Conceptualizing Change in the Cuban Revolution

This paper will consider two levels within the study of the Cuban revolution: the meta-narratives of change and continuity that determine the academic literature on Cuba and inform political positioning in relation to the revolution, and the methodological challenges in understanding how people in Cuba experience change and continuity in their daily life. Transformation and continuity have been the two dominant analytical tropes used to interpret Cuban social and political life since the overthrow of the Batista regime in 1959. For Cuban scholars and politicians, a focus on change in reference to what was Cuba’s reality before the Revolution is a continuous concern and a powerful discursive mechanism in redefining and reinvigorating the revolutionary project. Simultaneously, in periods of crisis throughout the 62 years since the revolution, the capacity to demonstrate continuity with revolutionary principles while developing new mechanisms to redefine the political project has ensured the revolution’s subsistence. Conversely, continuity and change are also harnessed by critics of Cuba’s current regime to articulate the ever-imminent collapse of socialism in the region. Change has been their main focus of concern during critical historic moments that affected the trajectory of the Cuban revolutionary project. From this perspective, change embodies a promise of progress and implies a movement toward liberal democracy and a pro-US foreign policy, while continuity denotes failure, stagnation, and repression. At the core of the analysis of change in Cuba lies a concern with the nature of the state. Ethnographic data reveals the partialities and contradictions people experience in their daily life and across time. Two elements of ethnographic experience are particularly informative: life histories that span across the revolutionary period, and generational conflicts surrounding political issues. I will focus on the life history of key informants and the generational conflicts that surround their experience, a well as their material contexts (their neighborhood, their house, their job), all of which help to elucidate the complexities of studying change within a permanent revolution.

Making Sense of Change: Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation—An Introduction

In this introductory chapter the authors discuss ways of studying change that go beyond a chronology of events and sweeping laws of evolution and that take into account the ways in which people live through, experience, desire, create, and challenge change. How can we‚ at the same time‚ gain a longue durée perspective on societal transformations and give a truthful account of the ways our different interlocutors describe, name, and understand the changes they are living and the kinds of future they expect? The authors first situate this question within broader disciplinary debates, focusing particularly on debates in anthropology and its focus on studying history and change through ethnography. Ethnography is a crucial instrument for uncovering and analyzing the relationship between emic and etic perspectives of change, as well as the complex and often contradictory interplay of continuity and change beyond linear periodization and teleological presuppositions. The authors argue for a combination of multiple methods of investigation that borrow from both ethnography and other methods of data collection and analysis, and for an analytical framework that articulates three levels of analysis: the unit of analysis, the empirical data and the metanarratives of change.

When a Coterie Becomes a Generation: Intellectual Sociability and the Narrative of Generational Change in Sayyid Qutb’s Egypt

Departing from the case study of Egyptian intellectuals, focusing particularly on Sayyid Qutb, this chapter explores the relationship between narratives of generational change and cultural renewal. It argues that the observation of intellectual sociability is a productive angle from which to understand the conditions under which generational claims result in the effective reshuffling of the intellectual leadership, aesthetic norms, and principles of intellectual authority. The biography of Qutb (1906–1966), a poet and literary critic who abandoned his literary activity in the mid-1950s to pursue a career in Islamic activism—allows us to observe how the generational narrative articulates with his shifting intellectual networks. As a public intellectual, Qutb was at the forefront of two literary confrontations in early- to mid-twentieth century Egypt in which he made generational claims in order to place himself in the literary tradition that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later to cut himself off from that tradition by announcing the emergence of a new generation dedicated to political Islam. At the core of these competing uses of generational rhetoric, this chapter argues, is Qutb’s shifting relationship with the senior literary generation, some of whom he had considered his mentors. Departing from the case study, the chapter then argues that collectives defined as generational tend to emerge in tandem with the reshuffling of social bonds that a writer maintains with his seniors, switching from a bond of transmission to one of confrontation. The change announced in the generational narrative is effective when followed by the concrete action of shifting one’s intellectual solidarities from masters to peers, as this is the moment when the masters are abandoned to history and peers are promoted as the new literary generation. Depending on the particular set of relationships in which a writer finds himself, the notion of generation may act as a narrative of either change or tradition.

