Markers Of Distinction Research Articles

Away from home, into the fields: Assessing the health of undocumented and indigenous farmworkers

A large and growing literature argues that the agricultural labor market is stratified by ethnicity and legal status. However, other markers of distinction, such as indigeneity, may overlap with legal status to reveal additional health inequalities. Our study contributes to this scholarly dialogue by assessing the relation between indigeneity, legality, and health among immigrant-origin farmworkers from Latin America. To this end, we use data from the National Agricultural Worker Survey (N = 21,092) to examine health outcomes among indigenous and non-indigenous immigrants. Results indicate that indigenous farmworkers experience higher rates of pain—but not chronic conditions—than their non-indigenous counterparts. While undocumented farmworkers who are not indigenous exhibit especially favorable health, indigenous workers who are documented are significantly more likely to suffer from pain. Finally, there is limited evidence that differences in insurance coverage can fully explain the patterning between legal status, indigeneity, and health. This project sheds light on the well-being of indigenous migrant laborers in the U.S. food system, a population that experiences pervasive barriers to socioeconomic advancement at home and abroad.

Breaking the “chain of contempt”: distinction and taste in Chinese social media fandom

ABSTRACT This article explores the complexity of taste in today’s Chinese social media fandom through a detailed analysis of bishilian (chain of contempt) and using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction. We examine bishilian both in relation to wider practices of taste in contemporary Chinese society, and in relation to platform-specific dynamics within Chinese-language social media. Two dilemmas emerge through the taste as a marker of social distinction in Chinese social media: first, that between the subjectivity of personal preference and the objectivity of high-low taste hierarchies; second, that between the desire to maintain the exclusivity of highbrow fandom and the desire for a higher impact through expansion, which may compromise exclusivity. The prerequisite for a better, rather than deeper, aesthetic literacy of Chinese society is a clearer understanding taste as a marker of social distinction in the context of Chinese social media fandom by the public.

Plugged into the Good Life: Living Electrically through the Ages in Urban Vietnam

With Vietnam's countrywide electrification rate approaching 100 percent, electricity has become ever more indispensable and essential to the quality of everyday life. The steady upsurge in household electricity consumption over the past years has been driven by a growing technification of the domestic sphere. Modern households are increasingly equipped with a variety of electric appliances that not only provide convenience and comfort but also serve as markers of social distinction. This essay explores the history of domestic electrification and people's aspirations to live electrically in urban Vietnam, from the colonial era until today. Inspired by recent advances in the anthropology of electricity, it investigates the meanings that people have attributed to electric home appliances through the ages and asks if, how, and why some of these have come to define what it means to live a good life. In the current era, however, living electrically has also come to reflect a global sense of “cruel optimism” in which people become increasingly attached to certain understandings of what constitutes a good life that are unsustainable in the long run, and detrimental to their well-being.

Overview of RelEP2 (2019–2024) findings. Is there a politicisation of and through religion in the European Parliament?

ABSTRACT This overview presents some outcomes of the survey ‘Religion in the European Parliament and in European multilevel governance’ (RelEP2) pursued during the term 2019–2024. It focuses on the way politicisation may occur in two capacities: politicisation through religion by its effects on the functioning of the European Parliament (EP) as an institution and on political belongings and cleavages; politicisation of religion as an issue or a set of actors likely to increase the conflictualisation of European politics. Politicisation is defined along three usual dimensions customised for the purpose of our research: the salience of religion in MEPs’ work, attitudes, and practices; its effects on polarisation (understood as a hardening of belongings and cleavages); its contribution to the expansion of actors and audiences involved in debating or shaping European integration. Our findings show that religion has limited salience in the functioning of the EP and in the practices of its members. Religion may work as a symbolic marker of distinction between and within existing belongings, and leads to a fragmentation rather than to the polarisation of clear-cut coalitions shaped by religious beliefs or issues. The capacity of religious actors or issues to expand the debate about European integration is not demonstrated.

Music as Magic

Music as Magic

Distinctions in the making: A theoretical discussion of youth and cultural capital.

