Cultural Valences Research Articles

Protolith

Abstract: This five-part essay melds the author’s personal attachment to gold with a larger rumination on the cultural valences of the metal across India and the American West. The essay considers the personal implications of claiming: a history, a stretch of land, a piece of gold.

Special issue: the global sixties in the Global South

ABSTRACT This Introduction provides a conceptual framework and preview of the five articles contained in the Special Issue, ”Global Sixties in the Global South.” The articles derive from a two-day, interdisciplinary conference held at Stony Brook University in Spring 2022 and reflect scholarship by both younger and more established scholars who explore diverse topics from African, Asian, and Latin American perspectives. After a brief historiographic overview and discussion of the semantic relationship between ”Global Sixties” and ”Global South,” the Introduction makes the case for the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue as the basis for Global Sixties scholarship. The Introduction further argues how the articles that make up the Special Issue reveal the contradictions inherent to solidarities across disparate lands, the cultural valence of place, the continued if refracted operation of imperialisms, the messiness of ideological schisms, and the corruption inherent to power dynamics that suffused revolutionary consciousness and Third World ambitions alike. Ultimately, we argue that ”Global Sixties in the Global South” provides a framework that reveals a world deeply entangled across geopolitics, political economy, and culture in ways that account for both the meta-narratives of revolution and ideology and the micro-histories of personal intimacy and affective relations.

“Languishing” in critical perspective: Roots and routes of a traveling concept in COVID-19 times

As the COVID-19 pandemic entered its second year, the New York Times published a column offering readers a name for its negative impact on mental health and well-being: “languishing.” Originally developed by positive psychologists, the term was designed to capture a sense of distress involving feelings of emptiness, stagnation, and lack of motivation that fall short of clinical significance. The column struck so strong a chord with readers that it was designated the most-read NY Times story of 2021. In this article, I examine how the concept of “languishing” traveled into U.S. popular discourse and consider the term’s emerging cultural valences and interpretive dynamics. I also examine key gaps and discrepancies between operationalized and vernacular usages of the term. Analysis focuses on a set of weekly journals created as part of the Pandemic Journaling Project, an online journaling platform and research study launched in May 2020. The journals show how a “psy” concept, once unmoored from its origins as a research construct, can become (re)invented as a cultural resource available to help people narrativize distress and, in some cases, name and confront injustice. Yet the popular appeal of “languishing” also raises urgent questions—in particular, about the growing role of positive psychology in both public and policy discussions about health and well-being. The field’s emphasis on individual-level behavior change tends to neglect the structural factors, ideological contexts, and relations of power that predispose some people to languish, and others to flourish, in the first place. While the language of “languishing” may prove helpful to some, its individual-level focus risks distracting us from another urgent need: to confront the root causes of today's profound and wide-reaching mental health burden—a burden that may not have been precipitated, but certainly has been exacerbated, by the ongoing pandemic.

The Human-Fish: Animality, Teratology, and Religion in Premodern Japan

This article focuses on the cultural valence of the human-fish (ningyo), a hybrid aquatic creature with a human face and a fish body, in premodern Japan from the eighth to the nineteenth century. Located at the intersection of religious, political, and scientific discourses, the ningyo becomes an exclusive observation point for better understanding the mechanisms of interweaving and mutual fertilization between apparently unrelated semantic fields such as those concerning deities, humans, and animals. Although heteromorphic bodies, here symbolized by the uncanny physicality of the ningyo, are usually dismissed as marginal elements within the broad panorama of relevant intel-lectual productions, this study problematizes this assumption and argues that hegemonic stances are constantly validated, or invalidated, according to their relationships with those on the fringes. Being an interstitial entity, that is, something that lives in the pleats of discourse, the ningyo is characterized by a continuous inclusion within networks of meaning and, at the same time, is doomed to perennial exclusion. This article sheds light on the hermeneutical dynamics that generate the exceptionality of the ningyo, and its never-ending role as a haunting mediator of reality.

