Struggle beyond tragedy

In this book Ralph Schoolcraft explores the extraordinary career of the modern French author, film director, and diplomat-a romantic and tragic figure whose fictions extended well beyond his books. Born Roman Kacew, he overcame an impoverished boyhood to become a French Resistance hero and win the coveted Goncourt Prize under the pseudonym-and largely invented persona-Romain Gary. Although he published such acclaimed works as The Roots of Heaven and Promise at Dawn, the Gaullist traditions that he defended in the world of French letters fell from favor, and his critical fortunes suffered at the hands of a hostile press. Schoolcraft details Gary's frustrated struggle to evolve as a writer in the eye of a public that now considered him a known quantity. Identifying the daring strategies used by this mysterious character as he undertook an elaborate scheme to reach a new readership, Schoolcraft offers new insight into the dynamics of authorship and fame within the French literary institutions. In the early 1970s Gary made his departure from the conservative literary establishment, publishing works that boasted a quirky, elliptical style under a variety of pseudonymous personae, the most successful of which was that of an Algerian immigrant by the name of Emile Ajar. Moving behind the mask of his new creation, Gary was able to win critical and popular acclaim and a second Goncourt in 1975. But as Schoolcraft suggests, Gary may have sold his shadow-that is, lost his authorial persona-by marketing himself too effectively. Going so far as to recruit a cousin to stand in as the public face of this phantom author, Gary kept the secret of his true authorship until his violent death in 1980 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The press reacted with resentment over the scheme, and he was shunned into the ranks of literary oddities. Schoolcraft draws from archives of the several thousand documents related to Gary housed at the French publishing firms of Gallimard and Mercure de France, as well as the Butler Library at Columbia University. Exploring the depths of a story that has long remained shrouded in mystery, Romain Gary: The Man Who Sold His Shadow is as much a fascinating biographical sketch as it is a thought-provoking reflection on the assumptions made about identities in the public sphere.

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

OF ALL THE MINORITIES in the United States, according to government statistics on income, employment, and housing, the American Indian is the poorest of the poor. Life in their social world can be brutal, often cut short by violent death. Homicide represents this violent death in an extreme form. A recent analysis of racial/ethnic homicide rates revealed that although the black population's national homicide rate (33 per 100,000 population) was much higher than both whites (4.6 per 100,000 population) and American Indians (9.6 per 100,000 population), the American Indian rate was double that of whites (Bachman 1991). Further, when reservation county rates are examined, the severity of the problem is illuminated. Some counties maintain American Indian homicide rates close to or more

Amidst ongoing wars and insecurities, female fighters, politicians and activists of the Kurdish Freedom Movement are building a new political system that centres gender equality. Since the Rojava Revolution, the international focus has been especially on female fighters, a gaze that has often been essentialising and objectifying, brushing over a much more complex history of violence and resistance. Going beyond Orientalist tropes of the female freedom fighter, and the movement's own narrative of the 'free woman', Isabel Käser looks at personal trajectories and everyday processes of becoming a militant in this movement. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, with women politicians, martyr mothers and female fighters, she looks at how norms around gender and sexuality have been rewritten and how new meanings and practices have been assigned to women in the quest for Kurdish self-determination. Her book complicates prevailing notions of gender and war and creates a more nuanced understanding of the everyday embodied epistemologies of violence, conflict and resistance.

Mulla Mustafa Barzani was a Kurdish leader who became the symbol of the twentieth‐century Kurdish nationalist movement. Barzani inspired a sense of pride not only among Iraqi Kurds but also among the Kurds of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and the Kurds in diaspora, which is how he became a national leader. With his dedication to the Kurdish freedom movement, Barzani led the Kurds in an armed struggle for over five decades against Iraqi and Iranian states. However, because of the feudal structure of Kurdistan, different tribal affiliations, and intertribal rivalries the Barzani‐led Kurdish movement could not develop into a unified national struggle.

Resilience and Refugees: From Individualised Trauma to Post Traumatic Growth

Analysis of community‐level data on community areas in Chicago substantiates two conceptual differences: the first. between gang crime and delinquency as community‐level phenomena; and the second, between theoretical associations of each of the former to community‐area patterns of social disorganization and poverty. One pattern is more common in Chicago's Hispanic communities; the other, in Chicago's black communities. Five measures of the quality of community life used are gang homicide rate, delinquency rate, unemployment rate, percentage living below the poverty level, and mortgage investment per dwelling. Identifying communities as white, black, Hispanic, or mixed and applying discriminant analysis reveal the racial‐ethnic communities as distinct social worlds. Regression analyses of gang homicide and delinquency rates show that the two measures display very different patterns of association with other community characteristics. An analysis of the residual change score for gang homicide rate over two time periods indicates the relative stability of community patterns with poverty measures explaining much of the change in patterns. It is concluded that gang homicide rates and delinquency rates are ecologically distinct community problems. The distribution of gang homicide rates conforms to classic theories of social disorganization and poverty, and the distribution of delinquency rates is more generally associated with poverty.

Social change and the aging process are racially bifurcated in the United States, where Black and White populations have long lived in divergent social worlds. This study examines the cohort patterns and life-course trajectories of Black and White homicide involvement over the past four decades. The study uses data from the Supplemental Homicide Reports and Age-Period-Cohort-Interaction (APC-I) models to analyze race-specific trends of (alleged) homicide offending and victimization between 1976 and 2018 in the U.S. Results reveal similar patterns in the age, period, and cohort effects on Black and White homicide involvement. However, while the shapes of these trajectories are comparable, the volatility in cohort effects on homicide is much more accentuated for Black cohorts than White cohorts. We also find racial differences for cohorts born after 1990, with a downward cohort pattern among the White group but a flat cohort trend among the Black group. Findings suggest that Black cohorts' homicide involvement is more susceptible than White cohorts' to the influence of external social changes (e.g., economic downturn, the crack epidemic). In addition, an increasing racial gap between Black and White populations is found among the recent birth cohorts. Possible mechanisms are discussed.

