Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 2004-2005

Elizabeth Davis, Anthropology: The Debt of Redress: Madness and Responsibility on the Greco-Turkish Border. As the scope of liberal democracy expands globally, and its attendant legal apparatus engages increasingly varied kinds of subjects, mental illness remains a resistant, troubling, unaccountable experience, generating confused claims of responsibility for a "vulnerable" population on the part of government, doctors, patient advocates, and patients themselves. This dissertation, based on extensive field research in northeastern Greece, is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and the therapists who treat them. Ms. Davis examines this topic against the political backdrop of psychiatric reform, which has promoted a shift from residential hospitals to outpatient care for patients suffering from even the most incapacitating mental illnesses, challenging them to help take care of themselves. She examines this focus on responsibility in the clinical encounter, a space of conjecture where ethical predicaments in psychiatry crystallize and demand resolution. Her dissertation is organized around three such predicaments in Greek psychiatry: (1) the ambiguous "dishonesty" of patients as an obstacle to treatment; (2) culture and ethnic difference as diagnostic diacritics; and (3) the politics of discrepant psychiatric theories of subjectivity.

Thad Dunning, Political Science: Extractive Industries, Social Conflict, and Institutional Change: Power and Politics in the Rentier States. The existing literature in political science suggests markedly different relationships between oil and mineral wealth and political institutions. While a number of studies, particularly of the Persian Gulf states, suggest that oil and minerals foster authoritarian stability, allowing repressive leaders to hang on to power longer than they otherwise would, resources have also been causally linked to coups and conflict in West Africa and elsewhere. And in the literature on Venezuela, some scholarship sees oil wealth as a contributing cause of the advent of democracy in 1958. In this project, Mr. Dunning attempts to integrate these three sets of hypotheses -- which link resources to authoritarian stability, coups and conflict, and the advent and durability of democracy, respectively -- into an explicitly comparative context. He investigates how the likelihood of one or another of these outcomes might increase or decrease as a function of the interaction of resources with particular social and historical contexts, including the form of ownership in the resource sector, the degree of inequality of private wealth, and other factors. This dissertation will take advantage of a range of comparative and historical evidence, as well as a diversity of methodological tools, to investigate this question.

Tasha Fairfield, Political Science: The Distributional Politics of Tax Reform in Latin America. This project explores the distributional politics of taxation in Latin America. Through what kinds of political processes are decisions made to allocate the tax burden across different categories of taxpayers? Which groups mobilize in response to different tax measures, and how do they attempt to influence tax policy? Many countries implemented efficiency-enhancing tax reforms recommended by international financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s and now rely heavily on consumption taxes. In this context, what kinds of reforms are governments likely to propose when they face revenue needs? Ms. Fairfield will address these questions through comparative research in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. These countries encompass variation in the types of proposals that have arisen and their subsequent fates. They also provide significant variation on structural variables (intra-elite, ethnic, and class cleavages) as well as institutional and organizational variables (federalism or decentralization, party system characteristics and organization of the business sector and popular sectors) that may shape preferences regarding tax reform and influence the fate of proposed reforms.

Eleonory Gilburd, History: "To See Paris and Die": Foreign Culture in the Soviet Union, 1956-1968. This dissertation examines how the Soviet government and the educated Russian-speaking public "saw Paris" in the 1950s and 1960s: how they imagined the "West," tasted its fruit, and were profoundly transformed in the process. In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the country was deluged by foreign words, thoughts, and artifacts, yet its immediate antecedent, a cultural invasion no less significant or spectacular, has not been systematically explored. Ms. Gilburd argues that in the 1950s and 1960s, the intrusion of foreign culture -- as cause, effect, and one facet of de-Stalinization -- resulted in a dramatic restructuring of Soviet society, substantial reshaping of the subject - government relationship, and a profound transformation of both Soviet culture and the regime. Her study of the dissemination of foreign cultural imports, therefore, should lead to a reconsideration of the reformism of the 1950s in the context of cross-cultural interactions and cultural diplomacy, the concepts of world culture and the war of civilizations, Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism.

David Granger, History: Revolutions Remains: Haiti and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century. This project examines the Age of Revolution (1775-1825) from the point of view of the Haitians, rather than that of the French or the Americans. The point is to investigate why it was that Haiti was unable, or remained unwilling, to negotiate a viable insertion into the Atlantic world. Even the best work produced on the Haitian Revolution has not attacked the fundamental question (one which applies to many post-colonial cases, especially in the Caribbean and Africa) of whether Haiti as a nation state within an evolving Western system still struggling with issues of race and citizenship was even viable. These studies take positions on whether or not the Haitian Revolution had a significant, and more importantly, lasting impact on the administration of race in the Atlantic world, but they miss the mark in that they do not investigate the often subtle responses of slave holders (and abolitionists) to the questions that Haiti raised. The Haitian Revolution was indeed an extremely important event, which operated on several levels of communication, each of which had separate implications, and produced separate challenges, for the slave owning Atlantic world. The most important of these for this study is the crisis for Western political thought created by the example of a racialized revolution which expressed the foundational principles of the French and American revolutions, in an arguably more applicable setting. The rearrangement of the discourse, and the actions and expressions of the French, British and American inhabitants of the Atlantic world in response to this crisis, and the subsequent implications for Haitian nation-state building in the post-revolutionary, post-colonial period, is the focus of this research.

