceptual gaps in theories on the dynamics of micro‐, meso‐, and macro‐level social phenomena.     

Hebrew,Yiddish and the creation of contesting Jewish places in Kazimierz

This paper examines the use of Hebrew and Yiddish in the linguistic landscape of Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow, Poland. Specifically, I examine how the use of these languages in primarily symbolic modes as a part of the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire is a part of the creation of three different types of Jewish places in the quarter. These places present different stances towards whether or not Jewishness can exist in present‐day Poland, which are, in turn, reacted to by American Jewish visitors to the quarter. This work shows that nonvernacular and fragmented use of languages, while in some cases is a part of the construction of a purely commodified “Disneyfied” landscape in which users of those languages have been displaced, in others, it can be perceived as a sign of more authentic community revitalization.