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Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography
... It would follow, then, that because race is a social construction, perceptions of group position are dynamic, adaptable, and subject to revision (Omi and Winant 2014). Indeed, previous research has suggested that White Americans' sense of threat may be contingent on viewing racial hierarchies as legitimate in the first place (Brown, Rucker, and Richeson 2022;Wilkins and Kaiser 2014), suggesting that racial ideologies have to be continuously amended in order to justify existing racial hierarchies (Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997;Skarpelis 2023). ...
Objectives
Existing applications of the group position thesis emphasize interracial differences in policing attitudes. However, this theoretical approach struggles to account for attitudinal differences among White Americans and the increasing role of partisanship in structuring public opinion on policing. We propose a theoretical revision, framed-group-position theory, which posits that political framing is a chief influencer of White Americans’ attitudes toward policing and other social institutions. By contrast, non-White Americans’ policing attitudes are likely to be based on a collective understanding of experienced subordination.
Methods
In two studies, corresponding to two separate data sets ( N = 121,000 and N = 1,150), we test whether partisan affiliations differentially influence police reform support across racial identities and if the moderating effect of political beliefs is mediated by racial attitudes.
Results
Our findings suggest that political affiliation is differentially associated with police reform support across racial groups. Relative to White respondents, political affiliation has a weaker association with reform support among Black respondents, and this moderated effect is mediated by racial attitudes. Among other ethnoracial respondents, we found a similar yet less pronounced pattern.
Conclusions
Framed-group-position theory offers a systemic-racism centered framework to understand interracial differences in both levels and variability in policing and other criminal justice attitudes.
... Building on the visual turn in sociology-which Gold (1997) dates to Becker's (1974) seminal article, "Photography and Sociology"-recent scholarship has analyzed visual discourse in ideological projects across a variety of empirical cases. 8 These include revolution in France (Agulhon 1981;Hunt 2016;Ozouf 1988); Nazism in Germany (Skarpelis 2023); nationalism in Latin America and Poland (Kyriazi and vom Hau 2020;Zubrzycki 2011); and socialism in Russia (Bonnell 1997), China (Ho 2018), and Cuba (Gastón-Greenberg 2021; Reed 2016; Regalado Someillan 2009). Such scholarship has shown that images embody and give visual form to ideologies, leveraging their seeming claims to "reality," which are based on the idea that an image "appears to record rather than transform" (Woollacott 1982, 99). 9 In combining linguistic and visual discourse, leaders of revolutionary regimes have the opportunity not only to promote certain practices, behaviors, and ways of interacting but also to clarify the ideological meanings behind them. ...
Within elite-led projects of ideological transformation, how do leaders encourage practices that reflect and reinforce the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs they are trying to make hegemonic? This article investigates how political elites use different mechanisms of subject formation as they attempt to replace one hegemonic ideology with another and to shape new subjects to match. Whereas leaders of the Mexican and Nicaraguan revolutions often approached creating “new women” through legislation and campaigns, the Cuban revolutionary elites leveraged their swift and broad control over mass media to complement institutional means of subject formation with discursive ones. I draw on careful qualitative analysis of 112 issues of the state-run women’s magazine Mujeres (Women) to show how leaders combined both linguistic and visual discourse to promote the development of the socialist “new woman” by encouraging women to participate in a wide range of labor outside of the home and by assisting them as they adjusted to the new material realities of the immediate post-revolutionary period. Bringing mass media swiftly and fully under state control allows leaders to communicate the ideological attitudes and behaviors they wish to promote among the people, while limiting alternate conceptions of revolutionary subjecthood.
Large language models (LLMs), through their exposure to massive collections of online text, learn to reproduce the perspectives and linguistic styles of diverse social and cultural groups. This capability suggests a powerful social scientific application—the simulation of empirically realistic, culturally situated human subjects. Synthesizing recent research in artificial intelligence and computational social science, we outline a methodological foundation for simulating human subjects and their social interactions. We then identify six characteristics of current models that are likely to impair the realistic simulation of human subjects: bias, uniformity, atemporality, disembodiment, linguistic cultures, and alien intelligence. For each of these areas, we discuss promising approaches for overcoming their associated shortcomings. Given the rate of change of these models, we advocate for an ongoing methodological program for the simulation of human subjects that keeps pace with rapid technical progress, and caution that validation against human subjects data remains essential to ensure simulation accuracy.