Social Change and Generational Disparity: Education, Violence, and Precariousness in the Life Story of a Young Moroccan Activist

This chapter illustrates how social change can be assessed in biographical research by methodologically focusing on processes of intergenerational transmission in interviewees’ life stories, not only within the family but also in educational institutions and other contexts. The author illustrates this by reconstructing the political socialization and politicization of a young activist in Morocco’s Unemployed Graduates Movement and Amazigh Movement. Life stories not only allow long periods of social time and the historicity of social processes to be taken into account but also shed light on the conflicts that young people have to tackle before they can claim to be adults as defined in their particular social contexts. From this perspective, social change and the reconfiguration of power relations depend to a great extent on how societies organize and broker the transition to adulthood, and what particular type of young individuals are granted by their position at the intersections of class, gender, and ethnicity. By assessing the interviewees’ reinterpretation of the experiences, narratives, and traditions passed down to them by the older generation and reconstructing how they position themselves in a generation or generational unit, social change and the formation of new social and political subjectivities become empirically accessible as narrated patterns of social interaction.

Funeral Reforms in Taiwan: Insights on Change from a Discourse Analytic Perspective

This chapter examines how Taiwan’s written media justified the state’s introduction of funeral reforms in the second half of the twentieth century. Situating this case study within the broader sociopolitical context of contemporary Taiwan, it illustrates how discourse analysis can be used as a tool for studying change. The state-led reforms induced changes in a field in which religious rituals play an important role, as state authorities operated with priorities differing from ritual practice. Instead, they were concerned with measures for land saving and popularized practices such as cremation or natural burials. The discourse analysis reveals that the justifications brought forward for reforms appeared with a high degree of consistency starting from the late 1970s in Taiwanese press articles. Following Michel Foucault’s understanding of discursive formations, four sub-formations can be distinguished, which all have in common that they are aimed at problematizing ritual practices prevalent at funerals. These sub-formations consisted of considerations concerning the quantitative limits of available cemetery land for graves, arguments referring to the economic advantages of cremation, articulations of the ideal of green cemeteries designed in a park-like fashion, and a critique of geomancy in labeling it superstitious. The discursive voices emerging in the sub-formations were state and local authorities, as well as experts and journalists commenting on reform measures. These priorities and justifications for reforms appeared to be incompatible with religious funeral rituals and are analyzed as changes in terms of a secularization process of Taiwan’s funerary practice. An important finding is that the secular reform measures were, to a large extent, inspired by similar reforms in other regions in the world, and are as such part of a global pattern.

Scales of Change and Diagnostic Contradictions: Shifting Relations Between an Emigrant Community and Its Diaspora

The specific question this chapter addresses is how to account ethnographically for change that unfolds on spatial and temporal scales larger than those of the ethnographic field study without opposing the local site to global forces. My research engages a processual approach which examines the effects of China’s transformations and the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone on the relationship between the members of a former emigrant community and their diaspora. I propose an analytical distinction between two relational dimensions of scale in which social action can be considered: scale as the scope of social systems or chains of interdependence that extend in space and time and in which actions and interactions take place, and scale as valence, i.e., the desirability of scale defined relative to other scales, generating “scalar projects.” I focus on how contradictions in the collected field materials are telling signs of accelerated change that generate conflicts of scale, and use such “diagnostic contradictions” as a starting point for understanding how people attempt to make sense of rapid change and reconceptualize the valence of local and global scales.

The Affects of Change: An Ethnography of the Affective Experiences of the 2013 Military Intervention in Egypt

In this chapter the author discusses the difficulties of exploring the ethnography of events as they are happening, especially when they are violent, not least due to the lack of reliable information available and the complex process of interpreting transmissions of affect. The epistemological turn away from language—in which the focus on affect has emerged as a critique of post-structuralism’s inability to recognize the prediscursive forces that also shape the body—is, the author argues, imperative, as using the framework of affect theory and new materialism allows us to assess societies in flux as long as our material is grounded in empirical research. Examining the material consequences of recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region may provide a way of addressing key methodological issues in qualitative research in innovative and creative ways. In her ongoing project in Egypt, the author has identified the materialization of a certain clustering of affect by spending time with Cairenes during violent uprisings and her own lived experiences at such intense and uncertain moments, especially from the summer of 2013 and onwards. Starting with an inquiry into the material affective consequences—in particular changes to the vibration of sound but also encompassing other materialized experiences—this chapter reflects upon how the author’s attempt to formulate alternative methods of inquiry, anchored in affects and the body as a way of studying affective politics and the tangible emotions that resonate with and transform everyday engagements in a transitional country, provides useful tools for the study of change in the making.

