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Example research essay topic: Final Chapter Chapter Five - 2,066 words

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Law and Community in Three American Towns In what ways and to what extent is difference to be accepted, accommodated, and / or paraded in todays globalized, postmodern world? Can, should, or must the envelope be pushed further? By and large, these conundrums of difference and belonging are at the heart of both books under review. In their very titles, both place a first concept that should be addressed more widely in anthropology in dialogue with a second that has long been central to the discipline. Both volumes are greatly influenced by the post- milieu at the heart of current scholarly trends. Both pay special attention to the role of the nation-state in the configuration of subjectivity.

This includes the states decreasing ability to penetrate the realities of everyday life, given the new flows that increasingly lie beyond its gaze and regulatory capacity. Both volumes seek to expose the cracks in official discourses. Both are framed in such a way as to position themselves within the larger political field, infusing more than a bit of moral vision into their scholarly enterprises. Albeit to varying degrees, both books also take liberalism to task as a political philosophy, but especially as a regime.

Beyond these similarities, the two works take different approaches. Citizenship and Identity offers itself as an introduction to key issues in current social and political theory. It looks at the political economic pressures created by advanced capitalism particularly towards the postmodern, globalizing realities in which the authors argue that the two title concepts are ultimately inscribed. In contrast to the pervasive tendency to view citizenship as universal and identity as particular, the book seeks to promote the relationship between citizenship and identity from a perspective that sees modern citizenship not only as a legal and political membership in a nation-state but also as an articulating principle for the recognition of group rights (p. 4).

This articulation of group rights shows the constant struggle, at once theoretical and practical, of coming to grips with alternative visions of the political. Citizenship and Identity has seven chapters, the middle five of which each deal with a specific type of citizenship: modern (Chapter Two), diaspora and aboriginal (Three), sexual (Four), cosmopolitan (Five), and cultural (Six). Chapter Two, for example, builds on T. H.

Marshalls articulation of various types of citizenship, and the extent to which they were enabled and restricted by the pressures of advanced capitalism, with its historical creation of social stratification and class inequalities. The chapter then draws from the work of Otto Gierke on group rights, Pierre Bourdieu on the theory of social groups (noting the mirror dangers of ignoring groups and uncritically reifying them), and a variety of democratic theorists (radical and otherwise) in the debates over redistribution and recognition as potential redresses for exclusions past. Chapter Five discusses globalization as a set of processes marked by two major differences: (1) the intensity of flows, and (2) the fact that such flows express new types of relations not between states but between transnational entities and local actors. Insofar as rights are concerned in this new-world order, the very concept of citizenship has lost much of its force, ceding ground to the exclusive privileging availed to cosmopolitan professions. Meanwhile, a large number of groups (largely urban), such as ethnic and racial minorities, immigrants, youth, unskilled workers, flexible workers, and a permanent underclass, suffer the blows of continued ether ization. In its ambitions, Citizenship and Identity is doubly political, insofar as it seeks to provide both diagnosis and cure.

The authors leave clear their radical democratic agenda in the battle against advanced capitalism. They argue for a critical balance between redistribution and recognition in equitably allocating the various forms of capital to the multitude of groups in a highly plural panorama. This work has an edge, one that often elides the line between moral and moralizing. In the authors call for an ethos of pluralization (p. 161), the descriptive, theoretical, and normative invariably intertwine. In spite of the books central focus on cultural politics, it falls short of providing a full sense of the cultural.

Aside from the basic understanding of difference, culture is buried in the general theory of groups. The result often seems more an attempt to legitimize ontological (albeit not essentialist) difference than to document how groups might pursue varied strategies in pressing claims, maintaining solidarity, or configuring themselves differentially and with less or more success in response to the realities of advanced capitalism so well chronicled in the volume. (Culture also appears in a different venue, in Chapter 6 s discussions of Bourdieu-ian culture-as-capital as a defining characteristic of postindustrial society. ) Moreover, liberalism, the West, advanced capitalism, and the dominant class all take their turn as (apparently) unitary culprits. The result is that the authors treatment suffers from what Marshall Sailing has referred to in a different context as cosmologies of capitalism (perhaps a less than fair critique of macro-style sociologists). The books promotion as an introduction serves to assuage many of the generalizations and glosses found throughout, however, and it is precisely in its role as a synthesizing introduction to the wide work on democracy and citizenship that its strength lies. This last critique is a good segue into Democracy and Ethnography. The book attempts to confront the relationships between the two title concepts in a series of twelve case studies falling under the aegis of the comparison of the United States and Spain.

None of the works is explicitly comparative save the last (see below). Leaning heavily on culture, Carol J. Greenhouse and David Greenwood's introduction attempts to map out the terrain for an integrative framework. Although the choice of these two cases seems somewhat fortuitous, it is in line with traditions of political scholarship on the two countries. (A strong current whose genealogy traces back to Tocqueville argues for American democratic exceptionalism; likewise, Spain is frequently held up as the twentieth-century exemplar of peaceful transition from an authoritarian regime. ) The comparative focus of the discourse of difference is racial versus ethno geographic, and in great part, individual versus collective, in the respective countries.

