National Global Imaginaries

Pierre Bourdieu is without doubt one of the main figures in the sociological study of culture today. Yet, for a theorist so central to the subject matter of cultural studies, it is clear that there is no coherent account of Bourdieu stance in relation to the 'concept of culture' among current commentators. More importantly, in the sister-discipline of anthropology, Bourdieu is thought of as a central figure precisely because he helped move contemporary anthropological theory away from the centrality of the culture concept. This paper reviews this peculiar double reception of Bourdieu's anthropological and sociological work, closely examining these unacknowledged strands of Bourdieu's thinking on culture. The basic argument is that the anthropological reception of Bourdieu's work is more faithful to the outlines of his late-career intellectual development while the sociological portrayal - Bourdieu as a Sausserean culture theorist with a 'Weberian power twist'- is fundamentally misleading. I close by outlining how Bourdieu's work points towards a yet-to-be developed 'post-cultural' stance - one that takes cognition, experience and the body seriously - in the sociological study of culture.

This paper offers an account of Bourdieu's rise to sociological 'stardom' in the last 30 years, giving special attention to the transnational dimensions of this process. It discusses the scope and relevance of his work to the field (in the making) of cultural sociology, showing how he contributed to its current form. It also presents the articles which constitute the contents of the journal special issue. The paper insists on the importance of assessing both the virtues and limits of Bourdieu's intellectual legacy through the means of historicization and sociological self-understanding, these being preconditions that allow the furthering of the 'progress of reason' which Bourdieu himself located as at the core of scientific endeavours

Case studies from Canada and Vietnam demonstrate both the importance and content limitations of local ecological knowledge (LEK) acquired during collaborative research between local fishers and scientists. The Canadian research disproved fishers' contentions that white hake (Urophycis tenuis) was the main predator on juvenile lobster (Homarus americanus). In the Vietnam case, the LEK of 400 fishers was used to test a hypothesis about monsoon seasonality and the availability of fish for fermentation. Fishers' LEK was important in both confirming the basis of the hypothesis and highlighting anomalies. The cases demonstrate that although important, harvesters' local experiences and observations may not characterize accurately such ecosystem processes as predator-prey dynamics or seasonality. It is unrealistic to expect fishers' LEK and understanding of ecology to embody such attributes, since stomach contents of commercially important target species are rarely examined, and fishers interact with ecosystems primarily to earn a living.

While there have been recent advances in theories of transitional justice, there remains a lack of theory about how truth commissions and human rights trials interact with each other to facilitate or constrain efforts at transitional justice. This is an important deficiency to remedy because numerous countries long ago leapt ahead of transitional justice theory by sequencing trials and truth commissions, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) will have to manage relationships with truth commissions as its work accelerates. The aim of this article is to use current literatures on transitional justice and political transitions to build a theory of how trials and truth commissions interact with each other. This will be done in three steps. First, the article will elaborate the goals and critiques of trials and truth commissions in order to provide a foundation for how they might interact. Second, the article will consider these institutions in sequence to understand how they interact when trials operate first, truth commissions first, or when they operate simultaneously. Third, the article will consider these sequences in context to understand how legacies of violence and its termination may affect their relationship. This effort is meant to clarify the theoretical issues at stake in the sequencing of these two important institutions, stimulate debate, and inform institutional design.

Forest governance has greatly evolved over the last few decades, moving from a state-based management process to a more private one. This evolution enabled stakeholders to become more involved in forest management decisions. The process of forest certification also encouraged greater participation in civil society. However, few studies have been done on the role of local stakeholders in forest certification initiatives. We used a qualitative approach to define the scope of local stakeholders' participation. Results show that their role mainly lies in the implementation phase of certification, where they are consulted more often. Stakeholders are less involved in the monitoring of forest certification and are not entirely satisfied with the place they are offered. We argue that if certification is to become an authentic governance process, better definition of the role of stakeholders is essential.

This article investigates the complex relationship between digital media, religion, and politics in Egypt since the early 1990s. Charting the emergence of a new media landscape - one that is facilitated by technological innovations such as mobile telephony, high-speed Internet, and small digital cameras - this paper explores how a very strong Islamic revivalist trend is capitalizing on the power and reach of these new media practices in an effort to develop Islamically inflected models of citizenship. The paper argues that such a mediascape is contributing to the development of new models of nationalism and civic citizenship in Egypt - ones that are not orchestrated by the Egyptian State but are mediated through oppositional groups, mainly of the Islamist variety. The paper aims to chart a map of media practices in Egypt in the past two decades, and trace how these practices are informing the rise of new notions of citizenship, cultural policy, digital activism, and media consumption.