This review examines cultural production and consumption through the lens of race and ethnicity. Although the sociological study of race, ethnicity, and cultural production and consumption (RECPC) is growing, it is scattered across various subfields. This review aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how race and ethnicity intersect with cultural production and consumption by bringing this scholarship together. I discuss five dominant themes in the scholarship: classification, valuation and evaluation, representations, market outcomes, and cultural capital. The article concludes with implications for future sociological research on RECPC.
Theories of race-making have recognized the confusion and contradiction in state-led racial projects but have not sufficiently elaborated their unintended consequences. Focusing on the relationship between the state, racial science, and immigration policy in the early twentieth century United States, this article illustrates how practical challenges in racial projects can jeopardize and thereby eventually trigger innovations in modes of racial governance. The Dillingham Commission (1907–1911) was a Congressional investigative commission that attempted to collect comprehensive data on immigrants in order to provide a scientific foundation of immigration policy. Specifically, the most powerful members of the Commission’s executive committee wanted to single out Southern and Eastern Europeans (SEEs) and portray them as “undesirable races.” Developing such a classification scheme, however, proved to be difficult, and the facts collected from the field did not support their goal, instead demonstrating that in many cases SEEs were not very different from other immigrants and their native-born counterparts. The idea for national quotas, as well as the theoretical foundation for the inclusion of SEEs, emerged in this process, not as an outcome of ideological design but as an unintended byproduct of knowledge production. I highlight the pursuit of facts-based governance and relative autonomy of middle-level managers as key factors that enabled such process.
Legitimacy is widely invoked as a condition, cause, and outcome of other social phenomena, yet measuring legitimacy is a persistent challenge. In this article, I synthesize existing approaches to conceptualizing legitimacy across the social sciences to identify widely agreed upon definitional properties. I then build on these points of consensus to develop a generalizable approach to operationalization. Legitimacy implies specific relationships among three empirical elements: an object of legitimacy, an audience that confers legitimacy, and a relationship between the two. Together, these empirical elements constitute a dyad (i.e., a single unit consisting of two nodes and a tie). I identify three necessary conditions for legitimacy— expectations, assent, and conformity—that specify how elements of the dyad interact. I detail how these conditions can be used to empirically establish legitimacy (and illegitimacy), distinguishing it from dissimilar phenomena that often appear similar empirically. Followed to its logical conclusion, this operationalization has novel implications for understanding the effects of legitimacy. I discuss these implications, and how they inform debates over the relevance of legitimacy as an explanation for socially significant outcomes.
Significance
The US government’s classification of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans as White means there is no direct way to numerically count members of this group in official statistics. Therefore, any potential disparities and inequalities faced by MENA Americans remain hidden. Nevertheless, we find that MENA Americans may not be perceived, nor perceive themselves, to be White. These findings underscore the minoritized status of MENA Americans and support the inclusion of a new MENA identity category in the US Census. This would allow researchers to examine the social, economic, and health status of this growing population and empower community advocates to ameliorate existing inequalities.
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic is puzzling from a visual point of view. There are millions of photographs published about the crisis every day, yet we can see the key actor, the virus, only in artistic representations. Most of us also have very restricted access to central sites of the crisis, as intensive care units, nursing homes, meat packing plants and prisons are often not available for photographic representation. At the same time, we are oversupplied by other images that try to capture the "essence" of the moment. This article analyzes three prevalent visual genres in connection with the ongoing pandemic: abstract representations of the virus and public responses to it, images of heroes and sinners, and photographs of the "stage": the iconic spaces including empty public buildings and busy domestic spaces. All these iconic representations try to grasp the "deep meaning" of the crisis through a particular scene or moment. Their expressive surfaces have become our key sources to imagine the coronavirus crisis, and to socially connect in a time of painful and prolonged physical distance.
White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to explore personal identities, they receive upsetting results they consider evidence of non-white or non-European ancestry? Our answer draws on qualitative analysis of posts on the white nationalist website Stormfront, interpreted by synthesizing the literatures on white nationalism and GATs and identity. We show that Stormfront posters exert much more energy repairing individuals’ bad news than using it to exclude or attack them. Their repair strategies combine anti-scientific, counter-knowledge attacks on the legitimacy of GATs and quasi-scientific reinterpretations of GATs in terms of white nationalist histories. However, beyond individual identity repair they also reinterpret the racial boundaries and hierarchies of white nationalism in terms of the relationships GATs make visible. White nationalism is not simply an identity community or political movement but should be understood as bricoleurs with genetic knowledge displaying aspects of citizen science.