Spatializing Social Change: Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in Upper Guinea

This chapter proposes a spatial perspective on the analysis of social change in the making via a study of artisanal and small-scale gold-mining sites in Guinea based on twenty-two months of fieldwork between 2011 and 2019 in the region of Upper Guinea, where increasing numbers of inhabitants have been circulating between artisanal and small-scale mining sites to search for gold since the price of gold rose between 2008 and 2012. The chapter starts by discussing artisanal and small-scale mining spaces through the notion of hotspots of transition, insisting on their liminal character. This liminality is analyzed as a spatial framework in which new opportunities emerge regarding gender—women’s adoption of what is considered masculine behavior, for instance—and where instantaneity is more privileged than continuity in some actions, such as those associated with consumption. More generally, it shows how the potential for change in artisanal and small-scale mining spaces is closely linked to their ephemeral nature. The relationship between space and temporality is more explicitly discussed in the second part of the chapter, which explores how the ephemerality of artisanal and small-scale mining spaces has recently been challenged by the Guinean government’s move to control mining mobility and fix mining sites spatially by delimiting legal mining territories. Since 2015–2016, multiple military operations have been conducted to expel miners from land for which the Guinean State has given industrial companies legal permits to prospect for and mine gold. This part of the chapter analyzes the socio-spatial consequences of this situation and shows that perceptions of time and of social change are constructed by the forms that space take.

“A Proper House, Not a Barn”: House Biographies and Societal Change in Urban Kyrgyzstan

In Kyrgyzstan, scholars disagree about the outcomes of the Tulip Revolution of 2005: while some argue that the revolution has not resulted in noteworthy changes in the country, others see it as the beginning of major political change. To trace the materiality of such change it is necessary to look at the micro-level of a society, as this chapter does by focusing on the house as the unit of analysis for a close study of change. It examines the gradual transformation of dwellings in Ak Jar, an illegal squatter settlement on the northern edge of Kyrgyztan’s capital city Bishkek. The immediate aftermath of the Tulip Revolution saw the emergence of numerous illegal squatter settlements on the outer fringes of the city. Ak Jar, the largest of these, has some 15,000 inhabitants who arrived in Bishkek as internal migrants in search of employment. The dwellings in Ak Jar have changed over the course of time: most began as small mud shacks, and changed when a family generated enough money to improve and expand them. The development of these houses was central for the gradual official recognition of the illegal settlements that emerged in post-revolutionary Kyrgyzstan. House biographies are therefore intrinsically tied to wider developments in Kyrgyz society and throw new light on the ruptures, power struggles, and consolidation of power relations after the Tulip Revolution.

Rescuing Biography from the Nation: Discrete Perspectives on Political Change in Morocco

Political biographies and the narratives of the nation-state may exert a reciprocal fictional influence: the nation as imagined community is often embodied in the biographies of imaginary actors. Since the 2004 launch of the transitional justice process in Morocco this tendency has led to increased attention for the stories of the victims of the violations committed by the State between 1956 and 1999 as if they were the main witnesses of the political change. In parallel, the protagonists of the nationalist struggle that led to independence from the French protectorate in 1956 have been acknowledged without, apparently, feeling it necessary to hear what they have to say about it. This chapter reflects on theoretical and methodological perspectives that allow the use of biography to explore political change beyond taken-for-granted conceptions of the nation-state and its trajectories of change. Reflecting on the relationship that developed between the author and a single actor called Abk, who wanted to tell his life story, the chapter proposes the writing of biography as a form of archival research and a fieldwork practice for exploring memory. It shows how paying attention to personal ways of conserving memory and remembering enables us to approach politics beyond predefined horizons of change without seeing a priori social configurations as ineluctable givens. Such a perspective, which the author calls “discrete”, suggests considering politics as a phenomenon that is difficult to fit into formal models of explanation, and taking subjectivity, the variability of life paths and contingency as relevant objects of inquiry for understanding political change.