Local Social Hierarchies Research Articles

Tribe-Caste Dynamics in South India

There are over 150 tribal communities in South India. Many of them live in remote and forested areas. However, historically, they have had a close relationship with caste society. The dominance of caste is evident in their everyday contexts, economic relations and social status within the local social hierarchy. The article reflects on how the situation of tribes in South India cannot be fully comprehended without acknowledging the overbearing influence of caste ideology and politics on their lives. It will focus on two Scheduled Tribes in South India, the Paniyan and the Koraga, to illustrate practices of untouchability and social deprivation among them. Despite their Scheduled Tribe status, the Paniyan and the Koraga continue to face caste-based discrimination and cannot access basic services provided by the state. There is a deep sense of dispiritedness among them and, increasingly, they are isolating themselves from ‘others’ in their vicinity. Isolation has become an active mode of distancing from caste and asserting their tribal identity. It expresses their rejection of tribal integration, and associated politics, responsible for their marginalisation.

Voluntary Aid Detachments During The First World War: Cottesmore Auxiliary Red Cross Hospital, Pembrokeshire, 1915–19

This article examines the experiences of Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) at an auxiliary Red Cross hospital in Pembrokeshire during the First world War. This case study provides almost a paradigm of the operation of local social hierarchies and philanthropy in shaping the institution, with the role of local elites being a prominent feature of its operations. A range of factors were at play in motivating young women to volunteer as a VAD, encompassing personal patriotism and the desire to render service at a time of national emergency. The diary of one VAD provides an insight into the experiences of those who volunteered.

A Tale of Two Storms: U.S. Army Disaster Relief in Puerto Rico and Texas, 1899–1900

This article argues that the disaster relief efforts following hurricanes in Puerto Rico in 1899 and Galveston, Texas, in 1900 represent a watershed in American military history. These two cases highlight a critical juncture where the U.S. Army became the lead federal agency in imperial and domestic disaster relief and established a precedent that lasted well into the twentieth century. By declaring martial law, directly overseeing relief efforts, and plugging into existing social hierarchies, the Army and local elites completely reconstructed the political, economic, and social order of both locales. As this was a relatively new role for the Army, they relied on the local social hierarchy as a matter of expediency because of the absence of any existing doctrine to guide their disaster relief efforts. These Army relief efforts culminated in fostering two antidemocratic governments: a colonial regime in Puerto Rico and the first commission-style government in Galveston that upheld Jim Crow policies that were eventually replicated throughout the United States.

Exploring the role of off-task activity on students’ collaborative dynamics.

Off-task activity is ubiquitous in classrooms, yet little understood. Building on recent work that illustrates the utility of off-task activity to disrupt relations of power among students, this article explores the potential functions of off-task participation during collaborative mathematics problem-solving. We examined 56 instances of off-task participation across 12 collaborative problem-solving sessions in a fourth grade classroom during a collaborative inquiry unit on place value. Results show that the majority of instances functioned to support the collaborative problem-solving process. Further, off-task participation often succeeded in shifting collaborative dynamics after on-task bids to shift dynamics failed. Off-task activity seemed to introduce new storylines that served as discursive tools to navigate local social hierarchies. We close by situating an understanding of the resources that students bring into collaborative learning through off-task activity within conversations on inclusive pedagogies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Becoming Favela: Forced Resettlement and Reverse Transitions of Urban Space in Brazil

AbstractThis article examines the forced resettlement of favela residents to a new neighborhood and the life they tried to make for themselves in the new state‐built social housing. They experienced a sense of betrayal by their new neighbors and by the state; much of what they had been promised was not delivered, and in the aftermath of resettlement they were left by the state project to their own devices. In the new neighborhood, the “territorial stigma” (Wacquant 2008) of the favela lingered on, placing the newcomers at the bottom of the local social hierarchy in the impoverished periphery of the city. While battling this stigma, they were also pursuing their dreams for a better future by investing their scarce resources into the improvement of their new but poorly built homes. Their house‐building practices resemble the urban development processes of “peripheral urbanization” (Caldeira 2016), as the slow and uneven self‐built constructions encroach on the ordered state‐built housing. The gradual transition of the new urban space followed a similar development pattern as the favela where they used to live, but in a reverse order, producing an inverse transition of urban space. I treat the negligence of the state, the housing practices of the residents, and the discursive practices of labeling the social housing a favela—by the long‐term neighbors and eventually the residents themselves—as co‐constituting an urban form, lived experience, and socio‐spatial process in which the housing project becomes favela. This analysis provides new insights into the anthropological literature on urban development and illicit house‐building in peripheral neighborhoods in the Global South and the socio‐spatial dynamics of forced resettlement.

