Two escape routes from the paradigm of monistic authenticity: post-imperialist and federal perspectives on plural and complex identities

Despite a recent explosion of works emphasizing the increasingly plural and complex character of identity, political and social elites' interpretations of identities have continued to be dominated by the paradigm of monistic authenticity. In the face of this resilience, theorists must say more about the formation, meaning and implications of plural and complex identities. They must provide social and political actors with a credible alternative language to make sense of the actual or potential plurality of their allegiances. This article aims at contributing to the task by relying on the complementary merits of two traditions that used to ignore each other: post-imperialism and federalism. First, we suggest that post-imperialism may provide a language for redefining communities and individual-community relationships in a pluralist way. Second, we argue that the language of federalism has a high – and neglected – potential to answer the political and normative questions raised by post-imperialism.     

The Role of Social Stratification in the Aztec Empire: A View from the Provinces

This paper explores the role of social stratification in the regional organization of the Triple Alliance, or Aztec empire. Unlike previous interpretations that see military coercion as the main force integrating the empire, I argue that the primary integrative factor was collusion between rulers of the core states and the nobility of the provinces, who gained economic rewards for their participation in the tribute empire. The common interest of the Mesoamerican nobility transcended political boundaries. The fundamental social and economic cleavage in Postclassic Mesoamerica was not between the Triple Alliance states and the provinces, as many have argued, but rather between the nobles and the commoners. The proposed model is supported through examination of the provincial polity of Cuauhnahuac in western Morelos, Mexico.     

Plural cities in comparative perspective

Adopting a comparative perspective, the article focuses on ethnically heterogeneous cities as sites shaped by political economy, and asks whether varieties of the plural city can be mapped against varieties of polity. Four ideotypical configurations of city, society and polity (preindustrial-patrimonial, colonial, modern-industrial-capitalist, neoliberal-postmodern-global) are discussed in terms of their modalities of ethnicity. In preindustrial-patrimonial cities, rulers were concerned less with the ethnicity of subordinate minority populations than their ability to render tribute, taxes and labour. The colonial city was grounded in the differentiation of the population in terms of supposed 'racial' distinctions. Modern-industrial-capitalist cities sought the cultural and linguistic homogeneity of their immigrant populations through assimilation, or, where certain groups ('races') were thought unassimilable, through exclusion. In the late twentieth century such cities have shifted towards postindustrial and postmodern forms of sociality in a globalized, transnational, world espousing neoliberal economic and social policies and contested forms of 'multiculturalism'.     

Identities in conflict: The Aboriginal question and the politics of recognition in Quebec

The will to have one's own particular identity universally acknowledged and respected is now one of the most significant determinants of the sociopolitical dynamic of contemporary modern societies. However, the actual recognition of difference is more often than not an unsatisfactory and disappointing experience for many of the groups and communities striving for that recognition. The recent experience of Canadian Aboriginal peoples is a case in point. This article looks at the struggle of Aboriginal nations for recognition in one particular region of Canada, the province of Quebec. Indeed, Quebec offers a revealing case‐study of the peculiarities of the politics of recognition. For over three decades now, the French‐speaking majority of Quebec has striven to assert its ethnocultural distinctiveness and laid claims to a special status within the Canadian political and constitutional framework. Today, both Quebecers and Aboriginals are recognition seekers within the Canadian polity. As a result, their relationship is inevitably marked by their respective but competing attempt to draw the attention of the Canadian state to their particular identity claims. In recent years, this has led to a highly conflictual dynamic which considerably strains any hope of social and cultural coexistence. The article examines the particularities of the politics of recognition in the Quebec context. Its objective is twofold. First, it should serve to shed some light on the manifestations of Aboriginal ethnonationalism in Canada. Secondly, it seeks to illustrate the limitations and paradoxical nature of the politics of recognition within a liberal framework.     

Contesting the Politics of Culture, Rewriting the Boundaries of Inclusion: Working for Social Justice with Muslim and Arab Communities

This article calls on anthropologists of education to assert a more public voice attacking the ideological purposes to which the concept of "culture" has been deployed following the September 11 attacks. We must support schools, communities, and the media to address the power and politics of race and religion in contemporary social and political contexts, rather than focus primarily on multicultural education about Islamic and Arab "culture." Finally, this article urges us to expand our knowledge of the processes of social incorporation for Muslim and Arab immigrant youth to include a deeper understanding of how global politics contribute to young people's sense of emerging identities.     

