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This practitioner-oriented text is the first to help social researchers define research projects, manage the social research process, engage with stakeholders and influence change. It will be invaluable for all those commissioning, managing and conducting social research.
How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens’ interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the “naturalization” of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such “soft power” they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the “curing” and “caring” dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens’ honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring “by nature,” and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women’s effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands.
British Cochin was a port in southwestern India surrounded by princely states. This article uses a dispute surrounding its limits to interrogate the role international law played in generating novel forms of political claim-making among European and non-European powers at the turn of the twentieth century. Cochin was located in an area where both physical and political boundaries were hard to define. Situated at the tip of a narrow coastline surrounded by water, it was also lodged amid territories belonging to two princely states—Cochin State and Travancore. Its ever-shifting coastline and proximity to princely states forced colonial authorities to adopt a flexible approach to the port’s boundaries, allowing the tiny princely state of Cochin to become progressively more involved with the British port’s development over the nineteenth century. The article starts by examining the forces that shaped these entanglements, and then explores a territorial dispute involving British Cochin to illuminate the ways in which, during the twentieth century’s first quarter, both the colonial administration and the Cochin State deployed the language of international law to try to extend their powers over the port. By highlighting the Cochin State’s partially successful attempts at claiming sovereignty over the waters surrounding the harbor in order to become involved with the development of a port in British India, this article shows how international law emerged as a site through which semi-sovereign territories began testing and even extending the limits of their sovereignty.
In worlds of difference, how might certain unities be forged for liberation? This paper pursues this question from the vantage-point of the dialectical tension between Marxism and religion. While some scholars have noted parallels between the two, philosophers of critical realism have aimed to establish a deeper equivalence between Marxism and religion. This paper, however, considers how an equivalence may be forged by subaltern actors in the context of political struggles—how a religious Marxism might look as a theoretical and political practice. I do this by historically reconstructing the life of Sufi Sibghatullah Mazari, a locally influential communist from Pakistan who equated Sufism with Mao-inflected Marxism. Born into a poor farming family from South Punjab, he would go on to lead peasant movements against “feudal” landlords (jagirdars) during the 1970s and be recruited into the Mazdoor Kisan Party, the country’s historically largest communist party, which drew inspiration from Mao Tse-tung. Sibghatullah’s introduction to Maoist thought and practice, especially its emphasis on a vernacular-driven communist universalism, led him to comparatively reflect on circulating insurgent Sufisms and their own universalist possibilities. Maoism and Sufism’s shared universalist elements then allowed him to equate the two: an equivalence he centered on the concept of Truth (Haqiqat). Sibghatullah also expressed this “mystical Marxism” in his political practice, as he mentored revolutionary Sufi disciples, recruited Sufi-inflected mullahs into the communist party, built alternative insurgent mosques, and even challenged the tribal and patriarchal “honor” codes, practices that, in undermining landlordism’s hegemony over Islam, threatened its reproduction.
This paper proposes an ethnographic theorization of the relationship between naming, translation, and subject constitution via the analysis of forms of interpellation in colonial Angola. It engages critically with systemic/structural renderings of colonial society that portray social positions as oppositional to argue for a deconstructive approach attentive to historical disjunctions between naming and social positioning. Dwelling on core signifiers in Portuguese and Umbundu, the paper describes the iterative chain of substitutions through which subjects have been constituted, that is, reduced and transformed. For instance, how are the Umbundu status signifiers ocimbundu and ocindele reduced in their respective translations as “black” and “white”? How can translation both re-enact and challenge the constitution of racialized and ethnicized categories of difference? How is this related to transformations in Angolan history? The argument put forth challenges the conventional understanding of social categories in the context of Portuguese colonialism in Angola by arguing that the performativity of naming and translation constitutes subjects via both fixation and displacement. Therefore, the possibility of transformation does not lie in the intentional action of subjects, but in their capacity to operate within the fractures of the relationship between language and society by drawing on disjunctions between signifier and signified, names and social positioning, subjective constitution and sociopolitical context.
