Mobility,Stasis and Transnational Kin: Western Later-life Migrants in Southeast Asia

Studies of transnational families tend to filter understandings of mobility and stasis through a bi-national framework that juxtaposes the movement of migrants across international borders with the immobility of in-place kin within equally static national spaces. This article examines the concept-metaphors of mobility and stasis through the eyes of later-life (over 50 year-old) Western migrants living in Penang, Malaysia and Bali, Indonesia. By treating “in-place” kin as mobile subjects I examine the extent to which the movement of individuals and families within and across a range of national borders affects the lives, concerns and movements of these older, Western migrants and retirees in Southeast Asia. By examining the concept-metaphors from the perspective of these migrants I illustrate the extent to which such people both succumb to yet exceed scholarly imaginings of im/mobility and juxtapositions between mobile selves and immobile others. Migrant thinking about these concept-metaphors, I suggest, complicates an ongoing tendency within the field of transnational family studies to view mobility and stasis as categorical opposites and offers fresh insights into the role and relevance of these concept-metaphors in the lives of Western migrants in Southeast Asia and their transnational relations with teenage and adult children, ageing parents and grandchildren.     

Infanticide and infant abandonoment in the new South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1915

The Civil War and Reconstruction and the South's postbellum industrialization produced economic dislocation on a tremendous scale. One product of that economic upheaval was an increasing problem of infanticides and infant abandonments. This case study of Richmond, Virginia, examines patterns of abandonment and neonaticide as documented in records of the city almshouse and the city coroner. It demonstrates that race shaped the options available to women with problem pregnancies in that African American women had access to fewer social welfare unstitutions such as maternity homes. As a result, unmarried black women kept their out-of-wedlock babies more often than did whites, but they also committed infanticide at higher rates than did whites. Moreover, racial trends in infanticides and infant abandonment suggest that Ricomond's white working class experienced economic advancements at the turn of the twentieth century, while the city's black working class continued to live in depression-like conditions throughout the period.     

The Underside of Microfinance: Performance Indicators and Informal Debt in Cambodia

Microfinance is a dominant strategy used to promote rural development around the world. Rather than directly track its impact on borrowers, however, microfinance institutions rely on indicators of financial performance adopted from commercial banking as proxies for positive social impact. Yet, as critical research has shown, the industry depends on coercive peer pressure, social shaming and various forms of gendered exploitation to achieve its high rates of loan repayment. This article maintains that there is a need to investigate how the microfinance industry's own indicators of impact contribute to the ways microfinance can harm borrowers. Based on qualitative research in Cambodia during 2021 and 2022, the article demonstrates how financial performance indicators, most notably portfolio quality, both hide and exacerbate the ways that borrowers juggle debt between formal and informal lenders. In making this argument, the article advances critical scholarship on microfinance by showing how microfinance repayment structures debt-juggling practices in ways that put borrowers at greater risk of over-indebtedness. As a result, the microfinance industry is able to claim that it successfully helps to alleviate poverty, even as it accumulates profits by appropriating wealth from poor and low-income households across the global South.     

The Arabn influence on Western European cooking

The importance of the spice trade to commercial development in Europe in the later middle ages has long been recognized, although the reasons for the demand for exotic condiments from the East have not been much considered. There seems little evidence to support the idea that spices were used either to mask the taste of rotting or “vulgar” food or as preservatives. There are sources, however, which do provide a basis for the unriddling of the taste for spices. Contained within the recipes of the period is evidence that the style of cooking was adopted from the Arabs, and that the heavy use of spices was but one of a cluster of characteristics of Arab food replicated in Europe. In order to establish the similarities between European and Arabic medieval cookery, a sample of French, Italian, Spanish, Flemish, English, and German texts is drawn upon and compared with the main features of the several Arabic works which have been translated into Spanish, French and English. Underlying the upheaval in the cooking of the élite in Europe from about 1300 was a changed attitude toward eating which was stimulated by the place of food in Moslem theology as represented in depictions of the Garden of Delights, a concept which is explored in its rather wide currency in Europe. I postulate that, intrigued with the sensual pleasures of eating as portrayed in the Garden, Europe began to associate luxurious dining with the food of the Arabs, and thus the passage of what was a strange and alien cuisine was facilitated.     

The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim City in Asia’s Future

This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia’s cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of ‘de-cosmopolitanization’. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city.     

Beyond structure and agency: Rethinking political identities in Iraq after 2003

This paper examines ethno‐symbolic and instrumental explanations of ethnic and sectarian identities placed within the constructivist turn in the study of political identity, both in the abstract and how they have been deployed to explain the increasing contemporary influence of ethnosectarian mobilisation in Iraq and the wider Middle East. The paper identifies explanatory value in these approaches but finds their focus on either ideational structures or individual rationality too narrow to provide a comprehensive explanation of what happened to political identities in Iraq after 2003. Instead, the paper deploys what can be termed a ‘Bourdieusian method’, in an attempt to get beyond the polarities of structure and agency. It uses Bourdieu's conceptions of political field, principles of vision and division and symbolic violence to understand the influence that de‐Ba'athification, the creation of the Muhasasa Ta'ifia or sectarian apportionment system and national elections had on political identities in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.     

The Multiple Roots of Party Loyalty: Explaining Republican Dissent in the U.S. House of Representatives

Why does any member of Congress choose to be loyal to one's party? The conventional wisdom is that party loyalty stems from constituent expectations, electoral concerns, or a lawmaker's ideological beliefs. However, this neglects two other, less-instrumental reasons for sticking with a political party: partisan identity and personal connections with party leaders. I test these alternative theories as well as conventional ones on a set of key moments in the 113th Congress (2013–2014) when rebellion against House Republican leadership by the rank-and-file was especially noteworthy. The results provide some support for both the party identity and personal connection hypotheses. They also indicate that although constituency characteristics help predict the likelihood of dissent from GOP leaders, there is little evidence for the electoral hypothesis, while cross-cutting ideological preferences as well as preferences along the traditional left-right spectrum prove statistically significant. In short, evidence reveals both personal and instrumental roots of party loyalty in Congress.