Islam, Migration and the Political Economy of Meaning: Fergo Nioro from the Senegal River Valley, 1862–1890

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
The Political ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
Senegal River ◽  
Cholera Epidemic ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recruitment Effort

The Muslim social movement known as the fergo Nioro provides a case of popular elaboration of the message of a leader of jihad. Umar Tal's call to holy war led to the conquest of Karta in the mid-1850s, and his call to hijra resulted in the migration of perhaps 20,000 Senegal-valley Fulbe to form a Muslim settler community. In the years after Umar's departure from Karta in 1859, military leaders and others in the Fulbe settler community sent envoys to recruit additional settlers from the Senegal valley. At least 16,000 and perhaps as many as 30,000 Fulbe responded to this recruitment effort and left Bundu, Futa Toro and the lower Senegal valley between 1862 and 1890. Two periods of more massive migration coincided with the residence at Nioro of Amadu Sheku, Umar's son and designated successor. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, a cholera epidemic swept up the Senegal valley, claimed thousands of victims, and encouraged Fulbe to leave the region for Karta. During the mid-1880s, French policies in the Senegal valley, notably the emancipation of slaves and moves to halt Fulbe raids in the lower Senegal valley, influenced the social movement.In both periods of large-scale migration and at other times, the Umarian envoys constructed an appeal which elaborated and even transformed Umar's call to hijra. Umar's insistence on holy war was a dominant theme in all periods, and resonated with the young men who left the valley in hopes of accumulating wealth through warfare. His condemnation of French influence in the Senegal valley was also expressed in the Arabic letters delivered by envoys. Umar's emphasis on the cutting of social bonds was not emphasized, as Fulbe settlers sought to attract relatives and neighbors to the new Fulbe communities in Karta.

Violent Imaginaries and the Beginnings of a New State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Oliver Chang
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ritual Violence ◽  
Chinese Individual ◽  
The Revolution

U.S. consular reports on Mexican anti-Chinese activities document the uncoordinated, synchronous anti-Chinese activities that took place as a part of the revolutionary battlefield. This chapter traces the social relations that gave rise to cooperative violence, or grotesque assemblies, in the context of the revolution. Events like the massacre at Torreón in 1911 illustrate the emergence of new social ties based upon Porfian discontent and doing harm to Chinese. Individual cases of tactical assassinations and ritual violence against the Chinese bodies further illuminate the absence of mestizo nationalism as motivation. The chapter details reports of ritualized violence that present a battlefield where Chinese immigrants are under constant attack. These modes of popular violence against Chinese shifted the political identity of assailants, no matter their allegiance or affiliation, to patriotic revolutionaries. Peasants and Indians did not threaten the bourgeois military leaders of the revolution when they expressed antichinismo.

Le Lions Clubs au Bénin : un club caritatif qui pratique une liturgie à dessein politique

2017 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Jean-Frédéric De Hasque
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
New Form

The comparison of meetings and protocol of the Lions Clubs in a ritual, offers an opportunity to measure the political impact of this community and the effect the meetings have outside the circle. The study also allows us to understand the importance of the Lions Clubs in Africa, where it cannot be reduced to a meeting of wealthy people seduced by the opulence and the opportunity to find new sources of profit. Lions are compared by population to diplomats because of their appearance, wearing uniforms and medals and are received by the highest political authorities from other nations. In the West this behaviour is seen as a caricature of governance but for members the meetings offer occasions for work and friendship. This appears like political religion because of the hidden goal: to conquer the independence of Africa in the Lions Clubs. This objective is facilitated by the explosion in the number of African members showing the social movement that rages at the top levels of society. The African elite, by its transformation of charity into political rally, proposes a new form of pan-Africanism.

scholarly journals SACRED RIVERS: ENERGY RESOURCES AND PEOPLE’S POWER

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-169
Author(s):  
Susan Visvanathan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Technology And Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Good Vision ◽  
The Way

This paper is concerned with the way energy requirements in the last three decades have seen a response from local communities who wish to express their love and longing for traditional occupations. Agriculture is a multi-faceted representation, and riverine civilisations have epitomised the relation between land, labour and production not just as a relation with technology and culture, but also in terms of the symbols of the sacred. With large scale over utilisation of resources and a lack of vision, the rivers are polluted. People’s movements draw on the work of scientists and those working in the Arts, including the Humanities and the Social Sciences to draw attention to the way in which petitions and protests communicate that politics is not merely about imposing ‘the good vision from above’ but is an interplay between the political, the legal, the socio-religious, the secular and the economic. In a democracy, politics is essentially about dialogue, and the rate of industrialisation may well be mediated by the power of the greens and environment movements, which have learnt their lessons from genocide of peasantry and tribals, and the mass exploitation of the resources of nature. The Sociologist attempts to document some of the shifts and evolving positions in this ongoing debate in India.

scholarly journals Medicalisation

2006 ◽  
Vol 05 (01) ◽  
pp. C02 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Colucci
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Health Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Medical Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Wellbeing ◽  
Optimal Health

Medicalisation means first of all a science – medicine – going beyond its boundaries: from the art of healing individuals, or systematically classifying useful information to treat diseases affecting individuals, it gradually turns into a pervasive development of knowledge and practices that, from the 18th century onward, are applied to collective issues, which traditionally are not regarded as medical issues, thus moving toward large-scale protection of the social body health. The physical wellbeing of people, as well as the protection and improvement of their health condition, become one of the main objectives of the political power, which aims not only at dealing with social marginalisation and poverty to make them productive, but also at “planning society as sphere of physical wellbeing, optimal health and longevity”.