Developing sociopolitical consciousness of race and social class inequality in adolescents attending progressive and no excuses urban secondary schools

Sociopolitical consciousness refers to an individual’s ability to critically analyze the political, economic, and social forces shaping society and one’s status in it. A growing body of scholarship reports that high levels of sociopolitical consciousness are predictive in marginalized adolescents of a number of key outcomes including resilience and civic engagement. The present study explored the role that urban secondary schools can play in fostering adolescents’ sociopolitical consciousness through a longitudinal, mixed methods investigation of more than 400 adolescents attending “progressive” and “no excuses” charter high schools. Analyses revealed that, on average, students attending progressive high schools demonstrated sizeable shifts in their sociopolitical consciousness of racial inequality, and students attending no excuses high schools demonstrated sizeable shifts in their sociopolitical consciousness of social class inequality. Qualitative interviews with participating students offered insight into the curriculum, programming, and practices that these youth perceived as contributing to these differences in their sociopolitical consciousness.     

Politics And Gastropolitics: Gender And The Power Of Food In Two African Pastoralist Societies

Male-centred aspects of political behaviour have generally remained the explanatory and interpretive focuses in analyses of the social organization of African pastoralists. While recent work on African pastoralists has shed increasing light on the lives of women, I argue that key assumptions underlying anthropological models of male dominance in these societies have been insufficiently challenged. Drawing on recent approaches in gender and social organization that highlight the mutual constitution of domestic and political domains, I examine comparative material from two well-known pastoralist societies: the Samburu of northern Kenya and the Nuer of southern Sudan. In doing so, I suggest strong linkages between male-dominated 'political spheres' and areas of domestic life in which the role of women is more significant – particularly processes of domestic food distribution. In re-examining central facets of Samburu politics – which are best known through Paul Spencer's seminal analysis of the gerontocratic aspects of Samburu political life – I suggest that the status and identities of Samburu men are in fundamental ways defined through their relationship to women as providers of food within Samburu households. Comparative material from the Nuer suggests, additionally, the strategic use of food by women in influencing male 'political spheres'. In comparing these cases, I suggest a more general model through which domestic processes of food allocation as realms of female-centred social action may be seen to play a central role in the forms and processes of pastoral 'political' life.     

Constituting ‘Asian women’: Political representation,identity politics and local discourses of participation

Political representation of ethnicized and other identities is a complex process, whereby identities are constructed and shaped through the competing claims of different collectivities. In the article I explore this process through a case study of a local authority community development project for Asian women. The analysis demonstrates that institutions are not neutral spaces in which contestations over collectivity are played out, but exert a constitutive impact upon the identities produced. Current theories of fluidity and instability in identities mean that collective identities must be staked strategically and contingently, determinant upon the political strategies appropriate within given institutional contexts.     

Metabolized‐Water Breeding Diseases in Urban India: Sociospatiality of Water Problems and Health Burden in Ahmedabad City

Studies on urban metabolism have provided important insights in the material and sociopolitical issues associated with the flow of water. However, there is a dearth of studies that reveal how infrastructure, as a hybrid of social and material construct, facilitates disease emergence. The article brings together urban metabolism, political ecology, and anthropological studies to examine the social construction and reconstruction of the material flow through everyday practices for addressing the water problem and its health burden in Ahmedabad city. The article georeferences the water problems and occurrence of diseases and, through interviews, documents Ahmedabad's sociospatial characteristics of water problems and health burden in two case study wards. Through a situated understanding of the everyday practices, the infrastructure is exposed through leakages, reveals the citizens desire for better water quality, and struggle to gain access to water using diverse ‘pressure’ tactics. It is these social‐material constructs of water that give structure and coherence to urban space, which spatially coincides with the occurrence of diseases. It reveals the sociopolitical drivers of the water problems and identifies different hypotheses of the hotspots of disease emergences. The methodology offers a way forward for researchers and development agencies to improve the surveillance and monitoring of water infrastructure and public health through an incremental approach that takes into consideration the diffuse interplay of power by diverse actors. It charts out avenues for building on the urban metabolism by emphasizing the importance of examining the sociospatiality of the everyday practices for improving resource use efficiencies in cities of rapidly growing economies.     

Multiculturalism,Latin Americans and ‘Indigeneity’ in Australia

What are the relations between the discourse of ‘multiculturalism’ and that of ‘indigeneity’ in Australia? In problematising these relations this paper explores the affiliations that Latin American migrants and political refugees living in Adelaide have with the notion of indigeneity. For some Latin Americans affiliations with the struggle of Aboriginal people and indigeneity is a product of strong political identification with the political left and the struggle for human rights in their countries of origin. At the same time references to Latin Americans' indigeneity are often evoked within Australian multicultural settings and performances that promote ‘cultural diversity’ and are consumed by White Australians for their exotic otherness and as forms of cultural enrichment. Such representations work to marginalise further the migrants (and the ‘indigenous’) into a cultural sphere which marks them as the tolerated ethnic ‘Other’.     

