bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Transforming Agriculture
Authors: Conway Gordon , Badiane Ousmane , Glatzel Katrin
Published: May 2020

This chapter charts a course for a successful agricultural transformation leading to broad-based employment and income growth. It starts by explaining the history of agricultural dynamics and the factors underlying it. The first decade of independent Africa was marked by strong overall economic growth, but things started to deteriorate rather rapidly in the following decade. The biggest impact on smallholders emanated from the far-reaching interventions by governments aimed at organizing nearly all activities in the agricultural sector. Only in the last two decades have African economies experienced a remarkable recovery in economic and agricultural growth. Rapidly modernizing agribusiness value chains, in particular the staple foods processing sector, have provided a major opportunity for labor-intensive industrial development, including a large source of employment for youth and women. Rising incomes are driving rapid transformation in diets and thus staples value chains, with a rapid increase in processed foods. The fundamental changes in the quality of sector governance and increased public sector investment in the last two decades have to be sustained to bring about real transformation of African economies.
Introduction
Authors: Boes Tobias
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter discusses Thomas Mann's peculiar role as an authority on German culture to oppose the Nazi regime. It explains that two factors characterize Mann's unique position in literary history—the battle of cultural autonomy against totalitarian dependence and the struggle between international and national sources of literary esteem—both of which continue to have a clear relevance for literary production into the present day. To that end, this chapter briefly explores the complex relationship connecting his battle for cultural autonomy to his struggle for international recognition. It also considers what it means for Mann when he defines his theory of exile as a “cosmopolitan Germanness.” Finally, this chapter looks at how Mann developed and employed strategies to wage a cultural war against Nazism and how he found success in this endeavor in the United States.
Interlude I: Joseph in Egypt (1938)
Authors: Boes Tobias
Published: May 2020

On February 28, 1938, almost exactly a week after Thomas Mann’s triumphant arrival in New York, Alfred A. Knopf published Joseph in Egypt, the third in the monumental series of biblical novels on which the author had begun working twelve years earlier. The book was greeted with rapturous enthusiasm and marked the high point of Mann’s critical acclaim from a purely literary point of view: while even greater laurels were as yet in store for him, they would all be given more for his services to democracy than for those to modern fiction....
Interlude II: Lotte in Weimar (1939)
Authors: Boes Tobias
Published: May 2020

Literary tradition, and specifically the question of how the public perception of an author is shaped by circulation and criticism, is one of the main topics of the first fictional work that Mann completed during his American exile: the novel Lotte in Weimar. This book was first published in America in 1940 as ...
Hemo Economicus
Authors: Copeman Jacob , Banerjee Dwaipayan
Published: May 2020

This chapter draws on ethnographic research in Kolkata and Delhi. It follows voluntary blood donor organizations seeking to convey to the janata (people) that the body produces more blood than it needs and that a portion of this excess blood can be given without the body losing anything. This is an insight at odds with conventional understandings of blood excorporation in the region as involving irrecuperable loss, understandings that inform continuing perceptions of blood donation as a sacrificial gesture. To give blood without risking irrecuperable loss would seem to fundamentally undercut the gesture of blood donation as sacrifice. An imagination of blood as excess and surplus thus involves the antisacrificial redescription of blood donation.
The Broken World of Transfusion
Authors: Copeman Jacob , Banerjee Dwaipayan
Published: May 2020

This chapter is concerned with perceptions and campaigns concerning how doctors prescribe too much of that which has already been given. The proportions of the transfusion, say clinical activists and others, are all wrong in Indian medicine. Once more, then, the focus is on proportionality and on educational campaigning, but here there is a different target. If donors do not give enough because they think they have a deficit when in fact (according to the campaign) they have a surplus, doctors prescribe blood as if they have a surplus when in fact they have a deficit. The irony is obvious: in so doing, of course, they exacerbate this deficit. Once more, excess is at stake, and the different spheres of excess interlock and inform one another.
Hematic Futures
Authors: Copeman Jacob , Banerjee Dwaipayan
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines in detail the differentiated nature of hematic possibility in India. It shows how this volume presents a number of ways in which blood might be considered a substance existing in the subjunctive mood, a substance with the propensity to image shared subjunctive “as if” or “could be” universes but also and equally of unfulfilled potentialities. To speak of blood's “as if” is to recognize how frequently the substance flows in bodies, tubes, and thoughts in states of hopeful uncertainty. Here the chapter revisits some of these flows, both smooth and disrupted. It also considers some supplementary ones in order to gain access to and convey the differentiated nature of hematic possibility in India.