The aim of this paper is to address the dynamics of contemporary cultural capital by interrogating what counts for young people as valuable cultural resources. Considerable support is given in later scholarship for Bourdieu's model of the social space, as the overall volume of economic and cultural capital combined is regularly found to be the most important axis of opposition, just as in Bourdieu's work Distinction. Yet, while Bourdieu found the second axis to be structured by an opposition between those with cultural rather than economic capital, and vice versa, many later studies instead find oppositions between the young and the old to structure the second axis. Up till now, this finding has not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we hold that considering age-related inequalities offers a powerful way of interpreting recent developments in order to understand the changing stakes of cultural capital, and also their interaction with the intensification of inequalities in economic capital. After a theoretical clarification of the relationship between cultural capital and youth, we will synthesise research on young people and explore the significance of youthful cultural consumption. We will pragmatically focus on the 15-30years old and put a particular accent on Norwegian studies in our review, as they are the most sophisticated in this genre. Four areas are explored: the restricted role of classical culture; the appeal of popular culture; digital distinctions, and moral-political positions as markers of distinction.

The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust, by Zachary Samalin

Reviewed by: The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust by Zachary Samalin John Plotz (bio) The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust, by Zachary Samalin; pp. xi + 325. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2021, $42.95, $27.99 ebook. The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust pinpoints crucial moments when public sentiment and governmental action were shaped not by Enlightenment reason but by “the Victorian structure of unwanted feeling” (12). From its opening pages, Zachary Samalin makes sure that readers feel what they perhaps already knew from the pages of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew: the streets that pulse with people like mud, the street refuse that takes on a putrefying loathsome liquidity, and even the turbid Thames itself, which during the Great Stink of 1858 no longer flowed but reeked, so clogged and fecal had it become. Crucial to his study is the sort of disgust such sights and smells engendered. The city that should have epitomized the greatest contrast to the peripheral and primitive world that Great Britain meant to rule instead incarnates all that is disgusting about the human body and its aftereffects: the empire’s heart is rotten. The book’s five complex and wide-ranging chapters cover aesthetic theory from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Jacques Rancière, biology, social sciences of the Durkheimian and Freudian variety, and the legal [End Page 724] history of obscenity; these chapters are accompanied by a wittily titled introduction, “Of Origins and Orifices,” and conclusion, “Horizons of Expectorations.” This stimulating and thought-provoking anatomy of nineteenth-century British thinking about disgust navigates the historical pathway that Samalin sees leading “from the Aesthetics of Disgust to the Psychoanalysis of Repulsion” (21). At its heart is a four-year period that Samalin sees as home to a crucial volta: 1857 to 1860. It was then that, “rather than seeing their disgust as an individuating and subjective experience, Victorians understood it to articulate something public and shared, a reflexive sense that a cultural or a civilizational threshold had been transgressed” (20). The Masses Are Revolting concludes with a far-ranging yet acute account of its aims: “This discourse of disgust was not merely a characteristic feature of Victorian society’s sense of its own civilization, but a productive force motivating social transformation; not merely an idiom for demanding or decrying change, but a medium of such changes in its own right.” Samalin notes that “describing this productivity has entailed tracking down the minute, counterintuitive ways that the regulation of an appeal to unwanted emotion were installed at the heart of the historical processes that have been more insistently described in terms of rationality and rationalization” (241). Samalin’s crucial question can be paraphrased: is disgust a marker of distinction (my revulsion proves my civility) or is it itself a contaminating stain (to be disgusted means to be immersed in a life that is innately disgusting)? Samalin’s discussion of the way notions of disgust were batted about and transformed in the Victorian era is expansive, ambitious, and delightfully erudite: I took masses of notes, underlined many wonderful phrases, and left feeling deeply informed about its chosen topics. Worth singling out for special praise is a chapter about disgust in Charles Darwin’s writings, delightfully unexpected in its revelations. Samalin acutely and persuasively analyzes the significance of Darwin’s insisting that involuntary vomiting in humans developed from an earlier capacity among other primates to vomit voluntarily. Samalin perceives in this Darwin’s commitment to an idea of biosemiosis (sign systems other than language) that confirms disgust as part of a communicative system among other animals even though it has now become an involuntary response to disgusting food among humans. Samalin makes two historical arguments about his anatomy of evolving theories of disgust. One is that the period between 1857 and 1860 is a signal turning-point in this history of the changed ideology of disgust—for reasons relating to the 1858 Great Stink, as well as to Darwin, Karl Marx, and other luminaries whose thoughts rapidly changed in just that short period. The other claim is more implicit...

