"An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work." --The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the "disenchantment" of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in "the market" has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity--and urges us to break its hold on our souls. "A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can't afford not to care about deeply." --Commonweal "More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment--an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers." --Christian Century
An urgent and deeply resonant case for the power of workplace democracy to restore balance between economy and society. What happens to a society--and a planet--when capitalism outgrows democracy? The tensions between democracy and capitalism are longstanding, and they have been laid bare by the social effects of COVID-19. The narrative of "essential workers" has provided thin cover for the fact that society's lowest paid and least empowered continue to work risky jobs that keep our capitalism humming. Democracy has been subjugated by the demands of capitalism. For many, work has become unfair. In Democratize Work, essays from a dozen social scientists--all women--articulate the perils and frustrations of our collective moment, while also framing the current crisis as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. Amid mounting inequalities tied to race, gender, and class--and with huge implications for the ecological fate of the planet--the authors detail how adjustments in how we organize work can lead to sweeping reconciliation. By treating workers as citizens, treating work as something other than an asset, and treating the planet as something to be cared for, a better way is attainable. Building on cross-disciplinary research, Democratize Work is both a rallying cry and an architecture for a sustainable economy that fits the democratic project of our societies. Contributors include Alyssa Battistoni (Barnard College of Columbia University), Adelle Blackett (McGill University), Julia Cagé (Sciences Po), Neera Chandhoke (University of Delhi), Lisa Herzog (University of Groningen), Imge Kaya Sabanci (IE Business School), Sara Lafuente (European Trade Union Institute), Hélène Landemore (Yale University), Flávia Máximo (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil), and Pavlina R. Tcherneva (Levy Economics Institute of Bard College).
More than one million Indians travel annually to work in oil projects in the Gulf, one of the few international destinations where men without formal education can find lucrative employment. Between Dreams and Ghosts follows their migration, taking readers to sites in India, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, from villages to oilfields and back again. Engaging all parties involved--the migrants themselves, the recruiting agencies that place them, the government bureaucrats that regulate their emigration, and the corporations that hire them--Andrea Wright examines labor migration as a social process as it reshapes global capitalism. With this book, Wright demonstrates how migration is deeply informed both by workers' dreams for the future and the ghosts of history, including the enduring legacies of colonial capitalism. As workers navigate bureaucratic hurdles to migration and working conditions in the Gulf, they in turn influence and inform state policies and corporate practices. Placing migrants at the center of global capital rather than its periphery, Wright shows how migrants are not passive bodies at the mercy of abstract forces--and reveals through their experiences a new understanding of contemporary resource extraction, governance, and global labor.
In its current state, the global food system is socially and ecologically unsustainable: nearly two billion people are food insecure, and food systems are the number one contributor to climate change. While agro-industrial production is promoted as the solution to these problems, growing global "food sovereignty" movements are challenging this model by demanding local and democratic control over food systems. Translating Food Sovereignty accompanies activists based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States as they mobilize the claim of food sovereignty across local, regional, and global arenas of governance. In contrast to social movements that frame their claims through the language of human rights, food sovereignty activists are one of the first to have articulated themselves in relation to the neoliberal transnational order of networked governance. While this global regulatory framework emerged to deepen market logics, Matthew C. Canfield reveals how activists are leveraging this order to make more expansive social justice claims. This nuanced, deeply engaged ethnography illustrates how food sovereignty activists are cultivating new forms of transnational governance from the ground up.
Egyptians often say that bread is life; most eat this staple multiple times a day, many relying on the cheap bread subsidized by the government. In Staple Security, Jessica Barnes explores the process of sourcing domestic and foreign wheat for the production of bread and its consumption across urban and rural settings. She traces the anxiety that pervades Egyptian society surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out of wheat or that people might not have enough good bread to eat, and the daily efforts to ensure that this does not happen. With rich ethnographic detail, she takes us into the worlds of cultivating wheat, trading grain, and baking, buying, and eating bread. Linking global flows of grain and a national bread subsidy program with everyday household practices, Barnes theorizes the nexus between food and security, drawing attention to staples and the lengths to which people go to secure their consistent availability and quality.
Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize Winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Award Winner of the British Association of American Studies Prize "Extraordinary...Deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways." --Los Angeles Review of Books "A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect." --Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts When considering the story of American power, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Yet it turns out that a government agency best known for managing natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported America's imperial aspirations. Megan Black's pathbreaking book brings to light the surprising role Interior has played in pursuing minerals around the world--on Indigenous lands, in foreign nations, across the oceans, even in outer space. Black shows how the department touted its credentials as an innocuous environmental-management organization while quietly satisfying America's insatiable demand for raw materials. As presidents trumpeted the value of self-determination, this almost invisible outreach gave the country many of the benefits of empire without the burden of a heavy footprint. Under the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, Interior scouted tin sources in Bolivia and led lithium surveys in Afghanistan. Today, it promotes offshore drilling and even manages a satellite that prospects for Earth's resources from outer space. "Offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism...as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire." --Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World "Succeeds in showing both the central importance of minerals in the development of American power and how the realities of empire could be obscured through a focus on modernization and the mantra of conservation." --Ian Tyrrell, author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation
"Too many companies don't know how to walk the walk of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Getting to Diversity shows them how." --Lori George Billingsley, former Global Chief DEI Officer, Coca-Cola Company In an authoritative, data-driven account, two of the world's leading management experts challenge dominant approaches to increasing workplace diversity and provide a comprehensive account of what really works. Every year America becomes more diverse, but change in the makeup of the management ranks has stalled. The problem has become an urgent matter of national debate. How do we fix it? Bestselling books preach moral reformation. Employers, however well intentioned, follow guesswork and whatever their peers happen to be doing. Arguing that it's time to focus on changing systems rather than individuals, two of the world's leading experts on workplace diversity show us a better way in the first comprehensive, data-driven analysis of what succeeds and what fails. The surprising results will change how America works. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev draw on more than thirty years of data from eight hundred companies as well as in-depth interviews with managers. The research shows just how little companies gain from standard practice: sending managers to diversity training to reveal their biases, then following up with hiring and promotion rules, and sanctions, to shape their behavior. Almost nothing changes. It's time, Dobbin and Kalev argue, to focus on changing the management systems that make it hard for women and people of color to succeed. They show us how the best firms are pioneering new recruitment, mentoring, and skill training systems, and implementing strategies for mixing segregated work groups to increase diversity. They explain what a difference ambitious work-life programs make. And they argue that as firms adopt new systems, the key to making them work is to make them accessible to all--not just the favored few. Powerful, authoritative, and driven by a commitment to change, Getting to Diversity is the book we need now to address constructively one of the most fraught challenges in American life.
In Close Association is the first English-language study of the local networks of women and men who built modern Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912). Marnie Anderson uncovers in vivid detail how a colorful group of Okayama-based activists founded institutions, engaged in the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, promoted social reform, and advocated "civilization and enlightenment" while forging pathbreaking conceptions of self and society. Alongside them were Western Protestant missionaries, making this story at once a local history and a transnational one. Placing gender analysis at its core, the book offers fresh perspectives on what women did beyond domestic boundaries, while showing men's lives, too, were embedded in home and kin. Writing "history on the diagonal," Anderson documents the gradual differentiation of public activity by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meiji-era associations became increasingly sex-specific, though networks remained heterosocial until the twentieth century. Anderson attends to how the archival record shapes what historians can know about individual lives. She argues for the interdependence of women and men and the importance of highlighting connections between people to explain historical change. Above all, the study sheds new light on how local personalities together transformed Japan.
Sharp and thought-provoking, this memoir-meets-cultural criticism upends the romanticism of the Great Plains and the patriarchy at the core of its ideals. For many Americans, Kansas represents a vision of Midwestern life that is good and wholesome and evokes the American ideals of god, home, and country. But for those like Jessa Crispin who have grown up in Kansas, the realities are much harsher. She argues that the Midwestern values we cling to cover up a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans, women, and the economically disadvantaged. Blending personal narrative with social commentary, Crispin meditates on why the American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in our country's mythic self-image. Ranging from The Wizard of Oz to race, from chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots to Utopian communities, My Three Dads opens on a comic scene in a Kansas rent house the author shares with a (masculine) ghost. This prompts Crispin to think about her intellectual fathers, her spiritual fathers, and her literal fathers. She is curious to understand what she has learned from them and what she needs to unlearn about how a person should be in a family, as a citizen, and as a child of god--ideals, Crispin argues, that have been established and reproduced in service to hierarchy, oppression, and wealth. Written in Crispin's well-honed voice--smart, assured, comfortable with darkness--My Three Dads offers a kind of bleak redemption, the insight that no matter where you go, no matter how far from home you roam, the place you came from is always with you, "like it or not."
