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American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment

Kevin R. Reitz (ed.)

The idea of American exceptionalism has made frequent appearances in discussions of criminal justice policies—as it has in many other areas—to help portray or explain problems that are especially ... More

The idea of American exceptionalism has made frequent appearances in discussions of criminal justice policies—as it has in many other areas—to help portray or explain problems that are especially acute in the United States, including mass incarceration, retention of the death penalty, racial and ethnic disparities in punishment, and the War on Drugs. While scholars do not universally agree that it is an apt or useful framework, there is no question that the United States is an outlier compared with other industrialized democracies in its punitive and exclusionary criminal justice policies. This book deepens the debate on American exceptionalism in crime and punishment through comparative political, economic, and historical analyses, working toward forward-looking prescriptions for American law, policy, and institutions of government. The chapters expand the existing American Exceptionalism literature to neglected areas such as community supervision, economic penalties, parole release, and collateral consequences of conviction; explore claims of causation, in particular that the history of slavery and racial inequality has been a primary driver of crime policy; examine arguments that the framework of multiple governments and localized crime control, populist style of democracy, and laissez-faire economy are implicated in problems of both crime and punishment; and assess theories that cultural values are the most salient predictors of penal severity and violent crime. The book asserts that the largest problems of crime and justice cannot be brought into focus from the perspective of a single jurisdiction and that comparative inquiries are necessary for an understanding of the current predicament in the United States.Less

At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy, and Regionalism in Orissa

Jayanta Sengupta

In comparison to other linguistic movements in India, Orissa is the single instance of a pan-regional linguistic identity that made a successful negotiation with the colonial state by using ... More

In comparison to other linguistic movements in India, Orissa is the single instance of a pan-regional linguistic identity that made a successful negotiation with the colonial state by using constitutional means. Subsequently, like many other linguistic movements that culminated in statehood in postcolonial India, its appeal waxed and waned. It gradually declined in the second half of the twentieth century, as language came to be displaced by issues of development as the prime movers of identity politics. This book addresses these broader questions of poverty, marginality, ethnicity, and identity in Orissa in the twentieth century. The work challenges the idea of 1947 as a watershed and seeks to grapple with the themes of regionalism, language-based ethnicity, centre–state relations, and the interrelationships between development and democracy across this divide.Less

Being Muslim in South Asia: Diversity and Daily Life

Robin Jeffrey and Sen Ronojoy (eds)

The 500 million Muslims who live in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka constitute roughly one-third of the world’s Muslims. Their lives in the twenty-first century are challenging and ... More

The 500 million Muslims who live in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka constitute roughly one-third of the world’s Muslims. Their lives in the twenty-first century are challenging and diverse. Too often in recent years, they have been unfairly associated with terrorism, as anyone with a Muslim name who has passed through a Western airport will attest. But South Asian Muslims do what other people do: they educate their children, earn livings, travel widely, discuss their faith, settle disputes, arrange marriages, cope with politics, struggle with governments, and support football teams. United by shared adherence to the Holy Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims of South Asia speak numerous languages, follow different local customs, and have varied aspirations for their own lives and those of their children. The essays in this book probe such aspects of Muslim life. The authors’ concerns range from great political debates that have affected Muslim lives to marriage on the east coast of Sri Lanka, schools and media in Pakistan, women’s groups in Bangladesh, and football teams in Kolkata. This work will interest readers who wish to discover the multi-faceted lives of South Asia’s Muslims.Less

Democratic Practice: Origins of the Iberian Divide in Political Inclusion

Robert M. Fishman

This book offers a new way to conceptualize and study differences among democracies, focusing on political conduct and interaction as well as related taken-for-granted assumptions. With an empirical ... More