Language and symbolic boundaries among transnational elites: A qualitative case study of European Commission officials

AbstractPrevious research has asked whether European integration leads to the formation of a new kind of ‘transnational class’ or ‘elite’ in and around the European institutions in Brussels. This paper focuses instead on intra‐group distinctions and symbolic boundaries between EU professionals from different countries. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of language as a marker of distinction, it argues that language continues to be a resource for symbolic boundary making. Empirically, this paper builds on in‐depth interviews with officials of the European Commission, who are at the heart of an emerging transnational elite of EU professionals. It shows that while Commission officials are multilingual and use multilingualism to construct themselves as a transnational group, intra‐group symbolic boundaries continue to be drawn based on competence in the Commission’s two main working languages, English and French. Overall, this paper points out the overlooked importance of language differences for transnational professionals’ symbolic boundary making.

GQ Style: coloniality and camp in fashion for men

The South African edition of the American men’s lifestyle magazine, Gentlemen’s Quarterly or GQ, launched in December 1999/January 2000. GQ Style, an aspirational supplementary magazine, sold separately to the parent publication, is evidence of the immense interest of GQ’s readers in sartorial distinction. The situatedness of this publication in a democratic South Africa tremendously sensitive to an intersectional politics has forced it to adapt. Through semiotic analyses of photographic tableaus, it becomes apparent how the magazine uses a Camp performance of masculinity as a marker of playful distinction for a new generation of almost exclusively Black readers. This article argues that in the current fantasy world of GQ Style, Afropolitanism implies a “remix” of the esthetic genealogies of Anglo-America. It also argues that GQ Style is complicit in the maintenance of epistemic coloniality.

Parochial cooperation and the emergence of signalling norms.

Why do people adorn themselves with elaborate body piercings or tattoos, wear obstructing garbs, engage in life-threatening competitions and other wasteful and harmful but socially stipulated practices? Norms of cooperation and coordination, which promote the efficient attainment of collective benefits, can be explained by theories of collective action. However, social norms prescribing wasteful and harmful behaviours have eluded such explanations. We argue that signalling theory constitutes the basis for the understanding of the emergence of such norms, which we call signalling norms. Signalling norms emerge as a result of the uncertainty about who is a friend and who is a foe. The need to overcome this uncertainty arises when different groups compete for scarce resources and individuals must be able to identify, trust and cooperate with their fellow group members. After reviewing the mechanisms that explain the emergence of cooperation and coordination norms, we introduce the notion of signalling norms as markers of group distinction. We argue that adherence to signalling norms constitutes a commitment promoting parochial cooperation rather than a quality-revealing signal facilitating partner choice. We formalize our argument in a game-theoretic model that allows us to specify the boundary conditions for the emergence of signalling norms. Our paper concludes with a discussion of potential applications of our model and a comparison of signalling norms with related concepts. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.

Purity and Polemics: Zoroastrian Women’s Bodies as Sites of Difference and Contestation in Early Islamic Iran

ABSTRACT Zoroastrian menstrual purity laws served as one of the most salient markers of socio-religious distinction during the tumultuous early centuries of Islamic rule in the Iranian world. This article surveys Islamic polemics – particularly by the Muʿtazilah—directed against these Zoroastrian strictures on bodily purity and reads them intertextually, as it were, in conjunction with Pahlavi apologetic texts that defend the sanctity of these millennia-old practices. It is argued that the Zoroastrian scholar-priests were responding directly to the charges levelled against them by their Muslim counterparts, clearly suggesting that both theology and jurisprudence were produced through inter-confessional debate and dialogue, much as we find in the better-studied cases of Christian-Islamic interactions.

