A Feminist Generation in Iran?

Numerous observers have noted that a feminist generation of educated young women appears to be emerging in Iran, despite the anti-feminist discourse of the Iranian government. Evidence from three surveys conducted in 2000–2003 confirms and complicates these observations. Educated young women are significantly more likely to espouse feminist attitudes of various sorts than other Iranians, including educated young men. In addition, educated young women are significantly more likely to work outside the home, marry later, give birth later, have fewer children, and have more egalitarian marriages than other Iranian women. However, surprising proportions of older Iranians also espouse feminist attitudes, and a majority of respondents in one nationally representative sample of urban Iranians identify themselves as proponents of women's rights.     

Is Feminist geography relevant?

Abstract

As the whole point of feminism is to empower women and girls and to improve the circumstances of their lives, most feminist geographers would claim that indeed feminist geography is — or at least aims to be — relevant; they would then hasten to point to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in this claim: what counts as relevant and relevant to whom are complicating questions. The work of feminist geography encompasses teaching, activism and scholarship — all potentially relevant activities. In considering what counts as relevant, I discuss the difficulties of equating relevant with applied and of knowing whether or not our teaching, research and activism will turn out to be relevant. Complicating any claim to relevance is our inability to know, and lack of control over, how others will use our work. Asking ‘relevant to whom?’ points to the difficult truth that what some women view as positive change others may see as harmful to their interests; in this senserelevance is specific to particular contexts, scales and places. At the same time, relevance can enter the intricate web of global interconnections and transcend particular contexts, scales and places. Relevance itself is therefore a geographic concept. Feminist geographers struggle to hold together these sometimes contradictory geographic dimensions of relevance. I close by arguing that the growing body of feminist geography work engages with a range of social issues around the world and certainly has the potential for relevance at a variety of scales. But the relevance question will remain a complex and ambiguous one for feminist geographers.     

Multiply Situated Strategies? Multi-Sited Ethnography and Archeology

Recent literature hails George Marcus’ multi-sited ethnographic strategy as a potentially useful approach for juxtaposing relations that transcend conventional spatiotemporal boundaries of archeological sites. Emerging from these discussions is what has been labeled multi-sited archeology, adapted from multi-sited ethnography to serve archeologists’ interests in comparing locales, multi-scalar connections, and local–global relations. Following a brief overview of multi-sited ethnographic principles, a review of the archeological literature exposes how archeologists are increasingly engaged with parts of multi-sited ethnography in practice, but in ways that remain, in our critical discussions, largely disengaged with the genealogy and idiosyncrasies of the approach’s foundational elements. Convergences and disjunctures between multi-sited strategies in ethnographic and in archeological practice are explored; these provide the basis for suggesting what might be a multi-sited archeology, illustrated here by a case study about the early New England iron industry. While multi-sited ethnography clearly cannot be a copy-and-paste application in archeology, its distinctiveness and usefulness in archeological comparisons is open to debate.     

Views and Commentaries: What Difference Does Feminist Theory Make?

This discussion explores what difference a feminist perspective makes in our understandings of the past in two ways. The first section examines to what extent feminist research questions were asked in the preceding papers by Lu Ann De Cunzo, Eleanor Casella, and Susan Piddock. The second section shows what difference feminist theory has made in asking new questions that have produced new gendered understandings of the global historical context of these papers. As a whole, this discussion shows how feminist theoretical approaches change our understanding of the lives of historic women and men in nineteenth century reform institutions within their larger gendered cultural context. While the introduction to this volume presents the broader ungendered historical context, this discussion focusses on the gendered cultural context that was foundational to the gender relationships embodied in the arrangement of architectural spaces and material culture at the sites in the preceding three papers.     

A Textual Ethnography of Collaboration in Early Sámi Studies

This is an ethnographic study of collaboration for publishing textual representations of the Sámi based on ethnographic experience that reflect acquisition of agency and contingent intertextuality. The textual ethnography unravels early twentieth-century collaborative frameworks in which the investigated works were generated and their historical context. Consequently, my paper proposes to re-evaluate the role and impact of the ethnographic writing by Emilie Demant Hatt in addition to her collaboration with Johan Turi. This entails an exploration into personal histories and relationships, gendered ramifications, intellectual and political context, the creative process, the contingent editorial activities and their reception histories.     

Machiavelli: A Socratic?

Erica Benner and Leo Strauss have recently challenged the reigning consensus that, having concentrated on politics, Machiavelli was not a philosopher. Readers did not always consider Machiavelli's work to be unphilosophical; and whether a commentator considers Machiavelli to be a “philosopher” depends on his or her understanding of what a philosopher is. Neither Benner nor Strauss takes the activities and studies of professors of philosophy in universities today to be definitive. Instead, they look to an older tradition both describe as “Socratic.” Benner rests her argument primarily on Machiavelli's references to Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch. Unfortunately, Machiavelli's references to the works of Xenophon and Plato do not include those that feature Socrates. Strauss points out the similarities between Socrates and Machiavelli's emphasis on the political and their appeal to the young, but he concludes that, although Machiavelli is a “political philosopher,” his use of philosophy to serve the desires of the demos means that he is not a “Socratic.”     

