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This book explores the convergence of different notions of Asia through the meeting between Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian and curator Okakura Tenshin in Calcutta in 1902. Set against a panoramic background, it draws on the intersections of the late Meiji period in Japan and the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, weaves through an intricate tapestry of ideas relating to pan-Asianism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship, and positions the early modernist tensions of the period within-and against-the spectre of a unified Asia that concealed considerable political differences. In addition to countering the imperialist subtext of Okakura's The Ideals of the East and The Awakening of the East against Tagore's radical critique of Nationalism, it inflects the dominant tropes of postcolonial theory by highlighting the subtleties of beauty and the interstices of homosociality and love. Spanning geographical boundaries, across the cities of Tokyo, Boston, and Calcutta, the book offers new insights into the ways in which the Orient travelled within and beyond Asia, stimulated by emergent modes of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) is widely considered the most influential British anthropologist of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his seminal works on South Sudanese ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (OUP 1937) and The Nuer (OUP 1940). In these works, now classics in the anthropological literature, Evans-Pritchard broke new ground on questions of rationality, social accountability, kinship, social and political organization, and religion, as well as influentially moving the discipline in Britain away from the natural sciences and towards history. Yet despite much discussion about his theoretical contributions to anthropology, no study has yet explored his fieldwork in detail in order to get a better understanding of its historical contexts, local circumstances or the social encounters out of which it emerged. This book then is just such an exploration, of Evans-Pritchard the fieldworker through the lens of his fieldwork photography. Through an engagement with his photographic archive, and by thinking with it alongside his written ethnographies and other unpublished evidence, the book offers a new insight into the way in which Evans-Pritchard’s theoretical contributions to the discipline were shaped by his fieldwork and the numerous local people in Africa with whom he collaborated. By writing history through field photographs we move back towards the fieldwork experiences, exploring the vivid traces, lived realities and local presences at the heart of the social encounter that formed the basis of Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology.

Black Radio is a window into the most famous radio show you never heard of. The Tom Joyner Morning Show is a quarter-century-old syndicated black morning radio show reaching more than eight million adult, largely working-class listeners. It offers progressive political talk, soul music, humor, advice, philanthropy, and celebrity gossip. But the TJMS is not just an adult “old-school music” radio show: it is an on-air organizer, fusing progressive politics and aesthetics. It focuses on specific political issues affecting and enraging African Americans. Black Radio analyzes the TJMS’s rise in the Clinton era, and its coverage of key events—9/11, Hurricane Katrina, President Obama’s elections and terms, the murders of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the shocking 2016 Donald Trump electoral triumph. It showcases the varied, contentious, and blackly humorous voices of anchors, guests, and audience members. Finally, it investigates the new synergistic set of cross-medium ties and political connections now affecting print, broadcast, and online politics in anti-racist directions. Despite the dismal present, this new multiracial progressive public sphere has extraordinary potential for shaping future American politics. Black Radio, then, is more than the project of making the invisible visible, bringing to light a major counterpublic phenomenon unjustly ignored for reasons of color, class, generation, and medium. It tunes us in to an alternative understanding of the black public sphere in the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio is politically progressive, music-drenched, angry, and blisteringly funny.

National governments around the world are turning to branding consultants, public relations advisers, and strategic communications experts to help them “brand” their jurisdiction. Using the tools, techniques, and expertise of commercial branding is believed to help nations articulate a more coherent and cohesive identity, attract foreign capital, and maintain citizen loyalty. In short, the goal of nation branding is to make the nation matter in a world where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete. But what actually happens to the nation when it is reconceived as a brand? How does nation branding change the terms of politics and culture in a globalized world? Through case studies in twelve countries and in-depth interviews with nation-branding experts and their national clients, Melissa Aronczyk argues that the social, political, and cultural discourses constitutive of the nation have been harnessed in new and problematic ways, with far-reaching consequences for both our concept of the nation and our ideals of national citizenship. Branding the Nation challenges the received wisdom about the power of brands to change the world, and offers a critical perspective on these new ways of conceiving value and identity in the globalized twenty-first century.

