Sociology Lens最新文献

Many scholars note that since the early 1990s, the CCP has been invoking Chinese nationalism to rescue the party's declining ideological legitimacy. Probing China's political indoctrination (thought work), this article makes two contributions to such conventional consensus. First, empirically it argues that the rise of nationalism in the 1990s was not altogether new. Instead, from the early 1980s, the CCP had been switching to “patriotism.” Second, this article argues that the communist regime's transition to nationalism was hesitant. It was an interactive process whereby multiple layers of the society and elite, confused alike, worked together to explore whether and how to embrace nationalism. The nation-building also bore the imprint of the revolutionary and state-socialist past. This article suggests that though the nation-state has become the dominant political format of the world, as a pattern it fuses with a society's traditions, preconditions, and internal struggles. Such fusions made nation-building in the non-Western world unseparated from quasi-national legacies such as revolution and socialism and could yield consequences other than capitalism and democracy.

Most studies on the connection between the legitimacy of an authority and its policy selection and legitimation follow a structure approach to legitimacy, which recognises an authoritative actor's selection and legitimation of a policy as determined by the subjects' collective commitment to values. Consequently, it cannot empirically explain policy variation under collective commitment to values and changes in those values. Building on existing processual theories and following the conceptualisation of legitimacy as a social process, this study proposes an integral process approach to legitimacy whereby an authority selects and legitimises a perceived legitimate policy towards subjects. Drawing on findings from a negative case methodology applied to the selection and legitimation of a tax policy by an official in Ming China, this study offers substantive content for an integral process approach to legitimacy. It develops the state legitimacy concept and contributes to emerging theories on the legitimacy dimension of fiscal state formation. Empirically, this study illustrates how the data from the nationwide field survey in mid-late Ming China were used in tax collection at the local level and illuminates the discrepancies between the survey data and that recorded in local official tax registers.

This study aims to understand how the durability of the past may be visible in a place whose past is constantly reinterpreted and unintentionally remade by coffee shop owners in their conversations with their customers in the framework of ongoing economic transformations while they weave their own identities into that of the neighbourhood. In the absence of any readily available information about the history of the area, the coffee shop owners of the Fener, Balat, and Ayvansaray neighbourhoods of İstanbul interpret the cosmopolitan past of the area within the limitations of the materiality of these neighbourhoods under the influence of economic conditions. In this respect, while this article shows how social memory is commodified and tamed for daily usage, it also argues that it is a process that includes different actors and their interpretations, and that this process is bounded by the materiality and durability of the past.

This essay offers a new interpretation of the terms ẓāhir and bāṭin in Al-Muqaddima based on Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of language and rhetorical style. It shows that the figurative phrase fī bāṭinihi, followed by the term naẓar, implies that bāṭin is where historians should look to verify their information. On this reading, bāṭin denotes human association and its “essential conditions”. The terms also imply that there is reason in the bāṭin of history. Polities are at the core of history and its study, and politics requires reason to conduct. In this context, bāṭin is the content and substance of history, which refers to political organization and the range of rational actions required for the management of society. The ẓāhir of history, on the other hand, refers to the expression where the conditions of speech need to conform to the conditions in human association. This interpretation underscores the role of choice in Al-Muqaddima and challenges the determinism prevalent in the secondary literature.

In this essay (originally delivered as a lecture at Alberta University of the Arts), my thoughts are centered around the question of the ethics of knowledge as an Arab racialized pedagogue and researcher in Western academia. Today, as I grapple with the notion of decolonization, I wish to think about the ways in which knowledge, or what is deemed as knowledge, is read and inscribed, interpreted, distorted, and even silenced in our epistemologies, and of its implications on my subjectivity as an Arab. I wish to think about how this knowledge also constitutes the ethics on which we knowingly, or unknowingly, participate in the everydayness of our lived realities; I suggest that we engage in “epistemic resistance” and “epistemic activism” as “practices of interrogation and resistance that unmask, disrupt, uproot biases and insensitivity.”

Based on a national survey funded by the TÜBİTAK SOBAG Program, conducted with 1,957 respondents in 12 cities during 2013-2014, this article examines the political memory of the 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 coups by describing the memories and accompanying emotions of Turkish adults. It then explains how differences in remembering and not remembering the coups are related to demographic, socio-cultural, political identity, and fear variables. The data reveals diverse, multidirectional, and contesting coup memory patterns. While religiosity was associated with the memories of the 1960 and 1997 coups, self-declared conservatism, modernity, political identity, political fears differed across the republican/secular and conservative/Islamist divides. The multidirectional and polarized remembering is largely a reflection of the current political context of a polarized memory regime instilled by the ruling Justice and Development Party from the basis of the 1990s′ memory landscape, which was filled with diverse and competing narratives that challenged early republican political memories.

How do leaders of social movements leverage resonance and radicalism to achieve movement goals? As eugenics gained prominence from the end of the 19th century through World War II, feminist leaders of contraceptive access movements pushed for the acceptance of birth control simultaneously as a right for women and as a tool to further racist, ableist and ethnonationalist eugenic interventions. This paper analyzes the trajectories of two feminist birth control activists in the United States and Germany to trace the development and divergence of their movements alongside eugenics through three general framings over the first half of the 20th century: advocating the individual, advancing humanity, and augmenting the state. This research uses personal papers and social movement records to show that these cases present a kind of double resonance through which movement leaders could reframe reproductive control as a solution not only to the problems of their audiences, but also legitimize their politics and identities. By contextualizing eugenics alongside neo-Malthusianism, birth control, abortion, and reproductive governance, this analysis helps to map reproductive control as a device historically wielded by white feminists to organize broader political support to fit varying and contradictory ideological projects.

This paper analyses the socio-spatial entanglement of West Indian anti-colonial knowledge production in the mid-20^th century existing between London and the Caribbean. This is interpreted as a case of the paradoxical politics of academic knowledge production in that British imperial policies that were constraining knowledge production in the West Indies were also seen as facilitating anti-colonial awareness and work in London by West Indian actors. Research demonstrating the importance of the metropole as a meeting place for global anti-colonial actors is complemented by shifting the focus to the entangled space between London and the West Indies. This article comparatively analyses the academic politics of the British Colonial Office – a spatial dislocation of knowledge production away from the West Indies – and its perception and challenge by Caribbean intellectuals who were temporarily based in London. The analysis builds on contributions by C.L.R. James and S. Wynter and their reflections on the institutionalisation of research in the West Indies and their experiences in London. Overall, I emphasise a relational and symmetrising analysis of knowledge production in imperial contexts that accounts for the entanglement of imperial politics in the metropole and the colonies, and the perception and potential use of these political entanglements by actors in and from colonial contexts.