Exploring the Nexus between Migration and Social Positions using a Mixed Methods Approach

Using a mixed methods approach, this article analyses the nexus between migration and social positions drawing on recent survey data on migrants who have arrived in Germany after 1994 from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), as well as qualitative interviews with 26 respondents to the survey. Drawing on a Bourdieusian forms of capital approach (Bourdieu, 1986) and applying the method of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to the SOEP survey data, we highlight two dimensions structuring the nexus between migration and social positions in Germany: (1) capital related to legal status and multiple migration and (2) (trans)national cultural capital. Through a cluster analysis based on the MCA results, we then identify and describe four profiles of migrants characterised by distinct configurations of cultural capital (social class background, education and linguistic skills before and after settlement), legal status (citizenship and status at migration), experiences of multiple cross-border movements and social positions: the ‘foreign working-class,’ the ‘foreign middle class,’ the ‘adapted German migrants,’ and the ‘young highly educated urbans.’ The complementary analysis of the qualitative data allows us to go further in understanding some of the factors that may play a role in shaping migrants’ social position(ing) in the four clusters. In particular, we show that resources such as determination and perseverance can be crucial for some migrants to counter structural constraints related to their legal status in transferring or accessing cultural capital, and that linguistic skills are also used by some migrants as a marker of social distinction.

“You are not as localised as I need”: employability of Chinese returning graduates

PurposeInternational student employability has been accorded increased emphasis in the internationalisation agendas, especially in major destination countries as it shapes universities' attractiveness to prospective international students. Having insights into returning graduates' employability in their home country has become critical given that a majority of international graduates return home after their overseas study. This study responds to this critical need by examining how foreign credentials are valued by employers in the field of accounting in China, based on in-depth interviews with employers, alumni and policymakers.Design/methodology/approachThis study draws on a qualitative approach involving literature review and in-depth interviews with 28 key stakeholders: employers, returning graduates and policymakers in China and India. The key research question of the study is how foreign credentials are valued by employers in the field of accounting in China and India. This article focuses on the Chinese context. In-depth interviews with employers and policymakers focused on eliciting nuanced socio-cultural understandings as to perceptions and decisions associated with desirable graduate attributes and the relative value of credentials. Interviews with returning graduates aimed to understand how different capitals were mobilised to gain employment in the Chinese labour market.FindingsThe empirical findings of the study show that Chinese returning graduates could be seen to lack the localised knowledge needed to work in Chinese companies and ability to adapt to the local environment. However the possible development of a dual local and international guanxi through overseas study can be regarded as a marker of distinction in the home labour market. The associated value of such a dual guanxi signals the importance for Chinese international students to develop transnational networks while simultaneously maintaining their kinship, social and business networks locally during their overseas education.Originality/valueThe study provides fresh insights into a marked shift in China, with less of a preference for Western credentials, as compared to 10 years ago when overseas credentials were often regarded more favourably. Even though overseas study generally provides Chinese graduates with an exposure to international practices and global perspectives, whether such an overseas exposure and foreign language competency would be an advantage also depends on the business needs and sometimes the business model of organisations.

'Ta, te, ti, toe, too'

Hollywood comedies of the 1950s saw the decline of a specific kind of female comedian, as unruly comediennes in the screwball tradition transformed into silly sexy vixens or tamed into homely sexless housewives. There are, however, some comedies which self-reflectively negotiate this shift. In this article, I would like to suggest that the voice of the comedienne serves as a marker of distinction. My article accordingly explores two pivotal examples of such transformative processes: Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950) and Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Both heroines feature what critics have called "the horrors of the harsh female voice." Whereas Billie's voice "survives" through schooling and refinement, Jean's voice resists all training and remains shrill and rowdy, leading to the violent expulsion of her character altogether. With the transformation and eventual disappearance of these extraordinary female actresses and their roles, such voices remained silent for a long time, until loud and brassy comediennes of a new generation were allowed to reappear on the silver screen and to raise their harsh and distinctive voices once again.

SWEET DEBATES IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BARCELONA

AbstractScholarly interest in early modern sweets has focused on the central role of these food products as markers of social distinction and conspicuous consumption in elite contexts, mainly centred on northern Europe and Italy. Less fully understood are the ways in which the increasing demand for sugar and sweets informed their production and marketing at local levels, in particular in non-courtly urban areas. This article examines the legal case against the baker Josep Cortés, accused of making and selling sponge biscuits in violation of the privilege of confectioners in late seventeenth-century Barcelona. It addresses how confectioners and bakers materially and discursively defined their products based on the use of certain ingredients, utensils, and skill. This article also illustrates a shift from a generic idea of sweetness to one which was explicitly linked to sugar in the period when sugar was becoming a semi-affordable commodity in Europe. By addressing diverse source materials including court records, printed cookbooks, handwritten recipes, and inventories, this case study exemplifies the significant material and cultural dimensions that sugar adopted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The contingencies of medical restratification across inter-organisational care networks.