This article analyzes how objects that are 'vessels of meaning' are involved in social interactions that create and maintain identity and community. Specifically, it examines the production and uses of chapbooks within poetry communities. Chapbooks are cheaply produced booklets of poetry that are distributed hand-to-hand rather than through institutionalized publication and distribution systems. The analysis draws from in-depth interviews with poets and ethnographic observation of literary events. By outlining the creation and deployment of chapbooks, a case is made for the centrality of material objects in constitutive social interactions. It is argued that material objects are both cultural products and cultural producers, not only because of their physical characteristics, but because of the ways in which they circulate.

This paper tries to examine what is at stake in the various projects to "re-enchant the world", which have arisen in the face of modernity. It sees the ambition to "save the sacred" in this context. It poses a number of problems which arise for such projects, and in particular examines the notion of "polytheism" which is central to the recent book of Sean Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining.

In the foreword to his 1938 novel Kanthapura, about the growing participation of village women in the Gandhian movement, Raja Rao explains the experimental method of the tale as a combination of colonial hybridity and cultural difference in language, style, and narrative form: The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a[n alien] language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own.… I use the word "alien," yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up-like Sanskrit or Persian was before-but not of our emotional make-up.… After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly.… There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous "ats" and "ons" to bother us-we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling.

An increasing number of local, national and international nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) are diligently working for the promotion and protection of human rights in the Muslim societies, and not without success. However, at times, some of these NGOs are perceived to be agents of 'Western colonisation' who attempt to undermine traditional structures and customs. Such attitudes are particularly prevalent in many Muslim countries such as Pakistan, which has suffered under colonial regimes for long periods of time. Thus it becomes important to frame human rights and peace-building efforts within the religio-cultural contexts of the community itself and to identify who can be effective agents of peace building and human rights. This article argues that human rights and peace building are inextricably linked and that any peace-building effort must incorporate mechanisms to enhance human rights.

Abstract The political theorist Michael Walzer has usually been taken as an opponent of global distributive justice, on the basis that it is incompatible with collective autonomy, would endanger cultural diversity, or simply on the basis that principles of global distributive justice cannot be coherently envisaged, given cross-cultural disagreement about the nature and value of the social goods that might be distributed. However in his recent work, Walzer demonstrates a surprising degree of sympathy for the claims of global distributive justice, even of the egalitarian variety. But the precise contours of his current position on global equality are not yet clearly developed. The paper, therefore, attempts to reconstruct what that position might be, paying particular attention to the conclusions we could draw firstly for our understanding of the opposition between global equality and national self-determination (which is more complex than has sometimes been thought), and secondly for the relationship between global equality and shared understandings.

'Bringing Capital Back In' is the title I have chosen for my article. The reference to a quite famous and successful book edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol in 1985 is justified in my eyes by some formal similarities between their research project and the one I would like to outline here. As Theda Skocpol wrote in her introduction to that book (Bringing the State Back In), 'society-centered theories' in comparative social sciences and history were giving way in the early 1980s to a 'new interest for the state' (Evans et al. 1985: 4f). The 'new theoretical understanding of states in relation to social structures' she and her co-editors were looking for could not nevertheless emerge from a step back with regard to 'society-centered theories' (Evans et al. 1985: 4f).

Convention suggests that multicultural areas tend to exhibit high levels of residential and educational segregation, high degrees of poverty and deprivation and low rates of contact between culturally distinct individuals and groups. By contrast, with the help of a case study of a fast growing English new town, this paper reflects on the experience of multicultural settlement in what might be described as an ordinary city: one in which that experience is relatively recent and whose identity is constantly in the process of being made and remade. It draws on qualitative research, based around semi-structured interviews, participant observation and the use of focus groups, to develop its conclusions. Moving beyond any notion that minority ethnic communities live 'parallel lives', the paper identifies and explores some of the ways in which the new city spaces of Milton Keynes are actively lived, negotiated and understood by the Ghanaian and Somali communities (and particularly by young people from those communities). It highlights the tensions between the ways in which difference is negotiated in practice and attempts to define communities through processes of governance.

Amara Lakhous, born and raised in Algeria, has had a significant impact on the changing landscape of contemporary Italian letters and cultural production. He is the author of three novels, all of which he has written in both Arabic and Italian. His best known work is the much-acclaimed Scontro di civilt per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio (2006)/Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2008), now translated into numerous languages, including French, German and Dutch. Lakhous draws on his position as cultural mediator to elucidate the importance of fiction in today's contentious debates over national identities. In the following interview, he speaks about his relationship to Arabic, Berber and Italian and the place these languages occupy in the conceptualization of his works. He also discusses the craft of writing, irony, politics, his views on Italy and Algeria today, and his latest novel, published in 2010.

