Peasant Studies: Subsistence, Justice, and Precarity

2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-397
Author(s):  
Shaila Seshia Galvin
Keyword(s):  
Rural Population ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Peasant Studies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Repertoires ◽  
Short Essay

“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.” With this epigraph, invoking the words of economic historian R. H. Tawney, James C. Scott launched The Moral Economy of the Peasant. His pathbreaking second book describes the social and cultural repertoires through which Southeast Asian peasantries struggled in the 1930s to dampen the ripples and torrents of political and economic change, in an effort to keep their heads above water. In the years since its publication, and despite this seemingly delimited focus, The Moral Economy of the Peasant has generated considerable ripples of its own, energizing the waters through which it has moved over the last four decades. A number of excellent reviews have delved deeply into the origins, inspiration, and impact of this work. Building on these, this short essay attempts to grapple with its intellectual energy, to understand something of how The Moral Economy of the Peasant became, and remains, a touchstone within and beyond the interdisciplinary field of Asian studies.

Context, Concepts, and Comparison in Southeast Asian Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikko Huotari ◽  
Jürgen Rüland
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Global Knowledge ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Southeast Asian Studies ◽  
Strong Position ◽  
Other World ◽  
Original Frame ◽  
Core Issues

This chapter argues that the value of comparative area studies (CAS) depends on some original frame of reference, here the field of Southeast Asian studies. We trace the evolution of this field in view of research on other world regions and general methodological debates. The chapter also highlights the role of CAS in overcoming increasingly rigid methodological divides over such core issues as context-sensitivity and the challenges of comparative research practice. We outline a methodologically pluralist framework of area studies comparisons. This requires methodological bridges between mainstream disciplines and area studies as well as innovative approaches to conceptual problems associated with comparing different regions and cultures. In the process, CAS can also increase attention to non-Western regions, which sometimes get short shrift in theory building in the social sciences. Thus, CAS is in a particularly strong position to mediate the ongoing internationalization and “de-Westernization” of global knowledge.

Wadhwa, Charan D. and MukulG. Asher (eds.). ASEAN-SOUTH ASIA Economic Relations. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. 1985. ix+384pp.

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-338
Author(s):  
Muhammad Hussain Malik
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Rigorous Research ◽  
Southeast Asian Studies ◽  
The Right ◽  
Policy Proposals

The need to enhance their economic relations with each other has long been felt by developing countries. However, their efforts in this regard have met with limited success. One of the reasons for this could be that not much serious work has been done to understand the complexities and possibilities of economic relations of developing countries. The complementarities which exist among the economies of these countries remain relatively unexplored. There is a lack of concrete policy proposals which developing countries may follow to achieve their often proclaimed objective of collective self-reliance. All this needs serious and rigorous research efforts. In this perspective, the present study can be considered as a step in the right direction. It examines trade and other economic relations of developing countries of two regions of Asia-South Asian countries and member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The study also explores ways and means to improve economic relations among these countries

Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Particle Physics ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Collective Knowledge ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Social Structure Of Science ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The Social

Descartes once argued that, with sufficient effort and skill, a single scientist could uncover fundamental truths about our world. Contemporary science proves the limits of this claim. From synthesizing the human genome to predicting the effects of climate change, some current scientific research requires the collaboration of hundreds (if not thousands) of scientists with various specializations. Additionally, the majority of published scientific research is now coauthored, including more than 80% of articles in the natural sciences. Small collaborative teams have become the norm in science. This is the first volume to address critical philosophical questions about how collective scientific research could be organized differently and how it should be organized. For example, should scientists be required to share knowledge with competing research teams? How can universities and grant-giving institutions promote successful collaborations? When hundreds of researchers contribute to a discovery, how should credit be assigned—and can minorities expect a fair share? When collaborative work contains significant errors or fraudulent data, who deserves blame? In this collection of essays, leading philosophers of science address these critical questions, among others. Their work extends current philosophical research on the social structure of science and contributes to the growing, interdisciplinary field of social epistemology. The volume’s strength lies in the diversity of its authors’ methodologies. Employing detailed case studies of scientific practice, mathematical models of scientific communities, and rigorous conceptual analysis, contributors to this volume study scientific groups of all kinds, including small labs, peer-review boards, and large international collaborations like those in climate science and particle physics.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literate Society

The introduction shows the convergence and intertwining of the Industrial Revolution and the provincial Enlightenment. At the centre of this industrial universe lay Birmingham; and at its centre was Hutton. England’s second city is described in the mid-eighteenth century, and Hutton is used as a lens to explore the book’s themes: the importance of a literate society shared by non-elites; the social category of ‘rough diamonds’; how individuals responded to economic change; political participation in industrial towns; shifts in the modes of authorship; and an analysis of social change. The strategy of using microhistory, biography, and the history of the book is discussed, and exciting new sources are introduced. The discovery that self-education allowed unschooled people to participate in literate society renders visible people who were assumed to be illiterate. This suggests that eighteenth-century literacy was greater than statistics based on formal schooling indicate.

scholarly journals Privatizing the Commons: Protest and the Moral Economy of National Resources in Jordan

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (S29) ◽  
pp. 113-137
Author(s):  
Matthew Lacouture
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
Food Riots ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Phosphate Mines

AbstractThis article interrogates the social impact of one aspect of structural adjustment in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: privatization. In the mid-2000s, King Abdullah II privatized Jordan's minerals industry as part of the regime's accelerated neoliberal project. While many of these privatizations elicited responses ranging from general approval to ambivalence, the opaque and seemingly corrupt sale of the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company (JPMC) in 2006 was understood differently, as an illegitimate appropriation of Jordan's national resources and, by extension, an abrogation of the state's (re-) distributive obligations. Based on interviews with activists, I argue that a diverse cross-section of social movement constituencies – spanning labour and non-labour movements (and factions within and across those movements) – perceived such illegitimate privatizations as a moral violation, which, in turn, informed transgressive activist practices and discourses targeting the neoliberal state. This moral violation shaped the rise and interaction of labour and non-labour social movements in Jordan's “Arab uprisings”, peaking in 2011–2013. While Jordan's uprisings were largely demobilized after 2013, protests in 2018 and 2019 demonstrate the continued relevance of this discourse. In this way, the 2011–2013 wave of protests – and their current reverberations – differ qualitatively from Jordan's earlier wave of “food riots” in 1989 (and throughout the 1990s), which I characterize as primarily restorative in nature.

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