Middle-class Reformers Research Articles

“A phobia of numbers?” the labour movement and social surveys in the German Empire

ABSTRACT Historians have long studied how statistical offices and parliamentary bodies made use of surveys to explore the lives of workers, and, in so doing, how they produced new social categories and strategies for political intervention in the process. Less attention has been paid to the role that surveys played in the history of the early labour movement. Drawing on extensive discussions in socialist and trade-union periodicals, this article explores how the labour movement in the German Empire perceived, responded to, and used social surveys. The article is divided into three parts. The first part discusses labour’s critical response to the growing number of surveys on working-class life by middle-class reformers, social researchers, and the state. The second part studies what appeared to be the only logical consequence of their critique, namely the independent gathering and analysis of data. The third part finally analyses why, despite the large number of independent surveys launched by party functionaries and local trade unions, participation among ordinary workers remained strikingly low. In the conclusion, the article shows that this might have stemmed not only from disinterest and inertia but also from how the labour leadership conceived of and presented the benefits of social surveys.

Civilised by Beasts: Animals and Urban Change in Nineteenth-Century Dublin

By focusing on Dublin's nonhuman inhabitants in the nineteenth century, Juliana Adelman offers a new and fascinating perspective on the city that also speaks to wider histories of human-animal relationships and development in the nineteenth century. What began as a book about “zoology in Dublin,” grew into five deeply researched and diverse chapters that explore many layers of Dublin's nineteenth-century human and animal life. “Historians of Dublin have ignored the city's beasts and in doing so they have missed much about urban life during the nineteenth century,” she writes (1). In Adelman's hands, the history of Dublin's nineteenth-century animal city is very much alive (and sometimes very much dead).There are parts of Dublin's animal history that are familiar across other urban animal histories in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century: the establishment of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; growing restrictions on livestock and animal industries downtown; and the development of zoos and domestic pet culture. Yet Adelman's Dublin also provides historians with distinction and nuance in thinking about urban change in nineteenth-century Europe and America.Civilised by Beasts is an expansive social history that engages with urban, political, environmental, and cultural history. In early chapters, the reader encounters the contemporaneous development of two prominent animal institutions: the Dublin Zoological Society (established in 1830) and the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (DSPCA) (established in 1840). The Zoological Society thrived with its popular gardens, but the DSPCA struggled to gain a following. Here, Dublin seems to have a somewhat distinct place in the transnational Humane Movement, as many Dubliners saw the DSPCA as Anglo-Protestant and anti-Catholic, and therefore resisted its influence.In later sections, Adelman explores the class meanings of pig keeping and interconnected efforts at social control through the city's porcine residents. “Middle-class reformers used animals to help them identify what it was to be truly human and applied these ideas to efforts to reform the lives of the urban poor,” writes Adelman (64). Though many Dubliners had “rational economic reasons” for keeping pigs, the practice often became “an indictment of a person's moral and intellectual character” (78). Here Adelman expands on Catherine McNeur's “swinish multitudes” of Manhattan to suggest “a prejudice across Western societies against the character of the pig,” and the people who kept them (77). As in New York, reformers were successful; by the 1850s, Dublin authorities had significantly reduced urban pig populations.In later chapters, Adelman turns her attention to the Dublin Cattle Market and policing animals in the second half of the 1800s. A center of live cattle production and trade, Dublin faced growing reform efforts shaped by “hardening middle-class attitudes to the dangers of meat production” (95). Here again Dublin seems somewhat distinctive as a city that did not eliminate or conceal the cattle industry from the urban environment. Cattle and the Cattle Market were part of the city's identity, and “Dublin embraced its status as an urban cowtown, Ireland's market metropolis” (93). The city did institute new rules on livestock and slaughter (licenses and inspectors, for example) and new means of enforcement and inspection. But authorities did not profoundly reorder livestock space as we see in other cities at the same time. Adelman argues that the “net result” of these reforms was “conservative,” as “slaughterhouses tended to stay in the neighbourhoods where they had always been” (103). In Dublin, nineteenth-century reforms “did not inevitably result in the concealment of animal exploitation,” and in fact some reforms made cattle “more permanently embedded in the urban landscape” (119).Adelman's history of Dublin now joins a spate of single-city studies of animals and nineteenth-century urban environments, which includes compelling cases of Seattle, New York, London, and more. What happens when we assemble these histories into one frame? There is notable overlap and coincidence but also distinction and room for contrasts across American and European cities. How do we explain these areas of convergence and distinction? Adelman's valuable contribution helps address these questions and affirms that we can no longer write urban histories without paying attention to nonhuman inhabitants.Civilised by Beasts is quite spatial and geographic, and the book would have benefited from additional maps and visualizations. (There would certainly be excellent visual material for a companion website.) Adelman introduces the reader to the booming demand for pet portraits, for instance, but the reader does not have the enjoyment of seeing these images. “I want to give readers a fuller sense of what it was like to live in nineteenth-century Dublin and who its residents were,” Adelman writes (11). On that point—and many others—she has succeeded.

Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State by Elisabeth Anderson

Reviewed by: Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State by Elisabeth Anderson Jaclyn N. Schultz Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State. By Elisabeth Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. xviii + 362 pp. Elisabeth Anderson argues in Agents of Reform that the welfare state's origins lie in child labor laws, yet the book's main focus is the eponymous "agents of reform" who pushed for such legislation. Anderson takes a social scientific approach to understanding these middle-class reformers who, with varying degrees of success, tried to convince legislators in nineteenth-century continental Europe and the United States to protect workers (especially children and women) from capitalist exploitation. Anderson concludes that such reformers were required for any real political movement on worker-related issues, particularly in times and places where organized labor was weak. Moreover, Anderson's framework theorizes that middle-class agents of reform were more likely to see their goals realized when they articulated the need for reform [End Page 313] vis-à-vis dominant discourses (which were often paternalistic), formed powerful alliances, and creatively problem-solved when facing barriers to success. Agents of Reform is a transnational comparative history in two parts. Part I focuses on the development of child labor laws during the first half of the nineteenth century, most of which were tied to education and were undesirable to the working class. Part II moves to the second half of the century and factory inspection laws that enforced earlier child labor laws. In these cases, reformers often worked to enact factory inspection with the help of labor movements. Throughout Agents of Reform, Anderson details the social, economic, and political contexts that reformers operated in as well as the backgrounds and political activism of the reformers themselves. Most of these agents of reform will be new to readers, but familiar faces such as Florence Kelley also appear. It is the depth and breadth of child labor law history that make Agents of Reform an impressive must-read not only for historians of child labor, middle-class reform, and the welfare state but also for those studying education, capitalism, and labor. In part I alone, Anderson compares two reformers in laissezfaire Prussia while tracing the eventual passage of child labor laws, in part, to compromises with chambers of commerce; she compares the cases of France and Belgium and argues that France passed child labor laws when Belgium did not because their agent of reform was flexible and effectively articulated and cited his proposal; she likewise relates the common school movement in Massachusetts to uncontroversial child labor laws there. In part II, readers are guided through a chapter each on the passage of toothless factory inspection laws in Germany, what Anderson calls "conciliatory" factory inspection laws in Massachusetts and, finally, robust factory inspection laws in Illinois that gave women enforcement powers. These six chapters collectively reveal the painstaking work that went into reconceptualizing the government as a protector of children and workers at a time when economic liberalism was at its height. This rich synthesis of child labor reform histories may, however, overshadow Anderson's social scientific framework as the highlight of Agents of Reform. As a trained social scientist, Anderson seeks to objectively answer the question of why some "states" passed labor laws protecting children while others did not. Across case studies, Anderson compares reformers, whom she refers to as policy or administrative entrepreneurs (the former push for legislation while the latter work from within bodies that administrate law), using variables including their abilities to effectively frame policy proposals, compromise, and signal expertise. Yet while these are collectively meant to be predictors of a reformer's success, Anderson's definition of success is ambiguous, particularly in part II. Moreover, her variables shift the focus away from other crucial factors in [End Page 314] child labor history. For example, at the times when Massachusetts passed child labor laws and Illinois passed factory inspection laws, both states were run by a single party (Whigs and Democrats, respectively) that supported the legislation. In the case of Belgium, which did not adopt child labor laws during the 1830s, child labor was...