This article explores how the powerful mechanisms of nation-state discourse in the news media obscure emerging constructions of transnational political thought and action. With the aid of empirical examples from qualitative media studies on critical events extensively covered by the news media, the article demonstrates how national identity in the news media represses transnational political identities of the intentional as well as the unintentional kind.

While Europe is unifying, it is also becoming more diverse, making multiculturalism one of the most hotly debated political issues in Western Europe. Minority citizens occupy an important place in the landscape of this challenging issue. Using the Eurobarometer 53 survey of European citizens, I look at the gap between Europeans who claim minority heritage and those who do not in support for multiculturalism in fifteen European Union member nations, taking into account percentage of extreme right-wing vote. This contextual factor has a persistent significant effect on the difference between minority and non-minority attitudes. High levels of support for extreme right-wing parties may have a polarizing effect, heightening awareness of personal heritage and making ethnic identity more salient in attitudes towards multiculturalism. This suggests an extension of group threat theory in which conceptions of what constitutes both a group and a threat can be created at the level of discourse

Indigenous peoples have been used and imagined as guardians of the Brazilian frontier since at least the mid-nineteenth century. This association was central to the foundation of the Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, or SPI) during the early 1900s and culminated with the Amazonian Vigilance System (Sistema de Vigelância da Amazônia, or SIVAM) at the turn of the millennium. Throughout the period, the abiding desire to establish defensive dominion over disputed national territory subjected individuals and groups identified as "Indians" to the power of overlapping discourses of scientific progress, national security, and economic development. A trinity of Brazilian modernity, these goals interpellated native peoples primarily through the practice and rhetoric of education, which grounds their historical relationship with dominant national society. Drawing on SPI records, government documents, journalism, personal testimonies, and visual media, this article traces the impact of this modernist trinity on indigenist policy and in the lives of those who have been affected by its tutelary power. By transforming private indigenous spaces into public domain, Brazil's politics of anti-imperialist imperialism propagated a colonialist, metonymic relationship between "our Indians" and "our America" into the twenty-first century.

Drawing upon recent literature on what has been called "epistemologies of ignorance" in relation to race, this paper examines an audit of a research project on equality and diversity in a UK university. It argues the audit functioned as a technology of ignorance. This paper suggests that the audit drew upon the cultural associations between white male academic masculinity with notions of quantification, detachment, and disembodied aggression. In this way, ignorance is seen as a form of labor. In particular, this paper suggests that current forms of neoliberal audit in UK universities could be understood in terms of Haraway's notion of scientific gentlemanly modest witnessing. But rather than the scientific gentlemanly masculinity, neoliberal audit legitimates a hyper-rational audit masculinity which casts women and racialized minorities as subjective, interested, and emotional and in so doing performs epistemic violence which maintains whiteness.

When we study human rights empirically, what do we mean to study? The existence of institutions that enable the realization of rights or the enjoyment of those rights? The absence of flagrant violations of some of the basic individual rights or the sense that one's rights will not be flagrantly violated? What theory of human rights should we use? Most positive theory of human rights-for example, empirical theories about the correlation between political institutions or economic conditions on human rights recognition-are based on the first kind of normative human rights theory, the one that defines rights outside of the struggle for them. This article puts forward a methodology for the empirical study of human rights from the inside: do people enjoy their human rights? Using the Latin American Public Opinion Project democracy survey database, the authors propose a new way to measure human rights.

This empirical article is based on a study of stigmatization of girls formerly associated with armed forces and groups (AFG) in the eastern Congo, and presents a detailed description of how these girls are perceived when returning home. The study reveals that the society views with suspicion those who are or have been part of an armed force or group. People believe that girls having been with an armed group will attract male soldiers to their villages, they are perceived as violent, thieves, promiscuous, and carriers of transmittable diseases, and they are thought to have a bad influence on the behaviour of their peers. These fears and prejudices are translated into stigmatizing behaviour such as name-calling, rejection, social exclusion, and discriminating treatment. Women are identified as those most actively involved in the stigmatization. The stigmatization the girls formerly associated with AFG experience hampers their reintegration process, and can be likened to a second traumatisation. In its discussion the article identifies some important factors impacting on the degree of stigmatization, and distinguishes between two categories: (1) pre-return factors; and (2) post-return factors that may reinforce or reduce the stigmatization. The evidence in this study supports the view that stigmatization is prevalent and poses a major challenge to the reintegration process of girls formerly associated with AFG. The article concludes that the more empowered and financially independent these girls become the less problems and stigmatization they will face