Transnationalism or assimilation? Patterns of sociopolitical adaptation among Canadian business immigrants

This study analyses patterns of sociopolitical incorporation among immigrant entrepreneurs in Ontario who entered Canada under the auspices of the federal Business Immigration Program [BIP] between 1984 and 1994. The analysis focuses specifically on issues of transnationalism, adaptation to mainstream social and political institutions, and citizenship. In-depth interviews of a sample of BIP entrepreneurs reveal that, over a period of eight to eighteen years, respondents generally achieved a high level of political awareness, maintained weak transnational ties, and naturalized at an extraordinarily high rate. In the process of sociopolitical integration, respondents relied primarily on human forms of capital, especially English language proficiency and business skills, rather than on the social capital that inheres in ethnic communities and networks.     

Shared Cultural History as a Predictor of Political and Economic Changes among Nation States

Political and economic risks arise from social phenomena that spread within and across countries. Regime changes, protest movements, and stock market and default shocks can have ramifications across the globe. Quantitative models have made great strides at predicting these events in recent decades but incorporate few explicitly measured cultural variables. However, in recent years cultural evolutionary theory has emerged as a major paradigm to understand the inheritance and diffusion of human cultural variation. Here, we combine these two strands of research by proposing that measures of socio-linguistic affiliation derived from language phylogenies track variation in cultural norms that influence how political and economic changes diffuse across the globe. First, we show that changes over time in a country’s democratic or autocratic character correlate with simultaneous changes among their socio-linguistic affiliations more than with changes of spatially proximate countries. Second, we find that models of changes in sovereign default status favor including socio-linguistic affiliations in addition to spatial data. These findings suggest that better measurement of cultural networks could be profoundly useful to policy makers who wish to diversify commercial, social, and other forms of investment across political and economic risks on an international scale.     

#SayHerName: a case study of intersectional social media activism

Social media activism presents sociologists with the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of how groups form and sustain collective identities around political issues throughout the course of a social movement. This paper contributes to a growing body of sociological literature on social media by applying an intersectional framework to a content analysis of over 400,000 tweets related to #SayHerName. Our findings demonstrate that Twitter users who identified with #SayHerName engage in intersectional mobilization by highlighting Black women victims of police violence and giving attention to intersections with gender identity. #SayHerName is a dialogue that centres Black cisgender and transgender women victims of state-sanctioned violence. Additionally, #SayHerName is a space for highlighting Black women victims of non-police violence. Therefore, we propose that future research on social media activism should incorporate intersectionality as a basis for understanding the symbols and language of twenty-first century social movements.     

Biological ancestries, kinship connections, and projected identities in four central Anatolian settlements: insights from culturally contextualized genetic anthropology

Previous population genetics studies in Turkey failed to delineate recent historical and social factors that shaped Anatolian cultural and genetic diversity at the local level. To address this shortcoming, we conducted focused ethnohistorical fieldwork and screened biological samples collected from the Yuksekyer region for mitochondrial, Y chromosome, and autosomal markers and then analyzed the data within an ethnohistorical context. Our results revealed that, at the village level, paternal genetic diversity is structured among settlements, whereas maternal genetic diversity is distributed more homogenously, reflecting the strong patrilineal cultural traditions that transcend larger ethnic and religious structures. Local ancestries and origin myths, rather than ethnic or religious affiliations, delineate the social boundaries and projected identities among the villages. Therefore, we conclude that broad, ethnicity-based sampling is inadequate to capture the genetic signatures of recent social and historical dynamics, which have had a profound influence on contemporary genetic and cultural regional diversity.     

Multiple hierarchies and the duplex nature of groups

This article examines the links between multiple hierarchies and a wide range of broad-based groups, in order to develop a theoretical framework capable of integrating group phenomena, social identities, and political mobilization. Various case-studies are used to illustrate how hierarchies between and within groups are obfuscated by discrepancies between the material and symbolic aspects of social reality. Yet such discrepancies, which are partly transparent, can generate contestation and the reconfiguration of groups. A duplexity model, which treats groups as a complex mix of embodied categories and observable attributes whose interconnections are contingent, can help unravel crosscutting social cleavages.     