Dynamics of race in South Africa are deeply entangled within a world system that continues to enable hegemonic white privilege. Prevalent views and behaviours towards “interracial” relationships reveal a rebellion against the non-racial philosophies and policies of the new government and are an indicator of the ongoing salience of race in shaping lived experience. Drawing on interviews with couples in so-called “interracial” relationships, this article argues that unequal power dynamics continue to hyperracialize and regulate these relationships through “privatized” racial boundary policing, even though such relationships are no longer stigmatized and criminalized by the state as in apartheid South Africa. Their experiences of racism show up in two distinct ways: aggressive policing and covert policing; these in turn can lead to self-policing, and perpetuate racial social organization.
This article traces one of the first attempts at photographing citizenship by examining some of the 7600 images produced for the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee's lanternslide scheme, a series of geography lectures documenting the land and peoples of the British Empire that circulated in classrooms around the world between 1902 and 1945. This unusual government project brought together imperial propaganda and visual instruction to teach children what it meant to look and to feel like imperial citizens. The lectures on India, in particular, point to the speculative nature of COVIC's project, which sought to predict which populations might pose a threat to the empire and how they might be safely managed and contained through colonial education. By reading COVIC's photographs and texts against contemporaneous visual culture in the empire, the article analyses the inconsistencies in photographing imperial citizenship amongst the more recognizable visual categories of race, class and gender.
Recent high-profile research suggests that social indicators like incarceration influence racial categorization. Yet, this research has largely ignored colorism—intraracial differences in skin tone that matter for stratification outcomes. In two experiments, we address how skin tone interacts with criminal background to produce external racial classification and skin tone attributions. We find no evidence that criminal history affects external racial classification or skin tone attribution. However, we find that skin tone is a strong and consistent predictor of external racial classification and skin tone attribution.
A growing literature posits the importance of boundaries in structuring social systems. Yet sociologists have not adequately theorized one of the most fraught and consequential sites of boundary-making in contemporary life: the delineation of the official edges of the government—and, consequently, of state from society. This article addresses that gap by theorizing the mechanisms of state boundary formation. In so doing, we extend culturalist theories of the state by providing a more specific model of how the state-society boundary is produced. Further, we contribute to institutionalist accounts of politics by highlighting boundary-work during policy creation as a crucial site of political struggle, one with causal implications insofar as it illuminates a process that determines fine-grained distinctions in policy forms.
This article takes its cue from an essay by Gerhard Richter on Walter Benjamin and the fascist aestheticization of politics. It examines the portrait photography of Dutch photographer W.F. Van Heemskerck Düker, who was a true believer in the ideology of a Greater Germany. He published a number of illustrated books on the Dutch Heimat and worked together with German photographers Erna Lendvai-Dircksen and Erich Retzlaff. When considering what type of photography was best suited to capture the photographic aesthetics of the fascist nation, the article argues that within the paradigm of the Greater German Heimat we find not so much a form of anthropometric photography, as exemplified by the work of Hans F.K. Günther, as a genre of Heimat portraits that was better equipped to satisfy the need to unify two crucial structural oppositions in fascist ideology, namely mass versus individuality, and physical appearance versus inner soul.
This article introduces the Völkerpsychologie of the German psychologist and liberal politician Willy Hellpach. It shows how Hellpach used the once venerable approach of Völkerpsychologie, introduced by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in the nineteenth century, to adapt to the Third Reich and distract the authorities from his political career. The article provides a close reading of Hellpach's main text on the subject, the Einführung in die Völkerpsychologie published in 1938, and explains the ease with which he was able to make this approach compatible with Nazi ideology. Hellpach's case thus illustrates the proximity of national-liberal thinking to ‘Nazi ideology’. Moreover, on account of the post-war reception of Hellpach's Völkerpsychologie by scholars such as Ralf Dahrendorf, the article examines the uneasy and incomplete repudiation of Völkerpsychologie after 1945. It concludes that the origins of widely used concepts such as ‘national habitus’ or ‘national identity’ can be traced back to the tradition of Völkerpsychologie and related studies of national character.
Shiao, Bode, Beyer, and Selvig argue that the theory of race as a social construct should
be revisited in light of recent genetic research, which they interpret as demonstrating that
human biological variation is patterned in “clinal classes” that are homologous to races.
In this reply, I examine both their claims and the genetics literature they cite, concluding
that not only does constructivist theory already accommodate the contemporary study of
human biology, but few geneticists portray their work as bearing on race. Equally important,
methods for statistically identifying DNA-based clusters within the human species are
shaped by several design features that offer opportunities for the incorporation of cultural
assumptions about difference. As a result, Shiao et al.’s theoretical distinction between
social race and biological “clinal class” is empirically jeopardized by the fact that even our
best attempts at objectively recording “natural” human groupings are socially conditioned.
This article brings together two case studies that examine how nontransgender people, “gender normals,” interact with transgender people to highlight the connections between doing gender and heteronormativity. By contrasting public and private interactions that range from nonsexual to sexualized to sexual, the authors show how gender and sexuality are inextricably tied together. The authors demonstrate that the criteria for membership in a gender category are significantly different in social versus (hetero)sexual circumstances. While gender is presumed to reflect biological sex in all social interactions, the importance of doing gender in a way that represents the shape of one's genitals is heightened in sexual and sexualized situations. Responses to perceived failures to fulfill gender criteria in sexual and sexualized relationships are themselves gendered; men and women select different targets for and utilize gendered tactics to accomplish the policing of supposedly natural gender boundaries and to repair breaches to heteronormativity.
Taking the example of ‘Studies in black and white', a genre of photographs taken around the end of the nineteenth century by Methodist missionaries in the Pacific, this article seeks to go beyond conventional analyses that scrutinize colonial photography for forms of domination. I argue that these photographs, and the context in which some of them were published, reveal a complex interplay between two contradictory principles: on the one hand, a Christian humanism, articulating a vision of commonality and equality, and on the other, paternalism, articulating a vision of superiority and inequality .
In 1926 Weimar photographer László Moholy-Nagy predicted that the illiteracy of the future would be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography. Five years later theorist Walter Benjamin described the ability to compare facial types via portrait photobooks as a vitally important skill. As Germany endured an interregnum identity crisis, the photographic book proved an effective alternative to what were perceived to be the more subjective, traditional “fine arts” of painting and sculpture. More than innocuous collections of fine art photography, these books functioned as physiognomic guidelines for the representation of national identity during Germany's turbulent transition from unstable democracy to totalitarian state. As conservative writer Ernst Jünger observed in 1934, portrait photobooks offered “a particularly effective means of tracking down the enemy's individual character,” because it is “easier to change one's views than one's face.” This essay charts portrait photography's exploitation as evidentiary support for nineteenth-century physiognomic theory and examines a resurgent interest in this outmoded “pseudoscience” in 1920s Germany. My analysis of the production and reception of two popular photobooks, one by Weimar photographer August Sander (The Face of Our Time), and the other by Nazi photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen (German Folk Faces), reveals the degree to which both progressive and reactionary factions relied on photography and physiognomy to help redefine a stable or “authentic” face of the nation in an otherwise unstable time. While Hitler's devotion to both photographic propaganda and biological determinism is well known, the fact that progressive Weimar photographers like Sander also believed in the medium's power to lay bare the nation's “true” character and corporeal countenance indicates a surprising cultural continuity between the two regimes downplayed by art history's focus on the Führer's repudiation of modern art. By exploring the way that two ideologically opposed photographers shared a reliance on physiognomic theory, this research demonstrates portrait photography's central importance within the discourse of modern German visual culture and challenges art history's persistent emphasis on aesthetic rupture, rather than cultural continuity, between Weimar and the Third Reich.
What led modern colonizers to treat their subject populations in radically different ways, ranging from genocide to efforts to "salvage" precolonial cultures? In Southwest Africa, Germany massacred the Ovaherero and Witbooi; in Samoa, Germany pursued a program of cultural retraditionalization; and in the Chinese leasehold colony of Qingdao/Kiaochow, the Germans moved from policies of racialized segregation to a respectful civilizational exchange. Bourdieu is not generally seen as a theorist of empire, despite the partial genesis of his lifelong research program in the late colonial crucible of French Algeria (Bourdieu 1958; Yacine 2004). Nonetheless, Bourdieu's theoretical work—most notably his conceptions of field and capital— helps solve the main riddle of the colonial state. Different European social groups competed inside the colonial state field for a specific form of symbolic capital: ethnographic capital. This involved exhibiting an alleged talent for judging the culture and character of the colonized, a gift for understanding "the natives." Competitive dynamics among the colonial rulers decisively shaped the ongoing production of native policies. Policy formation was also influenced by geopolitical and economic interests, responses by the colonized, and the metropolitan government's final authority in appointing and dismissing colonial officials. The effects of these additional mechanisms were typically mediated by the internal dynamics of the semi- autonomous colonial state.
The study of social inequality and stratification (e.g., ethnoracial and gender) has long been at the core of sociology and the social sciences. In this article, I argue that certain tendencies have become entrenched in our dominant paradigm that leave many researchers pursuing coarse-grained analyses of how difference relates to inequality. Centrally, despite the importance of categories and categorization for how researchers study social inequality, contemporary (as opposed to classical) theories of categories are poorly integrated into conventional research. I contend that the widespread and often unquestioned use of state categories as categories of analysis reinforces these tendencies. Using research on colorism as an inspiration, I highlight several components of what I call the infracategorical model of inequality, which urges researchers to disaggregate difference by shifting our focus from membership in (nominal) categories to the cues of categories, membership in subcategories, and perceived typicality.
This paper defends the concept of racialization against its critics. As the concept has become increasingly popular, questions about its meaning and value have been raised, and a backlash against its use has occurred. I argue that when “racialization” is properly understood, criticisms of the concept are unsuccessful. I defend a definition of racialization and identify its companion concept, “racialized group.” Racialization is often used as a synonym for “racial formation.” I argue that this is a mistake. Racial formation theory is committed to racial ontology, but racialization is best understood as the process through which racialized – rather than racial – groups are formed. “Racialization” plays a unique role in the conceptual landscape, and it is a key concept for race eliminativists and anti-realists about race.
Public debate and scholarly research has largely concentrated on the vast array of disparities between blacks and whites in their treatment by and experiences with the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, a growing body of research shows that African Americans’ life chances are internally stratified by gradational differences in their skin tone. This study brings together research on race, color, and the criminal justice system by using nationally-representative data to examine whether (and to what extent) skin tone is associated with policing and punishment among African Americans. I find that skin tone is significantly associated with the probability of having been arrested and/or incarcerated, net of relevant controls. Further analyses, using a sub-sample of whites drawn from the same nationally-representative survey, show that disparities in policing and punishment within the black population along the colour continuum are often comparable to or even exceed disparities between blacks and whites as a whole.
Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society's language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin's creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation's people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.
The rapid growth of genetic ancestry testing has brought concerns that these tests will transform consumers’ racial and ethnic identities, producing “geneticized” identities determined by genetic knowledge. Drawing on 100 qualitative interviews with white, black, Hispanic/ Latino, Asian, and Native Americans, the authors develop the genetic options theory to account for how genetic ancestry tests influence consumers’ ethnic and racial identities. The theory maintains that consumers do not accept the tests’ results as given but choose selectively from the estimates according to two mechanisms: their identity aspirations and social appraisals. Yet consumers’ prior racialization also influences their identity aspirations; white respondents aspired to new identities more readily and in substantively different ways. The authors’ findings suggest that genetic ancestry testing can reinforce race privilege among those who already experience it.
Individuals are claiming greater scope for choice in their racial identities. But how they are seen and classified by others is not necessarily changing in a similar way. Racial appraisals are the way that people classify the race of others, both particular individuals and larger groups. In this paper, I make a case for the study of racial appraisals as a field of sociological inquiry. I map out the different analytical levels and methodological approaches for this field and discuss how these can be used to understand observed race, norms of racial classification, and societal norms of the racial order. I present an example of how societal norms and logics of racial classification can be analysed in real time through survey research, using 2015–16 data on 866 White Americans’ reactions to Rachel Doležal’s racial identity claims. I present an agenda for studying changes in racial boundaries and classification norms through the longitudinal tracking of racial appraisals.
What Brubaker [2016. “The Dolezal Affair: Race, Gender, and the Micropolitics of Identity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (3): 414–448] referred to in these pages as “the Dolezal affair”, though widely and intensely scrutinized, was only one example of a broader series of recent public controversies over an individual's “true” racial identity. This article argues that in the early-twenty-first century, claims of race-group membership are being complicated by technological developments in genetics and in cosmetics, as well as by new respect for subjective self-identification. As a result, there are more paths than ever to claiming and demonstrating racial belonging. In particular, I suggest that four new types of race-group member are emerging: genetic, cosmetic, emotive, and constructed. Should these types come to be widely accepted as genuine race members, racial groups will become more heterogeneous, resembling kaleidoscopic arrays of core and peripheral members who differ in terms of how many qualifications for belonging they may legitimately claim.
We examine a vast, interdisciplinary, and increasingly global literature concerning skin color and colorism, which are related to status throughout the world. The vast majority of research has investigated Western societies, where color and colorism have been closely related to race and racism. In Latin America, the two sets of concepts have particularly overlapped. In the rest of the world, particularly in Asia, color and colorism have also been important but have evolved separately from the relatively new concepts of race and racism. In recent years, however, color consciousness and white supremacy appear to have been increasingly united, globalized, and commodified, as exemplified by the global multibillion-dollar skin lightening industry. Finally, we document the growing methodological attention to measurements of skin color and social science data that incorporate skin color measures. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology Volume 43 is July 30, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Power is the ability to send and bind someone else to act on one’s behalf, a relation that depends upon habits of interpretation. For persons attempting to complete projects, power involves communicating with, recruiting, and controlling subordinates and confronting those who are not in such a relationship of recruitment. This leads to a basic theoretical vocabulary about power players and their projects—a model of rector, actor, and other. As multiple relations of sending and binding become mutually implicated, chains of power—understood as simultaneously social and symbolic—emerge. The vocabulary presented for analyzing power is developed with reference to a series of instances, including the exploitation of labor and police violence. Finally, the paper analyzes a case study of an imperial encounter on the American frontier and examines therein a shift in how political power was represented, with implications for the sociology of transitions to modernity.
Due to a preoccupation with periods of large-scale social change, nationalism research had long neglected everyday nationhood in contemporary democracies. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to shift the focus of this scholarly field toward the study of nationalism not only as a political project but also as a cognitive, affective, and discursive category deployed in daily practice. Integrating insights from work on banal and everyday nationalism, collective rituals, national identity, and commemorative struggles with survey-based findings from political psychology, I demonstrate that meanings attached to the nation vary within and across populations as well as over time, with important implications for microinteraction and for political beliefs and behavior, including support for exclusionary policies and authoritarian politics. I conclude by suggesting how new developments in methods of data collection and analysis can inform future research on this topic.
This book is a comparative study of imperial organization and longevity that assesses Ottoman successes as well as failures against those of other empires with similar characteristics. Barkey examines the Ottoman Empire's social organization and mechanisms of rule at key moments of its history, emergence, imperial institutionalization, remodeling, and transition to nation-state, revealing how the empire managed these moments, adapted, and averted crises and what changes made it transform dramatically. The flexible techniques by which the Ottomans maintained their legitimacy, the cooperation of their diverse elites both at the center and in the provinces, as well as their control over economic and human resources were responsible for the longevity of this particular “negotiated empire”. Her analysis illuminates topics that include imperial governance, imperial institutions, imperial diversity and multiculturalism, the manner in which dissent is handled and/or internalized, and the nature of state society negotiations.
While some scholars claim that games are not primarily visual texts, the horror genre is obsessed with vision and practices of looking. The aesthetic concept of horror vacui describes aspects of this obsession. Horror vacui is the fear of empty space that results in the over-marking of visual space, excessive decoration that threatens to overwhelm what is being decorated, the stuffing of gaps and caesura with further representation. Shed of its standard aesthetic meaning, horror vacui could also be used to describe the fear operable in off-screen space, the monstrous unseen that lies outside the frame and constantly threatens to appear within it. Forced to move through this blind space, horror games create the conditions for excessive representation and practices of looking that erupt around the threat of the unrepresentable and invisible. In recent horror games this threat is mobilized by anxieties concerning online and networked culture.
