Construction Of Collective Identity Research Articles

Memories of life experiences in a teacher training institution during the revolution

We evoke here events that took place in an ordinary school, the Teacher Training College in Coimbra (Portugal), during the on-going revolutionary process (processo revolucionário em curso; PREC), in an attempt to understand people’s actions within the collective becoming of a certain time and place, and to grasp how memory works as a narrative of the recollection of events connected with the course of the individual and the society. We equate the issue of memory – as the essential dimension, when collecting information, of the construction of individual and collective identity, embodied by the relevant social frameworks – with the feeling, relevance and interpretation of such memory at the time of its recovery. We listened to the memories revived during the interviews and to the narratives reconstructed, either through our intervention fostering the active search for memories, or actively listening and participating in their stories, focusing on their personal experiences as teachers or students of that institution, and scrutinising the personal processes of reconstruction, the expression of a claimed and overt memory, which feeds, rhetorically, on an experienced ideology. Memory is particularly invoked here, because it takes us on a journey to the past, while exploring the recollections of people who experienced unique events which cannot be captured nor reproduced in any other way. Memory is particularly invoked here because it takes us on a journey to the past, while exploring the recollections of people who experienced unique events which cannot be captured or reproduced in any other way.

Transforming National Holidays: Identity Discourse in the West and South Slavic Countries, 1985–2010 (review)

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 942 that the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are consciously using the Russian Orthodox Church as a channel for diplomatic communication, as is widely assumed by Curanović and other scholars. Despite these weaknesses it is worth mentioning that this monograph affords some interesting insights. It highlights, for example, that the Russian Orthodox Church plays a greater role in Moscow’s relations with Central Asia than Russia’s Muslim community, as the latter is more fragmented than the Orthodox camp. The author also points out that due to migration from Central Asia the Russian language has been strengthened in Russia’s Muslim community as it is the lingua franca amongst the migrants and their hosts. These points as well as some clever argumentation make this book an enjoyable read. University of Erfurt and London Katja Richters Šarić, Liljana, Gammelgaard, Karen and Hauge, Kjetil Rå (eds). Transforming National Holidays: Identity Discourse in the West and South Slavic Countries, 1985–2010. Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 47. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA, 2012. xiii + 314 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Index. €99.00: $149.00. The common point of interest uniting the contributions to this volume is the transformation of collective identity within the context of broader societal transformation that took place in Central and Southeast Europe between 1989 and 2010. The work is focused on discursive constructions of collective identity in speeches delivered at and print media covering national holidays. The analyses invariably confirm that identity discourse used on the occasion of nationalholidayswassubjecttofrequentanddrasticchangesandcontroversies, indicating the salience of national identity as a category of practice for elites during societal transformations. Although the academic relevance of the articles is beyond dispute, the volume as a whole lacks an overarching framework. The authors apply a broad array of methodological approaches within discourse analysis. At times this complicates the analysis and the argument of the separate articles and the volume as a whole. The same applies to the introduction by Liljana Šarić and Karen Gammelgaard, which reads like a series of thoughts and lacks a concise definitionofmethodologyandconcern.Additionally,mostofthecontributions remain restricted to a descriptive account of the instability of interpretations of national holidays by press and politicians, and no overarching findings or further research questions are attached to the different case-studies. Nevertheless, a number of shared findings are evident. A first group of essays focuses on the profoundly changing interpretations of national holidays in the REVIEWS 943 region since the fall of Communism. Marko Soldić clarifies how in Macedonia, Ilinden has gained new relevance and meaning to make sense of the country’s internal and international situation. Soldić also points out that the two major political parties appropriated Ilinden in support of their political agendas, establishing parallel interpretations and commemorations. Alexander Bielicki studies homilies delivered at the Slovak national pilgrimage on Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows Day to show that the languages of religion and nationhood were closely intertwined in the late Communist period and mid 2000s. However, the content of the intertwining changed drastically, contingent on the socio-political position of the Catholic Church in Slovakia. Gammelgaard studies presidential addresses delivered on 28 October by Czechoslovakia’s last Communist president and the three presidents of the Czech Republic after 1993. She too concludes that the discursive construction of Czech national identity changed considerably depending on the political context. Asecond,morein-depthandstimulatingthemeintheessaysrevolvesaround competing discursive constructions of national holidays. Kjetil Rå Hauge describes the controversial re-introduction of the national holiday of 3 March in Bulgaria after the fall of Communism, presenting the major arguments pro and contra and suggestions for other national holidays. In Croatia, Šarić explains, there are controversies and public confusion over two new competing statehood days that are closely associated with political opponents. In the most rewarding contribution to the volume, Vjeran Pavlaković relates the change of the official Antifascist Struggle Day in Croatia to societal divisions between the state authorities who have embraced Croatia’s multi-ethnic Partisan legacy, the Serbian minority, which seeks the affirmation of its role in Croatia’s history and present, and far-right organizations that refute Croatia’s Partisan legacy. Lastly, Svein Mønnesland...

