Languages as Women: The Feminisation of Linguistic Discourses in Colonial North India

This article locates and analyses the gendered discourses of Hindi and Urdu linguistic identity in late nineteenth‐century colonial north India. Using a new concept of language woman, it characterises the multiple discourses of feminisation through three distinctive terms of linguistic femininity, linguistic morality and linguistic patriarchy. These three modes of representation and articulation of feminised discourses over Hindi and Urdu languages are explored using the concept of heteronormativity as a political, ideological and social–cultural construct. The paper argues that language woman established an intimate bond between nationalisation and feminisation of the dominant Hindi linguistic identity in private and public domains as not mutually opposed but complementary and reproducible of each other.     

Commentary: Tex-map Mania: The Outline of Texas as a Popular Symbol

The Canto general is a book containing a large collection of poems by Pablo Neruda that shows the intricate relationships among nature, places, and peoples in the Americas. The third section in the book, “Los conquistadores,” has heretofore received scant critical attention. Its warp is Neruda's depictions of nature, Indians, and the conquistadors. “Los conquistadores” is shown to be much more than a reiteration of the Black Legend, which presents the Spanish conquest and settlement of the Americas in an entirely negative manner. Neruda's vision of a new people bonded to nature for nourishment and united in a collective will is discussed, and the role of the Conquest toward that end is explained.     

Turkey and the Palestinian Question: The Shift of Roles in Foreign Policy

For Turkey, which was seeking a leading role in the Middle East, the Palestinian Question became a priority in its foreign policy during the late 1990s. In this article, it is argued that the role Turkey primarily espoused in the resolution of the Palestinian Question in the period 2000–2009 has mainly been that of a communicator. Nonetheless, in times of crises between Palestine and Israel, Ankara lost its neutrality and credibility to some extent, as it shifted to the role of guardian of Palestinians and proponent of Palestine, thereby undermining its communicator role. Finally, this dilemma in Turkish foreign policy in the Palestinian Question was the fundamental impediment to Turkey's sustainable and constructive contribution to the settlement of the problem in the examined period.     

The Civil Intifada:1 The Power and Politics of the Palestinian Census

The Palestinian census of December 1997 holds both symbolic power, grounding a national identity within an intended modern, sovereign structure, and instrumental value, serving as a basis for social and economic development. Some scholars privilege the role of domination in this enumeration process, imposing official categorizations on people for the purpose of state control. However, in this article I argue that the census also has the potential to promote resistance, contingent upon the nature of the agency implementing the process and the historical circumstances of the community engaged in this exercise. In this case, Palestinian and Israeli governments compete over the parameters of this research implementation, particularly within the confines of Jerusalem, recognized by each as its (intended and existing) capital. Based on personal interviews, official documents and secondary sources, I describe this process in relation to other attempts to articulate a Palestinian community, and characterize the census within the context of a Palestinian political struggle for sovereignty against a dominant Israeli state.     

The Father's Success and the Son's Failure: Explaining the Growth of Lebanon's Resistance to Syria's Invisible Occupation

In the 15‐year period since the Syrian military entry into Lebanon on June 1, 1976, allegedly to put an end to the civil war that broke out there a year earlier, Syria firmly solidified its control of the country, as evidenced by the signing of the “Treaty of Brotherhood, Cooperation and Coordination between Syria and Lebanon,” on May 22, 1991, which granted Syria a special status. Yet, 14 years later, on April 24, 2005, the Syrian forces withdrew from Lebanon. This article seeks to explain this relatively rapid decline in Syria's standing in Lebanon by examining the strategies of the two Syrian rulers who indirectly controlled this country during those years. It examines what was right in Hafiz al‐Asad's strategy in Lebanon, and what did not work in Bashar's policy. In 2000, the year of Hafiz al‐Asad's death, Syria's status in Lebanon seemed unshakable: 1) Lebanon's president (Emile Lahoud) acted as Damascus's puppet; 2) Hezbollah, the Shi‘a militia Hezbollah largely accepted Syria's authority while it simultaneously tightened its control over southern Lebanon and also began gaining popularity in the rest of the country; and 3) finally the politics of the noble families, which had characterized Lebanon since its establishment, began to gradually give way to a politics where a political figure is measured by the level of his connections to the country's power base in Damascus. Yet, merely five years later, Syria was under immense pressure to withdraw its forces from Lebanon. This suggests that we must look at the difference between the strategies of Hafiz al‐Asad and his son Bashar for controlling Lebanon to better understand the rapid deterioration in Syria's standing in the country. We argue that the difference in the degree of anti‐Syrian pressures from Lebanon's society and political elements between the two tenures is largely rooted in the different strategies that the two Syrian presidents adopted for informally ruling Lebanon. We identify three main areas where Bashar al‐Asad made mistakes due to his failure to continue his father's methods. First, Bashar put all his cards on Hezbollah, thus antagonizing all the other groups which resented that Shi‘a dominance. Second, in stark contrast to his father, Bashar distanced himself from the regular management of Lebanon's ethnic politics. Hafiz al‐Asad made sure that all the leaders of the different ethnic groups would visit Damascus and update him on their inter‐ethnic conflicts, and then he would be the one who would either arbitrate between them or, for expediency reasons, exacerbate these feuds. Once the ethnic leaders had to manage without Damascus, they learned to get along, making him far less indispensable for the running of the country. Finally, Bashar, unlike his father, did not make a real effort to gain international and regional legitimacy (or at least de‐facto acceptance) for Syria's continued control over Lebanon. Most conspicuously, while Hafiz participated in the First Gulf War against Iraq, his son supported Sunni rebels who fought against the United States‐led coalition forces there. This foreign acquiescence was significant since the Lebanese felt they had a backing when they demanded Syria's withdrawal in 2005. These different strategic approaches of the two rulers meant that the father's policies wisely laid the ground for some of the most controversial measures which were needed as part of any attempt to monopolize control over another country, such as Lebanon (assassinating popular but too independent‐minded Lebanese presidents/prime ministers or extending tenures of loyalist ones), whereas the son's policies myopically failed to do so properly. Indeed, the article will show that while both the father and the son took these same controversial measures, the responses of the Lebanese were completely different. Admittedly, some historical developments increased the Lebanese propensity to rise up against Syria, and these meant that Bashar did in fact face a harder task than his father in maintaining Syria's informal occupation. The Israeli withdrawal from its so‐called “security zone” in south Lebanon meant that one justification for the Syrian presence was gone. More importantly, the risk of renewed eruption of the civil war (which in turn had meant for many years a greater willingness by the locals to tolerate the Syrian presence which prevented the war's resumption) declined significantly due to a variety of processes that could not have been halted even with better “management” of the interethnic strife from Damascus (i.e., making sure that the ethnic groups remained in deep conflict with each other). Nevertheless, as we will show, Bashar's mistakes played a crucial role in bringing the rival ethnic groups together by making Damascus their joint enemy.     

