Pervasive Fetishism

We all have the propensity to materialize our elusive sense of belonging to others. We are pervasive social fetishists, creating placeholders of our social alliances by making them more tangible for self and for others. In all social groups, there is indeed a pervasive propensity to objectify alliances, transforming them into something more fathomable and collectively shared, something that has visibility like a flag, a totem, a genealogical tree, a uniform, or etiquette or mannerisms like gang idiosyncratic tags or gestures. It is the transformative process of alliances into something physical that everybody can refer to in an animist and fetishist way. “Thinging” and associated fetishisms are major reinforcing mechanisms of social clustering, stereotyping, and other social categorizing processes. At a social and, ultimately, ethical level, it also pertains to how we tend to construe others as groups. It captures the way we perceive elusive essence as tangible characteristics, justifying the clustering of individuals into groups, a process that reinforces and is the source of stereotypes and shortcut moral reasoning.

Strategies for scaling up Agroecological experiences in Europe

There is a growing consensus that the dominant food regime is not viable and that there is a serious risk of food collapse. Building a food system based on sustainability is therefore an urgent task. For years, agroecology has been developing strategies for scaling out agroecological experiences. However, the current institutional framework blocks the growth of these experiences, relegating them to the sidelines. The main challenge facing agroecology is to expand the scale of agroecological experiences, building an alternative food system and challenging the hegemony of the corporate food regime. In this paper, a change in strategy of agroecological practices is proposed, aiming at the formation of local agroecological-based food systems that, by increasing in scale, impose a new institutional framework. This goal will only be possible through social mobilization focused not only on agricultural production or distribution but also on food consumption, weaving social alliances that promote change. This can be done by politicizing food consumption.

Locating Gramsci in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh: Perspectives on the iconic women’s protest in India

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019, in India was widely contested by both political parties and various civil society formations. Shaheen Bagh, a sit-in protest demonstration which continued for over a hundred days in the nation’s capital from mid-December 2019 to late March 2020, occupied the central position within the corpus of these protest demonstrations. The protests at Shaheen Bagh were led by poor, Muslim working-class women, who had come out on the streets protesting and asserting their rights amidst the dominant ruling-class communal politics. The Shaheen Bagh protests were a potent force of the working-class and oppressed minorities of the country. The paper brings in Marxist and Gramscian perspectives to explain how Shaheen Bagh has contributed to Indian left-wing politics. The paper argues that the women in Shaheen Bagh have been successful in bridging the gap between the civil society and political society in the country and has to an extent, altered the very nature of Indian politics. Moreover, the assertive nature of the Muslim women regarding their religion and the support which they garnered from the Indian left, widely accused by many of being Islamophobic in nature, has wide repercussions as far as political and social alliances between the left and Muslim politics in India is concerned. The present paper locates the protest within the notion of subaltern unity and tries to analyse the possible impacts of the support for the protests, within and beyond the anti-CAA protest movement, from the Indian left.

The October 2019 Indigenous and Citizens’ Uprising in Ecuador

Once again the indigenous movement in Ecuador has shown its considerable capacity for mobilization and the creation of social alliances for change. Media coverage of the October 2019 uprising has been both weak and openly biased, giving credence to a mythical “enemy within.” A chronology of events from the social movements themselves shows that this insurgent event and the aftereffects now being felt have changed the political map of Ecuador and represent a significant blow to the neoliberal project of Lenín Moreno, who replaced President Correa in 2017. Una vez más, el movimiento indígena en Ecuador ha demostrado su considerable capacidad de movilización y de creación de alianzas sociales para el cambio. La cobertura en medios del levantamiento de octubre de 2019 ha sido poca y abiertamente sesgada, apelando a la idea de un mítico “enemigo interno”. Una cronología de los acontecimientos por parte de los movimientos sociales mismos muestra que este evento insurgente y las actuales secuelas han cambiado el mapa político de Ecuador y constituyen un golpe importante al proyecto neoliberal de Lenín Moreno, quien sustituyó al presidente Correa en 2017.

