Gender,Caste and Matchmaking in Kerala: A Rationale for Dowry

The matrilineal castes of northern Kerala consider dowry demeaning and resort to it only in ‘exceptional’ circumstances. In local discourse, dowry is transacted when women are considered ‘old’ by the standards of the marriage market, where over‐age is a condition reached usually on account of what is considered a deficit of a normative conception of femininity. Dowry is practised openly only by poor and socially vulnerable households, as the relatively affluent could mask dowry with hidden compensations. This article explores the ways in which gender mediates matchmaking and generates a residual category of women for whom dowry is openly negotiated. Open negotiation on the margins of the marriage market expose the terms of exchange in ‘respectable’ society, where matchmaking strategies reveal the emphasis placed on conjugality and on caste in the social construction of women's interests and identity. Up to the mid‐twentieth century, matrilineal women derived their identity from their natal families. The political economy of marriage in Kerala brought a new emphasis to bear on conjugality and on caste, which generated new restrictions on women and produced a rationale for dowry.     

An officer and an activist: Futuring,precarity and life after exile in Namibia

This article explores the life histories of two Namibians who grew up in SWAPO's exile camps in Angola and their ‘futuring’ trajectories once they returned home to Namibia after independence. Presenting these actors’ life histories of navigating Namibian society helps challenge a one-sided economic interpretation of precariousness. More critical than asserting dichotomies between ‘elite’ and ‘precariat’ are the stratagems and choices shaping lived experiences.     

The political subjectivization of Korean creative workers: working and living as urban precariat in creative city Seoul

This study aims to reconsider and re-evaluate the rapid circulation of global creative city policy from the viewpoint of its creative workforce by focusing on the case of Seoul, South Korea. By locating creative workers’ experiences in Korea within the growing scholarship on the precariat, this research not only attempts to fully understand the complexity of labor subjectivities of creative workers but further explores how creative workers can actually become political subjects who can resist their given precarious working and living conditions. By using Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘political subjectivation’, it attempts to show how creative workers can empower themselves as ‘political subjects’ who strategically disavow their given self-identities as ‘individualized creators’, and through this language they are able to recall the often neglected subjectivity of ‘solidified labor’. In doing so, this research contributes to theoretical insights so that we can better understand what leads to political formation of creative workers.     

Entrepreneurs,elites and the ruling class: the changing structure of power and wealth in Australian society

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a surge of research concerning power and wealth in Australian society. One line of inquiry was framed in terms of ‘elites’, the other in terms of the ‘ruling class’. This article builds upon both lines of inquiry, exploring the new wave of entrepreneurs and their articulation with the structure of power and wealth. It does so through qualitative interviews with 43 individuals drawn from the Business Review Weekly ‘Rich 200’ list. The article finds that the institutions at the top levels of Australian business and society have become more specialised, diffuse and far-flung than was the case in earlier times. At the very least, it suggests some kind of radical reconfiguration of connections, trust and solidarity between elite groups. It remains a challenge to develop more finely tuned ways of understanding this process in terms of class analysis.     

美国劳工史研究中“阶级”的概念重构与范式更新

在20世纪美国劳工史研究中,“阶级”概念的内涵被多次重构。旧劳工史家们依据马克思主义的社会分析理论,把“阶级”视为在生产力基础之上形成的一种社会结构。60到80年代美国的新劳工史家在社会史的广阔视野中重新研究阶级。他们反对“阶级”的结构化定义,重视工人自身在“阶级”形成中的能动性,但是,这种“社会转向”也让阶级研究变得碎片化。90年代以后,受后现代主义思潮影响的学者们把种族、性别等分析范畴嵌入劳工史研究,从而解构了“阶级”概念的确定性,将其变为一个不稳定的、模糊不清的“社会和话语构造物”。随着“阶级”概念被多次重构,其作为一个分析范畴在劳工史中的重要性也呈现出弱化的趋势。     

Place,identity and social conflict in post-industrial England: cases from South Lincolnshire in the 1980s

ABSTRACT

This article examines a case of social conflict in an overlooked corner of England (Lincolnshire) in the late 1980s when self-described ‘local’ people opposed private housing developments and the migration of ‘southerners’, ‘townies’ and ‘commuters’ into their towns and villages. Protestors lamented change and disliked newcomers. This was a reaction to the arrival of affluent, ‘post-industrial’ workers on the back of a booming service sector. They personified a series of complex, interconnected socioeconomic and cultural changes which disrupted patterns of life rooted in disappearing productive industries and destabilised communities amidst factory closures, agricultural mechanisation, job losses and now suburbanisation. This affected meanings ascribed to places and introduced hierarchies and conflicts structured around Britain’s transition towards a service economy. Opposition was expressed through nostalgia, conservationism, inverse snobbery, anti-metropolitanism, attachment to ‘local’ identities, and concerns about declining independence, community and power. This paper argues that these protests demonstrate the emergence of new ideas about social relations, difference and distinction in post-industrial England. The findings also highlight feelings which would slowly seep into a new, reactionary politics foreshadowing the way that many towns and rural areas (including Lincolnshire) embraced a new political right in the first decades of the next millennium.     

Spatial segregation and class subjectivity in Turkey

Drawing on ethnographic research in an upper-class district in Turkey, this article examines social and spatial experiences of young low-wage service workers who travel daily back and forth between their homes in low-income neighbourhoods and their jobs in gated communities, upscale shopping malls and corporate offices. The paper argues that the significance of upper class districts or gated communities for urban inequality lies not in the sites themselves, nor the lifestyles of their elite inhabitants as commonly treated in the literature, but rather in the ways in which they relate to the outside and outsiders. Within this framework, the paper analyses the district’s effect on urban spatial segregation and urbanites’ sense of place in society. While resentment and reaction to inequalities and upper class customers are prevalent in young workers’ narratives, workers’ class subjectivities are also marked by a sense of mobility and liminality between the upper middle classes in their work district and their families, friends and neighbours back home. This sense of socio-spatial ‘in-betweenness’ is reinforced by being young, hence a sense of temporal liminality between youth and adulthood. The study contributes to the understanding of urban inequality at the intersection of spatial, emotional and temporal experiences of urbanites.     

Political preferences in the new middle class: A ‘correspondence analysis’ of the orientations of Australian professional workers

Most discussions of the relationship between class and political orientation assume a coherent and homogeneous class response. Here, the new middle class of professional workers is disassembled into constituent occupations. An analysis of political preference data by means of ‘correspondence analysis’ reveals a pattern which is consistent with a structural relationship between occupational experience and political preference.     

Stating the Difference: State,Discourse and Class Reproduction in Uttar Pradesh,India

Much development literature concerned with state–society relations operates with a simplistic state–people dichotomy. In contrast, this article focuses on the intersection between state and society and argues that this plays an important part in class reproduction in ‘civil society’. This issue is explored with reference to the role of the local state in class reproduction in the Indian countryside. The focus is on the means by which rural social groups negotiate access to the local state and discourses surrounding the state. The balance of colonization, co‐option and opposition that characterizes the relationship between dominant rural classes and local state officials/institutions is examined against the impact of the rise of a populist low class party. It is argued that the intersection between ‘class’ and ‘state’ is closer than even critical studies of state–society relations have posited. Moreover, the state can, within certain limits, be brought to serve interests other than those of the dominant classes.     

Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.     

Demographic Change,Differential Ageing,and Public Policy in Rural and Regional Australia: A Three‐State Case Study

This paper takes a differential demographic change in six rural settlement categories within rural and regional Australia as the starting point for the measurement of differential ageing using a Relative Ageing Index which compares ageing in sub‐populations with the national norm. The spatial units employed are 412 rural communities, approximated by social catchments each consisting of a country town and its surrounding dispersed population. The study covers the period from 1981 to 2006 and includes the rural areas of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, excluding major cities, peri‐urban areas, and the remote rangelands. It examines demographic change and differential ageing in a selection of the rural settlement categories recommended for further analysis in the report of the ‘Demographic Change and Liveability Panel’, one of three advisory panels established in 2010 by the then Commonwealth Government seeking to develop a sustainable population strategy for Australia. Ageing profiles are produced for the whole study area, for the individual rural settlement categories, and for the urban and rural components within each category separately. Results show that differential ageing is least advanced in the ‘regional cities’, most advanced in the ‘sea change’, but of most concern in the agriculture‐based rural settlement categories where it exacerbates the effects of overall population decline. In all categories, ageing in the dispersed rural population element exceeded that of the urban component. Results emphasise the vital role of the ‘regional cities’ category in future public policy development supported by ameliorative and collaborative measures for their surrounding agriculture‐based communities.     

Civil society,political society and politics of disorder in Cambodia

This paper questions under what conditions the social foundation necessary for the construction and sustenance of civil society are present in post-colonial social formations, and the extent to which there has been a need to develop concessionary politics to maintain a project of rule. It utilizes Partha Chatterjee's usage of Gramsci's political society to understand how Cambodia's ILO-led garment factory monitoring regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of worker citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for their well being. I argue that the hegemonic project is fraught by virtue of the fact that consent-seeking forms of regulation, which aim to prevent strikes through trade union membership and tripartitism, have reached their limit and spilled over and into a disaggregated, messier terrain of struggles akin to political society. To develop the argument that workers' politics cannot be expressed in state-civil society relations, I present case studies of two forms of protest. The first form is distinguished by mass faintings, which I characterize as ‘visceral protest’ against the terms of workers' insertion into industrial capitalism. The second is large-scale, worker-led strikes that signal a ‘politics of social disorder’ is emerging, characterized by extra-legal, disruptive, and sometimes violent protest. The paper calls for a re-politicization of labor, and research attuned to workers' ambitions that cannot be reduced to a stable location or sphere within state-civil society relations.     

Christian Marriage,Money Scams,and Melanesian Social Imaginaries

In this paper, we draw on fieldwork with middle‐class investors in ‘fast money schemes’ (Ponzi scams) to consider how Neo‐Pentecostal Christianity may be mediating social and economic change in Papua New Guinea, particularly in relation to gender equality. Ideas of companionate marriage and the cultivation of an affective self imply masculinities that are more sensitive and less domineering. As these images of fulfilled modernity flow out from Pentecostal churches into broader Papua New Guinean society, they corroborate Taylor's theory of how change occurs within the modern social imaginary.     

‘Working out’ for two: performances of ‘fitness’ and femininity in Australian prenatal aerobics classes

In this article, I consider the distinctly classed places/spaces in which affluent Australian pregnant women physically maintain their bodies through aerobics. The case study described is drawn from data obtained between 2006 and 2008 in a longitudinal study examining feelings about body image and ‘fatness’ in a sample of pregnant women in Melbourne, Australia. The ways in which pregnant bodies are disciplined within gym spaces are discussed through a case study of a prenatal fitness centre, FitForTwo, and drawing on narrative data of pregnant informants. FitForTwo is described as a primary site for the performance of ‘fit’ pregnancy and underscored by bodies that can be shaped, trained, moulded and modified. This case study is analysed against a backdrop of a growing Australian moral panics about ‘fighting’ maternal obesity. It adds to a body of feminist geographical and qualitative studies of pregnancy, bringing both a more sustained, longitudinal analysis than previously offered, and an Australian context that offers rich comparative material.     

Australian foreign policy in political time: middle power creativity,misplaced friendships,and crises of leadership

Over the past century, Australian foreign policy orders have been stabilised by the construction of ideas that have reduced uncertainty regarding national interests. Yet, such ideas have often evolved in ways that have engendered misplaced certainty, renewed instability, and crisis. To explain such shifts, I highlight the role of an Australian ‘pragmatic liberal tradition’, one which has enabled alternating tendencies to principled stability or technocratic hubris. In a tripartite model, I trace stages over initial ‘middle power’ efforts to construct ideas that lead states—and particularly great powers—to identify interests in cooperation, misplaced certainty in great power ties which obscures new challenges, and the construction of crises that impede or enable change. Empirically, I apply this framework to the construction, conversion, and crises of the ongoing ‘Reform order’. These span the initial Hawke-era middle power integration of US and regional ties, Howard-era misplaced certainty in US-styled neoconservative bandwagoning and neoliberal macroeconomic accommodation, and evolving constructions of the War on Terror and Global Financial Crisis. In the conclusion, I address theoretical and policy implications, highlighting the initial challenges that crises can pose for middle power leadership, and the subsequent scope for creativity.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Identity,uncertainty and responsibility: privileging place in a risk society

That young people today reside within social worlds of unprecedented ‘risk’ is a persuasive position. While such discourses have become increasingly pervasive, there has been little interest in exploring contemporary shifts within specific socio-geographic contexts: place has been largely invisible. This paper considers Ulrich Beck's ‘risk society’ theses as a framework for exploring the experiences of 85 young residents of a regional Australian centre. These young people's stories revealed complex and often contradictory, tensions in relation to identity, uncertainty and responsibility. Socio-geographic location was found to be a significant feature in the negotiation and repercussion of these young people's lives.     

Community Antagonism Towards Asylum Seekers in Port Augusta,South Australia

An overtly hostile response to asylum seekers was observed in questionnaire responses provided by residents of Port Augusta, South Australia in April 2002. A social construction approach to identity and representation was used to interrogate this antagonism within its social, cultural, political and geographical contexts. Asylum seekers were constructed as ‘burdensome’, ‘threatening’ and ‘illegal’, and opposition to them was set within the discursive framework of a ‘Self/Other’ binary. Enmity towards asylum seekers was articulated concurrently with overwhelming support for the Federal Government's exclusive and deterrence‐oriented asylum policies. However, vehement opposition was expressed regarding the government's decision to construct Baxter Immigration Reception and Processing Centre in close proximity to Port Augusta. Factors contributing to the respondents’ negative perceptions of asylum seekers include xenophobia (specifically Islamophobia), events of geopolitical significance, and problematic government and media representations of asylum seekers. An awareness of these factors is necessary to unpack and, potentially, to destabilise the negative constructions of asylum seekers circulating in contemporary Australian discourses. Their entrenchment in the national consciousness may lead to tangible social implications including fear, friction and ultimately violence between the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and this should therefore be countered. Community antagonism also contradicts notions of a culturally tolerant Australia and fosters electoral support for the policies of exclusion and deterrence that undermine Australia's commitment to international human rights frameworks.

相似文献   

Ethical dilemmas? UK immigration,Legal Aid funding reform and caseworkers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The article considers the kinds of responsibilities anthropologists might have when working on immigration and asylum matters, particularly in the light of recent ‘reforms’ to the funding of legal aid in the UK. The article focuses on a single case study in its context, exploring an interaction between an immigrant applicant and a lawyer/case worker in a not‐for‐profit Law Centre. The paper shows how case workers find themselves caught in the middle, squeezed between increasing financial pressures and their ethical obligation to their clients. In their everyday work they are faced with the contradictory imperatives of giving sympathy and advice to genuinely deserving cases on the one hand while being required to check up on opportunist and possibly deceitful clients on the other. In the context of ‘reform’, they are increasingly encouraged to prejudge the probable outcomes of cases by reference to ‘value for money’. These effects, we argue, have severe consequences given the adversarial nature of the UK's system of law. As anthropologists, our aim was to investigate the day‐to‐day realities of case worker/client interactions, to enable both ourselves and legal practitioners, in conversation, to reflect on our own and each others' interpretations of the situation, and to place these in the public domain.     

Explaining voting in the 2017 Australian same-sex marriage plebiscite

The 2017 Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey led to the adoption of same-sex marriage. Using ecological analysis, this paper tests five hypotheses to explain voting in the plebiscite. Social characteristics exerted a strong influence on the vote, with a higher ‘yes’ vote in more affluent and suburban electorates, and a higher ‘no’ vote in electorates with large numbers of traditional households. The strongest predictor of a ‘no’ vote was electorates with large proportions of newly arrived immigrants. Electorates that had larger proportions of female same-sex couples displayed a higher ‘yes’ vote. Higher turnout in the plebiscite benefitted the ‘yes’ vote. Finally, the views of the local MP on the issue were positively related to the result in their electorate.