Mad cow militancy: Neoliberal hegemony and social resistance in South Korea

Massive protests shook South Korea through the summer of 2008. This political eruption which exhibited many novel and unexpected elements cannot be explained by pointing to basic political conditions in South Korea (strong labor unions, democratization, and so forth). Neither does the putative reason for them – to protest the new President’s decision to reopen South Korea’s beef market to the U.S. – adequately explain the social dynamics at play. In this paper, we examine the political geography of the ‘candlelight protests’ (as they came to be known), focusing in particular on their novel aspects: the subjectivities of the protesters, fierce ideological struggles, and differentiated geography. We argue that the deepening of neoliberal restructuring by the new conservative regime formed the underlying causes of these intense conflicts. In other words, the new protests should be seen as a response to the reinforced contradictions engendered by neoliberalization and a new alignment of social groups against the prevailing hegemonic conditions in South Korea. In this view, the huge demonstrations revealed vulnerabilities in conservative hegemony but failed to produce a different hegemony. To advance these claims, we examine three aspects of the protests: first, the neoliberal policies of the new conservative regime; second, the intense ideological conflicts around the media; and finally, the spatial materialization of the protests.     

“利他之心”在加利福尼亚

一、取得成功却被工会觊觎 我出生于1935年,高中毕业后继承家业从事过一个阶段的农业。23岁结婚并生下长女,但因感到就这样在农村务农人生没有希望。就在1961年作为农业见习生远渡美国。那一年我25岁。     

Bad,bad multiculturalism!!

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? By Susan Moller Okin with respondents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), vi?+?146 pp. $29.95 cloth; $12.95 paper.     

醉美加州海岸线

正一边是海阔天空惊涛拍岸,一边是陡峭悬崖群峦迭翠,还有一连串如珍珠般洒落的玲珑小镇贯穿其间。美国加州一号公路海岸线,是阳光与海洋的交融,是流动的《蓝色狂想曲》,是大自然的倾情奉献。     

Socioreligious context and rock art in east-central California

Interpretations of rock art typically focus on the symbolic meaning of the art, treating the paintings and engravings implicitly as passive iconographic texts. Rock art, however, is the product of active ritual and ceremony. As such it played an important role in the socioreligious lives of its creators and users. Here I provide a study of the socioreligious contexts of the pictographs and petroglyphs of eastern California, North America, emphasizing the painted art of the Tubatulabal and Coso Shoshone territories and the petroglyphs of the Coso region and using only archaeological data. This requires, first, establishing the chronological placement of this art. Based on a variety of lines of evidence the pictographs and some of the petroglyphs are argued to be historic in age. An ethnography of communications model is then used to provide a conceptual basis for investigating socioreligious contexts and ritual functions of the art. Message content is studied using a factor analysis of painted motif types and an examination of the distribution of sites predominated by certain factors. Two motif complexes, or message content groups, are identified: a Tubatulabal ritual community, employing geometric designs, and a Coso Shoshone community, exhibiting a predominance of representational pictographs. Analysis of message form, channels, settings, and inferred ritual participants suggests that Tubatulabal art resulted from community rituals, in which all the inhabitants of a hamlet would have directly or indirectly participated. Knowledge of the rules for creating and interpreting the parietal art would have been common to all in the community. In contrast, pictographs of the Coso Shoshone were the result of private rituals, with limited numbers of participants and witnesses. The message communicated in the ritual and the painted art would have necessarily been arcane, and few in the community at large may have even known of the creation of this rock art. The Coso petroglyphs, also created by the Coso Shoshone but apparently by a different ritual community within the population, had a different set of rules for ritual actions and symbolic interpretation. The ceremonies creating the engravings were commonplace, yet logically were conducted in private or with few participants, suggesting that the knowledge concerning the means for undertaking and interpreting this type of ritual was widely known throughout the population.     

动感北加州

<正>在美国这个全民皆运动的国度,你会深切地感知体育已渗透进民众的灵魂深处。体育运动是亲友联络团聚的纽带,是永恒的热门话题,它令人充满活力,令人疯狂着迷,它甚至比政治更能牵动美国大众的神经。来到北加州,你在领略旧金山丰厚的人文历史,触摸世界高科技核心硅谷的脉络时,为何不把体育运动列入旅行计划,参与伴着汗水"自虐"的快感,或是走进比赛场馆,去见证一场酣畅淋漓的胜利?美式橄榄球常规赛季为9月至     

An anatomy of race and immigration politics in California

At the US–Mexico border specific community organizations have played an important role in reinforcing and challenging dominant ideas about race and immigration through a series of protest and media campaigns. In this paper I explore the ways in which key community organizations have relied upon specific and specified constructions of race and ethnicity to redefine notions of borders and identities. I argue that an examination of debates around immigration reveals the centrality (and marginalization) of the images and spaces of the racialized immigrant body. An exploration of the ways in which policy, media, national and individual identities are mapped on to particular spaces provides an opportunity to interrogate and challenge the 'naturalness' of representations of race and immigration and the ways in which power is strategically located yet hidden in discussions of the border(s).     

The bad things we do because of empathy

ABSTRACT

Empathy is usually seen as a prosocial and morally positive influence on behaviour. This article provides an overview of cases of negative acts motivated by empathy. It includes discussions of polarizations that are fueled by side-taking and empathy, selfish forms of empathy (such as sadistic empathy, vampirism, and helicopter parenting), and filtered empathy (using identification with a third person as a medium to have empathy with another). The definition of empathy used is to co-experience the situation of another.     

The Archaeology of California

Stimulated by several important, recent empirical advances, California archaeologists are engaged in a series of lively debates. These advances include new discoveries about the early peopling of western North America and sustained occupation of the California coasts as early as 12–13,000 BP. There also have been significant new developments in the role of paleoenvironmental change in cultural evolution, the emergence of long-distance interaction spheres, the presence of intensive craft specializations, and the appearance of sociopolitically complex hunter–gatherers. This article addresses these issues—and several others—with a view to the general interests of scholars worldwide. The exceptional heterogeneity of California ecosystems (from deserts to dense redwood forests to bountiful offshore islands) and the remarkable cultural diversity exhibited by the dozens of major groups who made these lands their home combine to produce a complex indigenous sociopolitical picture. Current understandings reveal myriad trajectories of cultural change across nine major subregions of the state.