Beyond Alternative: Exploring the Potential for Autonomous Food Spaces

Abstract: Much attention has been given in recent years to the rise of alternative food networks However, the very concept of “alternative” has come under increasing scrutiny, as theorists grapple with what is meant by alternative and whether the concept adequately captures the key components of such a diverse range of networks and communities. Drawing on poststructuralist political economy, I propose the concept of autonomous food spaces as one possible lens for approaches food‐provisioning activities that situate food within the broader context of non‐capitalist communities seeking to build relationships of mutual aid and non‐market exchanges. I use the examples of a radical collective kitchen, Food Not Bombs, and a community‐supported agriculture operation, Vegetables Unplugged, to explore the potential for autonomous food spaces as part of a broader “politics of possibilities” beyond capitalism.     

Beyond the Chokepoint: Blockades as Social Struggles

Blockades are a long-standing tool used by political groups of various kinds to interrupt or redirect flows of materials, capital, and people. In this introduction to the Symposium, “On the Blockade: Geographies of Circulation and Struggle”, we review recent debates concerning the politics of spatial disruption, chokepoints, and circulation struggles. In doing so, we question some tendencies to fetishise the seizure of capital circulation as a de facto progressive form of disruption to the contemporary order. We argue that blockades ought to be considered not merely as tactics or pure negations of capital, but instead are articulations of collective life and open-ended attempts to build power. Thinking with blockades thus requires accounting for not only their spatial disruption but also their distinct historical contexts and social forms. We introduce the articles in this Symposium through an analysis of five modalities through which blockades can be interpreted: as moments of refusal, redistribution, provocation, subject-formation, and concrete utopia. Finally, we describe five future directions for scholars and movements: insurgent mapping, feminist interpretation, expansion of blockade networks, analysis of reactionary blockades, and broadening the geographical and historical scope of study.     

社会名望与权力平衡:解读王敦之乱

东晋初期,皇权与士族之间以及士族内部存在着权力分配的微妙平衡。王敦第一次举兵是反对元帝打破此平衡之举,第二次举兵却是自己主动打破此平衡,因此众多士族对此的反应前后大不相同。最终,这场各方力量参与的博弈维持了东晋初期权力平衡的局面。在这场权力角逐中,名望所带来的社会资本扮演了关键的角色。通过对王导、元帝、王敦、周■、温峤等人社会资本与政治权力的分析,可以揭示出文化场域中名望与政治场域权力间的互动和转化。     

Welfare Caseload Change: An Alternative Approach

In the last decade, caseloads in AFDC/TANF have shifted dramatically up, then down. Of existing studies based on time series or state panel data, some tend to underplay the role of welfare reform. All say little about what policies drove the decline or about the role of governmental quality. An approach using cross-sectional models explains interstate differences in caseload change rather than the national trend but allows more discussion about the role of policy and government. Results suggest that grant levels, work and child support requirements, and sanctions are important explainers of change, along with some demographic terms and unemployment. These policies in turn are tied to states' political opinion, political culture, and institutional capacity. Moralistic states seem the most capable of transforming welfare in the manner the public wants.     

关于社会主体旅游方式决定因素的分析——兼论东西方旅游习惯差异的形成与表现

东西方国家民众的主体旅游方式和旅游传统有着明显差异,长期以来,西方人喜欢一地停留式的“度假旅游”,以中国人为典型代表的东方人则喜欢周游式“观光旅游”。本文认为,东西方之间在旅游文化上的这种差异,不但体现在社会主体旅游方式上,也体现在各自语言文化中有关旅游的日常用语上,还体现在旅游机构的名称,以及旅游统计口径和划分标准上。本文进一步认为,是以下六大因素决定了社会主体旅游方式的形成——文化观念、社会环境、地理条件、经济条件、心理因素、科技水平,并分析了它们如何作用于人们旅游习惯的形成。     

