Social Topography Research Articles

Toward a Social Topography

Sociological theorists have long understood the central role of status distinctions in producing social inequality. Although empirical studies have demonstrated how status hierarchies are reproduced in a broad range of cultural domains, there remains little research into where legitimating cultural practices take place, where they do not, and the role of space itself in producing status differences. As a result, sociologists lack a clear understanding of how status hierarchies give shape to cities and how the structure of cities might be practiced hierarchically. On the basis of interviews at a high-end shopping center in Istanbul, Turkey, I examine how consumers enact social rank in physical space with specific reference to the social contours of their city. Through privileging particular forms of consumption practices within socially and spatially exclusive venues, elites map legitimating values upon the physical shape of the city itself, providing a spatialized understanding of how status inequalities are distributed.

Introduction – Geographies of Promise and Betrayal: Land and Place in US Studies

In various ways, the essays published in this special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies testify to the perils, potentials, and necessities of “aestheticizing” the rapidly shifting social topographies of the United States. The concentration of immigrant and rural populations in cities during the latter half of the nineteenth century, for example, demanded the development of new practices and perceptions of affect and place, new somatic vernaculars and discursive phenomenologies, new styles and habituations that might accommodate the shocks of the new within the hoarier mythological narratives of frontier republicanism and American exceptionalism. In a more palpably destructive, perhaps, but no less dynamic fashion, the post-industrial dismantling of the securities of “place” compels scholars, artists, activists, cultural labourers of all stripes to question anew the unstable domains and terrains of American identity, questions we posed when deliberating our themes for the 2012 Canadian Association of American Studies conference on place and space in American Studies: What makes a house a home? What makes a home a good investment? What makes a real estate “bubble” burst? Who “owns” the streets? The water? The land? What makes this land your land, my land, or our land, from California to the New York Island, or beyond? How do you “occupy” Wall Street? How can you “walk for the cure”? How is land/earth/terrain understood and used? What are the distinct debates, discourses, and spatial practices that have defined American culture and society in the past, and how might they be changing today?

Deadly Flies, Poor Profits, and Veterinary Pharmaceuticals: Sustaining the Control of Sleeping Sickness in Uganda

ABSTRACTEfforts to control neglected tropical diseases have increasingly focused on questions of implementation. But how should we conceptualize the implementation process? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2010 and 2012, in this article I explore efforts by a small-scale public–private partnership to use private veterinarians to sustainably control zoonotic sleeping sickness in Uganda. With a fundamental tension between business incentives and vector control, I show how divergences in knowledge, power, values, and social norms shaped project implementation and community responses. Reflecting more widely on the relationships between project plans and local realities, I argue that these encounters reveal the heuristic value in approaching global health interventions as evolving ‘social experiments.’ This metaphor reveals the uncertainty inherent to dominant narratives and models, the role of available expertise in defining the limits of action, and the need for continuous adaption to synchronize with emergent social and institutional topographies.

Mapping the meaning of ‘difference’ in Europe: A social topography of prejudice

This paper draws on original empirical research to investigate popular understandings of prejudice in two national contexts: Poland and the United Kingdom. The paper demonstrates how common-sense meanings of prejudice are inflected by the specific histories and geographies of each place: framed in terms of ‘distance’ (Poland) and ‘proximity’ (United Kingdom), respectively. Yet, by treating these national contexts as nodes and linking them analytically the paper also exposes a connectedness in these definitions which brings into relief the common processes that produce prejudice. The paper then explores how inter-linkages between the United Kingdom and Poland within the wider context of the European Union are producing – and circulating through the emerging international currency of ‘political correctness’ – a common critique of equality legislation and a belief that popular concerns about the way national contexts are perceived to be changing as a consequence of super mobility and super diversity are being silenced. This raises a real risk that in the context of European austerity and associated levels of socioeconomic insecurity, negative attitudes and conservative values may begin to be represented as popular normative standards which transcend national contexts to justify harsher political responses towards minorities. As such, the paper concludes by making a case for prejudice reduction strategies to receive much greater priority in both national and European contexts.