This book offers a new way to conceptualize and study differences among democracies, focusing on political conduct and interaction as well as related taken-for-granted assumptions. With an empirical basis in a multimethod study of Portugal and Spain, pioneers in the worldwide turn to democracy that began in the 1970s, the argument identifies how political inclusion and equality vary substantially as a result of processes that the book theorizes: Nationally predominant forms of democratic practice constitute cultural legacies of the countries’ pathways to democracy during the 1970s. Whereas Portugal moved from dictatorship to democracy through a social revolution that inverted hierarchies and reconfigured cultural patterns while also generating thorough political democratization, Spain experienced a regime-led process of political transition under pressure from the opposition. The book shows how this contrast in pathways put in place ways of understanding democracy that have had deep consequences for political inclusion and conduct. Points of contrast in contemporary democratic practice include patterns of interaction between social movement protest and elected power holders as well as conduct within representative entities and in crucial secondary institutions such as the news media and the educational system. Consequences are identified in distributional outcomes, housing and welfare state policies, employment policy, and in the handling of economic crises. The implications of Spain’s less inclusionary democratic practice for cultural “others” such as Catalans are taken up in the chapter on the Catalan crisis. Implications for democratic theory and for sociological and political science theory are also taken up.Less

Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009

Fatma Muge Gocek

To this day, the Turkish state officially denies that what happened to the Armenians in 1915 was genocide, while the Western scholarly community is almost in full agreement that what happened to the ... More

To this day, the Turkish state officially denies that what happened to the Armenians in 1915 was genocide, while the Western scholarly community is almost in full agreement that what happened to the forcefully deported Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was genocide, in which approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished. This book studies why denial of collective violence persists in Turkish state and society. To capture the negotiation of meaning, it undertakes a qualitative analysis of 356 contemporaneous memoirs penned by 307 authors in addition to secondary sources, journals, and newspapers. The main theoretical argument is that denial is a multilayered, historical process consisting of the interaction of the structural elements of collective violence and situated modernity with the emotional elements of collective emotions and legitimating events. In this empirical case, denial emerged through four stages: (1) the initial imperial denial of origins of violence commenced in 1789 with the advent of systematic modernity until 1907; (2) the Young Turk denial of the act of violence lasted for a decade from 1908 to 1918; (3) early republican denial of actors of violence took place from 1919 to 1973; and (4) the late republican denial of responsibility for violence started in 1974 and was still present in 2009 when the book was completed.Less

The Diary of Manu Gandhi: 1943-1944

Manu Gandhi, M.K. Gandhi’s grand-niece, joined him in 1943 at the age of fifteen. An aide to Gandhi’s ailing wife Kasturba in the Aga Khan Palace prison in Pune, Manu remained with him until his ... More

Manu Gandhi, M.K. Gandhi’s grand-niece, joined him in 1943 at the age of fifteen. An aide to Gandhi’s ailing wife Kasturba in the Aga Khan Palace prison in Pune, Manu remained with him until his assassination. She was a partner in his final yajna, an experiment in Brahmacharya, and his invocationof Rama at the moment of his death. Spanning two volumes, The Diary of Manu Gandhi is a record of her life and times with M.K. Gandhi between 1943 and 1948. Authenticated by Gandhi himself, the meticulous and intimate entries in the diary throw light on Gandhi’s life as a prisoner and his endeavour to establish the possibility of collective non-violence. They also offer a glimpse into his ideological conflicts, his efforts to find his voice, and his lonely pilgrimage to Noakhali during the riots of 1946.Less

Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China

Joel Andreas

Disenfranchised recounts the tumultuous events that have shaped and reshaped factory politics in China since the 1949 Revolution. The book develops a theoretical framework consisting of two ... More