Culture, television and urban imaginarium

Este artigo tem por objetivo demonstrar as relações entre cultura, televisão e imaginário urbano, no Brasil, isto é, pretende evidenciar de que forma neste país a televisão atua como a principal mediadora das relações sociais e construtora das identidades coletivas. Ao longo da história moderna, a imprensa aparece como importante fator de fixação do homem ao território e construção do ideal da cidade como espaço de convívio e trocas. A narrativa da imprensa coincide com o projeto de ordem e progresso da burguesia em ascensão. Somente em meados do século passado, vozes dissonantes dão origem a outras narrativas, até então colocadas à margem do discurso oficial. No Brasil, a inauguração da televisão, em 1950, antecipa uma nova (des)ordem mundial, em que a complexidade e a incerteza substituem os rígidos referenciais do homem moderno. É neste cenário de ruptura, que se pretende analisar a influência da televisão na formação identitária do brasileiro e na construção do novo imaginário urbano

Fashioning the 1950s “Vassar Girl”: Vassar Student Identity and Campus Dress, 1947–60

In 1957, Clifford Coffin photographed real Vassar students as models for the annual Vogue college issue. High fashion and elite education were combined and the photographs underscore the significance of the “Vassar Girl” as both a cultural and sartorial icon during this decade: a media-cultivated, almost mythical presence that permeates 1950s American media, popular culture, and fashion discourses. What these images more pressingly demonstrate is that, by the 1950s, the “Vassar Girl” was a powerful entity in American culture: seemingly both real and imagined, but lucrative all the same. Genuine Vassar students had to navigate a series of sartorial assumptions and expectations to assert and formulate their own identity, both within and without, the campus culture, providing material for a rich exploration of individual and collective identity of Vassar students at the mid-century.Following the collection and analysis of original oral testimony of hundreds of mid-century Vassar graduates and studies of iconic garments of the period, this article provides an explorative analysis of the ways in which fashion functioned in the construction of personal and collective identity at Vassar, and the construction and perpetuation of a “Vassar Girl” aesthetic and brand in American fashion and media discourses of the 1950s. Grounding the exploration in an analysis of Vassar's revolutionary psychological and developmental study of its students during the 1950s (the Mellon Study), this article will undercut media discourses and hyperbole to root considerations of dress and identity in the statistical and narrative proof of original college records from the pre-feminist era, which was also the last full decade of all-female education at Vassar.

Civilizing Societies: Recognition and Respect in a Global World

The essay discusses the terms “recognition” and “respect” as new transcultural candidates for our post-ideological age. Although intimately connected with each other, the two terms have different genealogies, historical baggage, and ranges of application. The essay begins with eighteenth-century England, introducing the important bourgeois concepts of politeness and civility as new enlightened norms for social and transcultural behaviour. In the second part, the focus of the discussion is the anthropological concept of recognition as a vital resource for individual and collective identity construction. The last part introduces “respect” as a complementary term to “recognition,” offering a distinction between different forms of respect. It is the aim of this historical and conceptual analysis to reframe some of the crucial problems of our current social, political, and literary debates. Without disregarding differences, new global forms of respect simultaneously create and strengthen social ties that overcome the divisive aspects of difference through assertions of solidarity and similarity. In spite of, across, and underneath differences, civility is the practical response to the important recognition that we are all citizens of the same world.