Sailing Through the Sacraments: Ethnic and Cultural Geographies of a Port and Its Churches-Cartagena de Indias

Using a series of unusual parish books that record the sacraments performed by naval chaplains, that are in the Cartagena de Indias Cathedral, this work examines the intimate relations between various individuals and ethnic groups in the port city. Through these documents, it is possible to discover a slave society set within a frontier or even liminal social topography that reveals the multitude of possible dynamics created within the structures of such a heterogeneous community. We discover that much as the Spaniards and their Creole offspring may have sought to maintain the boundaries of what they envisioned as an ideal caste system, institutions such as the navy, the military and the church were forced to incorporate Africans and their descendants for various reasons. Free people of color (pardos libres) as well as the enslaved were agile in their appropriation of those narrow fissures in the rigid racial system that was the theoretical standard. From early on, Africans, Europeans, indigenous peoples and their descendants created a type of tropical Babylon in Cartagena, developing distinct geographical spaces along the coast and in the city and port that can be mapped out ethnically and culturally.

From Cultural Complexes to Complex Social Topography: A History of Spatial Approaches to Native Cultural Landscapes in the Middle Atlantic

This paper explores the variety of spatial approaches Middle Atlantic archaeologists have used over the last 150 years to depict past Native social landscapes. It argues that the primary model used throughout the early 20th-century, cultural territories and complexes, illustrated past Native societies as isolated, static, and rigidly bound. The paper then explores how Middle Atlantic archaeologists in the last half of the 20th-century and the first decade of the 21th-century have provided alternatives to previous depictions by using different methodological and theoretical approaches and interpretative frameworks when considering variation in Native material culture. These approaches have revealed dynamic aspects of Native social landscapes that were overlooked by previous models. The acknowledgment of social complexity introduces the challenge of how to depict the more intricate social networks of past Native communities. However, a review of regional literature suggests that archaeologists are not using the full variety of maps at their disposal. The conclusion of this paper explores how archaeologists can continue to improve and diversify the cartographic conventions they use to illustrate Native social topography.

Ethnographic Challenges Encounteredin Rwanda’s Social Topography

La recherche sur l’education civique presente des defis a l’anthropologue du fait que le programme d’enseignement aborde des sujets delicats comme les identites nationales, l’histoire ou la justice d’un pays. Quand le pays en question a ete, dans un passe recent, l’objet de violence de masse et se trouve a present soumis a controle etatique etroit et tatillon, les choses deviennent encore plus compliquees. Si l’on ajoute a cela une chercheure ayant anterieurement des liens avec l’institution etatique chargee de l’education civique, tous les elements de mon projet doctoral au Rwanda sont reunis. Cet article depeint quelques-uns des defis que j’ai affrontes sur le terrain, notamment comment saisir le sens des temoignages censures, comment naviguer entre les differentes factions sociales et, par dessus tout, comment savoir se desengager afin de rester engagee.

Umbricius’ Farewell Tour

Umbricius’ speech, which comprises the majority of Juvenal’s third satire, should be read as the character’s syntaktikon , or farewell speech, to Rome, as it provides a totalizing portrait of the city’s physical and social topography. The theme of fullness, mixture of influences, and the expansion of satire’s generic boundaries allow Juvenal to represent the city, culturally bloated and socially fractured, in verse form while simultaneously reaffirming the genre’s urban nature and illustrating its post-Lucilian decline.

Violent continuities: telling stories of one sexual minority life in the African Great Lakes region

This article examines the multi-layered continuities of violence experienced, navigated and narrated by those in the Great Lakes region from the perspective of one life. Drawing on the unfolding life stories of Alex, a sexual minority refugee in Uganda, it focuses upon the complex predicament of persecution and marginalisation of the region’s sexual minorities, as they navigate protracted political conflict, displacement and wider intersecting forms and sources of violence. This article aims to draw attention back to the lived realities of violence as they are interpreted and articulated through time and space in situated acts of speaking. An ethnographic life stories approach compels us to consider the agency of those who navigate complex constellations of intersecting and multiple forms of violence woven through the fabric of everyday life, the social topographies within which people navigate and the wider sociocultural, political and legal dimensions within which they live.

“Make Them Pay”: Charting the Social Topography of an Old Assyrian Caravan Cycle

With one foot on the Tigris and the other on the Anatolian plateau, Assyrian merchants conducted a brisk trade in tin, textiles, and silver in the late twentieth and early nineteenth centuries BCE.1 The structural aspects of the shipment and sale of tin and textiles in exchange for silver in caravan cycles have been the subjects of many excellent studies with methodologies including lexical studies and text-type studies.2 In addition, archival studies have been helpful in giving a sense of the variety of organization and involvement in the trade among different individuals.3 However, approaches that focus on structural activities like transporting, or on archives spanning a generation of activity, inevitably sublimate the context of merchants’ short-term interests—interests that drove the creation and retention of the surviving documents. This is particularly so with the richest group of documents from the Old Assyrian trade, namely, the business letters sent between coordinating merchants scattered throughout the locales of the trade. Like most cuneiform missives, the Old Assyrian letters were not explicitly dated and few contain references that permit them to be secured confidently in the chronology of a merchant’s life or in relation to other letters. As a result, many letters must often be read for structural patterns of the trade or as anecdotes, connecting most directly to recognizable contours of the human condition. Some correspondence can be recognized as pieces of a particular epistolary conversation. Such conversations are most easily recognized when the circumstances are