REVIEW ESSAY Beyond Social Construction: Toward New Histories of Psychiatry

Focusing on symptom classification and on the outcome of somatic interventions, Berrios and Shorter challenge the social constructionist and anti-psychiatry tendencies that have framed the writing of the history of psychiatry for the past quarter-century. Contextualizing clinical interventions, these studies point out the value of examining the proposition that practitioners were motivated as much about curing distress as they were about eliminating nonconformity. Such examinations require an understanding of the strengths and limits of medical science that often have been trivialized or ignored by some social constructionists. Together the studies under review open the possibility that recent biological interventions may have transformed psychiatry in such fundamental ways that they call into question the assumptions that have underlay in an almost two-century-old classification system. Ironically, adherence to the scientific method (falsification) reveals that the biological revolution in psychiatry fits post-modern claims about the tentative nature of knowledge claims, while it simultaneously undercuts the particular historical interpretations of post-modern scholarship.     

Beyond the Coastalscapes: Preindustrial Social and Political Networks in East Africa

The archaeological community worldwide now readily recognizes the role and significance of interregional interaction in the development and sustenance of urban societies (e.g., Marcus and Sabloff 2008; Sinclair et al. 2010; Trigger 2003). Over the past two decades, we have carried out a systematic, problem-oriented research program on the Kenyan coast and its hinterland in an effort to understand the ecological and cultural milieu that enabled towns and city-states to develop along the East African coast beginning in the late first millennium CE. Archaeological research complemented with historical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows that different scales of analysis can be used to understand the long-term history of the development of urbanism along this Swahili coast: local, regional, and trans-continental frames of reference each show that Swahili communities were part of numerous networks of interactions. An emerging picture of preindustrial urbanism shows that local, regional, and trans-continental interaction spheres tied coastal towns to the hinterland and to wider Indian Ocean commercial and social networks. Not all of the theorized links between the coastal towns and their local and regional trade and interaction partners will be visible archaeologically. We address the still poorly known elements of preindustrial regional networks of alliance and interaction spheres between urban and rural polities and argue that an integrative approach is necessary to understand the context of coastal urban society.     

Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to increase the production of environmental benefits, have expanded across the global South since the late 1990s. These initiatives have thus far been conceptualized rather narrowly; by their early proponents as a novel economic instrument for more ‘rational’, effective and efficient environmental policy or by their critics as an exogenously imposed conduit of hegemonic neoliberalism. This introductory article to the special issue that follows advocates for and demonstrates a more grounded and historically situated approach for understanding the conformation and outcomes of PES in actual practice. It proposes a framework for examining individual PES initiatives as shaped by dynamic interactions between imposed structure and the development pathways and situated agency of actors in the territories in which they are implemented. It finds that certain ubiquitous components of this approach — the valuation of nature, the creation of institutions and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — provide potential openings for articulation and engagement that can allow these initiatives to be contested, adapted, hybridized or more fully co-opted and captured. This framework opens a pathway for more inclusive, nuanced and grounded research on PES and on market-based environment and development policies more broadly.     

Karl Polanyi for Historians: An Alternative Economic Narrative

The purpose of this essay is to provide the historian with a generic understanding of the term economy by examining some aspects of the work of the Hungarian “economic historian” Karl Polanyi (1886–1964). It does not seek to explain Polanyi's economic ideas to economists nor does it seek to locate his ideas within the discourses of the academic discipline of economics; there is abundant academic literature which carries out those tasks. This essay is intended to help fill a void in the historical understanding, especially the modern historical understanding, of the term economy, and of how the characteristics associated with it are generally understood. Yet, in reality, it is the neoclassical paradigm of economics which is typically and uncritically taken to be the touchstone for understanding the economy. This circumstance is problematic, however, when referring to the economy of societies earlier than the late nineteenth century or of societies whose culture differs radically from that of the advanced capitalist “west.” Polanyi's insights may help historians avoid the risk of either distorting or anachronistically misunderstanding the economy of such societies.