Disenfranchised recounts the tumultuous events that have shaped and reshaped factory politics in China since the 1949 Revolution. The book develops a theoretical framework consisting of two dimensions—industrial citizenship and autonomy—to explain changing authority relations in workplaces and uses interviews with workers and managers to provide a shop-floor perspective. Under the work unit system, in place from the 1950s to the 1980s, lifetime job tenure and participatory institutions gave workers a strong form of industrial citizenship, but constraints on autonomous collective action made the system more paternalistic than democratic. Called “masters of the factory,” workers were pressed to participate actively in self-managing teams and employee congresses but only under the all-encompassing control of the factory party committee. Concerned that party cadres were becoming a “bureaucratic class,” Mao experimented with means to mobilize criticism from below, even inciting—during the Cultural Revolution—a worker insurgency that overthrew factory party committees. Unwilling to allow workers to establish permanent autonomous organizations, however, Mao never came up with institutionalized means of making factory leaders accountable to their subordinates. The final chapters recount the process of industrial restructuring, which has transformed work units into profit-oriented enterprises, eliminating industrial citizenship and reducing workers to hired hands dependent on precarious employment and subject to highly coercive discipline. The book closes with an overview of parallel developments around the globe, chronicling the rise and fall of an era of industrial citizenship.Less

Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India

Michael Levien

Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against “land grabs.” Dispossession without Development argues that beneath these conflicts lay a profound transformation in ... More

Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against “land grabs.” Dispossession without Development argues that beneath these conflicts lay a profound transformation in the political economy of land dispossession. While the Indian state dispossessed land for public-sector industry and infrastructure for much of the 20th century, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies since the early 1990s prompted India’s state governments to become land brokers for private real estate capital—most controversially, for Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Using long-term ethnographic research, the book demonstrates the consequences of this new regime of dispossession for a village in Rajasthan. Taking us into the diverse lives of villagers dispossessed for one of North India’s largest SEZs, it shows how the SEZ destroyed their agricultural livelihoods, marginalized their labor, and excluded them from “world-class” infrastructure—but absorbed them into a dramatic real estate boom. Real estate speculation generated a class of rural neo-rentiers, but excluded many and compounded pre-existing class, caste, and gender inequalities. While the SEZ disappointed most villagers’ expectations of “development,” land speculation fractured the village and disabled collective action. The case of “Rajpura” helps to illuminate the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism that underlay land conflicts in contemporary India—and explain why the Indian state is struggling to pacify farmers with real estate payouts. Using the extended case method, Dispossession without Development advances a sociological theory of dispossession that has relevance beyond India.Less

Empire's Legacy: Roots of a Far-Right Affinity in Contemporary France

John W.P. Veugelers

Building on the idea of latent political potential, this book offers an alternative interpretation of the contemporary far right. Its main thesis is that relations between colonizers and colonized ... More

Building on the idea of latent political potential, this book offers an alternative interpretation of the contemporary far right. Its main thesis is that relations between colonizers and colonized implanted a legacy that, under certain conditions, translated into support for the far right in France. To make this argument, the book offers a model for the study of political potentials that combines a situational approach to identity relations, a networks approach to subcultural practice, and a historical approach to political opportunity. The early part of this book traces the origins and development of this potential among the European settlers of French Algeria. The middle part examines its transmission via voluntary associations and its channeling into mainstream parties. The latter part examines the conditions under which this potential redirected into the far right. Starting with colonial Algeria, after independence in 1962 the book moves between politics at three levels: France, the southeast region, and Toulon (which in 1995 became the largest city in postwar Europe to elect a far-right administration). Complementing economic explanations for nativism, this book argues that our understanding of modernity errs when it disregards the potency of anachronistic remnants.Less

Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930

Karen V. Hansen

In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with a poverty nearly as severe as that ... More

In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with a poverty nearly as severe as that of their Dakota neighbors. Yet the homesteaders’ impoverishment did not impede native dispossession: by 1929, Scandinavians owned more reservation land than did Dakotas. In the words of Helena Haugen Kanten, who staked a claim with her widowed mother in 1905: “We stole the land from the Indians.” How did this extraordinary, largely unknown encounter between Dakota people and Scandinavian immigrants come to pass? Who were the people who experienced this episode in U.S. history? What does their experience teach us about landtaking, dispossession, and coexistence? This book upends prevailing assumptions about the experience of Native Americans, immigrants, and women in this period. It reveals Scandinavians’ and Dakotas’ resistance to assimilation, and their use of citizenship to combat attacks on their cultures. It documents women’s use of land to leverage resources for themselves and their families, and recounts the efforts of Dakota women to gain autonomy in the use of their allotments, even as Scandinavian women staked and “proved up” their own claims. It chronicles the intertwined stories of Dakotas and immigrants—women and men, farmers, domestic servants, and day laborers—and their shared and contrasting struggles to maintain a language, sustain a culture, and navigate their conflicted ties to more than one nation.Less

