The Construction of the League of Nations Secretariat. Formative Practices of Autonomy and Legitimacy in International Organizations

This article investigates the formative staffing practices of the League of Nations Secretariat. Drawing on the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, it argues that core traits of the League's institutional capacity and identity was produced through the institutionalization of recruitment practices in the League's formative years from 1919 to 1923. Through an exploration of early negotiations and practices of staffing, we show how the League built and balanced legitimacy, by combining a clearly international make-up of the League Secretariat with acute sensitivity to state interests, and autonomy, by defending the Secretary-General's exclusive prerogative of staffing, in a way that has been defining for the trajectory of international organizations (IOs) until today. The article thus turns to the institutional landscape where the individual and its surroundings meet: through the daily staffing practices of the Secretariat, it explores how an institution came to be, function and assert its influence as an autonomous and legitimate diplomatic agent in a broader international field. As such, the article, as an innovative contribution to the field, argues that international historians should connect thorough institutional investigations with elements of the ‘cultural turn’ in International History, in order to properly engage with and understand IOs as diplomatic actors.     

Aretusa: continuity,rupture and space for intervention (1944–46)

This article focuses on the cultural activity of Aretusa (1944–46), a journal that was deeply connected to the inner circle of philosopher and politician Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). The article analyses the role played by periodical editors Francesco Flora (1891–1962) and Carlo Muscetta (1912–2004) in shaping the mission and direction of this journal. By drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, and the notion of hysteresis in particular, this study details the factors influencing the aesthetic dispositions, political positioning and the wider impact of historical circumstances on the cultural practice of each editor while at the helm of the review.     

海归的适应策略研究：学院派的案例分析

文章在对部分海归”学院派”深入访谈和个案分析的基础上,运用布迪厄“文化资本理论”、“习性”和“场域”的分析工具,解析了海归“学院派”归国后的不同心态和不同适应策略的选择。得出结论,“文化资本”本身并不足以成为个体适应策略选择的决定因素,“习性”和“场域”概念也是影响个体适应策略选择的因素之一;深层文化认同的非同一性、生活表象与意识深层的非和谐性等复杂的文化意识构成他们独特的行为表象。这些行为表象是其长期海外生活学习所形成的个人“习性”的体现。透过这些表象了解他们的“习性”及其产生的原因,是深入了解他们归国后所选择适应策略的基础。     

The Receiving End of Reform: Everyday Responses to Neoliberalisation in Southeastern Mexico

Abstract: This article builds upon the literature on neoliberalism and environment as well as studies on community forestry by examining the creative accommodations that rural producers have made in navigating Mexico's neoliberal turn. In contrast to previous work that emphasizes macro‐level processes (eg privatization of public natural resources) and local resistance, I employ Bourdieu's theory of practice to examine the symbolic and material dimensions of local responses to neoliberal policy reform. Drawing on research from nine communities in the state of Quintana Roo, I argue that local producers have accommodated neoliberal policies and programs by adopting hybrid logics, property regimes, forms of organization, and modes of exchange. Moreover, I contend that these creative responses constitute elements of a longstanding “culture of accommodation” to institutional change that predates Mexico's neoliberal reforms.     

Staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy: Hits and misses in the work of Michael Jackson

This review essay assesses Michael Jackson’s ongoing project of staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy in two books: Lifeworlds (2013) and As Wide as the World Is Wise (2016). Considering his philosophical enrichment of ethnographic theory and method, this essay addresses foundational questions about the prospects and practices of interdisciplinary engagement. It also suggests future avenues for continued dialogue between philosophy and anthropology.     

From Cosmopolitan to Vernacular in the Language Sciences: A Global History Perspective

Sheldon Pollock's justly famous work on cosmopolitan orders and processes of vernacularization in the worlds of Latinity and Sanskrit invites questions of a comparative and global-historical character. I will raise such questions in the context of the Persianate cosmopolitan order, especially as exemplified by the early modern Ottoman Empire, focusing on the wave of vernacularizations this empire witnessed in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries. In this process of vernacularization, new vernacular forms of philological learning appear to have played a crucial role. Building on Bourdieu's work, I will try to analyze the Ottoman cosmopolitan as a pre-modern form of linguistic domination, and vernacularization as a form of resistance. Moving beyond Bourdieu, I will be arguing for a genealogical approach that is alive to premodern non-European philological traditions, and to the historically variable relation between (philological) knowledge and power.     

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.     

Vehicle Writings in an Iranian Context: The Interplay of Habitus and Field

The main objective of this paper is to problematize writings on vehicles in an Iranian context. Previous studies have indicated that vehicle stickers can be employed to express emotions and social status, political views, ideology and identity, and religious beliefs. However, very little has been done on this discursive practice in Iran. This study is the result of the content analysis of 122 vehicle writings collected from April 2011 to March 2012. This paper will draw on six of the most frequent themes: religion, humor, playing pessimism, didactic expressions, ethnic-geographic identification, and love. Employing Bourdieu's conceptual frameworks of “habitus,” “field,” and “doxa,” and Heath and Street's social practice perspective on literacy, it will be argued that vehicle writings in this study can be regarded as situated literacy practices reflecting the dominant undisputed discourses in the context, but at the same time displaying the dynamic interplay of power relations, the relationship of cultural structures and individual customized versions of those structures in vehicle writings.     

ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE (AND IS THAT WHAT MAKES THEM HAVE A HISTORY)? A BOURDIEUIAN APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING EMOTION

The term “emotional practices” is gaining currency in the historical study of emotions. This essay discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of this concept. A definition of emotion informed by practice theory promises to bridge persistent dichotomies with which historians of emotion grapple, such as body and mind, structure and agency, as well as expression and experience. Practice theory emphasizes the importance of habituation and social context and is thus consistent with, and could enrich, psychological models of situated, distributed, and embodied cognition and their approaches to the study of emotion. It is suggested here that practices not only generate emotions, but that emotions themselves can be viewed as a practical engagement with the world. Conceiving of emotions as practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity. Emotion‐as‐practice is bound up with and dependent on “emotional practices,” defined here as practices involving the self (as body and mind), language, material artifacts, the environment, and other people. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the essay emphasizes that the body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical. Four kinds of emotional practices that make use of the capacities of a body trained by specific social settings and power relations are sketched out—mobilizing, naming, communicating, and regulating emotion—as are consequences for method in historical research.     

Fiddling for outcomes: traditional music,social capital,and arts policy in Northern Ireland

Arts development policies increasingly tie funding to the potential of arts organisations to effectively deliver an array of extra‐artistic social outcomes. This paper reports on the difficulties of this work in Northern Ireland, where the arts sector, and in particular the so‐called ‘traditional arts’, have been drawn into a politically ambiguous discourse centred on the concepts of ‘mutual understanding’ and, more recently, ‘social capital’. The paper traces the recent history of these policies and the difficulties in evaluating the social outcomes of arts programs. The use of the term ‘social capital’ in the work of Putnam and Bourdieu is considered. The paper argues, through a rereading of Bourdieu’s articulation of the ‘forms’ of capital and Eagleton’s ‘ideology of the aesthetic’, the concept of social capital can be released from its current neoliberal trappings by imagining a reconnection of the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘the aesthetic’.