How Do NPOs Get Funding? A Business Model Perspective Based on the Conversion of Symbolic Capital

Despite intensive research dedicated to both social alliances and business models, a research gap persists with regard to why and how nonprofit organizations (NPOs) choose (or not) to partner with for-profit organizations (FPOs) to obtain funding. By adopting an NPO-centered analysis, this article presents a new framework, based on Bourdieu’s forms of capital. With an explicit consideration of symbolic capital—and the risks of damaging it if the NPO turns to FPOs for funding—the authors explore specific issues related to NPO business models. The empirical test of the framework relies on an original database of 150 nongovernmental organizations with international scope. It reveals four distinct business models (public, civic, opportunistic, and diversified) and demonstrates that a high stock of symbolic capital gives organizations the power to choose and eventually diversify their funding sources, including partnering with select FPOs.

One British Thing: A Manuscript Recipe Book, ca. 1690–1730

A single eighteenth-century British manuscript recipe book, bound in parchment decorated with gold tooling, can tell us an enormous amount about Britain's gastronomic and imperial ambitions. That is because this book, now known by its call number, V.a.680, and held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, contains recipes like “Indian Pickle,” which included ginger, garlic, cauliflower, mustard, turmeric, and long pepper. How did this distinctly South Asian recipe find its way into a London recipe book? In this essay, we explore how British households engaged with and circulated new ideas about food during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We analyze two remarkable recipes, one for mutton kebabs and another for sago pudding, both brought to Britain through emerging imperial projects. Although one recipe originated in the eastern Mediterranean and the other in Southeast Asia, both were changed and altered to suit British metropolitan tastes. We then examine the book itself as a material object created and altered over time, offering evidence of the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts were amended, torn apart, repaired, organized, and ultimately professionalized over multiple generations. As physical testaments to the social alliances and networks of knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons, manuscript recipe books were tools of empire, used to appropriate, translate, and transmit the global foodways that permeated Britain's earliest colonial schemes.

Adaptive Strategies during Times of Conflict and Transformation: Copiapó Valley under the Spanish Conquest in the Sixteenth Century

This article explores the changes and adaptation of warfare strategies in indigenous societies during the Spanish conquest, through a case study of Copiapó valley in northern Chile. Using ethnohistorical and archaeological data, it explores the experiences and actions of collective agents who transformed their warfare practices and social alliances in order to fight for their autonomy and survival. The Copiapó people transformed from a society characterized by low-scale intermittent warfare to one that employed an intensive mode of conflict and developed broader inter-ethnic alliances. Their relative success in this last stage eventually proved to be an effective bargaining tool to negotiate better conditions for their incorporation into the new colonial system.

Social alliances improve rank and fitness in convention-based societies

Social hierarchies are widespread in human and animal societies, and an individual’s position in its hierarchy affects both its access to resources and its fitness. Hierarchies are traditionally thought of in terms of variation in individual ability to win fights, but many are structured around arbitrary conventions like nepotistic inheritance rather than such traits as physical strength or weapon size. These convention-based societies are perplexing because position in the hierarchy appears to be gained irrespective of individual physical ability, yet social status strongly affects access to resources and fitness. It remains unclear why individuals abide by seemingly arbitrary conventions regarding social status when they stand to benefit by ignoring these conventions and competing for top positions or access to resources. Using data from wild spotted hyenas collected over 27 y and five generations, we show that individuals who repeatedly form coalitions with their top allies are likely to improve their position in the hierarchy, suggesting that social alliances facilitate revolutionary social change. Using lifetime reproductive success as a fitness measure, we go on to demonstrate that these status changes can have major fitness consequences. Finally, we show that the consequences of these changes may become even more dramatic over multiple generations, as small differences in social rank become amplified over time. This work represents a first step in reconciling the advantages of high status with the appearance of “arbitrary” conventions that structure inequality in animal and human societies.