Topographies of citizenship: Purhépechan Mexican women claiming political subjectivities

A variety of politics are waged through recourse to the language of ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’: from George W. Bush's selling of free trade for the Americas by invoking freedom and democracy, to the calls for citizenship and equality by popular movements throughout Latin America and other regions. This article links these paradoxical and transnational constructions of ‘citizenship’ to the daily economic and political struggles of indigenous women in rural Mexico. A transnational and what Cindi Katz calls a ‘topographical’ analysis of local processes deepens and complicates our understanding of local changes as they articulate with global dynamics, and it transforms how we conceptualize the global. Drawing on an ethnography of local gendered political transformation in Cherán, Mexico, I map processes visible locally onto spatialities of power and meaning across scales, weaving together various symbolic and material processes—the intentional actions and negotiations of individual women; the history of Cherán as a place and community; neoliberal economic globalization; and the effects of profoundly gendered and racialized nationalisms—in order to produce a situated knowledge of global citizenship politics. This approach highlights how women in Cherán, situated within global political economic relations and the symbolic horizons of ‘modernity’, transform the meaning and practice of citizenship and political subjectivity.     

The regard of the first man: on Joseph Addison’s aesthetic categories

This study examines the sources that could inspire Joseph Addison’s influential ‘aesthetic’ triad of ‘great’, ‘uncommon’, and ‘beautiful’, as elaborated in his essay-series The Pleasures of the Imagination in 1712. After identifying a philological problem in the interpretative tradition which gives rise to Addison’s triad from a section of Ps Longinus’ Peri Hypsous, further three seventeenth-century texts – Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra, Dominique Bouhours’ Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, and Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón – are presented in order to reconstruct a ‘reading glass’ through which Addison could peruse and understand the Longinian section, and then could create his ‘aesthetic’ triad. As a result of this reconstruction, the possible connection between Gracián’s allegorical novel and Addison’s essay can cast more light on the complex and insufficiently discussed relationship between theology or devotional literature and the emerging modern aesthetic discourse. From this angle, Addison’s ‘man of polite imagination’, that is, the homo aestheticus in the modern sense of the adjective, seems to be the heir of Gracián’s ‘first man’ who has the privilege of regarding the created world in a new light, and, as Addison’s aesthete, of discovering its greatness, novelty and beauty in ‘innocent pleasures’.     

The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his heirs 1794–1854

ABSTRACT

Historians of modern design and sociology have shown little interest in the leaders of the ever resourceful and influential British Positivist Society. One of the aims of this essay is to show that the Positivist polymath Frederic Harrison (1831–1923) cultivated ideas and practices that are compatible with modernists’ aspirations to improve the lives of the masses. It is accordingly shown that Harrison was an ardent supporter of working-class causes and that on this basis he developed sociological survey methods and produced social programmes to initiate the comprehensive reorganisation of cities. Harrison intended to realise a modern utopia called the “Occidental Republic”, created by Auguste Comte, the Positivist Philosopher who – during the 1830 and 1840s – introduced both sociology and the Religion of Humanity. While many studies pore over the Positivists’ “church” rituals, this essay is the first to argue that the Religion of Humanity and sociology were of equal consequence – and that together they formed the basis of their controversial spatial theory and practice, which was considered the means to realise Comte’s utopia. This vision, it is argued, is central to appreciating how Positivism percolated into the “modern movements” of architecture and planning.