Daniel A. Graham, Geography: Spatial Dynamics of Lenca Indigenous Resurgence in Western Honduras. This dissertation project undertakes to improve our understanding of the lineaments of the social and political resurgence of indigenous Lencas in western Honduras over the past decade. Specifically, it analyzes and describes the way one social-movement organization (SMO), COPINH (the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras), has mobilized Lencas over the past eleven years, giving the lie to a national "myth of mestizaje" that had threatened to relegate the Lencas to the scrapheap of Honduran history. The study places particular emphasis on the spatial dynamics of the movement -- an essential element that has gone curiously missing from most social-movement analyses to date. The main research question -- how COPINH's and its members' political fortunes may be assessed in terms of the SMO's spatial practices and its creative engagement with the lived spaces of its members -- finds its expression in the development of interrelated lines of inquiry organized into two themes: spatial linking and the framing of material and meaningful claims within and between villages. In taking stock of the spatial dynamics of COPINH's political activities, this project will describe the evolution and operation of this important SMO, add to the growing literature on indigenous political resurgence in Mesoamerica, and contribute to social-movement theory by demonstrating the utility -- indeed, the necessity -- of taking space properly into account.

Sarah Horowitz, History: Friendship and Intimacy in France and Britain, 1750-1850. This dissertation examines the transformation of models of friendship among elites in France and Britain between the mid-eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, both cultures placed a premium on extensive friendship networks that helped integrate individuals into society, teaching them proper morality and behavior. However, while British conceptions remained relatively stable over time, the French came to value more intensive and exclusive bonds towards the end of the eighteenth century. Ms. Horowitz argues that the reason for this divergence was primarily political, not social or cultural. In Britain, social ties were seen as vital to the health of a liberal society; however, in France, these relationships were regarded as wholly private, in line with the demands of an étatiste state. Drawing on letters, diaries, and journals, as well as the normative literature on the topic, this study will illuminate how questions about the relationship between state, self and society were resolved in two national contexts at the advent of modernity.

Laura Hubbard, Anthropology: Lusaka Media Moderns, Johannesburg Markets: Making and Selling Culture in Southern Africa. This dissertation research focuses on the relationship of aesthetic values to notions of African modernity through tracing circuits of media production between Zambia and South Africa. As mass media in Southern Africa becomes increasingly fragmented and liberalized, Zambians find themselves in a tense and intimate relationship to Johannesburg, the center of continental media production, as they aim their products and aspirations for ?making it? southward instead of north to Europe. Underscoring the emerging and contested ties between South Africa and Zambia culturally and economically, Ms.Hubbard?s field research follows these ?south-bound? Lusaka media professionals in the music and television industries as they attempt to create mobility and meanings for cultural commodities and selves that come from the edge of a regional route of circulation. She examines the processes of valorization, aesthetic choices, notions of African modernity and trans-local alliances utilized by Zambian cultural producers through fourteen months of multi-sited ethnographic inquiry in Lusaka and Johannesburg. Ms. Hubbard argues that these routes and actors defy easy assumptions that map cultural globalization on a north-south, global -local matrix and suggests the pivotal importance of trans-local circuits between two urban centers in producing the relationship between media practices and modernity in Southern Africa.

Elizabeth McGuire, Political Science: Children of the Revolution: Chinese Students in Soviet Russia, 1920-1970. This dissertation will tell the life stories and family histories of two generations of Chinese students educated in the Soviet Union. Their experiences reveal subtexts in the history of the Sino-Soviet relationship: how the Soviet Union's attempt to create an international socialist family in political terms generated biological families as well; how travel and international education became integral to the mythologized history and everyday practice of revolution; how traditional sources of identity such as family, birthplace, and nation merged with revolutionary values to create a multitude of conflicting socialist identities; how Russian culture and language found its way into the hearts of certain Chinese elites through socialism; how the Russified Chinese became the poster-children of Sino-Soviet friendship and the ultimate scapegoats during the Sino-Soviet split; and how both governments and the former students themselves write and rewrite the story of their lives in an attempt to shape its symbolic significance.

Jason Moore, Geography: Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism. This dissertation offers an environmental history of the origins of the modern world. In four successive chapters, which take the reader from Europe's late medieval crisis to the general crisis of the 17th century, Mr. Moore advances four central propositions. First, the origins of today's global ecological crisis are found in the rise of capitalism over the long 16th century -- not in industrialization, population growth, or market expansion. Second, the crisis of feudalism was a general crisis not only of medieval Europe's political economy, but in equal measure an expression of feudalism's underlying ecological contradictions. Third, the rise of capitalism effected a radical recomposition of world ecology, and indeed the formation of a distinctively modern "world-ecology" understood as a globalizing mode of ecological production. This was manifested most dramatically in the two great commodity frontiers of early capitalism -- silver mining and sugar cultivation. By the 16th century, the first outlines of capitalism's unusual footprint could be seen -- its relentless incorporation of external social ecologies and a pronounced tendency to perceive and transform nature into discrete commodities. Thus did the political ecology of European expansion -- the midwife of capitalism -- begin to radically transform relations between nature and society. Capitalism thus differed radically from feudalism and all other pre-capitalist formations. Where earlier ecological crises had been local, capitalism globalized them.

Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Architecture: Stealing Beauty: Aesthetic Appropriation and Historical Narration in the Making of Jewish Israel and Hindu India. As cities whose built environments are largely indicative of their Arab and Islamic pasts, Jaffa (Israel) and Old Delhi (India) occupy precarious positions within their larger national imaginaries, which tend to define Israel as the Jewish homeland and, more recently, India as a Hindu nation. A crucial part of these singular and exclusionary constructions of "nation" is the denial ofa significant Arab/Palestinian history, in the case of Israel, or Muslim history, in the case of India. It is within these contexts that the two cities, valuable as they are in terms of built heritage and historical importance, threaten to unravel the national projects of Jewish and Hindu homelands, therefore becoming the loci of grave national anxieties. This dissertation will look at the tensions and trepidations that surround thte historical narrations of these cities, which aspires to appropriate the aesthetics of each city while denying its historical circumstances and origins. More specifically, it examines the relationship between these narrations of history and the physical as well as metaphorical displacements of Israeli-Arabs and Indian-Muslims from their nation-states.

Jeffrey Sallaz, Sociology: Gambling with Development: A Comparison of Casino Labor Regimes in Gauteng, South Africa, and California, USA. This dissertation is a comparison of the casino gambling industries in Nevada, USA and Gauteng, South Africa. Data derive from historical research, interviews with regulators, and participant observation as a worker (croupier) and manager (pit boss). It commences with an ethnographic puzzle: while the contemporary casino is a potential panopticon, in South Africa management embraces complete, centralized control while in Nevada authority is de-centralized and workers permitted to bend and even break official rules. These divergent strategies of managing the labor process are then traced "upward," through the historically constituted managerial habitus and to the state regimes for regulating gambling firms. In brief, legalization of casinos in each case necessitated resolutions to legitimacy threats emanating from civil society. In South Africa, purification of gambling as an industry took the form of the regulation of casino labor markets (firms must hire and promote Black workers), which entrenched managers experience as a forced substitution of untrusted -- despised, even -- workers. In Nevada, purification entailed regulation of firm ownership (capital must be clean; that is, unconnected with organized crime); allowing floor managers autonomy over labor markets.

Edith Sheffer, History: Burned Bridge: Defining East and West Germany in the Borderland since1945. How do neighbors become strangers? This dissertation examines the division of two neighboring cities by the East-West German border from 1945-89 and their contentious relations in the decade since reunification. The twin cities (Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg) were remarkably similar and intertwined prior to 1945 and comprise the largest population center outside of Berlin to be divided by the inter-German border. This story of German division and reunification illustrates how an externally imposed border was transformed into an enduring social boundary. What began as an arbitrary and unwanted demarcation between two sister cities became, in only a few years, an astonishingly accepted and even instrumentalized measure on both sides. This tactical adaptability meant the dynamic of division was far messier than many today would like to believe. My dissertation traces the intersection of global dynamics and local processes -- how states and citizens mutually negotiated, manipulated, and defined division on the ground -- through archival sources, personal writings, interviews, and a mailed survey. Ultimately, this project aims to offer a different perspective on current problems of German reunification by recasting the Cold War as a history of interaction, rather than isolation, of East and West.

Lisa Stevenson, Anthropology: Life in Question: Inuit Suicide and the Emergence of an Alternative Modernity in Nunavut. In Nunavut, Canada's northernmost territory, Inuit suicide has been described as both an "epidemic" and a "routine part of life." The topic has become the site of intervention for psychiatrists, social scientists, Inuit community groups, religious leaders, journalists, and by proxy, the international public. At the very least, it is possible to say that Inuit suicide has emerged as an international "problem" with its own cadre of experts and gatekeepers of knowledge, and that Inuit life has become an entity to be judiciously managed, improved and preserved. This research demonstrates that putting life into question brings to the fore divergent ways of conceiving of life, the significance of death, and what it may mean to be alive and human within modernity. In the writing phase of her dissertation, Ms. Stevenson will draw on fourteen months of ethnographic research in the capital of Nunavut, Iqaluit; the more traditional settlement of Pangnirtung; and the psychiatric institutions in Toronto which provide service to Baffin Island. The dissertation will focus on the production of knowledge about suicide, in a society (Inuit) that is struggling to define its place in a modern nation-state (Canada). The tension between different geographical sites of power and knowledge (Iqaluit-Pangnirtung-Toronto) and different modes of knowing (traditional Inuit knowledge versus scientific medical discourse) is central to her research and is, in the end, the source of much suffering on the part of Inuit.