In 2011, lawyers for the Chevron Corporation filed a civil suit against an aqueous geochemist under federal racketeering and corruption laws. They claimed that the geochemist and her colleagues had ghostwritten significant portions of a report attributed to a court-appointed expert in Ecuador, although the accusation was subsequently withdrawn. The original case addressed the environmental impact of Chevron’s operations in lowland Ecuador, the subject of a $9 billion judgment against the oil company. This article treats legal transcripts and depositions as examples of life writing to examine the contribution of experts to environmental litigation. It adds to recent scholarship on the instability of scientific authorship by comparing different forms of ghostwriting. Whereas the pharmaceutical industry employs ghostwriters to conceal the potentially harmful consequences of its products, the scientists contributing to the case against Chevron sought to make the company’s environmental impacts visible. The company undermined confidence in the legal proceedings in Ecuador by criticizing the experts for the plaintiffs rather than their data, preventing people whose lives and livelihoods have been affected by oil contamination from collecting the judgment against Chevron. This corporate strategy may have a chilling effect on the willingness of environmental scientists and other expert witnesses to provide evidence against powerful corporations. There is a need for better accounting of scientific research undertaken in support of environmental litigation, especially given the high stakes of legal contests like this one, in which corporate fortunes, human lives, and the fate of the environment are contingent on their technical expertise.
This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a contested memory site. The project was once an ambitious, modernist project that housed former squatters during Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency (1970–1973) and its demise has subsequently become emblematic of the violent processes of neoliberal urban restructuring that marked the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Yet efforts to memorialize the site also contain within them certain silences and elisions, gaps which can help to reveal the complex, embedded nature of liberal property relations in Chile. These relations underscore certain dynamics through which squatters have historically been able to gain housing rights and a foothold in the city. They also provide a key location through which to better understand the specific contours of neoliberalism’s trajectory, including its haunted forms of ruination, its points of tension, its limits, and the making of its counterpublics.
The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non-white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR goods extended beyond the borders of Germany to newly decolonized countries that were the beneficiaries of the GDR’s solidarity policies. Using the example of Vietnam, I challenge formulations of Ostalgie as a site of white German memory production only, highlighting consumption of East German products by racialized foreign Others. In examining the objects that Vietnamese migrants amassed and transported back to Vietnam, and their subsequent use and circulation through today, I offer a different take on the temporal and spatial relationship between people and commodities, one that assigns value and agency to imported socialist things. In contrast to reunified Germany, where socialist-era goods were deemed disposable and obsolete, in Vietnam, East German products did not lose their utility and associations with modernity. The essay argues for a more inclusive exploration of memory and approach to Ostalgie that takes seriously the alternative logics of time, space, and materiality that informed the circuits of consumption, trade, and meaning of GDR things.
This article asks under what historical conditions people who consider themselves as belonging to the ingroup resort to collective violence against free labour migrants. Based on cases in the North Atlantic, and largely limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offers a starting point for a more global approach. By using the concept of boundary work, I conclude that once ethnic boundaries are in place they need maintenance, through discourse, legislation, and surveillance. Migrants defined as outsiders, who did not accept their inferior role and thus became direct competitors for such key resources as jobs and houses, were bound to evoke irritation, protest, and, in extreme cases, mob violence. The latter occurred a number of times in early modern England, but such incidents occurred especially in the period 1860–1880 (US and Australia), 1880–1900 (Western Europe), and on both sides of the Atlantic around World War I. In all these cases, boundary-making (through heightened nationalism, imperialism, and embedded racial hierarchies) was prominent, while, at the same time, the state was unable or unwilling to protect its citizens against competition on the labour market and to provide a welfare safety net. This lack of actual boundary maintenance could lead to mob violence, especially when authorities were unwilling or unable to intervene. Moreover, it is striking that violence was directed especially against outsiders who were considered racially or culturally inferior. These included the Chinese and African-American internal migrants in the United States and colonial migrants in the United Kingdom.
Eighteenth-century England has been described as witnessing a ‘rage for gambling’. This notion, however, offers very little in respect of either characterizing or explaining gambling in its various forms in this period. Instead, this chapter uses, amongst other things, modern gambling theory as developed by social psychologists as part of an attempt to begin to reframe our understanding of gambling and its various meanings in British society in the long eighteenth century. Particular attention is devoted to attitudes towards chance, social mobility, and the highly gendered nature of much gambling. Gambling is represented here in terms of the intimate and multiple connections between it and major currents and developments in British society; indeed, gambling in this as in any other period needs to be understood primarily in the context of the social and cultural values and settings which shaped its significance.
