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Journal of Historical Sociology

Impact factor: 0.17 5-Year impact factor: 0.304 Print ISSN: 0952-1909 Publisher: Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing)

Subjects: Sociology, Anthropology, History

Most recent papers:

  • Toward a Historical Sociology of COVID‐19: Path Dependence Method and Temporal Connections.
    Sung Hee Ru.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 09, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 283-297, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nEncountering the unprecedented social crisis of COVID‐19, an increasing number of sociologists are calling for historical sociology to engage empirically with the dynamics of the COVID‐19 crisis. I present the “path dependence method” and the “temporal connections” to interpret social life during the COVID‐19 pandemic. By using the path dependence method, I show how the personal, social, and national problems created by the COVID‐19 crisis initiate a new path and furthermore how this newly created path is justified in a society. Through the temporal connections, I will show how non‐Western countries responded more reasonably and quickly than most Western countries to the COVID‐19 crisis. The overall aim of this research is to disclose effectiveness of historical sociology, to encourage researchers to think time variable, and to argue that linking historical‐sociological knowledge to the COVID‐19 crisis would be a positive step for an in‐depth COVID‐19 sociology.\n"]
    June 09, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12367   open full text
  • Historical Sociology and Secularisation: The Political Use of ‘Culturalised Religion’ by the Radical Right in Spain.
    Rafael Ruiz Andrés.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 09, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 250-263, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe critique of the theory of secularisation has favoured the emergence of a series of concepts for the analysis of contemporary socio‐religious transformations, such as ‘culturalised religion’. These categories constitute, in turn, an opportunity to rethink the process of secularisation from the perspective of historical sociology. Against this background, this article carries out a theoretical analysis of the ambiguities of secularisation in Spain from which a cultural approach to religion (‘culturalised religion’) emerges and its potential connection to the expansion of the radical right‐wing party Vox, which became the third‐largest party in Spain's parliament in the 2019 national election. After analyzing this interrelation between ‘culturalised religion’ and the radical right on the basis of statistical sources, discourse analysis and bibliographical sources, the article concludes by stressing the importance of historical sociology for understanding phenomena like ‘culturalised religion’, which take us out of the binomial logic that has marked part of the interpretation of secularisation (revival of religions vs decline of the religious) and introduce us into the multiple interactions between the historical past and sociological reality.\n"]
    June 09, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12369   open full text
  • The Social Backgrounds of Nazi Leaders: A Statistical Analysis of Political Elites in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933.
    Simon Unger‐Alvi.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 09, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 222-249, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article compares the social backgrounds of Nazi leaders and representatives of democratic parties in the Weimar Republic. It does not advance any overarching new narrative on Nazism’s social origins, but rather aims to present a nuanced statistical picture of Weimar’s political elites. The results of this analysis are derived from an index of German members of parliament and from a new dataset, which has recently been collected from the Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Germany’s largest biographical encyclopaedia. Together, these two samples cover more than 2000 German politicians, industrialists, diplomats, political writers, academics, high state officials, and important journalists. This article reveals sociological differences between the politicians who led the Nazi party in parliament and those elites that promoted Nazism in the media, in academia, or within the German civil service. While Nazi politicians in the Reichstag were recruited from a variety of social classes, ranging from industrial workers to members of the aristocracy, National Socialist elites outside the parliament typically belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum and sociologically resembled the highly educated members of democratic and liberal parties. Overall, the picture of a generation of Nazi leaders emerges that was sociologically far more heterogeneous than is often recognized by historians.\n"]
    June 09, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12370   open full text
  • A Not Merely Charitable Alliance: Anti‐Poverty Workers Within and Against the State.
    Andrew Anastasi.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 09, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 264-282, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis essay explores the insurgent practices of members of the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program from 1965–1973. VISTA is situated historically in relation to New Left community organizing projects and the War on Poverty. Testimonials of VISTA workers demonstrate that many developed political perspectives critical of the “war” in which they had enlisted. Records of collective mobilization chart how VISTA workers attempted to form a labor union and bring the program under community control. Their largest organization, the National VISTA Alliance, represented a form of social justice unionism ante litteram within and against the U.S. state.\n"]
    June 09, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12375   open full text
  • Lost in Transitions? Feudalism, Colonialism, and Egypt's Blocked Road to Capitalism (1800–1920).
    Jelle Versieren, Brecht De Smet.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 09, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 200-221, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nWe 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.\n"]
    June 09, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12364   open full text
  • Original and Ongoing Dispossessions: Settler Capitalism and Indigenous Resistance in British Columbia.
    Justin Paulson, Julie Tomiak.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 09, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 154-169, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper draws on archival research and theoretical work to articulate the specific histories, processes, and structures of primitive accumulation in British Columbia. Such processes of accumulation appear differently here than in the comparably more well‐theorized contexts of imperial colonialisms. As we highlight the agents and infrastructures of dispossession, our research also aims to foreground the importance of agents and infrastructures of resistance. Different dispossessions generate different antagonisms, and we argue that Indigenous subjects are situated antagonistically to capital not only as laborers partially or wholly subsumed into capitalist social relations, but as Indigenous peoples as such, whose Indigeneity has been ‘in the way’ of development from the 1850s onward. Private property requires before all else the deterritorialization of those whose relations with the land do not revolve around its commodification. Violence against Indigenous nations, and especially Indigenous women, is not incidental to capitalist development but is a prerequisite to capitalist subsumption in the settler‐colonial context. In requiring the death of either Indigeneity or the person, capital constitutes Indigenous struggle as an antagonist, interrupting both the subsumption of labor and the circulation of capital (even as such struggles may also self‐constitute themselves in a variety of ways).\n"]
    June 09, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12365   open full text
  • Emigration State: Race, Citizenship and Settler Imperialism in Modern British History, c. 1850–1972.
    Freddy Foks.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 09, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 170-199, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nWhat role did migration play in the making of modern Britain? We now have a good sense of how ethnicity, class, religion and gender structured immigrants' experience and what impact they had on Britain's culture, society and economy. But as Nancy Green pointed out almost two decades ago, scholars of migration must focus on exit as well as entry. Such a call to study ‘the politics of exit’ is especially apposite in the case of the UK. For in every decade between 1850 and 1980 (with the exception of the 1930s), the UK experienced net emigration year on year. This article analyses this outflow of migrants to reveal a new vision of the UK as an ‘emigration state’. The article employs this concept to make a new argument about the formation of migration policy in the UK and offers a revised account of the geographical boundaries of the modern British state.\n"]
    June 09, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12366   open full text
  • Are We Still Dependent? Academic Dependency Theory After 20 Years.
    Jinba Tenzin, Chengpang Lee.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 2-13, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nAcademic dependency theory has attracted increasing attention in academia in the last two decades, especially during the last decade. Syed Farid Alatas, a Singapore‐Malaysia based sociologist, has contributed significantly to the popularization of the idea of academic dependency through theorizing and foregrounding the conditions of dependency in Western‐dominated knowledge production and the global division of academic labor. The growing importance of this idea as applied in Asian contexts is however inseparable from the reconfiguration of the world‐systems in which Asia and especially China have achieved great advancement economically and otherwise. In line with this transformation, we have seen an enhanced effort in Asia and the Global South towards decolonization and indigenization in educational and academic domains. We have therefore organized this special issue to engage critically with Alatas's theory and to rethink the status quo of dependency, decolonization and indigenization in Asia, particularly East Asia, in response to a new development in global and local higher education and research. To close our discussion, we call for an action‐based initiative to address and transform the circumstances of dependency and for more genuine global collaborations.\n"]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12355   open full text
  • Political Economies of Knowledge Production: On and Around Academic Dependency.
    Syed Farid Alatas.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 14-23, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nApproaches to the study of knowledge production on a global scale have drawn analogies from the study of political economy, namely, the theories of political economic imperialism and economic dependency, the notion of economic extractivism, and capitalism. Thus, we have the conceptualization of intellectual imperialism, academic dependency, academic extractivism and academic capitalism. This essay focuses on two of these phenomenon, that is, intellectual imperialism and academic dependency, suggesting that they refer to different, yet related, problems in global knowledge production. While intellectual imperialism is a crucial starting point for the understanding of knowledge production in the Third World/Periphery/South, it interacts with academic dependency to maintain the underdevelopment of academia in many communities worldwide.\n"]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12362   open full text
  • From ‘The Body Politic’ to ‘The National Interest’: English State Formation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (An Argument Concerning ‘Politically Organized Subjection’).
    Philip Corrigan, Derek Sayer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 109-152, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nPreviously unpublished, “From the Body Politic to the National Interest” was presented at the Mellon Symposium in Historical Anthropology at California Institute of Technology in May 1987. We are publishing it in the Journal of Historical Sociology for the first time to honor Philip Corrigan's memory. The essay was an attempt to expand upon arguments in Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (1985) under two main rubrics: (1) “routines and rituals of rule” and (2) “regulated representations and the making of ‘the’ public.” In both cases we went beyond our treatment of these topics in The Great Arch, to which this paper should be seen as a supplement.\n"]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12357   open full text
  • Prefatory Note: On “From the Body Politic to the National Interest”.
    Derek Sayer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 107-108, March 2022. ", nil]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12360   open full text
  • The Aura of the Local in Chinese Anthropology: Grammars, Media and Institutions of Attention Management.
    Hans Steinmüller.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 69-82, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nSince the late Qing dynasty, Chinese scholars have confronted the challenges of indigenisation: what are the limits of (Western) universalism, and how can social science, history, and anthropology become ‘Chinese’? This article deals with a series of Chinese ‘native anthropologies’, from Republican‐era outlines of ethnology and anthropology, to current anthropologies of history, urban experience, and immorality. Rather than an assessment of the merits and flaws of indigenisation in these debates, I analyse the social practices of attention management that decided which scholars and texts became influential, and which ones were ignored. These practices of attention management include the grammars, media, and institutions, within which interaction networks were established and scholarly communities formed. What held the attention of many fellow anthropologists was the aura of the local conveyed: a sense of incommensurability based on the unlikely identification of the anthropologist with the subject of study and with the intended reader. The aura of the local, I argue, appeared precisely when new grammars (such as empiricism and social theory), media (e.g. academic journals, books), and institutions (universities, government offices) made it increasingly difficult for anthropologists to construct shared understandings with the people they studied and the readers they wrote for.\n"]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12359   open full text
  • The Indigenization Debate in China: A Field Perspective.
    Junpeng Li, Songying Xu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Taiwen Yang.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 55-68, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe indigenization of sociology has been an issue of considerable controversy in China. Rather than taking a side in the debate itself, this article intends to make sense of different perspectives in the debate. Utilizing Bourdieu's field theory, it links a sociologist's view on indigenization with the sociologist's position within China's sociological field. This article traces the history of the indigenization debate in China and proposes a theoretical model based on Bourdieu's insight. It then analyzes how the different combinations of academic and political capital shape the different positions on indigenization and how such a debate can be viewed as a symbolic struggle in the intellectual field.\n"]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12356   open full text
  • In What Ways We Depend: Academic Dependency Theory and the Development of East Asian Sociology.
    Chengpang Lee, Ying Chen.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 24-36, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nSince it was framed 20 years ago, Syed Farid Alatas's theory of academic dependence has made a long‐lasting impact within the global social science field, and has elevated the previous discussion on academic dependence. In this essay, we critically examine his theory of academic dependence with an original dataset that contains 22 top sociology institutions in East Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We further engage the data, and theory within the global higher education ranking system, a theme that had not yet emerged when he framed his theory of academic dependence. Our findings suggest that (1) higher rankings do not create job opportunities for locally trained PhDs; (2) emphasis on the number of publications is still prevalent; (3) adopting the standards set up by the ranking agency re‐enforces the existing global division of academic labor. Overall, sociology in these societies after 20 years is now more dependent, rather than autonomous from, the Western academic center.\n"]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12358   open full text
  • Rethinking the Rise of China: A Postcolonial Critique of China and a Chinese Critique of the Postcolonial.
    Jinba Tenzin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 83-106, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article is intended to rethink a symbiotic but otherwise inadequately attended relationship between postcolonial studies and Chinese academia at a time when the rise of China evokes epistemic, ontological and empirical challenges for critical reflection. Above all, I argue that China is situated in her postcolonial conditions in such a way that these conditions largely define China's multi‐faceted positioning as colonial agent, (semi‐)colonial victim, recipient of colonialist ideology, overthrower of that ideology and its accompanying world‐system, and contender for the “top place” within such a world‐system. Postcolonial theory hence becomes relevant and productive in terms of its potential to problematize various puzzles, contradictions and tensions during China's rise like widespread disregard of basic civic values, political partisanship in scholarship, aggravation of the East‐West divide and rising Chinese exceptionalism. Additionally, however, this article also pinpoints the need to transform and reshape the oftentimes Eurocentric inclination in postcolonial studies through an incorporation of the revolutionary and post‐revolutionary experiences in China and elsewhere. Doing so therefore calls for a post‐revolutionary paradigm as proposed by Wang Hui, among others. I thus advocate cross‐fertilization, rather than mutual exclusion, not only between the postcolonial and post‐revolutionary paradigms but also between postcolonial studies and Chinese scholarship/academia.\n"]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12361   open full text
  • Academic Dependency Theory and the Politics of Agency in Area Studies: The Case of Anglophone Vietnamese Studies from the 1960s to the 2010s.
    Yufen Chang.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 29, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 37-54, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nAcademic dependency theory argues that scholars of developing countries uncritically imitate Western academia. Anglophone Vietnamese studies presents a puzzle: many scholars, particularly historians, follow the research frameworks developed in Vietnam and emphasize Vietnam's agency since the field emerged in the 1960s. To explain, this essay conducts content and citation analyses of 25 key texts on history of Vietnam. The findings show that they are influenced by Vietnamese official historiography in the following ways. First, they adopt Vietnam's “nation to nation” framework and essentialize China into a Confucian Other in dealing with the asymmetrical dimension between the two societies. Second, while their works utilize sources in Literary Sinitic, they seem to rely on modern Vietnamese translations and reinterpretations rather than on original primary sources. Third, the scholars are more attentive to Chinese authors' ethnocentrism than to their Vietnamese counterparts, even though ethnocentrism is inherent in both. By following Vietnam's nationalistic historiography and emphasizing Vietnam's agency, Anglophone scholars are wittingly or unwittingly involved in the power struggles between the United States and China, a current hegemon and a historical one that has been rising rapidly in the twenty‐first century.\n"]
    March 29, 2022   doi: 10.1111/johs.12363   open full text
  • Political Economies of Knowledge Production: On and Around Academic Dependency.
    Syed Farid Alatas.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 22, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nApproaches to the study of knowledge production on a global scale have drawn analogies from the study of political economy, namely, the theories of political economic imperialism and economic dependency, the notion of economic extractivism, and capitalism. Thus, we have the conceptualization of intellectual imperialism, academic dependency, academic extractivism and academic capitalism. This essay focuses on two of these phenomenon, that is, intellectual imperialism and academic dependency, suggesting that they refer to different, yet related, problems in global knowledge production. While intellectual imperialism is a crucial starting point for the understanding of knowledge production in the Third World/Periphery/South, it interacts with academic dependency to maintain the underdevelopment of academia in many communities worldwide.\n"]
    February 22, 2022   doi: 10.1002/johs.12362   open full text
  • Rethinking the Rise of China: A Postcolonial Critique of China and a Chinese Critique of the Postcolonial.
    Jinba Tenzin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 15, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article is intended to rethink a symbiotic but otherwise inadequately attended relationship between postcolonial studies and Chinese academia at a time when the rise of China evokes epistemic, ontological and empirical challenges for critical reflection. Above all, I argue that China is situated in her postcolonial conditions in such a way that these conditions largely define China's multi‐faceted positioning as colonial agent, (semi‐)colonial victim, recipient of colonialist ideology, overthrower of that ideology and its accompanying world‐system, and contender for the “top place” within such a world‐system. Postcolonial theory hence becomes relevant and productive in terms of its potential to problematize various puzzles, contradictions and tensions during China's rise like widespread disregard of basic civic values, political partisanship in scholarship, aggravation of the East‐West divide and rising Chinese exceptionalism. Additionally, however, this article also pinpoints the need to transform and reshape the oftentimes Eurocentric inclination in postcolonial studies through an incorporation of the revolutionary and post‐revolutionary experiences in China and elsewhere. Doing so therefore calls for a post‐revolutionary paradigm as proposed by Wang Hui, among others. I thus advocate cross‐fertilization, rather than mutual exclusion, not only between the postcolonial and post‐revolutionary paradigms but also between postcolonial studies and Chinese scholarship/academia.\n"]
    February 15, 2022   doi: 10.1002/johs.12361   open full text
  • In What Ways We Depend: Academic Dependency Theory and the Development of East Asian Sociology.
    Chengpang Lee, Ying Chen.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 15, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nSince it was framed 20 years ago, Syed Farid Alatas's theory of academic dependence has made a long‐lasting impact within the global social science field, and has elevated the previous discussion on academic dependence. In this essay, we critically examine his theory of academic dependence with an original dataset that contains 22 top sociology institutions in East Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We further engage the data, and theory within the global higher education ranking system, a theme that had not yet emerged when he framed his theory of academic dependence. Our findings suggest that (1) higher rankings do not create job opportunities for locally trained PhDs; (2) emphasis on the number of publications is still prevalent; (3) adopting the standards set up by the ranking agency re‐enforces the existing global division of academic labor. Overall, sociology in these societies after 20 years is now more dependent, rather than autonomous from, the Western academic center.\n"]
    February 15, 2022   doi: 10.1002/johs.12358   open full text
  • Are We Still Dependent? Academic Dependency Theory After 20 Years.
    Jinba Tenzin, Chengpang Lee.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 05, 2022
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nAcademic dependency theory has attracted increasing attention in academia in the last two decades, especially during the last decade. Syed Farid Alatas, a Singapore‐Malaysia based sociologist, has contributed significantly to the popularization of the idea of academic dependency through theorizing and foregrounding the conditions of dependency in Western‐dominated knowledge production and the global division of academic labor. The growing importance of this idea as applied in Asian contexts is however inseparable from the reconfiguration of the world‐systems in which Asia and especially China have achieved great advancement economically and otherwise. In line with this transformation, we have seen an enhanced effort in Asia and the Global South towards decolonization and indigenization in educational and academic domains. We have therefore organized this special issue to engage critically with Alatas's theory and to rethink the status quo of dependency, decolonization and indigenization in Asia, particularly East Asia, in response to a new development in global and local higher education and research. To close our discussion, we call for an action‐based initiative to address and transform the circumstances of dependency and for more genuine global collaborations.\n"]
    February 05, 2022   doi: 10.1002/johs.12355   open full text
  • Agency as Interspecies, Collective and Embedded Endeavour: Ponies and People in Northern England 1916–1950.
    Helen Wadham.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 550-572, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nAnimals are increasingly acknowledged as historical agents. There are calls for more critical approaches that explore how this agency—often shared with humans—is embedded within wider relations of power. This paper responds by employing Critical Theory, particularly the ideas of Jurgen Habermas, to explore how interspecies agency is shaped and constrained by its broader socioeconomic context. Empirical illustrations are drawn from the experiences of Dales ponies and people in the early twentieth century, who found themselves navigating the growing commodification of their shared lifeworld. The findings suggest the outcome of this process of “colonisation” was not inevitable. Rather, just as the demise of the ponies seemed unstoppable, their shared communicative relations re‐emerged powerfully during the harsh winter of 1947. The paper asks what this means for our understanding of the apparently irrevocable decline of horsepower and how we might better understand horses’ own experiences of such events and processes.\n"]
    December 11, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12335   open full text
  • Why Do Political Elites Fracture? The Unusual Case of the Yugoslav Communist Elite.
    Sergej Flere, Tibor Rutar.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 652-664, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nAfter World War II, Yugoslavia as a state was reconstituted by a small communist elite. Since this was an ideocratic rule, ideology was taken seriously by the elite and treated enthusiastically. One of the elite’s initial goals was to speedily develop Yugoslavia, so that a Western level of economic development be achieved. Economic disparities among regions were also to have been overcome. For various reasons, this objective was never close to being achieved, although in certain periods economic development was strong. The elite tried to speed up growth by various incentives, including worker self‐management. Failure to achieve this goal and various economic troubles first precipitated mutual acrimony within the elite along national lines, while at the next stage, it brought about ethnic segmentation of the elite itself. By 1972, the elite had dissolved into national, although still communist, elites. The major reasons for this process are found in the very failure to achieve the developmental goal, in the consociational nature of the political system, and in the nature of the political elites, which were national ones. Elite segmentation sheds important light on the dissolution of the Yugoslav state.\n"]
    December 11, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12340   open full text
  • Forging the Nation‐centric World: Imperial Rule and the Homogenisation of Discontent in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878–1918).
    Siniša Malešević.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 665-687, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nHistorical sociologists have questioned the idea that nationalism and imperialism are mutually exclusive phenomena. In contrast to traditional historiography that depicted empires as ‘the prison houses of nations’ contemporary scholarship emphasises the structural and ideological ambiguities that characterised the 19th century European imperial projects. Hence instead of ‘popular longings’ for national independence the focus has shifted to the experiences of ‘national indifference’. In this paper I aim to go beyond this dichotomy by questioning the role of (nationalist) agency in the collapse of imperial order. Drawing on the primary archival research I zoom in on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Austro‐Hungarian rule (1878–1918). The paper contests the view that the imperial state was severely undermined by the presence of strong nationalisms. I also challenge the notion that the majority of Bosnian population remained ‘nationally indifferent’ during this period. Instead, I argue that understanding the character of the Austro‐Hungarian rule is a much better predictor of social change that took place in this period. Rather than stifling supposedly vibrant nationalisms or operating amidst widespread national indifference the imperial state played a decisive role in forging the nation‐centric world through its inadvertent homogenisation of discontent.\n"]
    December 11, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12350   open full text
  • Street Fighters with Insurance Coverage: The Insurance System of the Nazi Storm Section (Sturmabteilung).
    Jesus Casquete.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 624-639, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThe Storm Section (Sturmabteilung, or SA) was organized throughout the Weimar Republic as a paramilitary force entrusted with the ‘fight for the streets’ during the so‐called ‘time of struggle’ (Kampfzeit). To offset the potentially paralyzing effects of activism entailing risks of injury or death, the leaders of the movement devised and implemented an insurance system, which was retained throughout the following years. This insurance system smoothed the way for the most radical uncivility to hold sway without restriction during the final years of the Republic. Starting from late 1926, the National Socialist mechanism for overcoming the barriers to participation in violent activities that could potentially involve a high cost was to introduce an insurance system to facilitate their activists' willingness to ‘sacrifice’ themselves. The visceral anti‐Semitism of the Nazis was central to the negotiations and agreements reached with different insurers. The Nazis introduced an insurance policy for their activists that would cover them while carrying out their obligations as militants in the ‘fight’ against Social Democrats and, more often, Communists. By lowering the potential costs of participation in a high‐risk instance of activism, the insurance system contributed to stoking a ‘latent civil war’ in the German streets during the final years of the Republic. Relaying on archival and other primary sources and looking at them from a collective action perspective, this paper delves into the history of the SA insurance system, as well as on its functions.\n"]
    December 11, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12351   open full text
  • The Development of the State‐Owned Enterprises in Turkey: 1923–1980.
    Ahmet Zaifer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 640-651, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article seeks to re‐interpret the development of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in Turkey from 1923 to 1980. The article shows that the dominant strong state tradition (SST) literature, which interpreted the development of SOEs as an independent project of the state to maintain its control over society, had been unable to fully explain the development processes of SOEs because it treated the state as an external entity distinct from (and even opposing to) the social classes. Employing an alternative Poulantzian framework, the article argues that the development of SOEs in Turkey was driven by class‐industry interest and appeared as a precondition of the development of capitalism in Turkey. As such, relations between SOEs and the social classes were internal and complementary, rather than external and antagonistic. The SOEs were providing the bulk of industrial inputs and investment capital to the bourgeoisie fractions within the constitutive context of domestic capital accumulation strategies at the time (e.g. capitalist consolidation in 1930s, capitalist expansion in 1950s, capitalist expansion with duty losses in 1960s and 1970s). The SOEs were also benefiting the laboring and popular classes in terms of employment opportunities and higher wages.\n"]
    December 11, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12349   open full text
  • Post‐Fascists: Putting the So‐Called “Populist Right” into Historical Perspective.
    Wiebke Keim.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 604-623, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nAuthoritarians are back: Demanding the restoration of community against formalized society and of tradition against the stranger; asking for strong states enforcing law and order, closing borders, preventing dark men from threatening white women; defending traditional family models against individualism and gender‐pluralism; claiming to represent “the people.” Today many denounce them as “Fascists!”. This article tries to conceptually capture the recent developments in two countries, France and Germany. In both cases, a diachronic comparison seems tempting. Are the '30s ahead of us? What is the extent and what is the impact of the fascist legacy today? The comparison in this article is based on Mann's book “Fascists” (2004). The paper argues that while the current far‐right cannot be considered fascist anymore and resembles interwar fascism only remotely, we have to consider it post‐fascist. If interwar fascism is largely explicable out of a context of multilevel crises to which it provided answers that many found convincing, I conclude that the current strength of the German and French far‐right does happen in a rather moderate crisis context to which it provides some answers.\n"]
    December 11, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12352   open full text
  • Politics of Hospitality: African Students at the Hebrew University Medical School in the 1960s.
    Benny Nuriely, Liat Kozma.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 573-586, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nFrom 1961‐1965, the Medical School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem taught four cohorts of medical students from developing countries, mostly African. This article explores the program through the theory of hospitality. First, we find that hospitality is constructed and enabled by international interests. Second, those interests build a status which has unexpected consequences that reveal sorts of hosts, welcoming and xenophobic. Third, as an outcome of the international structure of student exchange, the guests' response to the terms of hospitality was mitigated by their privileged status as international medical students. On the one hand, they appreciated Israel as a model of post‐colonial state‐building; on the other, they criticized the racist reactions to their presence.\n"]
    December 11, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12353   open full text
  • State, Commune and Gender Inequality Among Teachers in Rural and Small‐Town China, 1957–1979.
