Ethnic Lens Research Articles

Libya's ‘Major Minorities’. Berber, Tuareg and Tebu: Multiple Narratives of Citizenship, Language and Border Control

The Qadhdhafi regime neglected ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities by virtue of its conception of the national order of Libya as being a homogenous Arab Muslim nation state. After the fall of the regime, the Berber, the Tuareg and the Tebu started demanding political participation, legal residence, and the acceptance of minority rights. Using examples of citizenship, language and border control, I elaborate how Libya needs to be analyzed through national, transnational, ethnic, and tribal lenses in order to understand its socio-cultural plurality and to grasp the intricacy that characterizes the process of identity-making among these groups.

Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters ed. by Beverly Bossler

Reviewed by: Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters ed. by Beverly Bossler Anne E. McLaren (bio) Beverly Bossler, editor. Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. xii, 266 pp. Hardcover, $50.00, isbn 978-0-295-99470-3. Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters offers an illuminating set of studies on gendered encounters at specific moments in Chinese history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Arranged in rough chronological order, the chapters span the early eighteenth century through to the contemporary period. Each contributing author enlists a particular case study to present a set of intriguing encounters between men and women, different social classes, Han Chinese and other ethnic groups, and, in one case, Europeans and Chinese. In her introduction, Beverly Bossler provides a timely overview of several decades of work on the study of gender in Chinese history. We are reminded of earlier contributions that challenged Eurocentric notions of gender and established the importance of the relational nature of male and female roles within Chinese kinship and status systems. Chinese “patriarchal” institutions have been fruitfully studied from the perspective of female participants. We now know much more about women’s roles in local economies and in household management, female influence at court, women’s property and legal rights, and the role of women in writing and publishing. The cults of “the chaste widow” and “the faithful maiden” have been intensively studied. The new topics of masculinity, homosexuality, and nonconventional sex roles are now routinely included in studies of “gender” in China. The first chapter, by Ann Waltner, discusses a Chinese bridal procession as re-created in the European imagination, seeking to assess early Western understandings of the gendered nature of Chinese ritual. The image is an engraving in the monumental encyclopedic work on China by French Jesuit Jean Baptiste du Halde (1679–1743). According to Waltner, this engraving was produced by A. Humblot (ca. 1700–1758), who had access to Chinese illustrations and encyclopedias brought back from China, most likely from Canton. Waltner suggests that the illustrative matter from which the wedding procession was derived could well include illustrations devised in China specifically for the export market to the West. This helps to account for the “exoticized” aesthetics of Humblot’s engraving. Unfortunately, the image provided in this volume is the wrong one. It turns out to be the funeral procession and not the bridal procession (see fig. 1.1 on p. 24). The reader will notice immediately the large coffin beneath the central canopy and will look in vain for the details of the bridal procession set out here (pp. 28–30).1 The two images are clearly companion pieces with a similar style of composition. It would have been instructive to consider them both together. One finds the same curved procession with similar musicians and entertainers. However, the bridal sedan is markedly smaller than the gigantic canopied coffin in the funeral procession. The processions also travel in opposite directions. The giant coffin travels [End Page 113] from the lower right to the upper left, where one sees a tunnel in a large mound awaiting its occupant. The wedding procession begins in the upper left and zigzags toward the marital home at the bottom right. One could even speculate that the funeral procession is bearing a “male” coffin (it is large and grand) while the marriage procession, with its (small) sedan chair at the center and female riders on horseback, is coded “female.” Such considerations could have enriched this chapter, which is otherwise detailed and insightful. Literati men commonly reproduced works of female instruction. Guotong Li discusses one such male, Lan Dingyuan (1680–1733), who served as magistrate of counties in Guangdong Province as well as a term as political advisor in Taiwan. While Lan’s Women’s Learning is a conventional type of instructional text, Li examines his intentions through the lens of ethnicity. Lan Dingyuan was descended from both Han Chinese and Fujian She people. In his life work he vigorously promoted the sinicization of non-Chinese populations, believing that the promotion of female “virtue” along Confucian lines was an essential aspect of good governance in the borderlands. For this...