E-Press and Oppress

Prior studies suggest that public service motivation (PSM) is associated with individuals’ pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs), but these studies have been observational and thus have not manipulated PSM experimentally to estimate its causal effect on PEBs. Thus, this study draws on a pre-registered survey experiment with 376 public school teachers in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to examine the influence that activating PSM has on public school teachers’ non-workplace pro-environmental behavioral intentions (PEB-I). Our results show that experimentally activating PSM leads to respondents forming higher PEB-I. Further, we observe that PSM activation has a larger effect on PEB-I for participants with higher overall levels of PSM. By experimentally estimating the effect of PSM on PEB-I, this study enhances our understanding of the causal effects of PSM not only in the workplace but in the wider social world.

As Internet freedom movements build infrastructures to promote online privacy, they enrol a wide range of different kinds of of technological work [Coleman, E. G., & Golub, A. (2008). Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism. Anthropological Theory, 8(3), 255–277]. I explore the cultures of the wider forms of technical work involved in these struggles through a sociological study of the Tor Project, involving twenty-six qualitative interviews with people in the Tor community and extensive archival research in Tor’s mailing lists and design documents. Tor is an online privacy infrastructure whose practice of radical transparency makes it uniquely accessible, and it constitutes an example of a successful, widely used infrastructure which directly undermines the centralisation of governmental power online. Tor is not united around a single worldview, instead exhibiting three distinct framings of its work. Using Susan Leigh Star's social worlds framework, I characterise these three ‘social worlds’ of Tor. I argue that Tor has in the past accommodated its internal clashing perspectives through an ambiguity around politics and a shared construction of the users of Tor, which allow individuals to bridge and translate between these worlds. In recent years, this political ambiguity has become unsustainable. As Internet platforms and infrastructures extend further into social life around the world, so too are they being forced to come to terms with the shaping forces they exert on society and the values they represent. Tor is not exempt from this, and as it navigates these issues it is becoming increasingly mindful of its own relationships to power, values and politics.

This article discusses radical democratic citizenship in the context of the ‘Rojava Revolution’, an ongoing society-building effort that emerged in majority Kurdish regions in the context of the Syrian war. It describes aspects of the political vision of Abdullah Öcalan, as interpreted and applied by activists involved in the democratic self-governance system in Rojava (northern Syria), since 2012. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the region, the article focuses on the ways in which activists frame their revolution and notions of radical democratic citizenship as consciousness-raising efforts against the state system. Centering the role of educational institutions, it argues that theoretical discussions within the Kurdish freedom movement seek to emancipate political action from state-centric ways of articulating political will, justice demands, and wider geopolitical interests. Lastly, it encourages studying radical democracy efforts by taking seriously the political vocabularies, everyday practices, and long-term perspectives advanced in collective self-organisation from below.

By challenging postcolonial theory's “methodological dualism,” this article explores non-Western intersocietal encounters and interactions that facilitated the vanguard role of the Kurdish region of Iran (Rojhelat) in the country's “woman, life, freedom” revolutionary movement. The neglect of inter-subaltern interactions within the framework of methodological dualism has rendered it incapable of explaining the agential entanglement of “inter-subaltern colonialism” and gender in the non-Western nation-building process and its subsequent impact on the affected groups. Addressing this limitation, the author argues that Rojhelat's vanguard position arises from the strategic deployment of patriarchal gender norms in Iran's nation-building process characterized by “inter-subaltern colonialism” before and after the 1979 revolution. Anti-patriarchal tendencies within the left faction of the Kurdish national movement in Rojhelat emerged in response to this context, rendering it receptive to the slogan “woman, life, freedom,” which originally emerged through the Kurdish freedom movement in Turkey and Syria. Furthermore, the centrality of gender in the Islamic Republic of Iran's exceptionalist geopolitical discourses has made the slogan a powerful tool for expressing opposition to the state and mobilizing multiple oppressed groups.

Most social and cultural researchers emphasize the way people use cultural concepts to organize their social world and to constitute themselves and others in meaningful ways. In this article, this is taken one step further through taking into account the way that such cultural constructions are animated and loaded with personal meaning and emotions that stem from specific psycho-biographies. Making use of object-relational theory in general, and Chodorow’s theory of ‘power of feeling’ in particular, the authors analyse the self-talk of two young women, positioning themselves in a ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ discourse respectively, relating these discursive positions to the generational context in which they seem to have evolved. The aim is to contribute to a more concrete and historically situated understanding of subjectivities as ongoing processes interweaving both cultural demands and personal constructions, which always involve emotional meaning.

Despite their general acceptance of pacific coexistence and village life, the Huaorani are still living in a social world structured by the continuous efforts they need to deploy to contain homicidal rage and to mitigate the ravages of violent death. Death is generally interpreted as having been caused by some raptorial agency which may in turn drive men to kill blindly. This article shows that it is because men are particularly susceptible to the predatory call of supernature that society works at embedding them within matrifocal house-groups. I discuss death and the desire to kill in relation to cultural constructions of sex and gender, especially in the context of funerary rites. Huaorani perspectivism, which articulates the point of view of the prey, not of the predator, associates the soul, maleness and conquering predation, to which it opposes the body, femaleness and resisting victimhood.