    Joseph Lawson.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 587-603, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nStudies of Maoist China have suggested that workplace gender inequality was greater in rural areas than cities. One possible explanation is that this was a result of the different institutional arrangements that governed rural and urban spaces. Another alternative is that different ideologies were associated with different types of work irrespective of institutional context. This article examines this through an analysis of teachers in Guangdong and Jiangsu. Some teachers were employed by the state in the same way that urban workers were, while others were employed by village‐level administrations within communes. Levels of gender inequality were not majorly different between the two groups of teachers. In both groups there was a high degree of pay equality in comparison to other types of work. Other types of gender inequalities existed in teaching, but their effects were mitigated by the unintended consequences of structural changes in education during the Cultural Revolution.\n"]
    December 11, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12354   open full text
  • Bandits, Brigands and Militants: The Historical Sociology of Outlaws.
    Baris Cayli Messina.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 402-405, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nOutlaws have been prominent actors in a social context which is characterized by collective dissent, conflict, and violence. Bandits, brigands, and militants emerged in societies with the decline of social justice, political stability, and economic prosperity. Their emergence and social networks with different actors and agencies provide us principal motives to deconstruct the social identity of outlaws and determine the factors that fostered collective dissent, conflict, and violence in different societies. This special issue covers a vast geography and different time periods to theoretically and methodologically advance our knowledge in the historical sociology of outlaws. In doing so, we address complex social, political, and cultural issues that rendered outlaws inextricable part of social problems. Exploring the power and activities of outlaws in different social geographies offers us new perspectives to tackle the origins and outcomes of social, political, and cultural dissent across the world.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12338   open full text
  • The Global History of Social Dissent: Deconstructing Outlaws within the Conundrum of Crime, Conflict, and Violence.
    Baris Cayli Messina.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 406-422, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nOutlaws have been formidable local authorities throughout history and some of their stories survived thanks to poems, ballads, and plays within a culture deeply colored by violence, avenge, injustice, punishment, and state response against them. I underscore the role of power relationship in society to examine the emergence of outlaws and utilize it to deconstruct the social, political, and cultural conundrum. Consulting the British, Mexican, Bulgarian, U.S., Ottoman, and Brazilian archives, I attempt to theorize the activities of bandits, brigands, and militants within the global history of social dissent. I argue that if we employ social dissent as an instrumental concept, we can effectively determine both local factors and uncover global connections that explicate why various outlaws and societal reactions against them demonstrate astonishing similarities in distant geographies and different time periods. This study contributes to our knowledge in the historical sociology of outlaws by offering new theoretical ventures and highlighting methodological challenges in studying outlaws within the conundrum of crime, conflict, and violence.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12345   open full text
  • Eustace the Monk: Banditry, Piracy and the Limits of State Authority in the High Middle Ages.
    Peter Lehr.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 479-490, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nBandits have been popular ‘heroic’ individuals throughout history. Many of them also proved to be quite useful figures, allowing interested parties to fill in gaps in their capacities on the quick by way of co‐opting them. Such ‘interested parties’ even included kings, whose authority still was a rather limited one. A particularly glaring gap in their authority existed at sea: keeping a fleet at the ready was quite expensive, and affordable only for a few rich exceptions. Everyone else had to make use of naval mercenaries–pirates with a license. One of the most illustrious medieval examples of such maritime entrepreneurs is Eustace the Monk. His colourful life includes being a monk, the seneschal of the Count of Boulogne, a bandit and pirate after he fell out with the count, and finally naval mercenary first for King John of England, then for King Philip Augustus of France. This contribution focuses on Eustace the Monk's maritime career. It will do so by assessing the political constellation and culture of his days which made it possible in the first place.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12347   open full text
  • “Palestine’s Robin Hood”: Abu‐Jildeh and the Making of a Social Bandit.
    Shlomi Chetrit.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 423-438, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis study explores the history of Palestinian Arab outlaw Abu‐Jildeh (∼1900–1934), as a case study for constructing a social bandit image. Between May 1933 and April 1934, following several robberies and murders, Abu‐Jildeh was Palestine’s most wanted criminal. The British‐led Palestine Police Force’s failure to arrest the bandit, despite significant efforts, further enhanced Abu‐Jildeh’s public image, making him an Arab folk hero and symbol of resistance to the British Mandate government. The research used British archival sources, Palestinian Arab and Jewish press articles, memoirs, and oral history to propose a valid historical narrative and uncover the facts behind a typical social bandit myth. These enable retracing the actions of the three main actors in Abu‐Jildeh’s saga: the outlaw himself, the police hunting him, and the local Arab press, who glorified him. Seen in the context of contemporary Arab political and national climate in Palestine, the interplay between bandit, police, and press shows how an ordinary, “opportunistic,” criminal transformed into a national hero, regardless of his actions.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12344   open full text
  • Bandits, Militants, and Martyrs: Sub‐state Violence as Claim to Authority in Late Antique North Africa.
    Gregory J. Goalwin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 452-465, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nFourth Century North Africa was a site of intense religious and political conflict. Emerging from a period of persecution and newly legitimized by the Roman state, the Christian Church immediately fractured into two competing camps. Now known as the Donatist schism, this fracture was the result of competing claims to religious authority between two camps of bishops, but the doctrinal debate at its core precipitated a specific form of violence: attacks on clergy and property perpetrated by roving groups of militant bandits. Known as circumcellions, these bands acquired a perverse reputation for religious zeal, a desire for martyrdom, and what their opponents described as the ‘madness’ and ‘insanity’ of their violence. Here I analyze sources produced by both Donatists and Catholics to trace patterns of circumcellion violence. I draw on borderland theory and research on non‐state violence to argue that such acts were not mad, but rather the result of strategic efforts to consolidate religious and political power. In this, Donatism and the sectarian violence that accompanied it provide important insights into how banditry and peasant rebellions can serve as alternate sources of social and political power, avenues through which heterodox movements challenge the power state and religious hierarchies alike.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12342   open full text
  • The Black Sheep of the Land: Bandits in the Polish Borderlands, 1918–1925.
    Aleksandra Pomiecko.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 439-451, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article examines banditry in the northeastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic after the First World War and into the mid‐1920s. It considers the devastating effects of the war, which ravaged the territory, together with policies of the Polish state that contributed to an increase in bandit activity in the eastern borderland region. This work argues that banditry here worked as a multi‐level system and thrived due to the involvement of multiple social actors—the bandits themselves, locals, state authorities, and foreign aid. Furthermore, this article pushes for an examination of bandits—not merely as social outcasts or misfits—but as an integral part of the communities they emerged from. More broadly, the focus on banditry contributes to scholarship dedicated to better understanding the aftermath of the First World War and continued conflict from the perspective of everyday people.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12339   open full text
  • Myth of the Eternal State: Armenian Outlaws, American Outsiders, and the Ottoman Search for Order.
    Emrah Sahin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 491-503, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nFocusing on violent Ottoman contexts, this study explores state behavior, charts criminal taxonomy, and contributes to the state‐outlaw paradigm an analytical conduit through which to explain state responses to the outlaws on discursive and institutional levels. At the center of this study are several cases that demonstrate the engagement of local outlaws with evangelical outsiders named George Knapp, George White, and Ellen Stone. It is my contention that, while mitigating specific activities involving these outlaws and outsiders, the state under study invents new traditions, empowers security networks, claims unaccountability, and executes double standards in pursuit of social order within its borders.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12337   open full text
  • Reluctant Militants: Colonialism, Territory, and Sanusi Resistance on the Ottoman‐Saharan Frontier.
    Jonathan M. Lohnes.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 466-478, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nLibya's enigmatic Sanusi brotherhood has been the subject of perennial debate since its emergence in Ottoman Cyrenaica in the mid nineteenth century, becoming a screen upon which apologists and detractors could project their own political anxieties and desires. For European critics, the brotherhood embodied the irrationality and fanaticism of the Islamic East. Its networks in North and Central Africa constituted an obstacle to their expansionist designs, while Sanusi prestige throughout the Muslim world rendered the brotherhood a threat to the entire colonial order of things. Nationalist historiography has generally endorsed this view, albeit with a positive valence, characterizing the Sanusiyya as an anticolonial social movement. Meanwhile, modern critical scholarship has tried to impose order on the chaos of the turn‐of‐the‐century Sahara by assigning to the fraternity the role of a “proto‐state.” This article proposes a new framework for understanding the history and sociology of the Sanusi. Drawing on theorists of subaltern resistance such as James Scott and Michael Adas—alongside Ottoman, British, French, and Italian primary sources—I demonstrate that the brotherhood began its life as an inward‐looking Islamic social justice movement with little evident interest in state building or the geopolitical controversies of the moment. I coin the term “reluctant militants” to describe its mercurial trajectory from frontier evangelism to armed struggle in response to French and Italian colonial encirclement. This process culminated in the Long War of 1911–1931, during which the Sanusiyya played a critical part in the struggles over post‐Ottoman reconstruction, from the Maghreb to Anatolia.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12348   open full text
  • National Robin Hoods and Local Avengers: On Two Shifts in the Criminal Myth of Rayyā and Sakīna in Present Day Egypt.
    Elena Chiti.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 517-534, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThe article examines bandit myths from a socio‐historical perspective, as part of the socio‐cultural reality of present‐day Egypt. It engages in the semiotics of banditry encouraged by Stephanie Cronin by taking a first step towards a social semiotics analysis of Rayyā and Sakīna, the two Egyptian female criminals par excellence, arrested in 1920 and executed in 1921. I will argue that Rayyā and Sakīna's criminal myth is currently being resignified in terms that can be conceived of as social banditry. Ethnography, press, and broadcast sources help to highlight two different recent shifts towards bandit myths, linked respectively to national and local circulation.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12343   open full text
  • Trouble with the Outlaws: Bandits, the State, and Political Legitimacy in Greece over the Longue Durée.
    Sappho Xenakis.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 504-516, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nUsing the case of modern Greece, this article examines the long historical resonance and embattled legacy of state relations with bandits. Whilst there have been enduring debates about the motivations of bandits in the armed struggle for Greek liberation from Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century, their central role within that struggle is nevertheless widely acknowledged. After independence in 1832, bandit histories eventually became a core part of nationalist myths on which the modern Greek state staked its legitimacy. As this article contends, however, this stake was not unproblematic, and was not to go unchallenged. At notable junctures over the course of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, the Greek state faced counter‐claims to these cherished tropes, when outlawed groups sought to present themselves as the authentic inheritors of the nationalist bandit mantle. This article thus draws attention to the potential for extended political reverberations over the ascription of bandit tropes and their significance in claims of legitimacy by political actors. In so doing, the paper offers a conceptual bridge over a divide commonly found between, on the one hand, studies of banditry, and, on the other, research on groups of outlaws that emerge over successive periods within the same geographic space.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12341   open full text
  • ‘The Captain of the Band is un Galant Uomo’: The Good Bandit from Boccaccio to Washington Irving.
    Alessandro Ceteroni, Simone Maria Puleo.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 535-547, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThe article explores the figure of the “good bandit,” connecting representations of the historical personage Ghino di Tacco in late‐medieval Italian literature with the bandits in Washington Irving’s travel tales. Ghino di Tacco was a notorious bandit, known for raiding pilgrims and travelers in thirteenth‐century Tuscany. Nevertheless, according to literary sources such as Boccaccio's Decameron, the infamous raider left his victims unharmed and with the means necessary to complete their journeys. Sources also indicate that Ghino di Tacco became a bandit because of factional disputes and was eventually pardoned by Pope Boniface VIII for healing the Abbot of Cluny. Similarly, the fictional bandits in Irving’s Tales of a Traveller (1824) are revealed to be men of moral standing, forced into a violent life of banditry in response to the excesses of nineteenth‐century Italy’s ruling classes. His tales redeem the figure of the bandit from crude one‐dimensional treatments common in the works of English writers such as Ann Radcliffe. Pivoting from established proposals that have characterized bandits as either criminals or revolutionaries, this article argues that, for Boccaccio as with Irving, the figure of the good bandit functions as a symbol of reconciliation and social reintegration.\n"]
    September 17, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12346   open full text
  • Bottom‐up Nation‐building: National Censuses and Local Administration in Nineteenth‐Century Spain.
    Pere Salas‐Vives, Joana Maria Pujadas‐Mora.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 04, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 287-304, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nIt 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.\n"]
    July 04, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12323   open full text
  • The Globalization of Penal Space in Nineteenth‐Century Malta.
    Russell Palmer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 04, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 323-349, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nIn the second half of the nineteenth century an unprecedented number of prisons were built across the Western‐influenced world. However, many more developed from repurposed and modified buildings. By applying space syntax analysis to examples from the then British colony of Malta, this article investigates the commonalities of penal space across a series of purpose‐built and refashioned prisons, taking into consideration key architectural phases resulting from remodelling. Rejecting the notion that Maltese developments are merely symptomatic of British colonialism, the spread of Western prisons is cast in terms of wider trends and the global spread of a particular type of penal space.\n"]
    July 04, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12322   open full text
  • Reframing the History of the Competition Concept: Neoliberalism, Meritocracy, Modernity.
    Jonathan Hearn.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 04, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 375-392, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English language dictionaries and encyclopaedias, using a method of ‘conceptual history’. I show how the concept, its grammatical forms, and characteristic associations have evolved substantially since the eighteenth century. This finding is placed in a broader explanatory context, arguing that it is the combined rise of a set of core institutions of modernity, not just capitalism but also democracy, adversarial law, science, and civil society, that deeply embeds competition in the modern world. The decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the national subordination of martial power, opened the way for more ‘liberal’ forms of society in which authority is routinely contested through competition, across economy, politics, culture and beliefs. Appreciating this is a necessary step towards truly grappling with the effects of competition on modern life.\n"]
    July 04, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12324   open full text
  • In‐Situ Displacement: Institutional Practices and the Making of the Hindu Other.
    Shelley Feldman.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 04, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 271-286, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper introduces the concept of in‐situ displacement‐displacement without mobility‐as an analytic for understanding the place of Hindus in Muslim majority East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh, a national formation that is best defined as one of a changing identification with Pakistan and India, and, subsequently, as a sovereign country in South Asia. Elaborating the contributions of Corrigan and Sayer on state formation and law, the paper highlights the importance of the judiciary as constitutive of the meanings that attend to belonging in the body politic. Evidence for this argument comes from court cases in the Dacca Law Review.\n"]
    July 04, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12328   open full text
  • The Death Penalty and Historical Change in Spain.
    Pedro Oliver Olmo.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 04, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 305-322, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article studies the long duration of the death penalty in Spain until its abolition in the Constitution of 1978. After analysing the plurality of theoretical approaches and possibilities offered by archival sources and specialised historiography (particularly those produced by specialists in the history of law and social history), I synthesise the Spanish answers to the major questions posed in the international historiographical debate on this issue. I then review the formality and the religious and juridical content of these “ceremonies of torment” in order to understand the scope of the practice of the death penalty in processes of social change: what did political power transmit from the scaffolds and what type of social impact was generated by public executions? How did the institutions that exercised the death penalty evolve? Why, during the transition from the Old Regime to the liberal state, was the death penalty used more regularly than before? How many prisoners were in fact executed, for what crimes, and using what procedures and techniques? Finally, after confirming that in the decades straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the death penalty was on the decline, being counteracted by abolitionist discourse in the field of penal sentencing, I examine the functions played by political executions in the repressive dynamics of the Civil War and Francoism.\n"]
    July 04, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12329   open full text
  • “Better red than dead”: Socialism in British Public Schools, 1900–1918.
    Nikita Makarchev, Chelsea C. Xiao.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 04, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 250-270, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper examines socialism in Edwardian public schools. It concentrates on understanding their students’ responses to, and conceptions of, socialism’s core tenets. For, existing scholarship has depicted these Edwardian institutions as almost uniformly conservative and proficient in inculcating students with pro‐social hierarchy, anti‐social innovation views. Any ideological tensions, then, stemmed from the interaction of popular, conservative‐compliant, dogmas within school contexts: social Darwinism, imperialism, athleticism, muscular Christianity and so on. This paper, however, draws on new Eton College archive sources to enhance and complicate this view. It argues socialism captivated the students’ attention and garnered a strong supportive minority that, at times, advocated complete collective ownership. Moreover, the school administration showed tolerance to even the most outspoken socialists, and its non‐hegemonic, semi‐decentralized nature gave rise to local, independent sites of support. Accordingly, this research is important to understanding Edwardian public school ideologies and socialization processes. In wider terms, too, it casts insight on Edwardian socialism’s penetration into secondary education and inter‐class acceptance.\n"]
    July 04, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12327   open full text
  • Mooring Mobilities, Fixing Flows: Towards a Global Urban History of Port Cities in the Age of Steam.
    Lasse Heerten.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 04, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 350-374, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article critically surveys the current historiography of port cities, which have recently attracted a lot of interest, particularly from global historians of the 19th and early 20th century. The article contextualizes this body of scholarship within larger recent and older trends in the discipline. Recently, historians and other scholars have predominantly analyzed port cities as “nodal points” or “hubs” within global networks. The article argues that these perspectives project spatial patterns defined by the imaginary of globalization today into the past, failing to acknowledge how tightly interwoven globalization and urbanization were in port cities during the age of steam. However, port cities can provide concrete narrative focal points to develop empirically‐grounded global histories, and remind us of the various efforts to control, limit, or prevent unsolicited forms of mobility and entanglement in the sites where these were moored or fixed. Finally, port cities can render the labor of the urban masses visible that facilitated the making of steam age connectivity and a globality anchored in the urban space of the ports.\n"]
    July 04, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12336   open full text
  • “There are traitors among us”: On the Emotional Vicissitudes of Populist Politics.
    Julia Fierman.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 04, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 234-249, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article examines fellowship and accusations of betrayal among members of a populist movement in contemporary Argentina. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among self‐described “militants” of the Kirchnerist movement, a contemporary iteration of Peronism, this work makes a uniquely anthropological intervention into existing literature on populist politics, which tends to focus on populism’s demonization of the enemy of “the people.” In contrast, this article argues that a focus on the demonization of an external enemy misses essential dimensions of the social world of Peronist politics, which is primarily characterized by loving bonds of fellowship between Peronist militants. I show how, in moments of uncertainty, this emphasis on fellowship morphs into a preoccupation with treachery, such that concern with the potential insubordination of one’s fellow Peronists eclipses animus towards external enemies. This article argues for greater attention to the lived experiences of adherents to populist movements to encourage a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the social world of populist politics.\n"]
    July 04, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12326   open full text
  • The Arab Spring and Revolutionary Theory: An Intervention in a Debate.
    Asef Bayat.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nThe so‐called Arab Spring of the 2010s that toppled six dictators has spurred productive debates about the character of these political happenings and their implications for revolutionary theory broadly. One such debate that appeared recently on the pages of Historical Sociology questions whether or not we are moving into a fifth‐generation revolutionary theory. This essay is an attempt to partake in this conversation, not only because my work is under discussion but because I wish to engage with some of the key arguments in the debate to clarify some misunderstandings and suggest ways that the Arab Spring allows for a new thinking about revolution and revolutionary theory. Whether or not new perspectives have emerged may be contested, but there is surely a need for them.\n"]
    June 18, 2021   doi: 10.1002/johs.12334   open full text
  • Framing Sectarianism in the Middle East.
    Vicken Cheterian.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 186-201, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper argues that a long view perspective of contemporary sectarianism between Sunni and Shia Islam in the Middle East could be read on the background of earlier forms of sectarianism going back to the 19th and 20th century history of the region. Such an approach would disentangle sectarianism from primordial narratives as an intrinsic problem of Islam going back to the early schism of the 7th century and place it in social formations and social practices, and link it to the emergence of sectarianism during the Ottoman age of reforms. It would explicit arguments that link sectarianism with modernism, discussing how the emergence of modern, secular institutions that were based in early‐modern millet system led to sects and sectarianism. The outcome of this approach is conceptualization of sect and sectarianism, its categorization, and confronting it with other modern narratives of the history of the Middle East.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12306   open full text
  • Australia and the Global South: Knowledge and the Ambiguities of Place and Identity.
    Fran M. Collyer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 41-54, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nAustralia was settled as a colony of Britain from the 17th century, and its early history of violent occupation has gradually given way to a relatively peaceful, wealthy, multicultural society. As a post‐colonial country, its people share characteristics with those of Britain, but, as a multicultural society, national identity is increasingly influenced by the cultures of many countries, from both the global North and South. In this paper, the question of Australia's placement as a country of the global North or South is explored. Considerations of geography, the economy, political regimes and national identity are the backdrop to an investigation of Australian scholarship and the attitudes of scholars to the inclusion of Australia as a country of the global South.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12312   open full text
  • The Production of Contemporary Sociological Knowledge in Hong Kong.
    Denise Tse‐Shang Tang.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 120-133, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper explores the development of academic sociology in Hong Kong since the expansion of higher education and increased student enrolment in the nineties. Colleges gained university titles and sociology departments matured as a result. I attempt to trace the current state of sociology in teaching programs and research directions. I conclude with a discussion of future developments with specific reference to the repositioning of Hong Kong within sociology as the former British colony continue to negotiate, navigate and grapple its relationship with Mainland China both as a productive site for sociological research and a reference point to be different in method.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12310   open full text
  • Between the West and the World: Historical Perspectives on the Place of Sociology in Asia.
    Stephane Dufoix, Hon‐Fai Chen.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 4-12, March 2021. ", nil]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12318   open full text
  • Structure, Temporality, and Theories of Revolution. Reading Alberto Melucci in Revolutionary Saint Domingue, 1791–1804.
    Carl Wilén.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 202-218, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article addresses the debate on structure, agency, and process in contemporary revolution theory, drawing on social movement theory and using the Haitian Revolution as an illustrative case. The article seeks to make three main contributions. Firstly, while accepting the critique against the failure of structuralist revolution theory to explain why revolutions can occur under difficult circumstances, the article proposes a structuralist solution instead of the focus on intentions and processes in contemporary revolution theory. Secondly, it brings a new angle to the emerging dialogue between the different fields that theorize social movements and revolutions, by combining Alberto Melucci's early and later approaches to social movements and temporality. Thirdly, the Meluccian approach is utilized in a case study that explores how independence from France can be understood in the Haitian Revolution, which serves to illustrate the strengths of the theoretical approach and to criticize the major accounts of independence in existing studies of the Haitian Revolution.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12307   open full text
  • The Making of “La Gran Familia Mexicana”: Eugenics, Gender, and Sexuality in Mexico.
    R. Sánchez‐Rivera.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 161-185, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article examines the impact of Mexican eugenics on different programs relating to the family throughout the post‐Revolutionary period. It deals with how Mexican elites thought about the family and how these discussions delimited who should be part of or exist under the banner of “la gran familia mexicana”. I discuss how eugenicists' debates regarding motherhood, puericulture, class, and different preventive health measures were intended to keep “undesirables”—or the people who, in their view, should not be part of “la gran familia mexicana”—at bay. I argue that science was used as a tool for implementing different eugenic plans that would make ideas of mestizaje and “rational mixing” into the modern Mexican nation. I argue that according to the Mexican Society of Eugenics (MSE), it was through the regulation of individual families and the acceptance of eugenic precept of self‐management and rational reproduction that the creation of the national family was to be crafted. Thus, the “gran familia mexicana” would become the organizing principle for both the individual and broader national dynamics in Mexico.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12308   open full text
  • Nationalist Ideas and the Colonial Episteme: The Antinomies Structuring Sociological Traditions of India.
    Sujata Patel.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 28-40, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThe paper traces the growth of sociology in India through three phases. The first phase, it argues, begins in the 30s with the slow consolidation of the discipline. In this phase, sociology was associated with the Indological perspective and the social was perceived in culturist terms and analysed through the prism of the past, in and through Sanskrit texts. In the second phase, which begins in the early 60s, when University education expands in India, this indigenous perspective is re‐framed. There is a shift from textual studies to empirical investigation and the village becomes the site for studying Indian civilization. This paper makes a detailed analysis of the social anthropological perspective of M.N. Srinivas whose theories on village and caste influenced the sociological imagination in this phase. The third phase starts in the late 70s with the growth of social movements of the subalterns which challenge the received culturist nationalist sociological imagination. Today sociology together with other social sciences are at crossroads in India due to the impact of neoliberalism. The latter has encouraged privatisation of education, decreased state funding in material and human resources and an increased state control on academia. All three have affected the autonomy of the teachers and as well the University system and thus the efforts to chart a new sociological imagination in which the Indian social is perceived in global comparative terms. It is difficult to assess which turn sociology in India will take in these circumstances.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12311   open full text
  • How a Catastrophe Found the Past Hurricane Floyd and the Rise of Historical Consciousness in Princeville, North Carolina.
    Calvin Adkins, Ena Prskalo, Steve Kroll‐Smith.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 219-232, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nHistory has no voice. It requires those who care enough about the past to put it into words. But to narrate the past, we must be conscious of it. This paper is an inquiry into how a small town in North Carolina found its unique history in the wake of a catastrophic hurricane. In 1885, Princeville, North Carolina became the oldest town in America charted by free Blacks. In spite of its historical significance, over time the town's storied past was silenced. By the latter half of the 20th century, the unique place of Princeville in African‐American history, indeed in United States history, was known to only a few elderly people; and they did not talk about it. The reasons a muted past begins to matter are themselves rooted in history. In 1999 Princeville was flooded by the deluge that was Hurricane Floyd. In the midst of mayhem this wordless past found a voice. In this paper we explore how a massive storm created space for the emergence of an historical consciousness among the town's residents. We also look at how the people of Princeville are leveraging their new found past to secure a safer, more predictable future.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12309   open full text
  • Between North and South: Historicizing the Indigenization Discourse in Chinese Sociology.
    Hon‐Fai Chen.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 103-119, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper aims to examine the indigenization discourse in mainland China by charting its evolution in shifting historical contexts. Three phases are distinguished. In the 1980’s, the idea of indigenization or “sinicization” was promulgated by Taiwanese and American Chinese social scientists. In taking up the idea, the early indigenization discourse in mainland China embraced rather than rejected positivism and modernity. The second phase is the 1990’s to 2000’s, when remarkable efforts at indigenization were made in the theory of social change, social psychology and post‐positivist philosophy. Yet these efforts did not constitute a pointed critique of Western social science. Most recently, there is a revival of interest in the indigenization idea, as evident in a major controversy over its adequacy and relevance in the Chinese context. While the call for indigenization is gaining currency, there is a concurrent trend of coalescence with the state‐sanctioned program of building “discursive power”.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12313   open full text
  • The Indigenization of American Sociology in Japan: The Contribution of Kazuko Tsurumi.