Conceptualizing Ethnicity, Justice, and Resistance During Organizational Change

This paper builds on work demonstrating that resistance to change is better conceptualized as resistance to loss and that change or loss has too many different manifestations to be addressed as a single phenomenon (Dent & Goldberg, 1999a; 1999b). Consequently, we explore the loss of justice, perceived through the lens of ethnicity, as a factor in organizational change. Key variables are analyzed within three workplace constructs: change, ethnic culture, and justice, to explore the many dimensions of organizational resistance. It is argued that organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) serves as a useful proxy for resistance - reduced levels of OCB equate to increased resistance. The dimensions of American minorities are conceptualized and explored to challenge theories of workplace resistance. Lastly, to explore the complexity of organizational injustice, interpretations of non-instrumental procedural justice is viewed separately from distributive and interactional (anticipatory) justice. By addressing organizational injustice as one factor in reduced acceptance of change, the study opens the door for a new line of research into the many psychosocial factors that account for performance differences during the organizational change process.

‘No smoke without fire’: Strategies of coping with stigmatised migrant identities

This paper examines how ethnicity informs the ways in which Romanian migrants in the UK cope with stigmatisation. Instead of assuming ethnicity’s relevance, our purpose is to examine how responses to stigmatisation may or may not become ethnicised. We consider two strategies. The first strategy invokes and reinforces the salience of ethnicity, albeit in a negative and thus still stigmatised way. Instead of countering stigma with a positive reappraisal of ‘Romanianness’, some Romanians seek to transfer the stigma onto the ethnic Roma with whom they are frequently associated. This strategy thus acknowledges stigma, but attempts to detach it from the self and reattach it to the ethnicised other. The second strategy emphasises individual skills and accomplishments to overshadow the effects of a stigmatised ethnicity. Ethnicity is made less salient by this switch to a register of personal skill and worth. Exploring the interplay of these coping strategies, we highlight the fluctuating relevance, rather than declining relevance, of an ‘ethnic lens’ (Glick Schiller et al., 2006) in individual migrants’ de-stigmatising discourses and practices that produce, transform or at times elide different ethnic boundaries.

Locating migrant pathways of economic emplacement: Thinking beyond the ethnic lens

This article reinforces the calls, including those articulated by the editors of this special issue, for scholarship that does not rely on an ethnic lens to study migrant practices, socialities and identities. We offer a concept of migrant emplacement that focuses analytical attention on the relationship between the economic, political and cultural positioning of cities within broader networks of power and the ability of migrants to forge a place for themselves within a specific locality. Using the example of Halle/Saale in eastern Germany but calling for comparative research, the article notes the synergies between urban regeneration and rebranding efforts and the emplacement of migrants in that city through local situated and transnationally connected small businesses. Time is also shown to be a factor: a welcoming ambience and opportunity structure in urban regeneration at one point can be replaced by a reduction in possibilities at a later period.

Neo-tribal capitalism, socio-economic disadvantage and educational policy in New Zealand

This paper draws on the idea of neo-tribal capitalism to argue that in New Zealand educational disadvantage is typically understood through the lens of ethnicity and that policy-makers appear blind to disadvantage that is related to socio-economic status. A clear expression of this gap is the fact that while New Zealand has strategies to lift the achievement of Māori and Pasifika school students (many of whom come from relatively poor backgrounds), there is no strategy to lift the achievement of European/Pākehā students from similar backgrounds. Drawing official statistics, this paper argues that a significant proportion of those who do not succeed in New Zealand’s education are Europeans/Pākehās from poor socio-economic backgrounds.

Turkey and Europe: Locating Homeland Ties and Re-scaling Migration Scholarship

This article aims to open a theoretical space to address the variation of migrant settlement and transnationalism in time and space beyond the national scale and ethnic lens. On the basis of the emergent homeland ties and Hometown Associations of Syriac migrants from Mardin (Turkey) in Europe it approaches migrant dynamics through the lens of the repositioning struggles Mardin has undergone within the context of neo-liberal development agendas.

