Rights, Cultures, Subjects and Citizens
This book questions the political logic of foregrounding cultural collectives in a world shaped by globalization and neoliberalization. Throughout the world, it is no longer only individuals, but increasingly collective cultures who are made responsible for their own regulation, welfare and enterprise. This appears as a surprising shift from the tenets of classical liberalism which defined the ideal subject of politics as the unencumbered self - the free, equal and self-governing individual.
The increasing promotion and recognition of cultural rights in international legislation, multiculturalism, and public debates on culture as a political problem more generally indicate that culture has become a more central terrain for governance and struggles around rights and citizenship. On the basis of case studies from China, Latin America, and North America, the contributors of this book explore the links between culture, civility, and the politics of citizenship. They argue that official reifications of culture in relation to citizenship, and even the recognition of cultural rights, may obey strategies of governance and control, but that citizens may still use new cultural rights and networks, and the legal mechanisms that have been created to protect them, in order to pursue their own agendas of empowerment.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Economy and Society.
Susanne Brandtstdter is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research in China has focussed on gender and social relatedness, moral economies, modernity and peasant subjectivities, legal knowledge, notions of justice, social and political rights, and local responses to global capitalism. Previous publications include Chinese Kinship. New Anthropological Perspectives (2009).
Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. He works on race and ethnicity - and their articulations with gender - in Latin America and on ideas of race, nature and culture generally. His recent work is on race and genomic science in Latin America. Previous publications include Race and Sex in Latin America (2009).
Kath Woodward is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK. She works on diversity, mobilities and inequalities, especially in relation to sex gender and embodied practices and the relationship between virtual and material forms of inequality, most recently in the field of sport. Previous publications include Sex Power and the Games (2012).
Rights, Cultures, Subjects and Citizens
Edited by
Susanne Brandtstdter, Peter Wade and Kath Woodward
First published 2013
by Routledge
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2013 Taylor & Francis
This book is a reproduction of Economy and Society, volume 40, issue 2. The Publisher requests to those authors who may be citing this book to state, also, the bibliographical details of the special issue on which the book was based.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN13: 978-0-415-63127-3
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Taylor & Francis Books
Publisher's Note
The publisher would like to make readers aware that the chapters in this book may be referred to as articles as they are identical to the articles published in the special issue. The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen in the course of preparing this volume for print.
Contents
Susanne Brandtstdter, Peter Wade and Kath Woodward
Charles R. Hale
Nina Glick Schiller
Rachel Sieder
Susanne Brandtstdter
Andrew B. Kipnis
The chapters in this book were originally published in the Economy and Society, volume 40, issue 2 (May 2011). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Susanne Brandtstdter, Peter Wade and Kath Woodward
Economy and Society, volume 40, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 167183
Charles R. Hale
Economy and Society, volume 40, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 184210
Nina Glick Schiller
Economy and Society, volume 40, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 211238
Rachel Sieder
Economy and Society, volume 40, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 239265
Susanne Brandtstdter
Economy and Society, volume 40, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 266288
Andrew B. Kipnis
Economy and Society, volume 40, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 289306
Charles R. Hale is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. Previous publications include Resistance and contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan state, 18941987 (1994), Racismo en Guatemala: Abriendo debate sobre un tema tab (1999), Memorias del mestizaje: Cultura y poltica en Centroamrica, 1920 al presente (2004) and Ma's que un indio: Racial ambivalence and neoliberal multiculturalism in Guatemala (2006). He is also editor of the volume, Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics and methods of activist scholarship and author of numerous articles on identity politics, racism, neoliberalism and resistance among indigenous peoples of Latin America. He was President of the Latin American Studies Association from April 2006 through to October 2007 and began a four-year term as Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies in September 2009.
Nina Glick Schiller is a professor of social anthropology and the Director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures, University of Manchester, UK. Known for her work on transnational migration, particularly her 1994 book Nations unbound: Transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states (co-authored with L. Basch and C. Szanton Blanc), Glick Schiller's more recent work includes: Georges woke up laughing: Long distance nationalism and the search for home (2001), Migration, development, and transnationalization: A critical stance (2010), Cosmopolitan sociability: Locating transnational religious and diasporic networks (2011) and Locating migration: Rescaling cities and migrants (2011).
Andrew B. Kipnis is a Senior Fellow in Anthropology and Political and Social Change at the Australian National University, Australia. He is co-editor of The China Journal and author of Governing educational desire: Culture, politics and schooling in China