The Fall of Gods: Memory, Kinship, and Middle Classes in South India

Ester Gallo

The book explores the relationship between colonial history and memory from the perspective of middle- class intergenerational relations. Drawing from a prolonged research conducted with Malayali ... More

The book explores the relationship between colonial history and memory from the perspective of middle- class intergenerational relations. Drawing from a prolonged research conducted with Malayali middle classes in Kerala and in the diaspora, the analysis focuses on how specific historical events are retrieved in the present to shape kinship relations and to legitimize trajectories of class mobility. The book bridges historical analysis of gendered family relations as they developed in colonial and postcolonial times with an anthropological inquiry of the symbolic and material premises of kinship among contemporary middle classes. It provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of how middle-class status in contemporary south India is expressed by recalling family histories, and how remembrance shapes kinship ideals, norms, and experiences in domains as different as houses, conjugality, parenthood, reproduction and family size, intergenerational love and genealogical transmission. The book offers original insights on the continuities and differences between colonial and contemporary middle classes, and the role played by migration and diaspora in both contexts. It originally contributes to two interrelated and undertheorized fields within social sciences. Firstly, it addresses the need to develop further our understanding of how gendered kinship and family relations result from and express class belonging. Secondly, it unravels the complex and ambivalent relation between political history, memory, and the ‘private’ domain of family relations.Less

Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method

Mike Savage

This book examines how, between 1940 and 1970, British society was marked by the imprint of the academic social sciences in profound ways that have an enduring legacy on how we see ourselves, ... More

This book examines how, between 1940 and 1970, British society was marked by the imprint of the academic social sciences in profound ways that have an enduring legacy on how we see ourselves, focusing on how interview methods and sample surveys eclipsed literature and the community study as a means of understanding ordinary life. It draws extensively on archived qualitative social science data from the 1930s to the 1960s, which it uses to offer an account of post-war social change in Britain. The book also uses this data to conduct a new kind of historical sociology of the social sciences, one that emphasises the discontinuities in knowledge forms, and which stresses how disciplines and institutions competed with each other for reputation. Its emphasis on how social scientific forms of knowing eclipsed those from the arts and humanities during this period offers a re-thinking of the role of expertise today that will provoke social scientists, scholars in the humanities, and the general reader alike.Less

LEARNING TO FORGET: The Anti-Memoirs of Modernity

Dipankar Gupta

This book introduces some of the enduring features of modernity which are often overlaid and hidden from view because of contemporaneous diachronies, or the coexistence of different temporal rhythms. ... More

This book introduces some of the enduring features of modernity which are often overlaid and hidden from view because of contemporaneous diachronies, or the coexistence of different temporal rhythms. The difference between ethical anonymity and morality is discussed. It illustrates how taste can attain the character of intersubjectivity by moving away decisively from past orientations to style. In addition, it describes the possible transformation of nation-states to knowledge-states. Then, several ways by which the intersubjective rationality conveys itself in modern societies and why it is essential to intentionally interfere to advance its cause are explained. Furthermore, it is indicated that the creation of a ‘minimum set of resemblances’ among citizens cannot be settled by poverty considerations.Less

Lifeworlds of Islam: The Pragmatics of a Religion

Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Islam is what Muslims do. From this premise, the book elaborates a sociology of Islam in three concise chapters. The book shows that Islam has operated typically not in the form of standard dogmas, ... More