About justice that is yet to come: a few remarks about the international pursuit of post-conflict gender justice

The past three decades has seen increasing recognition of the gender-specific impact of armed conflict. This issue became especially important in context of conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda, which were marked by the high prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence. International criminal law has also made some significant advancements regarding sexual violence committed during periods of conflict. In particular, successful prosecutions of wartime rape led to the development of long-awaited (especially in the field of international law) post-conflict justice. However, here it is argued that much of ‘post-conflict gender justice’ is yet to come. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda is examined in relation to how wartime rape is defined and prosecuted. The extent to which the Tribunals addressed these acts as gender crimes as opposed to through the lens of victim's ethnicity or nationality is evaluated as an area where there is much work to be done.

Mining

Mining

Compare and contrast: understanding Irish migration to Britain in a wider context

This article explores the potential for comparative research across different migrant groups. Research on migration is often weakened by the marked tendency to use a single ethnic/national group as the unit of analysis. Analysing migration from the experiences of a particular ethnic group may exaggerate ethnic exceptionalism and understate the extent to which experiences are shared across different migrant groups. My recent experiences on a range of research projects with diverse migrants to London made me think about similarities with the Irish, but each in different ways. However, there is a dearth of comparative analysis in relation to the Irish experience in Britain. On the one hand, there are many studies of Irish migrants, but these tend to focus solely on the Irish or else examine the relationship between Irish migrants and the ‘native’ British population. There has been little work on how the Irish relate to other migrant groups within British society. On the other hand, studies of other migrant communities rarely refer to the Irish as a comparative group. The article explores the reasons for the dearth of comparative work involving Irish migrants in Britain. In so doing, it considers some of the benefits and challenges of going beyond the ‘ethnic lens’. What would be gained but also lost by viewing Irish migration to Britain through a more comparative perspective? I explore how such comparative analysis might contribute, firstly, to a wider understanding of migration processes, experiences and inter-migrant relations, and, secondly, to a fuller appreciation of varied dimensions of migratory experiences in Britain. These issues are considered through a comparison of Polish and Irish migration to Britain.

Ethnicity or tribalism? The discursive construction of Zimbabwean national identity

In Zimbabwe, any attempt to discuss ethnicity risks being labelled as ‘tribalism’ and, therefore, divisive to a supposedly ‘united nation’. But what is ethnicity? This paper will attempt to discuss this issue, with particular focus on its intersection with nationalism and the construction of national identity. It will illuminate the liminal process of the ‘criminalisation of ethnicity’ through some moves aimed at blocking open discourse on ethnicity as a form of identity. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how Zimbabwe's Shona-dominated nationalist discourses tend to follow the social constructivist path, which publicly dismisses the existence of ethnicity while clandestinely embracing it for dubious political purposes. In the process, the paper will also challenge the Eurocentric theoretical perspectives underlying the normative engagement of ethnicity within the political and culturalist perspectives in Africa for presenting ethnicity as retrogressive and divisive. It is further argued that the scarcity of indigenous theoretical lenses of understanding ethnicity, exacerbated by grotesque forms of nationalism, as seen in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa sustains the suppression of ethnic minority voices and the shrift dismissal of their issues as peripheral or regional. This lack of proper vent has thus led to the continued resurgence of violent ethnic upheavals across the African continent.

Those Who Can't, Teach: The Disabling History of American Educators

This essay is an exploratory history of American educators as viewed through the lens of disability studies. By this I mean that I am looking at the history of school teachers with disability as the primary marker of social relations, in much the same way that I and others have looked at the history of education through the primary lens of race, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and sexuality. Looking at the history of teachers through the analytic framework of disability studies allows us to see first, how educational systems, practices, values, and professional norms have developed in a way that excludes people with disabilities from educational employment, or assigned them to parallel and marginalized institutions of special education and second, how notions of normality have defined the work and identity of all educators. It is this latter point that is my greatest interest here: how cultural concepts of ability and disability have shaped all educators' occupational identity and experience over time.