Who is the ‘Other‘?: A Postmodern Feminist Critique of Women and Development Theory and Practice

In the last decade poststructural and postmodern critiques have increasingly dominated the world of scholarship. The grand theories of the past have been called into question; universals have been overtaken by particularities and difference. Feminist scholars have reacted to postmodernism in a number of ways. Some reject it outright, while others call for a synthesis of feminist and postmodern approaches. Many scholars and activists concerned with Third World issues, especially poverty and development, have rejected both feminism and postmodernism, dismissing them as First World preoccupations, if not indulgences. This article seeks to explore the relevance of postmodern feminism for Third World problems and analysis, particularly its utility for theorists and practitioners concerned with issues of women and development.     

Pepperoni or Broccoli? On the Cutting Wedge of Feminist Environmentalism

Feminist environmentalism has become a significant intellectual and social policy force across fields as diverse as public health, political economy, philosophy, science, and ecology. Feminist environmental theory and activism together are challenging and redefining foundational principles, from animal rights to the environmental economy of illness and well-being, from global political economy to the role of Big Science as the primary arbiter of the state of the environment. Animal rights is one of the most intellectually challenging and innovative areas of intellectual activity and social activism, and within feminist environmentalism is one of the most radical subfields. This paper provides an overview of activity in this subfield, starting from the observation that feminist environmental scholarship and grassroots activism on animal rights pivot around three concerns: elucidating the commonalities in structures of oppressions across gender, race, class, and species; developing feminist-informed theories of the basis for allocating "rights" to animals; and exposing the gendered assumptions and perceptions that underlie human relationships to nonhuman animals. At the same time, the serious contemplation of animal rights makes a considerable contribution to destabilizing identity categories and adds new dimensions to theorizing the mutability of identity.     

Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice

Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in development, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize. Focusing on the unfolding activities of a development project over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this article challenges the assumption that development practice is driven by policy, suggesting that the things that make for ‘good policy’— policy which legitimizes and mobilizes political support — in reality make it rather unimplementable within its chosen institutions and regions. But although development practice is driven by a multi‐layered complex of relationships and the culture of organizations rather than policy, development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorized policy, because it is always in their interest to do so. The article places these observations within the wider context of the anthropology of development and reflects on the place, method and contribution of development ethnography.     

HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?

Richard Kirkendall's collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association's (MVHA) and the OAH's activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization's progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall's book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization's history.     

Mercosur: A Failing Development Project?

Latin America is a developing region. Although it is different from other such regions it shares with them ‘the challenge of change’, particularly as a result of globalization. Its response has been to embrace democracy, neoliberal restructuring and ‘new (open) regionalism’. The ‘Common Market of the South’—Mercosur—was an important regional initiative involving Argentina and Brazil, and included in its various aims was the acceleration of ‘economic development with social justice’. This article explores to what extent development aims have been achieved and whether Mercosur is little more than a loose confederation of states unable to build institutional structures that could help development. To what extent is this the result of traditions that have entrenched elites and prevented a more egalitarian approach? Has the law generally failed its citizens? Or does it have a place in development? The article begins by briefly considering the concept of ‘development’ and seeks to place Latin America within the ‘developmental framework’ and questions whether there is a distinct Latin American development tradition. Within that tradition, and in the context of the ‘inter‐American system’ and globalization, the development of Mercosur is assessed both in terms of institution building and legal traditions. Finally, some preliminary conclusions are drawn about Mercosur's future and the extent to which institutional and other constraints have contributed to Mercosur falling short of its devleopmental potential.     

Critical Nationalism: A Liberal Prescription?

Abstract. In this article I examine the coherence of ‘liberal nationalism’, namely, the attempt to combine liberal and nationalist ideas. Attempts have been made to marry these ideas because of the belief that nationalism has continuing influence and importance for the achievement of liberal objectives, such as respect for identity, democracy and justice. Two central ideas in liberalism are the idea of self‐respect as a primary good and the idea of critical reflectiveness. A central idea in nationalism is the idea of the importance of the nation as a community. If critically reflective individuals are to possess self‐respect then, I argue, the value of membership of particular national communities needs to be argued for against criticism. By rejecting an appeal to universal principles, however, nationalists are unable to provide a reasoned defence of the importance of particular national communities, and therefore unable to satisfy the liberal commitment to self‐respect resulting from critical reflection on membership of a national community. The particularism of nationalism, indeed, pulls against the universalism of liberalism so that ‘liberal nationalism’ constitutes an incoherent construct.     

Noril'sk Nickel: A Global Company?

Two specialists on Russia's minerals industries examine the evidence supporting the argument that the Russian mining conglomerate Noril'sk Nickel can be viewed as a global company. Included among the criteria they assess are the geographic dispersion of the company's markets and operations, the diversified and multinational character of its ownership, whether it has matched the performance standards set by its major international competitors, and the effect of the company's ownership presence on the management style of its foreign operations. A particular focus is on how an ongoing conflict between two major Russian oligarch shareholders (Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska) has shaped Noril'sk Nickel's ownership and management structure, which is characterized by the continued (background) presence of the state, the lack of any organized policy for training a multinational management cohort, and the absence of a major block of foreign shareholders. In the end, they conclude that Noril'sk Nickel is not a genuinely global but rather a Tier-1 Russian company, albeit one with a global scale of operations.