Islam is what Muslims do. From this premise, the book elaborates a sociology of Islam in three concise chapters. The book shows that Islam has operated typically not in the form of standard dogmas, but usually as a compass for practical orientations (“lifeworlds”). This more pragmatic character of the faith established it as a relevant factor in three arenas in which common social life acquires meaning: participatory ethics, public philosophies, and global networks. The book argues that all three are poorly understood in recent literature, which tends to focus on one specific problem or another, and then in isolation from global and historical contexts. The book argues that the larger preoccupations of ordinary Muslims—how to live in a global society; how to guide life in the manner of a total philosophy; and how to relate to the world of daily struggles—are unique neither to the present period nor to religious life. But the career of a particular religion—Islam in this case—offers a focused empirical lens through which we may learn something more about the nature of global citizenship; the philosophical needs of ordinary people; and the sorts of ethics that facilitate social participation.Less

The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan

Akiko Hashimoto

How do memories of national trauma remain relevant to culture and society long after the event? Why do the memories of difficult experiences endure, and even intensify, despite people’s impulse to ... More

How do memories of national trauma remain relevant to culture and society long after the event? Why do the memories of difficult experiences endure, and even intensify, despite people’s impulse to avoid remembering a dreadful past and to move on? This book explores these questions by examining Japan’s culture of defeat up to the present day. It surveys the stakes of war memory in Japan after its defeat in World War II and shows how and why defeat has become an indelible part of national collective life, especially in recent decades. Drawing on ethnographic observations and personal interviews as well as testimonials and other popular memory data since the 1980s, it probes into the heart of the divisive war memories that lie at the root of current disputes over revising Japan’s pacifist constitution, remilitarization, and the escalating frictions in East Asia that have come to be known collectively as Japan’s “history problem.” This book examines this divisive national project, drawing on the sociological insights of cultural trauma theory and collective memory theory. Contrary to the Western stereotype that describes Japan as suffering from “collective amnesia,” Japan’s war memories are deeply encoded in the everyday culture and much more varied than the caricatured image suggests. The book identifies three conflicting trauma narratives in Japan’s war memories—narratives of victims, perpetrators, and fallen heroes—that are motivated by the desire to heal the wounds, redress the wrongs, and restore a positive moral and national identity.Less

The Making of the Populist Movement: State, Market, and Party on the Western Frontier

Adam Slez

This book provides a field theoretic account of the origins of electoral populism, which first emerged in the American state of South Dakota in 1890, at the height of what was known as the Populist ... More

This book provides a field theoretic account of the origins of electoral populism, which first emerged in the American state of South Dakota in 1890, at the height of what was known as the Populist movement. Lasting from roughly 1877 to 1896, the movement brought together farmers throughout the agrarian periphery in an effort to combat material hardship at the hands of railroads and banks. The book argues that the rise of electoral populism in the American West was a strategic response to a political field in which the configuration of positions was literally locked in place, precluding the success of new contenders or otherwise marginal actors. This argument is developed in two parts. The first part of the book examines the transformation of physical space resulting from the simultaneous expansion of both state and market. Together, these two processes contributed to the stability of the political field, where the struggle for power was synonymous with a struggle for position in an emerging urban hierarchy. The second part of the book examines the subsequent push for market regulation and the rise of the Populist movement in southern Dakota. Unable to make headway through social movement organizations such the Farmers’ Alliance and administrative agencies such as the Dakota Territory Board of Railroad Commissioners, farmers in southern Dakota looked to third-party alternatives as means of affecting change. The result was the People’s Party which, for a brief period between 1892 and 1896, threatened to destroy the prevailing party system.Less

Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala

P. Sanal Mohan

This book tells the story of Cherumas, Kuravas, Parayas, Pulayas, and Thanda Pulayas—the slave castes of nineteenth-century Kerala—and their tryst with Christianity. These castes comprised nearly ... More