De-naturalizing the national in research methodologies: key concepts of transnational studies in migration

Building on the transnational approach to migration, this introduction outlines some elements of the programme of an emergent methodological transnationalism. This effort aims to de-naturalize the concept of the national within migration studies. First, the analysis identifies methodological challenges of migration studies, such as contextualization, the ethnic lens and the essentializing view on ethnicity. Second, it indicates the relevant conceptual elements which deal with these methodological challenges, such as the critique of methodological nationalism, cosmopolitanism and the relational concept of space. Third, it addresses the relevant methods, such as multi-sited ethnography, the mobile methods approach, as well as researchers' positionality and strategies of de-ethnicization, all of which correspond to the new epistemology of migration studies. Finally, it highlights the common characteristics of the contributions to this special issue, which go beyond the normative view of cross-border migration.

Latino/a Depression and Smoking: An Analysis Through the Lenses of Culture, Gender, and Ethnicity

Rates of major depressive disorder (MDD) and cigarette smoking increase with Latino/a acculturation, but this varies by gender and ethnic subgroup. We investigated how lived experiences (i.e., discrimination, family conflict, family cohesion, familismo) clustered together in the everyday lives of Latina/os. We further examined associations of cluster profile and Latino/a subgroup with MDD and smoking, and tested whether gender moderated these associations. Data came from the National Latino Asian American Study, which included 2,554 Latino/as (48 % female; mean age = 38.02 years). K-means cluster analysis revealed six profiles of experience, which varied by gender and socio-cultural characteristics. Proportionately more women than men were in groups with problematic family lives. Acculturated Latino/as were disproportionately represented in profiles reporting frequent discrimination, family conflict, and a lack of shared family values and cohesion. Profiles characterized by high discrimination and family problems also predicted elevated risk for MDD and smoking. Findings suggest that Latino/a acculturation comes jointly with increased discrimination, increased family conflict, and reduced family cohesion and shared family values, exacerbating risk for MDD and smoking. This research on pathways to depression and smoking can inform the development of targeted assessment, prevention, and intervention strategies, tailored to the needs of Latino/as.

Beyond Ethnicity: Writing Caribbean Histories through Social Spaces

Ethnic groups have frequently functioned as building blocks for the narration of Surinamese and, more generally, Caribbean social histories. This focus on ethnicity may lead to the portrayal of society as made up exclusively of racial/ethnic groups with primordial loyalties and attachments and pure, distinct cultures. Such an approach makes it impossible to understand social life but through an ethnic lens, while barring us from asking how ethnicity has been construed, deployed and contested. This article attempts to formulate an alternative vantage point and methodology for narrating Surinamese and Caribbean social histories. It argues for historical narratives that take differentiated geographies, rather than naturalized ethnic groupings as their vantage point.

A Transnational Poetics (review)

Ramazani, Jahan. 2009. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. $29 he. XVM + 221 pp.Studies in modernism continue to complicate and redraw horizons of a period once characterized by a few and Eurocentric literary histories. Jahan Ramazani's book, A Transnational Poetics, neither dismisses nor rehearses such well-known accounts of era. Rather, Ramazani seeks to historicize porous and multi-directional channels between Euromodernism and postcolonial poetry, fashioning approaches to some usual suspects - most notablyT.S. Eliot, W.H.Auden, and W.B.Yeats - and laying historical and critical groundwork for important, but otherwise ignored, Third World poets such as Christopher Okigbo, WoIe Soyinka, Okot p' Bitek, and Louise Bennett.The first two chapters draw on work by Arjun Appardurai, Kwanie Anthony Appiah, and to argue that too often modernist and postcolonial literature is read through a monolithic orientalist epistemology closed to alterities within and without, or [seen as] a self-contained civilizational unit in perpetual conflict with others (12). third and fourth chapters are thematically directed, focusing on traveling and of mourning, using these tropics to cut across and between East/West and North/South hemispheres. second half of book pivots toward latter, though often recalling thematic anxieties and technical features of Anglophone avant-garde. final chapter returns to London to theorize ways in which black British poetry fashions a translocal re-imagining of imperial center.Ramazani explores those terms that mark common and sometimes elusive capital of literary scholarship - including postcoloniality, hybridity, migration, and diaspora - to reflect on way in which these categories both enable and, in some cases, inhibit a rethinking of modernism within a larger global framework. book's ultimate bane and boon is its oscillation between theory and practice; neither a wide theory of modernism and modernity, nor a specifically developed historical study, readers seeking either one or other will, perhaps, be disappointed, since book seems as concerned with refining and complicating critical habits of reading as it does with building a case for transnational histories. Revisiting Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, Ramazani focuses on a poetics of enmeshment, a keyword of this study, to think about way texts encode and generate relationships across and between very borders that have come to demarcate the West from the Rest. So, Ramazani presses, how might field change if the nationalities and ethnicities of poets and poems... were genuinely regarded as hybrid, interstitial, and fluid imaginative constructs? (24). National and generic categorizations might function as starting points for each of Ramazani's chapters, but A Transnational Poetici consistently rewrites very critical frames that have come to naturalize these starting points. For Ramazani, enmeshment means contending with both roots and routes that become, literally and metaphorically, threaded throughout a text both in terms of production and critical reception.Questioning tentative and interstitial relationship between local and global, Ramazani invokes famed Homeric line from Walcott's The Schooner Flight Shabine's incantatory I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation. Pointing out that in a critical framework which positions and interprets writers through lens of nationality and ethnicity, such categories often fail to capture fully way Shabine's particular nobody contains multitudes, Ramazani situates Shabine in a much larger tropics of literary history. A Transnational Poetics frequently examines how many postcolonial writers claim, indigenize, and ironically make new very aesthetic programs which have otherwise seemed part and parcel of colonial conquest. …

Rhetorical Agency asHaciendo Carasand Differential Consciousness Through Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An Examination of Dolores Huerta's Rhetoric

This study explores the rhetoric of Dolores Huerta, cofounder of the United Farm Workers of America, and expands theoretical understandings of rhetorical agency as a negotiation of the intersectional aspects of gender, ethnicity, race, and class. Huerta's rhetoric illustrates how rhetorical agency can function through what Gloria Anzaldua calls haciendo caras [making face, making soul] and what Chela Sandoval calls differential consciousness. Using these rhetorical caras, Huerta embodies collaborative agency through rhetorical styles of emotionality, familia [family], egalitarianism, and optimism, using factors from social and material dispositions relating to ethnicity, gender, and class, that both enable and constrain her sense of rhetorical agency. Ultimately, Huerta's caras and negotiation of habitus shape rhetorical agency through optimism, resistance, and transformation. La capacite d’agir rhetorique en tant que haciendo caras et conscience differentielle, selon le genre, la race, l’ethnicite et la classe sociale : une etude de la rhetorique de Dolores Huerta Stacey Sowards Cette etude explore la rhetorique de Dolores Huerta, vice-presidente du syndicat United Farm Workers of America. Elle developpe la comprehension theorique de la capacite d’agir (agency) rhetorique comme etant une negociation entre des aspects intersectionnels de genre, d’ethnicite, de race et de classe sociale. La rhetorique de Huerta illustre les manieres par lesquelles la capacite d’agir peut fonctionner a travers ce que Gloria Anzaldua appelle haciendo caras (making face, making soul) et ce que Chela Sandoval nomme la conscience differentielle (differential consciousness). Utilisant ces caras rhetoriques, Huerta incarne la capacite d’agir collaborative par le biais de styles rhetoriques d’emotion, de familia (famille), d’egalitarisme et d’optimisme, usant de facteurs provenant de dispositions sociales et materielles liees a l’ethnicite, au genre et a la classe sociale, qui tout a la fois permettent et restreignent son sentiment de capacite d’agir rhetorique. Finalement, les caras de Huerta et sa negociation de l’habitus donnent forme a sa capacite d’agir par l’optimisme, la resistance et la transformation. Rhetorische Agentschaft als Haciendo Caras und differentielles Bewusstsein aus dem Blickwinkel von Geschlecht, Rasse, Ethnie und Klasse: Eine Untersuchung der Rhetorik von Dolores Huera Stacey Sowards Die Studie untersucht die Rhetorik von Dolores Huerta, Vizeprasidentin der Vereinigung der Farmarbeiter in Amerika, und erweitert das theoretische Verstandnis von rhetorischer Agentschaft als die Vermittlung der intersektionalen Aspekte von Geschlecht, Ethnie, Rasse und Klasse. Huertas Rhetorik zeigt, wie rhetorische Agentschaft durch das, was Gloria Anzald′ua hacienda caras (einen Gesichtsausdruck machen, Seele machen) nennt und was Chela Sandoval differentielles Bewusstsein bezeichnet, funktionieren kann. Unter Verwendung dieser rhetorischen caras verkorpert Huerta die kollaborative Agentschaft durch eine rhetorische Art von Emotionalitat, Familia (Familie), Egalitarismus und Optimismus und benutzt Faktoren der sozialen und materiellen Art, die sich auf Ethnie, Geschlecht und Klasse beziehen und ihrem Verstandnis von rhetorischer Agentschaft sowohl zutraglich sind als es auch beschranken. Letztendlich formen Huertas caras und die Vermittlung von Habitus die rhetorische Agentschaft durch Optimismus, Widerstand und Transformation. La Agencia Retorica en Haciendo Caras y la Consciencia Diferencial a traves de las Lentes del Genero, la Raza, la Etnicidad, y la Clase: Una Revision de la Retorica de Dolores Huerta Stacey Sowards Department of Communication, University of Texas-El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA Resumen Este estudio explora la retorica de Dolores Huerta, vice-presidenta de los Trabajadores de Granja Unidos de America, y expande los entendimientos teoricos de la agencia retorica como una negociacion de los aspectos de interseccion del genero, de la etnicidad, la raza y la clase. La retorica de Huerta ilustra como la agencia retorica puede funcionar a traves de lo que Gloria Anzaldua llama haciendo caras [haciendo el alma] y que Chela Sandoval llama la consciencia diferencial. Usando estas caras retoricas, Huerta representa la agencia colaborativa a traves los estilos retoricos de la emocionalidad, la familia, la igualdad, y el optimismo, usando factores de las disposiciones sociales y materiales relacionadas con la etnicidad, el genero, y la clase, que a la vez permite y constrine su sentido de la agencia retorica. En ultima instancia, las caras de Huerta y la negociacion del cuerpo dan forma a la agencia retorica a traves del optimismo, la resistencia, y la transformacion.

Male Peer Educators Can Reduce Campus Sexual Violence

Male Peer Educators Can Reduce Campus Sexual Violence

Globalization and politics in the Economic Community of West African States

Globalization and Politics in the Economic Community of West African States Eric M. Edi, Globalization and Politics in the Economic Community of West African States. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2007, xii+209pp, ISBN 13: 978-1-59460- 283-2. The series in which this important book appears -Carolina Academic Press Studies on Globalization and Society- seeks to publish provocative books that not only address controversial issues, but also offer innovative methodologies and normative analysis, presented in accessible and engaging manner. Eric M. Edi's book is an excellent contribution to the understanding of the dynamics of globalization in West Africa, which largely satisfies these conditions. Organized into eight chapters, the first three chapters basically provide background issues to the analytical fulcrum of the book. The first situates the problem within methodological and theoretical perspectives, integrating what he called Africa-centered perspective, autocentricity and political interaction framework into a multi-paradigmatic approach. The second traces the history of ECOWAS, underscoring its evolutionary processes, the role of core actors in the process most notably Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Eyadema of Togo and Gowon of Nigeria, among others, and its accomplishments in both political and economic terms. Chapter three explores the concept of globalization, reflecting on contending perspectives, the same way it tries to domesticate it to local realities. From chapter four, the book began to interrogate the impact of globalization on politics in west Africa, underscoring the impact of domestic and external pressures for democratization, both of which compelled constitutional changes across most West African States, either by drafting new constitutions as in Benin, Ghana or revising/amending existing constitutions as in Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal. There were also notable changes in terms of political party and party system, elections and electoral system, and the reconfiguration of the media and civil society landscape. Edi did well analyzing the ups and downs of these changes, including the institutional environment within which they had to operate and how these impact the search for democratic consolidation. Chapter five furthers these discussions by interrogating the question of democracy in West Africa, rooting its arguments in comparative literature on democratization. Edi then makes a powerful case for adapting democracy to local realities. He suggests six propositions -the autochthony of democracy in Africa, alteration of the western heritage, decentering African politics by re-centering the people, moving the trend up, a diversity of routes and the demystification of the ballot box- that should mix to form the bedrock of an African- centered theory of democracy (pp.89-90). Proceeding from this premises, Edi attempts a behavioral analysis of democracy in Chapter six, using the lenses of gender, religion, ethnicity, the military and security forces, political representation, government, rule of law and the mass media. …

Intelectuales y educación superior en Chile: De la independencia a la democracia transicional, 1810 – 2001

The essays compiled in this volume explore “the dynamic process, of advances and backward steps, of reforms and counterreforms, that has characterized Chilean higher education” since the country gained independence almost two centuries ago (p. x). They do so, crucially, through the lenses of gender, class, and ethnicity. With this approach, and this is the book’s central claim, they provide new viewpoints and fresh insights on the subject, going beyond the existing secondary literature, which, Robert Austin Henry maintains, mainly pays attention to the roles played by university-based intellectuals in Chile’s system of higher education in particular, and in national politics in general. The volume claims to achieve what other publications fail to do, such as Academic Rebels in Chile by Iván Jaksić (1989), the only study explicitly identified as representative of this trend and singled out for criticism by Henry. In view of the overall thrust of the book, the choice of title neither captures its spirit nor indicates its subject matter.It seems to lie in the nature of edited volumes that not all essays conform to the same standards or are equally insightful and interesting to read, and Intelectuales y educación superior en Chile is no exception to this rule. It includes some readable and well-informed contributions. The best example in this respect is Alvaro Bello’s chapter on indigenous intellectuals and universities. It is easily accessible and makes ample use of interviews with Mapuche intellectuals and activists; it is also one of only three articles (out of eight) which have not previously been published in one way or the other. Useful as well is Emma Salas Neumann’s panoramic contribution about the Chilean women’s emancipation movement and higher education, covering more than eight decades (from the late 1870s to 1950) in no more than 20 pages. Although one gains the impression that most of what she says has already appeared in an article published back in 1992, and the chapter is economical with quotes from primary sources as well as references to the secondary literature, it does give one an idea of the main issues.Considerably less enjoyable are the various chapters by Henry, who is ultimately responsible for more than half of the book, having written two chapters and coauthored two more, one of which (chap. 8) originally appeared under his sole authorship. All of them, especially the first essay, on the foundation and the historical development of higher education in Chile, suffer from sweeping statements and a penchant for simplistic labels and distinguish themselves by the heavy use of Marxist and postmodernist jargon. Describing the pedagogues Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Johann Friedrich Herbart as authoritarian, for example, does not do them justice; their works were certainly more complex. I also wondered what Henry means when he terms the Instituto Pedagógico, founded in 1889 on the basis of the German education system (and ideal), a “proyecto extranjerizante-europeizante” (p. 17); he certainly does not elaborate on it. Nor does it help, to give a final example, when statements about the allegedly sexist and conservative content of contemporary Chilean textbooks are not backed up by any quotes.In view of the fact that this volume was begun as early as 1996, one would have expected better editorial work and a more balanced result. There are numerous thematic overlaps between the different contributions and also many repetitions. The entire book lacks a central thread, which could have held together the disparate chapters. The issues of gender, class, and ethnicity, which are indeed addressed throughout the volume (although the first two more so than the latter), are too broad to give the book a clear structure. At the same time, the introduction is too short to provide a proper framework, and the first chapter does not live up to the claim that it lays the foundations for the other articles. In the end, the book leaves a decidedly mixed impression. One cannot deny that it does represent an effort to address important questions and fill lacunae in the literature, but because of its incoherence and heterogeneity it does not do so in a satisfactory way.