A much-needed exploration of the history and philosophy of scientific research into male homosexuality. Questions about the naturalness or unnaturalness of homosexuality are as old as the hills, and the answers have often been used to condemn homosexuals, their behaviors, and their relationships. In the past two centuries, a number of sciences have involved themselves in this debate, introducing new vocabularies, theories, arguments, and data, many of which have gradually helped tip the balance toward tolerance and even acceptance. In this book, philosophers Pieter R. Adriaens and Andreas De Block explore the history and philosophy of the gay sciences, revealing how individual and societal values have colored how we think about homosexuality. The authors unpack the entanglement of facts and values in studies of male homosexuality across the natural and human sciences and consider the extent to which science has mitigated or reinforced homonegative mores. The focus of the book is on homosexuality's assumed naturalness. Geneticists rephrased naturalness as innateness, claiming that homosexuality is innate--colloquially, that homosexuals are born gay. Zoologists thought it a natural affair, documenting its existence in myriad animal species, from maybugs to men. Evolutionists presented homosexuality as the product of natural selection and speculated about its adaptive value. Finally, psychiatrists, who initially pathologized homosexuality, eventually appealed to its naturalness or innateness to normalize it. Discussing findings from an array of sciences--comparative zoology, psychiatry, anthropology, evolutionary biology, social psychology, developmental biology, and machine learning--this book is essential reading for anyone interested in what science has to say about homosexuality.
Traversing from the rapidly urbanising county-level city of Fuqing to the remote mountainous kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa, Searching for Sweetness is one of the first and most extensive ethnographies linking rural-to-urban migration in China with Chinese migration to Africa. Against the backdrop of China's national struggle for modernity and globalisation, Sarah Hanisch examines Chinese migrant women's complex and ever-shifting struggles for upward social mobility across different generations and localities in China and Lesotho. Embedding the women's individual portraits into larger historical contexts, Hanisch illustrates how these women interpret and narrate their migratory and everyday experiences through and beyond powerful state metanarratives on 'sweetness' and 'bitterness'. In her exploration of migratory identities and projects that have been overlooked by previous studies, Hanisch brings uniquely gendered, multi-sited, and intergenerational perspectives to existing scholarship on Chinese internal and international migration.
What does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of such great importance? This book makes sense of queer cultures in China-a country with one of the largest queer populations in the world-and offers an alternative to Euro-American blueprints of queer individual identity. This book contends that kinship relations must be understood as central to any expression of queer selfhood and culture in contemporary cultural production in China. Using a critical approach-"queering Chinese kinship"-Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, and questions Eurocentric queer culture's frequent assumption of the separation of queerness from blood family. Offering five case studies of queer representations across a range of media genres, this book also challenges the tendency in current scholarship on Chinese and East Asian queerness to understand queer cultures as predominantly counter-mainstream, marginal, and underground. Shedding light on the representations of queerness and kinship in independent and subcultural as well as commercial and popular cultural products, the book presents a more comprehensive picture of queerness and kinship in flux and highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture.
A much-needed exploration of the history and philosophy of scientific research into male homosexuality. Questions about the naturalness or unnaturalness of homosexuality are as old as the hills, and the answers have often been used to condemn homosexuals, their behaviors, and their relationships. In the past two centuries, a number of sciences have involved themselves in this debate, introducing new vocabularies, theories, arguments, and data, many of which have gradually helped tip the balance toward tolerance and even acceptance. In this book, philosophers Pieter R. Adriaens and Andreas De Block explore the history and philosophy of the gay sciences, revealing how individual and societal values have colored how we think about homosexuality. The authors unpack the entanglement of facts and values in studies of male homosexuality across the natural and human sciences and consider the extent to which science has mitigated or reinforced homonegative mores. The focus of the book is on homosexuality's assumed naturalness. Geneticists rephrased naturalness as innateness, claiming that homosexuality is innate--colloquially, that homosexuals are born gay. Zoologists thought it a natural affair, documenting its existence in myriad animal species, from maybugs to men. Evolutionists presented homosexuality as the product of natural selection and speculated about its adaptive value. Finally, psychiatrists, who initially pathologized homosexuality, eventually appealed to its naturalness or innateness to normalize it. Discussing findings from an array of sciences--comparative zoology, psychiatry, anthropology, evolutionary biology, social psychology, developmental biology, and machine learning--this book is essential reading for anyone interested in what science has to say about homosexuality.
A radical and necessary rethinking of trans care What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion? Trans Care is a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious consideration of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
An optimistic and nuanced portrait of a generation that has much to teach us about how to live and collaborate in our digital world. Born since the mid-1990s, members of Generation Z comprise the first generation never to know the world without the internet, and the most diverse generation yet. As Gen Z starts to emerge into adulthood and enter the workforce, what do we really know about them? And what can we learn from them? Gen Z, Explained is the authoritative portrait of this significant generation. It draws on extensive interviews that display this generation's candor, surveys that explore their views and attitudes, and a vast database of their astonishingly inventive lexicon to build a comprehensive picture of their values, daily lives, and outlook. Gen Z emerges here as an extraordinarily thoughtful, promising, and perceptive generation that is sounding a warning to their elders about the world around them--a warning of a complexity and depth the "OK Boomer" phenomenon can only suggest. Much of the existing literature about Gen Z has been highly judgmental. In contrast, this book provides a deep and nuanced understanding of a generation facing a future of enormous challenges, from climate change to civil unrest. What's more, they are facing this future head-on, relying on themselves and their peers to work collaboratively to solve these problems. As Gen Z, Explained shows, this group of young people is as compassionate and imaginative as any that has come before, and understanding the way they tackle problems may enable us to envision new kinds of solutions. This portrait of Gen Z is ultimately an optimistic one, suggesting they have something to teach all of us about how to live and thrive in this digital world.
