Stephen Ellingson

Understanding the Dialectic of Discourse and Collective Action: Public Debate and Rioting in Antebellum Cincinnati

This analysis of the public debate and riots about abolitionism in antebellum Cincinnati uses constructivist approaches to demonstrate how discourse makes some forms of action possible and legitimate and, conversely, how collective action transforms the meaning and structure of discourse. Two incidents of mob violence in Cincinnati interrupted the discursive struggle over abolitionism, undermining some diagnoses and solutions while making others more compelling. Speakers incorporated the events into their discourses, thus creating new definitions of the situation and new means to resolve the problems it raised, abandoning or reworking discredited arguments, and reframing the issues in the debate. The conclusion discussed this studys implications for understanding the dialectical relationship between cultural representation and social action.

Book ReviewsWhitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media.By John Gabriel. New York: Routledge. Pp. vii+219.

While her ethnographic approach to sexualities leads Weston to larger debates in social science, just as she had hoped it would, it also serves her resistance to queer theory. Weston asserts that the recent ethnographic treatment of sexualities has produced a rich variety of sexual practices (not all consistent with sexual identities); it, therefore, also has produced an anxiety over whether there is a sexuality prior to its various practices or whether sexuality is constituted as such in terms of these various practices. Weston concludes that recent ethnographic study of sexualities has produced its own version of queer theory, which is able to complicate and denaturalize the Anglo/Eurocentric conceptions of gender and sexuality. While Weston seriously oversimplifies queer theory, ignoring its treatment of unconscious fantasy in relationship to dominant ideological discourses, her ethnographic approach does lead to other complexities, those produced when the ethnographer takes the role of native. Because anthropology’s recent treatment of sexualities has depended on the ethnographic work of self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual anthropologists, Weston turns her concluding chapter into a reflection on the difficulties of doing ethnography of “one’s own.” Focusing on the compounded experience (or the hybridity) of being a native-to-be-studied and a professional-trained-to-study, Weston offers a chilling account of the rejection and marginalization facing anthropologists practicing various forms of autoethnography, even if they get jobs, tenure, and fame. But, she also argues that it is these anthropologists who will most likely retool social science for the 21st century. It is these anthropologists who, in embodying the contentious debates over scientific authority, are best able to elaborate strategies for self-reflexivity necessary to a critical social theory. While Fighting Words and Long Slow Burn do not break new ground—at least not for those who have been close to the cultural criticism of the last 20 years, nevertheless, both are careful treatments of cultural criticism and its impact on social science. While neither is concerned to further elaborate the more radical aspects of the cultural criticism of the past 20 years, both focus on what matters most: the politics of race, class, gender, nation, ethnicity, and sexuality.