Multiculturalism in Europe and America

Abstract. Although there is a popular discourse about multiculturalism in Europe and North America which suggests that there is a single set of problems, the political problems which multiculturalism addresses are different in these two contexts. As outlined here the problem in Western Europe is that in liberal democracies and social democratic welfare states two questions have to be addressed. One is that of equality, the other the recognition of cultural diversity. As is shown here a number of important European social scientists have feared that the acceptance of cultural diversity will actually undermine important and valued political structures without improving the condition of minorities. In the United States a different set of problems has arisen. While the Civil Rights movement appeared to be helping Blacks to achieve equality in the sixties, by the late eighties there was a sense of disillusion about this process and the emergence of ideologies based upon separatism which appeared to point to the ‘disuniting’ of America. Some of these ideologies were what was being discussed under the heading of multiculturalism. A further contrast has to be made with Canada which is often thought of as an arch-exponent of multiculturalism, but in which all problems of ethnic equality are tied up with the specific problems generated by Quebecois nationalism.     

Metallurgy in Ancient Eastern Asia: Retrospect and Prospects

Metallurgy has been taken as essential to the development of Chinese civilization. Archaeological study has been particularistic and evolutionary, tied to traditional Chinese historiography, and modern Marxist models of social development. Modern studies suggest that metallurgy emerged independently in a ‘core’ area and then spread to ‘peripheral’ areas by way of political expansion and cultural diffusion over many millennia, and that metallurgy was also homegrown. New excavations suggest: multiple early centers of production; that the Chinese case belongs to a regional context; that native sources of ores were significant; that metals were used in several pre-state level societies.     

America's Europe, Europe's America: Image, Influence, and Interaction, 1933–1958

John Lamberton Harper. American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson .
Reinhold Wagnleitner. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War .
Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann. The Rebirth of the West: The Americanization of the Democratic World, 1945–1958 .
Michael Ermarth, ed. America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945–1955 .     

Population and poverty in dependent states: Latin America considered

"Malthusians maintain that rapid population growth aggravates poverty, while Marxists contend that social formations determine its nature and extent. Each perspective is incomplete, however, since it ignores the insights of the other. Latin American states, characterized by dependent capitalism formations and dominated by ruling elites, are generally incapable of solving the problems of population and poverty. Since population growth under dependent capitalism weakens labor's bargaining position against capital, reduced population growth is emphasized as a labor empowerment strategy the poor can implement on their own to improve their socioeconomic conditions."     

Bodies as urban infrastructure: Gender,intimate infrastructures and slow infrastructural violence

Drawing from deep longitudinal and ethnographic work, this article interrogates a set of key relationships between bodies, gender and infrastructure in the context of understanding cities such as Bharatpur and Dhangadhi in Nepal as well as Delhi, India. This article seeks to make two contributions. First, utilizing feminist political geography approaches, we examine bodies as infrastructure, referring to how the social and material work of the body helps to build, develop and maintain cities through gendered infrastructures in the everyday. We show conceptualizing bodies as infrastructure reveals important and intimate dimensions of the everyday politics and social and material forms that enable critical resources to flow and integral networks be built in cities. Second, we demonstrate from our comparative case studies the ways that gendered “slow infrastructural violence” accrues through patterns of infrastructural invisibility. Particular bodies act as urban infrastructure in everyday and unremarkable ways, shaping the uneven social and political consequences of embodied infrastructural configurations. We specifically examine slow violence and informal financial infrastructure in Bharatpur and the provisioning of health in Dhangadhi followed by the exploration of slow violence and fragmented water in Delhi. This article thus raises a simultaneous call for theoretical engagement with the socio-materiality of infrastructure and the body, an increased regard for the multiplicity of urban infrastructures, and an interrogation of gender and infrastructural politics in cities where more people will be living in the future and where politics and infrastructure are being actively created.