Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This essay looks at the history of changing levels of power and interactions between indigenous populations in Brazil and the Brazilian nation state. The theoretical framework of this essay considers this change through international relations theories of constructivism (Price 1998: Wendt 1994: Wendt and Friedman 1995) as well as through Foucault’s (1977) conception of policy being considered differently within different temporal contexts. Foucault’s idea of changing conceptions and operations of policy is related to historical change of policy in Brazil though the creation and enforcement of norms on the societal level (see: Finnemore 1996: Finnemore and Sikkink 1998 for an overview of the conception of norms).

In light of the history of poorly enforced laws to protect indigenous populations in Brazil this essay turns toward Machiavelli’s assertion (1517) made in The Discourses that governments can use time to default on promises of change made to dissenting people and organizations. The unwillingness of local governments to enforce national and international norms is conceptually related back to Allina-Pisano’s (2004) analysis of land use in post-Soviet Ukraine which analyzes reasons why policy makers only pretend to follow national directives while simultaneously doing the opposite.

The main argument of this essay is that, despite some of the positive changes in the levels of power of indigenous populations, as reflected in partial legal victories in Brazil, the history of state society relations in Brazil has many examples which provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that the Brazilian nation state has potential to fall short of its legal promises. Subsequently, this essay concludes by recommending that indigenous people and concerned NGOs should focus more on gaining power at the local level, rather than the national level in Brazil.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In Cavarero’s (2000) philosophical conceptualization of the narratable self, narration, both biographical and autobiographical, is a political act in its capacity to expose the fragile uniqueness of the self in its constitutive relation with others. Drawing on the notions of the narratable self and the relational character of stories, in this paper I am sketching out a genealogy of relating narratives by focusing on an early twentieth century document of life: Rosa Bonheur’s auto/biography written by her lover Anna Klumpke. This rare blend of biography and autobiography brings forward in a unique way what Cavarero has defined as the desire of the narratable self to listen to her story being told by others. It further highlights the political and ethical responsibility of the listener to retell and rewrite the story disclosed to her. What I suggest is that there is an urgent need for narrative driven sociologists not only to bend over the timely necessity of listening to stories being told by others, but also to problematize their listening and dig deeper into the political and ethical effects of the stories they write and tell.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: We contribute to research on Black urban low-income fathers and family men, by using demographic genealogical methods to explore their attachments and contributions to households, in a very distressed, disadvantaged public housing project, with a more than 90 percent poverty rate. Between 1999-2001, we incorporated life history interviews with 27 men with in-depth focus group and personal interviews with the relatives, children, partners, and ex-partners who live in the households in which the men participate through social and financial support. The findings indicate that men live across multiple households and bear substantial elder and child caregiving responsibilities. The policy implications are three-fold. First, these Black men face heavy family demands that often begin at very young ages. Second, many Black men face conflicts between supporting their children and their elders. Third, Black men attribute extreme underemployment and prison records associated with illegal work activities as impediments to marriage and stable parenting.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There has been significant recent scholarly interest in reading the Collège de Sociologie of the French inter-war years (and especially its leading figure, Georges Bataille) as an important intellectual point of connection between the Durkheimian school of the pre-WWI period and the post-‘68 generation of poststructuralists (see e.g., Gane 1991a and b; Richman 2002). This work, though useful and often ground-breaking, largely concentrates itself in a history of ideas tradition that is centered on texts. I propose that a full understanding of the intellectual genealogy necessitates an interpretive framework more attentive to the sociology of knowledge; that is, a framework sensitive to the actual institutional and other social sites in which the melding of Durkheimian and other (especially Nietzschean) ideas could take place in such a way as to clearly inform subsequent generations of thinkers with a kind of intellectual Zeitgeist that has both textual and lived, experiential, social elements. The journal Critique (which was founded by Bataille in 1946 and later edited by Jean Piel, brother-in-law to both Bataille and Jacques Lacan) serves as one such institutional (if in many ways ‘outsider’) site. Here, and in a few other sites I examine, the conditions were present for the creation of interaction rituals and the production of a kind of collective memory that linked thinkers of Bataille’s generation influenced by Durkheimian thought via Marcel Mauss to thinkers of the post-’68 generation (e.g., Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) who would absorb these Durkheimian/Maussian elements often without explicitly realizing it.