Spoiler Alert

Spoiler Alert

The Mismeasurement of Cattle Ownership In Namibia's Northern Communal Areas

Abstract The standard approach to measuring livestock ownership in pastoralist communities relies on an assumption of uniformity that does not reflect the diverse concepts of ownership held by pastoralists themselves. In Namibia’s Koakaveld Region, Himba and Herero pastoralist communities have a rich vocabulary for categorising the origins, usage rights and cultural valence of their cattle. Drawing on both authors’ experience overseeing a large-scale rangeland management programme evaluation in Namibia’s Northern Communal Areas – and one author’s experience growing up in and keeping cattle in a Himba pastoralist community – we show how the standard approach to measuring cattle ownership undermines accurate estimates of livestock wealth, off-take and inequality, and obfuscates pastoralist’s strategies for turning ecological variability to their advantage. We conclude with lessons about how multi-dimensional data collection methods improve upon the standard approach to livestock ownership measurements.

Environmental Politics of Reproduction.

What constitutes "human reproduction" is under negotiation as its biology, social nature, and cultural valences are increasingly perceived as bound up in environmental issues. This review maps the growing overlap between formerly rather separate domains of reproductive politics and environmental politics, examining three interrelated areas. The first is the emergence of an intersectional environmental reproductive justice framework in activism and environmental health science. The second is the biomedical delineation of the environment of reproduction and development as an object of growing research and intervention, as well as the marking off of early-life environments as an "exposed biology" consequential to the entire life span. Third is researchers' critical engagement with the reproductive subject of environmental politics and the lived experience of reproduction in environmentally dystopic times. Efforts to rethink the intersections of reproductive and environmental politics are found throughout these three areas.

Thinking Algorithmically

Cold War competition shaped the process of computerization in both East and West during the second half of the twentieth century. This article combines insights from Science and Technology Studies, which brought the analysis of Cold War technopolitics beyond the context of the nation-state, with approaches from Critical Algorithm Studies, to question the algorithm’s role in the global “computer revolution.” It traces the algorithm’s trajectory across several geographical, political, and discursive spaces to argue that its mutable cultural valences made the algorithm a universalizing attribute for representing human-machine interactions across the ideological divide. It shows that discourses about the human capacity to devise algorithms, a practice central to computer programming, became a space for negotiating different versions of modern subjectivity. This article focuses on two related episodes to demonstrate how the notion of “algorithmic thinking” became explicitly associated with a range of politicized agendas, each claiming the algorithm’s power. On one hand, the coupling of “algorithm” and “thinking” was used to describe a naturalized cognitive capacity shared among the members of the international scientific community and projected backward to the medieval scholar Al-Khwarizmi. On the other hand, the universal spread of “algorithmic thinking” became the educational goal of a late Soviet computer literacy campaign under the slogan of “Programming, the Second Literacy,” a metaphor and a political vision conceived to bring about the Socialist “Information Age.”

Informality as Fix

Street cultures of make-do and reuse in contemporary India, colloquially known as jugaad, is a set of material practices that have had a long and established history in the country. This article juxtaposes such practices with ‘repair’ in order to consider the politics of jugaad as it played out in the years following the financial crisis of 2008. As growth rates suffered massive contractions and workers were laid off in large numbers, jugaad came to take on cultural valences in unexpected contexts, especially within business management literature, where it signalled the vibrancy of the ‘informal’ economy. Following the migration of the term into widespread English usage, alongside the parallel, growing demand for the ‘right to repair’ in the United States and Europe, this article traces how an undisciplined, subaltern practice of repurposing came to be repurposed, in turn, in the service of the failing ‘formal’ economy.