The contemporary social organisation of medical work is characterised by internal hierarchies and stratification in the form of professional elites and managerial hybrids. This paper examines the changes in medical restratification brought about by the introduction of inter-organisational care networks. The study focuses in particular on the social position of doctors and the contingencies that enable or constrain intra-professional hierarchies across inter-organisational boundaries. This ethnographic study of major system change within the English healthcare system finds that a relatively small group of 'multiplex' elites have significant influence in both national policy-making and regional service re-configuration based upon multiple sources of clinical and reputational capital. Subsequent forms of restratification at the regional level are found to mirror such status markers whilst also revealing important local contingencies, especially where professional markers of distinction are coupled with and dependent upon organisational markers of distinction.

Serving the Militant’s Cause: The Role of Indo-Pak State Policies in Sustaining Militancy in Kashmir

The essay explores three recently published books on the origins of militancy in Kashmir. In short, they all find that two causal factors are responsible for the insurgency’s ability to endure. First, the unending muscular security policy of India coupled with its explicit integrationist approach that triggered alienation by squeezing the democratic space of Kashmiris. Second, the role played by Pakistan in strongly backing the menagerie of militant groups for weakening political and territorial control of India over Kashmir. These books rely on a series of case studies of the different militant groups that have operated in Kashmir: most notably, Al-Fatah, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), Hizbul Mujahedeen (HM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). The emergence of Al-Fatah and JKLF was an offshoot of New Delhi’s iron-fist approach compounded with the dwindling of democratic space. Pakistan played a major role in the creation of HM and LeT by invoking Islam and Muslim identity as mobilising factors. These books, in their own different ways, identify a teleological shift in the thinking, strategies and operations of the militant groups, and this essay tries to extrapolate this by outlining the key markers of distinction between the old and new militancy.

Aspiring, Ambivalent, Assertive: Bulgarian Middle-Class Subjectivities and Boundary Work through Migration

This article investigates the subjectivities of a group of aspiring middle-class Bulgarians and their boundary work in the context of their migrations to the United Kingdom. Drawing on Lamont’s critique of Bourdieu’s theory on class formation and reproduction, it shows how people from underprivileged social backgrounds can lay claims to middleclassness by strategically drawing on cultural and moral markers of distinction revolving around the notions of “civilization,” “culturedness,” and the “West.” The adoption of such narratives and their enactment in the cultivation of personal attributes, however, fails to guarantee full-fledged middle-class membership for people who lack the necessary economic and social capital. Thus, boundary-building becomes the key mechanism for negotiating ambivalent middle-class subjectivities and rejecting objectively assigned positions in the social structure. The article traces the emergence of ideal-type models of middle-class belonging since 1989, their adoption by aspirational middle-class people, and the boundary work and self-differentiation by which they try to reassert their superior status both before during and after their migrations to the UK. It concludes that the observed everyday processes of group classification through the defining of and distancing from cultural, moral, and racial “others” reproduces class antagonisms that preclude a more critical understanding of the discontents of Bulgaria’s capitalist transition.

Roadwork: expertise at work building roads in the Maldives.

This article engages critically with concepts of ‘skill’, ‘expertise’, and ‘capacity’ as they operate as markers of distinction and domination and shape migratory labour relations among road construction workers from across South Asia in the Maldives archipelago. The article examines roadwork at three levels: the professional biographies leading to ‘flexible specialization’ rather than technical expertise amongst Maldivian managers; the technical expertise and social incorporation of ‘skilled’ Sri Lankan supervisors; and the key material expertise of ‘non‐skilled’ Bangladeshi labourers in precarious employment. Whilst discussions of South Asian labour migration have been dominated by caste and class, this article argues that it is important to consider how the cultural production and understanding of concepts such as ‘expertise’, ‘capacity’, and ‘exposure’ at worksites can (also) become distinguishing factors in (hierarchical) migratory labour relations.

Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity

Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity