Civil society,political society and politics of disorder in Cambodia

This paper questions under what conditions the social foundation necessary for the construction and sustenance of civil society are present in post-colonial social formations, and the extent to which there has been a need to develop concessionary politics to maintain a project of rule. It utilizes Partha Chatterjee's usage of Gramsci's political society to understand how Cambodia's ILO-led garment factory monitoring regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of worker citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for their well being. I argue that the hegemonic project is fraught by virtue of the fact that consent-seeking forms of regulation, which aim to prevent strikes through trade union membership and tripartitism, have reached their limit and spilled over and into a disaggregated, messier terrain of struggles akin to political society. To develop the argument that workers' politics cannot be expressed in state-civil society relations, I present case studies of two forms of protest. The first form is distinguished by mass faintings, which I characterize as ‘visceral protest’ against the terms of workers' insertion into industrial capitalism. The second is large-scale, worker-led strikes that signal a ‘politics of social disorder’ is emerging, characterized by extra-legal, disruptive, and sometimes violent protest. The paper calls for a re-politicization of labor, and research attuned to workers' ambitions that cannot be reduced to a stable location or sphere within state-civil society relations.     

Taking back taste: feminism,food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which people's beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.     

Life and Death Decisions in our Posthuman(ist) Times

Abstract: Geography, like much of social science, is witnessing a resurgence of interest in Michel Foucault's formation of biopower—the power to make live and foster life. This paper seeks to engage with this interest by staging a dialogue between the work of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow on the one hand and that of Giorgio Agamben on the other. I propose that, while Rose and Rabinow provide a diagnostic for our emerging geographies of “life itself” and outline allied forms of political citizenship known as “biosociality” or “biological citizenship”, it is Agamben who enables us to consider the limit figures to this form of political inclusion. To draw out these limit figures I focus on recent debates surrounding end‐of‐life decisions and provide examples from the Dignity in Dying campaign and the Not Dead Yet movement. Throughout, I situate this paper within recent debates on posthumanism and the posthuman in geography. In doing so I effectively ask: why, in our seemingly posthuman(ist) times, does much of Western politics seek to decide on the form, the right and, inevitably, the limit of human beings?     

The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.     

Undoing Nature: The John Muir Trust's “Journey for the Wild”, the UK,Summer 2006

Abstract: I take as a point of departure for a discussion of the idea of nature the John Muir Trust's much publicised Journey for the Wild which took place in the UK during the summer of 2006. My objective is to explore how, at the same time that the “wild” was performed as a political category through the Journey, replicating the binary nature/society, prevalent norms of nature that depend on that binary, including, ironically, those of John Muir himself, were “undone”. I work with Judith Butler's (2004, Undoing Gender) ideas of “doing” and “undoing” gender and what counts as human, and her link between the articulation of gender and the human on the one hand and, on the other, a politics of new possibilities. Taking her argument “elsewhere”—unravelling what is performed as “wild” and what counts as “nature”—and using as evidence the art of Eoin Cox, the actions of journeyers, extracts from their diaries and from Messages for the Wild delivered to the Scottish Parliament, I suggest that the idea of a working wild points towards more socially just political possibilities than a politics of nature defined through a binary.     

Sociopolitics

Sociopolitics refer to ways in which politics and relations of power are constituted through an authoritative discourse on the social. This concept echoes Foucault's biopolitics. “Society” and the “social” are devices, as well as categorical foundations, for the political. As with “bio” in biopolitics, “socio” gives a particular form to power that it articulates and constitutes. This review essay uses this concept to discuss recent work of James Scott and David Graeber, and the English-language translation of a 1980 collection of essays by Pierre Clastres. I argue that this anarchist anthropology articulates a clear break within anarchist theory. This break is in the ways the social and the political are related as means and ends in ethnography and in conceptualization of anarchist practice.     

Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India: Art,Heritage, and Development in Ahmedabad,Gujarat

Using a critical cultural politics approach and deploying the concept of sentimental capitalism, this article problematizes the burgeoning creative economy discourse while analyzing spaces of art and heritage production in Ahmedabad, India. I situate the Cotton Exchange exhibit (April 2013) in an erstwhile mill in recent histories of mill closures, genocide, creative economy initiatives and development aspirations of revitalizing degraded space. I argue that in remaking place, art mobilizes sentiments—here, nostalgia and hope—while erasing violence and inequality. Sentimental capitalism is at work in the exhibition by mobilizing artisans as entrepreneurial agents not victims of capitalism; constructing art's aura of grassroots participation and artisanal empowerment while obscuring displacement and exploitation; and fostering cult‐like regard for art's intrinsic and instrumental value as non‐profit and its capacity to engender opportunity, recognition, and even property. While another spatial politics is possible, in Ahmedabad today, art is being mobilized to obscure dispossession and exploitation in the name of urban revitalization and heritage production.     

Caring at a distance: gift theory,aid chains and social movements

This paper takes as its starting point recent work on caring for distant others which is one expression of renewed interest in moral geographies. It examines relationships in aid chains connecting donors/carers in the First World or North and recipients/cared for in the Third World or South. Assuming predominance of relationships between strangers and of universalism as a basis for moral motivation I draw upon Gift Theory in order to characterize two basic forms of gift relationship. The first is purely altruistic, the other fully reciprocal and obligatory within the framework of institutions, values and social forces within specific relationships of politics and power. This conception problematizes donor–recipient relationships in the context of two modernist models of aid chains—the Resource Transfer and the Beyond Aid Paradigms. In the first, donor domination means low levels of reciprocity despite rhetoric about partnership and participation. The second identifies potential for greater reciprocity on the basis of combination between social movements and non‐governmental organizations at both national and trans‐national levels, although at the risk of marginalizing competencies of states. Finally, I evaluate post‐structural critiques which also problematize aid chain relationships. They do so both in terms of bases—such as universals and difference—upon which it might be constructed and the means—such as forms of positionality and mutuality—by which it might be achieved.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.     

Spaces of capability: Consumption geographies at an inner‐city university

Inner‐city universities are noteworthy in relation to food provisioning and consumption because of their locations and spatial characteristics. Among 18,500 university students surveyed by Universities Australia in 2017, one in seven reports being unable to eat in regular patterns. This finding suggests that it is important to explore how eating spaces at inner‐city universities intersect with students' eating practices. Ethnographic work conducted over three semesters in Melbourne at RMIT University's city campus revealed that around 100 microwaves installed there were used by students to prepare food in ways that may support regular eating. The research included observations, focus groups, and digital ethnography. Analysis of the findings suggests that the university's eating spaces and their material arrangements are related to students' on‐campus and off‐campus practices. Using both Walker's interpretation of Sen's capability approach—the social practice capability framework—and Schatzki's site ontology, I propose that this relationship produces spaces of capability, encouraging and enabling varied activities such as using leftovers, bulk cooking, and buying discretionary foods less impulsively. The study and its use of the idea of spaces of capability may foster new insights about the ongoing challenge to ensure student wellbeing and to consider the relationship of student wellbeing to broader issues such as sustainable consumption and environmental justice.     

Not My Taxes! Explaining Tax Resistance and its Implications for Australia's Welfare State

In discussing Australia's need to increase taxes to pay for future social security, Michael Keating worries that voters see taxes as a ‘burden’ and that ‘the link between taxation and citizenship has been broken’. This paper deals with the problem of tax resistance (preferring lower taxes even when tax cuts risk public services) for Australia's welfare state. First, I describe how two Australian fiscal institutions—a residual welfare system and visible income taxes—promote tax resistance among voters. Second, I draw on these insights to develop several explanations for tax resistance: voter self-interest, voter hostility to minorities, voter disengagement (low trust and lack of interest in politics), and individualistic attitudes. The main conclusion is that tax resistance in Australia is institutionalised, making it easier to mobilise interests around low taxes, and harder to advocate for alternatives. Results of multivariate analysis using AES 2004 data indicate that an ‘anti-tax coalition’ can build on three diverse publics; one of higher and middle-income earners attuned to self-interest, another hostile to welfare beneficiaries, and another ‘tuned out’ of politics and willing to support any call for tax cuts. Inevitably, the debate about the welfare state is shadowed by a debate about voter willingness to pay taxes that finance it.     

