Nomadic identities and socio-spatial competence: making sense of post-smoking selves

The reconstruction of smoking as an unhealthy practice has given rise to a discursive field in which some people shy away from smoking identities that are tainted with the attendant notions of dirt and disgust and also from overt external control over individual behaviour. In many cases individuals demonstrate social competence by quitting smoking. Social and secret smokers challenge both binary understandings of smoking identities (smoker/non-smoker) as well as the addiction model that is prevalent in explaining smoking. Social and secret smoking are conceptualised as nomadic identities that are situationally constructed and deconstructed, but always with the potential to slip into one or other identity more permanently. While these identities remain ambivalent and appear to manage their own risks, they provide us with a window into the body as a potentiality rather than a problem and thus move us beyond a compliance/resistance schema. The paper concludes that ex-, secret and social smoking involve different types of socio-spatial competence and, in order to make sense of this, we utilise both Foucauldian and Deleuzo-Guattarian frameworks.     

Partisan Efficiency in an Open-Rule Setting: The Amending Process in the U.S. Senate, 1865–1945

Given significant differences between the House and Senate's amending processes, one would anticipate the Senate majority party to be far less successful when voting on the floor. However, recent work has demonstrated that majority party success on the Senate floor is remarkably similar to the House. We argue that an overlooked explanation for majority party success stems from its ability to control intra-party amending activity through coordination between members of the majority party. Utilizing a new data set consisting of all amendments receiving recorded roll call votes in the Senate from 1865–1945, we demonstrate that majority party extremists refrain from offering amendments despite the relative open-floor setting. Nevertheless, chamber majorities cannot restrict minority legislators from offering amendments designed to force them to cast uncomfortable votes and delay the legislative process.     

MakingGüeras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the product's representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts.

Creando güeras: La venta de identidades blancas en la televisión Mexicana de media noche En este artículo, hacemos un análisis sobre los discursos de ‘blancura’ y de color con respecto a la población en México a través de una discusión sobre ‘White Secret’, un producto cosmético para aclarar la piel que es muy disponible en México. Por un análisis de un ‘info-nuncio’ que sale por la televisión anunciando el producto ‘White Secret’, exploramos los entretejemientos de la construcción de blancura en México y como este ‘info-nuncio’ manipula imágenes de los cuerpos de güeras (mujeres de piel clara) y tecnología cosmética avanzada. Reflexionamos acerca de las maneras que el producto ‘White Secret’ pueda hablar a concepciones más amplias sobre la construcción de identidad y blancura y además, discutimos que tal exploración indica la necesidad de interrogar los limites epistemológicos y geográficos de la comprensión actual de la construcción de blancura basados en los contextos Latino Americanos y Anglo Americanos.     

Rethinking Whiteness and Masculinity in Geography: Drinking Alcohol in the Field in Vietnam

This paper evaluates the spatial politics of fieldwork in Vietnam in order to think through the connections between whiteness, masculinity, and geography. In drawing attention to how the consumption of alcohol underwrites daily activities in Vietnam, as well as fieldwork activities, I show that research ethics are underpinned by unique spatial contexts that do not conform to conventional accounts of masculinity and whiteness in the global North. I make three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that debates in geography about whiteness and masculinity must be understood alongside fieldwork experiences in the global South. Second, I invite geographers to think through how research ethics are shaped by spatially contingent productions of whiteness and masculinity. Lastly, I challenge geographers to keep pace with how disruptive categories like whiteness and masculinity are produced outside of the global North.     

Agents of knowledge: Marxist identity politics in the Revisionismusstreit

To be Marxist at the turn of the twentieth century was highly contested. During this crisis of Marxism, identity politics were acute, exemplified by the private and public debate between Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. With Bernstein's celebrated turn away from the Marxist theory of his day, the grounds for being Marxist were at stake. Was it possible to criticise Marx's analysis of industrial capitalism, his account of historical change and his hard-nosed class politics, and yet still be in a position to carry his name forward? Moreover, the springing-up of another identity, Revisionist, suggested that being Marxist was ambiguous. If one accepted Bernstein's and the Revisionists' point that Marxists had become too orthodox, leaving Revisionists as the true heirs of Marx's critical socialist spirit, then the Marxist identity was so open as to be meaningless. In this article, I contend that the name-calling of this period, the Revisionismusstreit, should be seen as creative. In contrast to politico-ideological perceptions of the Streit, which construe the clash of Marxist and Revisionist as representative of foundational Social Democratic party political realities, I highlight the manner in which being Marxist—the veneration of Marx's and Friedrich Engels's word into a Marxology of sorts by Marxists and Revisionists alike—held a certain epistemic value in its own right.     

Unity from disunity: law,rhetoric and power in the Visigothic kingdom

This paper explores the relationship between the ‘Church’ and the ‘State’ in the Visigothic kingdom of sixth- and seventh-century Spain. The authors examine the copious legal material from this period – both church council records and royal legislation – to see what it reveals about the significant degree of interpenetration of the two spheres. For example, the royal laws gave bishops an important role in the supervision of judges, while a church council could not be called without the permission of the king, who often attended along with his officials and set the agenda for the meetings. There has been significant debate on this issue over the past two centuries, and the authors' analysis will be situated accordingly. The extent to which the Visigothic evidence emerges out of late Roman practices and precedents or is independent of it will also be addressed.     

Anthropology at the bottom of the pyramid

This article explores what anthropology has to say about contemporary business strategies for market expansion among poor consumers in Africa and Asia. Focusing on the activities of global consumer goods company Unilever in India, we show how anthropology can provide valuable insights into the hidden work and power relations involved in transforming an everyday commodity like soap into a composite object, what we call a 'social good', that is capable of simultaneously combating disease, tackling poverty and realizing value for shareholders.     

Postneoliberalism and its Malcontents

Abstract: The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not crisis of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some of the near‐term and longer‐run consequences of the economic crisis for processes of neoliberalization, asking whether we have been witnessing the terminal unraveling of neoliberalism as a form of social, political, and economic regulation. In many ways a creature of crisis, could neoliberalism now be falling to a crisis of its own making? Answering this question is impossible, we argue, without an adequate understanding of the nature of neoliberalization and its evolving sociospatial manifestations. These are more than definitional niceties. The prospects and potential of efforts to move genuinely beyond neoliberalism must also be considered in this light.