Relawan: Dari Gerakan Sosial ke Proyek Politik

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ustad Mangku Alam ◽  
Erisandi Arditama ◽  
Cahyo Seftyono
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Community Participation ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Political Values ◽  
The Social

This article describes the 2014 presidential contest marked by the presence of political volunteers as a form of increasing the citizen's active participation in substantial democracy. This article argues that the rise of the social movement has spawned a tradition of voluntarism in politics. In addition, voluntarism also helps change the political values of patrimonial and oligarchic nuances into voluntarism and participation. Active and online political volunteers can increase community participation. The article also argues that the presence of political volunteers contributes positively to the development of an extra model of parliamentary democracy.

scholarly journals The Road to Democracy: The Political Legacy of “1968”

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Maeckelbergh
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Institutional Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
The 1960S

SummaryOver the past forty years, the social struggles of the “long 1960s” have been continuously reinterpreted, each interpretation allocating a new mix of relevance and irrelevance to the brief global uprising. This article is a contribution to one such interpretation: the small but growing body of literature on the central importance of experiments with democracy within movements of the 1960s. Rather than examining the transformative effect of 1960s movements on institutional politics or popular culture, this article examines the lasting transformation 1960s movements had on social-movement praxis. Based on seven years of ethnography within contemporary global movement networks, I argue that when viewed from within social-movement networks, we see that thepoliticallegacy of the 1960s lies in the lasting significance of movement experiments with democracy as part of a prefigurative strategy for social change that is still relevant today because it is still in practice today.

scholarly journals The Political Aesthetics of Vulnerability and the Feminist Revolt

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-199
Author(s):  
Leticia Sabsay
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Affective Domains

Abstract Contemporary transnational times are characterized by renewed struggles over the meaning of democracy. In this postdemocratic moment, political and cultural practices and popular mobilizations and demands have exceeded, and ultimately questioned, some of representative democracy's core conventions, from the mass feminist demonstrations and strikes, to the rise of populist politics both in Europe and the Americas. Importantly, these struggles attest to the tension between failing democratic institutions and the heightening of increasingly authoritarian and cruel forms of social precarization and exclusion. Against these murderous trends, which this article characterizes as marked by an aesthetics of cruelty, some of these struggles foreground the vulnerable character of life and the embodied dimension of politics and its affective domains. This article focuses on the social movement Ni Una Menos to examine the ways in which vulnerability has been mobilized by some contemporary feminist popular struggles, focusing on the current investment in cultural activism opposing the curtailment of bodily life along gendered, sexualized, and racialized lines. Ultimately, this intervention seeks to ponder the emancipatory potential of a political aesthetics that weaves vulnerability into the gendering of democratic claims.

A feminist and decolonial perspective on passing the test in activist ethnography

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-222
Author(s):  
Claire Jin Deschner ◽  
Léa Dorion
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Content Type ◽  
European Cities ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Movement Organizations

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to question the idea of “passing a test” within activist ethnography. Activist ethnography is an ethnographic engagement with social movement organizations as anti-authoritarian, anarchist, feminist and/or anti-racist collectives. It is based on the personal situating of the researcher within the field to avoid a replication of colonialist research dynamics. Addressing these concerns, we explore activist ethnography through feminist standpoint epistemologies and decolonial perspectives. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on our two activist ethnographies conducted as PhD research in two distinct European cities with two different starting points. While Léa entered the field through her PhD research, Claire partly withdrew and re-entered as academic. Findings Even when activist researchers share the political positioning of the social movement they want to study, they still experience tests regarding their research methodology. As activists, they are accountable to their movement and experience – as most other activist – a constant threat of exclusion. In addition, activist networks are fractured along political lines, the test is therefore ongoing. Originality/value Our contribution is threefold. First, the understanding of tests within activist ethnography helps decolonizing ethnography. Being both the knower and the known, activist ethnographers reflect on the colonial and heterosexist history of ethnography which offers potentials to use ethnography in non-exploitative ways. Second, we conceive of activist ethnography as a prefigurative methodology, i.e. as an embedded activist practice, that should therefore answer to the same tests as any other practice of prefigurative movements: it should aim to enact here and now the type of society the movement reaches for. Finally, we argue that activist ethnography relies on and contribute to developing consciousness about the researcher’s political subjectivity.

scholarly journals MPEDS: Automating the Generation of Protest Event Data

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Intervention ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Labor Costs ◽  
Specific Data ◽  
News Sources ◽  
The Social

Large-scale research of social movements has required more detailed, recent, and specific data about protest events. Analyses of these data allow for new insights into movement emergence, consequences, and tactical innovation and adaptation. One of the issues with this kind of analysis, however, is that the generation of event data is incredibly costly. Human coders must pore through news sources, looking for instances of protest and coding many variables by hand. Because of the high labor costs, projects are typically limited to one or two newspapers per country. This, in turn, exacerbates issues of selection and description biases.This article aims to address this issue with the development, validation, and application of a system for automating the generation of protest event data. This system, called the Machine-Learning Protest Event Data System (MPEDS), is the first of its kind coming from within the social movement community. MPEDS uses recent innovations from machine learning and natural language processing to generate protest event data with little to no human intervention. The system aims to have the effect of increasing the speed and reducing the labor costs associated with identifying and coding collective action events in news sources, thus increasing the timeliness of protest data and reducing biases due to excessive reliance on too few news sources. Work on MPEDS is ongoing, and to that end, the system will also be open, available for replication, and extendable by future social movement researchers, and social and computational scientists.

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