Erik Schneiderhan

Reasons and Inclusion: The Foundation of Deliberation*

This article provides two empirical evaluations of deliberation. Given that scholars of deliberation often argue for its importance without empirical support, we first examine whether there is a “deliberative difference”; if actors engaging in deliberation arrive at different decisions than those who think on their own or “just talk.” As we find a general convergence within deliberation scholarship around reasons and inclusion, the second test examines whether these two specific mechanisms are central to deliberation. The first evaluation looks at outcomes within a laboratory setting; the second at videotapes of decision-making processes within this setting. Our results show two things. First, in terms of outcomes, deliberation differs from other forms of interaction. Second, reasons and inclusion are central to the deliberative process. The more reasons provided within each group, the more likely participants were to change their position; similarly, the more inclusive groups were, the more likely participants were to change their position. We conclude by arguing that more work needs to be done, both in evaluating the deliberative difference and in disaggregating deliberation and examining its central explanatory mechanisms.

Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation:

Representations,’’ delves into the more profane aspects of museum management. Here, Autry analyzes the organizational ecology of black history museums and shows that all museums face related concerns about funding, attendance, membership development, and exhibition design. Despite these similar concerns, not all museums face the same structural constraints. For example, Autry highlights how a museum’s setting and architecture can be particularly resistant to change. Furthermore, older museums must compete with newer museums that tend to provide the elaborate displays, cafes, and gift shops that contemporary museum patrons have come to expect. Older, socialjustice oriented, community-centered museums thus find themselves having to cater to visiting tourists in order to survive. The final empirical chapter, ‘‘Memory Deviants: Breaking the Collective,’’ returns to the arguments presented in Chapter Two by considering the limitations of consensusdriven collective memory. Here, Autry develops the concept of ‘‘memory deviants’’ as those ‘‘who openly refuse to abide by conventional styles and tropes used to represent the past’’—a welcome conceptual addition to a literature that tends to focus on official agents of memory (p. 22). Here, Autry provides detailed information on specific sites of memory, including museums and monuments with multiple or competing narratives, such as the King Center in Atlanta and the Voortrekker monument in Pretoria. Various ‘‘art spaces’’ provide additional fodder for analysis and, according to Autry, represent more likely venues for deviant memories. While the creative arts are often motivated by and contribute to collective representations of difficult pasts, memory scholars rarely include them in the same analytical framework as more ‘‘traditional’’ sites of memory (i.e., monuments, memorials, and museums). This approach worked well and suggests a promising avenue for continued research. Taken together, these chapters present a compelling analysis of museums as ‘‘texts’’ worthy of analysis in their own right, but exactly which museums the author included in the study remains somewhat elusive. The book begins with a helpful list of museums that the author visited, including 17 in South Africa and 22 in the United States; the introduction (p. 5), however, mentions 13 museums in South Africa and 16 museums in the United States. Moreover, it is unclear whether the author visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which opened in 2016 in Washington, D.C. The NMAAHC is not on the list of museums visited but is discussed throughout the text. These discrepancies may have little if any impact on the analysis presented, but they did prove somewhat distracting. More detail on which museums were included in the study, and why, would also help to clarify the scope of the study. Some of the museums are described as black history museums, others as ethnic history museums, and still others as national history museums. This surely represents the richness and complexity of the data, but it can be confusing for a reader unfamiliar with such distinctions in the field of museum studies. Overall, Desegregating the Past offers an important perspective on the collective memory and commemoration of difficult pasts. It presents a convincing argument that will likely challenge many memory scholars to think more deeply about the nature and consequences of the ‘‘collective’’ in representations of the past. Students and scholars of sociology, history, cultural studies, memory studies, and museum studies will find much to gain from this text, especially those interested in counter-narratives and counter-memory.

Talking Like a Generation: The ‘Documentary’ Meaning of Ethnicity for Aging Minority Britons

This article contributes to the ‘cognitive turn’ in the study of ethnicity and national identity, which focuses on how individuals construct ethnic identity categories pertinent to social cohesion. Using Mannheim as a methodological and analytical guide, we show how examining ethnicity as a relational enactment devoid of a priori categorisations allows situational identities that intersect with classical sociological concepts other than ethnicity – namely generation, class, and citizenship – to emerge within and across typical ethnic categorisations. We draw on an analysis of micro-level interactions among 40 aging ‘black and minority ethnics’ (BMEs) engaging in small-group discussions and a large deliberative assembly held in London in 2011.

The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity: Formulating a Field of Study

that James draws between the extension of housing credit, which assumes the existence of a housing property market, and customs that vest land in the hands of ‘‘communal leaders,’’ effectively decommodifying land and therefore housing. Two decades after the end of Apartheid, millions of South Africans are mired in debt. Is credit ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’? Money from Nothing deftly demonstrate that no easy answers are possible. For its champions, credit brings the radiant future into the present. The spending it enables on items—from university education to vacuum cleaners— greases the economy and provides employment. For its detractors, credit fuels moral degradation and degrees of debt peonage that rival the grinding poverty and subordination of apartheid. The ‘‘credit is bad’’ faction may look to the peculiar composition of South Africa’s credit lending community for support. In one of her most arresting vignettes, James shows that Afrikaners who had been replaced with black employees in South Africa’s vast civil service were among the first to carve out an alternative lifestyle by lending money at ‘‘uncapped’’ rates to the new and ambitious civil servants filling the deracializing state. Greatly complicating matters for the borrower is the power that lenders have to garnish wages and (before the practice was outlawed) confiscate ATM cards, which they were entitled to use until a debt was satisfied. Ranged against such stories, however, are the narratives of middleclass employees—any number of teachers, policemen, civil servants, aspirant small business owners—for whom the transcendent quest in their lives, to ensure that their children benefit from the best (and most expensive) education, would remain a chimera were it not for credit. Although it navigates this debate deftly, Money from Nothing excels in underscoring the crippling effect of the credit/debt nexus in South Africa. James’ outstanding ethnography, interviews, and observations animate a topic that tends to be dull and ‘‘data driven’’ in the usual hands of economists. Where economists and institutionalist accounts devote meticulous attention to the scale, organization, and strategies of the institutions that are part of the credit industry, James delves into the beliefs, aspirations, and cultural orientations of borrowers without moralizing about the predictable outcome of continued or greater immiseration for South Africa’s poorer citizens, whether they are gainfully employed or not. Good pioneering books inspire further research, as Money from Nothing does. Even if her anthropological interests quite reasonably lie elsewhere, questions of the state’s transformation after 1994 are surely more pertinent to the evolution of South Africa’s credit economy than James suggests. Finally, the democratization of credit in a racial state that for decades thrived on suppressing the purchasing power of the black majority undoubtedly involved the painstaking construction of a supporting advertising blitz. The trove of narratives, images, and discourses that awaits future researchers will no doubt round out the fascinating story that James has told.