Manuela Boatcă

“From the Standpoint of Germanism”: A Postcolonial Critique of Weber's Theory of Race and Ethnicity

Sociological conceptualizations of capitalism, modernity, and economic development as due only to factors endogenous to Western Europe have been prominent targets of postcolonial criticism. Instead of an over-the-board condemnation of classical sociology as a whole or of the work of one classic in particular, the present article zooms in on Max Webers theory of ethnicity from a postcolonial perspective in order to pinpoint the absences, blind spots and gestures of exclusion that Webers classical analysis has bequeathed to the sociology of social inequality more generally and to the sociology of race and ethnicity in particular. Through a reconstruction of Webers conceptual and political take on race and ethnicity, the article links Webers general social theory with his particular views on racial and ethnic matters and reveals both as historically and politically situated. To this end, it starts with a brief look at Webers theory of modernity as an indispensable prerequisite for an analysis of his approach to race and ethnicity and subsequently discusses his chapter on Ethnic Groups, his treatment of the “Polish question” in the 1890s and of the “Negro question” in the United States in the 1890s. Using Webers canonical treatment of ethnicity as a test case, the article ends by suggesting that postcolonial critique can prove sociological theory more generally as built upon unwarranted overgeneralization from a particular standpoint constructed as universal.

Dynamics of inequalities in a global perspective: An introduction

The contribution in this introduction, and in this monograph issue of Current Sociology itself, is to explain how patterns of inequality associated with global capital have been reconfigured in different contexts and have historically produced varied results. The definition of global inequality used here transcends Euro- and US-centric models of linear development and comparisons of national income and its distribution to explain how complex socioeconomic hierarchies, including – but not limited to – class, reinforce inequalities among social groups around the globe. The editors trace contemporary patterns of inequality back to the history of imperial and colonial power so as to reintroduce into the scholarly dialogue on inequality a broader understanding of ascriptive hierarchies of race, gender, caste, and national citizenship and their relationship to colonial conquest, enslavement, and labor migrations as interrelated contexts of the global production and reproduction of inequality patterns.

Die zu Ende gedachte Moderne — Alternative Theoriekonzepte in den lateinamerikanischen und osteuropäischen Peripherien

Die Moderne ist zahlbar geworden. Lange Zeit als einzigartiges abendlandisches Phanomen betrachtet, dessen Entstehung einem historisch kontingenten Bundel von soziokulturellen Faktoren zu verdanken war, wird in der neueren theoretischen Diskussion zunehmend im Plural auf sie verwiesen. Dabei ist es unerheblich, ob von ihrer Vielfalt oder aber von ihrer Einheit, ob von unterschiedlichen Pfaden, Konfigurationen oder Auspragungen einer im Grunde unteilbaren Moderne, oder eindeutig von „anderen“ (Faubion 1993), „multiplen“ (Eisenstadt 2000), „alternativen“ (Beck u. a. 2001) oder „verwobenen“ (Randeria 1999) Modernen die Rede ist: die Notwendigkeit, die Homogenitatsthese zu verteidigen, impliziert bereits deren strittig gewordenen Charakter.

Unequal and gendered: Notes on the coloniality of citizenship

An entire Occidentalist tradition of citizenship theory viewed citizenship as a modern, progressive institution that helped overcome particularities of unequal social origin. Contrary to the claims of this (mainly male) Western scholarly tradition, the article argues, first, that the institution of citizenship has developed in the West through the legal (and physical) exclusion of non-European, non-White and non-Western populations from civic, political, social and cultural rights; these exclusions, and thus citizenship as such, have historically been (en)gendered. Second, the article maintains that citizenship and gender are the most decisive factors accounting for extreme inequalities between individuals in rich and poor countries in the twenty-first century. Forms of racialization, sexualization and precarization to which the acquisition of citizenship and the corresponding gain in social mobility are linked today are illustrated with examples of practices to subvert citizenship law through marriage or childbirth in countries relying primarily on jus sanguinis and jus soli, respectively.