    Shujiro Yazawa.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 91-102, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper is an investigation of attempts at endogenization and indigenization in the history of sociology in Japan. The author begins by presenting a short history of Japanese sociology. While the issues of endogenization and indigenization had been raised in the 1910s, imperialism and the militarization of the Emperor state and society blocked this form of development. Japanese social sciences have thus mainly followed the model of Western social sciences. The issue of indigenization gained attention after World War II and especially after the late 1960s, which was a time of reflection on the extreme influence of American sociology. In this context, this paper investigates the development of Kazuko Tsurumi’s sociology, which is one of the best examples of work that deals with the issue of indigenization. Tsurumi analyzes social change from pre‐World War II to post‐World War II Japan by drawing on sociological functionalism. However, Tsurumi suggests that Kunio Yanagita’s theory of folklore and ethnology provides a stronger explanatory framework than functionalism, and contends that Kumagusu Minaka has developed an approach rooted in East Asia. Tsurumi advances this indigenous development theory based on the work of Yanagita and Minakata, and at the same time internationalizes this theory. This paper concludes that Tsurumi’s theory is an important medium between Western sociology and Eastern sociology.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12320   open full text
  • Facing Each Other: Japanese and Russian Sociologies.
    Sayana Mitupova.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 75-90, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThe history of sociology as a subfield has long aimed to describe the historical developments of the discipline, within which national traditions offer unique voices while also contributing to a global sociology. How do various sociological paradigms and national traditions approach social reality in similar and different ways? This paper examines Russian and Japanese contributions to the history of sociology by reviewing some of their major concepts and perspectives. On this basis, this paper seeks to probe into the past and present self‐understandings of the two sociological traditions, as well as their potentials for a more active role in global sociological discourse. Both countries have a history of protracted isolation, which has made them more or less invisible in the international sociological community. However, Russian and Japanese sociological traditions exist and are ready to be tapped, even as their production and mobilization of intellectual resources remain strongly embedded in their politics, cultures, and societies. A broader aim of this paper is to enhance mutual understandings and future collaborations between sociologists in Russia and Japan.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12321   open full text
  • Deparochialising the Canon: The Case of Sociological Theory.
    Syed Farid Alatas.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 13-27, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nSociological theory is not irrelevant to the South but needs to be deparochialised. The parochiality of sociological theory as it exists today can clearly be seen from the canon. The canon would have us believe that sociological theory was the sole creation of a few white men who lived in the nineteenth century. The absence of non‐European thinkers in accounts of the history of sociological theory is particularly glaring in cases where non‐Europeans had not only contributed to systematic thinking about the nature of society in the modern period but also influenced the development of sociology in the West. Typically, a history of social thought or a course on social thought and theory would cover theorists such as Montesquieu, Vico, Comte, Spencer, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Toennies, Sombart, Mannheim, Pareto, Sumner, Ward, Small, and others. Generally, both non‐Western thinkers as well as women founders are excluded. Although sociology is slow to take a decolonial turn, there are now efforts to critique and rethink the canon. This article is a contribution in the direction of critiquing and expanding the canon to render it less parochial.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12314   open full text
  • Under Western Eyes? Elements for a Transnational and International History of Sociology in Asia (1960s–1980s).
    Stéphane Dufoix.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 18, 2021
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 55-74, March 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nVery few articles or chapters account for the history of sociology in Asia as a whole or for its inception from the late 19th century, especially in Japan, China and India. The following article, partly based on archival evidence, takes into consideration two important elements that bind together the various developments of sociology in Asia after World War II, namely calls for a better relevance of concepts and theories in order to fight academic colonialism, and strivings in the 1970s for the organization of an Asian sociological or social science organization. It will end with a short reflection and interrogation on the role of Asia in the world social science archipelago.\n"]
    May 18, 2021   doi: 10.1111/johs.12319   open full text
  • Rethinking Political Elites' Mass‐Linkage Strategies: Lessons from the Study of Indira Gandhi's Political Habitus.
    Sourabh Singh.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 644-664, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nIn this article, I critique available elite‐mass linkage theories that depict elites either as structurally determined or rational actors. Taking cues from Bourdieu's political field theory, I argue that elites' mass‐linkage strategies are a product of their point of view on politics structured by their trajectory in historically specific structures of politics. I demonstrate my argument by documenting shifts in the mass‐linkage strategies of Indira Gandhi, one of the most influential leaders of postcolonial India. The general lesson to be drawn from this study is that it is important to examine political elites' past mass‐linkage experiences in historically specific conditions of the political structure in order to explain their current choices of mass‐linkage strategies.\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12291   open full text
  • Between Pachakuti and Passive Revolution: The Search for Post‐colonial Sovereignty in Bolivia.
    Chris Hesketh.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 567-586, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nFrom the period 2000 to 2005, Bolivia experienced a profound political convulsion as social movements rose‐up to contest the neoliberal model of development. This was most markedly inspired by contestation over the control of natural resources, namely water and gas. The period of mobilisation brought down two successive governments and propelled the MAS, led by Evo Morales, to power in 2006. This period also helped to revalorise indigenous culture and held out hope for a reimagining of power, politics and political economy. The transformation that would result from this uprising, effectively re‐founded Bolivia as a “pluri‐national state,” recognising 36 separate national groups with their own languages and cultures. This was, furthermore, a process based on the convergence of national‐popular and indigenous struggles. However, following his disputed election for a fourth successive term in office, Evo Morales and other key leaders of the MAS have gone into exile, while right‐wing, revanchist social forces are increasingly prominent. How do we begin to make sense of this turn of events, which include the swirling combinations of reactionary capitalist interests but also left‐indigenous critiques of development from marginalised sectors? In this article, I argue that we need to situate Bolivia's indigenous social movements in the struggle between Pachakuti (an Andean term referring to the desire to turn the world upside down and forge a new time and space) and passive revolution (a state‐led process of modernisation that seeks to expand capitalist social relations whilst incorporating limited demands from below, ultimately diffusing their radical potential).\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12293   open full text
  • Minding the Gaps in British Ethnic Entrepreneurship and Commercial History: From the Genesis to the 21st Century.
    Fred A. Yamoah, Christopher Johnson.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 614-627, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nTracing the origin and development of British ethnic entrepreneurship from the 1800s to the 21st century raises awareness of a salient research gap to make a contribution to entrepreneurship research. We draw on path dependency theory to understand the range of socio‐cultural and economic factors that inform the dynamic behaviour and actions of visible minorities (Africans, Chinese, South Asians and people form the Caribbean) ethnic entrepreneurship. Archival and industry documentations are analysed to identify four distinctive epochal periods of origination of ethnic entrepreneurship that highlight the path dependency of activities. Furthermore, we found network alliances, business clusters and resilience factors, such as founder‐owner social outlook, culture, faith, and social identity as critical success factors. We further outline the implications of the historical development for research, government policy, industry and entrepreneurial practice in the UK.\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12296   open full text
  • Notes on Monetary Institutions in State and Class Formation Processes.
    Jakob Feinig.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 601-613, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nCharles Tilly emphasizes that state formation is a contingent and violent process: states develop as they extract resources, including currency, from a population. Neochartalist approaches to money challenge what I call the extractivist view of state formation because they see currencies as public institutions established by governments, not a resource to be seized from a population. At the same time, neochartalists rarely address how state institutions capable of establishing monetary institutions emerge. In this article, I propose a framework to analyze the entangled development of the institutions of money and state. I then showcase its usefulness by revisiting a series of crowd actions and militarized responses in eighteenth‐century Massachusetts and Pennsylvania today known as Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, focusing on the initially ad hoc and then routinized funding mechanism that enabled emerging state actors to deploy armed groups. In closing, I argue that despite the violence involved in the emergence of the institutions of state and money, citizens and inhabitants can begin to imagine democratic ways of institutionalizing money today.\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12290   open full text
  • Forging a Pure Military Identity: The Rise of Jurchen Heritage in Northeast Asia (15th–17th Century).
    Sung Hee Ru.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 628-643, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nProminent studies of the Qing dynasty's military evolution in the field of comparative military history, which is heavily dependent on the binary conception of “West–China,” have failed to present the early military heritage of the dynasty. Unlike previous studies, this paper aims to find a new voice for the early Qing military inheritance, as a reflection of past West–China comparative studies that have continued to discriminate between Western and Chinese military merits and demerits and to ignore the early Qing military approach. By presenting the economic and military interconnections between the Manchu (the Jianzhou Jurchens, the Jianzhou confederation, and Nurhaci), Ming, and Chosŏn, this article reveals that early economic and military development through border trade, tributary trade, and predatory behaviors enabled the Manchus to establish the Later Jin and Qing states. Understanding early Manchu military history helps us put forward an important but less studied military heritage of Qing.\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12294   open full text
  • Capital and Mining Property Relations: Reconsidering Marxist Understanding of Feudal Mining Land.
    Jeannette Graulau.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 587-600, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nMarxism holds that feudal mining land was characterized by production relations that gave lords the upper hand. Lacking productive capital, mining land was generally a site of coercive feudal‐property relations. The idea is indefensible, as evidence shows that mining lands triggered property arrangements antagonizing lordly power. This article discusses the labor and capital relations that transformed feudal land into mining land. It argues that this transformation challenged the supremacy of feudal lords by triggering property relations relatively unconstrained by feudal lordly power. The article concludes that mining lands were sites of antagonistic relations, were capital confronted feudal landed property, aiming at isolating lords from the gains of mines.\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12292   open full text
  • The Changing Nature and Patterns of Traditional Marriage Practices among the Owerre‐Igbo, a Subgroup of the Igbo of Southeast Nigeria.
    Kenneth Chukwuemeka Nwoko.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 681-692, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nThis research investigates the changing nature and patterns as well as the social construct of traditional marriage and practices among the Owerre‐Igbo of Southeast Nigeria. In particular, it investigates the practice of heterosexual marriage, woman‐to‐woman marriage, child marriage, and the dynamics of bride price. It also analyses the eclectics that has come to characterise Igbo traditional marriages especially the plethora of cultural borrowings that have become features of Igbo traditional marriage practices in recent times. The research investigates how this acculturation has shaped the contemporary social construct of marriage as well as how it articulates with continuities and changes in Owerre‐Igbo social organization. The research found out that these changes were brought about by three major factors; (1) the extensive contacts which the Owerre‐Igbo have had with other ethnic groups, (2) the influence of Christianity and Western education, and (3) occupational influence.\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12295   open full text
  • From Naturalized Suffering to Futile Ownership—A Genealogy of the Depressed Lifeworld.
    Domonkos Sik.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 546-566, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nWhile several separate researches focus on either the phenomenological description of depression, or on the modernization theoretical analysis of the structural transformations responsible for its emergence, the combination of both perspectives is still rare. The article aims at filling this gap by analysing modernization from the perspective of the phenomenological preconditions of depression. A depressed lifeworld is characterized by burdensome embodiment, disorganization of linear time, existential hopelessness and guilt, loss of agency and disturbed intersubjectivity. The ideal‐typical late medieval and early modern constellations are described according to these dimensions in order to identify the structural transformations resulting in the increased prevalence of depression. Even if the medieval era is characterized by the naturalization of suffering, limited agency and lacking worldly hope, these experiences are counterbalanced by an eschatological horizon of time providing a transcendental framework for resolving guilt, and, furthermore, a continuous presence of other persons around preventing complete isolation and consequent despair. During early modernity, such formula has changed: the gradual expansion of agency promising control over suffering and enjoyment lead to the emergence of a parallel horizon of worldly time and ambiguities of intersubjectivity. In order to handle these ambiguities and improve worldly control, the modern notion of property as absolute dominion was born, which by linking the potential of control to the detachment from the others resulted in a dangerous compound. Being deprived from property or being failed by it, renders the subject helpless: as the totality of the lifeworld dependent on ownership collapses, depression emerges.\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12305   open full text
  • Associational Structures and Beyond: Evolution and Contemporary Articulations of Bhumihar Caste Associations in Bihar, India.
    Aniket Nandan, R. Santhosh.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 28, 2020
    ["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 665-680, December 2020. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper examines the historical development, growth, and contemporary articulations of the Bhumihar caste associations in Bihar by focusing on their relationship with land, political economy, and ideological orientations. As a landowning upper caste, the Bhumihars negotiated with a host of structural as well socio‐political transformations in the state primarily by constructing the self‐image of a warrior caste holding a Brahmin status. The paper in particular examines the impact of land reforms, violence unleashed by the Bhumihar caste militia during the agrarian unrest and the rise of Backward Caste mobilisation followed by the Hindutva mobilisation on the changing articulation of the Bhumihar caste associations. The paper also focuses on the emergence of the Bhumihar middle class and points out that through a visible process of culturalisation, the Bhumihars are able to maintain their exclusivity and purported superiority in the contemporary Bihar society even while upholding the mantle of Hindutva unity along with other lower castes.\n"]
    December 28, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12304   open full text
  • Religion, Crime, and Social Trust in Historic Germany: Are Catholics More Inclined to Violate Social Norms than Protestants?
    Peter Graeff, Gert Tinggaard Svendsen.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 02, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nAre Catholics more inclined to violate social norms than Protestants? A tentative answer is yes due to this confession's attitude towards absolution of sins. Opportunities existed for Christians around Reformation times, for example as sales of indulgences. Catholics and Protestants arguably differed historically in their understanding of whether penitence is feasible or not, resulting in different conditions under which Catholics and Protestants decide in situations of social exchange. This is illustrated by ethical game theory and exemplified by historical data. The analysis points to the tentative suggestion that religious socialisation can affect social payoffs of crime and social trust in a long‐term perspective.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. "]
    December 02, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12297   open full text
  • Lutheranism from Above and from Below: “Pastoral Professionals” and Trust within the Nordic State/Society Nexus.
    Fredrik W. Thue.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 29, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThe article points to the dispersion, democratization, and feminization of “pastoral” forms of power and authority since the mid‐19th century as a key to understanding the exceptionally high degree of social trust in the Nordic countries. Taking Norway as its central case, it argues that the Nordic welfare state has been shaped by an older, distinctively Lutheran–Pietist combination of educational forms of government from above and edifying popular self‐organization from below. This trust‐producing synthesis has been sustained by such “pastoral” professions as teaching, nursing, and social work, functioning as mediators between public welfare policies and the life world of citizens.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. "]
    November 29, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12302   open full text
  • I Trust You with My Child: Parental Attitudes to Local Authorities in Cases of Disobedient Children in 18th Century Denmark.
    Nina Javette Koefoed.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 29, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nDuring the 18th century, a series of new institutions appeared in the provinces of Denmark. Their purpose was to discipline beggars and vagrants and to teach them not only to work, but also the Word of God. These tugt workhouses also became institutions for the reform of disobedient children behaving in an “un‐Christian” manner. Children were often placed here at the initiative of their parents. The article argues that the trust placed by parents in the state authorities in this way can be understood within the framework of Luther's social teaching, especially his doctrine of the three estates and the understanding of the nature of authority and of mutual obligation that is represented there.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. "]
    November 29, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12303   open full text
  • The Eurovision Song Contest – A Continent (still) Divided?
    Anna G. Piotrowska.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 26, 2020
    ["\nABSTRACT\nCredited as one of the most successful major televised music events held annually in Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) still serves as a battlefield between Eastern and Western European aesthetic paradigms. Although the Western paradigm has long been regarded as an almost universal criterion of success, the contemporary ESC presents a unique opportunity for post‐communist acts to contest that hegemony while playing with its conventions. This article examines how, in the post‐1989 situation, the most successful Eastern European acts purposely exploited, juxtaposed and subverted several aesthetic categories, demonstrating their understanding of the conventions promoted at the ESC on the one hand, while undermining and contesting them on the other. The article argues for greater attention to such strategies as over‐exploitation of stereotypes and auto‐stereotypes, as well as mocking the prevailing aesthetics by playing with such notions as authenticity, folklore, nationalism, essentialism, camp, kitsch or hyper‐reality and challenging the contest's utopian and nostalgic ideals.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 371-388, September 2020. "]
    October 26, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12285   open full text
  • Discourse Dynamics and Cultural Context in the Antiwar Movement in the United States (2002–2004).
    Isis M. Sánchez Estellés, Mario Domínguez Sánchez‐Pinilla.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 26, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThis paper addresses the impact of the antiwar movement (2002–2004) in the United States by analysis the three main coalitions at that time: ANSWER, UFPJ and Win Without War. New concepts and tools have been provided within discourse theory that can improve the analysis of framing and impact. Furthermore, the failure in discourse dynamics of the antiwar movement (2002–2004) is analyzed with a qualitative approach. Finally, we study the cultural context of 9/11, demonstrating that the best analysis for culture might not be ideational and static but, rather, contextual and dynamic.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 425-442, September 2020. "]
    October 26, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12286   open full text
  • ‘The Hidden Holocaust’: The East Timor Alert Network (ETAN) and Human Rights Claims in Canada, 1985–1998.
    Julian Torelli.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 26, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThis article examines the East Timor Alert Network's (ETAN) claims‐making strategies regarding support for human rights and self‐determination of East Timor during the Indonesian occupation from 1975–1998. This research seeks to understand how ETAN attempted to persuade Canadians to care about a geographically distant horror. I examine various claims‐making strategies that ETAN used to encourage Canadian audiences to evaluate the problem as an object of public concern, the Timorese as victims deserving of their sympathy, and Canadian government as condemnation‐worthy.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 316-344, September 2020. "]
    October 26, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12283   open full text
  • Chuprov and Neyman: Priority in Science and the Uneven Diffusion of Scientific Results.
    Dominic Lusinchi.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 26, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nPriority in “discovery,” which sometimes leads to eponymy, is a highly prized form of reward in the scientific community. Recognition of priority is a norm whose violation will bring opprobrium (e.g. suspicion of plagiarism) upon the offender. But in order for an idea to receive an attribution of novelty, and its author to be acknowledged, it must first be noticed. This essay is a case study of an innovation (formulas related to stratified sampling) in the field of mathematical statistics that was “overlooked” for many years by many. Unknowingly, Jerzy Neyman (1894‐1981) “refound” these formulas a decade later (1933). When a statistician in 1950 uncovered the original idea and its author (A.A. Chuprov, 1874‐1926), he contacted Neyman who promptly published a “Recognition of priority” (1952). The study examines the perplexing situation in which some results become known to and recognized by the statistical community, while others, originating from the very same paper, were “overlooked” by sampling statisticians (among others) who, unlike Neyman, had access to the paper and thus had ample opportunity to identify Chuprov's formulas as relevant to their work. Chuprov was well‐known in the statistics world, and the publication in which he published his ideas (1923) was a respected statistical journal (Metron). How is it that it took nearly 20 years for someone in the statistics community to notice that Chuprov had anticipated Neyman in deriving the formulas in question?\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 410-424, September 2020. "]
    October 26, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12288   open full text
  • An Eccentric Analysis of Political Logistics of Maritime Mastery: Establishing a Framework.
    Kuang‐hao Hou.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 26, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nDefinitions of sea power in reputable studies can be classified into two broad categories: sea power as a form of military power at sea, and sea power as the capacity at or from the sea to influence others’ actions or conditions. Despite the differences in definitions of sea power, the relevant literature written by international relations scholars, maritime historians, and naval affairs experts is abundant and has primarily focused on grand strategies, military strategies, and military doctrines. This paper briefly introduces an exceptional monograph on the logistic foundation of British maritime ascendancy, but it has not sufficiently explored the political processes of sea power. This paper thus utilises the concepts of politics, elite coalition, and power source to highlight the importance of studying the political processes behind the creation, maintenance, enhancement, and even corrosion and destruction of sea power. Specifically, building on the logistics of maritime ascendancy, this paper suggests that it is not only essential to examine how the state co‐ordinates all required resources for its sea power, but that it is also necessary to evaluate how elite coalitions amenable to sea power are organised and sustained.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 389-409, September 2020. "]
    October 26, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12289   open full text
  • Using the Concepts of Hermeneutical Injustice and Ideology to Explain the Stability of Ancient Egypt During the Middle Kingdom.
    Zeyad El Nabolsy.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 26, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThis paper argues that the relative stability of ancient Egyptian society during the Middle Kingdom (c.2055 – 1650 BC) can in part be explained by referring to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice, i.e., the manner in which imbalances in socio‐economic power are causally correlated with imbalances in the conceptual scheme through which people attempt to interpret their social reality and assert their interests in light of their interpretations. The court literature of the Middle Kingdom is analyzed using the concepts of hermeneutical injustice and ideology. It is argued that while it is true that there was room for maneuver and for internal critique, the efficacy of internal critique was hindered by the structure of the intellectual discourse of Middle Kingdom Egypt. This intellectual discourse was suitable for the interpretation of social reality in a way that allowed the elites to assert their interests, but it was not suitable for the interpretation of social reality in a way that accorded with the interests of the exploited peasantry.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 345-370, September 2020. "]
    October 26, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12287   open full text
  • A Modern Day Caesar? Donald Trump and American Caesarism.
    Brett Heino.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 26, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThis article argues that the American political system under Donald Trump is an example of what Antonio Gramsci dubbed “Caesarism,” a situation where a taut balance of warring class forces allows for the emergence of a third force to freeze the antagonism and challenge/usurp established political institutions. To concretise Gramsci's rather abstract formulation and to better illuminate the nature of American Caesarism, this article employs a reading of the Roman poet Lucan's magisterial Civil War. Through a close reading of this text, we can explore the origins of Caesarism and study the efficacy of different means of struggle against it. Lucan thus helps us reinvigorate the concept of Caesarism and apply it in the contemporary American context. In particular, it will be demonstrated that whereas Lucan depicts a progressive form of Caesarism with a qualitatively new state form, the Trump administration embodies a regressive form of Caesarism within an old state form.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 297-315, September 2020. "]
    October 26, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12280   open full text
  • It's more than just news: Print media, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Collective Memory among African Americans.
    Cleothia Frazier.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 26, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThis study examines how media can influence and shape collective memory through cultural objects such as magazines. Examination of Jet and Ebony magazines' coverage of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, as well as, changes in the narrative over time, reveal potential mechanisms that might have influenced African Americas' collective memory surrounding this event. Data for this study come from news articles about The Tuskegee Syphilis Study in Jet and Ebony magazines from 1972–2016 (N = 49). Content analysis was used to analyze and discover themes in each of the 49 news stories. Findings show that the journalistic coverage of The Tuskegee Syphilis study by these magazines centered around themes of exploitation of uneducated victims, racism and blame, genocide, medical mistrust and deliberate injection with syphilis, reflecting past and current beliefs of African Americans' remembrance of the study.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 280-296, September 2020. "]
    October 26, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12281   open full text
  • The Appeal to Honour and the Decision for War.
    Robin Archer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 18, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThe outbreak of the First World War is one of the great formative events of modern times. Yet during its centenary, there was surprisingly little attention to how uncertain entry into the war was in the English‐speaking world or how finely balanced the forces for and against intervention were. This article examines the role of appeals to honour in the decision for war. It begins by exploring the role of these appeals in convincing radical liberals to accept British intervention – something they had been successfully blocking just days earlier – before examining parallel appeals in the United States and Australia. It then considers why the language of honour was effective, and whether it still plays a role a century later, before concluding with some possible centennial lessons.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 248-262, June 2020. "]
    June 18, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12274   open full text
  • After Empire: The Breakup of the Soviet Military System.
    Luyang Zhou.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 18, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThis article examines an understudied topic: after imperial political sovereignty has ended, how does the empire's infrastructural power physically disintegrate along national lines. By tracing the breakup of the Soviet military establishment from 1992 to 1993, this article shows that physical dissolution is a multifaceted process that cannot be equated with political termination of an empire. Drawing on the Russian military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda over 1992 and 1993, I identify three ways by which successor states exited the Soviet military system: (1) quitting, withdrawing from the Soviet military and establishing a national military from scratch; (2) partitioning, seizing the Soviet military's manpower and assets to establish a national military; (3) staying, maintaining a unified federative military opposed to the idea of developing national militaries. The tracing of these three paths shows that this trifurcation stemmed from the complicated combination of four factors of successor states: the existing capacity to maintain a national military, the security situation at the moment of independence, the expected availability of foreign aids, and the professional backgrounds of nationalist elites. This article concludes that physical disintegration is a process largely distinct from the political termination of empire, and therefore, ought to be carved out as a research area of empire study.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 216-233, June 2020. "]
    June 18, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12273   open full text
  • Complicating the Duality: Reconceptualising the Construction of Children in Victorian Child Protection Law.
    Kieran Walsh.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 18, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThis article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that child protection legislation introduced in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods was characterised by a victim/threat duality. An examination of the parliamentary debates leading to the passage of major reforming Acts leads to a more complex construction of children. While the classic duality was present in respect of some issues earlier in the period under examination, it gave way to a view which placed greater emphasis on the child as a victim. At the same time, the law began, in an admittedly limited sense, to recognise children as agents with individual stories capable of contributing to the legal process, especially through increased capability to participate at trials. This conclusion can add significantly to our understanding of how the law understood childhood before the development of the modern children's rights movement.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 263-277, June 2020. "]
    June 18, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12272   open full text
  • Manufacturing American Identity Among Immigrant Workers: Colorado Fuel & Iron Company at the Turn of the 20th Century.
    Chris M. Messer, Thomas E. Shriver.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 18, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nExtant research indicates that white racial framing is utilized to rationalize discrimination, but less work has examined how the white racial frame becomes filtered into institutional settings such as corporations and instilled within its programs and practices. This paper analyzes white racial framing in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company during the early twentieth century as part of its effort to Americanize and control its racially diverse workforce. The company developed a special unit headed by a physician and proponent of eugenics to promote “social betterment.” Our findings show how dominant racial ideologies were embedded within the company's conceptualization of social betterment and how these ideas influenced corporate programs aimed at mollifying the workforce and increasing productivity. We discuss the implications of our research for future analyses of historically embedded racial framing.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 184-197, June 2020. "]
    June 18, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12271   open full text
  • The Formation of the Cypriot Thalassaemia Prevention System: The ‘Slow’ Assembly and Construction of a Problem (1944‐1984).
    Theodoros Kyriakides.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 18, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThalassaemia is one of the most widespread recessive blood disorders in the world. This article focuses the historical trajectory by which the Cypriot thalassaemia prevention system, one of the most successful of its kind, achieved full prevention rate. By tracing the history of decision‐making of medical practitioners central to the construction of the prevention system, my objective is to further elucidate underlying logics of policy‐making and health governance which can account for its success. As I suggest, the Cypriot thalassaemia prevention system achieved a full prevention rate because it operated according to a ‘slow’ modality of problematisation and decision‐making, which accounted for the cultural, social and ethical dimensions specific to the Cypriot public.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 234-247, June 2020. "]
    June 18, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12270   open full text
  • Fascists at the Fair: Political Resistance at the 1933–1934 Chicago World's Fair.
