Distinct Cultural Practices Research Articles

Widening access while tightening control: Office-holding, marriages, and elite consolidation in early modern Poland

Elites are dynamically emergent and evolving groups, yet their organization at any given time has tremendous implications for the tenor of social life and the probability of historical change. Using data on more than 3,000 Senatorial office-holders and over 3,100 elite marriages in early modern Poland, this article systematically documents changes over time in the structure of the Polish elite between 1500 and 1795 from a “multiple-networks” perspective. It measures timing of entry into senatorial ranks, regional integration of the elite, degree of elite dominance, and patterns of overlap between office-holding and marriage networks across four distinct eras in Polish history. Aggregate network patterns reveal a system in the eighteenth century characterized simultaneously by widening political access and increasing super-elite political control. Highlighting these patterns makes better sense of the Polish nobility's distinct cultural practices than do other historical sociological accounts and illuminates the structural basis for Poland's remarkable constitutional moment in the late eighteenth century.

Eastern european cluster: tradition and transition

The eastern European cluster consists of Albania, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Poland, Russia, and Slovenia. It has a population of 232 million and a gross domestic product (GDP) of U.S.$772 billion. The cluster’s distinctive cultural practices are high power distance and high family and group collectivism. The region is facing significant challenges during its period of transition from communist philosophy to market-based economies. The participating managers value a much greater degree of future and performance orientation, but are strongly attached to their cultural heritage of deep family and group cohesion. They are also highly value charismatic and team-oriented leadership. The challenges and complexities facing the region are explored in the paper.

Liberalism and the Limits of Multiculturalism

One of the most pressing issues facing liberal democracies today is the politicization of ethnocultural diversity. Minority cultures are demanding greater public recognition of their distinctive identities and greater freedom and opportunity to retain and develop their distinctive cultural practices. In response to these demands, new and creative mechanisms are being adopted in many countries for accommodating difference. This essay discusses some of the issues raised by these demands, focussing in particular on the difficulties that arise when the minority seeking accommodation is illiberal. Undoubtedly, ethnocultural relations are often full of complications that defy simple categories or easy answers; however, we can make some progress if we draw some distinctions between different kinds of groups and different kinds of group rights. This essay probes the nature of liberal tolerance and then delineates the limits of state intervention by looking at some troubling practices and analyzing pertinent court judgements.

Bypassing of Borders and Building of Bridges

This article conceptually frames First Peoples television development in Canada into historical periods divided on the basis of distinct cultural representational practices, improved technological infrastructures and corresponding expansions of target audiences. After characterizing each period, the focus turns to the most current phase - the licensing and launching of a new channel with mandatory carriage by cable operators - the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), which went on air 1 September 1999. The only aboriginal television service in the world that is national in distribution, APTN carries six hours a day of original indigenous content (repeated three times), broadcasts in multiple languages and maintains the status of a fully independent broadcasting undertaking alongside Canada's two other national public services. Noting the controversy and significance of the bold and inclusive decision on the part of the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission to license APTN, questions are then raised about the relationship between the technical location of the channel at the very high end of the Canadian broadcasting spectrum and the social position of sociocultural, political and economic marginalization of First Peoples in Canadian society. The extent to which First Peoples new visibility and audibility will build bridges of understanding or ignite existing negative stereotypes in cross-cultural audiences is yet to be determined, but the fact that APTN is now an integral member of Canada's national broadcasting infrastructure is internationally significant.

Spoilers and Cheaters

Spoilers and Cheaters

The Conceptual Politics of Race: lessons from Our Children

When thinking about race there is a tendency to combine into a single package two distinct cultural practices: one racialist, the other racist. On the one hand, people effortlessly (or seemingly effortlessly) partition humans into categories based on differences in external anatomy. On the other hand, people use these categories to rationalize inequitable distributions of valued resources, power, and authority. That people engage in these practices is uncontroversial. What is contentious is the relationship between racialist and racist modes of thought, which might be called the conceptual politics of race. Psychologists, who are principally concerned with the organization of mental life, tend to view racial categories as the unmediated outcome of discontinuity in human phenotype encountering a spontaneous impulse to categorize similar things together. Of course, psychologists do not deny that representations of race play a role in the rationalization of domination and of inequity. But they tend to view this role as a by-product of the way that racial representations are mentally formed. On such a view, race is a category of power because it is a category of mind. In contrast, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists—that is, those scholars most concerned with race as a category of power—argue that the partitioning of humans into racial categories is contingent on and derived from the particular ways power and authority are articulated in specific systems of domination. In this view, race is a category of mind because it is a category of (certain) power relations. Both these approaches clearly have merit, and one might be tempted to adopt an eclectic reconciliation if not for one thing. Neither provides much insight into arguably the most significant aspect of racial thinking, the capacity of a system that simply represents human difference to underwrite judgments about the intrinsic value and potential of those groups represented. Thus, although thought to be directly derived from

Representing gender in the Chinese nation: Chinese sportswomen and Beijing's bid for the 2000 olympics

In recent decades, the international victories of Chinese sportswomen have defied Western stereotypes about the oppressed Asian woman. The Western interpretation of women's sports history begins with the introduction of women's sports in the 1890s by the YMCA as a part of a strategy for liberating Chinese women and saving the nation; it continues through the Marxist egalitarianism of the Maoist era; and concludes with the wholesale imitation of the East German sports medicine machine in the 1990's. Utilizing Marshal Sahlins’ notion of the structure of the conjuncture, this paper tells another story: women's sports were shaped by distinct Chinese cultural practices, and by the use of gender symbols by elites to distinguish regional and national identities (particularly in the symbolism of opening ceremonies at major sports events). This article illustrates how, amidst the propagation of the seemingly homogenizing idea of the nation‐state, distinctly Chinese constructions of gender‐in‐the‐nation nevertheles...

Constructing local identities in a revolutionary nation: the cultural politics of the artisan class in Nicaragua, 1979‐90

During the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979‐90), the Sandinista government was simultaneously committed to a politics of class consciousness and a nation‐building project informed by an indigenista ideology. Western Nicaraguan artisan communities, a heterogeneous social group with variable and distinctive cultural practices, responded to the Sandinista Revolution by creating a union that represented artisans' interests in terms of class rather than ethnicity, which has historically been a marker of subordinate status. Through an analysis of a particular history in which class identity became salient, in this article I stress not only the fluidity of local identities, but also underscore ways in which anthropology may be complicit in nation‐building projects that maintain the subaltern position of peoples among whom anthropologists work.