SSRC-IDRF Book Fellowship > Competitions

SSRC-IDRF Book Fellowship 2010

Recipients

Michelle C. Johnson
Associate Professor, Bucknell University, Sociology and Anthropology
Arguing through Ritual: African Custom and Global Islam in Portugal
[ project summary ]
For Mandinga immigrants from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau living in Lisbon, Portugal, ritual practices are currently provoking transnational debates about African "custom" and global Islam. In Guinea-Bissau, Mandinga conflate ethnic identity with religious identity: to be Mandinga is to "naturally" be Muslim. In Portugal, however, the experience of transnationalism and contact with Muslims from outside of Africa have thrust this long-held notion into debate. In this book, I explore the contours of this debate as Mandinga "argue with ritual" about what it means to be Mandinga and what it means to be a Muslim. Whereas many Mandinga women in Portugal view “traditional” rituals—such as circumcision, "writing-on-the-hand," and healing—to be at once "Mandinga" and "Muslim," others view them as African customs that should be replaced by a more orthodox version of Islam, as practiced in Saudi Arabia. The various case studies in this book reveal an internal debate about Mandinga ethnicity, Islam, and ritual practices, one that is especially expressed along gendered lines. I argue that this internal debate, although intensified by migration, is not itself a consequence of "modernity" but rather has long been central to how Mandinga imagine themselves as Africans and as Muslims in a changing world.
Kathleen Keller
Assistant Professor, Eckerd College, History
Colonial Suspects: Suspicious Persons and Police Surveillance in French West Africa, 1914-1939
[ project summary ]
This book manuscript focuses on police surveillance of people deemed “suspicious persons” by the French colonial administration of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française—AOF) in the interwar period. Police surveillance of “suspicious persons” emerged as an interwar phenomenon following a policy created during the First World War to monitor foreigners, but became an important strategy of the Colonial Ministry in Paris and the administration of French West Africa in the 1920’s. The book traces both the emergence of the concept of “suspicion” at an empire-wide level and the implementation of surveillance practices in local contexts. The book covers the history of the French administration and the lives of “suspects” in order to understand both state and society in French colonial Africa. It reveals the paranoia and limits of state power, but also slices of life and the rich diversity of people that emerged in interwar colonial Africa.
Miriam Lynn Kingsberg
Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, History
The Poppy and the Acacia: Opium and Imperialism in Japanese Manchuria
[ project summary ]
This monograph furnishes a social history of narcotics in Manchuria under Japanese occupation (1905-1945). Imperial Japan depended financially on the revenues of the opium traffic in East Asia. I explore the implications of this de jure illegal, de facto legitimate market from the perspective of society. Using the port city of Dairen as a case study, I probe the consequences of the opiate market from the perspective of four overlapping collective participants: discussants, drug users, dealers, and doctors. These communities cut new cleavages of power and payoff across traditional divides of race, nationality, class, and gender, enabling the consolidation and perpetuation of Japanese rule over northeast Asia. This study sheds light on a poorly understood aspect of Japanese wartime history: the importance of opium to social management, military encroachment, and imperial legitimacy in Manchuria. It also contributes to the field of global history, using drugs, goods that traverse and transgress all national boundaries, to integrate the study of the Japanese empire into the larger history of the early twentieth-century world. Finally, my model of the social anatomy of an urban drug economy may be useful to social scientists working on both historical and contemporary problems of commodities and power.
Lauren Nauta Minsky
Assistant Professor, New York University, Abu Dhabi, History
Medicine That Works: An Agrarian History of Health and Healing in Colonial Punjab
[ project summary ]
In this book, I re-think conventional approaches to the history of health and healing in colonial agrarian regions, especially the attention placed on single diseases, medical traditions, and healer-led therapeutic change. Studying the Punjab region during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, I explore how the agrarian lower-classes experienced the expansion and intensification of commercial agricultural production through changing seasonal patterns and distribution of human and animal sickness; and how, in turn, these groups fashioned seasonally specialized and effective healing institutions and practices as part of their ongoing labor for survival. As I show, lower-class struggles not only produced a range of healers with characteristic specializations (that cut cleanly across ‘traditions’), but also reshaped resource redistribution practices involving offerings, fees, food, water, medicine, accomodation, transportation, and nursing at major healing institutions, including clinics, hospitals, dispensaries, temples, and shrines alike. Further, by selectively combining the available expertise and resources of similarly-specialized healing institutions, these groups constructed altogether novel and regionally distinctive, seasonal cultures of fever prevention and treatment. Bringing social histories of environmental and medical change into the same frame, my study thus illuminates the central role that the agrarian lower-classes –who were most vulnerable to disease morbidity and mortality – played in shaping South Asia's medical history.
Romola Sanyal
Lecturer in Global Urbanization, Newcastle University, Architecture Planning & Landscape
Architectures of Displacement: On Identity and Refugee Space in Beirut and Calcutta
[ project summary ]
Displaced populations, particularly those who have been the victims of war and conflict are often seen as subjects of humanitarian intervention and treated as hapless victims of trauma. Policies towards such refugee populations usually consider them as people out of place-temporary aberrations to the larger global political order. However, the close of the twentieth century has seen a rise in civilian, low-intensity conflicts creating ever-greater numbers of refugees as well as longer periods of time spent in “exile.” A radical reconsideration of refugee spaces therefore is necessary as these sites that contain temporary populations are becoming increasingly permanent. An architectural and geographical study of long-standing refugee spaces in Beirut and Calcutta reveals the intricate politics of space-making and identity formation that are intrinsic aspects of people who are variously seen as being in a “state of exception” or being subjects of “emergency urbanism.” In so doing, what is unveiled, are processes in camps that not only mimic urban practices of the poor, but in fact allow us to understand insurgency, belonging and rights in new and unique ways.
Matthias vom Hau
Assistant Professor, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)
Contested Inclusion: Transformations of Nationalism in Mexico, Argentina, and Peru
[ project summary ]
Contested Inclusion analyzes changes of official national ideologies in Mexico, Argentina, and Peru during the early and mid-20th century. During this period the three countries witnessed a transition from political to cultural conceptions of nationhood, and from elite-centered to class-based understandings of national identity and history. The extent and the timing of this change varied substantially across the three cases, with major long-term implications for political development and social policy, and subsequent struggles over national belonging. To explain the distinct transformations of nationalism in these countries I present a novel theoretical framework that calls attention to conflicts and alignments between state elites and social movements, and to the timing of state institutional development. In the exploration of my argument I draw on school textbooks to trace the contents of official national ideologies, and teacher testimonials to examine the broader reception of those discourses. The manuscript represents one of the first efforts systematically to compare different forms of nationalism in Latin America. Its argument will stir debate among historians of Mexico, Argentina, and Peru. Contested Inclusion will also be of broad interest to scholars of nationalism. The methodological approach unpacks the role of schooling in the construction of nationhood, and the general framework provides a corrective to the relative absence of theories that explain how, when, and why official national ideologies change.