The limits of civil society activism in Indonesia: the case of the weakening of the KPK

ABSTRACT This paper examines the limits of Indonesian civil society activism in advancing democratic politics. This activism, mainly by middle-class reformers, has not only failed to prevent democracy from being hijacked by illiberal interests but also contributed to justifying the deepening of political illiberalism. A predominantly anti-political approach among civil society activists mainly aims to establish new institutions and policy designs to generate reforms, while allowing entrenched power relations to remain unchallenged and to pervade new institutions. Meanwhile, social protests mobilized by this kind of activism, both on the streets and social media platforms, also tend to be sporadic and have no clear leadership and structure, while protest demands are often contradictory, making these too weak to challenge anti-democratic interests. This paper challenges existing studies that extoll Indonesian civil society activists for their success in advocating certain legislation, policies, and institutions. The weakening of the Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK) illustrates how even trusted democratic institutions equipped with extraordinary powers and capacities are vulnerable to vested interests. Not only have Indonesian civil society activists failed to defend the KPK, but many of them have justified attempts to paralyze this agency.

Troublesome Women: Gender, Crime, and Punishment in Antebellum Pennsylvania

Troublesome Women: Gender, Crime, and Punishment in Antebellum Pennsylvania

Enforcing Gender at the Polls: Transing Voters and Women’s Suffrage before the American Civil War

Abstract Between 1800 and 1860, individuals deemed female by society donned male attire, represented themselves as men, and tried unlawfully to vote, thus challenging the gender binary at the foundation of U.S. democracy. Newspapers regularly featured those who were caught, describing how officials used inspection, violence, and ridicule to deny them the vote and reassert the association between gender and assigned birth sex. Commentators also linked these illicit voters with the organized women’s movement, mocking the possibility of female participation in electoral politics. In response, members of the mainstream women’s movement emphasized their desire to vote as women, reinforcing the gendered assumptions that justified their exclusion. Yet, “transing” voters were more inspired by the raucous partisan politics of the era than such middle-class reformers. The history of their confrontation with an electoral system reserved for men suggests a more porous and inclusive history of gender and citizenship before the Civil War.

The Labor Angle: Reflections on the History of the Working-Class and Radical Press

The Labor Angle: Reflections on the History of the Working-Class and Radical Press

The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement

The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement

“A Superior Kind of Working Woman”: The Contested Meaning of Vocational Education for Girls in Progressive Era Chicago

AbstractProgressive Era school officials transformed public education in American cities by teaching male students trades like foundry, carpentry, and mechanics in classrooms outfitted like factories. Historians have demonstrated how this “vocational education movement” was championed by male administrators and business leaders anxious to train the next generation of expert tradesmen. But women also hoped vocational education could prepare female students for industrial careers. In the early twentieth century, members of the National Women’s Trade Union League demanded that public schools open trade programs to female students and teach future working women the history of capitalism and the philosophy of collective bargaining. Their ambitious goals were tempered by some middle-class reformers and club women who argued vocational programs should also prepare female students for homemaking and motherhood. This article uses Chicago as a case study to explore how Progressive Era women competed and collaborated to reform vocational education for girls, and how female students responded to new school programs designed to prepare them for work both in and outside the home.

Plainclothes Policewomen on the Trail: NYPD Undercover Investigations of Abortionists and Queer Women, 1913–1926

In early twentieth-century New York City, policewomen went undercover to investigate abortion and queer women. These early female entrants to the New York Police Department were not the middle class reformers typically associated with Progressive Era vice reform; they tended to be working class white widows who carved out a gendered expertise that relied upon their unique capacity and willingness to extend surveillance over the female, immigrant spaces that eluded their male counterparts. The NYPD instrumentalized policewomen's bodies; investigations of criminalized female sexuality required policewomen participate in intimate encounters, exposing their own precarity in the masculine world of policing. But plainclothes work also furnished policewomen with a rare route to professional renown and social mobility, “success” they won at the expense of more marginalized women. Their work reveals that the early twentieth-century state was more innovative and invested in methods to police “disorderly” female heterosexuality and same sex desire than previously understood.