Employers as Mediating Institutions for Public Policy: The Case of Commute Options Programs

Scholars have recently noted the role that employers can play as “mediating institutions” for public policy. Mediating institutions connect the private lives of individuals with public policy concerns by communicating societal norms to members and providing social contexts that encourage a commitment to these norms. Despite the potential importance of employers as mediating institutions for public policy, little scholarly attention has been devoted to employer mediation behavior. Accordingly, this study examines two research questions. What factors influence an employer's willingness to mediate policy problems? And how effective are employers as mediating institutions? The mediation behaviors of interest relate to employer efforts to mitigate traffic congestion and air quality problems by enabling employee “commute options,” which are alternatives to single‐occupancy vehicle commuting to work. Drawing on theories of organization behavior, the study hypothesizes that self‐interest, organizational control, and association membership will affect willingness to provide commute options. The study also hypothesizes that employers providing commute options will have lower percentages of employees that drive to work alone. Both sets of hypotheses are supported by statistical analyses of data from a cross‐sectional mail survey of metropolitan Atlanta organizations.     

Nuclear Weapons: The Global and Popular Context of Policy

Book reviewed:
Lawrence S. Wittner. Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement , 1971 to the Present . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. 491 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 (cloth), $32.95 (paper).     

Place and Innovation in Popular Music: The Bebop Revolution in Jazz

This paper explores the relationship between place and processes of innovation in popular music, focusing on the example of the bebop style of jazz. Bebop emerged during the 1940s both as a reaction against older jazz styles and as an expression of artistic innovation within a community of younger jazz musicians. The process of its creation and early development was situated in a set of "nested'' locales centered in New York City. This analysis examines the diverse nature of these locales and the distinctive ways in which they fostered interactions among bebop's creators and their various audiences. The analysis reveals that different locales played dissimilar roles during specific stages in bebop's emergence, as it evolved into an increasingly coherent form of cultural expression. Most importantly, certain jazz clubs in Harlem provided a setting for the early experimentation that culminated in the bebop style, but the style's subsequent formalization and popularization depended on its exposure in jazz clubs in midtown Manhattan, at first along 52nd Street and later on nearby sections of Broadway. These findings confirm the importance of place in understanding the dynamic nature of popular music and the processes of innovation integral to it.     

20世纪规模最大的中国民间教门田野调查--评路遥《山东民间秘密教门》

路遥教授著《山东民间秘密教门》 (当代中国出版社 ,2 0 0 0年版 ,以下简称《山东教门》) ,是一部经过田野调查和口述史研究 ,将乡土社会的越轨信仰集团引入历史学的力作。这项研究自 1 990年被确定为山东省社会科学“八五”规划的重点项目之后 ,作者和他的助手们费时近 1 0年 ,足迹遍及山东境内及河北部分地区计 70多县的广袤的乡村集镇 ,不论从时间跨度还是从地域范围看 ,都可以称得上是 2 0世纪中国规模最大的一次民间教门的田野调查。 45万余字的著述凝结了作者创获性的丰硕成果 :在前人相关研究的基础上 ,该书进一步理清了历史上发源于…     

The Ethnocracy of the Palestinian Urban Space and the Indigenous Approach: Praxis and Theory

This article is a case study of the Palestinian recent past that produces a new knowledge on the maltreatment given to the archaeological remains of the Palestinians in the Late Ottoman period (18th to 20th centuries) by the dominant culture in Israel. The inequitable representation of the Palestinian-Ottoman heritage by the state creates both submission and resistance to the prevailing culture by the Palestinian citizens. The new knowledge created by this case study may be further used in order to understand the diverse experience of marginality of various contemporary dispossessed and displaced groups.