The Lack of Collective Memory and Identity Construction in Cyberspace

According to Maurice Halbswachs memory depend upons social conditions. Social framework is the sine qua non of the existence of memory. A lonely person can neither has an individual nor a social memory. However social amnesia and forgetting is a problem in contemporary world wherein social life and the society is fragmented; in addition, the identity is the result of this fragmented world. The frantically identity-seeking is a side effect of the repression and tension rooted in globalization and individualization. Identity in today’s world is unstable, multible, fluctuating and fragmentary. If the identity is a seeking of escaping from uncertainity, one of the reasons of this uncertainity is the lack of collective memory. The problem in producing and transfering the common past in today’s world, in other words the loss of collective memory is lead to the individualization of the society; identity means for a man -who is imprisoned in a permanent “now”- a kind of a safety home in an unsafe world. As Barbara A. Mitsztal asserts “memory and identity depend upon each other since not only is identity rooted in memory but also what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity.” John Locke sees memory as the criterion of personal identity and equates it with a collection of experiences. He says that “I am what I remember.” The essence strategy of postmodern life is not the construction of identity, avoiding to make it immobilized. Digital world and cyberspace fulfil this need through the cheapest and easiest way. Digital world offers us a lot of opportunities in having different identities. On the internet an individual identity becomes so fluid. Cyberspace allows people to construct their self-presentation and to play with online identity. The user become the author of their life.

Click ‘Like’ and Post It on Your Wall! Chain Posts on Facebook – Identity Construction and Values

The article 1 focuses on chain posts that were collected in the years 2010-2012 and spread predominantly among girls of ten to twelve on Facebook (facebook.com) - a social network that has a membership of over 450,000 in Estonia. The source material comprising approximately 220 texts is similar by form and content to chain letters known from earlier tradition; yet, the web environment with its specific technical structure allows the texts to turn into a peculiar Facebook-like phenomenon. The author takes a closer interest in the changes in form adapted to chain letters as a genre in Facebook environment as well as thematic categories of these letters. The analysis of the epistolary cultural phenomenon focuses on the socio-folkloric nature of texts with its communicative and socio-cultural as- pects. The main focus is on how socio-cultural environment influences changes in the genre, what kind of global and local impacts occur in Estonian-language chain posts and how this everyday genre reflects the realities of the era and the values intrinsic to this age group. The levels of personal and collective identity construction of chain posters as a special age group have been analysed against the identity motivation theory known from social psychology.

A Battlefield of Meanings: The Struggle for Identity in the UN Debates on a Definition of International Terrorism

For nearly forty years, debates on a definition of international terrorism as part of a comprehensive convention have been preoccupying the United Nations. This article challenges conventional approaches referring to divergences in national interests and preferences, or to institutional constraints and national legal traditions, to explain why no definition has been agreed upon. It analyzes the inconclusive debates from a critical perspective and argues that the continuous search for a definition can be understood through the prism of collective identity struggles: the desire to define terrorism is not only the desire to give a precise content to terrorism and, thereby, create the identity of an Other. It is also the desire to create a collective identity, a “Self,” representing and uniting those who oppose terrorism. By applying a discursive understanding of collective identity construction to analyze the UN debates, the article elucidates how strongly the definition of terrorism hinders a common understanding among those who are opposing terrorism. Thereby, the analysis highlights that the demonization of terrorism foremost impedes a homogeneous understanding of a collective Self, ready to confront and define terrorism in the first place.