The politics of suffering: from the survivor-witness to humanitarian witnessing

This essay engages with the work of the French anthropologist, sociologist and psychiatrist Didier Fassin on the proliferation of the language of trauma and suffering in the late twentieth century. It shows the benefit of taking a long historical view. It describes the fashioning of the ‘survivor-witness’ during the 1961 Eichmann trial and its symbolic connection to the humanitarian witness that emerged in the 1990s. By illustrating the historical processes by which each of these two figures became a ‘witness’, it reveals the conditions under which traumatized victims are assigned a negative or positive cultural valence.

The Tale of the Tailor: Munshi Mohammad Meherullah and Muslim–Christian Apologetics in Bengal, 1885–1907

Rural Muslim atrap communities in the eastern part of the colonial Bengal Presidency were the target demographic ofChristian conversion efforts in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Debates (bahas) between Muslim preachers and Christian missionaries, as well as religious meetings (waz mahfils), characterized these apologetics. Disseminated through street-market chapbooks in Musalmani-Bengali or dobashi Bengali, such polemics translated the cultural valences of Christianity and Islam both as personal faith and as communitarian identifying markers. In this paper, I analyze a selection of such pamphlets authored by an itinerant tailor called Munshi Meherullah, who spearheaded the atrap Bengali reaction against missionary efforts. Meherullah understood that the theological debates between Christian missionaries and Muslim alims was colonially and racially inflected and pre-determined, and the very act of engagement in apologetics was merely a performance of social, racial and theological superiority. As this paper exhibits, Meherullah’s distinctive approach towards social reform, religion and religious identity played a very important role in defining the parameters of being a good Bengali Muslim. Religious conversion, as a result of his intervention, became a techne, a phronetic device that operated in excess of the real boundaries of its perceived threats, to enable self-examination and analysis of their immediate social milieu for Bengal’s Muslims, in order to resist colonial religious and political subordination.

Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the 'Crisis' of the 1970s.

This article argues that, by the 1970s, people in Britain were increasingly insistent about defining and claiming their individual rights, identities and perspectives. Using individual narratives and testimonies, we show that many were expressing desires for greater personal autonomy and self-determination. We suggest that this was an important trend across the post-war decades, and of particular importance to understanding the 1970s. This popular individualism was not the result of Thatcher; if anything, it was a cause of Thatcherism. But this individualism had multiple political and cultural valences; desires for greater individual self-determination, and anger with the 'establishment' for withholding it, did not lead inexorably to Thatcherism. There were, in fact, some sources for, and potential outlets for, popular individualism on the left-outlets that explicitly challenged class, gender and racial inequalities. With this, we suggest the possibility of a new meta-narrative of post-war Britain, cutting across the political narrative that organizes post-war British history into three periods: social democracy, 'crisis' and the triumph of 'neoliberalism'. The 1970s was a key moment in the spread of a popular, aspirational form of individualism in post-war Britain, and this development is critical to our understanding of the history of the post-war years.

Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930 ed. by Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt

Reviewed by: Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930 ed. by Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt Alexandra Minna Stern Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt, eds. Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016. viii + 472 pp. Ill. $49.00 (978-0-262-03443-2). The editors of this weighty volume have assembled a stellar international ensemble of historians to explore salient facets of heredity and their intersecting scientific, social, political, and cultural valences from 1850 to 1930. The second installment in a series devoted to tracing the genealogies of heredity over a modern era that begins in the 1500s, this book offers compelling frameworks and innovative scholarship to better understand an eight-decade period that was foundational to the emergence of classical genetics, cellular biology, and eugenics movements around the globe. This volume is neither comprehensive nor disciplinarily uniform; rather, it includes distinct perspectives that "show that a history of heredity includes much more than the history of genetics, and that knowledge of heredity was always more than the knowledge formulated as Mendelism" (p. 1). [End Page 667] Seventeen chapters are divided into five parts, organized by conceptual frames including kinship and population, evolution and reproduction, agro-industrial contexts, medical contexts, and Mendelism. Contributors explore how heredity influenced and interacted with public discourse and policy and how hereditarian principles were applied in specific contexts and using particular model organisms. This volume clearly articulates a strong interest in disrupting unilinear discovery narratives of Mendelism that have become too comfortably accepted by historians of science and medicine. A brief review of several exemplary chapters illustrates this volume's original research. In one chapter, Luis Campos and Alexander von Schwerin situate Mendelism in a broader constellation of research on inheritance, and particularly, mutation, that emerged in the early twentieth century. Pivoting away from the centrality of the "gene," they focus on Erwin Baur and Albert Francis Blakeslee who tested Hugo de Vries's mutation theory by observing hereditary patterns in plants (jimsonweed and the snapdragon), and then posited the importance of chromosomes and of large-scale techniques of experimental agricultural genetics. Notably, Baur and Blakeslee helped pave the way for a decidedly technological approach to the induction of mutations in model organisms that adumbrated subsequent biological and biomedical research. Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Ilana Löwy perceptively highlight the absence of Mendelism in medicine in the early 1900s, when Mendelian theories of human inheritance and medical understandings of human pathology often were incommensurate. Only in rare instances, such as familial adenomatous polyposis and phenylketonuria, was Mendelization successful. Most physicians viewed human pathologies as intrinsically complex and multifactorial, and embraced a model of "vertical transmission" that did not allow for Mendelian factors. Furthermore, the wide gap between clinical practice and scientific experimentation militated against the kind of evidence-based medicine taken for granted today. Unidirectional narratives of the intertwined rise of racial hygiene and Jewish persecution are troubled by Veronika Lipphardt's insightful essay, which illustrates how a subset of Jewish biologists engaged visibly in debates about the biological worth of the Jewish "race" through lenses of racial and evolutionary progress, even emancipation. She smartly notes "one should not project today's knowledge about the Holocaust back into pre-1933 Germany but instead consider those multiple future outcomes that seemed possible to contemporaries" (p. 128). This keen reminder—to side-shadow, not back-shadow, histories of eugenics and genetics—can help scholars understand perplexing phenomena such as African American eugenics in the United States. In his essay on the overlooked but pivotal role of statistics, enumeration, and bureaucracy, above all in asylums and mental institutions, Theodore Porter recenters U.S. and British histories of eugenics around a distinct kind of serialization and biopolitical efficiency. He traces methods, theories, and material practices within the institutions themselves, underscoring the relevance of STS approaches to analyzing classificatory systems that mattered to early twentieth-century eugenicists and social reformers. [End Page 668] The volume contains a wealth of insights into national and comparative histories of heredity, that the contributors show, were complex, multilayered, and sometimes counterintuitive. As is typical of anthologies, overarching arguments...

‘A Mad-Cap Ruffian and a Swearing Jack’: Braggart Courtship from <i>Miles Gloriosus</i> to <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i>

<p>There is a generic skeleton in Petruchio’s closet. By comparing his outlandish behaviour in Shakespeare’s<em> The Taming of the Shrew </em>(ca 1592-94) to that of Pyrgopolinices in Plautus’s <em>Miles Gloriosus</em> (ca 200 BC), as well to that of English variants of the type found in Udall, Lyly, and Peele, I re-situate Petruchio as a braggart soldier. I also reconstruct a largely forgotten comic subgenre, <em>braggart courtship</em>, with distinctive poetic styles, subsidiary characters, narrative events, and thematic functions. Katherina’s marriage to a stranger who boasts of his abilities and bullies social inferiors raises key questions: What were the comic contexts and cultural valences of a match between a braggart and a shrew?</p>

Beyond Culture: Human Rights Universalisms Versus Religious and Cultural Relativism in the Activism for Gender Justice

This Article explores the tension between (and within) feminism and culture/religion in the efforts to improve the lives of women and how that seemingly intractable divide continues to complicate activism transnationally. I revisit the question of multiculturalism but in the broader context of global feminist action in order to suggest a way to bridge the divide and to foster greater solidarity among transnational feminists. In order to do so, we have to come to terms with our own positions of authority and exercises of power. The Article proceeds in five parts. First, culture (and its religious analog) is often used as a justification for avoiding gender law reform by cultural relativists and traditionalists who hold state power. However, what is often hidden behind such usage is a highly particular and discreet set of political choice about how to arrange the rights and obligations within society. These choices are not determined a priori by a cultural script. The article argues that cultural relativists and traditionalists strategically employ culture as a smokescreen for political choices where other choices are just as defensible. Second, both those who tend to use culture to justify doing nothing or doing very limited reforms as well as those who seek sweeping reforms against culture view culture itself similarly as determinate and unmutable. This mirroring of relativists and universalists is an old construction that has roots in the colonial period and this history is important in understand the present dilemmas of feminism. That dynamic also reflects a seemingly intractable oppositional tension between multi-culturalist/relativists who seek to preserve culture and the universalists who seek to overcome it. This tension is very present in legal feminist thought and activism making transnational coalitions and support more complicated. In order to be effective, we have to see culture and religion as contested and take women’s dissenting views seriously.Third, I explore how these assumptions about culture play into a global narrative in the War on Terror. In particularly, I explore how liberal feminist notions of culture exacerbate the negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslim males in particular. I suggest that the easy stereotyping that the War on Terror has made ubiquitous pervades liberal feminist understandings of the “problems” of Muslim women. While these may actually be quite accurate, the overall narrative of superiority of the War on Terror and its “clash of civilization” rhetoric makes transnational coalition building much more difficult.In Part Four, I delve deeper into the constructions of authority and agency in liberal feminism and question how power is distributed among women. Using the examples of the veil debate and the topless jihad by Femen, I explore the who has the power to speak and what they are able to convey to suggest that the assumptions of positions of epistemological authority and power are very problematic. By grounding the theoretical observations in these two practical phenomena, I hope to show that unless the impasse is overcome, the full potential of emancipatory feminist thought and activism will never be realized.Finally, I suggest a few approaches to bridge the divide among feminists by acknowledging the cultural valence of seemingly neutral rights, taking difference seriously and engaging on more equal footing.

Foodopoly and Barnyard and Birkenstocks: Two Approaches for Changing Food Systems

The food we eat is the center of increasing attention in both popular media and academic discourse which focuses on the immediate connections of diet and health as well as the broader consequences for the environment and social justice. New metaphors such as the food chain and food deserts capture public attention and are employed in narratives of hidden dangers, larger systemic problems, and often crises. Wellknown investigative journalists such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser reveal links between commodity subsidies, high-fructose corn syrup, the obesity epidemic, corporate control, and labor issues. In the wake of this critique of the industrial food system, a diverse set of alternatives such as farmers markets, CSAs, and food hubs re-work the relationships between producers and consumers to change the cultural and ecological valences (organic, fair trade, local) of the food we eat. In a relatively short period of time, the largely taken-forgranted aspects of the conventional food system have been thoroughly deconstructed and alternatives have become conventions. The question now is how often do these narratives need repeating? More importantly, how significant are the alternatives? What ideologies do they represent and are these the only means of intervention? Two recent books contribute to the larger critique, while focusing analysis on some new areas and possible new strategies for change. The title Foodopoly: The Battle Over The Future of Food and Farming in America, as well as the jacket cover image of a gang of wheat combine harvesters working at the scale of a large agribusiness operation, seem to offer the familiar critique. However, the author, Wenonah Hauter, challenges the idea that more informed consumers can change the food system. She states, Bwe cannot shop our way out of this mess.^ Foodopoly goes beyond the strategy of Bvoting with our forks^ to analyze the structural aspects of the food system— the corporate, scientific, industrial frameworks, and policy decisions that created and depended on the system in the first place. Following the introduction which frames this argument, Hauter unpacks how powerful interests shaped farm and food policy with a vision of economic efficiency of large industrial farms linked to a global Bfree market^ which would mean cheaper food as well as fewer farmers. Subsequent chapters follow how this vision influenced Federal food policy in the 1960s, and the consequences it has had for corporate consolidation, deregulation of food safety, factory farming (including organics), and control of genetic resources. It is a very clear and substantive argument that provides a foundation for structural alternatives. Based on her analysis of policy and power relationships, Hauter challenges individuals and groups involved in various food movements (local, organic, fair trade, etc.) to politicize their activities and advocate for larger policy changes, regulation and enforcement, and ultimately build political power for significant change. One obvious place to begin to change the food system is on the ground at the level of production. However, Barnyard and Birkenstocks: Why Farmers and Environmentalists Need Each Other examines the difficulty of making such policy and regulatory change on the farm. It highlights the fact that * Matthew Potteiger ranchotomatillo@earthlink.net

Positioning Steinbeck's Automobiles:

Abstract Steinbeck's depiction of vehicles in The Grapes of Wrath reflects his nuanced automotive knowledge and his journalist's eye for detail, and much has been said about the symbolic nature of the Joad's 1926 Hudson Super Six as he depicts it. Time has eroded current readers' understanding of the semiotic significances of their vehicle of deliverance and the other vehicles they encounter in the course of the novel. Just as a BMW or Corvette expresses status today, automobiles communicated cultural, political, and economic position in the Depression era. Steinbeck clearly intended to convey class and social standing with specific makes and models; however, readers today cannot place a 1925 Dodge or a 1926 Hudson Super Six in a meaningful social context, leaving a gap in potential understanding. I exhume the cultural valences of the automobiles that populate The Grapes of Wrath and reveal these significances in practical terms of cost, advertising, and styling. This will reveal larger social and economic patterns of an emerging consumerist class and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial America.

EXPLORING THE ROLE OF CULTURE IN THE LINK BETWEEN MENTAL HEALTH AND FOOD INSECURITY: A CASE STUDY FROM BRAZIL

Food insecurity has traditionally been characterized as a driver of health disparities because of its potential impacts on nutritional status. Food, however, has important social and cultural valences that make it much more than a nutritional vehicle. Recent research that is sensitive to the social meanings of food has drawn attention to the complex and far‐reaching mental and social health effects of food insecurity. In this article, we outline several theoretical pathways linking food insecurity to reduced physical and mental well‐being, and then present results of a preliminary study in rural Brazil designed to test the relative importance of each of these pathways. Our results tentatively suggest that in this context, food insecurity is closely related to both mental and physical health disparities, but the pathways connecting food insecurity and mental health remain somewhat unclear. We present lessons learned and propose a set of research steps to further address the relationships between the social meaning of food and mental health.

Old Nick Crossed the Mississippi: The Figure of the Devil in Late Cold War Era Novels of the American West

The figure of the devil – employed time and again by Americans as a means of culturally construing the perceived enemy Other, as W. Scott Poole illustrates in his study Satan in America – appears with great frequency within the corpus of the literature of the American West. This essay focuses on Western regional novels of the late Cold War period (1968-1991), analyzing their manner of using the devil figure to variously challenge and/or reinforce mainstream conceptions of evil and come to terms with the meaning and direction of America at a time of crossroads and vast social transfiguration. It argues that Stephen King’s The Stand (1978) employs the satanic Randall Flagg to interrogate what is taken as an intrinsic strain of evil running through America’s history and emerging in especially pointed form in the social unrest and malaise of the late 1960s and 1970s. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), on the other hand, attributes Mephistophelean attributes (among others) to its antagonist Judge Holden as a means of dramatizing how barbarity, destruction, and expenditure are inexorably intertwined with the values and goals of civilization, while Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) reconfigures and repurposes the devil figure, drawing on the cultural valences of pagan male fertility figures and the Africana traditions he elsewhere conceptualizes as “neo-hoodoo” to wage a counter-cultural attack upon the pillars of American and Western Christian society.

Introduction:

Introduction: