Sociology

This book tells the story of an apparently territorial journey—the one between the village and the city—to capture some of the core fantasies and anxieties of the Indian civilization in the past hundred years. It looks at the vicissitudes of the metaphor of journey; profiles various heroes as they negotiate the transitions from the village to the city and back to the village; and focuses on the psychopathological journey from a poisoned village into a self-annihilating city. It contends that the decline of the village in the creative imagination of Indians in recent decades has altered the meaning of this journey drastically. And that even the true potentialities of Indian cosmopolitanism and urbanity cannot be realized without rediscovering the myth of the village.

Over the past half-century, two overarching topics have dominated the study of mass political behaviour: How do ordinary citizens form their political judgments, and how good are they from a normative perspective? This book provides a novel goal-based approach to these questions, one that compels a wholesale rethinking of the roots of responsible democratic citizenship. The central claim of the book is that partisan identity comes in qualitatively different forms, with distinct political consequences. Blind partisan loyalty, as the pejorative label implies, facilitates bias and reduces attention to valuable information. Critical loyalty, by doing the opposite, outperforms standard measures of political engagement in leading to normatively desirable judgments. Drawing on both experimental and survey methods—as well as five decades of American political history—this book examines the nature and quality of mass political judgment across a wide range of political contexts, from perceptions of the economy, to the formation, updating, and organization of public policy preferences, to electoral judgment and partisan change. Contrary to much previous scholarship, the empirical findings reveal that rational judgment—holding preferences that align with one's material interests, values, and relevant facts—does not hinge on cognitive ability. Rather, breaking out of the apathy-versus-bias prison requires critical involvement, and critical involvement requires critical partisan loyalty.

This volume discusses criminology and policy analysis of adolescence. The focus is on the principles and policy of a separate and distinct system of juvenile justice. The book opens with an introduction of the creation of adolescence, presenting a justification for the category of the juvenile or a period of partial responsibility before full adulthood. Subsequent sections include empirical investigations of the nature of youth criminality and legal policy towards youth crime. At the heart of the book is an argument for a penal policy that recognizes diminished responsibility and a youth policy that emphasizes the benefits of letting the maturing process continue with minimal interruption. The book concludes with applications of the core concerns to five specific problem areas in current juvenile justice: teen pregnancy, transfer to criminal court, minority overrepresentation, juvenile gun use, and youth homicide.

This book explores the convergence of different notions of Asia through the meeting between Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian and curator Okakura Tenshin in Calcutta in 1902. Set against a panoramic background, it draws on the intersections of the late Meiji period in Japan and the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, weaves through an intricate tapestry of ideas relating to pan-Asianism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship, and positions the early modernist tensions of the period within-and against-the spectre of a unified Asia that concealed considerable political differences. In addition to countering the imperialist subtext of Okakura's The Ideals of the East and The Awakening of the East against Tagore's radical critique of Nationalism, it inflects the dominant tropes of postcolonial theory by highlighting the subtleties of beauty and the interstices of homosociality and love. Spanning geographical boundaries, across the cities of Tokyo, Boston, and Calcutta, the book offers new insights into the ways in which the Orient travelled within and beyond Asia, stimulated by emergent modes of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

With urban poverty rising and affordable housing disappearing, the homeless and other “disorderly” people continue to occupy public space in many American cities. Concerned about the alleged ill effects their presence inflicts on property values and public safety, many cities have wholeheartedly embraced “zero-tolerance” or “broken window” policing efforts to clear the streets of unwanted people. Through an almost completely unnoticed set of practices, these people are banned from occupying certain spaces. Once zoned out, they are subject to arrest if they return—effectively banished from public places. This book offers an exploration of these new tactics that dramatically enhance the power of the police to monitor and arrest thousands of city dwellers. Drawing upon an extensive body of data, the chapters chart the rise of banishment in Seattle, a city on the leading edge of this emerging trend, to establish how it works and explore its ramifications. They demonstrate that, although the practice allows police and public officials to appear responsive to concerns about urban disorder, it is a highly questionable policy—it is expensive, does not reduce crime, and does not address the underlying conditions that generate urban poverty. Moreover, interviews with the banished themselves reveal that exclusion makes their lives and their path to self-sufficiency immeasurably more difficult. At a time when ever more cities and governments in the U.S. and Europe resort to the criminal justice system to solve complex social problems, the book provides a challenge to exclusionary strategies that diminish the life circumstances and the rights of those it targets.

This book examines interracial intimacy in the beginning of the twenty-first century, an era rife with racial contradictions in which interracial relationships are increasingly seen as forward-thinking symbols of racial progress, even as old stereotypes about illicit eroticism endure. With extensive qualitative research, this book examines the racial dynamics of everyday life for lesbian, gay, and heterosexual Black/White couples. It disputes the notion that interracial partners are enlightened subjects who have somehow managed to “get beyond” race. Instead, for many partners interracial intimacy represents not the end, but rather the beginning of a sustained process of negotiating racial differences. This research reveals the ordinary challenges that partners frequently face and the myriad ways in which race shapes partners’ interactions with each other, as well as with family members, neighbors, coworkers, and strangers.This book analyzes contemporary interracial lives through the lens of “racework”: the everyday actions and strategies by which individuals maintain close relationships in a society with deeply rooted racial inequalities. It explores how racework operates in three realms: public spaces, the internal dynamics of relationships, and in the construction of interracial identities. Comparing the experiences of gay and lesbian partners with heterosexual partners, it argues that sexuality and gender play a significant role in how partners use racework in negotiating public spaces and identities, but a minor role in how partners deal with inequalities inside their relationship. With a focus on racework, this book positions interracial intimacy as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular accomplishment.

This book revisits the Black Seventh Ward neighborhood and residents of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro over the course of the twentieth century. Through the dual lens of political agency and critical historical events, Black Citymakers follows the transformation of the neighborhood from being predominantly black at the beginning of the twentieth century into a largely white upper-middle-class and commercial neighborhood by the century’s conclusion. Employing the insights of an array of scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley, James Scott, Cathy Cohen, William Julius Wilson, and Mary Pattillo, Black Citymakers argues that black Philadelphians were by no means mere victims of large-scale socioeconomic, structural, and political changes such as deindustrialization of the local and national economy, urban renewal, and the growing federal intervention into urban America following World War II. As the book shows, black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intraracial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. Whereas most urban studies analyze multiple facets of black life over the span of a few decades, Black Citymakers extends the chronology to nearly a century, capturing events such as banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led antiurban renewal mobilization, and the changing politics emergent in post–civil rights Philadelphia.

André Béteille’s Caste, Class and Power has grown out of his fieldwork in Sripuram in Thanjavur District, Tamil Nadu. The book’s main strengths are the clarity of its descriptive analysis of the three caste groups and agrarian classes, as well as the interactions between them; and the force of its theoretical argument about the relationship between the caste structure, the class system and the distribution of political power. Its thesis about correspondence among the caste, class and political systems is considerably less convincing for the middling majority than for either the Brahmins or Adi-Dravidas. It is also an important historical source about the social structure of Indian villages in the early decades following Independence. Additionally, it is a model of ethnographic and theoretical analysis.

This book explores the practice of Christianity among the Yakoba in the small region of Kerala. It uses the categories of time, space, architecture, and the body as a means of identifying the ways in which Hindu, Christian, and Syrian strands have been woven together to form a rich cultural tapestry in the region. The Yakoba, on which this study is based, are divided into two distinct groups—the Orthodox Syrians and the Jacobite Syrians. The author relates their on-going quarrel over ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the ways in which this quarrel affects Syrian Christian life and experience as a whole. She argues that people’s interpretations of Christianity are a very powerful mode of cultural expression and societal flexibility.

The 40% drop in crime that occurred across the U.S. from 1991 to 2000 largely remains an unsolved mystery. Even more puzzling then is the crime rate drop in New York City, which lasted twice as long and was twice as large. This 80% drop in crime over nineteen years represents the largest crime decline on record. This book sets off in search of the reason for the New York difference through a detailed and comprehensive statistical investigation into the city's falling crime rates and possible explanations. If you listen to City Hall, aggressive police created a zero tolerance law enforcement regime that drove crime rates down. Is this self-serving political sound bite true? Are the official statistics generated by the police accurate? The book shows the numbers are correct and argues that some combination of more cops, new tactics, and new management can take some credit for the decline, but zero tolerance policing and quality of life were never a consistent part of the NYPD's strategy. That the police can make a difference in preventing crime overturns decades of conventional wisdom for criminologists, but the book points out that the New York experience challenges the major assumptions dominating American crime and drug control policies that almost everyone else has missed. First, imprisonment in actually New York decreased significantly from 1990 to 2009 and was well below the national average, proving that it is possible to have substantially less crime without increases in incarceration. Second, the NYPD sharply reduced drug violence (over 90%) without any reduction in hard drug use. In other words, they won the war on drug violence without winning the war on drugs. Finally, the stability of New York's population, economy, education, demographics, or immigration patterns calls into question the long-accepted cultural and structural causes of violence in America's cities. That fact that high rates of crime are not hard wired into modern city life is welcome news for policy makers, criminal justice officials, and urban dwellers everywhere.