The Faith and the Fury: The Construction of Anticlerical Collective Identities in Spain, 1874–1931

This article explores the construction of anticlerical collective identities among Spanish workers from the late nineteenth century, outlining the ways in which the daily experience of the Church generated and intensified anticlerical sentiment. From the turn of the century, political, social and cultural changes sparked by industrialization and rural-urban emigration altered the face of ‘traditional’ Spanish popular anticlericalism; newly politicized workers increasingly identified the Church as part of the repressive machinery of the Restoration Monarchy’s political system. As workers struggled to fend off the ever-expanding central state’s intrusions into their domestic space and the Church’s influence over innumerable aspects of everyday life (including, crucially, its control of public spaces) they constructed their own, strongly anticlerical ‘workers’ public sphere’ grounded in alternative forms of socialization, cultural activities, and new secular rituals.

A national pride or a colonial construct? Touristic representation and the politics of Fijian identity construction

Identity research in the Pacific region has been dominated in the past by discussions of reconstruction and mobilisation of symbols of cultural tradition as a medium of anti-colonial resistance and nationalism. The present article proposes to widen the scope of this literature by exploring mass tourism as a contested field of collective identification. It outlines the historical making of the colonial and post-colonial imagery of indigenous Fijians and its subsequent reification and essentialisation in the context of twentieth-century mass tourism. It further highlights the implication of this process in colonial, anti-colonial and post-independence national politics, in which indigenous Fijians have been variously located: the imagery has been claimed by Western colonialism, transnational corporate capitalism, ethno-nationalism, and counter-hegemony. The article illustrates that collective identity construction is not political in a uni-dimensional manner but constitutes a dynamic arena of ongoing ‘cultural battle’ where multiple power relations unfold simultaneously.

What the membership has taught? National identity construction in Lithuanian public discourse after accession to the European Union

‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’ have historically been the most remarkable landmarks, playing geopolitical, cultural, and moral guide-role in the construction of national collective identities in the Central Eastern European countries, including Lithuania. This ‘civilizational identity’ helped to unite Lithuanian political elites as well as society towards the direction to West and Europe after the collapse of Soviet Union. The question article addresses is: does the factual belonging to the European Union after the 1st May, 2004 give the impulse to re-define ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’ as the old essentials of collective identity of Lithuanians? The article presents the research based on monitoring of national public discourse (five Lithuanian national newspapers) in 2004-2007, i.e. enjoying three years of membership in the European Union and NATO. The main result is that the role of Russia in the Lithuanian collective identity has not changed and still continues to play the major threat. The membership in the European Union and NATO has not solved Lithuanian security problem. According to the perceived threat, Russia has started to penetrate softly into Lithuania’s economy (especially energy sector) and has silently begun to make an impact to the domestic political parties and political elite. The traditional role of Europe, however, is slowly but gradually shifting from mythical ‘Paradise’ image to more critical understandings about divided Europe and selfish member-states. Already being in the EU and NATO, Lithuania should balance sometimes unfriendly westerners’ reluctance to understand the situation and help against Russia with the economic power that Russia uses as a political instrument against Lithuania on the international arena, as well as in domestic politics. This results in the feelings of „lost and forgotten” between Europe and Russia. Nevertheless, Europe continues to earn a positive meaning in national collective identity of Lithuanians, but all these trends in public discourse show that the state and society have only just started to realize its interests and learn how to handle the major challenges through the cooperation within the European Union, i.e. to build integrational European identity.

‘We’ is for Anarchism: Construction and Use of Collective Identity in the Anarchist Press of Fin-de-siècle Switzerland

CONTEXTLooking at the history of organized anarchism and of anarchist theorists, many a connection with Switzerland is revealed. The anti-authoritarian International Worker's Association (I.W.A.) was inaugurated 1872 in St. Inner and I.W.A. congresses took place in Geneva and Basel. Renowned theorists such as Michail Bakunin, Elisee Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Paul Brousse or John Most stayed and campaigned for a number of years from within the small republic in central Europe. While anarchism proved to have an affinity for Switzerland due to its relatively high tolerance of anarchist newspapers, congresses, schools and gatherings at the end of the 19th century, the love was not exactly returned, to put it mildly. Swiss press with bourgeois, conservative and/or social-democratic agendas denoted anarchism repeatedly as a plague and its adherents as pests, vermin, traitors or psychopaths.2The public opinion has been echoed and met by statist practices. From the 1 840s onward, both the official and public discourses remained, by and large, hostile towards anarchism and anarchists alike.3 While anarchist manifestations turned into brawls with the general public4 from time to time, officials supported and nurtured the hostile public opinion with a variety of means, ranging from expulsions5 to the introduction of Anarchist Acts6 through to the sharpening of the so-called guillotine seche (dry guillotine) by passing on sensitive data from the political police to employers.7 Nonetheless, Switzerland remained (...) one of the most important European locations for anarchists in exile.8Newspapers at the time were a busy industry in Switzerland. As late as 1939, there are notions of Switzerland being the country with the highest number of published titles among all countries9 Whereas in 2007 merely 20510 titles were on sale, in 1896 there were 33811 titles available. Anarchist newspapers did not make an exception to that rule and added to that wide variety. In the three decades between the beginning of the official persecution of anarchists and anarchism in early 1885 and until the First World War, no less than 23 titles in French and German have been published, as could have been revealed: Freie Gesellschaft, Junge Schweiz, Der Weckruf, Revolutionare Bibliothek, Der Vorposten, Polis, Die Vorkampferin, Der Sozialist, Arbeiter-Wille, Jahrbuch der Freien Generation, Le Revolte, L'Egalitaire, La Critique Sociale, L'Avenir, Le Reveil, L'Emancipation, Action Anarchiste, La Voix du Peuple, L'Almanach du Travailleur, L'Union Syndicale, Le Boycotteur, L'Exploitee, Bulletin de l'Ecole Ferrer}2 However, anarchist media was, much like anarchists themselves, not exactly welcomed, but rather tolerated at best. Constant repression and persecution especially for foreign, asylum-seeking anarchists was aimed not so much at singular persons but at the social movement as a whole. These de facto antianarchist practices weren't a Swiss phenomenon alone, but reflected a predominant opinion in Belle Epoque Atlantica. From 1884-1894 national legislations were introduced from France to Italy, from Germany to Austria throughout Europe. In a more international gesture, the antianarchist sentiments culminated in the Conferences Against Anarchism in Rome 1898 and St. Peterburg 1904.13WHY COLLECTIVE IDENTITY?Despite these headwinds that affected everyday life as much as travel and work, the anarchist movement persisted. As I argue, collective identity played an integral part in the prolonging. The reason for this assumption lies in the character of anarchism as a social movement. Unlike other social movements, anarchism did not try to ameliorate the status quo through reforms on principle. Political participation and the social, professional and wealth status and benefits that come with it, were diametrically opposed to the anarchist Weltanschauung. On the contrary, anarchism demanded all the more for the abolition of paid administrative offices in order to establish a federative, non-hierarchical society based on mutual aid and solidarity. …

The Artist as a Work-in-Progress: General Idea and the Construction of Collective Identity

In its twenty-five years of activity (1969–1994), the art collective General Idea developed a complex artistic mythology and identity that permitted it to produce a substantial corpus of work while confronting challenges provoked by evolving social relationships and, eventually, HIV/AIDS. The group maintained a cohesive partnership, a ‘collaborative body’ that subsumed individual members' identities within a collective whole. This paper analyses the conceptual projects and artists' statements of the group's first decade, many of which belong to the domain of Correspondence and Mail Art. It argues that these textual and performative artworks strategically constructed an elaborate collective identity. They equally functioned as a vehicle through which to develop methods and strategies of collaborative practice, reflecting debates about authorship such as those theorized contemporaneously by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

Hong Kong identity and the press–politics dynamics: a corpus-assisted discourse study

This article uses corpus-assisted discourse studies to examine the discursive construction of collective identity in the Hong Kong press, particularly with regard to its relationship with mainland China. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and collective identity theory, it develops a set of analytical techniques amenable to quantification, and applies it to a corpus of newspaper coverage of the 2005 Hong Kong Chief Executive election. The article uses these techniques not only to develop a representative description and interpretation of discursive patterns, but also to offer an explanatory account of the discursive construction of Hong Kong identity. It shows that the discursive patterns vary systematically depending on newspaper ownership, commercial imperatives, and newspaper type.