One of the most striking developments of this period was the rise and success of the official lottery, first staged in 1694. Prior to its abolition in 1823 – the last official lottery was held in 1826 – the lottery represented state-sanctioned gambling, as well spawning a whole host of derivative gambling activities. This chapter explains the operations of the lottery, in particular the markets for lottery tickets as they developed very rapidly from the 1690s, and grew to encompass the whole of Britain, penetrating deep down into as well as across British society. It emphasizes how far the early development of the lottery marketplace was enfolded within the contemporaneous financial revolution. From early on, however, it also owed much to widely diffused entrepreneurial spirit and energies, in particular those of the lottery office keepers and their proliferating agents. The lottery was thus another facet of the accelerating commercialization of British society in this period, as well as a leading exploiter of the new power of publicity unleashed by a relatively free and ebullient print industry. From newspapers to hastily printed single-sheet handbills, publicity was key to stoking contemporary interest in and demand for the lottery and its various derivatives.
This conclusion reviews changing practices and habits of gambling in Britain in the long eighteenth century, among different groups in society, and among women and men. The rise in female gambling of different kinds was one of the most striking developments of this period, attracting significant comment from the contemporary press and writers, as well as anxiety from authors of the myriad conduct books of the period. The implications of these changes and of the prevalence of different forms of gambling for our understanding of Britain in this period is examined, in particular in relation to debates among historians about the impact and influence of polite values and culture. The final section of the conclusion looks briefly ahead to the new worlds of gambling as they began to develop in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.
This chapter examines an apparent paradox, the existence and further development of significant body of laws prohibiting different forms of gambling and gambling in certain places, and their overwhelming inefficacy. The law provides, nevertheless, a very useful prism through which to plot changing and fluctuating attitudes towards gambling among the authorities and politically powerful, and, indeed, rather lower down in society. The heart of this chapter is an analysis of successive drives to clamp down on gaming houses in London and their fairly negligible impact viewed in the longer term. This is partly a story of the resourcefulness and resources of the gaming house keepers, and their ability to evade or blunt the effects of law and magisterial campaigns to enforce the law. But it is also a story of how ineffective the law and contemporary forms of policing were when faced with an extensive, well-embedded and well-capitalized gambling industry, often supported by or at least tolerated by local communities. This is quite apart from the flagrant double standards which were entertained by the state and Parliament towards gambling.
The focus of this chapter is the gambling of the elites and primarily gambling for large financial stakes, so-called playing deep. It seeks to provide a picture of how far gambling of different kinds was firmly integrated in the lives of many among the elites, and how the landscape of elite gambling changed across the eighteenth century. However, it also emphasizes the tensions and even contradictions which existed in elite attitudes towards ‘gaming’ and the influence of different milieu on the propensity to gamble and nature of gambling. At its core are a series of case studies of individual gamblers and specific gambling coteries, including a detailed examination of a case of a junior member of a leading Scottish titled family, Lord William Murray of the Murrays of Atholl, for whom gaming was very destructive personally. Gambling, it is often emphasized, was frequently an enactment of the code of honour of the gentleman; but at stake were different, competing versions of honour and masculinity. Gambling divided as much as it united the elites, in terms of habits, conduct, and attitudes.
This chapter seeks to establish who adventured in the lottery, on what sorts of scale, and how regularly. It moves beyond purely impressionistic comment and evidence, and goes in search of systematic records for participation in the official lotteries. It underlines the sheer social and geographical extent of participation in the lottery, which developed first and most intensively in London and its environs, but which quickly spread far beyond the capital and its extensive shadow. The second half examines the motivations of those who undertook lottery adventures, focusing on attitudes towards ‘fortune’ or luck, and the extent to which the lottery served to exemplify and amplify the social solvent which was money, but also engage very widely entertained hopes for independence and social mobility present in British society in this period. Men, women, and children, from all social backgrounds, were susceptible to the allure of the lottery and the possibility of winning one of the capital prizes in the draw, even if some among the upper and middling ranks sought to distance themselves from such entrapments at the same time that they entertained them.