Strikes and Singing Classes: Chartist Culture, ‘Rational Recreation’ and the Politics of Music after 1842

Abstract Historians have often debated why so much energy was poured into efforts to reform working-class leisure and cultural pursuits in nineteenth-century Britain. This article uses a case-study of singing classes established in the early 1840s for industrial workers by local employers in the Manchester region to provide fresh answers to this question. It criticises a tendency to cast middle-class reformers as the primary agents of change in working-class leisure activities, arguing instead that many supposed innovations had been developed already by the Chartists, whose extensive transformation of working-class culture is increasingly recognised by scholars. The strike wave of 1842 permitted a dramatic manifestation of these cultural achievements, as the sounds of factory machinery were replaced by highly organised Chartist bands and choirs broadcasting radical messages. The establishment of a network of singing classes in the aftermath of the strikes was thus a belated attempt by the region’s middle classes to counter the dangerous eloquence of Chartist sonic culture. However, the subjective nature of musical experience meant working-class participants could derive quite different meanings from their massed singing than those their middle-class benefactors intended. In short, this article seeks to ascribe the central place to the Chartists, rather than middle-class reformers, in our explanations of why working-class leisure pursuits changed in the way they did, and to contend that the early Victorian singing-class mania, far from representing the reconciliation of middle and working classes in a shared liberal culture, might just as easily have furthered a radical cultural agenda.

Water Infrastructure and Practical Knowledge in Progressive-Era Los Angeles

This article proposes that a history-of-knowledge approach offers innovative ways to study the use of domestic infrastructure in the household. More specifically, the article investigates the role of knowledge about water fixtures, such as meters, taps, and toilets, in the history of progressive-era Los Angeles. Building on the rich literature about how Los Angeles obtained its water, this article shifts the focus to the relationship that everyday consumers had with their water and how technology mediated this relationship. While the article analyzes three major fields of knowledge about the use of infrastructure (knowledge about personal and public hygiene, about the maintenance and repair of fittings, and about responsible levels of water consumption), it foregrounds users’ agency in construing bodies of knowledge. Taken together, this article argues, first, that practical knowledge about water as a modern convenience was mutually developed by the utility’s publicity department, meter men, municipal health authorities, elected officials, newspaper editors, middle-class reformers, property owners, working-class immigrants, and female householders. Second, the article emphasizes the dynamics, contingency, and locality of this knowledge, which was linked to the stunning growth of Los Angeles between 1880 and 1930.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Fabricating black modernity: Fashion and African American womanhood during the first great migration

The early twentieth century was a time of great influx in America. Shifting demographics in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably the migration of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centres of the North, opened economic and leisure possibilities that provided new spaces to define black modernity and its role in shaping American identity. Debates over black women’s bodies, clothing, hair, and general appearance stood at the centre of public attention and political discourse over gender and race equality, forming a realm where African Americans could challenge white racist stereotypes regarding black femininity and beauty, as well as a means through which they could claim new freedoms and achieve economic mobility. Middle-class reformers, young black migrants, as well as new role models such as female performers and blues singers, all used dress and appearance to redefine notions of beauty, respectability and freedom on their own terms. For these women, fashions became intertwined with questions of racial progress and inclusion in American society, offering a way to lay claims for equal citizenship that moved beyond individual expressions and preferences. This article highlights the place of fashion as a critical political realm for African Americans, who were often barred from access to formal routes of power in the era of Jim Crow. Shifting the perspective beyond official forms of civil rights activism, it argues that fashion enabled black women to carve new positions of power from which they could actively participate in gender and racial politics, demanding their equal place in American society.

Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

Reviewed by: Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone Aaron Bachhofer Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. By Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone. Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 212. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-6291-1.) Current approaches to studying the history of jazz in the United States often focus on the stylistic and compositional nature of the music itself. The physical backdrop and spaces in which the musical scene developed and evolved are frequently subsumed in the story of “great men” who “did jazz”—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, for instance. Worse yet, the historical canon reimagines and sanitizes the jazz scene for a variety of motives that speak [End Page 948] to the preconceived expectations of scholars and their need to characterize scenes, such as those found in Kansas City, as wide-open and licentious. Such myopic practices ignore significant intersections of race, gender, class, non-normative sexuality, and spatial elements in the development of jazz scenes. These are precisely the subjects unpacked by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone’s Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. Clifford-Napoleone relies on a penetrative theoretical foundation, which includes works by Michel Foucault and José Esteban Muñoz, to resurrect Kansas City jazz scenes from the limited and misleading concentration on giant personalities from the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to her efforts, readers visualize the convoluted nature of early-twentieth-century Kansas City politics, in which the Thomas J. Pendergast machine clashed with moral reformers who hoped to spatially compartmentalize vice. Rather than being just a place where the so-called Kansas City sound developed, the early-twentieth-century “Pendergast world” is exposed as one that also included prostitution, gender nonconformity, racial mixing, and displays of non-normative sexuality (p. 22). Scholars have ignored or downplayed them all, though this underworld shaped jazz in Kansas City. With her approach, lesser-known cabarets, clubs, and personalities fall into clearer focus. Institutions like Dante’s Inferno and the Spinning Wheel emerge as sites of gender nonconformity on the part of patrons and entertainers alike, and these venues’ significance rivaled that of canonical institutions like the Chesterfield Club, the Cherry Blossom, and the Subway Club. Clifford-Napoleone also highlights women in this creative maelstrom, not only as performers who enjoyed long but somewhat obscure careers, such as Edna Mae Jacobs, but also as conduits for female agency and resilience, such as madam Annie Chambers. The refusal of canonical literature to see Chambers’s efforts to protect prostitutes and working-class women from the corrective morality of middle-class reformers constitutes what Clifford-Napoleone terms the “deterritorialization and reterritorialization of space,” a process that ultimately distorted the creative structures of scene-making into discussions of the roles that “great men” played in the development of jazz in Kansas City (p. 15). Clifford-Napoleone reframes the Kansas City jazz scene as one shaped by otherness, and she focuses on the nonmusical foundations of jazz. While that is one obvious strength of this slender volume, its greatest contribution entails the resurrection of the marginalized cultural pioneers of scene-making—the gender and sexual nonconformists, the working-class Kansas Citians, women, and the plethora of journeyman entertainers, all of whom nourished this scene. In that regard, Queering Kansas City Jazz is an example of the opportunities that intersectionality provides for the reimagination of cultural phenomena. Aaron Bachhofer Rose State College Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

When the Girls Come Out to Play: Teenage Working-Class Girls’ Leisure between the Wars by Katherine Milcoy

<i>When the Girls Come Out to Play: Teenage Working-Class Girls’ Leisure between the Wars</i> by Katherine Milcoy

Middle-class modernities and the reproduction of sectarian identity among Puṣṭimārg Vaiṣṇavas in the Bombay Presidency

The rise of Puṣṭimārg Vaiṣṇavism in parts of western India through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be attributed to its patronage by the region’s wealthy Gujarati merchant communities (the Vāṇiyās). Patterns of religious giving became significant mechanisms for the production and preservation of mercantile honour and prestige or ābrū. This article is concerned with how the maintenance of such status as well as the reproduction of sectarian identity among Vāṇiyā members of the Puṣṭimārg community were informed by, participated in, and evolved alongside the modern notion of class in the Bombay Presidency. I discuss the degree to which Puṣṭimārgī lay members engaged with forms of colonial modernity, such as English education, print culture and, especially, social and religious reform. I argue how despite being the focus of reformist critique, members of the Puṣṭimārg community actually became important players in the articulation of middle-class morality in western India. Puṣṭimārg leaders, theologians, as well as lay practitioners sought to amend aspects of Puṣṭimārg theology and liturgy to make the tradition more palatable to emerging middle-class sensibilities. In the process of negotiating modern morality, moreover, the divergent camps of educated middle-class reformers and upper-class Puṣṭimārg Vāṇiyā patrons all seemed to agree with regard to what formed respectable behaviour leading to the acquisition of ābrū, especially with regard to Puṣṭimārg women and their public religious practices.