“I didn't think I could get out of the fucking park.” Gay men's retrospective accounts of neighborhood space, emerging sexuality and migrations

Young, African American and Latino gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) are disproportionately represented among new HIV cases according to the most recent national surveillance statistics. Analysts have noted that these racial/ethnic disparities in HIV among MSM exist within the wider context of sexual, mental and physical health disparities between MSM and heterosexuals. The intercorrelation of these adverse health outcomes among MSM, termed syndemics, has been theorized to be socially produced by a heterosexist social system that marginalizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, MSM and other sexual minorities. African American and Latino MSM experience overlapping systems of oppression that may increase their risk of experiencing syndemic health outcomes. In this paper, using data from twenty in-depth qualitative interviews with MSM living in four New York City (NYC) neighborhoods, we present accounts of neighborhood space, examining how space can both physically constitute and reinforce social systems of stratification and oppression, which in turn produce social disparities in sexual health outcomes. By analyzing accounts of emerging sexuality in neighborhood space, i.e. across time and space, we identify pathways to risk and contribute to our understanding of how neighborhood space is experienced by gay men, adding to our ability to support young men as they emerge in place and to shape the social topography of urban areas.

Music Studies in the New Millennium: Perspectives from Canada

Canada and the Canadian University Music Review have proved fertile grounds for the development of progressive music scholarship since the 1970s. Such developments had to counter the weight of history, which supported established and securely institutionalized forms of academic music. Yet these progressive developments in turn benefitted from major social and cultural shifts, such as those of the Depression years and of "the sixties." A crucial lever and sustaining force in major developments in progressive music scholarship that were to occur from the 1970s onward was critical theory. Theory now pervades much academic work in music, and has given rise to more sophisticated and varied approaches than was possible in the 1970s. The essays in this volume evidence this sophistication and variety, and bear witness to the way in which the intellectual and social topography of Canada can be argued to have proved especially nurturing to progressive scholarship in music.

Viviendo en el bosque. Un Siglo de investigaciones sobre los makú del Noroeste amazónico by Gabriel Cabrera Becerra (review)

Reviewed by: Viviendo en el bosque. Un Siglo de investigaciones sobre los makú del Noroeste amazónico by Gabriel Cabrera Becerra Bartholomew Dean Gabriel Cabrera Becerra, ed., Viviendo en el bosque. Un Siglo de investigaciones sobre los makú del Noroeste amazónico. Medellin: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Económicas, 2010. 245 pp. Gabriel Cabrera Becerra’s edited collection Viviendo en el Bosque (Living in the Forest) is a collection of essays devoted to understanding the multiple, small-scale “hunter-gatherer” societies known collectively in the ethnographic literature by the ethnonym Maku. The issue of Maku identity is a complex topic complicated by the fact that many native “mobile” peoples in northwestern Amazonia have at one time or another been called Maku: including the Nükâk and the Kákwâ (Bara Cacua or Makú) of Colombia; the Hupdë and the Yuhupdë of Brazil and Colombia; and the Nadëb (Kabori) and the Düw (Dâw o Kamâ) of Brazil. In the northern border frontier between the Colombian and Brazilian Amazon, two culturally distinctive, yet inter-dependent indigenous social groupings reside: the sedentary Eastern Tukano and Arawak speaking societies and the nomadic Maku peoples. But when it comes to describing the contemporary social topography of the region it would certainly be misleading only to emphasize the dynamics of intra-ethnic indigenous relations and say nothing about the broader supra-local context, namely the presence of outsiders who are increasingly trying to gain a foothold in Maku territories. In the Colombian Amazon, the fight for indigenous people’s cultural survival remains fierce, while the politics of land claims and indigeneity are volatile. Recent governmental restrictions on indigenous societies like the Nükâk Maku threaten the very basis of their cultural autonomy, not to mention their customary livelihoods, which were predicated on foraging and hunting and gathering the forests and waterways they once called their home. Indeed, a mere generation ago, nomadic groups such as the [End Page 309] Nükâk Maku enjoyed a more or less serene life, largely removed from the so-called modern world of global markets, digital-interconnections, intrusive Spanish-based formal education, and the impersonal dictates of capitalist production. Instead, these proud nomadic peoples spent their time with one another leisurely trekking through a swath of the northwest Amazon rain forest roughly three times the size of Los Angeles. But this was all to change abruptly and irrevocably following sustained contact with national Colombian society beginning in the 1980s. Today, the Nükâk Maku have been forced from their territorial home-lands by a confluence of factors, like the growth of an illicit coca economy, and the presence of external social actors—leftist rebels, (including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC), paramilitary death-squads, and State security forces. For their part, the Nükâk Maku peoples seem now to be a shadow of their former selves. They currently inhabit an unkempt clearing only half the size of a soccer field near the Colombian settlement of San José del Guaviare. Nevertheless, local indigenous Maku leaders continue to clamor for the expulsion of the military and leftist rebels from their homelands; recently Colombia’s Constitutional Court declared that the armed forces must vacate the Nükâk’s territory, which is currently employed as a major training base by Colombian special forces and navy infantry. Spanning more than a century of keen ethnographic description, Gabriel Cabrera Becerra’s welcome edited collection brings together texts devoted to assessing various aspects of Maku society and history. Comprised of contributions from a number of complementary disciplinary approaches, including anthropology, linguistics, and history, it grapples with a series of key issues, like territoriality, ethnographic film, childhood, inter-cultural education, and spatial location. A series of poorly understood themes in lowland ethnology are developed, such as the nature of the Maku’s division of labor, the dynamic forces shaping their settlement patterns, and their controversial formalized relations of subservience vis-à-vis other indigenous and mestizo or caboclo societies. A condensed Spanish translation of Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s (1906) classic essay on the Maku peoples is reprinted in the collection.1 Written during...

Discovering gupta-Vrindavan: Finding selves and places in the storied landscape

This article seeks to be a contribution to the recent bourgeoning of studies in the anthropology of (sacred) spaces, places and landscapes. Ethnographically, it deals with the social topography of Navadvip and Mayapur, vaishnava pilgrimage places in the Nadia district of West Bengal. It analyses the contemporary articulations of the experience and making of a contrasted and consecrated landscape, and its potential in embodying differentiated community identities. It describes the various public faces of Bengal-Vaishnava groups and argues in favour of the inherent relationships between devotional self-experiences and the emotional landscape which is inhabited and constituted simultaneously. It details the cultural geography of Navadvip and Mayapur as embodied in the layout of different temples and ashrams, and the circulating stories establishing their significance. The stories sometimes hunt out lost sites, sometimes legitimise existing ones and, at other times, override all such concerns over specific sites in favour of a passionate engagement with the entire landscape. In every instance among the plural modes of ‘dwelling’ in the mnemonic-fabled sacred space, the vaishnava groups claim to discover the essence of the landscape and thereby assert their multiform practices of self-experiences as authentic representations of the sect. In the end, the article also contrasts the inhabitants’ landscapes and devotional self-experiences with that of the traveller and throws up new questions in the anthropological understandings of places, landscapes, journeys and devotion.

The city as a transient home: residential patterns of Moscow workers around the turn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT:This article examines the social topography and the housing patterns of Moscow workers in the context of their social status and experience of immigration. It argues that in the early twentieth century Moscow was characterized by extremely poor housing conditions and the absence of clear residential segregation of social classes due to the lack of profound planning policy and urban reforms.

PRODUÇÃO DE UMA TOPOGRAFIA SOCIAL URBANA (the production of a urban social topography)

O presente artigo apresenta reflexoes sobre o papel do sitio urbano no processo de producao do espaco urbano. As caracteristicas topograficas sao abordadas na condicao de importante elemento estruturador do espaco ao influenciarem as possibilidades de uso da terra para fins urbanos, sendo que a apropriacao e uso desigual dos compartimentos do relevo contribuem para uma maior diferenciacao socioespacial. A consequencia e a consolidacao de uma organizacao espacial que configura o que se esta chamando de topografia social, espacialidades urbanas nas quais ha uma correspondencia muito proxima entre os desniveis do terreno e as disparidades sociais. Como exemplo, e apresentada uma analise da cidade de Ponta Grossa, no Parana, onde tais influencias da topografia sobre a evolucao socioespacial sao marcantes. Palavras-chave : Expansao urbana, Ocupacao e uso da terra, Desigualdades socioespaciais, Topografia social. ABSTRACT This paper presents reflections about the role of urban site in the production process of urban space. Topographic characteristics are discussed as the main structural element of the space to influence the possibilities of urban land use, and the appropriation and unequal use of compartments relief contribute to a higher socio-spatial differentiation. The result is the consolidation of a spatial organization that constitute what is called the social topography, urban spatialities in which there is a closely match between the slope of relief and social disparities. As an example, an analysis is presented considering Ponta Grossa city, Parana State, Brazil, where such influences of the topography on spatial and social evolution are striking. Key words : Urban expansion, Occupation and land use, Spatial and social inequalities, Social topography. RESUME Cet article presente des reflexions sur le role du site urbain dans la production de l’espace urbain. Les caracteristiques topographiques sont discutees comme un important element pour la structuration de l’espace, une fois qu´il agit sur les possibilites d’utilisation des terres a des fins urbaines, etant que l’appropriation et l’usage inegaux des compartiments du relief contribuent a une plus grande differenciation sociospatiale. Le resultat est la consolidation d’une organisation spatiale qui contemple ce que l´on appelle la topographie sociale, des spatialites urbaines dans lesquelles il y a une correspondance tres proche entre les denivellations du terrain et les disparites sociales. A titre d’exemple, l´on presente une analyse sur la ville de Ponta Grossa, Etat de Parana, au Bresil, ou telles influences sur l’evolution sociospatiale sont remarquables. Mots-cles : Expansion urbaine, Occupation et utilisation de la terre, Inegalites sociospatiales, Topographie sociale. DOI : 10.4215/RM2012.1126.0005

Karen Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and ParisCultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris. Karen Newman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. x+200.

<i>Karen Newman</i>, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris<i>Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris</i>. Karen Newman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. x+200.

Experiencing Space—Time: The Stretched Lifeworlds of Migrant Workers in India

In the relatively rare instances when the spatialities of temporary migrant work, workers' journeys, and labour-market negotiations have been the subject of scholarly attention, there has been little work that integrates time into the analysis. Building on a case study of low-paid and insecure migrant manual workers in the context of rapid economic growth in India, we examine both material and subjective dimensions of these workers' spatiotemporal experiences. What does it mean to live life stretched out, multiply-attached to places across national space? What kinds of place attachments emerge for people temporarily sojourning in, rather than moving to, new places to reside and work? Our analysis of the spatiotemporalities of migrant workers' experiences in India suggests that, over time, this group of workers use their own agency to seek to avoid the experience of humiliation and indignity in employment relations. Like David Harvey, we argue that money needs to be integrated into such analysis, along with space and time. The paper sheds light on processes of exclusion, inequality and differentiation, unequal power geometries, and social topographies that contrast with neoliberalist narratives of ‘Indian shining’.

Emotional Spaces and Places of Salaryman Anxiety in Tokyo Sonata

In this article I discuss the ways in which the 2008 film Tokyo Sonata engages with the contrasting emotional and physical geographies of comfortable suburbia and the contemporary reality of socio-cultural despondency. The Sasaki family is the embodiment of the quintessential nuclear family of urban, middle-class Japan. Their world starts unravelling the day the father, Sasaki Ryūhei, is laid off from his middle-management job. Unwilling to reveal this to his family, Ryūhei continues to leave for work each morning dressed in his suit, but spends his days in a park inhabited by homeless men. Ultimately, he finds employment as a cleaner in a shopping mall. Ryūhei's journey from white-collar salaryman to menial worker is set against the backdrop of collective anxiety in the intermeshing physical and emotional ‘scapes’ of recession-era Tokyo. I argue that, at the core, this is an anxiety about the loss of masculine authority in the home and the workplace, and at the level of Japan as a nation. Moreover, it is an anxiety that cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the framing social, cultural, economic and emotional topographies of post-bubble Japan.

Apocalyptic futures: The violent transformation of moral human life among Ayoreo‐speaking people of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco

ABSTRACTIn this article, I describe the social topography of apocalyptic futurism among recently contacted Ayoreo‐speaking people in Paraguay to examine the novel senses of being in the world that are emerging in harsh postcontact conditions. I show how apocalyptic futurism exceeds the temporal confines of both “traditional culture” and “Christianity.” Rather, it derives from the afterlife of violence and a general consensus that biological survival now requires a reconstitution of the terms of humanity. Apocalyptic sensibilities are concerned with more than local values or the transcendence of death; rather, as I show, they mark a new threshold between the human and the nonhuman.