    Andrew C. Herman.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 18, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nAt the 1933–1934 World's Fair in Chicago the local German American population was able to organize some resistance to minimize the Nazi presence on the fairgrounds, while Italian Americans, for their part, were held in check by the close oversight of Fascist Italy's representatives at the Fair. Neither the Fairs organizing committee nor the U.S. State Department offered any objection to either governments presence. The history of the event shows that these differences were fundamentally due to international regulations surrounding international expositions, suggesting that our existing approaches toward meaning‐making and political action at mega‐events need to take better account of larger regulatory structures.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 198-215, June 2020. "]
    June 18, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12269   open full text
  • The League of Nations, Minorities, and Post‐Imperial Turkey.
    Yeşim Bayar.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 18, 2020
    ["\nAbstract\nThe Minority Treaties that were signed at the end of First World War were not only instrumental in establishing the status of minorities in their respective countries but also significant in terms of their impact on nation‐building processes. Through focusing on the post‐Ottoman lands, and specifically on Turkey, this paper examines the tension between the goals of the Allied Powers and the League of Nations, and those of the nationalist political elites in the newly‐created national states.\n", "Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 172-183, June 2020. "]
    June 18, 2020   doi: 10.1111/johs.12268   open full text
  • A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory is Yet to Come.
    Benjamin Abrams.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 11, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract Despite revolution's recent return to the world stage, the progress of revolutionary theory has markedly stalled. While some have argued that recent work on the 2011 Arab Spring constitutes a new, misguided ‘fifth generation’ of theory, I show this claim to be misplaced, demonstrating the remarkable continuity between foundational fourth‐generation scholarship and present‐day analyses. Furthermore, I critically analyse the theoretical, methodological and professional obstacles which fourth‐generation theory has encountered, concluding that scholars must move beyond the fourth generation if we are to surmount them. Finally, I consider the theoretical, methodological and ethical prospects of a true fifth generation of revolutionary theory. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    September 11, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12248   open full text
  • Secularism as a field of class struggle: State, religion, and class relations in Turkey.
    Gönenç Uysal.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 30, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract The dialectical relationship between secularism and capitalism, where contradictions in this relationship are resolved on the basis of class relations, results in various state‐religion relationships in different social formations. The limitations and particularities of secularism are exaggerated in countries that arrived late at capitalism, such as Turkey. These late‐developers are subject to the dynamics of uneven and combined development. This paper borrows from Marxism, particularly the theory of uneven and combined development, in order to explore the relationship between the consolidation of the modern nation‐state and its secularisation process during the bourgeois revolution of 1923 in Turkey. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    August 30, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12245   open full text
  • Resisting “Politics as Usual”: Examining the Rise of Anti‐Establishment Politics by Comparing the Narratives of Opportunity Used Within the Single Payer Movement During Two Presidential Eras.
    Lindy S. Hern.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 30, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract The recent rise of “Medicare for All” in American political discourse was many years in the making. Behind this rise is a movement composed of grassroots activists and organizations focused on the goal of establishing a single‐payer health care system in the United States. I examine the ways in which activists used narrative to interpret opportunity within their historically specific environments to work towards this goal. I find that while the Single Payer Movement's narrative practice during the Clinton era was focused on opportunity within the political sphere, the focus in the Obama era shifted to mobilizing the public sphere, or grassroots opportunity. This was related to the critique that the Obama Administration was engaging in “politics as usual”, which was defined as the “enemy” of “real” health care reform. This narratively produced critique is tied to the anti‐establishment turn that factors into the current era of American politics. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    August 30, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12247   open full text
  • The science of childhood and the pedagogy of the state: Postcolonial development in India, 1950s.
    Arathi Sriprakash, Peter Sutoris, Kevin Myers.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 29, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract This article examines how, in the decade following India's independence, the psychology of childhood became a locus of experimentation, and an avenue through which approaches to postcolonial development were expressed. Tracing the ideas of educational reformers, psychological researchers and child welfare advocates, we show how a ‘science of childhood’ in this period emphasised both the inherent potential and the emotional complexity of India's young citizens. However, while identifying this potential, these actors at times circumscribed it by deploying culturalist assumptions about Indian childhood that were linked to a teleology of the new nation state. These were ideas that shaped a ‘pedagogic’ approach to postcolonial modernisation. Nation‐building was not just a technocratic undertaking, but an educative project that was scientific, spiritual, and therapeutic in orientation. The article argues for greater attention to the pedagogy of the state in analyses of past and present state‐citizen relations. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    August 29, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12246   open full text
  • Disaster cosmologies in comparative perspective: Islam, climate change and the 2010 floods in Pakistan's Southern Punjab.
    Ali Nobil Ahmad.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 23, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract As humanity enters a new era of climate‐induced unpredictability, research into the role of religion in shaping perceptions of, and responses to disaster will become increasingly important. This is particularly true of South Asia, which contains dense populations certain to be adversely affected by climate change. This contribution explores the way religion shapes and mediates responses to disaster in Pakistan. Where previous work in this field has focused on extremists and militants, mine considers currents of lived Islam that take explicit stances on questions of natural resource development. Drawing upon extensive primary data, I identify two distinct disaster cosmologies permeating state and society. First, I consider the official Islam of experts and policymakers, whose approach to development is derived from, but arguably surpasses the modernism of British and American colonial and Cold War paradigms in its dogmatic, faith‐based belief in the imperative of mastering and exploiting nature. The second is an altogether contrasting formation embedded in a political protest movement representing a marginalized constituency, the Siraiki speaking population of Southern Punjab, which mobilized flood affectees in the aftermath of the 2010 floods around issues of social and environmental justice. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    June 23, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12235   open full text
  • Siegfried Kracauer's Differentiating Approach to Friendship.
    Harry Blatterer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 17, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract Siegfried Kracauer's essays Über die Freundschaft (‘On Friendship’) and Gedanken über Freundschaft (‘Thoughts on Friendship’) exemplify a conceptually differentiating approach to friendship. This article aims at highlighting the explanatory yield of such an approach in contrast to a prevalent conflation of personal relationship types in research today. Kracauer's work is a call from the past to take seriously the semantic nuances of friendship in the present in order to better reflect lived experience in a sociologically plausible manner. I begin by identifying the practice of semantic conflation and its methodological problems. A brief description of the publication background of the friendship essays and their embeddedness in Kracauer's anxiety about the modern subject precedes a selective exposition. To conclude, I offer a summary reflection on the contemporary significance of Kracauer's approach with reference to social media friends and political friendship. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 173-188, June 2019. '
    June 17, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12211   open full text
  • 'You cannot get enough of them!’ The rise (and fall) of complementary therapies in British nursing practice in the 1980s and 1990s.
    Christine Gowing, Nicola Gale.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 17, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract This paper examines the emerging use of complementary therapies in British nursing practice at the end of the twentieth century. Many nurses turned to complementary therapies as a means to provide a closer therapeutic relationship with their patients and this paper will establish how nurses were informed and empowered. The paper places complementary practices in the context of nursing developments in the closing decades of the twentieth century and concludes that the extent of the supporting networks that encouraged nurses to incorporate these therapies into their work was more significant than has been previously recognised and exemplifies a distinct period in the history of modern nursing. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 215-231, June 2019. '
    June 17, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12214   open full text
  • Surveillances, Social Management, and Architectural Morphologies: An approach to the Prison and the Hospital in 19th Century Spain.
    Pedro Fraile, Quim Bonastra.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 17, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract Surveillance is one of the key aspects of the economic and social system in which we live. Its relevance is growing, due in part to technical advances and in part to complex social dynamics and the magnitude of certain conflicts. In this article we discuss the analytical framework formulated by Bauman, in which he contrasts the concepts of liquid and solid surveillance, and we introduce the concepts of inquisitive and coercive surveillance. We examine the genesis and evolution of both types of surveillance by analyzing public health and penitentiary strategies, particularly in 19th century Spain, as well as those of their respective institutions—the hospital and the prison—with special focus on their spatial manifestations and the divergence between the paths taken in the health‐care and penitentiary spheres. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 189-214, June 2019. '
    June 17, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12212   open full text
  • Habitus, social elevation, and the channel of shame‐fear: The decision to expand Guinness advertising.
    John Connolly, Paddy Dolan.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 17, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract This article explains the relationship between social habitus, social mobility and shame feelings using Elias's theoretical frame of figurational sociology. Much work to date has centred on Bourdieu's theoretical formulations and while there are clear parallels with Elias, significant differences exist. Elias identified how shame functions as a key channel for the transmission of social tensions generated by the structure of social relations into the social habitus of individuals. We explain how apparently rational decision‐making in organisations obscures the emotional dynamics of shame and fear connected with processes of social elevation, habitus change and shifting power relations between social classes. Our empirical case concerns the brewer Arthur Guinness & Sons Ltd and the decision in 1927 to sanction a direct advertising campaign in Britain for the first time. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 232-243, June 2019. '
    June 17, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12213   open full text
  • The Silent Backdrop: Colonial Anxiety at the Border.
    Natasha Carver.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 17, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract Through the categorization of movers, states determine and fix the belonging of migrants and thereby reproduce the nation‐state system as a global reality. Some movers, however, are deemed illegible and must be identified, labelled and thus brought within the system. This paper unpicks the legal consequences of a “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2000) embedded within the border system as a whole. The paper demonstrates this process through a post‐colonial examination of Somali migration and the application of the 1951 Refugee Convention at the UK border. The Somali migrant, like his colonized predecessor, is constructed as an unreliable informant of him/herself; a “lying native” (Bhabha, 1994) whose identity can be ‘discovered’ by the tools of the enlightened West. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 154-172, June 2019. '
    June 17, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12238   open full text
  • The Jewish Issue in Islamic Radicalism: Historicity, Impact and Evolutions.
    Mohamed‐Ali Adraoui.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 17, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract This article focuses on the long‐term ideological vision of Jews and Israel in radical Islam. By examining, on the one hand, the animosity towards Judeo‐Israelis in the spawning and bolstering of Islamist, Salafist and Jihadist movements, and on the other hand, the sociological composition of Jihadist elites related to the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, I show the centrality of the Judeophobic discourse in the world of radical Islam as well as the importance of Israel in its reinforcement. By trying to historicize this discourse, as well as political and strategic movements linked with the State of Israel, I also question the nature of the hostility towards Judaism, and more specifically the role of the Israeli issue in the development and evolution of the most radical and violent forms of Muslim identity over nearly a century. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 275-291, June 2019. '
    June 17, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12237   open full text
  • Comparing Protest Massacres.
    Alexei Anisin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 17, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract Why do some bouts of collective action end in bloodshed? This study evaluates a diverse collection of cases featuring opposition movements that experienced government‐led massacres. Historically, protest massacres originate to 19th century struggles associated with populational needs of obtaining public goods and political representation from governments. Unlike genocide and politicide which are likely to take place during heightened conflict, protest massacres tend to occur outside of war and civil war. Data on 76 incidents (1819–2017) capturing direct action strategies, preceding levels of mobilization, regime threat levels, and temporal characteristics of each massacre is analyzed. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 258-274, June 2019. '
    June 17, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12236   open full text
  • Imagining Animal Rights in Nineteenth‐century New York: Satire and Strategy in the Animal Protection Movement.
    Darcy Ingram.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 17, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract In 1866, America's most widely circulating newspaper the New York Herald published an extended satire directed at Henry Bergh and his newly established American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the first animal protection organization to be established in the United States. This article takes the Herald authors' decision to satirize the animal protection movement by framing it in terms of animal ‘rights’ as an opportunity to consider the challenges associated with that frame. Weighing the ease with which the movement could be ridiculed through the concept of rights and the broader discursive landscape connected to the rights of blacks and of women in the wake of the Civil War, it argues that animal rights was far more useful as a framing strategy to the critics of the animal protection movement than it was to its proponents. In turn, the article suggests that the challenges associated with the concept of animal rights that are revealed in this satire help to explain the dominance for much of the movement's history of the animal welfare frame over that of animal rights. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 244-257, June 2019. '
    June 17, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12221   open full text
  • Shifting Imperial Strategies in Contemporary Latin America: The U.S. Empire and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez.
    Timothy M. Gill.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 27, 2019
    --- - |2 Abstract Some scholars have shown how the U.S. has deployed several traditional, imperial strategies to maintain global power, including military interventions, support for proxy governments, economic coercion, and the exercise of hegemony. In many countries, though, these strategies cannot effectively work. Some countries have elected leaders that defy U.S. influence, and, in middle‐income countries, the U.S. cannot use economic coercion. The U.S. also cannot militarily invade all countries that possess anti‐American governments. How, then, does the U.S. aim to confront and control anti‐American governments in the contemporary world? I examine U.S. foreign policy towards Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, who recurrently challenged U.S. global power during his time in office. Through interviews with U.S. state elites, who developed policy towards Venezuela, and through analysis of U.S. diplomatic cables, I show how the U.S. has moved away from traditional, imperial modalities and towards new imperial techniques aimed at frustrating political processes within particular countries, as well as containing their global influence. These techniques include pressuring the federal judiciary, utilizing state agencies to fund and support opposition political parties and NGOs, seeking to terminate particular pieces of legislation, and eliminating eligibility for global leadership positions. These efforts do not immediately aim to displace existing governments, but, in the least, they aim to frustrate the domestic efforts of particular governments, and ultimately cultivate conditions favorable for the political opposition to eventually attain political power. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    February 27, 2019   doi: 10.1111/johs.12216   open full text
  • The Decline of Monarchy in Nepal, the Ascendancy of the Professional Middle Class and the Event that Transformed Them.
    Kathleen M. Gallagher.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 06, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract In the years leading up to the dissolution of absolute monarchy in Nepal in 1990, resistance to political authority proceeded fitfully. Opposition to the crown gained momentum after the involvement of the professional middle class. Using Max Weber's theory on legitimate power and class, this paper analyzes the erosion of the legitimacy of absolute monarchy, the ascendancy of the professional middle class, and how one event, a peaceful forum that ended in mass arrest, created momentum for the People's Movement by transforming the political subjectivity of the professional middle class, who, in turn, helped catalyze opposition to absolute rule. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    November 06, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12215   open full text
  • Issue Information.

    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract No abstract is available for this article. - Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 237-237, September 2018.
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12173   open full text
  • Lessons in Democracy: America's Tenuous History with Immigrants.
    Denise N. Obinna.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Taking an uncompromising stance on immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has been sharply criticized for its policies and racially coded rhetoric of immigrants as criminals or undesirables. Despite this criticism, the administration's policies fall in line with historically widespread, exclusionary, nativist and xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants. Much of the American immigrant story has been a tortuous struggle for equality, integration and civil rights. This essay takes a critical look at the complicated history of immigration policy during the last century, focusing on the social, economic and political forces that helped shape legislation. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 238-252, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12201   open full text
  • Allodial Land Rights (The Odelsrett) and Early Nineteenth Century Norwegian Nationalism: Propertied Sovereignty as National Sovereignty.
    Eirik Magnus Fuglestad.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract The early nineteenth century was a transitional time in western Europe; from the old feudal and imperial order, modern nation states and capitalism emerged. The Norwegian nation state emerged out of the flames of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814. But changes in landed property structures in the eighteenth century lay the ground for Norwegian nationalism in the early nineteenth century. This article explores early nineteenth century nationalism through a focus on property rights and the positive view on the odesrett – an allodial right to land – arguing that an examination of the positive view on the odelsrett can shed new light on Norwegian nationalism in the early nineteenth century. Such an examination suggests that the Norwegian property structure contributed to reinforcing certain property rights element in the Norwegian nationalism where ownership of landed property and national, popular sovereignty were closely interconnected. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 363-379, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12183   open full text
  • The Historical Political Ecological and Political Economic Context of Mohawk Efforts at Land Reclamation in the Mohawk Valley.
    Samuel W. Rose.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the history of the relationship between the political ecological and political economic changes occurring in the Mohawk communities in the Saint Lawrence river valley during the Twentieth Century with three Mohawk efforts at land reclamation in Upstate New York and the reestablishment of a Mohawk residential community in the ancestral homelands of the Mohawk river valley. I demonstrate how each of these efforts is conceptualized and should be understood in historical materialist terms as a social response to the changing social, economic, ecological, and political conditions in those communities and the processes involved in the reshaping and remaking of those communities. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 253-264, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12182   open full text
  • Institutional Isomorphism in Religious Entities of Post‐Soviet Tajikistan.
    Hakim Zainiddinov.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Grounded in institutional isomorphism theory, the paper analyzes the extent to which the process of homogenization (isomorphism) can be useful in our understanding of changes within religious entities. Examining the emergence and development of religious entities in post‐Soviet Tajikistan, I find that three isomorphic mechanisms are less dependent on the impact of religious institutional environments and interaction among religious organizations. Rather, isomorphic changes are manifested as the result of interaction with the state. Mimetic and normative processes are observed in a weak state, whereas coercive isomorphism is exerted under the influence of a strong state. A relative heterogeneity of the religious field is observed in the first two stages of the development of religious entities. Once the state expands its regulation and control, religious entities become more homogeneous in structure and administration due to coercive isomorphism. Implications for extending the concept of institutional isomorphism beyond traditional organizational fields are discussed. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 346-362, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12181   open full text
  • A Rewriting Experiment of Modernity from the Perspective of Connected Histories: Taiwan as a Laboratory of Modernity.
    Chih‐Chieh Tang.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract This paper aims at a new understanding of modernity from the perspective of connected history. It demonstrates that with the case of Taiwan, so‐called ‘modernity’ emerged from the interactions and connections among the various regions, cultures, and civilizations. Thus, modernity has been entangled since its birth, and has had diverse variants. When we combine this reconceptualization of modernity with the concept of functional differentiation as the most essential structural condition of modernity, a theoretical escape from the trap of Eurocentrism emerges; additionally, we are able to integrate sociological theoretical reflections with the advancements of world history study. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 330-345, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12180   open full text
  • Silencing the Good: Memory, Forgetting and the Belated Reputation of Giorgio Perlasca.
    Andrea Cossu.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract The sociological analysis of the reputation of historical figures has rarely paid attention to temporal delays in the emergence of collective memory. This article focuses on a case of belated reputation as a particular reputational trajectory. I analyse the reputational trajectory of the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, who posed as Spain's representative in Budapest during the German occupation of 1944‐5, and saved thousands of Jews from deportation. Upon his return to Italy, his story was neglected, only to resurface forty years after the events. An analysis of these processes requires the consideration of three factors: the presence of agents who promote a reputation, the configuration of centre‐periphery relations, and the memorability of the figure. The consideration of how these three factors change over time offers an adequate account of processes of commemoration. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 314-329, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12179   open full text
  • Unionization in the American Newsroom, 1930 to 1960.
    Will Mari.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract This study of the material benefits brought to American news workers from the 1930s through the 1960s builds on previous work by media labor‐studies scholars such as Bonnie Brennen, Daniel Leab, Phillip Glende and Sam Kuczun, among others, who have examined the history of the American Newspaper Guild (ANG) in great detail. Their work has focused on legal and policy developments under the Roosevelt administration and in U.S. labor law. My study, as part of a larger project, looks at some of the ground‐level impacts of unionization. It does so examining Editor & Publisher, The Quill and The Guild Reporter, among other publications, and references to the material benefits in pay, time off, work‐life balance, health insurance, job security and other, practical and positive ancillary effects brought by the uneven unionization of the newsroom. The arrival of white‐collar unions for new workers was not a panacea to their problems. But it did help them in their collective quest in the United States during the interwar and then post‐World War Two‐eras for better working conditions and a firmer sense of their professionalized identity. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 265-281, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12177   open full text
  • Sovereignty and Martyrdom: A Sociological Sketch.
    Clayton Fordahl.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract This paper has two goals: to develop a sociological conception of martyrdom and to use that concept to interpret the history of sovereignty in the West. While recent research on the topic has focused on martyrdom as a terrorist tactic associated with radical Islam, I redress these trends by analyzing martyrdom as a social process, focusing on cases of martyrdom in European history, and cultivating a new perspective on the relationship between religion and politics in the historical development of sovereignty in the West. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 297-313, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12167   open full text
  • Conceptualising and Categorising Child Abuse Inquiries: From Damage Control to Foregrounding Survivor Testimony.
    Shurlee Swain, Katie Wright, Johanna Sköld.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Testimony before inquiries into out‐of‐home care that have taken place in many countries over the last twenty years has severely disrupted received ideas about the quality of care given to children in the past. Evidence of the widespread abuse of children presented before recent inquiries internationally gives rise to the question: why didn’t we know? Part of the answer lies in the changing forms and functions of inquiries, whose interests they serve, how they are organised and how they gather evidence. Using as a case study, a survey of historical abuse inquiries in Australia, this article explores the shift to victim and survivor testimony and in so doing offers a new way of conceptualising and categorising historical child abuse inquiries. It focuses less on how inquiries are constituted or governed, and instead advances an historically contextualised approach that foregrounds the issue of who speaks and who is heard. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 282-296, September 2018. '
    September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12176   open full text
  • The ‘First Generation’ in Historical Perspective: Canadian Students in the 1960s.
    J. P. Grayson.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 31, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Over the past few years a number of studies have focused on the disadvantages confronted by students who are the first in their families to attend university. Their liabilities include relatively low levels of preparedness, a lack of involvement in campus activities, and low levels of academic achievement. Rather than accepting the universality of this characterization, in this article, these negative characteristics and experiences were viewed as one ‘ideal type.’ Using this ideal type as a reference point, the current study focused on a period in Canadian history in which first generation students were the norm. In an examination of Glendon College, York University, located in Toronto Canada, in the mid 1960s, it was found that the experiences of the first generation did not fit the ideal type. Those who likely were the first in their families to attend university were prepared for their studies, involved in campus activities, and earned good grades. Possible explanations for this deviation from the ideal type include the buoyancy of the economy in the mid‐sixties, an expanding university sector, the size and relative intimacy of the College, the way in which high schools prepared students for university, and stringent admission requirements. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    July 31, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12203   open full text
  • Hakk or Right: A Veblenian Narration of the Differences between the Justice Notions in Western Europe and Turkey.
    Ahmet Öncü.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 24, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Using Veblen's status emulation theory in the background, but essentially engaged in theoretical debates on the transition to capitalism and modernity, this paper attempts to provide a comparative account of different forms of domination in Western European feudal society and the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, an individualistic representation of reality gained prevalence in social conflicts in Western Europe, precisely because forms of exploitation associated with European serfdom were far more severe and un‐tempered than was true for the Ottoman Empire. Due to being short of a legitimate claim to genuine nobility, Western European feudal aristocracy was driven into an insatiable hunger for luxury and waste. In the absence of a powerful central authority, members of this class “turned inward” for their ever‐increasing exploits and waged war against their servants, living and working under their private jurisdictions. The peasants, both free and serf, not only revolted repeatedly, but also ran into the cities to have “fairly secure property rights” so that they would be “the lord” or “dominus” of their own lives and morality. Out of this, a new justice notion had grown, that of natural rights law, which equated all human individuals within one single concern, that of “the right to self‐preservation,” eventually dragging the whole social fabric into heightened self‐centeredness. The Ottoman ruling class could not turn inward and wage an open class war against its servants. This was the land of peace, dar‐al Islam. All people, Muslim and non‐Muslim lived, or were supposed to live, in peace and harmony under the supreme order of Hakk. The transition to an individualistic justice notion along the lines of natural rights law was on the whole clogged in Turkey. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    July 24, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12210   open full text
  • Moral Realism in Historical Sociological Theory.
    Kevin McCaffree.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 19, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Sociologists of morality often assume the field can undertake descriptive studies of moral claims (e.g., what are the social origins of moral systems, in what ways do moral systems change over time) but ought not and, indeed cannot, speak to the rightness or wrongness of moral claims in any scientific sense. However, many founders of the field of sociology suggested that moral claims should be viewed as historically, demographically and ecologically situated interdisciplinary attempts at establishing scientific facts about human well‐being. This essay reviews the moral realism of sociology's founders, underscoring important components from each theorist's approach. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    July 19, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12204   open full text
  • “Where do all the lovers go?” – The Cultural Politics of Public Kissing in Mumbai, India (1950–2005).
    Sneha Annavarapu.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 18, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Public expressions of sexual intimacy have often been subject to moral censure and legal regulation in modern India. While there is literature that analyzes the cultural‐political logics of censorship and sexual illiberalism in India, the discourses of sympathy towards public displays of intimacy has not received as much critical attention. In this paper, I take the case of one representative discursive space offered by a popular English newspaper and show how the figure of the ‘kissing couple’ became an important entity in larger discussions about the state of urban development, the role of pleasure in the city, and the imagination of a “modern” Mumbai. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    July 18, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12205   open full text
  • Homonegativity in the Religious Dress History of the Marist Brothers, 1817–1840.
    William J.F. Keenan.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 24, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract This article presents a historical sociological case study of sexual oppression within the early nineteenth‐century foundation period of a French Roman Catholic male religious order, the Marist Brothers, founded in 1817. The different sexualities of two rival founder figures, the priests Jean‐Claude Courveille and Marcellin Champagnat, the former homosexual, the latter heterosexual, found expression in radically divergent conceptions of the religious habit. For Courveille, the costume design for the Brothers was ostentatious and stylish; for Champagnat, it was sober and clericalised. This archive‐based investigation shows how Courveille's sexual orientation led to his fall from grace within the Church and the suppression of his sartorial self‐expression. Champagnat, whose conventional dress rules prevailed, became a canonized saint. In the victory of the orthodox sacred dress code, the ideology of ‘clerical masculinism’ weaves its hegemonic power over the bodies of ‘men of the cloth’. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    May 24, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12200   open full text
  • Guilt(y) today? What some German youths say after virtual encounters with Shoah survivors.
    Katalin Eszter Morgan.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 15, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Against the theoretical background that sketches Biblical, legal, historical, psychological and biographical perspectives on guilt, this article examines the mental models that some German youths have in relation to the experiences told by Shoah survivors. Ethnographic descriptions and discourse analytical interpretations of these models are based on six participants’ responses to video‐graphed interviews with Shoah survivors. These responses were video‐recorded during a public presentation that the youths gave in a German small‐town in honour of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Results indicate that attitudes to the crimes of the Shoah consist largely of formulaic recitations of commonly‐adopted discourses that separate guilt from responsibility and silence the crimes in multiple, subtle ways. To balance this, some counter‐examples are provided from other German contexts. The article ends by offering pointers towards appropriate ways of being responsible. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    March 15, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12199   open full text
  • Art criticism and its power over women artists ‐ An inquiry into the sources of gender discrimination in Jewish Palestine/Israel, 1920‐1960.
    Graciela Trajtenberg.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 14, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Discrimination against women in the Western field of Visual Arts persists, even today. In this article I reflect upon the formative years of the field of Visual Arts in Jewish Palestine/Israel. I examine what role art critics took in the emergence of the systematic forms of artistic malestream domination. I also analyze which strategies allowed art critics to develop their position as the "knowers" of high art. While artistic malestream practices have not only held back female artists in the past, they also still affect women's artistic careers. Thus, the exposure of these concealed mechanisms can inform both academic scholarship and the artistic discourse. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    March 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12187   open full text
  • The advertisement of alcohol in colonial and post‐colonial times in Southern Nigeria.
    Uche Uwaezuoke Okonkwo.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 02, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Until the arrival of Europeans to the coast of Africa, indigenous alcohol brands were heavily consumed. The arrival of Europeans with foreign alcohol brands came with heavy advertisement focusing on the idea of modernity. Although the people did not abandon indigenous consumption of alcohol, imported alcohol brands became a yardstick for measuring class and thus created a new form of identity not previously in existence. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    March 02, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12185   open full text
  • Building a dam, constructing a nation: The ‘drowning’ of Capel Celyn.
    Ed Atkins.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 26, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Throughout history, the planning and construction of a dam has become symbolic of wider political events and processes. This paper investigates how the Tryweryn scheme in north‐west Wales in the 1950s and 1960s became a central signifier within the emergent Welsh nationalism of the period. The project, providing water to the city of Liverpool, flooded the village of Capel Celyn and displaced its 48 residents. However, the opposition to the project extended beyond this rural community, with the scheme becoming a focal point for Welsh nationalism. This paper explores this significance, arguing that the Tryweryn scheme was articulated in a number of ways that elevated the project from a local issue to a national outcry, resulting in the term ‘Tryweryn’ having a resonance that continues to this day. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    February 26, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12186   open full text
  • Paths to democracy and authoritarianism in Europe before world war one.
    Adam Bilinski.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 21, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract This article offers a novel explanation of why some European democracies survived while others collapsed in pre‐WWII Europe, describing historical paths which ended with establishment of either self‐sustainable democracies or non‐democratic regimes in the interwar period. The historical path to self‐sustaining democracy began with the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of constitutional monarchies with executive power responsible to the monarch and freely elected legislatures. Such polities, without exception, became self‐sustaining democracies unless the transition was achieved through regime discontinuity (as in Germany in 1918). An intermediate stage in this historical process consisted of development, in some countries, of competitive oligarchy as a transitional stage between the constitutional monarchy and democracy. If a country's political history did not follow the above‐mentioned path, its initial democracy was susceptible to breakdown. This pertained to countries which transitioned directly to democracy or competitive oligarchy from absolute monarchy or other regimes lacking open‐outcome elections. - 'Journal of Historical Sociology, EarlyView. '
    February 21, 2018   doi: 10.1111/johs.12184   open full text
  • Iraq, Afghanistan, and rethinking the post‐heroic turn: Military decorations as indicators of change in warfare.
    Brieg Powel.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 10, 2017
    This article compares the awarding patterns of the two senior Anglophone military decorations, the British/Commonwealth Victoria Cross and the American Medal of Honor, to challenge arguments that a shift to ‘post‐heroic’ warfare has been in progress in Western societies since 1990. Despite the two decorations being independent of each other, each born of a particular military, political, and social context in their respective parent societies, the article reveals strong consistencies across the two. These include common understandings of military heroism centred on infantry‐ rather than machine‐intensive combat, and a shared neglect of armoured, aerial, and naval combatants. Crucially, the medal data suggests that, despite academic suggestions to the contrary, there was no discernible shift towards ‘post‐heroism’ in the post‐Cold War era. Such a shift, however, is observable between 1916 and 1920, suggesting that the ‘new Western way of war’ began far earlier than is often suggested.
    October 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12175   open full text
  • Life in a forgotten Scottish gulag: Punishment and social regulation in HM Peterhead convict prison.
    Chris Holligan.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 18, 2017
    This paper contributes to filling a lacuna in our knowledge of penal history in Scotland by examining the voices of convicts through records of prisoners experiencing Penal Servitude during the period 1897–1942. The sources utilized are the archived files of thirty‐two male convict prisoners in Scotland's Convict Prison at Peterhead. These files give insights about life in this remote prison as conveyed through records of punishment, prisoners' requests, and prisoners' letters. Prison Rules about convict correspondence highlight penal letters as a distinctive genre of communication: political and personal boundaries were enforced on all exchanges. The convict prison, like nineteenth‐century British labour colonies, imposed workhouse conditions at the extreme; it was a place of exclusion, dominated by religious and social sentiment and suppositions about criminal psychology and containment. The extent of the curtailment of convicts' liberty and the aim of re‐socialization is refracted in penal practices fostering convict dependency. The ethos of Scotland's convict colony was immersed in military traditions of training, subservience to authority and generalized gloom.
    August 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12170   open full text
  • Banking on identity: Constructing a Canadian banking identity one branch at a time.
    Simarjit S. Bal.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 11, 2017
    This paper seeks to explore the role that the Canadian branch banking structure has played in producing a national Canadian economic space as well as nationally oriented conservative Canadian banking subjects. Explosive growth in the scope of Canadian bank branch networks between 1880 and 1930, both in terms of number of branches and their geographic range, forced banks to re‐evaluate their management practices. To manage an increasingly unwieldy structure, banks worked to centralize control and homogenize operations and the bankers themselves. Through centralization, bank head offices developed more robust branch reporting tools, which allowed them collect and repurpose disparate data into new national level information and knowledge. Working as centres of calculation, bank head offices used this new information to integrate a nationalist outlook throughout the network, deploying disciplinary technologies and techniques, in an effort to detach bankers from a local or regional orientation. This paper shows that, rather than merely a tool for efficient allocation of capital, the branching structure is a productive socio‐technical structure, which helped to construct the very nature of the national space it sought to manage.
    August 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12169   open full text
  • Spiritual eugenics as part of the Irish Carceral archipelago.
    Ingrid Holme.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 01, 2017
    Institutionalisation has played a key role in Irish social policy, however there is still a lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the governing structures (government departments, medical and education regulators etc.) and those who ran the institutions, such as the Catholic convent institutions for ‘fallen’ women. Specifically a question remains as to the precise logic for transferring girls and women into these settings. This paper expands the debate by exploring the existence of Catholic Convent industries in Ireland through the lenses of spiritual eugenics in the early 20th Century. In contrast to Anglo‐American eugenic practices based on sterilisation and birth control, Latin eugenic practices accepted by the Catholic Church were based on removing women from temptation and may have produced a necessary commitment to long‐term closed institutions. The paper offers a brief description of the differences between eugenics aimed at biological fitness and the practices aimed at spiritual promotion.
    August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12166   open full text
  • Figures of history, foundations of law: Acéphale, Angelus Novus, and the Katechon.
    Joshua Nichols.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 27, 2017
    In this paper, I offer the reader a survey of three figures of history, namely, Bataille's Acéphale, Benjamin's Angelus Novus, and Schmitt's Katechon. My approach will not be to provide an exhaustive exegetical account. Instead I focus on the primary texts and provide the reader with comparative sketches. This is important because each of these figures respond to the crisis of authority in the 1930s. Each of them uses the concept of the moment or now as a way of questioning law, and legitimate authority. My aim is to explore the similarities and differences that relate them.
    July 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12162   open full text
  • A forgotten history, a marginalized community: Biographical narratives of Ethiopian Jews, former activists in underground organizations during the civil war in Ethiopia, 1974–1991.
    David Ratner.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 18, 2017
    Despite a proliferation of studies concerning Ethiopian Jews (formerly known as “Beta Israel”) and their lives while still in Ethiopia, a topic that has not been studied enough is their lives during the turbulent period of the 1974 revolution and the civil war that followed (ending 1991). According to most existing (Israeli) literature, this group was completely cut off from these events, or at most passively affected by them. The present study, based on 17 in‐depth interviews with Ethiopian‐born Israelis, shows that some members of the community were indeed deeply involved in these historical events, as political activists and/or military rebels in one of two major political parties: the TPLF and the EPRP. After a short historical introduction, the study discusses the central themes that emerged from the interviews: (1) the interviewees' deep identification with universal and contemporary ideology, (2) their deep solidarity with Ethiopia and with the organizations they belonged to, (3) abandonment of revolutionary ideology and politics after arrival in Israel. The central argument in the concluding part is that this chapter in the community's history was forgotten because it did not accord with the Ethiopian Jews' intended role as reinforcement of the official Zionist narrative of the negation of exile. This oblivion meant that the community was constructed in the Israeli public imagination as pre‐modern, detached from modern ideologies and characterized by a very limited worldview.
    July 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12163   open full text
  • Labor, Agency, and State‐building in Trinidad and Tobago: Toward a Postcolonial Sociological Approach to Development.
    Zophia Edwards.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 13, 2017
    Existing development theories predict that factors such as natural resource wealth and the legacies of European colonizers inhibit development. However, the case of Trinidad and Tobago challenges these theories, as a resource‐rich former colony that has achieved high levels of development. This article examines what accounts for Trinidad and Tobago's development trajectory. Advancing a novel analytical approach – a postcolonial sociological approach – this study emphasizes what existing theories miss, namely, the role of organized labor in enabling Trinidad and Tobago to escape the development trap. The findings suggest that development studies attend to how colonial labor legacies shape post‐colonial development.
    July 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12168   open full text
  • Between the military government and the minority affairs ministry: The construction of the Palestinian minority as a security threat during the first years of the existence of Israel.
    Alina Korn.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 30, 2017
    This study examines correspondence and documents on various matters handled by Israel's Ministry of Minority Affairs during its brief period of operation. The extensive correspondence illuminates aspects relating to the distress faced by Palestinian citizens as a result of the 1948 War and the restrictions imposed on them by the military government, as well as the nature of the emerging relationship between the State and the minority population during the crucial first year following the establishment of Israel. We argue that the construction of the Palestinian minority as a security threat was not a product of the war circumstances, but rather an outcome of interests and political considerations. This construction grew gradually, along with the developing of practices of supervision and means of control, peaking with the subjugation of the Arab population to military government.
    June 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12164   open full text
  • Transhumance revisited: On mobility and process between ethnography and history.
    Paolo Palladino.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 28, 2017
    This paper advances the argument that transhumance, the seasonal movement of pastoral people and their livestock, is a useful site for critical reflection on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1988) and its importance to the understanding of mobility and process. It does so by bringing into dialogue ethnographic and historical perspectives on the resonance between transhumance and Deleuzian configurations of both nomadism and relations between human and non‐human animals. It concludes that adjacent juxtaposition and syncretic ordering of diversity, rather than any ontological reconstruction, may be key to a more effective engagement with the complexities of contemporary existence.
    June 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12161   open full text
  • The Holocaust: Commemorated but not remembered? Post‐colonial and post‐traumatic perspectives on the reception of the Holocaust memory discourse in Poland.
    Slawomir Kapralski.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 23, 2017
    The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East‐Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post‐communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post‐communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re‐composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non‐Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non‐Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.
    June 23, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12165   open full text
  • Displays of masculinity and rituals of display: Congolese immigration and xenophobia in Johannesburg.
    Nanette Jong.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 03, 2017
    Since the end of apartheid, Johannesburg's city centre has become home to a large number of Congolese men who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Republic of Congo (RC) for socio‐political or economic reasons. Although many may have arrived with hopes to integrate, xenophobia has made that goal near impossible. Rather than accept acts of marginalisation, however, many of these men have responded with boasts that Congolese culture is not only equal to that of South Africa—it is better. At the root of this argument is Congolese soukous music (specifically soukous appreciation songs) and fashion (specifically Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes, a Congolese fashion movement known by its acronym la SAPE), which, according to one young Brazzaville man, “show everyone in South Africa that the Congolese are number one” (Interview 2010). This article introduces soukous and la SAPE through notions of masculinity and display, which collectively enable these Congolese men in Johannesburg to reverse the hierarchies of inferiority imposed by xenophobia; and empowers them with opportunities for new imaginaries and practices of belonging. The research for this study was carried out in Johannesburg between 2010 and 2016.
    May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12155   open full text
  • Women's Access to Property: A Comparative Study on Islamic and Kemalist Women in Turkey.
    Mary Lou O'Neil, Sule Toktas.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 16, 2017
    This article uses a comparative approach to discuss women's access to property using evidence collected from field research conducted on two distinct communities of Istanbul: one secular and one Islamic. The two groups of women possess distinctly different views of the world and how it is organized. This is particularly the case concerning gender where secular women put forth a view rooted in the sameness of the genders where the Islamic women were clear in their commitment to the idea of difference. These attitudes toward the equality and difference of the genders structures the relations of these women to property and the process of inheritance.
    March 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12154   open full text
  • “An Economics of Capital”: Genealogies of Everyday Financial Conduct.
    Rob Aitken.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 12, 2017
    Although recent forms of neoliberalism have been associated with everyday forms of ‘investment’, this paper argues that the financial conduct of everyday populations has long been an intense site of intervention. Drawing on the history of nineteenth and twentieth‐century Canadian government savings, annuities and tax deferral programs, this paper argues that everyday financial conduct has long been a key site of experimentation and innovation in practices of the self. These programs experiment with a language and practice of investment which emphasizes everyday conduct as a space of individual responsibility attached to diverse political goals. This suggests that enterprise as a mode of self and citizenship has a diverse and longer trajectory that predates neoliberalism. By extension, this paper conclude with a case for more diversified, complicated and historically‐situated analyses of ‘neoliberalism’.
    February 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12145   open full text
  • The Crisis Sequence: The Case of Secessionism in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama.
    Cedric Leon.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 23, 2017
    Prevailing scholarly approaches to the U.S. Secession Crisis suggest that the crisis reflected either the interests of slaveowners or mounting socioeconomic pressure in the electorate. Both arguments suffer from empirical and analytical challenges, chief among these being that the southern Whig Party and its planter base actively resisted secession until the early 1850s. Why did the largest slaveowners oppose disunion only to fold by 1861? Drawing on beat‐level electoral returns, newspapers, and private correspondence from antebellum Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, I argue that the answer lies in conceiving of the prelude to secession as a “crisis sequence,” so named because it precipitates crises of hegemony, when no one political actor possesses the mass consent to rule and once salient social cleavages cease to resonate. Such sequences destabilize the relationship between parties and their constituents and allow political allegiances to swing wildly from one party to the next, giving such sequences their nonlinear character.
    January 23, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12141   open full text
  • The fatal affinity of the ‘Sonderweg’ revisited: The diffusion of emergency powers in Germany, Japan and Korea (1871–1987).
    Hak Jae Kim.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 17, 2017
    Many authoritarian regimes in Asia have utilized emergency powers to legitimize their measures of suppressing political opponents and maintaining power. In opposition to previous interpretations that categorize Asian experiences as ‘exceptional cases’ when compared to ‘normal’ Western liberal democracies, this article suggests that this issue should be viewed within the context of the broader ‘affinity’ of the ‘Sonderweg’ phenomenon. The paper compares Germany, Japan and Korea by examining the complex ‘diffusion’ processes of constitutional emergency powers and also by illuminating systemic affinities and fundamental differences. It argues that elites and technocrats in Germany, Japan and Korea exhibited diverging patterns in adopting, filtering and utilizing these constitutional powers.
    January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12144   open full text
  • The Two Hundred and Fifty Year Transition: How the American Empire Became Capitalist.
    James Parisot.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 02, 2017
    This paper aims to rethink United States history from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction by examining how capitalism and empire joined together as the logic of expansion increasingly became driven by the logic of capital over approximately two hundred and fifty years. Specifically, it argues that (what became) the United States originated as a ‘society with capitalism’ and became a ‘capitalist society’. This transition was a highly complex and uneven process as a variety of social forms developed and interacted, and in which there was not one road to capitalism, but a variety, depending on the historical circumstance. To accomplish this, first, the article reviews the Marx‐Weber debate to develop a theoretical and methodological approach to the historical sociology of capitalism. The remainder of the paper focuses on narrating an empirical interpretation of the transition to capitalism including the diversity of labor forms capital historically utilized.
    January 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/johs.12143   open full text
  • Nomen est Omen?
    Srdja Pavlovic.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 27, 2016
    There is no abstract available for this paper.
    December 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12142   open full text
  • The Moral Economy of Money between the Gold Standard and the New Deal.
    Jakob Feinig.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 25, 2016
    In this article, I show that Depression‐era popular opposition to gold standard orthodoxy had an identifiable impact on New Deal policy. Popular pressure was rooted in a political‐economic vision I call the “moral economy of money.” The moral economy of money included a critique of the gold standard and creditor classes and advocated a democratization of control over money and credit to restore social justice. Against many odds, Roosevelt narrowly defeated congressional majorities connected to popular groups bent on mandating Treasury currency issue. At the same time, he pioneered a discourse that became generalized in the following decades and discouraged a reemergence of the moral economy of money.
    December 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12139   open full text
  • The Social and Spatial Stratification of Vaccinal Patterns in Berlin Following Re‐Unification.
    Nicole Baur.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 25, 2016
    Efforts by health authorities to stress the importance of herd immunity in the light of a resurgence of seemingly vanquished childhood diseases have frequently met with poor response rates. Investigating whether reunified Berlin can achieve a desirable herd immunity of 80% ‐ 85% against diphtheria, this paper examines the potential influence of socio‐demographic variables (age, gender, social circumstances, migration background) on vaccine‐uptake. Secondly, it investigates historically diverging vaccinal policies in Berlin as well as recent changes to monitoring coverage in their effect on immunisation‐related behaviour.
    November 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12140   open full text
  • Towards an Integrated Understanding of Critical Upheavals: From Crisis to Contentious Politics to “All‐Encompassing Contentious Crisis”.
    Wensheng Wang.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 07, 2016
    This article advances a general, comprehensive approach around the concept of “all‐encompassing contentious crisis” to studying critical upheavals and their historical impacts. This interpretative framework aims to reorient how we think about extraordinary events by providing a rubric for converting the scheme of seemingly unrelated destructive upheavals into an integrative model of constructive development. It appropriates the theoretical insights developed in political science and sociology to enrich historical inquiry and, furthermore, to turn crisis into a more precise and full‐fledged model of development. It is hoped that this synthesized model can not only help to lessen the barrier between historians and social scientists but also bridge the gap between event and structure in explaining historical change.
    November 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12138   open full text
  • The Zones of Fragility: Outlaws and the Forms of Violence in the Ottoman Empire.
    Baris Cayli.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 21, 2016
    This study explores the relationship between violence and power through examining the archival documents about the outlaws in the Ottoman Empire from 1852 to 1876. I argue that the outlaws and the use of violence in the public sphere defied the power of the Ottoman Empire. Thereof, the present study agrees with the main thesis of Hannah Arendt about the destructive influence of violence on power. However, I take Hannah Arendt's argument on violence one step further by claiming that the form of violence ‐whether political or non‐political‐ loses its significance when both public safety and state sovereignty are under great threats at the same time in the zones of fragility.
    September 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12137   open full text
  • The Import/Export of Police Models: Danish 19th Century Police Reform Between Elites of Revolution and Reaction.
    Mikkel Jarle Christensen.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 10, 2016
    The article investigates the diffusion of police models in the 19th century taking the Danish import of the Metropolitan Police implemented in London in 1829 as its main object of analysis. Building on the sociological framework of Pierre Bourdieu, the focal point of the analysis is how an international police model was crafted by national elites who profited from the import of a specific form of policing. In the Danish context, the import and mutation of the English role model was closely related to a transformation of the national field of power as absolutism was formally disbanded but practically folded into a new constitutional monarchy in which conservative and liberal elites coexisted.
    August 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12132   open full text
  • Christ vs. Communism: Communism as a Religious Social Problem in Finland's Proto‐Fascist Lapua Movement in the 1930s.
    Sami Koskelainen, Titus Hjelm.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 28, 2016
    This article traces the emergence of religious anti‐communist discourse in Finland's proto‐fascist Lapua Movement in the 1930s. Applying constructionist social problems theory, it discusses the constructions of communism as a religious social problem, Christian piety as a solution to the problem of godless communism, and the religious legitimation of violence. The article argues that by identifying Christianity with the Finnish nation the construction of communism as a religious problem—itself an outcome of the influence of revivalist Lutheran ministers in the leadership of the movement—resonated with the broader audience, but that this indigenous religious nationalism lost support with the increasing belligerence of the movement.
    July 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12130   open full text
  • Science of Selection: Social Technologies in the Norwegian Educational and Vocational Fields 1910–1940.
    Marte Feiring.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 08, 2016
    This article analyses how applied psychology redefined societies' views on abilities and disabilities during the early twentieth century. It studies the making of this new knowledge as two interrelated processes: first, the experimental laboratory developments of scientific knowledge, and second, the translation of quantitative techniques for measuring intelligence and aptitudes into real‐life situations for political reasons. The two unified processes ‘scientification’ and ‘politicisation’ point to how abilities and aptitudes were redefined due to scientific and political authorities and interests. This article aims to give a critical overview of the international innovations of applied psychology analysed as ‘social technologies’, and how these technologies transformed the Norwegian educational and vocational systems. The main empirical sources are seminal professional and political texts.
    July 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12131   open full text
  • From Vagrancy Heterotopias to the Proximity of Homelessness. A Historical Ethnography of the State's Moral Dilemmas in the Management of Unease.
    Susana Trovão.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 08, 2016
    This paper discusses the tension between the criminal justice system and the welfare state as expressed through practices focused on populations who are perceived as being ‘at risk’ and constituting ‘a danger’ to society, therefore challenging the national governance of social precariousness and public (in)security. The analysis of a paradigmatic institution of Portuguese Fascism has brought to light how the contradictions between the long‐term subjectivation of vagrancy processes and the uses of anti‐vagrancy policies promoted by the dictatorial state to arrest and punish a significant part of his citizens may justify the moral dilemmas underlying the current Portuguese State's response to homelessness and urban marginality.
    June 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12127   open full text
  • State‐Space beyond Territory: Wormholes, Gravitational Fields, and Entanglement.
    Daniel Neep.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 07, 2016
    Neo‐Weberian historical sociology and political science establishes that territory is a defining feature of the modern state. Drawing on insights from political geography, I argue that ‘territory’ is not a pre‐existing physical location, but an effect produced by state practices and technologies. The spatial fetish of territory, moreover, distracts analytical attention from the equally important non‐territorial dimensions of the state. To map these new and unfamiliar dimensions, I propose three analogies from the study of physics ‐ wormholes, gravitational fields, and quantum entanglement ‐ as powerful conceptual devices with the potential to reorient social scientists towards a fuller understanding of state‐space.
    June 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12126   open full text
  • Spillover Effects: Explaining Narrative Divergences of the Christian Right, 1979‐1989.
    M. Eugenia Deerman.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 07, 2016
    A case study of two organizations central to the Christian Right, the Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America, shows that the movement's core narrative of redemption split into two narratives that emphasized either of two meanings of redemption: (1) to reform society, and (2) to save sinners through prayer. I document the divergence by analysis of organizational publications. I find that the Christian Right's relationship with the New Right shaped the expression of this redemption narrative, resulting in these two versions of a core narrative. Spillover between the two movements occurred through organizational networks and contact between New Right organizations and Christian Right leaders. Spillover effects are evident in the ideological content, political training, and issues frames developed by Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America. These findings suggest that we must consider how movements accommodate divergent core narratives.
    June 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12129   open full text
  • Intersectionality and the Role of White Women: An Analysis of Divorce Petitions from Slavery.
    Rachel Feinstein.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 28, 2016
    Research on sexual violence and rape during slavery often focuses on the dynamic between white men and black women. However, white women played an important intermediate role in the sexual violence of enslaved black women. Analyzing divorce petitions submitted during slavery, the unique role of white women and their responses to sexual violence carried out by their husbands offer additional depth to the discussion of rape of enslaved black women. Furthermore, this analysis adds to intersectionality theory with the concept of a web of intersectional incentives, tactics, and consequences that encourage the maintenance of oppression.
    May 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12125   open full text
  • Post‐Authoritarian State Formation in Argentina: Transitional Justice as the Accumulation of Symbolic Power.
    Michelle Frances Carmody.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 27, 2016
    Looking at the transitions to democracy in Latin America during the late 20th century, a number of scholars observed that human rights and transitional justice had become the central legitimizing axis of the new, post‐authoritarian order. But the question of how human rights and transitional justice measures became such powerful sources of legitimacy in the first place was left unexplored. In this article I use Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital along with Mara Loveman's explanation of the accumulation of this capital to explain how transitional justice came to function as a form of post‐authoritarian state formation in Argentina.
    May 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12128   open full text
  • The Singular Freedom of Academic Freedom.
    Eve Haque.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 24, 2016
    In this paper, I want to discuss how particular conceptions of academic freedom can overshadow issues of justice for racialized members of the academy. In particular, the question I will explore is how we can begin to think of academic freedom in relation to, and not against, freedom from structural racial discrimination. I will explore this question in relation to presentations made at a conference on academic freedom, and through the examination of a few notable cases (both historical and contemporary) of academic freedom and racism in the classroom as well as in the blogosphere and social media.
    March 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12120   open full text
  • Degrees of (Self‐)Exploitation: Learning to Labour in the Neoliberal University.
    Casey Brienza.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 24, 2016
    Much has been written on the neoliberalization of the academy on the one hand and precarious creative labour/work in the culture industries on the other, but there has been comparatively little writing which makes explicit the intimate links between these two sociological phenomena and how they have come to complement and reinforce one another. Taking as a case study a new postgraduate MA course in Self‐Publishing, this article aims to fill this gap, arguing that fundamental to learning to labour in the neoliberal university is both ready acquiescence to exploitation and further willingness to self‐exploit on the part of both staff and students. Furthermore, incumbents of a profoundly unequal and managerial knowledge hierarchy benefit from the introduction of programmes which neither train students vocationally nor educate them liberally. This, in turn, threatens the autonomy within institutions of higher education while simultaneously undermining future artistic and intellectual flourishing.
    March 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12119   open full text
  • Using Disability Law to expand Academic Freedom for Disabled Researchers in the United Kingdom.
    Reuben Kirkham, Mary Webster, Ko‐Le Chen, John Vines.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 24, 2016
    We consider the findings of a study of the experiences of Postgraduate Researchers with Disabilities and explore how this relates to academic freedom. Drawing upon the provisions of the Public Sector Equality Duty and Indirect Discrimination within the Equality Act (2010), we note that a range of existing public policy practices, such as the operation of the REF, are likely to be in breach of these obligations. We recommend revisions to existing practice that speak more widely to the general concern of academic freedom, suggesting that a consideration of anti‐discrimination law – rather than a purely intellectually focussed agenda – represents a pragmatic means towards shaping the inclusivity of higher education policy going forwards.
    March 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12121   open full text
  • Performance Management and the Stifling of Academic Freedom and Knowledge Production.
    Liz Morrish, Helen Sauntson.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 24, 2016
    In an era of neoliberal reforms, academics in UK universities have become increasingly enmeshed in audit, particularly of research ‘outputs’. Using the data of performance management and training documents, this paper analyses the role of discourse in redefining the meaning of research, and in colonizing a new kind of entrepreneurial, corporate academic. The new regime in universities is characterized by slippage between the audit and disciplinary functions of performance management. We conclude that academic freedom is unlikely to emerge from a system which demands compliance with a regime of unattainable targets and constant surveillance.
    March 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12122   open full text
  • “By Whose Definition?”: The University of Saskatchewan's Firing of a Dean and the Textual Battle to Define Academic Freedom in Canada.
    Carolyn Sale.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 24, 2016
    The article focuses on the firing of a dean at Canada's University of Saskatchewan in 2014 to consider both the decidedly weak response to this event as an infringement of academic freedom protections, and the corporate instrument that was cited as the excuse for the firing, an employment contract's confidentiality clause. The central concerns are with the relationship of academic freedom to freedom of expression more generally, and the textual battle in Canada for the definition of academic freedom in which (in the face of the silence of academics at all levels) administrative imperatives shaped by a neoliberal agenda are currently dominating.
    March 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12123   open full text
  • An Indigenous Feminist's Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.
    Zoe Todd.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 24, 2016
    In this article, I ask how anthropology can adopt a decolonial approach that incorporates and acknowledges the critical scholarship of Indigenous thinkers whose work and labour informs many current trends in Euro‐Western scholarship, activism and socio‐political discourse. I also query how to address ongoing structural colonialism within the academy in order to ensure that marginalised voices are heard within academic discourses.
    March 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12124   open full text
  • The Simple Geometry of ‘Linearism’. Metaphors of the Nation in the Radical Falangist Discourse of the Immediate Postwar Period in Spain.
    Zira Box.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 20, 2016
    Taking as a point of departure the understanding that metaphors, as linguistic expressions, indicate the thought processes of those who formulate them, the present article explores a specific metaphor that formed part of the discourse of radical Falangism: the definition of the Spanish nation as straight, upright, linear or vertical, in opposition to another Spain that had to be combatted, and which was portrayed as twisted. The argument put forward here is that, by analysing the various metaphorical expressions that arose in the wake of the identification of Spain with an image of linearity, it is possible to examine aspects of Falange nationalism that bring into relief the ideal of a sombre, spare, masculine and austere Spain.
    February 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12117   open full text
  • Revolution and the Whip of Reaction: Technicians of Power and the Dialectic of Radicalisation.
    Marc Mulholland.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 14, 2016
    This article argues that sociologically informed studies of revolution tend to underestimate the importance of counter‐revolution and ‘reaction’ in generating radicalisation. Revolutions are inherently political. Most accounts recognise this, but emphasise the executive organs of state – such as monarch, cabinet or ministers – at the expense of the intermediary ‘technicians of power’. Revolutions, however, typically seek to refashion an entire technocracy of power, and in so doing struggle against embedded and powerful sites of reaction. Central to the dynamic of revolution is the ‘purge’ of the technocracy of power. As governing structures are not easily transformed at a stroke, revolutions may be seen as punctuating long processes of struggle. Historically, the governing apparatus has been most effectively revolutionised under conditions of military occupation. The thesis is illustrated here by a narrative of revolution in Europe from the English Civil War to the Liberation of the 1940s, with a coda on ’68.
    February 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12118   open full text
  • Fighting in the Dark: Ideology and State Formation in Post‐Colonial Burma.
    Min Ye Paing Hein.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 25, 2016
    Extant major approaches to states and revolutions privilege the role of state practices and the character of war‐making in shaping modern state‐making in the Third World. Bringing the role of ideology into this analytical landscape of state‐making, this paper advances an alternative claim that ideological practices shape modern state structures and practices as well as the dynamics of political contention between the state and the revolutions. First, I argue that that intra‐movement ideological dynamics within the nationalist movement can have a profound impact on the structure and practices of the state. Using the writings of the party leaders, memoirs and official publications of the Burmese communist party, I maintain that subtle and specific ideological differences amongst the Burmese leftist movements generated organizational splits and internecine conflicts in the nationalist struggle, which exerted profound influences on the structures and practices of the Burmese state Secondly, relative ideological positions of the state and the revolutionary movements play an important role in shaping the dynamics of contention between the state and revolution. For example, an intimate web of ideological affinity between the nascent Burmese state and the Burmese leftist movements shaped the context and content of political contention between the state and these movements in the post‐colonial Burma. To address these issues empirically, the first part of the paper examines the formation and cementation of organizational linkages amongst Burmese leftist nationalists during the anti‐colonial struggle. The second part of the paper addresses specific and subtle ways in which ideological character and practices of the Burmese state and the Burmese Communist party shaped state practices and state structures in modern Burma as well as the dynamics of political contention between the state and the revolutionary movements.
    January 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/johs.12115   open full text
  • Dissonant Notes on the Post‐Secular: Unthinking Secularization in Global Historical Sociology.
    Gennaro Ascione.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 08, 2015
    The article criticizes the assumption that modernity is a rupture in time and space conceivable in terms of the coming of a secular age. It tackles Habermas concept of ‘post‐secular’ and denotes it as an attempt to provide new foundations to modernization narratives, in postmodern terms; it discusses Blumenberg's idea of secularization and questions the historical ontogenesis of what Blumenberg thinks of in terms of the transition to the modern age; it further elaborates on Wang Hui analysis of the relation between Western science and the role of China in global modernity. Secularization and the post‐secular, it is argued, re‐frame narratives of the disenchantment within a western geocultural ideology of western superiority.
    December 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12116   open full text
  • “Nothing More Than the Usual Injury”: Debating Hockey Violence During the Manslaughter Trials of Allan Loney (1905) and Charles Masson (1907).
    Stacy L. Lorenz, Geraint B. Osborne.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 25, 2015
    This historical case study of violence in Canadian hockey examines media coverage of two manslaughter trials: the 1905 trial of Allan Loney and the 1907 trial of Charles Masson. Both players stood accused of killing opposing players by striking them in the head with their hockey sticks. In each case, the offending player was acquitted in the courts, mainly because such violence was deemed intrinsic to the sport. Injuries that resulted from violent acts were downplayed or ignored; even death from a deliberate stick attack could be rationalized as an unfortunate accident. Newspaper accounts of the deaths, trials, and subsequent acquittals offer valuable insight into the cultural narratives surrounding hockey violence and notions of masculinity in early twentieth‐century Canada. These cases generated considerable debate around the issue of what constituted “clean” and “rough” hockey. The game reports, trial coverage, and public opinion examined in this case study suggest that stick‐swinging incidents and aggressive play have been regarded as ordinary and “proper” aspects of “strenuous hockey” for more than a century. The historical examination of such cases is important because the justifications for violence that were articulated in the context of the deaths continue to be voiced in contemporary discussions of hockey violence. As long as fighting and aggression remain markers of masculinity – and hockey continues to be seen as a training ground for manhood – it will be difficult to remove such forms of violence from the sport.
    November 25, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12111   open full text
  • When “citizenship is indispensable to the practice of a profession”: Citizenship Requirements for Entry to Practise Professions in Canada.
    Tracey L Adams.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 25, 2015
    This paper explores citizenship requirements for entry to practice regulated professions historically in four Canadian provinces. It reviews how common citizenship restrictions have been in Canadian professions, when and where they were implemented, and what rationales were provided for these restrictions. Findings provide support for both Weberian social closure theory which sees such restrictions as the product of professional lobbying, and state‐centred explanations which hold that states regulate professions to facilitate governance. Many citizenship restrictions were historically implemented by state actors. The decline of citizenship restrictions reflects not only changing social attitudes, but changes in state‐profession relations in Canada.
    November 25, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12112   open full text
  • Codes of Contention: Building Regulations in Colonial Bombay, 1870‐1912.
    Sukriti Issar.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 11, 2015
    This paper investigates the contentious institutionalization of building codes in colonial Bombay. Based on original archival research, the paper demonstrates that building codes were inflected with a discourse of moral regulation that masked the material interests of the state. Resistance to these regulations came from many quarters; conflicts within the state, public opinion expressed in the press, and political strategizing of residents and landowners in the public sphere. The paper argues for greater attention to the historically variable interconnections between power and resistance in specific empirical contexts.
    November 11, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12113   open full text
  • Commodity Fetishism and Consumer Senses: Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐Century Consumer Activism in the United States and England.
    Tad Skotnicki.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 11, 2015
    At the turn of the twentieth century, the National Consumers’ League, the Co‐operative Wholesale Society, and the Women's Co‐operative Guild encouraged people to become ethical consumers. I argue that we can explain their common strategies by invoking commodity fetishism. By casting their consumer activism as a practical response to the fetish of commodities, we explain: 1) activists’ use of sensory techniques – both figurative and literal – to connect producers, commodities, and consumers and 2) their commitment to the ethical power of the senses. This account reveals the virtues of commodity fetishism as a tool for understanding the dynamics of consumer activism.
    November 11, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12114   open full text
  • The Paranoid Style Revisited: Pseudo‐Conservatism in the 21st Century.
    Scott Appelrouth.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 02, 2015
    Fifty years ago, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning historian Richard Hofstadter published the seminal essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In this and related works he examined the rhetoric animating the extreme right‐wing of the country's electorate. In this article I revisit Hofstadter's claims regarding the marginalization of the paranoid style and its connection to status‐based politics. A review of the most popular “pseudo‐conservative” commentators, survey data, the rise of the Tea Party, and the intransigence of the present day Republican Party suggests that a worldview that was once extreme has now become “mainstreme” within the political culture.
    June 02, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12095   open full text
  • The Vestiges of the U.S. Occupation and the Redefining of the Japanese Woman.
    Masako Endo.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 02, 2015
    This article addresses the construction of Japanese womanhood toward the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan (1945–1952). In the early 1950s, the Japanese people were conscious about independence and envisioned a new, positive image of the nation. However, the actual image was overtly sexualized by the presence of numerous women consorting with U.S. servicemen during the occupation. This article explores how the Japanese government attempted to eliminate any sexualized elements from Japan. While focusing on Japanese women who had relationships with foreign men and mixed‐blood children, I argue that they served as the “Other” in redefining post‐occupation femininity.
    June 02, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12096   open full text
  • The Race for Education: Class, White Tone, and Desegregated Schooling in South Africa.
    Mark Hunter.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 25, 2015
    In the early 1990s, privileged “white” South African public schools began to admit “black” pupils. Drawing on interviews, ethnography, and archival sources related to formerly‐white schools in Durban, this article addresses two main questions: first, why did white parents so enthusiastically vote for schooling desegregation when apartheid was still in place?; and second, why, over time, did intense competition emerge between schools, and become so focused on improving sports results? In addressing these questions this study takes an historical‐geographical approach, paying particular attention to two areas of Durban: the middle‐class central Berea area and the more working‐class areas in Durban's south. This story begins in the 1950s, a period of major schooling expansion and urban segregation, tracing how a hierarchy of white schools developed in relation to the city's uneven geographies of race and class. It is this schooling hierarchy and the way it became contested in the 1990s that is key to understanding the schools' shift from “cooperative desegregation” to “aggressive competition.” More broadly, the article argues that education provides a window into key post‐apartheid tensions – namely between the deracialization of privilege, the continued dividend of whiteness, and efforts to redistribute resources to the poor. Finally, in an age of mass education, it argues that the actions of schools play an important role in shaping raced and classed divisions in society.
    May 25, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12097   open full text
  • Shaping Identities: The Cypriot Left and the Communist Party of Greece in the 1940s.
    Alexios Alecou.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 25, 2015
    This paper seeks to reveal the many ways in which the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) influenced the Cypriot Left (AKEL) during the 1940s. The analysis centres on the main political events of the decade and details the reaction of AKEL, especially as it was reporting to the KKE. Attention then switches to AKEL's ideology and tactics and how these were developed during and because of the Greek civil war. What this paper brings to the discussion is that the advice and control given by the KKE to AKEL – and at the same time the Cold War, which was a playing field on which a political party had to choose a side – were the main factors that formed the identity and ideological framework practiced for decades by AKEL.
    May 25, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12102   open full text
  • The Railway Switches of History: The Development of Disease Control in Britain and the United States in the 19th and early 20th Century.
    Charles Allan McCoy.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 13, 2015
    When Britain and the United States began to respond to outbreaks of disease in the 19th century they developed two distinct systems of disease control. While not polar opposites, Britain focused primarily on sanitation, whereas the United States adopted policies of quarantine. Utilizing the approach of path dependency I argue that this divergence can be partly explained by the timing of disease control formation in each country. As Britain formed its system of disease control earlier, during the 1840s, it was influenced by a miasmatic understanding of disease (the belief that disease is caused by noxious gases that emanate from filthy environments), while as the United States formed its disease control system later, around the end of the 1870s, it was more influenced by new ideas about contagion and the rise of germ theory. Once formed, the public health system of each country began to travel down divergent historical paths; Britain came to connect disease control to the social problems of the working classes (e.g. poverty, working conditions, overcrowding) while the United States developed a militaristic approach that, at times, used quite coercive measures to isolate the contagious bodies of the sick. The origins of public health formation in each country helped shape the overall development of disease control in Britain and the United States over the long‐term.
    May 13, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12099   open full text
  • The Human Right to Food as Political Imaginary.
    José Julián López.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 13, 2015
    The overwhelmingly normative nature of the study of Economic, Social, and Cultural (ESC) human rights enables ESC rights to function in their default settings as taken for granted norms and principles, originating in international agreements. This paper, instead, probes the social and historical “thingness” of ESC human rights themselves. It analyses the emergence of the Human Right to Food (HRF), and proposes a sociological model, political imaginary, as an explanatory tool to identify the historical socio‐discursive conditions of the emergence of the HRF. It uses this model to understand FoodFirst Internal Action Network (FIAN)'s contributions to the development of the HRF.
    May 13, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12098   open full text
  • Reconfiguring Sovereignty in Foucauldian Genealogies of Power: The Case of English Master and Servant Law and the Dispersion and the Exercise of Sovereignty in the Modern Age.
    Marc W. Steinberg.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 13, 2015
    This paper is a critique and partial reconfiguration of the Foucauldian genealogy of sovereignty. Sovereignty is largely conceptualized as the antithesis of governmentality and disciplinary power in the modern age; presented as a negative case as a juridical and centralized power of interdiction and containment in the classical age. I argue that we can genealogically examine how sovereignty in the modern age underwent transformation and dispersion. My empirical focus is on how master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the development and transformations of local courts, led to the increasingly dispersal of sovereign power as it as practiced in specific industrial sites and regions.
    May 13, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12101   open full text
  • Early Modern Antwerp: The First “World City”?
    Eric Mielants.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 08, 2015
    It is problematic to think of globalization as a new phenomenon and to believe that the phenomenon of a world city, embedded in the global division of labor, is a 20th century novelty. World city literature in sociology often emphasizes, if not assumes, the relatively recent emergence of world cities in the “new” international division of labor. Sixteenth century Antwerp, however, was the first world city of an expanding capitalist world economy. Understanding this phenomenon and its decline can raise important questions about the modus operandi of subsequent world cities.
    May 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12100   open full text
  • “Shell as Hard as Steel” (Or, “Iron Cage”): What Exactly Did That Imagery Mean for Weber?
    R. Bruce Douglass.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 24, 2015
    Max Weber did not invent the image of the iron cage; it was Talcott Parsons who created that image in preparing the first translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism into English to be published. But that has not prevented it from catching on and even acquiring the status of a popular symbol of Weber's entire view of modern life. Despite its popularity, however, the image does not have a commonly accepted meaning. In part this is because of the creative uses to which it has been put by other scholars, but it is also a result of the fact that Weber himself used the German terms that were the source of Parsons’ translation in a variety of different ways over the course of his scholarly career. The purpose of this paper is to examine those uses to determine whether the meanings they convey add up to something coherent, and if so, what exactly that meaning was.
    February 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12093   open full text
  • “An Instrument for Reaching Into Experience”: Progressive Film at the Rockefeller Boards, 1934–1945.
    Rob Aitken.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 16, 2015
    The emergence of progressive filmmaking in the interwar period is often associated with John Grierson, the British documentary movement and the influence it traced abroad. This paper argues, however, that more particular attention needs to attend the specific context for progressive filmmaking in the United States. To make this argument, this paper foregrounds two strands of progressive filmmaking that were pursued alongside, and often in tension with each other at the Rockefeller Boards between 1934 and 1945. The Rockefeller Boards pursued both a version of social‐realist documentary in the Griersonian tradition as well as a project focused on “human relations” films. As this paper suggests, the human relations project contrasted with Grierson's social documentary by linking film to a particular kind of psychological interior; a self not oriented to the social world but to the internal spaces of psychological and personality development. This implies a complex process of cultural diffusion in which Grierson's model was filtered through, and ultimately displaced by, a set of concerns and preoccupations unique to the American context.
    January 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12094   open full text
  • Selective Authenticity: Civil War Reenactors and Credible Reenactments.
    Gregory Hall.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 13, 2015
    This article addresses authenticity and how it is selectively used by Civil War reenactors to create credible reenactments. The Civil War provides a structured set of scenarios for reenactors to use as a backdrop for their participation. Some use this backdrop to bring objects to the forefront and others use this setting as a way to interact with an audience person to person. This research indicates that authenticity may come through on different levels for individuals participating in the same activity. An authentic experience or object is authentic because it has an important immediate meaning. The objects and narratives displayed by reenactors may be set in specific history but this does not mean that these same objects and narratives are part of that history. This paper contributes to the study of authenticity by examining groups of Civil War reenactors and where their focus of authenticity lies whether it is on authentic objects or interactions.
    January 13, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12089   open full text
  • Sub/Urban Histories Against The Grain: Myth And Embourgeoisement In Essex Noir.
    Gareth Millington.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 13, 2015
    This paper considers how literary and cinematic constructions of Essex noir expose the darker, chaotic sides to working‐class embourgeoisement: initially via post‐War suburbanisation and later, via Margaret Thatcher's attempt to encourage competitive individualism and entrepreneurship. Noir angles a “dark mirror” to suburban Essex and develops a distinctive aesthetics of social and cultural change, while also puncturing myths of social mobility and suburban security. The paper points to both affinities and breaks between noir's bleak pessimism and Walter Benjamin's understanding of history as overcoming the concept of progress.
    January 13, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12087   open full text
  • Dostoevsky and Freud: Autonomy and Addiction in Gambling.
    Sytze F. Kingma.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 07, 2015
    In this paper the modern ideal of “autonomous” or “pure” gambling is put forward in an analysis of Dostoevsky's gambling behavior, his novel The Gambler (1866) and Freud's psychoanalysis of Dostoevsky. The significance of The Gambler lies in the way conceptions of gambling are related to the social conditions of gamblers. Furthermore, the author demonstrates that Dostoevsky and Freud express contradictory views on gambling addiction. While Dostoevsky primarily appreciated roulette as a means of making money, Freud mistakenly interpreted this as a “pathological passion”. In different ways, however, both approaches toward excessive gambling presuppose and reinforce “gambling‐for‐its‐own‐sake” – Le jeu pour le jeu.
    January 07, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12086   open full text
  • Fleeing to Babylon: How the Erie Canal, Diffusion, and Social Structure Forever Changed American Calvinism.
    Justin Rowe.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 01, 2015
    The following focuses on the Presbyterian Church in the early 19th century United States and suggests that by historically examining its structural dynamics, historians and social scientists alike can better understand not only American religious history but also the diffusion process of intellectual innovation.
    January 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/johs.12092   open full text
  • Strategic Action Fields in US Higher Education: The 1939 Mercer University Heresy Trial.
    Barrett J. Taylor.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 18, 2014
    This paper uses Fligstein and McAdam's (2012, 2011) theory of the strategic action field, or “SAF,” to highlight the ways in which individuals can act within cultural and material constraints to shape social processes. It applies these concepts to the Mercer University heresy trial of 1939, in which a group of students backed by fundamentalists from the conservative Protestant movement accused members of the University's faculty of unbelief. By understanding the organization, the social movement, and the higher education industry as “SAFs,” the theory explains how the trial reached its unusual outcome, and suggests implications for broader understandings of organizational change.
    December 18, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12084   open full text
  • The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation: Ethnicisation of Citizenship in Imperial Germany and China.
    Choo Chin Low.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 17, 2014
    In the era of perpetual allegiance, the nationality regimes of Germany and China were characterised by restricted, instead of voluntary, expatriation. Although this policy reflected the two states' perceptions of overseas Germans and Chinese as sources of national strength, it also resulted in widespread dual nationality practices. Using case studies of Germany and China, this article analyses the right to expatriation in the aforementioned era. This study suggests that both the imperial regimes adopted strict expatriation rules with knowledge of the possibility of dual allegiance but remained indifferent to its consequences. Dual nationality practices were the accidental result of strict expatriation rather than a deliberate outcome.
    December 17, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12085   open full text
  • Eventful Subjectivity: The Experiential Sources of Solidarity.
    Rachel Meyer, Howard Kimeldorf.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 17, 2014
    Scholarship on events has been devoted primarily to large‐scale occurrences that transform macro structures. Here we put forward a perspective that we term eventful subjectivity which moves the analysis of events in two related directions. First, we shift the arena of eventful analysis from rare world historical occurrences to smaller, more frequent events. Second, we direct attention away from macro‐structural outcomes to micro‐level changes in understanding. We employ the framework of eventful subjectivity to examine a living wage campaign in Chicago, demonstrating how the multi‐faceted diversity of the campaign – in the context of collective action – engendered solidarity rather than fragmentation.
    December 17, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12083   open full text
  • “Mostly we are White and Alone”: Identity, Anxiety and the Past in Some White Zimbabwean Memoirs.
    Kate Law.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 17, 2014
    Using the space created by the land invasions, over the last ten years or so there has been a proliferation of exile memoirs written by white Zimbabweans living in the diaspora, which foreground colonial nostalgia and postcolonial anxiety. This article profiles elements of this latest wave of “white (female) writing”, arguing that writers such as Alexandra Fuller construct their own personal narratives based on an extremely teleological and narrow interpretation of the history of Zimbabwe. It is argued that memoirs are used as a mechanism to uphold an idealised (i.e. powerful) white identity, because whites' current “destabilised” identity has resulted in them clinging to a seemingly utopian version of both what it meant to be white and the past. The article also examines some aspects of whiteness studies, utilising Peter McLaren's framework to argue that these memoirs are beset by a whiteness of social amnesia.
    December 17, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12090   open full text
  • The Invention of Work in Modernity: Hegel, Marx, and Weber.
    Daniel Just.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 17, 2014
    In the modern era, a wide range of human activities has been redefined as work. This essay traces a genealogy of the modern conception of work, from early Protestant ethic of work as worship of God, through secularization of this ethic and the emergence of the idea of progress, to the later model of work as personal duty and source of stability. Analyzing Hegel, Marx, and Weber's interpretations of the growing centrality of work in the modern epoch, as well as later reflections on these interpretations by Kojève, Arendt, and Foucault, the paper argues that in modernity work is no longer a mere instrument of power and tool for repressing human life, but a mode of power of its own accord: a privileged means of shaping life by cultivating and regulating its productive potential. Modern society is reorganized according to the principles of productivity, efficiency, and economic welfare of population as a whole that recalibrate individual existence and posit virtually all activities as a form of work.
    December 17, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12091   open full text
  • “An Army of Civil Servants”: Max Weber and Émile Durkheim on Socialism.
    Matt Dawson.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 17, 2014
    This paper is a comparison of the views of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim on socialism; these two have yet to be compared on this topic. They offered shared critiques of socialism, but differed in assessment of its overall worth, with Durkheim being more welcoming. After considering possible explanations for this divergence I argue it reflects the contrasting methodologies adopted by both. Whilst Weber places questions of the “value” of socialism solely in the conscious of the individual, and therefore beyond sociology, Durkheim sees this as a social question and therefore part of the practical concerns of sociologists.
    December 17, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12088   open full text
  • Days of Labour: Topographies of Power in Modern Peripheral Capitalism. The Case of The Industrial City of Łódź.
    Wiktor Marzec, Agata Zysiak.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 28, 2014
    The article investigates the city of Łódź as an exceptional case of a settlement constitutive of different kinds and techniques of power typical of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. We consider Foucault's disciplinary power/biopower through the convergence of the paternalistic gaze of the factory owner, and the Tsarist rule in the Scheibler and Grohman industrial establishment and the nearby workers housing estate. The aim of this article is to investigate a specific locus of peripheral capitalism and the relations accompanying it through the Foucauldian analysis of power. We argue that unique and unstable patterns of correlation of power techniques emerged here. Power is no longer strictly related to the temporal matrix or the functional demands of capitalist production, and only temporarily ossified in contingent configurations. While Foucault's canonical theoretical premises and concepts are of explanatory value, the very relations between them become problematic when confronted with the particular entanglement in Łódź. Therefore we opt for the new paradigm of power analysis through S. J. Collier's “topological analysis”.
    August 28, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12080   open full text
  • On the Centrality of Action: Social Science, Historical Logics, and Max Weber's Legacy.
    Eric Malczewski.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 27, 2014
    This article draws attention to the fundamental centrality of “action” – i.e. symbolically constituted behavior – for the historical and social sciences. The work of Max Weber and contemporary American historian and theorist William H. Sewell, Jr. are examined, so as to shed light on the debate concerning social science's central subject matter as well as on the implications of this work for sociological and historical theory. The examination of Sewell's view leverages the importance of the concept of action underlying Weber's concept of “social action.” Weber's position on action and social action is of great interest not only to general theory but also to the field of cultural sociology, which has neglected to develop systematically upon the theoretical purchase Weber offers to it.
    August 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12081   open full text
  • Studying Modern Nation‐State in a World‐Historical Perspective: The Instance of Iraq.
    Zehra Taşdemir Yaşin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 19, 2014
    By examining conceptual and historical approaches on modern state and state formation in the context of Iraq, this paper addresses four interrelated methodological aspects of studying state formation (1) to contest the simplicity of Eurocentric knowledge production in studying state formation especially in the periphery, (2) to bring capital and nation‐state into a relational analysis and to call for research on how they constitute each other historically and geographically, (3) to integrate methodologically local and world‐historical context in understanding the historical complexity of state formation, (4) to problematize the concepts of “capital relation” in order to recognize nature and transformation of nature in the study of state formation.
    August 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12078   open full text
  • Democratic Punishment and the Archive of Violence: Punishment, Publicity and Corporal Excess in Antebellum New York.
    Luca Follis.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 13, 2014
    Nineteenth century American prisons were paradoxical institutions. Porous and impermeable, transparent and opaque, open to public view and occluded from sight; prisons clearly functioned as containers for raw coercion even as they were paraded as paragons of democratic transparency. How did New York State navigate between these countervailing positions and how did officials explicate the difference between them? In this essay I focus on the representation of institutional violence as a problematic of governance, I consider its impact on the development and transformation of public authority and track the role of state actors in navigating the scandals, crises and opportunities it engendered.
    August 13, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12082   open full text
  • Time Construction in Insurance Society.
    Alberto Cevolini.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 13, 2014
    This article deals with the social meaning of insurance contracts in the late medieval and modern society. Starting from the empirical analysis of one of the early marine insurance contracts which were stipulated in the second half of the 14th century, the hypothesis is suggested that the premium rate coincides with the estimated average frequency of sea accidents. By means of a proto‐probability calculus, rate was used by the early insurers for trading risks. Therefore the main thesis arises that insurance premium is a way of giving a certain price to the uncertainty of the future and that it indeed represents the cost of such observation. A comparison with the original function of money in primitive societies based on reciprocity is finally developed in order to explain how time construction is contingent on social structures.
    August 13, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12079   open full text
  • “We are a people, one people”: How 1967 Transformed Holocaust Memory and Jewish Identity in Israel and the US.
    Daniel Navon.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 11, 2014
    This paper examines how the “narrative‐identities” of Jewish communities in Israel and the US were unified through the events surrounding Israel's 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Using a range of historical materials, I show how key elements of the two communities' identities were rearranged and untied through a new, shared narrative that linked the Holocaust, Jewish victimhood and Israel. I argue that the old Zionist narrative enabled the new one, which in turn helped bind the two communities discursively, materially and politically. Finally, I discuss the implications for our understanding of identity change and the conflict over Israel/Palestine.
    August 11, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12075   open full text
  • Protected Sites: Reconceptualising Secret Societies in Colonial and Postcolonial Singapore.
    Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 11, 2014
    Street gangs in Singapore are commonly known as secret societies. The irony behind this term is that these secret societies have not only been contributing to the making of modern Singapore for more than a century, they have often carried out their dealings in the public sphere. These overt operations of the underworld are possible, in part, due to the symbiotic relationship forged between the Chinese triads and the police which have continued till today. Through examining the notion of protected sites, this article explores how the postcolonial state has taken on a similar pragmatic approach as that practised by its colonial predecessor in the management of the criminal underworld.
    August 11, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12072   open full text
  • Constructing a Modern Society Through “Depillarization”. Understanding Post‐War History as Gradual Change.
    Peter Dam.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 05, 2014
    The term “depillarization” (“ontzuiling”) emerged in the Netherlands during the 1970s to proclaim the end of a society dominated by “pillarization” (“verzuiling”). In breaking away from the past, a groundbreaking renewal of religious and civic life through secularization and individualization was proclaimed or deplored. As hopes of an emancipation from the past subsided in the face of a considerable continuity, depillarization became a narrative of loss and frustration. This article shows how metaphors of disaggregation such as depillarization have produced an inability to conceptualize contemporary society, accompanied by a distortion of the past as the “other” of the present. It demonstrates how such metaphors may become dominant through their ability to incorporate competing visions of social order and the integration of scholarly and popular discourse. In conclusion, this article proposes to overcome the narratives of disaggregation by interpreting post‐war history as a gradual transformation from the ideals and practices of heavy communities to those of light communities in the domains of politics, civil society and religion.
    August 05, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12074   open full text
  • Deviance, Persecution and the Roman Creation of Christianity.
    Gervase Phillips.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 05, 2014
    Although Roman persecution of Christians was sporadic and localised for much of the first three centuries of the church's existence, it is argued here that such persecution was nevertheless crucial in the creation and shaping of a distinct Christian identity. The primary deviance of the radical Jewish sect that had surrounded Jesus himself created a “sticky reputation” that endured even when the church had become largely politically and socially conservative. Periodic outbreaks of violence towards those labelled Christians by the authorities created a transactional relationship, in which the victims and their co‐religionists responded by the explicit adoption of a deviant identity and experienced the corollary reconstruction of the self in terms of attitudes, mores and affiliations (secondary deviance). This transaction halted a drift towards religious syncretism that might otherwise have seen Jesus take his place within the henotheistic Roman Pantheon, and thus ensured the survival of the Christian faith as monotheistic and oppositional to Roman religio.
    August 05, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12071   open full text
  • “Radiation is Not New to Our Lives”: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Continental Atmospheric Weapons Testing, and Discursive Hegemony in the Downwind Communities.
    James Rice, Julie Steinkopf Rice.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 05, 2014
    Drawing from the post‐structuralist discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe and corpus linguistics techniques, we deconstruct the discursive strategies of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) during the era of continental atmospheric atomic testing in southern Nevada. The data consist of AEC pamphlets distributed in the “downwind” communities in 1953, 1955, and 1957 coincident with major test series. We illustrate discursive dominance hinged on the invocation of national security and instrumental rationality as key signifiers and portrayal of radioactive fallout as natural, ubiquitous, and controllable. Further, AEC discourse was predicated upon casting officials in a paternalistic role and residents of the rural communities downwind as best served though acquiescence to AEC authority and expertise. We conclude by highlighting the empirical evidence regarding the deleterious health effects of atmospheric atomic testing between 1951 and 1962 and argue examination of AEC discursive hegemony offers important lessons applicable to contemporary socio‐technical controversies.
    August 05, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12076   open full text
  • “Too Weird for Banknotes”: Legitimacy and Identity in the Production of Danish Banknotes 1947–2007.
    Anders Ravn Sørensen.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 05, 2014
    In this article I argue that questions of banknote design are closely related to ideas of the national collective. Using the Danish banknote design competitions from 1947 to 2007 as an exemplary case I show how the Danish central bank, Nationalbanken, continuously sought to balance banknote iconography between different and evolving perceptions of the national community in an attempt to underpin the legitimacy and authority of Danish banknotes. I suggest that concepts from institutional theory can explain this equipoise relationship and I argue that banknote designers need to somehow reconcile conflicting ideas about the national community. As such, this article contributes to a more detailed understanding of the considerations and challenges facing banknote‐issuing authorities.
    August 05, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12077   open full text
  • Getting the Gold Out of the Ground: Social Constraints on Technical Capacity in South African Deep‐Level Mining.
    T. Dunbar Moodie.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 05, 2014
    This paper examines the limits and pressures imposed on South African deep‐level mining technology by changing economic and socio‐political constraints that have obliged mining engineers to adapt their practices of “getting gold out of the ground.” Initially employing straight‐forward arguments about the importance of means for achieving ends, the paper eventually raises questions that complicate our understanding of practices that underlie simple conceptions of mining technology.
    August 05, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12073   open full text
  • How It Was/Is Told, Recorded and Remembered: The Discontinued History of the Third Front Construction.
    Ju Li.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 29, 2014
    By comparing different historical narratives of the Third Front Construction that was built as a home‐front defensive industrial base against the threat of war from both the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1960s, this paper aims to explore a particular aspect of China's socialist history in a relational manner that contrasts but also connects past and present, archives and subjectivity, top‐down and bottom‐up perspectives. It is part of a larger effort to understand the complexity of China's socialist history and its relation to the present.
    July 29, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12070   open full text
  • The Boss's “Brains”: Political Capital, Democratic Commerce and the New York Tweed Ring, 1868–1871.
    Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 20, 2014
    Departing from Pierre Bourdieu's contention that capital takes on many forms beyond the economic, including a political form, this article examines how commodification patterned nineteenth century American politics. A case study of the Tweed Ring, which briefly governed Gilded Age New York, is reevaluated as a speculative political bubble that produced empirically identifiable political profits. From an election sweep in 1868 to a bank run in 1871, William Tweed gained and lost political power and material wealth through management of what the editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast hailed as the boss's “Brains,” or democratic commerce, the market in political commodities.
    May 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12062   open full text
  • The Place of Africa, in Theory: Pan‐Africanism, Postcolonialism, Beyond.
    Shaden M Tageldin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. April 01, 2014
    Twentieth‐century African theory translated two destructive diasporas – of peoples by the slave trade, of lands by empire – into a creative third: a pan‐Africanist philosophy of decolonization that recovered Africa's pluralism as a powerfully “diasporic” defiance of imperial taxonomies. Comparing a 1967 lecture given in Cairo by Senegalese poet‐president Léopold Sédar Senghor with a 1955 treatise on the philosophy of revolution by Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser (Jamal cAbd al‐Nasir), and both with Achille Mbembe's 2001 On the Postcolony, this essay shows how Senghor marshals race/culture hybridities, Nasser historical/geographic alignments, and Mbembe temporal entanglements to deconstruct monolithic constructions of “Arab”, “Black”, and “African” being, space, and time – and to pluralize and “world” a continent. It argues that the logics of trans‐territoriality and trans‐temporality that informed Third World solidarity in the 1950s–1970s represent a forgotten legacy of pan‐Africanism to postcolonialism and to global theory generally. Africa's place, in theory, decenters Eurocentrism.
    April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12061   open full text
  • Physicians' Discourse for Establishing Authoritative Knowledge in Birthing Work and Reducing the Presence of the Granny Midwife.
    Alicia D. Bonaparte.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 27, 2014
    This study examines regulatory efforts directed toward southern Black granny midwives in the early 20th century. Using Black feminist theory, I analyze physicians' written anti‐midwifery advocacy in The Journal of the American Medical Association and The Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association as evidence of the presence of inter‐occupational conflict between physicians and Black grannies. I argue that doctors advocated for enhanced midwifery education and midwifery supervision to eliminate midwives while defining physicians as heroes in birthing rooms. This study illustrates how physicians' professional writings substantiated doctors as veritable experts in birthing work rather than strategically targeting Black midwives.
    March 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12045   open full text
  • Situated Interpretations of Nationalism, Imperialism, and Cosmopolitanism: Revisiting the Writings of Liang in the Encounter Between Worlds.
    Chenchen Zhang.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 27, 2014
    The idea of the nation has been considered to have delivered political modernity from its native Europe to the rest of the world. The same applies, though more implicitly, to those paradoxes inherent to the nationalist ideology – that between universalism and national particularity and that between liberal nationalism and imperialism. This article seeks to complicate these theses by looking at the interpretations of nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism provided by Liang Qichao, one of the most influential Chinese intellectuals in early twentieth century, during his exile in Japan when increasingly exposed to the encounter between worlds. This reading also engages with the wider debates on modernity/modernities in non‐Western societies through showing that neither the “consumers of modernity” approach nor the “creative adaptations” approach can be easily applied here. I argue that the various tensions, contingencies and historical situatedness in Liang's accounts of the nation‐state structure represent and constitute the paradox of the structure itself. They also shed light on contemporary debates about the limits of our political imagination in the misnamed “global politics” beyond the false opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.
    March 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12058   open full text
  • “VY Mudimbe: from the ‘Nation’ to the ‘Global’ – ‘Who is the Master?' ”.
    Pierre‐Philippe Fraiture.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 20, 2014
    This article examines Valentin Yves Mudimbe's work form the early 1970s, in the neo‐colonial era, to the present day, a period marked by the advent of “Empire”, as conceived by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. The investigation appraises the way in which Mudimbe's epistemological excavation of African discourses and discourses about Africa serves wider ethical and political objectives resonating with critiques of anthropology as formulated by Benoît Verhaegen and Johannes Fabian in the 1960s and 1970s. Part I focuses on Zairian nationalism (“Zairianization”) and the ambition, on the part of the Mobutu regime, to develop an authentic national culture. This examination of the birth of a Zairian “community” is developed through a comparison between Mudimbe's little‐studied Autour de la “nation” (1972) and Kangafu Kutumbagana's Discours sur l'authenticité (1973) and is argued on the basis of a number of propositions formulated by Jean‐Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community (1991). The second part of the article focuses on Mudimbe's On African Fault Lines (2013); it examines Mudimbe's attempts, in his analyses of contemporary works by Deepa Rajkumar and Geert Hofstede, to reflect on globalization and to assess the political and ethical relevance of critical tools developed in the neo‐colonial period to denounce the unequal basis of anthropology.
    March 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12060   open full text
  • Humbling Turkishness: Undoing the Strategies of Exclusion and Inclusion of Turkish Modernity.
    Ipek Demir.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 20, 2014
    Kurds make up about a fifth of Turkey's population. Turkey has taken steps – albeit slowly and reluctantly – towards increased recognition of Kurdish cultural and linguistic rights. However, within Turkey there is also a steeply rising tide of Turkish nationalism, prejudice and intolerance towards Kurds, and increasing anti‐Kurdish sentiment. This article brings studies of Kurdishness and Turkishness into a single conversation and traces the relationship between Turkish modernity, Orientalized Kurdishness and the construction of Turkishness as the efendi (master) identity. It does this by drawing attention to “strategies of exclusion and inclusion” in the construction of official Turkish history, and relates these to the way in which the tense borders between Kurds and Turks are maintained and currently reproduced. It also presents a normative argument in favour of “humbling Turkishness” and “solidarity trading zones”.
    March 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12054   open full text
  • On Coloniality, Racialized Forgetting and the “Group Effect”: Interrogating Ethnic Studies' Meta‐Narrative of Race.
    Vrushali Patil.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 19, 2014
    Against the backdrop of collaborative antiracist struggle, this paper considers knowledge about race constructed by contemporary ethnic studies. Examining narratives of self, history and purpose produced by ethnic studies, it argues that these narratives highlight processes of racialization at the level of received ethnic groups while eliding cross‐group processes. It argues that the hyper‐visibility of racialization at the level of distinct groups, coupled with the invisibility of cross‐group processes, creates a “group effect” which has significant implications for alliance‐building and solidarity. It ends with a discussion of some possibilities for countering the group effect.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12057   open full text
  • Managing the Living through the Dead.
    Hyang A Lee.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 19, 2014
    This article investigates how the Japanese colonial state's new governmental rationality was deployed and how these technologies of rule sought to regulate Koreans. Using the theory of colonial governmentality, it examines the 1912 burial rules that transformed Koreans' social norms on death and the dead. In order to achieve efficient state management of burial customs, the Japanese colonial government applied laws pertaining to burials, and the disciplinary technologies of policing and punishment. In so doing, the colonial government disciplined the individual Korean body and enforced conformity to colonial institutions.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12056   open full text
  • Colonialism, Decolonisation, and the Right to be Human: Britain and the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees.
    Lucy Mayblin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 12, 2014
    The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees is central to scholarship on refugee and asylum issues. It is the primary basis upon which asylum seekers make their claims to the majority of host states today and, as a key text of the human rights framework, has come to be associated with the very idea of a universalised rights‐bearing human being. Yet British asylum policy today is characterized by efforts to limit access to the right to asylum. Many scholars believe this is because asylum seekers today are different, in character and number, to previous cohorts of applicants. This article goes back to the founding of the refugee rights regime and investigates the exclusions of colonized peoples from access to the right to asylum. Using Chimni's concept of the “myth of difference”, the article demonstrates that asylum seekers have long existed outside of Europe, and that their exclusion from international rights has been both longstanding and intentional. This historical sociology suggests that the basis for critical work on the issue of asylum policy today must be one which takes colonial histories into account.
    March 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12053   open full text
  • Contesting Imperial Epistemologies: Introduction.
    Gurminder K Bhambra, Robbie Shilliam, Daniel Orrells.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 07, 2014
    This special issue addresses the Eurocentred nature of knowledge production by examining alternative loci of knowledge production and the consequences of subverting standard narratives of particular events and conceptual paradigms through a focus on “other” places and traditions of thought, especially those formed in colonial encounters. In contesting imperial epistemologies, this special issue draws together contributors working on a variety of globally located phenomena and also seeks to re‐examine how “foundational” concepts and events within social theory and historical sociology are understood differently once we start from locations and traditions other than the typically hegemonic West.
    March 07, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12059   open full text
  • Another Colonialism: Africa in the History of European Integration.
    Peo Hansen, Stefan Jonsson.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 07, 2014
    Today's European Union was founded in a 1950s marked by its member states' involvement in numerous colonial conflicts and with the colonial question firmly entrenched on the European and international agenda. This notwithstanding, there is hardly any scholarly investigations to date that have examined colonialism's bearing on the historical project and process of European integration. In tackling this puzzle, the present article proceeds in two steps. First, it corroborates the claim that European integration not only is related to the history of colonialism but to no little extent determined by it. Second, it introduces a set of factors that explain why the relation between the EU and colonialism has been systematically neglected. Here the article seeks to identify the operations of a colonial epistemology that has facilitated a misrecognition of what postwar European integration was about. As the article argues, this epistemology has enabled colonialism's historical relation to the European integration project to remain undetected and has thus also reproduced within the present EU precisely those colonial or neo‐colonial preconceptions that the European partner states, in official discourse and policy, falsely claim that they have abandoned.
    March 07, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12055   open full text
  • The Devil Rejoiced: Volk, Devils and Moral Panic in White South Africa, 1978–1982.
    Danielle Dunbar, Sandra Swart.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 06, 2014
    The first four years of P.W. Botha's premiership in apartheid South Africa were plagued by intra‐party politicking, renewed anti‐apartheid resistance, economic instability, and Satan. Between 1978 and 1982, the heavy political rhetoric of “total onslaught” inflected perceived “moral onslaught” in a virulent moral panic over Satanism in white, and particularly Afrikaner, South Africa. With attention to its discursive and socio‐political context, this paper seeks to explore the emergence of this distinct satanic moral panic in white South African history, arguing that it reflects the intense political and moral ambiguity of white society as the edifices of apartheid began to fracture.
    March 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12044   open full text
  • How Do Intergroup Grievances Develop in the Absence of Oppression? Revolutions and Political Parties in Nineteenth‐Century Uruguay.
    Nicolás M. Somma.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 06, 2014
    Political sociologists often assume that widespread grievances require a long legacy of intergroup oppression. Yet in nineteenth‐century Uruguay, supporters of the White and Red political parties developed intense grievances against each other even though a legacy of oppression was missing. For explaining this puzzle I present an alternative perspective. It states that grievances first originate among political elites, which mobilize the masses through selective incentives in order to impose their will. If elites and masses are bound by close ties, sustained mobilization facilitates cross‐class group identification and allows grievances to “trickle down” from the top to the bottom of the social structure.
    March 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12046   open full text
  • Self‐Knowledge, Gender Roles, and the Making of the Secret Gospels: A Chapter in the Sociology of Nonknowledge.
    Matthias Gross.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 06, 2014
    In addition to the four canonical gospels of the Bible's New Testament, some so‐called apocryphal gospels have also been discovered to exist. Although the process by which the four gospels by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were determined to be the core gospels was completed by the late second century AD, it is generally held that the exclusion of other gospels was an incremental process that was finalized more than a century later. This article explores the inclusion and exclusion of texts in the New Testament canon by reference to the sociological notion of ignorance, or “nonknowledge.” It is argued that the strategic use of nonknowledge can be shown to have achieved an “unknowing” of things that had previously been known among the early Christian community. Underpinning this argument is the suggestion that at least part of the success of Christianity during the first 100 to 200 years AD was due to many Christian women not only occupying a special position in their communities but also being seen as having been favored with knowledge about God. Such women were subsequently marginalized and knowledge about their role suppressed. The article concludes by noting that the formal exercise of control over what ought (not) to be known is part of the normal process of establishing stability and order in a bounded institution. This in turn promises to deliver insights for the sociological analysis of historical cases in many other areas.
    March 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12047   open full text
  • “What Daughters, what Wives, what Mothers, Think You, They are?” Gender and the Transformation of Executions in the United States.
    Annulla Linders.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 06, 2014
    The transformation from public to private executions is generally understood as a consequence of the rationalization of authority in conjunction with growing class tensions and the emergence of bourgeois sentimentality. What is missing from this analysis is the role gender played. The exclusion of women from the execution site captures a more general tension around womanhood in the nineteenth century, but that tension was expressed differently depending on women's class and race locations. Using newspaper coverage of executions as my primary data source, I show that the interpretive challenges posed by women at the execution site varied by the social positions they occupied.
    March 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12048   open full text
  • Civility and Humiliation under the French Flag: The Tensions of Colonial Liberalism in Pondicherry, 1871–86.
    Anne Raffin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 06, 2014
    This article explores the extension of political “liberty” and franchise – as well as the eventual extension of citizenship rights – to Indians during the decades of France's Third Republic (1870s–80s) in French colonial India. Not only does this example stand in stark contrast to the civil position of Indians in British India at the time, but it was also something of a unique situation in the French colonial world. How did the French attempt to apply a colonial policy of liberalism to Indian communities in Pondicherry, India, whose social world was constructed upon caste‐based rituals and rules? I argue that liberal policies that could violate caste rules concerning purity and lead to the loss of communal rights cannot be assessed without understanding how they were received and instrumentalized by the Indian population. Overall, the difficulty of transplanting liberalism in Pondicherry was not due just to the opposition of colonial society, but also due to the resistance of local Indians. Rejections of a more emancipatory agenda meant that the republican “civility” of liberty, equality and fraternity was compromised, and this illustrates one of the fundamental tensions in imperial/liberal discourse at the time.
    March 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12049   open full text
  • When Women Support the Patriarchal Family: The Dynamics of Marriage in a Gécamines Mining Camp (Katanga Province, DR Congo).
    Benjamin Rubbers.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 06, 2014
    Based on ethnographic research among the ex‐Gécamines workers of Panda (Likasi, DR Congo), this article studies the dynamics of the spousal relationship in a post‐industrial context that has been long characterized by paternalism. The results of this research suggest that, though men and women living in this mining community talk about their spousal relationships by invoking the ideal of Christian marriage promoted during the colonial period, in practice such relationships faced important changes following Congolese independence in 1960. The nationalization and subsequent dramatic decline of Gécamines caused changes which directly affected three central dimensions of the colonial family model, namely monogamy, the ideal of domesticity, and male authority. If men and women continue to reference this model, it is because, in times of growing poverty, it allows spouses to remind one another of their respective duties as docile housewives and responsible husbands, and to command respect as virtuous Christian families in the local community.
    March 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12050   open full text
  • “The Past in the Present: Mills, Tocqueville and the Necessity of History”.
    Krishan Kumar.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 06, 2014
    Historical sociology has achieved a reasonable degree of respectability in the discipline, and there is much interesting work being produced. But a pronounced aspect of much of this work is an indifference to the question of the value of studying the past as a way to understanding the present. This article argues that, rather than trying to outdo the historians by producing “better,” more theoretically sophisticated history, sociologists would better advance the case for historical sociology by showing how any particular historical study helps illuminate contemporary concerns. The article draws upon the writings of C. Wright Mills and Alexis de Tocqueville to show not just the need for historical sociology but also as indications of how this might best be done.
    March 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12051   open full text
  • The Performance of Power: Sam Watson a Miners' Leader on Many Stages.
    Huw Beynon, Terry Austrin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. March 06, 2014
    This paper draws on the biography of Sam Watson, a miners' leader in the North East of England, to examine the ways in which power relations operated within the British labour movement in the forties and fifties. At that time the Marshall Plan and the concern by the US government to control the spread of communism in Europe provided a critical backdrop with the CIA's labor attaché programme providing links between the AFL and the CIO and the British TUC. Recent research has identified the significant role played in the development of these arrangements by Watson. The reliance of the Labour Party on the networks of national, regional and local trade unions has not been a central concern of students of this period. Certainly in accounts of the Marshall Plan, national figures like Ernest Bevin predominate. The “unveiling” here of Watson suggests the possibility of more fruitful investigations on a wider canvass. His relationship with the US mission in itself raises questions as to the social and political processes that made it possible for a middle ranking trade union official to occupy such a significant position of power and influence. The article draws on archival research and, most significantly, upon interviews conducted by the authors in the late seventies with key trade union officals and polticians. It explores the different ways that Watson dealt with communism and with members of the Communist Party, and the key role he played during critical struggles within the Labour Party. The detail of the “insider” accounts reveals the complex ways in which power was performed across and within different arenas – in North East England as regional secretary of the NUM; in London on the national executive committees of the Labour Party and NUM; and abroad as a member, then Chair, of the Labour Party's International Committee.
    March 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/johs.12052   open full text
  • Unthinking Modernity: Historical‐Sociological, Epistemological and Logical Pathways.
    Gennaro Ascione.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. November 07, 2013
    Modernity remains the privileged theoretical frame and narrative for long term processes at the global scale, notwithstanding the heterogeneously contested definition of its spatiotemporal coordinates, the irreconcilability of contradictions inherent to its alleged emancipatory power and the accusations of complicity with Eurocentrism. This article explores some logical, epistemological and historical‐sociological contradictions inherent in the effort to produce non‐euorcentric categories of social and historical analysis, and explains why such an effort is doomed to failure if modernity keeps on being accepted as the epistemic territory within which such an effort is located. Eurocentrism is thus defined as palingenetic, to the extent it constantly shifts its contextual meaning while reformulating European centrality in different and ever‐changing modalities; such properties of Eurocentrism as a paradigm are conceptualized in terms of its ability to operate by means of consequential isomorphism. Evidences from recent debates in history of scientific modernity are considered, in order to articulate analytical tensions between connected histories and dialogical civilizational narratives of East and West relation at the global scale. The impossibility to explain the ‘why’ of modernity according to a coherent ‘how’ of modernity without falling into Eurocentric structures of thinking is assessed. Finally, theoretical project of “unthinking modernity” is introduced as a possible way to reframe the problem of Eurocentric limits in historical and social sciences.
    November 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12042   open full text
  • Bedbugs and Grasshoppers: Translation, Myth and the Becoming of the Nation‐State.
    Yoke‐Sum Wong.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 29, 2013
    How is literally, a nation translated? This paper looks at translation practices as historical process and practice rather than submitting them to causal explanations with respect to the constitution of the nation‐state. It takes as its starting point, two contemporary Malay words negeri (province, state) and negara (country, nation‐state) and how they once had opposing definitions. Working with over three hundred years of dictionaries and lexicons, mainly English‐Malay dictionaries, the words negeri and negara were translated and defined very differently from current dictionaries – nor are they clarified today. What then happened to these words and how were they understood and translated over time, and in what possible context within the language of post‐colonial nation‐state formation? What do the processes of translation offer or convey that disrupts the singularity of nations and nationalism? Writings on translation do not necessarily shed any further clarity but they offer a space in which we can think about translating practices and what they enact in the narrative of the nation.
    October 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12043   open full text
  • What We Should Want with History: A Meditation on Cultural Studies, Methodology, and Politics.
    Sean Johnson Andrews.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 18, 2013
    This essay evaluates two of the central problems for Cultural Studies as a field: how to generate methodologically rigorous scholarship that is also politically useful; and how to productively use models and theory in the practice of history. Beginning with conversations about the place of (disciplinary) history in Cultural Studies, this essay explores one of the legendary debates in the field: between E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and (at least in theory) Louis Althusser. Though the debate centered on the degree to which the English Civil War could be termed a “bourgeois revolution,” Thompson's fundamental critique concerned Anderson's use of abstract models in history. However, the distinctions Thompson makes are not nearly as clear‐cut in practice – particularly when we look at Ellen Meiksins Wood's attempt to intervene on Thompson's side in her 1991 book The Pristine Culture of Capitlism. Wood's understanding of capitalism relies on an abstract conceptualization of that mode of produciton that is ironically similar to that of Althusser and Anderson. Arguing this as an illustratration of the importance of explicit models and methods, the essay develops Richard Johnson's account of Marx's use of abstraction and theory in his own historical scholarship. Marx's framework is then deployed to reconsider the English Civil War in realation to a key contemporary concern: the origins of copyright and intellectual property. It ends by advocating for what I term anarchic abstraction: a conscious, rigorous, politically‐committed, and dialectical attention to the order and determinations of history with no strict hierarchy given in advance.
    October 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12041   open full text
  • History's Ornament: Photography and Cultural Engineering in Early Soviet Siberia.
    Craig Campbell.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. October 03, 2013
    There is no abstract available for this paper.
    October 03, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12038   open full text
  • All Things Thrown and Wonderful, All Memories Great and Small.
    Alex Wilkinson.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 17, 2013
    And the Lord God made them all. I went to Sunday school and like lots of other kids (though far from all) came to an age at which I simply stopped going. Nothing conscious about it, I don't think, it's just those sets of spaces stopped becoming; stopped like nothing physical can stop, like a car crashing into a wall and instead of rebounding being merely consumed in whole. I (re)member, in my naive teens (when is this? I do not know. Perhaps the time of the Iraq war, but maybe this was a different car journey) I once came out with the statement (which was not particularly naive especially) “I think God exists, how did we all get here otherwise”. Me, my sister that is two years older than me, my mum and dad, were on the road from Auchmuir Bridge towards Stirling around Loch Leven, the loch in Fife, Scotland, on which Mary Queen of Scots was held on an island. I have an image of a memory of going there as well. It is thus, however, that I (re)member the initiation into a different vision of the universe and everything. Yet it is a state clearly pleated bewilderingly. As an event it exists in what Deleuze and Guattari term a “rhizome, a burrow”, with “flights of escape” which have no beginnings or ends, mere initialities and finalities. This is strange. It is not a polemic, nor does it have an explicit argument, except perhaps to ask the question that always dances on a pinhead – as Bohumil Hrabal once put it, “Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp” – is there any escape? I think I sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful” at my Gran's funeral, but it might have been something else. We stopped in the house of the priest and watched England lose the Cricket World Cup in 1999; they played in blue. That's how I (re)member the year of my Gran's funeral. The church I used to go to burned down. Arson, I think.
    September 17, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12040   open full text
  • American on Everest: Individualism, the American Intellectual Tradition, and the Dream of Woodrow Wilson Sayre.
    Christopher Sutch.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 12, 2013
    This article identifies the American philosophical antecedents that informed Woodrow Wilson Sayre's failed attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1962. Sayre, a philosophy professor at Tufts University, was an extreme proponent of individualism and saw the challenge of climbing Everest as a struggle of one man against cold, “antiseptic” Nature. In his writings on the subject Sayre uses some of the same cultural notions about humanity and mountains that were current in American intellectual culture during the 19th century. The paper traces these notions from the Transcendentalists and American poetic descriptions of mountains through to Sayre's writings. The paper ends by describing the official response to Sayre's expedition as revealed in archival sources.
    September 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12039   open full text
  • Chinese Migration and Entangled Histories: Broadening the Contours of Migratory Historiography.
    Kelvin E.Y. Low.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. September 02, 2013
    This paper broadens the analytical contours of Chinese migration by employing the paradigm of histoire croisée. By comparing three connected episodes within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (1) British expansionism; (2) Kuomintang activities and British migratory legislation; and (3) the interconnection of the slump in China's silk industry, the anti‐marriage movement, and the intertwinement of historiographies of China and Singapore – the entangled histories approach offers analytic purchase for which Chinese migration can be scrutinised with attention paid to the interpellations of historical contingencies and economic relations. The paper therefore analyses broader sociocultural and political patterns that inflect migratory flows, and considers the significance of how migratory historiography bears upon social memory of Chinese female migrants.
    September 02, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12037   open full text
  • Universal Suffrage as Counter‐Revolution? Electoral Mobilisation under the Second Republic in France, 1848–1851.
    Malcolm Crook.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. August 13, 2013
    The advent of mass, male suffrage in France in 1848 is usually regarded as a great success. There was a huge turnout in elections for a Constituent Assembly, but the outcome disappointed republicans, who failed to win a majority and blamed a backward peasantry. This paper suggests that the electoral system was at fault rather than the electorate. A hastily devised procedure, based on collective voting and the absence of declared candidatures, enabled notables to dominate the new regime. Radicals revised their tactics with some success in 1849, but soon succumbed to the plebiscitary democracy of Louis‐Napoleon. Universal suffrage might well mean counter‐revolution.
    August 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12035   open full text
  • The Social Evolution of the Term “Half‐Caste” in Britain: The Paradox of its Use as Both Derogatory Racial Category and Self‐Descriptor.
    Peter J Aspinall.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 14, 2013
    The term “half‐caste” had its origins in nineteenth century British colonial administrations, emerging in the twentieth century as the quotidian label for those whose ancestry comprised multiple ethnic/racial groups, usually encompassing “White”. From the 1920s–1960s the term was used in Britain as a derogatory racial category associated with the moral condemnation of “miscegenation”. Yet today the label continues to be used as a self‐descriptor and even survives in some official contexts. This paradox – of both derogatory racial category and self descriptor – is explored in the context of the term's social evolution, drawing upon the theoretical constructs of the internal‐external dialectic of identification and labelling theory.
    July 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12033   open full text
  • American Sociology: History and Racially Gendered Classed Knowledge Reproduction.
    Jennifer Padilla Wyse.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. July 11, 2013
    The purpose of this paper is to explore how racially gendered classed power‐relations structure history, knowledge and American Sociology's historical memory and disciplinary knowledge production. In order to do so, this paper will 1) utilize Cabral's (1970) theory of history to center humanity as historically developed into a racially gendered classed capitalist world‐system, 2) employ intersectionality as a heuristic device to see how knowledge is manipulated to normalize dehumanization as well as to perpetuate exploitation and privilege by denying “Othered' ” knowledges, and lastly 3) sociologically imagine this racially gendered classed process in the “institutional‐structure” of American Sociology by exploring the ancestry of the concept of “intersectionality.” In all this paper argues 1) American Sociology under theorizes history, a central aspect of the sociological imagination and production of new sociological knowledge, 2) American Sociology reproduces a dehumanized theory of history per Marx's “historical materialism” and 3) the structure of American Sociology's knowledge is racially gendered classed, as illustrated in the collective memory of the concept of “intersectionality.”
    July 11, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12032   open full text
  • When is the State's Gaze Focused? British Royal Commissions and the Bureaucratization of Conflict.
    Matthew R. Keller.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 27, 2013
    Scholars have long documented changes in knowledge regimes and power relations characteristic of state‐centric drives to pacify conflicts and govern populations. But the mechanisms through which social conflicts are “made legible” in routine policy processes – as well as the reasons why some ongoing conflicts are pacified and others are persistent – have remained less clear. I explore these issues through an analysis of the shifting analytic terrain of national‐level commissions of inquiry, an historically powerful form of government organization designed to combine publicly‐engaged and “objective” explanation with recommendations for concrete policies of governance. Drawing principally on 19th and early 20th Century British Royal Commissions, I show how investigations into three fields of social conflict – involving prisoners, the working class, and colonial populations – were characterized by cyclical drives to bureaucratize conflict. Yet strikingly, only two of the three substantive fields – prisons and labor – achieved relative bureaucratic closure. Evidence from commission reports is marshaled to explain why some types of conflict have been resistant to incorporation, while others are more readily absorbed into an apparatus of governance.
    June 27, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12031   open full text
  • Sovereign Force and Crime‐focused Law at the Cape Colony.
    George Pavlich.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 07, 2013
    This paper shows how law enables right‐based versions of the sovereign to take root by studying how British sovereignty was fashioned over the Cape of Good Hope since its occupation in 1795. Challenging notions that sovereignty is predicated on an ability to except itself from law, the analysis shows how the emerging Cape sovereign was authored into being through its active insertion into crime‐focused legal practices.
    June 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12027   open full text
  • “Time Immemorial” and Indigenous Rights: A Genealogy and Three Case Studies (Calder, Van der Peet, Tsilhqot'in) from British Columbia.
    Lorraine Weir.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 07, 2013
    “Time immemorial” has operated as a legal fiction in the discourse of colonization, performing a genealogical function in the construction of “antiquity” and “legal memory” in English law, and repurposed in Indigenous rights cases in Canada. Beginning with a genealogical outline, this paper analyzes “time immemorial” in relation to Settler and Indigenous discourses of time, memory and the land in Calder, Van der Peet, and Tsilhqot'in.
    June 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12028   open full text
  • “The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel”: Debating between History and Theory.
    Sagi Cohen.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 07, 2013
    When “History” is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian's revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault's own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida's intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida's position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. “The last refuge of the scoundrel” appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that's based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel's famous saying, that the University is the Protestant's Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.
    June 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12030   open full text
  • The End of the World Designed with Men in Mind.
    Simon Glendinning.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 07, 2013
    According to Derrida, the European self‐understanding marking the name “Man” is governed by eschatology and teleology. Man is that being on its way towards its proper end. The times of science seemed to Kant and others to be evidence of just such progress. For Freud, by contrast, the great scientific achievements of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud have cumulatively contributed a series of de‐centring blows to our “self‐love”. This paper explores the nature of great scientific achievements, and raises the possibility of a further devastating blow to Man, this time in the twentieth century, and connected to the name of Marx.
    June 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12026   open full text
  • Allegories of the End: Classical Sociologies of Economic Sustainability and Cultural Ruin.
    Thomas Kemple.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 07, 2013
    Against the backdrop of contemporary discourses of “sustainable growth” and “cultures of waste”, this essay considers the arguments of early sociologists concerning the relationship between subsistence economies of reproduction and sacrificial economies of symbolic exchange. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss and Thorstein Veblen each formulated influential accounts of the social barriers and physical limits to human life which find an echo in later cultural theories concerning economies of excess and overproduction in (post)modern societies. Rather than assess the empirical validity or theoretical accuracy of these arguments, this essay examines how factual descriptions of excess and decay can be read as sociological allegories of a world in ruins. The model for such a reading can be found in the work of another sociological classic, Georg Simmel, whose systematic account of the self‐preservation and expansion of social groups anticipates his later more impressionistic and fragmentary reflections on “the tragedy of culture”, understood as a struggle for individual autonomy against social and natural forces of objectification. Simmel and his classical contemporaries thus anticipate later thinkers who ask whether “the end of an era” should be understood as a terminal point, an ideal purpose, or a cyclical stage in the “progress” of history.
    June 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12029   open full text
  • The Uses and Abuses of Public Space: Urban Governance, Social Ordering and Resistance, Avenham Park, Preston, c. 1850–1901.
    Angela Loxham.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 31, 2013
    This article contributes to scholarship on liberal governance during the nineteenth century through the much‐neglected area of the public park. Using Preston as a case study, it seeks to answer why parks were considered necessary, but also to argue for the need to understand micro‐level issues that determined their precise formation and governance. In line with this, attention is paid to how space was orchestrated to encourage self‐regulation, and the elite appropriation of this space to bolster the fragile social order that industrialisation had engendered in the town. Finally attention is paid to the outcome of this, and the ways in which people could enjoy the park, without internalising the intended norms.
    May 31, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12018   open full text
  • Citizen or Subject? Blurring Boundaries, Claiming Space: Indians in Colonial South Africa.
    Bijita Majumdar.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 29, 2013
    Citizenship and subjecthood are often seen as discrete, bounded categories, temporally disparate and conceptually distinct in law and in the social sciences. This paper challenges this predominant formulation by attesting that these legal categories are in fact, often, breached and blurred in identity struggles over claims to rights. Using the case of colonial Indians in South Africa, this paper argues that under conditions of colonialism, the colonized use the dual category of citizen/subject to claim rights while pledging allegiance to the power‐holders. Using historical sources such as petitions and referenda written by Indians to the colonial rulers and Gandhi's writings during his stay in South Africa, I explore the implications of this slippage between subject and citizen, thus contributing to the existing literature on colonial law and colonial resistance, the politics of citizenship, race relations and the politics of difference and identity.
    May 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12020   open full text
  • A Tale of Two American Cities: Disaster, Class and Citizenship in San Francisco 1906 and New Orleans 2005.
    Steve Kroll‐Smith, Shelly Brown‐Jeffy.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 29, 2013
    Destruction, notes David Harvey, “is often required to make the new urban geography out of the wreckage of the old.”2 The history of San Francisco's Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake and fire and New Orleans' public housing following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reveal how powerful class interests collude with the fog of disaster to lay claim to the urban spaces of the poor and marginal. In two historic U.S. disasters we witness the concerted efforts of urban elites to confiscate the spaces of two politically vulnerable populations: the Chinese in 1906 and low‐income African‐Americans in 2005. The widely varying outcomes of these two attempts reveal a good deal about the intersection of calamity, class, race, and citizenship in American history.
    May 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12021   open full text
  • Empire and After: Toward a Framework for Comparing Empires and Their Consequences in the Post‐Imperial Middle East and Central Asia.
    Sally Cummings, Raymond Hinnebusch.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 29, 2013
    This article compares and contrasts the variations in paths from empire to sovereignty in the Middle East and Central Asia. We identify differences in empires and their impact; examine the drivers of transition from empire to sovereignty, the international system and nationalist mobilization; assess the consequences of imperial transmissions for state formation and nation‐building; and link these factors to the degree of rupture with empire in the post‐imperial period.
    May 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12022   open full text
  • Agile Materialisms: Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Racialization, and Modernity.
    Robert Carley.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 29, 2013
    This article investigates why Gramsci's theories and concepts have a discrete relevance to the study of race and ethnicity in contemporary contexts. Two theoretical points emerge from the investigation. First, through Gramsci's work, Hall's approach to the structural/cultural theory problem provides an important mediation for theoretical approaches to race. Hall is then able to demonstrate that the racialization of labor and the coercion of workers in colonial and neocolonial contexts, with regard to the “global south” was the rule and not the exception. Second, through an historical and discursive approach, I demonstrate how Gramsci's analysis of politics and political strategies took race into account. I contend that Gramsci's perspective on race facilitated Hall's ability to deploy Gramsci's theoretical framework and concepts.
    May 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12023   open full text
  • They Say Bad Things Come in Threes: How Economic, Political and Cultural Shifts Facilitated Contemporary Anti‐Immigration Activism in the United States.
    Matthew Ward.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 29, 2013
    This paper, first, provides an analysis of contemporary anti‐immigration activism in the United States, situating it historically and theoretically through an examination of nativism and vigilantism. Second, it merges insights from political process theory and structured ignorance theory to develop an historical account of three key preconditions that set the stage for and accelerated contemporary anti‐immigration activism. In so doing this paper addresses fundamental empirical and theoretical gaps in political process theory and demonstrates how structured ignorance theory can help us better understand how shifting structural conditions promoted contemporary anti‐immigration mobilization by generating perceptions conducive to conservative activism.
    May 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12024   open full text
  • The Discreet Charm of Lenin.
    Petra Rethmann.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. May 15, 2013
    This article takes two postcards of Lenin as their point of departure to ask about articulations of Soviet history as image and kitsch. I am especially interested in the ways in which the dead body or mummy of Lenin comes to symbolize an imagined social coherence that accrues specific political significance after the demise of the Soviet Union. In looking at Lenin's mummy as a site of memory and key to understanding contemporary Russian political desires, the article offers one analytical interpretation of the continuing preservation of Russia's revolutionary and also Stalinist past. By arguing that the Lenin mummy simultaneously functions as camp and kitsch, and as an embodied time of eternity, I also seek to understand how “grandiose” understandings of Soviet history work in this present.
    May 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12017   open full text
  • Harry Johnston's New Boot: The Uganda Agreement and Ideas of Development.
    Glenn H. McKnight.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 15, 2013
    As an early development practitioner, Harry Johnston came to Uganda intending to develop a socially responsible capitalism – his ‘new boot’ for the Baganda. He negotiated this intent into the 1900 Uganda Agreement and expected that, once implemented, these conditions would lead naturally to the desired ends. What happened was something quite different. Baganda chiefs negotiated their own goals into the Agreement, and their actions, along with those of Baganda farmers and workers, produced very different results than that which Johnston envisioned. In effect, his intent to develop was subsumed by the contingent process of development. While interesting in itself, this story informs recent development debates. Some post‐development theorists, while attempting to provide a practical alternative to modernist development, appear to incorporate assumptions similar to those under which Johnston operated. However, if these laudable attempts are to succeed, they must learn from Johnston's experience and account for development's contingent nature.
    February 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12015   open full text
  • The Statute of Kilkenny (1366): Legislation and the State.
    David Green.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 15, 2013
    This article offers a re‐evaluation of the notorious Statute of Kilkenny by placing it within a broader context of English state development in the fourteenth century. It argues that the Statute needs to be understood as part of a wider political and legislative programme shaped by military expansionism and the upheaval of the Black Death. Although racially motivated, at least in part, the Statute should not be seen as attempting to engineer a form of apartheid in Anglo‐Ireland. Rather it was representative of a broader governing culture and compares closely with legislation enforced not only in the other Plantagenet dominions but also in England itself.
    February 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12014   open full text
  • Globalized Hopes and Disillusions.
    Uri Ben‐Eliezer.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. February 15, 2013
    In contrast to the common tendency to see war as the result of leadership decisions based on risk assessments, and political and economic considerations about gains or losses, we use a constructivist and institutional perspective to historicize and politicize the way “nation‐state interests” and “nation‐state preferences” even in a decision to go to war are socially constructed and culturally embedded. We maintain that with the end of the Cold War, many societies found themselves at a crossroads where they had to resolve internal conflicts in regards to neoliberal globalization. These internal conflicts and a crisis of identity, between those who supported the principle of globalization and regarded it as a promise for democracy, openness, liberty and peace, and those who saw it as a danger to their exceptionality and distinctiveness, ended in wars (either internal wars or external wars) when the objectors of neoliberal globalization succeeded in creating an institutional turn which presented war as the “efficient,” “necessary,” “legitimate”, or “desired” solution to the new threatening reality. We demonstrate the validity of this argument by using Israel as a test case, examining how institutional changes in the 1990s, arising from internal societal conflicts around the Oslo Agreements, led the state to move from the brink of peace to new wars despite exogenous objections to its policy.
    February 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12016   open full text
  • ‘Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation’: Political Orientations and Activities of a Cohort of Canadian University Students in the Mid‐Sixties.
    J Paul Grayson.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. January 02, 2013
    While Canadian scholars have documented some of the beliefs and behaviours of student activists in the 1960s, little has been said of the ‘average’ Canadian university student. As a result, this article deals with the political orientations and activities of students who entered Glendon College, York University, in 1963 and who graduated by 1967. It will be shown that upon entry to the university this cohort of students was primarily Liberal. Despite fundamental changes that were occurring at a macro‐social level, by and large, the distribution of students’ political orientations was the same in 1967 as it had been in 1963. The virtual absence of collective action with a political objective was consistent with this reality.
    January 02, 2013   doi: 10.1111/johs.12002   open full text
  • Designating Dependency: The “Socially Inadequate” in the United States, 1910–1940.
    Lizzie Seal.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2012
    This article examines the use of “socially inadequate” as a label for the dependent poor in the United States, 1910–40. It analyses the dense meanings that were given to this term and the political significance that the label “socially inadequate” gained in relation to sterilization and immigration policy. The article explores the role played by eugenicist, Harry Laughlin, as a label maker for the term and a moral entrepreneur in relation to the problem of dependency. It argues that “socially inadequate” was a stigmatising designation for members of perceived deficient groups, whom were seen as falling below the normal or acceptable standards of society and were, as such, viewed as undeserving of the status of citizen. Finally, it contends that the negative moral and emotional judgments encoded into definitions of the “socially inadequate” can be situated within the history of the derogation of dependency, understood as economic reliance on the state or charity, in the United States.
    December 11, 2012   doi: 10.1111/johs.12003   open full text
  • “A Parliament of Man Become a Parliament of Women”: Performing Femininity and the State Through Mediated Civic Ritual in Ontario, 1900–1940.
    James Cairns.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2012
    This article analyses representations of bourgeois femininity in early twentieth century newspaper coverage of the ceremonial Opening of the Legislature in Ontario, Canada's largest and most populous province. Building on theories that shed light upon the complex processes of material and symbolic reproduction required to reproduce “the idea of the reality of the state,” I argue that mass mediated representations of women's bodies and fashions during this key civic ritual contributed to state formation. The article demonstrates the ways in which newspaper coverage of a particular type of gendered performance reflected and reinforced an imperialist and patriarchal provincial state‐building project.
    December 11, 2012   doi: 10.1111/johs.12004   open full text
  • Nineteenth Century Wood Engravers at Work: Mass Production of Illustrated Periodicals (1840–1880).
    Michèle Martin.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2012
    This paper traces the labour processes and working conditions of wood engravers in France and England during the 19th century as the process of production of the illustrated periodicals became increasingly industrialized. It argues that the bulk of 19th century wood engravers should be considered as one of the first classes of proletarians in the mass media industry. The paper first looks at the general socio‐economic conditions from which 19th century wood engravers emerged as proletarians. Second, it examines wood engraving workshops, wood engravers' working conditions, their training and type of production. Lastly, it discusses the hierarchical relations between editors‐publishers and wood engravers, the wood engravers economic conditions, their socio‐cultural attitudes towards their work and the control exercised on them in the labour process. With the industrialization of the production of illustrated periodicals, wood engravers formed a class of waged workers who owned no means of production, had little autonomy or creativity in their work and sold their labour power to fabricate illustrations. Workshops operated as factories, training apprentices to mechanically reproduce fragmented segments of illustrations in an assembly‐line type of labour and based on a rigid hierarchy in which engraver‐apprentices were at the bottom.
    December 11, 2012   doi: 10.1111/johs.12005   open full text
  • Promiscuous Intimacies: Rethinking the History of American Casual Sex.
    Barry Reay.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 11, 2012
    Casual sex has become a cultural commonplace since it was named in the 1960s and later became associated with the US college sex phenomenon of “hooking up”. However, contemporary accounts of this sexual practice are curiously lacking in historical perspective. This article explores this modern history, both before and after uncommitted, non‐romantic, sexual encounters – sex for sex's sake – were named as casual sex. It agues that studies that contrast the increased “sexual possibilities” of hookup sex to the assumed restrictive practices of an earlier era distort both the restrictions of the earlier period and the freedoms of the latter.
    December 11, 2012   doi: 10.1111/johs.12012   open full text
  • Exposing Humanism: Prudence, Ingenium, and the Politics of the Posthuman.
    Timothy D. Harfield.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. December 06, 2012
    This article examines posthumanism and its relationship to humanism. First, it is argued that the term “posthumanism” relies upon an incomplete conception of humanism, and in a way that forecloses the possibility of looking to the humanist tradition for support. Addressing Foucault's often quoted comments about the recent invention and imminent demise of man, it is argued that Foucault is not anti‐humanist, but is rather critical of the use of humanism as an axis of reflection. Second, the posthumanist perspective is summarized as attending to a set of interrelated ethical and epistemological concerns. Calling into question the boundary between human and nonhuman animals, posthumanism also challenges the primacy of empirico‐deductive reasoning and advocates a re‐legitimization of rhetoric as a mode of thought. Lastly, using Ernesto Grassi's interpretation of the early Italian humanists, this article demonstrates not only the compatibility of Renaissance humanism with posthumanist concerns, but also the fruitfulness of this tradition as a conceptual resource. Although the Renaissance notion of ingenium, the ability to adapt and make concrete situations meaningful without also affirming strong ontological commitments, is absent from posthumanist discourse, it is a concept that has the power to enrich the posthumanist project. Consequently, posthumanism is not actually at odds with the humanist tradition in general, but rather only with a very limited and relatively recent conception.
    December 06, 2012   doi: 10.1111/johs.12001   open full text
  • “Anarchy all over Baščaršija”: Yugoslavia's new socialist culture and the New Primitives poetics of the local.
    Dalibor Mišina.
    Journal of Historical Sociology. June 27, 2012
    The paper analyses Sarajevo's music movement of New Primitives and its “poetics of the local” as a struggle against the cultural hypocrisy of Yugoslavia's “new socialist culture” and its privileging of “external‐cosmopolitan” as apotheosis of cultured refinement and sophistication while denigrating “local‐parochial” as epitome of uncultured primitiveness. I argue that the movement's praxis is best understood as a call to reject externally‐imposed frames of reference as the basis for self‐understanding, and to embrace a socio‐cultural awareness that the only way to be in the world is to be authentically “primitive”– i.e. to exist as a distinct and autochthon socio‐cultural self.
    June 27, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2012.01435.x   open full text