Do you know who you are selling to? An ethnographic approach to upper-class shopping experiences in Rio de Janeiro

An ethnographic approach to consumption practices of upper-class young-adult women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, shows how shopping and selling experiences are seen as opportunities for owners, staff, and customers to build social relations. As a consequence, the belt of trust that is built through such transactions creates a network of stores, women, brands, and goods attached by strong reciprocity ties. This also produces a distinction between shops that are “cozy,” and the ones that are bureaucratic and “open to everyone.” Among such practices, informants reproduce the particular Brazilian rite of asking “Do you know who you are talking to?” to reinforce local social hierarchies and distinctions, a rite that was previously analyzed by the anthropologist Roberto DaMatta. While consumption practices are often seen as some sort of North Americanization of the world, we argue for the importance of ethnographic accounts that map local forms of appropriation and particular power dynamics.

Shrines of Goa: Iconographic Formation and Popular Appeal

Religious shrines in Goa (India), both Hindu and Catholic, are marked by notable differences. Shrines in temples and churches are distinguished from wayside shrines by their formalized iconography and elite patronization. Shrines are further differentiated by modalities of their representation and iconography. Formalized shrines fulfill particular representational (symbolic) functions that reflect local social hierarchies. Emergent Hindu and iconic Catholic shrines stand out through peculiar material and embodied characteristics of their iconography and enjoy wide demotic appeal. Although decisive for the role the shrines play in society, their inherent representational, semiotic, and practical distinctions and differentiations are usually not reflected in the concept of the “shrine.” Eventually, the article, therefore, takes issue with this concept itself arguing that it is rather elusive and obscures more than it brings to light.

Biography of a Sonic Archive

Biography of a Sonic Archive

Discrimination and Integration of the Dalits in Early Modern South Indian Missions: The Historical Origins of a Major Challenge for Today’s Christians

ABSTRACT The persistence of caste hierarchies and discrimination among the Christian faithful is one of the challenges that churches still face in India. While several studies have been devoted to the relation between caste and Christianity since the nineteenth century, the early modern period has attracted very limited attention. This article proposes junctures and figures that can illustrate the various approaches toward caste divisions held by the Catholic missionaries in India between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, namely, from the establishment of the Portuguese presence on the subcontinent until the Malabar Rites controversy. In particular, the article will suggest that, if missionary adaption (accommodatio) was based primarily on the incorporation of caste structures within the Church, unsuccessful attempts were made to root Christianity in the Indian context while criticizing local social hierarchies contradicting Christian values.

ABOVE AND BELOW AMONG MAINLANDERS AND SALTWATER PEOPLE IN BUKA, BOUGAINVILLE

This article draws on ethnographic field research in Buka, Bougainville, in order to address the question of multiple models in spatial orientation and the factors that constrain their relative salience. With respect to different Polynesian settings (Tonga and Samoa), Bradd Shore has suggested that a preference for allocentric models may be linked to pronounced social hierarchies. However, findings from other settings (Taumako) indicate that matters may be more complicated. Within the Buka area, I suggest that the relative salience of allocentric and egocentric radiality is connected to people’s relative position in local hierarchies. “Mainlanders,” who are located “above” in terms of local social hierarchies, rely more strongly on allocentric models, compared to “saltwater people” who are located further “below” and prefer to use egocentric models. I link this finding to the contrast between “mainland” and “saltwater” subsistence activities and show how “mainlanders” adopt a system of allocentric spatial orientation in their everyday activities of gardening, while spatial orientation during “saltwater people’s” fishing activities is strongly egocentric.

Do Local Social Hierarchies Matter for Mental Health? A Study of Neighborhood Social Status and Depressive Symptoms in Older Adults

Despite a well-established association between relative social position and health, stratification at smaller levels of social organization has received scant attention. Neighborhood is a localized context that has increasing relevance for adults as they age, thus one's relative position within this type of mesolevel group may have an effect on mental health, independent of absolute level of social and economic resources. We examine the relationship between an older adult's relative rank within their neighborhoods on two criteria and depressive symptoms. Using data from the Chicago Health and Aging Project, neighborhood relative social position was ascertained for two social domains: income and social reputation (number of neighbors one knows well enough to visit). Using multilevel models, we estimated the effect of relative position within the neighborhood on depressive symptoms, net of absolute level for each domain and average neighborhood level. Higher neighborhood relative rankings on both income and visiting neighbors were associated with fewer depressive symptoms. Although both were modest in effect, the gradient in depressive symptoms was three times steeper for the relative rank of visiting neighbors than for income. Men had steeper gradients than women in both domains, but no race differences were observed. These findings suggest that an older adult's relative position in a local social hierarchy is associated with his/her mental health, net of absolute position.