In this study, the author uses a nationally representative survey to examine the relationship(s) between skin tone, discrimination, and health among African-Americans. He finds that skin tone is a significant predictor of multiple forms of perceived discrimination (including perceived skin color discrimination from whites and blacks) and, in turn, these forms of perceived discrimination are significant predictors of key health outcomes, such as depression and self-rated mental and physical health. Intraracial health differences related to skin tone (and discrimination) often rival or even exceed disparities between blacks and whites as a whole. The author also finds that selfreported skin tone, conceptualized as a form of embodied social status, is a stronger predictor of perceived discrimination than interviewerrated skin tone. He discusses the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial health disparities and highlights the utility of cognitive andmultidimensional approaches to ethnoracial and social inequality.
A large body of literature supports the general hypothesis that social definitions of environments influence where people choose to interact, the behaviors in which they are most likely to engage, and the actions considered appropriate by others. This study explores the process by which people integrate complex information about settings and social interaction. First, the universal dimensions of affective meaning (evaluation, potency, and activity) are examined as sociologically relevant features of behavioral settings. Then equations are developed for assessing how the affective meanings of social role identities, interpersonal behaviors, and behavior settings combine to produce impressions of a social actor's goodness, powerfulness, and liveliness after an event has been discerned. Actors are evaluated more highly in familiar, positively-evaluated settings. Actors who occupy fast-paced, lively settings are viewed as more active. Finally, actors are evaluated more negatively if they engage in behaviors which are not in keeping with the pace or tempo of the social environment around them.
The article argues that coordinated state action depends not just on organizational forms and institutions but also on “cultural infrastructures,” systems of state meaning making. Cultural infrastructures are potentially consequential sites for explaining processes of state formation. The article develops this argument through an analysis of the production of coercive power against piracy in the early modern English empire. It analyzes the cultural dynamics involved in the transformation of piracy from an ambiguous legal category to a violently enforced social boundary, focusing on the interplay of codes, interpretive institutions, and social performances. Violence directed against the pirates in the 1710s and 1720s turned on an earlier, contentious period of state formation focused on the cultural infrastructures that made the authoritative classification of piracy possible.
This article analyses two late 19th-century technologies that sought to identify criminals with scientific accuracy: Alphonse Bertillon's techniques for measuring bodies and Francis Galton's composite portraits of criminal types. It analyzes the regulatory environment in England in which their ideas achieved considerable prominence, emphasizing crucial differences in the visions of `science' embraced by the two men. By highlighting their different claims to science, this article outlines their respective legacies in criminal identification arenas, and isolates unique dangers associated with each. Those dangers variously alert us to the importance of questioning a persistent, if often implicit, sentiment within much criminal justice thinking; namely, by identifying individual criminals, or criminal types, justice systems effectively address the problem of crime. Against this approach, and resonant with a critical criminology in search of less exclusionary ways to govern, the following analysis considers criminal identification not as a discovery but a creation. In so doing, it seeks to re-politicize current practices of criminalization, challenge claims to the purported scientific impartiality of criminal identification and embrace the possibility of justice beyond a dominant reflex to create criminals.
The exercise of symbolic power has become a privileged focus of scholarship on the state, but without much attention to how states acquired this power in the first place. This article lays a foundation for systematic historical inquiry into the primitive accumulation of symbolic power by modernizing states. It introduces an analytical framework for research on how new domains of administrative activity become recognized as legitimate state practices. This framework is deployed to analyze how a popular revolt in northeastern Brazil managed to frustrate the Brazilian state's attempt to implement civil registration in the mid-19th century. The conclusion considers broad implications of this analysis for students of modern state formation and suggests the need for comparative historical analyses that historicize the naturalization of state power.
The theory of "contacts shyness" it that differential physical attractiveness leads to variable social behavior. Following the hypothesis that burglars who commit "behind-the-back" crimes should be less attractive than robbers who commit "face-to-face" crimes, a sample of prison photographs of men equated for age, race, and intelligence was rated for "attractiveness" by a large sample of other prisoners. There was no tendency for prisoners of any class to show patterns to preferences different from the entire group. Uniformities of rankings did occur in substantiation of the hypothesis. The old theory of physiognomy in relation to personality is to some deree upheld.