The emergence of a visible, commodified leisure culture in the form of cafés, targeted at and appropriated by, young adults from the middle classes, is a striking phenomenon in the transformation of urban life in India since economic liberalization in 1991. Café Culture in Pune is an ethnographic snapshot, taken in 2008, tracing the effects of globalization from the perspective of young middle class urbanites in post-liberalization Pune, India. Documenting with meticulous detail their lifeworld, from clothing to hanging out, friendship, dating, education, and marriage, it captures new forms of socializing, consumption, self-improvement and relationship-management. These practices set the young generation apart–the first to grow up with mass-consumerism – as a group in historical time, in relation to other lifeworlds in India, to ‘western’ versions and as a rounded life world in itself. The study considers two questions: How do free global market economy and ‘globalization’ change the way people see themselves and the world? And to what extent might Indian practices modify the practices of ‘western’ individualism implicit in Indian modernity? The young café culture crowd in its practices was domesticating ‘the global’ while transcending ‘the local’. They were negotiating to follow their hearts, while preserving strong family bonds and inter-generational dependencies. They were thus modifying what it meant to be middle class Indians in our contemporary globalized world. The Indian middle class was reinventing India as a global player in a post-Cold war world by constructing a narrative of pivotal change.

Channelling Cultures: Television Studies from India is a seminal collection of essays on regional, national and global itineraries of Indian television in the twenty-first century. At a time when the television landscape in India is undergoing a second wave of change with compulsory digitization, new interactivity and convergence, unforeseen forms of televisual publicness and renewed debates on self-censorship, media ethics and the code of content, the essays in the volume seek to provoke a fresh understanding of television as a crucial player in Indian culture and politics. Featuring work by leading experts in the field, it locates the study of television within the myriad histories of the nation as well as various trajectories in global culture and politics. With a special focus on the genres of news, reality TV and soap opera, it addresses issues such as postcoloniality, citizenship, democracy, development, globalization, consumerism, liveness, affect, and gender. The volume demonstrates that Indian television provides an indispensable context for interrogating and critically engaging with the standard assumptions of television studies and more broadly global media studies.

For the past several decades, the United States has witnessed a profound transformation in what Americans do with the guns they own. While hunting used to dominate American gun culture, now the top reason for owning a gun is protection, and today, there are over eleven million concealed carry licensees. Why are millions of Americans—disproportionately American men—choosing to carry guns as part of their everyday lives? And what are the effects of gun carry on contemporary notions of citizenship, governance, and crime? This book examines these questions. Focusing on southeastern Michigan, particularly Metro Detroit, as a window into broader processes of socioeconomic decline in the United States, the book analyzes how men use guns to navigate contexts of social insecurity and how men’s use of guns is shaped by socio-legal structures supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The book draws on in-depth interviews with gun carriers and NRA-certified instructors and ethnography at firearms classes, activist events, and shooting ranges; and online gun forums. The author also obtained a concealed-pistol license, carried a gun on a regular basis, and became certified as an NRA instructor.

How do real individuals live together in real societies in the real world? What binds societies together and how can these social orders be structured in a fair way? This book addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others—the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest—are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. The book demonstrates that solidarity creates inclusive and exclusive social structures, and shows how they can be repaired. It is not perfect, it is not absolute, and the horrors which occur in its lapses have been seen all too frequently in the forms of discrimination, genocide, and war. Despite its worldly flaws and contradictions, however, solidarity and the project of civil society remain our best hope—the antidote to every divisive institution, every unfair distribution, and every abusive and dominating hierarchy. A grand and sweeping statement, the book is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.

This book examines how and why people use the concept of coming out as a certain kind of person to resist stigma and collectively mobilize for social change. It examines how the concept of coming out has taken on different meanings as people adopt it for varying purposes—across time, space, and social context. Most other books about coming out—whether fiction, academic, or memoir—focus on the experience of gay men and lesbians in the United States. This is the first book to examine how a variety of people and groups use the concept of coming out in new and creative ways to resist stigma and mobilize for social change. It examines how the use of coming out among American lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) people has shifted over time. It also examines how four diverse US social movements—including the fat acceptance movement, undocumented immigrant youth movement, the plural-marriage family movement among Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, and the #MeToo movement—have employed the concept of coming out to advance their cause. Doing so sheds light on these particular struggles for social recognition, while illuminating broader questions regarding social change, cultural meaning, and collective mobilization.

Traditional markers of adulthood have become increasingly delayed, disorderly, reversible, or even forgone in the latter half of the twentieth century. This book draws upon 100 interviews with working-class men and women in their twenties to early thirties to investigate the changing meanings and practices of adulthood. Looked at through the eyes of young working-class men and women, the transition to adulthood emerges as a very grim picture, one characterized by economic instability, precarious employment, uncertainty surrounding marriage and family, and deepening inequality. Working-class young people—the majority of whom bounce from one unstable service job to the next, bearing the burden of risks such as illness or education on their own, and racking up credit card debt just to make ends meet—have in large part abandoned the American Dream. Experiences of confusion and betrayal within the labor market, institutions, and the family teach young working-class men and women that they are completely alone, responsible for their own fates and dependent on outside help only at their peril. In the absence of the traditional rites of passage, the majority of respondents told therapeutic coming of age stories, framing their journeys to adulthood as a struggle to triumph over personal demons and reconstruct an emancipated and transformed self. However, there is a darker side to this new adulthood, which threatens to make self-reliance—and severing social ties—the only imaginable path to a life of dignity.

Economic liberalization and globalization in India in the early 1990s resulted in a whirlwind of consumerist activities. New material and visual temptations swept markets, infiltrated consumer minds through media, and aroused inhibited desires. This has engendered a fast-paced and relentless relationship with things and images that permeate our everyday lives. Consumerist Encounters elucidates how our all-consuming relationship with objects and their representations have transformed rapidly over the last few decades in contemporary urban India. It argues that ephemerality, frivolousness, and multiplicity of choice regulate our flirtatious encounters with commodities and their images as we restlessly use, exhaust, dispose, and move on. Such a trend is illustrated by examining a plethora of commodity-centric phenomena such as exclusion through apparel, eroticization of body images, population of the T-shirt surface with graphics and text, rise of business process outsourcing, instantaneous seeing and sharing of images, and rejection of material goods in junkyards and ruins. These explorations collectively shed light on the constant negotiation of our identities, statuses, and mobilities in the image-saturated commodity landscape.

This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. “Sharing,” “friending,” “liking,” “following,” “trending,” and “favoriting” have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become “social.”

In the contemporary era we have seen a proliferation of storytelling activities, from the phenomenon of TED talks and Humans of New York to a plethora of story-coaching agencies and consultants. Curated Stories seeks to understand the rise of this storytelling culture alongside a broader shift to neoliberal free market economies. The book shows how in the turn to free market orders, stories have been reconfigured to promote liberal and neoliberal self-making and are restructured as easily digestible soundbites mobilized toward utilitarian ends. The reader is taken to several sites around the world where we can hear stories and observe varied contemporary modes of storytelling: the online Afghan Women’s Writing Project, the domestic workers movement and the undocumented student Dreamer movement in the United States, and the Misión Cultura storytelling project in Venezuela. Curated stories are often heartbreaking accounts of poverty and mistreatment that may move us deeply. But what do they move us to? What are the stakes, and for whom, in the crafting and mobilization of storytelling? A careful analysis of the conditions under which the stories are told, the tropes through which they are narrated, and the ways in which they are responded to shows how stories may actually work to disguise the deeper contexts of global inequality in which these marginal lives are situated. The book is also concerned with how we might reclaim storytelling as a craft that allows for the fullness and complexity of experience to be expressed in pursuit of transformative social change.

Can small indigenous communities survive, as distinct cultural entities, in northeast India, an area of mind-boggling ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity? What are the choices such communities have, and what are some of the strategies such communities use to resist marginalization? In recent years, many such small groups are participating in large state-sponsored ethnic festivals, and organizing their own community festivals. But are these signs of their increasing agency or simply proof of their continued marginalization? How do state policies and political borders— inter-state as well as international—impact on a community’s need to perform their ethnicity? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this work, on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the small Tangsa community living in Assam in northeast India. The study also reveals the asymmetry in the relations between the dominant power-wielding Assamese and the Tangsa. In summary, this is a study about marginality and its consequences, about performance of ethnicity at festivals as sites for both resistance and capitulation, and about the compulsions, imposed by the state and dominant neighbours, that can force small ethnic groups to contribute to their own marginalization.