Adaptation and pathways of change and response: A case study from Eastern Europe

There are increasing calls for conceptualizing adaptation as future pathways as a foresight tool for adaptation planning and implementation. To assist understanding of future adaptation pathways, this paper used ethnographic approaches to understand past pathways of response to major social and political change over the last seven decades in a rural Transylvanian community. The results identified five main socio-ethnic groups that had different pathways of response to key periods of change. These periods provided different constraints and opportunities, and shaped the accumulation and loss of different categories of assets for each socio-ethnic group. Findings show that adaptation is an ongoing process in which responses and decisions are patterned along multiple, socially contingent trajectories with continuities and legacies. Importantly, while the different groups had interrelated pathways, these were associated with a powerful normative pathway that was implicated in producing and reinforcing local social hierarchies. In this case, the normative pathway was a mix of practicing subsistence agriculture and small scale flexible income generation. The nuanced understanding of the change and response dynamics in the village provide important insights for anticipating responses to, and the impacts of, future change. It also highlights the need for holistic and multi-perspective approaches when developing and implementing adaptation pathways. These approaches should responsibly and carefully consider the implications of particular future paths for all concerned, but especially for those that are the most marginalized in society.

OUT OF CONTROL? RETHINKING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WEALTH GOODS PRODUCTION AND THE CLASSIC MAYA

AbstractObjects crafted from jade played a prominent role in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica from at least the Middle Formative period (ca. 1000–400b.c.). Based primarily on the consumption of jade artifacts by Classic Maya elites, scholars have argued that their production was under the direct control of elite members of society. Recent research in the middle Motagua Valley and elsewhere in Mesoamerica suggests that that the production of wealth goods varied much more widely than previously assumed. These data and subsequent technological analyses indicate that jade artifact production took place in a variety of domestic and nondomestic, as well as elite and nonelite, contexts. In particular, the current evidence from the middle Motagua Valley suggests that households at all levels of the local social hierarchy were engaged in the production of jade beads and preformed blanks intended for final-stage production elsewhere. This evidence runs counter to many previous models of wealth goods production, which have viewed such production as an elite-dominated activity. This article brings together recent evidence from the middle Motagua Valley, Guatemala, to propose new ways of conceptualizing the place of elites in Classic period Maya wealth goods production and the extent of their role in controlling ancient economies. The current evidence suggests that we need to evaluate models of wealth goods production in regard to specific temporal and spatial circumstances.

How insulted religious feelings turned into pogroms: Lithuania in 1900

This article is devoted to a single wave of anti-Jewish violence in Lithuania which spread through northern Lithuania during the first half of the summer of 1900. It claims that specific incidents that took place during the first half of 1900 at Konstantinovo (news of an allegedly kidnapped girl, the so-called Jewish “procession” and a domestic dispute between Jews and the priest's workmen) were among the most important reasons for the pogroms. At the same time, it is clear that there were some more general (structural) changes in this society which facilitated the occurrence of violence (changes in the economy, growing Lithuanian nationalism, antisemitic tendencies, and pogroms in the south of the Romanov empire in the early 1880s, because they established the idea that violence against Jews was somehow legitimate). Peasants in the Panevėžys and Šiauliai districts took up violence against Jews because, as they understood it, an offence had been committed which no one else (especially the authorities) would put right and so Jews would go unpunished. Uncontrolled rumours ruled the mobs. Since Catholic peasant religious sentiments had been affected the most, it was common religious identity that drew people into a temporary community of action. When Jews were beaten in public spaces, the doors and windows of their houses smashed, the Jews were not only being punished for their alleged offences, but being shown the clearly delineated boundaries within the local social hierarchy. In public life, Jews were supposed to submit to the monopoly of power enjoyed by the Catholic community. Thus, this wave of anti-Jewish violence essentially differs from the deadly pogroms that took place in the early twentieth century in other gubernias of the Jewish Pale of Settlement.

The dominant/marginal lives of young Tanzanians: Spaces of knowing at the intersection of Children’s Geographies and Development Geographies

Development Geography and Children’s Geographies have become distinct sub-disciplines in their own right, yet despite a number of cross-cutting concerns, the theoretical and practical insights of both have only more recently become explicitly shared. I use a case study of an environmental education project with young people in Tanzania to illustrate how a perspective that draws from both Children’s and Development Geographies can deliver significant challenges to both fields, yet also reveals important insights into the lives of young people in the global South. Young people in Tanzania hold distinct environmental knowledges compared to adults, learnt through projects and schools which are focused on ‘conservation’ of the natural environment. This raises challenges for critical Development Geographies, as young people appear to hold ‘dominant’ Western knowledges, yet they are also ‘marginal’ actors in society. For Children’s Geographies, this provokes questions about whether the knowledges of young people should be challenged. Local social hierarchies also govern spaces of knowledge expression. Young people can be more empowered to express their knowledge in the formal spaces of the school compared to the wider community, such that formal spaces may offer more empowering potential. This runs counter to the general thrust of Children’s and Development Geographies, often championing informal, local knowledges and spaces. There is a need to re-think education for young people in Tanzania in terms of its potential for their empowerment, but also to reconsider some of the fundamental assumptions about childhood and local community development which pervade both Children’s and Development Geographies.

