Remembering Desirable Futures? Civil Defence Memories and Everyday Life in Sweden and the UK

This chapter explores how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can be used to examine civil defence as remembered. In focus stand oral histories testifying to the entanglement of civil defence in everyday life. The chapter employs a historical ethnography approach, using interviews and questionnaires collected between 2006 and 2012 in Sweden and the UK. The analysis, which departs from the three themes of localities, temporalities and mediations, illustrates the value of a more ‘bottom-up’ approach and discusses how we may refine the sociotechnical imaginaries framework to incorporate at least some elements of the ‘fuzziness’ of everyday life. It shows how elements of everyday culture relate to processes of embedding, resistance and extension of civil defence in Sweden, the UK and beyond.

Chinatowns Lost? The Birth and Death of Urban Neighborhoods in an American City

This article historicizes and links the ways in which ethnically segregated neighborhoods are born and die in American cities. Based on a historical ethnography of five Chinatowns in Los Angeles from 1850 to 1950, I highlight Chinese residents’ agency in both the birth and death of their own neighborhoods through a process called neighborhood architomy. Chinese residents split off new neighborhoods from dying neighborhoods while maintaining their institutions and memories, showing how neighborhood death and birth are intimately intertwined. To understand either process fully, we must treat neighborhoods and their residents as sociological and historical agents at both the birth and death of neighborhoods.

Governing through Contagion

This chapter focuses on the concept of “governing through contagion.” Flexing power over life, governing through contagion regulates subjects of a population to ensure their bodies are free from contagion, do not spread contagion to fellow subjects, and stay economically productive—or at least, avoid incurring economic costs of medicine and containment. In many territories, the legal strategies of control in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, such as quarantine orders and movement restrictions, grew out of earlier episodes of contagion that significantly shaped governing through contagion. The chapter then introduces three themes of governing through contagion: centralization and technology of law; normalization and technologies of moralization; and inter/dysconnectedness and the rearticulation of difference. The analysis draws on the historical ethnography of one British post-colony, Singapore, situated in three contexts: the colonial era (particularly 1868–1915), which was troubled by numerous epidemics such as plague, cholera, and smallpox; the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak; and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The “Abrahamic Metacivilization” of the 8th –13th Centuries

The article substantiates the expediency of considering the system of Christian and Islamic medieval civilizations as a single Abrahamic metacivilization. Heuristic possibilities of the term are revealed on the basis of research works on sociology, philosophy, world and domestic history. The features of the perception of civilizations and religions are analyzed from the point of view of the world-system perspective and global history. The definition of local civilization is being clarified. The definition of metacivilization is given. It is noted that, since the 8th century, on the territory of Asia Minor, North Africa and Europe, a system was forming whose unity was based on a combination of two universal cultures: the Hellenistic (science and law) one and the system of teachings of the Abrahamic religions. The expediency of designating this system as “Abrahamic metacivilization” is substantiated. It could not have arisen before the 7th–8th centuries. Along with the Arab conquests, the importance of religions in communications in the designated territories was growing, and the zone of influence of the Abrahamic religions was seriously expanding. The author proposes to leave open the question of the upper chronological framework of the phenomenon. The Abrahamic metacivilization disappears either in the 13th century (when its Hellenistic component begins to erode) or in the 15th century (with the formation of the capitalist worldsystem). Like world-systems, the Abrahamic civilization had a hierarchical structure, which depended on the degree of political power centralization and the completeness of the state ideology formation. The metacivilization center was represented by Byzantium and the empires of Islam. It seems promising to use the term to study some aspects of the legal, cultural, social and economic history of medieval states with an official Abrahamic religion, including the study of interfaith transactions. It seems promising to study from such positions the early history of Eastern Europe, whose many regions still preserved the tribal structure. The possibility of using the term “Abrahamic metacivilization” in historical ethnography (for example, based on some provisions of R. Redfield’s theory, in which the mechanisms of globalization and global processes were for the first time considered from the standpoint of social anthropology) is also substantiated. An advantage of the term is its specific territorial-chronological reference. It is noted that the term “Abrahamic metacivilization” can be used in studies with different methodological bases.

The Cause of the Refugee

This essay asks what current scholarly and political treatments of the refugee illuminate about our political moment. Taking as its starting point Ilana Feldman’s historical ethnography of Palestinian refugee camps and the possibilities for political action afforded by purportedly a-or anti-political institutions such as the humanitarian apparatus, the essay mobilizes her conclusions to consider the recent history of the refugee crisis in Europe. It argues that humanitarianism offers a valuable optic through which to understand present politics at two levels. The turn to humanitarianism and to the refugee as a political imaginary has marked ways of talking about and responding to the profound crisis of a political horizon on the left. But there have also been turns within humanitarianism—and, indeed, multiple humanitarianisms. Changes within the material apparatuses of humanitarianism and their routinization beyond the “exceptional” conditions of disaster and displacement have exemplified the broader social transformations producing that crisis of emancipatory politics. At once ideationally and materially, the story of humanitarianisms in recent decades is a tale of the conditions under which politics came to feel so difficult. The essay ends with a tentative suggestion that the generalization of the humanitarian apparatus and outlook offers a terrain—albeit messy and compromised—from which a collective politics might proceed.

Deception and Violence in the Ottoman Empire: The People's Theory of Crowd Behavior during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895

This article is an historical ethnography of the popular conceptualizations of crowd behavior during the pogroms against the Armenians in the Ottoman East in 1895–1896. It draws on contemporary sources like official telegrams, governmental reports, letters of American missionaries, and Armenian periodicals to show that observers with otherwise highly conflicting views described the structure of the event in the exact same way: as an outcome of sinister deception. Without exception, all parties told some story of deception to explain the violent attacks of the Kurdish semi-nomadic crowds on the Armenian neighborhoods of the city of Harput. The article analyzes these cases of disguise, deluding, and inculcation to reveal how contemporary observers theorized crowd behavior in general and the atrocities they witnessed in particular. They did not perceive violence as an index of social distance or deep societal divisions. On the contrary, they described a world in which Armenians and Muslims lived a shared life, and where one attacked the other only when deceived. Methodologically, the article lifts barriers between intellectual history and social history on behalf of an historical ethnography of people's theories about their own society.