From Casta to Californio: Social Identity and the Archaeology of Culture Contact

In culture contact archaeology, studies of social identities generally focus on the colonized–colonizer dichotomy as the fundamental axis of identification. This emphasis can, however, mask social diversity within colonial or indigenous populations, and it also fails to account for the ways that the division between colonizer and colonized is constructed through the practices of colonization. Through the archaeology of material culture, foodways, and architecture, I examine changing ethnic, racial, and gendered identities among colonists at El Presidio de San Francisco, a Spanish-colonial military settlement. Archaeological data suggest that military settlers were engaged in a double material strategy to consolidate a shared colonial identity, one that minimized differences among colonists and simultaneously heightened distinctions between colonists and local indigenous peoples.     

Young Chileans' Views of Citizenship: Findings From the First Generation Born After the Reinstitution of Democracy

Through a qualitative methodology, this study examines meanings attached to citizenship, barriers for citizenship, motivations for civic engagement, and aspirations as citizens in a sample (n = 71) of Chilean youth that grew up during the transition to democracy. The meanings youth attached to citizenship include membership, entitlement to rights and responsibilities, active participation, being informed, and voting. Participants perceived that practices of the political class, the economic system, and social disparities are barriers to exercising citizenship. They challenge the principles of a social order they consider unjust and advance proposals for social transformation that claim for social justice, reducing socio-economic disparities, discrimination, and bringing the political class closer to ordinary citizens. Findings reflect critical and cultural notions of citizenship. Contrasting their actual experiences with their aspirations for citizenship, participants feel politically inefficacious as they perceive they lack the power to influence the sociopolitical system. Implications for sociopolitical development and youth policy are discussed.     

Warts and All

A closer examination of the ways archaeological knowledge is spoken about and represented locally provides significant insights into social divisions and power struggles within Peru. In an account of the ambivalent relations between archaeologists and local experts in the prehispanic past, this article considers how the authority that enables the construction and maintenance of sociopolitical models (such as the ‘nation’) is itself constructed, not just from above, but also at the local level. The relationship between power and authority grants legitimacy to historical discourses justifying sociopolitical inequality and reinforces the centralized power structure of the Peruvian state. The article discusses the implications of these local perceptions for archaeology, both as a discipline practiced within the local setting, and as a category through which the Peruvian government expresses tropes of a unified modern identity.     

The politics of the social economy: a case study of the Argentinean empresas recuperadas

This paper offers an ethnographically grounded analysis of the transformative possibilities of the Argentinean empresas recuperadas (ERs), which speaks to current debates on the ‘social economy’. The ERs emerged in a context shaped by the crisis of neoliberalism and of the Argentinean political system and a huge upsurge in popular self-organisation. In response to widespread factory closures, thousands of workers occupied abandoned companies, forming cooperatives and often introducing assembly-based decision-making. By 2002, they established a national organisation, which connected workers’ struggles to a wider movement for institutional change. However, by 2006, the organisation had fragmented and many ERs had reinstalled traditional control methods. Much of the literature divides between idealistic and deterministic interpretations, which conceive as a technical material process. The paper proposes an alternative, a concept of labour as a process of creating value—subjective needs and values, and surplus value—which links organisations to society. Conceiving the ‘politics of value creation’ highlights continuities within the financial management and institutional relations of many ERs, but most importantly, it also recognises the different ways in which emerging social identities articulated a new need for control. Through two case studies, the paper explores the social processes through which these actors shaped their cooperatives in very different ways—highlighting innovations in accounting techniques and state-society relations. This reveals why a focus on accounting can enable anthropologists to recognise the general limitations of cooperatives and also their specific cultural diversity. In conclusion, the paper reconciles current discussions on the concept of the social economy by theorising it as the internal socialisation of capitalism and as an institutional expression of new cultural needs.     

Toward a Marxian anthropology? Bare,abstract, mobile,global

Anthropology has conventionally taken as some of its most cherished foundational categories the precise opposites of the key concepts that animate this inquiry: rather than “bare life,” anthropology has tended always to emphasize the fullness and complexity of social and political life; instead of labor in the abstract, which we recognize in its commodified form as “labor-power,” anthropology has produced exquisite inventories of concrete laboring activities and the “cultural” content of productive work; against the impermanence and mutability of lives characterized by their mobility, the ethnographic enterprise has been deeply attached to the sedentarist presuppositions of lasting settlement, dwelling, and “community”; and contrary to the task of apprehending space on a global scale, ethnographic study has been overwhelmingly localized and place-bound. Rethinking these elementary premises of the ethnographic endeavor and situating these critical concepts at the center of our epistemological frameworks are crucial theoretical and practical tasks for any meaningful social inquiry today. In this regard, the Marxian theoretical arsenal is simply indispensable. But, in the derisive words of so many disciplinary forebears and overseers, is this properly “anthropological”? The prospective convergence of genuinely critical sociopolitical inquiry with the techniques and insights of anthropology must remain for us the locus of an urgent problem—an open question on an open horizon.