Désoccidentaliser la sociologie. L'Europe au mirroir de la Chine

A book on the de-Westernization of sociology that looks at Europe from a Chinese perspective cannot be but big news. At least since Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, many Western scholars have been aware that the treatment of non-Western knowledges as local, particular, and as such ungeneralizable has gone into the making of Western academic knowledge as universal, generally valid, and unsituated. While subsequent poststructuralist, postcolonial and decolonial critiques have systematically denounced and painstakingly uncovered the historical contexts, the economic structures and/or the ideological mechanisms underlying the global asymmetries of knowledge production, works attempting to reverse-engineer the process by looking at Europe through one of its paradigmatic Others are still scarce. At a time when, as Roulleau-Berger tells us, it has become impossible for Europe ‘to ignore China’ (p. 8), starting from Chinese sociology in order to reinterpret European sociology would seem to be the perfect choice. However, this is not what the book does. In spite of its ambitious title, the author’s claim to participate in ‘a process of decolonial reformulation’ of universality (p. 13) that addresses ethnoscapes of knowledges emerged among Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean sociologists and defined according to shared academic norms ‘against forms of colonial domination of knowledges’ (p. 13) never goes beyond the introduction. The remainder of the book is essentially a comparison of French and Chinese sociologies of the past three decades. As such, it looks for similarities and differences between approaches to mainstream Western sociological topics, such as modernity, social mobility, and individualization, thus providing a conventional comparative analysis of two national cultures of scholarship, rather than the ‘intermediate transnational space’ (p. 11) proposed at the outset as an alternative to provincialized knowledges. While it often points to the influence of Western theoretical production and key empirical issues on Chinese

Die diskursive Macht von Zuschreibungen

Die Spannung zwischen wissenschaftlichem Erkenntnisinteresse, massenmedialer Dramatisierung und offentlicher Kriminalitatsfurcht — auf der potentiellen Betroffenheit eines jeden basierend — hat aus der Gewaltproblematik einen „Dauerbrenner“ der Forschung und Berichterstattung der letzten Jahrzehnte gemacht. Bei einem Diskussionsspektrum, das sich einerseits durch die Sensibilisierung gegenuber bereits bekannten und andererseits durch die „Entdeckung“ neuer Gewaltformen (vgl. Gunther 1998: 10) stets erweitert, ist der Verweis auf „unumstrittene“ Ergebnisse, auf den Wissenschaft wie Massenmedien systematisch rekurrieren, Ausdruck des regelmasigen Legitimierungsbedarfs eines anwachsenden Gewaltdiskurses.

Gegenwartsdiagnosen zu Gewalt im Geschlechterverhältnis

Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Phanomen Gewalt steht seit uber zwanzig Jahren im Mittelpunkt wissenschaftlicher wie offentlicher Debatten. Unabhangig davon, wo die Ursachen fur Gewalt gesucht werden, ob der immer wieder thematisierte Anstieg der Gewalt in der heutigen Gesellschaft als Tatsache oder als sozial(politisch)e, massenmediale oder pseudowissenschaftliche Konstruktion gesehen wird und ob Losungen fur Gewalt als soziales Problem oder eher fur die Relativierung ihrer skandalisierten und skandalisierenden Ausmase im Bewusstsein der Offentlichkeit angestrebt werden — ein gegenwartiger Trend ist ihnen allen gemeinsam: Sozial- wie kulturwissenschaftliche, juristische und medizinische Theorien zum gesamtgesellschaftlichen Phanomen Gewalt beziehen immer ofter in ihre Analysen die Kategorie „Geschlecht“ mit ein.

Racial urbanities: towards a global cartography

Race and city. Both terms share an anchor at the heart of commonsense discussions about the ways in which we live our lives. Both terms are the invisible centre of subdisciplinary studies in both social sciences and humanities. Both terms mean something, and yet when scrutinised more carefully they appear to expand to include everything or else melt into air as conceptually flawed caricatures of reality. (Keith, 2005, p. 26)

Postkolonialismus und Dekolonialität

Postkolonialismus ist ein Sammelbegriff fur eine Reihe von kolonialismuskritischen Ansatzen in den Kultur-, Geschichts- und Sozialwissenschaften, die essentialistische Annahmen uber den Modellcharakter westlicher Entwicklung als eurozentrisch anzeigen. Anhand von Perspektiven aus kolonialen Kontexten machen post- und dekoloniale Ansatze auf die wechselseitige Konstitution von westlicher und nicht-westlicher Welt aufmerksam. Eine zentrale theoretische Rolle spielt dabei die Kritik an westlichen Konzeptualisierungen der Moderne vor dem Hintergrund der kolonialen Erfahrung mit dem britischen Kolonialismus, insbesondere in Indien, sowie mit dem iberischen Kolonialismus, insbesondere in Lateinamerika. Lucken in der Aufarbeitung der kolonialen Geschichte anderer europaischer Lander gehen einher mit der mangelhaften Rezeption kritischer, post- und dekolonialer Arbeiten.

Staatsbürgerschaft, Gender und globale Ungleichheiten

The category gender has marked the institution of citizenship from the modern / colonial outset, and both citizenship and gender have been providing crucial factors for extreme inequalities between countries. In order to elaborate on this thesis, the article introduces a global and postcolonial perspective on citizenship and gender. In a second step, the article discusses »acts of citizenship« such as marriage, motherhood and sex tourism to subvert, reinscribe and appropriate engendered colonial-racialized structures. Finally, the article advocates a stronger focus on persistent colonial intersectional gender relations for the analysis of global power structures.