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

Nurses provide essential health care labor, but their work, a mix of caregiving and clinical expertise, is often undervalued and unacknowledged by health care administrators and the policies and practices that govern health care more broadly. Based on interviews with nurses working in the New York metropolitan area and through pairing feminist political economy with literature on abstraction and politics of the possible, I show that the ways in which nurses’ work is measured creates a value hierarchy of tasks. Examining various tools of measurement, I argue that methods for measuring work are rooted in an historical and continuous hierarchy of what counts as work and what has value. For nurses, these processes obscure the essential care work they perform. I argue that bringing an explicit politics of social reproduction to the politics of measuring and accounting for work makes visible necessary and often‐obscured tasks, spaces, and social relations.     

Policy Merchandising and Social Assistance in Africa: Don't Call Dog Monkey for Me

The title of this article draws on a Yorùbá aphorism that roughly translates into ‘don't sell me a dummy’. The dark side of social policy, the theme of this Debate, has a distinct character in the African context. The transformation of the African public policy landscape, shaped by the ‘counter-revolution’ in development thinking, has taken a new form with the donor ‘policy merchandising’ of cash transfer schemes. The stratified and segregated social policy on offer contrasts with the historical experience of ‘donor’ countries themselves. The policy instrument advanced is cast as ‘a silent revolution in development’, embodying the idea of development shifting from structural transformation to poverty alleviation. What is promoted is an impoverished version of development. Within the discourse of ‘working with the grain of African politics’, the politics of social assistance policy merchandising starts with a notion of politics as clientelist. It then deploys the instrumentality of clientelism — within an imperial deployment of power — in the manufacture of civil society and policy coalition, to ensure the local adoption of a policy instrument that the extra-territorial donor actors offer. This modality of public policy formulation contrasts sharply with the historical experience of public policy making in the ‘donor’ countries themselves. The result is the subversion of the consolidation of democracy in the African client states.     

Stating space in modern Mexico

This paper critiques the largely Anglophone “New Cultural History” (NCH) written on post-revolutionary Mexico, calling for a more robust theoretical and methodological approach to the state than scholars have thus far employed. Earlier trends, each of course inflected with the politics of their times, remained fastened upon the purportedly unified force of Mexican officialdom. Revisionist narratives tended to abstract the state from social and cultural belief and practice. As such, scholars' grasp of social change was weakened by their failure to see politics, culture, and society as interrelated processes. Nevertheless, the closer examination of popular culture stressed by some contemporary historians—an undeniably important analytical tack—still does not obviate the need for a solid, at times even central, focus on processes of state-formation. Herein, I review some of the critical contributions to a growing multidisciplinary field of state/culture studies, and from critical human geography, and suggest ways their insights might be useful for historians and historical geographers focusing on the post-revolutionary Mexican state.     

Reflective Action in the Academy: Exploring Praxis in Critical Geography using a “Food Movement” Case Study

Abstract: One of the key components of critical geography is praxis—defined here as the melding of theory/reflection and practice/action as part of a conscious struggle to transform the world. Put simply, praxis is giving life to ideas about the way the world is—and could be—by acting on one's convictions in daily (work and home) life. Praxis can thus take many forms, and can occur both within and outside the academy. This paper examines how research and practice can be co‐constituted by examining the “food movement” (ie the mobilization of disparate social actors in resistance to various aspects of the dominant corporate–industrial food system) in Canada as a case study. Through this lens, different forms of praxis are interrogated, not to identify a uniform “best praxis”, but rather to highlight the benefits and drawbacks of particular approaches in this one specific context. In so doing, the paper explores how critical geographers might contribute, through praxis, to the recognition and restructuring of social relations as part of the broader emancipatory project that is central to critical theory.     

Pierre Manent and the Politics of the Possible

Pierre Manent's recent works are marked by what he describes as a sense of realistic political possibility, which he uses to form a political response to the challenge of Islamic radicalism. Manent's “politics of the possible” differs from the usual alternatives that propose to integrate Islamic communities on liberal-individualist terms, or to repatriate Islamic immigrants to their countries of origin. Neither of those alternatives involves “politics” in the sense of articulating a political form within the polity given to us—a polity that now includes a sizable antiliberal minority. Manent's proposal to incorporate Muslim communities formally into the French polity by way of a certain social contract is thus a “politics of the possible” even if it is unlikely to be pursued. This article outlines Manent's account of political possibility and discusses two difficulties with his approach. First, the modern state's success and account of its legitimacy have distanced it from the foundational experiences in which it was capable of addressing the question of religion. Second, the situation caused by the radicalization of existing and new Muslim communities occurs at a different juncture in European political history from that which gave rise to the modern state.     

Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices,planty agencies and multiple temporalities in Australian viticulture

This article considers the agency of crop plants within sociocultural processes by examining how grape vines influence seasonal labour patterns in Australian viticulture and wine production. Drawing on ethnographic research within a large Australian wine company, I examine how vineyard managers and winemakers coordinate the timing of the grape harvest with the ripening of grapes. I argue that by making the harvest's approach perceptible to humans, chemical and sensory tests of grape ripeness precipitate seasonal changes in viticultural work—rendering grape vines active participants in patterning social time. Practices of attention to ripening grapes thus render the social agency of grape vines perceptible. I analyse these time-reckoning practices as a ‘learning to be affected’, in which human viticulturists actively strive through multiple sensory practices to become attuned to plants' activities. However, attending to the multiple practices used to reckon the ‘right’ time to harvest grapes also emphasises that these ways of enacting the times and agencies of crop plants may interfere or conflict with one another. Highlighting the emotional stresses and tensions between viticultural workers that this may generate, I suggest that agricultural time is both more conflicted and more suffused with power relations than theoretical accounts have typically indicated.     

Voices from the Kibbutz: Four Mothers,New Profile,and Women in Black

If there is any social organization that has provided a powerful illustration of the permeable boundaries between social politics—defined by Stephen M. Buechler as “forms of collective action that challenge power relations without an explicit focus on the state”—and social movements, and the role of collective identity in transforming either, as defined for women by Betty Friedan—it would be the Israeli kibbutz movement. The research presented here on grassroots Israeli women activists, a significant proportion of whom had grown up or had lived in a kibbutz, suggests that the social politics of everyday life on a kibbutz facilitated women's participation in larger social movements for peace, but also placed constraints on their activism. Many of these women had left or were in the process of leaving the kibbutz between 1989 and 1999, when this research was conducted. Those who had already left, and anchor women who organized urban demonstrations, saw the kibbutz as a conservative anti-woman force. Nonetheless, evidence gathered from qualitative interviewing with them suggests that the kibbutzim supported women who were politically active on national issues. Several women-led social protest movements illustrate how the kibbutz geared its members to think about the interplay of the moral and social orders in the small spaces of everyday life.     

Theorising 'Difference' in Aotearoa/New Zealand {1}

This paper discusses theoretical and political tensions that emerged for me as a result of exploring the implications of 'positionality'. The discussion is set in debates about the differences within and between women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Many New Zealand feminists, both Maori and Pakeha, have become concerned with the task of establishing an autonomous existence premised on unique identities. While recognising the political imperative that informs this politics and theorising, my own work has led me to theoretical understandings about the constitution of identities that could easily be construed as antagonistic to local aspirations. My dilemma, therefore, is how to produce feminist theory that compromises neither political or intellectual credibility. Positionality, I argue, involves not just positioning in a theoretical and ideological place, but also in a geographical location and, by implication, the politics of that place.     

Emancipatory or Neoliberal Food Politics? Exploring the “Politics of Collectivity” of Buying Groups in the Search for Egalitarian Food Democracies

In the context of apolitical tendencies in food studies, this paper explores how alternative food networks can contribute to developing emancipatory food politics rather than constitute a tool to reproduce neoliberal subjectivities. For this purpose, I contend that the post‐political literature offers a useful approach to examining the concept of food politics by developing a more robust theoretical framework, permitting the establishment of linkages with broader contemporary processes of social change. The analysis of an action‐research process with buying groups in Spain is used to examine the “politics of collectivity” at play, that is, how these initiatives institutionalise “the political”. Specifically I explore the motivations mobilised to construct place‐based ethical repertoires and unveil how these groups govern the relationality of consumption practices in the pursuit of broader processes of change. I conclude by discussing the contribution of these initiatives to building egalitarian food democracies.