This book delves into the street-level experience of a set of African American and Latino teenagers and adults worried about or after them. It argues that the risks and opportunities associated with a poor urban neighborhood get filtered through smartphones and popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The book shows that street life in Harlem plays out on and across the physical street and the digital street among youth, neighborhood adults, and the authorities. Each chapter examines the parallels, differences, and crossovers between these two layers of social life that bear out the “effects” of a neighborhood. From roughly five years of firsthand research as an outreach worker and in other roles in the community, the author illustrates the online and offline experiences of girls and boys of color coming of age in the shadow of the Harlem Children’s Zone and sweeping gentrification when social media came to permeate all aspects of life. The Digital Street addresses the role of communication and technology in the transformation of an urban neighborhood.

This volume focuses on the debate that developed in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom after the terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, in January 2015. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the unfolding of the public debate in terms of content of claims making, framing, and justifications as well as the quality (deliberativeness) of the discourses by a variety of actors in the public sphere. The volume features a threefold comparison that considers how the debate differs across countries; how it evolved over time; and how it varies when one looks at mainstream media compared to social movement arenas. Based on a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the volume pays particular attention to radical left, radical right, and religious actors and to issues related to migration and integration, secularism and cultural diversity, security and civil rights. Taking its starting point from the infamous attacks of January 2015, this volume aims also at contributing to a theoretical innovation by reflecting on the ways in which transformative events trigger discursive critical junctures.

The 21st century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible. To embrace change, work with unpredictable schedules, be available 24/7, and take charge of one’s own career. What are the wider implications of these pressures for workers’ moral lives? How do they construct conceptions of good work and a good life amid such incessant change? In The Disrupted Workplace, Benjamin Snyder examines how three groups of American workers—financial professionals, truck drivers, and unemployed job seekers—construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility. Based on 70 in-depth interviews and three years of participant observation, he argues that the flexible economy transforms how workers experience time. New scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the rhythms and trajectories of working life, which makes time feel chaotic, accelerated, desynchronized, and unpredictable. Amidst a welter of fragmented temporalities, the workplace becomes a site of perplexing moral dilemmas. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term. Through a vivid portrait of real workers’ struggles to adapt their moral lives to constant disruption, Snyder mounts a compelling critique of the cultural costs of the flexible economy.

The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes is a classic example of a conspiracy of silence, a situation where everyone refuses to acknowledge an obvious truth. But the denial of social realities—whether incest, alcoholism, corruption, or even genocide—is no fairy tale. This book sheds light on the social and political underpinnings of silence and denial—the keeping of “open secrets.” The author shows that conspiracies of silence exist at every level of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations, from personal friendships to politics. He also shows how such conspiracies evolve, illuminating the social pressures that cause people to deny what is right before their eyes. We see how each conspirator's denial is symbiotically complemented by the others', and learn that silence is usually more intense when there are more people conspiring—and especially when there are significant power differences among them. The author concludes by showing that the longer we ignore “elephants,” the larger they loom in our minds, as each avoidance triggers an even greater spiral of denial. Drawing on examples from newspapers and comedy shows to novels, children's stories, and film, the book travels back and forth across different levels of social life, and from everyday moments to large-scale historical events. At its core, it helps us understand why we ignore truths that are known to all of us.

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.

While examining its neuro-cognitive hardware, psychology usually ignores the socio-cognitive software underlying human attention. Yet although it is nature that equips us with our sense organs, it is nevertheless society that shapes the way we actually use them. The book explores the social underpinnings of attention, the way in which we focus our attention (and thereby notice and ignore things) not just as individuals and as humans but also as social beings, members of particular communities with specific traditions and conventions of attending to certain parts of reality while ignoring others. As members of such communities, we are socialized into culturally, subculturally (ideologically, professionally), and historically specific norms that delineate the scope of our attention thus effectively determining what we ought to consider relevant and what we may tacitly inattend, or should explicitly disattend, as irrelevant. The book argues that in order to study human attention, psychology and neuroscience are therefore clearly not enough and that we also need a sociology of attention.