According to Greenhouse and Greenwood, the three main interrelationships of the two title concepts are: first, the influence of state institutions over public discourses of diversity; second, the exchanges between constitutional discourses of diversity and anthropological discourses of difference; and third, the transformation of these structures and exchanges into modes of knowledge, reproduced in academic disciplines and in the professions associated with state practice (p. 7). These themes account for the tripartite organization of the book. Part I is called Diversity and Equality in Liberal Debate. In Chapter Five, defining disorderly difference as difference that threatens the allegedly fragile harmony and stability of this nation of immigrants (p. 82), Austin Sarat and Roger Berkowitz look at two Supreme Court cases. Roughly 100 years apart, the suits were initiated by parties asking that their differences be accepted via exemptions: Mormon polygamy and Amish rejection of public secondary school education. While the former plea was rejected and the latter accepted, the authors argue that both legitimized the institutional order.

The pursuit of austerity is relentless, and it is ultimately those in control that get to decide which differences are to be tolerated and the extent to which they become a threat to the polity, conceived of as such. As the authors astutely note, [i]f one is to be hospitable to difference, one must learn to think and speak about order as the indispensable partner of the friends of difference. (p. 83). Their call for accommodation, however, does not seem that different from the hierarchical tolerance of which they are so critical. Part II bears the title The Making of Official Discourses of Identity. Chapter 8, by Phyllis Pease Chock, explores the imagery of porous borders in U. S.

Congress hearings on (Mexican) immigration, and the perceived need to regain control. One of the recurring images was that of an animal-like population of illegal immigrants seen as overrunning the U. S. borders and thereby creating a state of disorder.

This allowed for the conflation of social differences with specie differences. It also stood in marked contrast to the alternative frame of personhood whereby, through a divide-and-assimilate strategy, the good alien could find success and be held up as paradigmatic of the very process of immigration. In Chocks words, [t]alk of a crisis of illegal immigration marked an ambiguous cultural space in which state and nation were conflated. The image of porous borders provided both challenges to meanings of community and nation and possibilities to make new meanings (p. 156).

Once again, we see how institutions serve as gatekeepers against excess difference. Part III is titled Official Discourses and Professional Practice. In the collections magisterial final chapter (13), Josep M. Comelles traces the history of ethnographic practice on both sides of the Atlantic. The chapter focuses on ethnography's roots in the medical profession, largely ignored by anthropology. For all the ambivalence's and ambiguities, ethnographic knowledge does pull towards context, egalitarianism, engagement, and, ultimately, greater social justice (and thus democracy).

Unfortunately, this model of medical practice was replaced by an antisocial, efficiency-driven, anatomical-clinical model inherently more compatible with the rise of the welfare state. This chronicling of alternative history raises issues about the self-promotion of a nascent discipline of anthropology and its subsequent less-than-democratic portrayal of the history of ethnography. This collection of essays performs the necessary service of bringing the scholarship of some leading Spanish anthropologists to a wider, anglophone audience. Moreover, some of the contributors are not anthropologists. This movement toward interdisciplinary scholarship bodes well for future anthropological discussions of democracy, considering how far behind anthropologists are in this terrain. The anthropological perspective is nevertheless welcome in this field precisely because of its focus on culture and interstitial realities.

I do have one major qualm with the volumes introductory framing, which dovetails well with themes in the final essay. I do not know why specializing in culture means taking a position (p. 6), and why pretending otherwise can only lead one to the so-called pure categories of ethno nationalist extremism (p. 15). Nor am I convinced that the Spanish anthropologists in the volume emphasize that anthropologists must decide whether to serve the chroniclers of regional movements or confront their renderings of identity and difference (p. 20). My reading of their work, both here and elsewhere, suggests that these scholars understand better the contradictions and ambiguities of cultural texts and contexts. (The reader of Spanish may consult the October 1992 issue of the journal Antropologica, including the piece in which Greenwood discusses at length [p]optical mercenaries, masquerading as anthropologists. ) Such positioning leads one to reflect upon other potential interconnections between ethnography and democracy, and to recognize that both define a range of rhetorical practices that legitimize a particular regime. Of course anthropology is itself inscribed within a field of politics. Perhaps recognition of this fact places an even greater burden on its practitioners to portray social reality with its many truths, contradictions, and pressures, especially when telling the tales of sinners and saints.

Of course democracy can never be constructed in a field of full inclusion, as any attempt to do so would be at the very cost of definition. But unless we decide to take on the clear mantle of advocacy, anthropologists are better served when we portray subjectivities rather than usurping the political fields that we ostensibly seek to document. Normativity need not be a bad thing. Sociological theory can be social, and social theory can be critical, as it has been from Marx to Habermas and beyond. As Comelles notes in the final chapter, ethnography creates the hope for real democracy insofar as it brings context to the fore and empowers subjects by providing a forum for their voices. As he further notes in his concluding reflections, anthropologists should be touched by the world around us, and let its dramas speak to us; real engagement might therefore be considered the antithesis of demonization.

The great merit of Democracy and Ethnography is that of placing ethnographic practices and settings within a framework of democracy. This is no small feat, and hopefully, it sets the stage for further work linking the two concepts. The books ultimate weakness is that it does not go quite as far in this direction as it claims or as might be hoped.


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Research essay sample on Final Chapter Chapter Five

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