While the Nazi politics of the body have been studied at length, the historiographical literature has largely failed to address the role of the Volkskörper, or the German people's body, in the Nazi worldview. As I attempt to explain, it was not the individual bodies of Germans that constituted the foundation for Nazi concepts of the corporeal. The handful of studies that have addressed the subject of the Volkskörper has underestimated its full significance because these studies have considered it an expression of “something else,” that is, a metaphor, or a sign of an organic view of society so characteristic of fascist ideologies. Using the phenomenological insights of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Nolte to recount the history of the Nazi Volkskörper, I describe the meaning this manifestation of the body of the German people had for the Jew as a body, in general, and as a foreign body (Fremdkörper), more specifically. The Volkskörper is what turned the Jew both into a body and into a Fremdkörper, existing either in a parasitical relationship vis-à-vis the Volkskörper or as a dangerous, cancerous body that had penetrated the Volkskörper. In this respect, I claim that the phenomenology of the Volkskörper already contains the phenomenology of the Jewish body. Thus phenomenology has methodological promise for the historical analysis of the phenomenon of Nazism.
History & Memory 17.1/2 (2005) 15-44
"No one," wrote Pascal, "dies so poor that he does not leave something behind." Setting the scene at the moment of a single individual's death and drawing attention to personal possessions, Pascal conjures up the material traces of a single lifetime. A lived life creates physical effects: a sheaf of letters, a lucky coin, or a small fortune, things that construct correspondences between experience and materiality. Putting the stress on the larger world reflected in small objects, Pascal ennobles even the most modest lives and places all individuals in the same passage from life to death. Nearly three hundred later, Walter Benjamin reflected on Pascal's assertion. To Pascal's things he added "memories too." He then went on to subtract from what he had just augmented: "although these do not always find an heir." What Benjamin accents is not the material endurance of things but the variable operations of memory. There is no longer the unproblematic correspondence between a life lived and a life remembered, but the difficult endeavor of remembering and the more general prospect of forgetting. And for Benjamin it is not so much what the dead leave behind as it is what the living end up retrieving. He thereby poses the question of attentiveness, the historically situated presence or absence of the habit of cultivating memories. Moreover, these habits of cultivation operate across time: heirs are daughters and grandsons. At the remove of a generation or two, they are the ones who undertake the work of memory. Finally, in place of the sonorous universal by which Pascal affirmed the material existence of all men and women, Benjamin implies particular heirs who need to feel a connection to the past in order for memories to remain alive. In contrast to Pascal's materialism, Benjamin proposes a cultural interpretation of remembering in which traces are not simply left behind and recollection is not assumed, in which mental habits across time rather than physical things in the present bring the past into view, and in which specific heirs undertake the work of memorialization. Although Pascal refers to things and thereby builds an implicit archive of past lives, it is Benjamin who imagines the space in which the historical archive was constructed in order to ward off oblivion, to make the particular case for a historical subject, to identify the responsibility of the heirs to cultivate specific stories in the past.
The three hundred years that separate Benjamin from Pascal dramatize the historicity of the uses of history. They suggest the specific historical circumstances under which the past does and does not find heirs, is and is not energetically recollected. Benjamin writes in reference to a "crisis of memory," a historical moment in the modern age when there is both a surfeit of unusable pasts and a deficit of usable history, when individuals die in the face of general indifference while self-appointed heirs energetically look for particular memories. It is in the distinction between Pascal and Benjamin that a history of the archive can be conceived. Archives are not comprehensive collections of things, the effects left behind by the dead, nor are they arbitrary accumulations of remnants and leftovers. The archive is the production of the heirs, who must work to find connections from one generation to the next and thereby acknowledge the ongoing disintegration of the past. The heirs also distinguish themselves as such: a cultural group that knows itself by cultivating a particular historical trajectory. In the West, the nation has been the dominant form of this particularity, reinforcing a common past within its borders and emphasizing the difference of cultural origins across its borders. It is a specific, historically contingent configuration of time and space that produced what Jacques Derrida referred to in another context as "archive fever." If most conceptions of the archive emphasize how the archive has shaped history, I want to examine how German history has shaped the archive.
At the most general level, archival production rests on the premise that the past is no longer the business of the present and must be handled carefully in order to recognize the difference...