This book tells the story of Cherumas, Kuravas, Parayas, Pulayas, and Thanda Pulayas—the slave castes of nineteenth-century Kerala—and their tryst with Christianity. These castes comprised nearly one-sixth of the population and were ’owned’ by upper castes, princely states, and even Europeans. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when European missionaries began working among the slave castes, thousands joined the Church. Their generational experiences, struggles, and memories shaped their collective self, and deeply impacted the emergence of Dalit consciousness in Kerala. This book presents and analyses the imaginations and articulations of the notion(s) of equality in the context of caste slavery, missionary activity, and socio-political transition in pre-colonial and modern Kerala.Less

National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America

Mara Loveman

The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity ... More

The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity on the national census. Most observers highlight the historic novelty of these reforms, but National Colors shows that official racial classification of citizens has a long history in Latin America. Through an analysis of the politics and practice of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of 19 Latin American states across nearly two centuries, this book explains why most Latin American states classified their citizens by race on early national censuses, why they stopped the practice of official racial classification around midcentury, and why they reintroduced ethnoracial classification on national censuses at the dawn of the 21st century. Beyond domestic political struggles, the analysis reveals that the ways that Latin American states classified their populations from the mid-nineteenth century onward responded to changes in international criteria for how to construct a modern nation and promote national “development.” As prevailing international understandings of what made a political and cultural community a modern nation changed, so too did the ways that Latin American census officials depicted diversity within national populations. The way census officials described populations in official statistics, in turn, shaped how policymakers “saw” national populations and informed their prescriptions for national development–with consequences that still reverberate in contemporary political struggles for recognition, rights, and redress for ethnoracially marginalized populations in today’s Latin America.Less

Other People's Struggles: Outsiders in Social Movements

Nicholas Owen

Other People’s Struggles is the first attempt in over forty years to explain the place of “conscience constituents” in social movements. Conscience constituents are people who participate in a ... More

Other People’s Struggles is the first attempt in over forty years to explain the place of “conscience constituents” in social movements. Conscience constituents are people who participate in a movement but do not stand to benefit if it succeeds. Why do such people participate when they do not stand to benefit? Why are they sometimes present and sometimes absent in social movements? Why and when is their participation welcome to those who do stand to benefit, and why and when is it not? The work proposes an original theory to answer these questions, crossing discipline boundaries to draw on the findings of social psychology, philosophy, and normative political theory, in search of explanations of why people act altruistically and what it means to others when they do so. The theory is illustrated by examples from British history, including the antislavery movement, the women’s suffrage and liberation movements, labor and socialist movements, anticolonial movements, antipoverty movements, and movements for global justice. Other People’s Struggles also contributes to new debates concerning the rights and wrongs of “speaking for others.” Debates concerning the limits of solidarity—who can be an “ally” and on what terms—have become very topical in contemporary politics, especially in identity politics and in the new “populist” movements. The book provides a theoretical and empirical account of how these questions have been addressed in the past and how they might be framed today.Less

Pieces of Earth: The Politics of Land-Grabbing in Kashmir

Peer Ghulam Nabi Suhail

Resource exploitation in the form of land-grabbing has become a major debate worldwide. Based on extensive field research conducted at the India-Pakistan border, using Kishanganga Hydroelectric ... More

Resource exploitation in the form of land-grabbing has become a major debate worldwide. Based on extensive field research conducted at the India-Pakistan border, using Kishanganga Hydroelectric Project as a case study, this book on corporate land-grabbing in Kashmir explains how capital is at play in a conflict zone. The author explains how different actors—village elites, government officers, politicians, civil society coalitions, peasants, and the states of India and Pakistan—mobilize support to legitimize their respective claims. It captures how the tensions between developmentalism, environmentalism, and national interest on one hand, and universal rights, national sovereignty, subnational identity, and resistance on the other—facilitate and challenge these corporate resource-grabs simultaneously. The author argues that the patterns and scale of land- and resource-grabbing has led to depeasantization, dispossession, displacement, loss of livelihoods, forced commoditization of the local peasantry, and damages to the local ecology at large. The book thus combines the literature in violence and development and dispossession studies by addressing the socio-political conflict in land- and resource-grabbing in conflict zones.Less