Social Relationships and Rural Livelihood Security in Afghanistan

This article examines the importance of a range of types of social relationships, characterised by differing levels of privilege, power, obligation and reciprocity, to rural Afghan livelihood security. Specifically, it explores how rural Afghan households in Kandahar and Badakhshan provinces negotiate within their diverse social environments, characterised by varied forms of institutional weakness and local power structures, to achieve some measure of physical and economic security. It draws from household case study data to assess how households are integrated into social relationships of variable quality and usefulness and under what conditions these relationships facilitate autonomous versus dependent security. In doing so, the article explores the importance of context, linking the details of household experiences to their village and provincial locations. The findings provide an understanding of the local social hierarchies and relations with which development actors must engage to successfully design and deliver poverty reduction programming, something which has been little evident to date, particularly in national policymaking processes and post-2014 transition strategies.

Knowing how to play the game of jump rope: Participation and stancetaking in a material environment

In this study the relations between knowledge, affect, and social organization are explored using as data a video recording of a jump rope activity. The analyses focus on how epistemic and affective stance interplay in the constitution of social order. In the activity, the participants position themselves as knowing and unknowing through talk and embodied action. Knowing is tied to the handling of game-relevant artifacts, the spatial configuration of the game, as well as rules for turn-taking. Language use is indexical with frequent references to embodied actions and the material environment. When disputing over problematic moves the participants re-enact previous actions, thus displaying not only knowledge of how the game should be played, but also taking a forceful affective stance toward each other. This interplays with epistemic stance so that the participants and their actions are evaluated in different ways, thus leading to a local social hierarchy in which one participant is excluded from the game. Such phenomena shed light on epistemic and affective stances and how they figure into the organization of action and social order in the midst of children's games.

Working of Decentralized Governance in Rural India: Social Dynamics or Institutional Rational Choice?

This paper critically evaluates the popular representation of rural decision making in India as guided by socio-cultural dynamics and as a resort from various social alignments. It investigates how decisions get taken about a decentralized governance scheme in rural India, what variables impact these decisions – namely, social, political, administrative or economic – and how these variables impact the scheme performance. Case studies and empirical analysis of performance of a decentralized welfare scheme in India, the Andhra Pradesh Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (APREGS), demonstrates significant influence of agriculture-based economic dynamics and administrative efficiency factors. Local social hierarchies and cultural complexities do not come as the main concerns. These results challenge the traditional understanding of rural dynamics as totally controlled by caste hierarchies and authority of the large land owners and are discussed in the light of the institutional rational choice framework proposed by Elinor Ostrom. The results also call for a fresh and wider debate of whether India is witnessing a longer term indirect developmental outcome of empowerment which actively started in 1993 with the recognition of local governance systems (Panchayati Raj) as a formal democratic body.

Neoliberalism, urbanism and the education economy: producing Hyderabad as a ‘global city’

This paper examines the emergence of Hyderabad as a hub of the global information technology economy, and in particular, the role of higher education in Hyderabad's transformation as the labor market for the new economy. The extensive network of professional education institutions that service the global economy illustrates the ways in which neoliberal globalization is produced through educational restructuring and new modes of urban development. Neoliberal globalization, however, is a variegated process wherein local social hierarchies articulate with state policies and global capital. This study shows how caste and class relations in the education sector in Andhra Pradesh are instrumental to forming Hyderabad's connection to the global economy. The contradictions of these regional realignments of education, geography and economy are manifest in the uneven development of the region and the rise of new socio-political struggles for the right to the city.

Governmentality and the Family: Neoliberal Choices and Emergent Kin Relations in Southern Ethiopia

ABSTRACT Rather than strictly local expressions of relatedness, kinship in southern Ethiopia has long been entangled with broad political and economic forces as people negotiate relations with each other, past generations, and the state. Accompanying government reforms in the 1990s, idioms of individualism and choice have circulated in transnational and national neoliberal discourses of development, rights, and economics. People in southern Ethiopia who use ideologies of ascribed social statuses to define local social hierarchies have employed these discourses in reshaping relatedness through an expansive trade association, which is referred to as a family and works through kinship principles of descent and generation. Drawing from recent scholarship on kinship and new reproductive technologies, I argue that, through mobile knowledges in neoliberal contexts, people choose this family and its lineage founder, transforming descent relations and land‐based ideologies. These choices represent the workings of neoliberal governmentality in altering cultural relations of power and inequality. [Keywords: kinship, neoliberalism, governmentality, hereditary status groups, Ethiopia]