Prototype Citizen

This chapter shows how the desire to achieve parity with the West brought the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and the grassroots tinkerers of China's early hackerspace and coworking space into a paradoxical and often highly ambivalent alignment in their respective projects to assert China as innovative and creative. It covers the years 2007 through 2011, when a collective of Chinese artists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and internet bloggers began to experiment with the ideals of the American free culture movement, participatory design, and eventually, open source hardware and making. Their work of transplanting Western ideals of participatory, open, and democratized technology production into contemporary China created an affective connection between China's history of manufacturing and its future as a global economic power. Their early experiments with participatory design, coworking spaces, makerspaces, and open source, open innovation, and open design, were aimed at prototyping a “new” Chinese citizen, i.e., the utilization of technology to cultivate an optimistic, forward-looking, entrepreneurial Chinese citizen, at last freed from connotations of lack and low quality. These attachments to technological promise are deeply intertwined with China's ambivalent relationship to the West, marked both by histories of colonialism and by revolutionary imaginings of alternative modernities.

The Anthropology of Labor

In the final decades of the 20th century, market reforms in China and India, post-socialist transitions in Eastern Europe, deindustrialization of historic centers of factory production, and the international project of neoliberalization ushered billions of people worldwide into a range of labor relations—waged and unwaged, relatively stable and wholly insecure, formal and informal, bonded and free. The heterogeneity and fragmentation of these labors require new insights about capitalism, class, politics, and culture. One position holds that inequality on a global scale creates people and communities who are permanently outside of capitalism. Many terms catalog capitalism’s failure to incorporate vast numbers of people, and they denote the irrelevance of surplus populations for capitalist value production. “The precariat,” “bare life,” and “disposable people” are among those classifications. More optimistic thinkers see capitalism’s outside comprised of “non-capitalist” spaces, where “alternative modernities” and “ontological difference” flourish. Marxist anthropologists counter that capitalism incorporates, marginalizes, and expels people on shifting terms over time and on a global scale. Capital and labor accumulation are always uneven, creating differences within and between working populations, especially along axes of race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, skill, and work regime. The proletariat or any similar uniform designation does not adequately capture this broader, heterogeneous social formation. Class analysis is nonetheless critical for understanding these actually existing social relations. In turn, this approach is criticized for too closely following surplus-value-producing labor, whereas cross-culturally, and especially in the global south, non-capitalist regimes of value persist. Disagreements between two overarching perspectives—one emphasizing political economic factors and the other culture—influence many debates within the anthropology of labor. Scholars extend the study of labor to engage theories of social reproduction, value, and uneven and combined development. New organizations address the problem of precarious work in academia, and a network connects labor anthropology researchers.

Within and Beyond Modernity: Lived experiences and ethical interruptions of the Tablighi Jamaat in West Bengal

This article examines the implications of the growing presence of the Tablighi Jamaat in Joygram, a Muslim-majority village in rural West Bengal, India, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013. The analysis of reformist Islam as a moral regeneration movement embedded in dharma and catalysing an alternative modernity contributes to the scholarship on lived experiences of Islam, modernity, and ethics. The Tablighi Jamaat in Joygram gains popularity in a political economic context of moral degradation and marginalization, which inspires engagements with globally resonant modern and anti-modern models of the self enveloped in the practice, discourse, and performance of Islamic reformism. These models mutually interact and conflict with locally particular practices and exclusionary categorizations. On the village level, the drive towards modernity ensues in conflicts over moral personhood and social exchanges. On the societal level, the modern aspirations of Joygrami Tablighis go beyond piety to ‘good culture’ and respected citizenship, and are embedded in anti-modern critiques of the hegemonic categorizations of the secular nation-state by which they are nevertheless confined. It is suggested that reformist Islam should not be misunderstood as pre-modern, anti-secular, or secular, but might better be called ‘post-secular’ because it encompasses those ideologies in vernacularized forms on the basis of a different ideal conception of society. Islamic reformism in Joygram may resonate with moral regeneration and reactionary movements elsewhere. This analysis of the Tablighi Jamaat demonstrates the potential challenges social movements face in the transition to alternative modernities.

Introduction

The introduction situates the figure of the Argentine joven moderna within current debates on consumer culture, mass culture, and alternative modernities. It explores cultural commodities as key to analyzing social and cultural constructions of femininity and examines the central role of gender in discourses of modern nationhood.

Conclusion

The conclusion discusses the empirical findings of the book—the movement from balance to fervor—against the backdrop of the question: how does the inclusion of emotions allow us to rethink the grand narrative of modernity beyond the disciplining project? For this it engages in a sustained way with the attempts to conceptualize modernity, starting from the idea of the stages of development brought forth by Enlightenment philosophers, moving on to multiple or alternative modernities, and finally considering colonial modernities and the possibilities it offered for bringing colonialism and modernity together as a single development. From modernity, the chapter moves on to the emotions/discipline side of the equation, re-reading the classical works of Elias, Marx, Weber, and Foucault against the findings of the book. The last section develops the argument that letting go of modernity as an analytical concept aiming at a periodization and replacing it with empty time would allow us to create a space where the experiences of the actors and their interpretations can receive more attention.

Country culture moderators of the relationship between gender and organizational commitment

Purpose The present study consists of managers and professionals in 26 countries including seven from Central and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether culture dimensions predict country differences in the relationship between gender and organizational commitment. The study integrated theories of social learning, role adjustment and exchange that link commitment to organizational roles to explain such differences in gender effects. Findings indicate that an alternative modernities perspective on theories of gender and commitment is better warranted than is a traditional modernities perspective. Design/methodology/approach This study examined the relationship between gender and organizational commitment using primary data collected in 26 counties. The cross-level moderating effects of individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, power distance and restraint vs indulgence was examined using hierarchical linear modeling. Findings Organizational commitment is found to be higher among men than women in four countries (Australia, China, Hungary, Jamaica) and higher among women than men in two countries (Bulgaria and Romania). Results shows that large power distance, uncertainty avoidance, femininity (social goal emphasis) and restraint (vs indulgence) predict an association between being female and commitment. These all suggest limitations to the traditional modernity-based understanding of gender and the workplace. Originality/value This study is unique based on the three theories it integrates and because it tests the proposed hypothesis using a multi-level nested research design. Moreover, the results suggest a tension between an alternative modernities perspective on top-down governmental effects on commitment through exchange and bottom-up personal effects on commitment through social learning with role adjustment in an intermediate position.