“My own character is thank God above suspicion”: Soldier’s Wives with The Royal Canadian Rifle Regiment and Social Values in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British North America

British military records provide an unexpected source of information on the lives of ordinary women of the popular classes in the mid-nineteenth-century. This article focuses on the women of the Royal Canadian Rifle Regiment, which served in small garrisons across British North America from 1841 to 1870 and included an unusually large number of families. The increasing regulation of the activities and morals of working-class women was characteristic of this era of middle-class reform. Women’s residence in open barrack rooms with soldiers was a cause of great concern, and led to close monitoring of their behaviour.

Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism by Anna C. Schultz (review)

Singing Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism. By Anna C. Schultz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xii, 231 p. ISBN 9780199730834. $21.95.] Music examples, illustrations, companion Web site, glossary, bibliographic references, index.For far too long the study of musical nationalism in India has maintained an almost singular focus on the classical traditions. Such narrow view reflects the longstanding perception, inherited from colonial discourse, that nationalism in India was principally project of the cosmopolitan elite, class whose ideas, formed in response to Western education, were readily accessible through the texts they produced and the institutions they founded. Theories of Indian nationalism more broadly, therefore, have tended to mold themselves according to the shape of elite ideologies. Partha Chatterjee's distinction, for example, of an inside spiritual sphere, which served as proxy for the lack of indigenous political power in the out side material sphere, has become virtually axiomatic in the study of cultural nationalism, including music (Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories [Princeton, NJ: Prince - ton University Press, 1993], 5-13).Anna Schultz's book thoroughly disabuses this elite-centric division between the spiritual and political spheres of nationalism by illuminating nationalist ideologies that operated almost entirely outside of post-Enlightenment discourse (p. 11). Schultz's critique is occasioned by her unique focus on genre of devotionalnationalist music known as ras.t.ri ya ki rtan (nationalist devotional song), which developed in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra in the early twentieth century. The performers of ras.t.riya kirtan, or kirtankars, whom Schultz considers, sit at various points along the spectrum of nationalist ideologies and allegiances. Though they have used, and been used, by elite nationalist ideologues of different stripes, Schultz demonstrates that ki rtankars were never simply the mouthpieces of the parties with whom they were sometimes associated, but have instead made their own creative and strategic choices. Most importantly, they did not adopt the schizophrenic dance of inner devotion and outer politics that Chatterjee posited (p. 75), but instead saw their devotion to dev (god) and devotion to des(country) as one and the same. They skillfully integrated nationalist leaders into devotional narratives (what Schultz calls nationalizing devotion) and glorified nationalist heroes using devotional rhetoric (devotionalizing the national).Schultz produces highly convincing account of how early kirtankars by holding to a nationalist world beyond middle-class reform that is vast, variegated, and shaped by local leaders who sang for the nation without worry about whether it was homologous with other nations (p. 51). This perspective comes across most strongly in chapter 3. As the book unfolds, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the majority of performers featured in Schultz's text, including those with whom she has worked most closely, resisted modernity by advocating some of the most socially repressive and chauvinistic ideas on the political spectrum. Even the insular brand of ethnic nationalism known as Hindutva (Hinduness), which placed Muslims and Christians as impediments to India's independence, was seen by some of these ki rtankars as moderate and accommodating because of its reformist take on Hindu caste taboos. As orthodox Brahmans, they instead saw themselves as protectors of conservative caste-based practices. It is interesting, however, that they did not view their position as aligned to any particular political party or leader. Political parties come and go. The truth that they lived and preached went beyond party politics; it was eternal (p. 96).The percentage of the book given over to illuminating this alternative civil society, (following Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu National - ism in Modern India [Princeton, NJ: Prince - ton University Press, 1999], 123) is sizable, thereby fulfilling sorely needed account of Hindu nationalism as it is lived and experienced by people in the ethnographic present-hitherto nonexistent in the ethnomusicological literature (p. …