Land Reform and Agricultural Development, 1968–1975
Authors: Thân Cao Văn
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the major policies under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu that transformed the countryside and contributed significantly to the economic development of South Vietnam in the last years of the war. These policies included land reform, an agricultural development program, price liberalization, and market stabilization. The policies practically eradicated land tenancy, reduced rural inequality by creating a large class of landowners, rapidly expanded production toward achieving food self-sufficiency, and stabilized market and consumption. This took place in the middle of a savage war and amounted to a successful rural revolution that has not been adequately acknowledged in the scholarship on the war. Rather than coercion and class struggle, the Republic of Vietnam's revolution was carried out based on a combination of economic incentives and new technologies that appealed to and benefited the majority of South Vietnamese farmers.
Striving for a Lasting Peace: The Paris Accords and Aftermath
Authors: Nhã Hoàng Ðức
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes a look at the tumultuous relationship between President Thiệu and President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger from the perspective of Thiệu's personal secretary. The South Vietnamese government at that time was in a unique and challenging situation. On the one hand, it had to defend the Republic of Vietnam's territorial integrity and defeat the communist invasion, and on the other hand, it had to create transformational change for the betterment of the entire population. All this had to be done while cooperating with the Nixon administration to restore peace to the two parts of Vietnam. However, this chapter reveals that South Vietnam's negotiating position with the United States was being constantly frayed by secret exchanges and communications with Hanoi. Relations gradually took a turn for the worse when after it was revealed that President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger wanted to end the war their way, South Vietnamese opinions or objections be damned.
Advising on the Super
Authors: Young Ken , Schilling Warner R.
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks into the business of campaigning for or against nuclear development. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its committees were at the epicenter of this debate. Here, the array of advice and potential pressure on the question of the Super as it existed in late 1949 offered no clear direction to the president. Powerful congressional opinion challenged the advice of the most powerfully placed scientists, but that had not yet been sufficient to swing Truman behind the Super's development. His views, however, began to take shape in mid-January after receiving a report on the military aspects. Furthermore, the scientific General Advisory Committee (GAC), chaired by the former Los Alamos laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer, enjoyed a privileged position that it used to block, as it seemed, further activity beyond the theoretical work already accomplished at Los Alamos.
Introduction
Authors: Tierney Matt
Published: May 2020

This chapter introduces critical and literary tools for prying apart presumptions about the centrality of technology to culture. It talks about what thinking can do and what it tried to do in order to enrich and enable the emancipatory critique of technology. It describes what spoken and written language have contributed to the transformation or destruction of reactionary institutions and ideas. The chapter emphasizes against the forms of exploitation identified with machines, or with some machines but not all, or with machinic thought and the becoming-machine of laboring bodies. It explains why “dismantling” is used to describe a way of reading with roots in a particular period of literary and theoretical production, the decade and a half before 1980, which historians of labor call the Long Seventies.
Luddism
Authors: Tierney Matt
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the technocentric world. It includes Édouard Glissant who offers an optimistic promise of literature's power to break systems, writing poetry that can “thicken” the “machine that the world is.” Audre Lorde is more skeptical, opening the possibility that even literature may be one among the “master's tools” that are inapposite to the task of dismantling. Joanna Russ is more skeptical still, in her insistence that scholars and science-fiction writers should “give up talking about technology” and W.S. Merwin imagines an intelligent machine that is fated to be relinquished. Such literary and theoretical practices do not oppose technology as such, but instead oppose large-scale forms of exploitation by dismantling the machines at their disposal. The chapter also talks about Epistemological Luddism, a specific form of Luddism that provides a critical defense against late-twentieth century technological politics and a dedramatization of the false choice for or against technology.
Revolutionary Suicide
Authors: Tierney Matt
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about revolutionary suicide is not an advocacy for death, but as the idea of a furious collective survival at all costs. Huey P. Newton's phrase describes revolutionary suicide as a form of political commitment that includes a willingness to endanger oneself. As forms of dismantling, the theories and practices of revolutionary suicide demonstrate how bodies may strike not only against their machines, but also against themselves, if the alternative is to be made into a machine. Revolutionary suicide is the cybercultural self-elimination of one body in response to instrumentalization by another. In a mode of revolutionary suicide, dismantling is a generative protest: not against technology but instead against the instrumentalization of human life through techniques of compulsory motherhood, black slavery, militarized science, and the binding constraints of humanist fiction. In characters' capacity to dismantle themselves, within and against the conventions of genre and story, revolutionary suicide is how texts rupture the stultifying categories of race and reproductive technology in defense of subjugable bodies.
Liberation Technology
Authors: Tierney Matt
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about liberation technology as a term for a situated theory of communitarian tool-use, developed in the activist and philosophical work of Seneca leader John C. Mohawk, also known as Sotsisowah. Discrete from other ways of thinking about machines and freedom, liberation technology more closely resembles the techniques and tools of what Maria Mies and Carol DeChellis Hill, in very different registers, called a politics of subsistence. When politics of technology and survival are seen as largely local, there remain ways to flourish at a subsistence level on the outer edge of the technologized world. Liberation technology grants that there is both value and risk in having nothing, or almost nothing. It names the basic material and collective strategy that can facilitate a transformation of shared life even under extremely exploited conditions. It is a hybrid concept, coined by Mohawk in a speech before the UN in 1977, which synthesizes liberation theology with appropriate technology, and might lead to unexpected kinds of shared belief and action.
The Game of Survival
Authors: Malejacq Romain
Published: May 2020

This chapter demonstrates that warlords are skilled political entrepreneurs who best exploit the means at their disposal to make themselves indispensable well beyond the battlefield. Here, warlord survival is a game in which political entrepreneurs express their power through a variety of resources, which they convert and project to maximize their chances of winning. To that end, this chapter shows that warlords mobilize their different sources of power through the corresponding power resources. It then develops the survival mechanisms, power conversion and power projection, to explain how warlords survive across the different types of political orders identified in the previous chapter. Finally, the chapter illustrates how warlords have typically converted and projected power since 2001 to exert their authority as armed notables. In other words, it shows how warlords win the game of survival.
Dostum, the Ethnic Entrepreneur
Authors: Malejacq Romain
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former pro-government militia leader, at one point ruled over most of northern Afghanistan. It shows that he never broke free from either his Uzbek identity or his role as an ethnic entrepreneur. This has in turn allowed him to successfully project authority both domestically and internationally, and eventually survive. Furthermore, Dostum has remained consistent in his lifelong attempt to be accepted by the political elites in the capital while maximizing his local autonomy. He has never betrayed his core clientele, and many ethnic Uzbeks continue to see him as the pasha, a fatherly figure who “has money and weapons and can defend them.”
Beyond Warlord Survival
Authors: Malejacq Romain
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter further articulates the core implication of this book: that state building is impossible in fragmented societies without significant concessions to nonstate power holders. Most international actors involved in Afghanistan and other war-torn countries would prefer that warlords fall into insignificance to favor the construction of a rule-based Weberian bureaucracy. This chapter argues that most warlords manage to remain influential despite the pressure that some international and state actors exert to marginalize them. Warlord survival is thus a story of shrewd individuals who develop creative political strategies to survive in hostile environments, in which international and state actors attempt to homogenize the exercise of power. Here, the chapter asserts that state building that is aimed at centralizing and monopolizing political authority is a delusion because warlords are in fact integral to the way states like Afghanistan actually work.
The Koch Network’s Long Game and Its Implications for Progressive Organizing
Authors: MacLean Nancy
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes a long view of the emergence of libertarian ideology and the development of the Far Right. It argues that it is these ideas, promoted through a deep, broad, densely connected network of right-wing think tanks, foundations, and sponsored academics, that have driven an ideological agenda. In this way, these parties weaponized these ideas and deployed a series of policy initiatives at the state level. The chapter argues that the right knew early on that voters would reject their policy agenda, which would benefit only a minority of citizens. Consequently, right-wing activists pushed a stealth campaign of incremental changes that obscured the true motives of their radical agenda. Their goal, as the chapter suggests, was to turn America back to the way it looked in 1900—a nation without workers' rights, without public regulation, run by business-dominated government institutions free of democratic accountability.
Right-Wing Populism, the Corporate Attack on Working Americans, and the Labor Movement’s Response
Authors: Lafer Gordon
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that the problem is a corporate assault, driven not by ideology but rather by business's self-interest. Here, business as a whole participates. This chapter shows that the most dangerous antidemocratic actions and policies are supported by a large majority of corporate actors. When so-called ideologues like the Koch brothers encounter a conflict between their ideology and their self-interest, self-interest wins. The chapter argues that this corporate assault has transformed the political process at the state level and restricted the scope of democratic deliberation. It underscores how the corporate agenda is at odds with what a majority of voters want. Even in states that voted for Trump, evidence shows that the right has been unable to convince voters to support its policy agenda. Indeed, this working-class resistance and support for progressive issues provides hope that organized opposition based on issues can defeat the corporate agenda.
Trump, Right-Wing Populism, and the Future of Organized Labor
Authors: Fletcher Bill , Luz José Alejandro La
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that the core problem is not ideology or corporate self-interest but rather the rise of a right-wing populism that feeds on racism and xenophobia. When workers suffer from stagnating or declining incomes, loss of benefits and pensions, declining health and health care coverage, and increased job insecurity, the right gives them an answer: blame black people, Latinxs, immigrants, Jews, or Muslims; blame the media elites, academics, or experts, not your employer; embrace the rich in the hope that someday you can be one of them; and condemn powerless people as the cause of your problems. The chapter describes how populism draws its energy from a racist, sexist, and xenophobic framing of the impact of the economic crisis on working-class Americans while also rejecting the postwar global order in favor of a return to American isolationism. It laments the Left's failure to offer plausible solutions and to create lasting solidarity across gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. This chapter explains that no revival of labor will be possible without engaging union members about race, gender, immigration, and the true nature of right-wing populism.
Fighting and Defeating the Charter School Agenda
Authors: Walters Kyla
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the dynamics behind a high-profile campaign led by the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA). In 2016, right-wing forces sought to expand charter schools through a ballot initiative. Initially, all signs suggested that the charter expansion would easily pass. The MTA mobilized, and the ballot measure was defeated in a landslide. This chapter identifies several mechanisms that contributed to the teachers' success. Most important, the MTA committed to fighting. Together with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Jobs with Justice, and others, this grassroots coalition defeated Wall Street's money and showed the power of social justice organizing. Fifteen months later, in spring 2018, a string of strikes in red states showed that educators in many places have both the inclination and the capacity to fight, even where teacher strikes are prohibited.
Out of Thin Air
Authors: Lyons Emily
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers the processes of constructing an academic identity for first-generation students. It discusses challenges to building an academic identity among first-generation college students, both for those whose parents are unambiguously supportive of their child's college attendance and those who are ambivalent. The chapter reveals that the identities that students take on as college students and as members of their family are two aspects of the self that students described as being central to who they are. For many students, tensions between their academic and family identities are moderate to none. For first-generation students, however, the very decision to enroll in college may mark a divergence from their parents' trajectories and the trajectories expected of them. This is because schooling plays a large role in socialization, and college plays a particularly large role in shaping people's beliefs, habits, preferences, and behaviors.
From “Ōkuma Finance” to “Matsukata Finance,” 1873–1881
Authors: Ericson Steven J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the transition from the expansionary policies of Ōkuma Shigenobu to the contractionary ones of Sano Tsunetami as background to the Matsukata reform, which in large measure ended up combining his predecessors' approaches. It shows the critical difference between the Ōkuma and Matsukata approaches to financial policy. Ōkuma sought to engineer a rapid currency reform using the proceeds from overseas bond issuance while applying the savings from austerity to continue the expansionary economic policies he had pursued as finance minister. The adoption of his new foreign-borrowing scheme in the summer of 1881 signaled a softening of official commitment to fiscal retrenchment. Matsukata intended to continue the Sano initiatives with the exception of borrowing abroad and founding a British-style central bank. Yet in practice he would diverge from much of the Sano austerity program in ways that differed from both classical and neoliberal orthodoxy.
Orthodox Finance and “the Dictates of Practical Expediency”
Authors: Ericson Steven J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the experiences and ideas that influenced Matsukata both in his commitment to aspects of mid-nineteenth-century British economic orthodoxy and in his predilection for unorthodox policies on certain issues. A widely held view is that, as finance czar, Matsukata rigidly applied the theories of orthodox finance he had learned from French economists during the nine-month trip he took to Europe in 1878. Some historians likewise claim that French scholarship and example provided the overall pattern for the Matsukata reforms of the 1880s. For the most part, however, French tutelage simply reinforced ideas that Matsukata had been developing since the Restoration, drawing on both Sino-Japanese and Western sources, ideas that he would go on to implement pragmatically after 1881. Matsukata and his brain trust had no single model for financial reform; rather, they participated in a global circulation of ideas and practices regarding public finance, including currents not only of Franco-British liberalism but also of German and U.S. economic nationalism.
Austerity and Expansion
Authors: Ericson Steven J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes the outbreak of military crises on the Korean Peninsula, the worsening of the domestic depression brought on primarily by Matsukata's own currency contraction, and other exigencies which prompted him instead to increase government spending, generating fiscal deficits that he financed not by boosting tax revenues but by promoting exports and selling public bonds. In responding to these trends through a pragmatic embrace of public bond issuance and state-led export promotion, Matsukata departed significantly from classical economic liberalism. He began turning toward such positive policies as early as 1883. In that regard, the Matsukata financial reform as it unfolded combined the contractionary program of Sano with the expansionary approach of Ōkuma. This policy mix, in turn, would help shorten a sharp, deflation-induced depression that Matsukata initially expected would continue for a year or two longer.
Spending in a time of “Retrenchment”
Authors: Ericson Steven J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how the Matsukata reform brought about a shift in industrial policy. This indicated a move away from direct state intervention in the economy and toward the creation of a favorable institutional setting for the growth of private enterprise. Yet, for all of Matsukata's free enterprise rhetoric—“the Government should never attempt to compete with the people in pursuing lines of industry or commerce”—he deviated from classical economic liberalism by increasing industrial spending in fiscal 1881–1885 compared to the previous four years and by maintaining fairly heavy state involvement in the economy. Likewise, his industrial policy contrasts with the emphasis of neoliberal IMF orthodoxy on privatization insofar as the Meiji government sold off hardly any of its enterprises until late in the Matsukata financial reform. Although, the paucity of sales until mid-1884 was a function more of the shortage of buyers than of Matsukata's lack of commitment to supporting private initiative.
Founding a Central bank
Authors: Ericson Steven J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how, like other aspects of the Matsukata financial reform that veered from classical financial orthodoxy, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) turned out to be hardly orthodox in its structure or operations. The BoJ, established in October 1882, was pivotal to Matsukata's effort to stabilize and modernize public finance. It separated currency management from the state's fiscal machine but keeping it under tight government supervision. Instead of choosing the Bank of England model with its high degree of independence from the government, Matsukata drew on the model of the Belgian central bank because it involved greater state control. Once established, the BoJ moved in an even more statist direction, assuming the task of financing industrial firms and adopting flexible German-style note issue under close government supervision rather than the orthodox Bank of England approach.
“Poor Peasant, Poor Country”?
Authors: Ericson Steven J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the Matsukata deflation and its impact on domestic agriculture and industry and on foreign trade. Regardless of whether scholars hold negative or positive views of the Matsukata reform, they have tended to overstate both the short- and long-term impact of the deflation-induced depression as well as the role of the reform itself in bringing about the “Matsukata deflation” in the first place. If Matsukata had strictly followed an orthodox program of financial stabilization, the depression would likely have been as severe as most accounts claim. But his deviations from orthodoxy—boosting government spending, promoting exports of commodities from the rural sector, and the like—helped to buffer the economy and abridge the downturn. In short, the chapter asserts that one needs to qualify the commonly held view that the Matsukata reform was “a devastating experience for millions of people.”
The Matsukata Reform as “Expansionary Austerity”
Authors: Ericson Steven J.
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter returns to the notion that Matsukata merged the positive and negative policies of his predecessors along liberal nationalist lines, pursuing a kind of “expansionary austerity” during the Matsukata deflation. It argues that Matsukata Masayoshi was committed to reform and modernization of Japan's fiscal and monetary systems and to encouragement of private enterprise, but not in a categorical orthodox liberal or neoliberal sense. He certainly set out to create budget surpluses through fiscal austerity. Yet he demonstrated flexibility in response to a series of unexpected developments that compelled the Finance Ministry in fact to increase government spending. As a result, the Finance Ministry was able to accumulate enough specie and money in the reserve fund to redeem a sizable portion of fiat notes, back the issue of convertible paper money by the Bank of Japan, and finance military expansion as well as enable the state to remain actively involved in the economy.
Family
Authors: Ralph Saw , Sheera Naw , Olinga-Shannon Stephanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes Saw Ralph's first meeting with Naw Sheera and his subsequent marriage to her. He met Naw Sheera as a soldier during the 1950s, as his unit passed by the village where she worked as a teacher. But there were complications to this love affair, as wedding arrangements had to be made in advance, with the knowledge of the higher authorities in the revolution, besides. Despite certain difficulties, however, the wedding pushed through, although this proved to be only the first of the many challenges the new couple would experience in married life. This chapter follows Saw Ralph's life after his marriage as he and Naw Sheera attempt to raise a family.
Childhood
Authors: Ralph Saw , Sheera Naw , Olinga-Shannon Stephanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter turns to Naw Sheera's childhood, covering her family life, her girlhood, and her early aspirations to become a teacher. She lived in a small and relatively isolated village called Et Et, where her family made their living as farmers. The chapter also reveals Naw Sheera's early exposure to Christianity. It goes on to detail Naw Sheera's life during the Japanese invasion, which interrupted her idyllic childhood and forced her to confront hardships alongside the rest of her village during the Japanese occupation. All throughout, Naw Sheera details her experiences with her grandmother in particular—an enterprising woman who unfortunately passed away during the occupation.
Bible School and Missionary Work
Authors: Ralph Saw , Sheera Naw , Olinga-Shannon Stephanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter recounts Naw Sheera's experiences at Bible school, where she strengthened her faith in Christianity. This would help her maintain her marriage later in life. Bible school proved to be a formative part of her life in other ways, as it taught her patience, consideration, and self-control. In addition to her academic experiences, the chapter reveals that Naw Sheera spent a year in Thailand to do missionary work. This too provided her with new challenges and new experiences, including an incident where Naw Sheera was nearly forced into marriage. And although she received no pay as a missionary, she was able to subsist on money and food as offerings.
The Fall of Manerplaw
Authors: Ralph Saw , Sheera Naw , Olinga-Shannon Stephanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the fall of Manerplaw from the perspective of Naw Sheera. At this time, Karen society was being split apart after decades of peace when Buddhist and Christian Karens came into conflict. The Burmese army used these tensions to their advantage, eventually forcing Naw Sheera to evacuate with her family, except for Saw Ralph, who was at the time at another Karen National Union base. This chapter details Naw Sheera's harrowing experiences in fleeing from the conflict alongside her fellow villages. They later received the support of international bodies such as the United Nations and the International Organization of Migration.
Numbers and the Assembling of a Community Mental Health Infrastructure in Postsocialist China
Authors: Ma Zhiying
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how globally validated epidemiological estimates have constituted a population of seriously mentally ill patients in China. It talks about the target population of the 686 Program and compares the program's different visions. It also discusses how national and local interests translate estimates into program targets and evaluation standards. The chapter explains how the numbers' circulation in existing bureaucratic pathways can generate controversies of “quota apportioning.” It covers what the numerically guided community mental health infrastructure might include or exclude and when it might work or break down. The data for the chapter draw on ongoing ethnographic research on community mental health in China.
Divergent Trust and Dissonant Truths in Public Health Science
Authors: Mason Katherine A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter is based on research conducted in the pseudonymous city of Tianmai between 2008 and 2014. It takes note of public health science after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) breakout was supposed to “save” China in part by promoting the reputation and standing of China's public health community throughout the world. With regard to this promise, the young, well-educated scientists who worked at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the Pearl River Delta in the years following the 2003 SARS epidemic were largely disappointed. They had arrived at their new posts full of idealism and ambition, but by the end of the decade they were voicing frustration, boredom, and embarrassment. What bothered these young scientists most of all was their feelings of powerlessness with regard to acting on this knowledge. The lingdao must still receive his statistics, the money must be spent, and the migrants must be counted and vaccinated. In this vein, the most commonly repeated phrase heard from the younger generation of scientists was one of fatalism: there is nothing to be done, it is all determined by the leaders. Modern science was contrasted with traditional clientelism to produce an ideal that felt impossible to attain.
China’s Eco-Dream and the Making of Invisibilities in Rural-Environmental Research
Authors: Lord Elizabeth
Published: May 2020

This chapter starts from the premise that technologies of knowing the environment are molded by broader political and societal contexts. Just as “science” is never singular, but rather an ever-changing product of personal commitments, institutional struggles, and historical legacies, environmental research, data, and methods that are never dryly environmental. It focuses on the production of environmental knowledge as an explicitly political process, one that is in constant conversation with institutional, ideological, and economic forces. Examining environmental knowledge production is important because China's green dream reaches the population unevenly and builds on inequalities to realize itself. The chapter identifies key parameters that regulate rural-environmental research. These include pressures to prioritize economic growth over environmental protection, the commercialization of academia, governmental controls of what is considered acceptable or unacceptable research, as well as limitations on fieldwork access. The chapter also details how economic and political parameters bound environmental research in specific ways.
The Black Soldier Fly
Authors: Zhang Amy
Published: May 2020

This chapter follows Dr. Wu in his work to devise a solution for organic waste treatment using insects. By examining the tension between China's urban development and the sustainable treatment of organic waste, the chapter argues that China's project to institute a green modernity increasingly shows a preference for scientific solutions that address local conditions. This preference is in stark contrast to previous policies and approaches under which Chinese cities, for example, pushed for the adoption of imported waste management technologies and, in the case of organic waste, expelled the animals that served as a de facto waste management system. The chapter also highlights the longer historical traditions and practices that buttress the development of technology. China has a specific history of using insects as a tool and resource and has also focused on biological pest control in domestic entomological research. As a waste management technology, the Black Soldier Fly project creates a new use for insects while simultaneously generating increased interspecies dependencies between insects and humans.
Afterword
Authors: Zhan Mei
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews the collective exploration into the entanglements of science and technology, the state, the market, and everyday life in contemporary China. The chapter presents a compelling argument for why it is critical, at this particular moment, for anthropologists to step in and make their accounts and analyses of science in/of/and China relevant to academic and public discussions and debates. It emphasizes that China is not a place outside of the West where “usual science” proliferates and changes its forms in a non-Western national or cultural context. Rather, the translocal sociohistorical formation and the complex conceptual and institutional interplay of state, market, and technoscience shaping and shaped by post-Mao, post-socialist, and now Xi's authoritarian China demand thoughtful and experimental ethnographic engagement on the ground. The chapter also invokes governmentality as an analytical point of entry into the enmeshments of science, state, and market and as a way to forge a conversation with topics central to science and technology studies (STS) literatures.
The End, or Zukie’s Bad Day
Authors: Kraus Joe
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the aftermath of the death of Benjamin Zuckerman, one of the most prominent leaders of organized crime in Jewish Chicago. His death marked the start of a “shake-up” in the gangster world, as some powerful people had taken aim at the last independent Jewish gang in the city. Although Zuckerman’s murder was never officially solved, gangland rumor, police speculation, and later history make it seem likely that the killers were Lenny Patrick and a number of others. In short, this was a mostly Jewish syndicate hit squad just getting its start as some of the city’s most prolific mob killers. Patrick eventually succeeded Zuckerman as the most powerful gangster in Jewish Chicago, doing so as an agent of the Syndicate, however, rather than in Zuckerman’s independent fashion.
Roots of the Lawndale Machine
Authors: Kraus Joe
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers the complex of politics and crime that created and depended upon a generation of Jewish gangsters in Chicago. It tells the stories of two gangsters who became politicians—Emanuel “Manny” Abrahams and Morris Eller. Manny Abrahams became the alderman for Benjamin Zuckerman’s adolescent Maxwell Street ward and was a boss of the world when Patrick was still a toddler. Abrahams got there using tactics that paved the way for Morris Eller and Jacob Arvey. Through a combination of political tactics and gangster violence, Abrahams put himself forward for election, becoming the first full-blown gangster/politician hybrid. The chapter then turns to Morris Eller, the man who picked up the pieces Abrahams left behind and went even further than Abrahams did. He played a long game, working his way from one political position to another over a quarter century, but he played it smart. He became not simply a city power broker but the leader of a gang willing to commit murder to keep him there.
Arvey’s Balancing Act
Authors: Kraus Joe
Published: May 2020

This chapter turns to Jacob Arvey. More than anyone else in Jewish Chicago, it fell to him to negotiate the political sea change from the crude saloon-style politicking of Manny Abrahams, through the gangster-riddled days of Morris Eller, to the efficient Machine politics of the middle 1940s. Arvey came to personal power in a ward where it was often difficult to distinguish the politicians from the gangsters, and he could never entirely free his political apparatus from connections to organized crime. At the same time, however, he found a space between the corruption that preceded him and the impossible-to-achieve purity that reformers from outside his world clamored for. Arvey established that middle ground between crime and reform by building relationships. Some of those hands were relatively clean, but others were dirty enough that he could not entirely remove the stain they left behind.
When Scarface Met Rico
Authors: Kraus Joe
Published: May 2020

This chapter traces the waning of Patrick’s career and that of the Outfit as law enforcement was closing in. It discusses the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, which was part of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. RICO expressly spelled out the capacity to target individuals for being part of a criminal organization. It expanded the existing power to bring conspiracy charges against criminal organizations. Under conspiracy, everyone involved had to be aware of the shared goal of the operation, and the group was defined by its participation in a particular crime. Under RICO, it became possible to convict someone who was part of an organization engaged in a pattern of illegal activity even if some members of the organization were unaware of specific actions or even of the ultimate goal of those actions.
Official Nationality
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the “Official Nationality,” an ideology created by Tsar Nicholas I. Nicholas sought to develop an alternative ideology that would counter Western European liberalism and emphasize Russia's distinctiveness, thereby forestalling revolution. To this end, in 1832 he appointed Count Sergei Uvarov as minister of popular enlightenment to reform the educational system and instill within it a new “national” spirit. Official Nationality was thus the moral counterpart of more practical reforms instituted by Uvarov. It consisted of three principles—“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.” According to Uvarov, these were “the principles which form the distinctive character of Russia, and which belong only to Russia.” They were to be the basis of the moral education of Russia's youth, but they soon extended beyond the educational system to become the ideological principles of Nicholas's Russia as a whole.
The Slavophiles
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the Slavophiles. They were a small group of mostly Moscow-based intellectuals who came together in the mid-1840s after a split with the so-called “Westernizers.” The Slavophiles were loyal to the autocratic regime, but their views on the nature of the nation and the state, as well as on specific issues such as free speech, departed from the official line. As a result, the government viewed them with definite suspicion. In general the Slavophiles found it difficult to make their opinions heard. It was only after the death of Nicholas I that they were finally given permission to publish a journal of their own. Despite the restrictions on spreading their views, they were to have a profound impact on the future of Russian conservatism.
Emigration
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2020

This chapter concerns Russian emigration. Historians have contrasted the political weakness of the Russian emigration with its vibrant artistic and intellectual life. In 1922, the Bolsheviks expelled 220 of Russia's leading intellectuals on the so-called “philosophers' steamer.” They and other émigrés made important contributions to a large range of subjects, including philosophy and history, while émigré communities produced hundreds of journals and newspapers. In the post-Soviet era, as Russian politicians and intellectuals have sought non-communist sources of inspiration, many have turned to émigré writings. Important political figures such as President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have cited émigré thinkers in their speeches. Although it was cut off from the vitally important developments taking place in the Soviet Union, the emigration is an integral part of Russian history.
Post-Soviet Russia
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at conservatism in post-Soviet Russia, particularly during the 2010s when there arose a “conservative turn” in Russian politics and society. This was associated with a revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, centralization of political authority, growing Russian nationalism, increased tensions between Russia and the Western world, and socially conservative legislation. These phenomena have made Russian conservatism a matter of considerable contemporary importance. The chapter describes multiple types of conservatism and shows that what all these groups have in common is support for a strong centralized state and belief in the need for Russia to protect its sovereignty and develop in an organic fashion, befitting its national traditions. Despite all the differences, as in previous eras, Orthodoxy, a belief in a strong central authority, and variations of nationalism remain at the core of Russian conservatism.
The Hygienic and Physiological Significance of Skiing1
Authors: Eimeleus K. B. E. E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter outlines some general hygienic, environmental, and physiological precautions for skiing. While there are no special hygienic rules for running on skis, the chapter provides some advice on nutrition and proper attire, as well as some remedies for winter-related ailments. After outlining this general advice, the chapter turns to the benefits of skiing. Although skiing can have its unpleasant side, the chapter argues that it provides so much benefit that one should not pay attention to its drawbacks. Through skiing it is possible to absorb prodigious amounts of oxygen. It develops a person's hardiness, adroitness, and dexterity. Three types of locomotion constitute skiing: walking, running, and jumping. These activities require immense effort from all the muscles of the body, causing extreme fatigue at first, but these hone the body through exercise and increasing one's capacity for tolerating low temperatures.
Upkeep and Preservation of Skis1
Authors: Eimeleus K. B. E. E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter deals with the maintenance of skis. It argues that a good skier should relate to their skis as a cavalryman does to their horse: concern for them should be their top priority. Moreover, all skis need detailed and conscientious upkeep regardless of the type of wood used in their manufacture, even if it was the driest and best conditioned available. New skis additionally require more maintenance than old ones no matter how many times they have been waxed. This is because a new ski cannot sufficiently absorb wax and other oleaginous agents right away. That is why care must be taken to avoid letting the skis get warped after they have been soaked.
Clothing1
Authors: Eimeleus K. B. E. E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses the requirements for ski footwear to fulfill their purpose. First of all, the material and workmanship should be of the very best quality. Second, they should be roomy enough so that one can put on two pairs of warm stockings or footwraps and still freely wiggle the toes, thus preventing frostbite. The chapter also addresses clothing for skiing in general. Clothing should be lightweight, loose, not too long, and at the same time, warm. There is no need to dress up in too much clothing since one rarely gets cold during a run. Furthermore, a skier's outfit should be made of smooth, impermeable, and pliant material so that snow does not adhere. This is because clinging snow can soak the clothing when it is thawed out in a warm place.