Internal media, conceptual metaphors and minority cultural identities

In recent times we have witnessed a growth in the number of groups who are calling for cultural recognition on the basis of a putative discrete ethnicity. In this article we examine one such group, the ‘Ulster-Scots’ in Northern Ireland. We examine how this group metaphorically conceptualize their identity within their internal press media output, specifically the monthly publication The Ulster-Scot. Drawing on the conceptual metaphor approach of Lakoff and Johnson, which argues that metaphors are central to how we define and understand our everyday world, we examine the discursive construction of an Ulster-Scots collective identity and history through an analysis of the metaphors employed. We argue that a focus on the use of conceptual metaphors within discourses of ethnicity provides a valuable insight into ethnic self-understanding at a given point in time, and that, consequently, this approach is a valuable addition to the analytic repertoire for researchers concerned with issues of emergent ethnicity and the construction ethnic identities in general.

SCALE, PLACE AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE ALONG INDIA’S NARMADA RIVER

This paper focuses on the struggles being waged by the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a rural social movement opposing displacement due to dams along India’s Narmada River. Building a comparison between two major anti-dam struggles within the Andolan, around the Sardar Sarovar and Maheshwar dams, this study seeks to show that multi-sited social movements pursue a variety of scale and place-based strategies and this multiplicity is key to the possibilities for progressive change that they embody. The paper highlights three aspects of the Andolan. First, the Andolan has successfully combined environmental networks and agricultural identities across the space of its struggle. The Andolan became internationally celebrated when its resistance led to the World Bank withdrawing funding for the Sardar Sarovar dam in 1993. This victory was viewed as a consequence of the Andolan’s successful utilization of transnational environmental networks. However, the Andolan has also intervened in agrarian politics within India and this role of the Andolan emerges when the struggle against the Maheshwar dam is considered. Second, this paper examines the role played by the Andolan in building a national movement against displacement. Given that India’s Supreme Court gave permission for the continued construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam in 2000, the power of the state to push through destructive development projects cannot be underestimated. The national level thus remains an important scale for the Andolan’s struggle leading to the formation of social movement networks and the construction of collective identities around experiences of rural and urban displacement. Third, this paper reflects on how common access to the Narmada river also provides a material basis for the formation of a collective identity, one which can be used to address the class divisions that characterize the Andolan’s membership. Overall, the paper aims to contribute to the study of social movements by showing how attachments to multiple geographies ensure that a movement’s potential futures always exceed the nature of its present forms of resistance.

Constructions of collective Muslim identity by advocates of Muslim schools in Britain

This paper considers how and why collective Muslim identity is expressed and mobilized by advocates of Muslim schools in Britain. This relates to broader questions about the conceptualization, construction and meanings of Muslim identities, and the problem of essentialism that can arise when reporting identity claims that emphasize intra-group unity. Analysis of data from interviews with stakeholders in the debate about Muslim schools in Britain revealed advocates commonly regarded separate schooling as a protective measure against threats to and/or attacks on Muslim identity. It is argued that interviewees invoked collective Muslim identity in ways that drew attention to common knowledge, values and practice, and/or shared life experiences relating to denigrated or discordant social identities. The commonalities expressed by respondents are interpreted as evidence of a convergence of identities and interests in particular social conditions, and are not claimed to be essential characteristics of collective Muslim identity.

The remythologisation of white collective identities in post-apartheid South African film by myth and counter myth

Since 1994 a collection of films, referred to here as post-apartheid South African history film, has thematically represented South Africa's apartheid history, and in so doing has engaged with the representation of the white figure in ways which suggest a reformulation of collective South African white identity construction. Part of this process is the phenomenon of the remythologisation, or the counter myth construction, of whiteness as an identity on film. Such mythic representations frequently describe the white figure as connected to aspects of guilt (whether individual or collective), remorse and forgiveness. Often the mythic construction of whiteness on film is delivered in a seemingly oversimplified binary fashion, reducing the representation of white identity in the post-apartheid South African situation to one that is robbed of complexities and nuances.

Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene (review)

Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene. By Travis D. Stimeling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. [xvi, 173 p. ISBN 9780199747474. $35.] Music examples, illustrations, notes bibliography, discography, filmography, index. The role of popular in the definition, articulation, and actualization of individual and collective identities is an accepted paradigm. How a particular style of popular music, its performance context, or its various functions manifests identity is largely determined on a case-by-case basis, shaped in no small part by the theoretical framework of the analyst. For Travis D. Stimeling, in Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive. Country Music Scene, the focus of his work is the itself, composed, performed, recorded, broadcasted via radio and television, marketed, and commented upon by the musicians, both headliners and sidemen, recording engineers, radio disc jockeys, television and record producers, and journalists--all in an effort explore the scene in Austin, Texas, covering primarily the years 1972-78. He draws from and expands on a nearly forty-year history of secondary literature on the Austin scene, offering for the first time a musicologist's perspective. Indeed, what distinguishes Stime-ling's work on the topic is the attention he gives the music. Informing his analysis are discussions of specific compositions, performance practicesy and styles, bringing relief the important role that music, as a sonic artifact with culturally specific meanings, plays in the construction of individual and collective identity and the political, cultural, and social work that accomplishes within scenes more generally (p. xi). To that end, Stirneling's chapters include a number of case studies, the first two on the emergence of folk singing as a distinctly countercultural act at such venues as Threadgill's (Austin's oldest honky tonk) in the early 1960s and the development of the progressive country radio format at Austin radio station KOKE-FM in the early 1970s. Here Stimeling draws from standard secondary sources including Jan Reid (The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, rev. ed. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004], Bill Malone (Country Music U.S.A., rev. ed. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002], and Barry Shank (Dissonant Identities: The Rock Roll Scene In Austin, Texas [Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994]), all arguing for the significance of Threadgill's in the emergence of the Austin scene in the early 1960s- Stimeling shows not only how owner Kenneth Threadgill served as the patriarch of counterculture, but also how, with his love for and performance of the of adopted Texan Jimmie Rodgers, he was a conduit the presumably unmediated golden age of Texan music (p. 24). Stimeling highlights the efforts of Austin musicians and audiences to reshape Threadgill into a symbol of idealized Texan past, allowing participants position themselves as heirs of a distinctly Texan musical heritage (p. 24). His take on the significance of Austin's radio format at KOKE-FM is informed by recent e-mail communication with dist jockey Joe Gracey, just one of numerous interviews of participants of this scene that support the author's arguments. Throughout the book, Stimeling makes use of sources that include oral histories--interviews with such figures and musicians who participated in the scene as Marcia Ball, Ray Benson, Guy Clark, Bob Livingston, Michael Martin Murphey, name only a few--as well as archival research. In chapters 2 and 3 Stimeling provides a detailed study of the musical construction of the cosmic cowboy and the redneck--two of the scene's most prominent icons. While his analyses provide further support his overall thesis, the attention he affords the critics of the and movement marks a particularly significant contribution our understanding of the Austin scene. …

Guns and roses: Collective identity processes of women activists in India

This article explores the processes of construction of collective identity of women activists in the state of Andhra Pradesh in south India. Utilizing methods such as the Twenty Statements Test and a semi-structured interview format with 10 activists, the study focused on their self-description as activist, formative influences on their decision to engage in activism, and their recall and narration of a significant collective action incident. Broadly, two dimensions of collective identity – sharing of a collective action frame and connection with a broader community rather than with narrow familial or personal identities – were found to characterize the way the participants construct their selves. The self-perceptions framed by political ideology and collective action experiences contained psychological overtones of subjective well-being that serve to explain in part the sustainability of their involvement with the organization.