"Subject Lessons" offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge "traveled" to India, changed that which it encountered, and was itself transformed in the process. Beginning in 1835, India's British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern, western knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the start, western education was endowed with great significance in India, not only by the colonizers but also by the colonized, to the extent that today almost all "serious" knowledge about India--even within India--is based on...
"Subject Lessons" offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge "traveled" to India, changed that which it encountered, and was itself transfo...
Writing letters to powerful people to win their favor and garner rewards such as political office, tax relief, and recommendations was an institution in Renaissance Florence; the practice was an important tool for those seeking social mobility, security, and recognition by others. In this detailed study of political and social patronage in fifteenth-century Florence, Paul D. McLean shows that patronage was much more than a pursuit of specific rewards. It was also a pursuit of relationships and of a self defined in relation to others. To become independent in Renaissance Florence, one first...
Writing letters to powerful people to win their favor and garner rewards such as political office, tax relief, and recommendations was an institution ...
A lauded contribution to historical sociology, "Class and the Color Line" is an analysis of social-movement organizing across racial lines in the American South during the 1880s and the 1890s. The Knights of Labor and the Populists were the largest and most influential movements of their day, as well as the first to undertake large-scale organizing in the former Confederate states, where they attempted to recruit African Americans as fellow workers and voters.
While scholars have long debated whether the Knights and the Populists were genuine in their efforts to cross the color line, Joseph...
A lauded contribution to historical sociology, "Class and the Color Line" is an analysis of social-movement organizing across racial lines in the Amer...
What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives.
Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers,...
What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people th...
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief--whether religious or secular--have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping...
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief--whether religious or secular--have ascribed wisdom to those who se...
For much of the twentieth century, France recruited colonial subjects from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in its military, sending West African soldiers to fight its battles in Europe, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. In this exemplary contribution to the "new imperial history," Gregory Mann argues that this shared military experience between France and Africa was fundamental not only to their colonial relationship but also to the reconfiguration of that relationship in the postcolonial era. Mann explains that in the early twenty-first century, among Africans in France and Africa, and...
For much of the twentieth century, France recruited colonial subjects from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in its military, sending West African soldiers ...
Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past.
Several contributors...
Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is n...
Laura L. Adams offers unique insight into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era through an exploration of Uzbekistan s production of national culture in the 1990s. As she explains, after independence the Uzbek government maintained a monopoly over ideology, exploiting the remaining Soviet institutional and cultural legacies. The state expressed national identity through tightly controlled mass spectacles, including theatrical and musical performances. Adams focuses on these events, particularly the massive outdoor concerts the government staged on the two biggest national...
Laura L. Adams offers unique insight into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era through an exploration of Uzbekistan s production...
Europe s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference particularly racial difference and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that...
Europe s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference particularly racial difference and its centrality to contemporary ...
City of Extremes is a powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994. Martin J. Murray describes how a loose alliance of city builders including real estate developers, large-scale property owners, municipal officials, and security specialists has sought to remake Johannesburg in the upbeat image of a world-class city. By creating new sites of sequestered luxury catering to the comfort, safety, and security of affluent urban residents, they have produced a new spatial dynamic of social exclusion, effectively barricading the mostly...
City of Extremes is a powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994. Martin J. Murray descr...