An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history. Today, a world without "gender" is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering. Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.
Against all evidence to the contrary, American men have come to believe that the world is tilted - economically, socially, politically - against them. A majority of men across the political spectrum feel that they face some amount of discrimination because of their sex. The authors of Gender Threat look at what reasoning lies behind their belief and how they respond to it. Many feel that there is a limited set of socially accepted ways for men to express their gender identity, and when circumstances make it difficult or impossible for them to do so, they search for another outlet to compensate. Sometimes these behaviors are socially positive, such as placing a greater emphasis on fatherhood, but other times they can be maladaptive, as in the case of increased sexual harassment at work. These trends have emerged, notably, since the Great Recession of 2008-09. Drawing on multiple data sources, the authors find that the specter of threats to their gender identity has important implications for men's behavior. Importantly, younger men are more likely to turn to nontraditional compensatory behaviors, such as increased involvement in cooking, parenting, and community leadership, suggesting that the conception of masculinity is likely to change in the decades to come.
The untold history of how Chicago served as an important site of innovation in environmental thought as America transitioned to modern, industrial capitalism. In Nature's Laboratory, Elizabeth Grennan Browning argues that Chicago--a city characterized by rapid growth, severe labor unrest, and its position as a gateway to the West--offers the clearest lens for analyzing the history of the intellectual divide between countryside and city in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. By examining both the material and intellectual underpinnings of Gilded Age and Progressive Era environmental theories, Browning shows how Chicago served as an urban laboratory where public intellectuals and industrial workers experimented with various strains of environmental thinking to resolve conflicts between capital and labor, between citizens and their governments, and between immigrants and long-term residents. Chicago, she argues, became the taproot of two intellectual strands of American environmentalism, both emerging in the late nineteenth century: first, the conservation movement and the discipline of ecology; and second, the sociological and anthropological study of human societies as "natural" communities where human behavior was shaped in part by environmental conditions. Integrating environmental, labor, and intellectual history, Nature's Laboratory turns to the workplace to explore the surprising ways in which the natural environment and ideas about nature made their way into factories and offices--places that appeared the most removed from the natural world within the modernizing city. As industrialization, urbanization, and immigration transformed Chicago into a microcosm of the nation's transition to modern, industrial capitalism, environmental thought became a protean tool that everyone from anarchists and industrial workers to social scientists and business managers looked to in order to stake their claims within the democratic capitalist order. Across political and class divides, Chicagoans puzzled over what relationship the city should have with nature in order to advance as a modern nation. Browning shows how historical understandings of the complex interconnections between human nature and the natural world both reinforced and empowered resistance against the stratification of social and political power in the city.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year "The main thrust of Horowitz's account is to make us understand Katrina--the civic calamity, not the storm itself--as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature." --Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana's oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. "Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we're willing--and unwilling--to protect." --New York Review of Books "If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one." --Los Angeles Review of Books
In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available--but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.
The Anarchist Inquisition explores the groundbreaking transnational human rights campaigns that emerged in response to a brutal wave of repression unleashed by the Spanish state to quash anarchist activities at the turn of the twentieth century. Mark Bray guides readers through this tumultuous era--from backroom meetings in Paris and torture chambers in Barcelona, to international antiterrorist conferences in Rome and human rights demonstrations in Buenos Aires. Anarchist bombings in theaters and cafes in the 1890s provoked mass arrests, the passage of harsh anti-anarchist laws, and executions in France and Spain. Yet, far from a marginal phenomenon, this first international terrorist threat had profound ramifications for the broader development of human rights, as well as modern global policing, and international legislation on extradition and migration. A transnational network of journalists, lawyers, union activists, anarchists, and other dissidents related peninsular torture to Spain's brutal suppression of colonial revolts in Cuba and the Philippines to craft a nascent human rights movement against the "revival of the Inquisition." Ultimately their efforts compelled the monarchy to accede in the face of unprecedented global criticism. Bray draws a vivid picture of the assassins, activists, torturers, and martyrs whose struggles set the stage for a previously unexamined era of human rights mobilization. Rather than assuming that human rights struggles and "terrorism" are inherently contradictory forces, The Anarchist Inquisition analyzes how these two modern political phenomena worked in tandem to constitute dynamic campaigns against Spanish atrocities.
