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THE EXCERPT

EXCHANGE IDEOLOGIES, PATRIARCHY, AND ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION IN SYRIA

“We don’t have two prices here, as God is my witness, our first price is our last price!” Despite frequent attempts by his mainly female clientele to negotiate a price discount on the household items he sold from his shop near Aleppo’s bazaar, Fuad Umar invariably refused to bargain. As a regular guest of the shop before the Syrian uprising, I was used to hearing his polite but firm refusals, however insistent his customers’ demands became. In moments between dealing with customers, he sometimes asserted his personal integrity with rhetorical flourishes and in a tone of masculine decisiveness, exclaiming, “In Islam, you cannot cheat even a Pharaoh!” His adult son Hamdi, who worked alongside him, adopted the same stance, telling customers, “Our price is not two prices,” and telling me that, “in Islam you are held to account for every word that you say.” In other words, even a white lie spoken in the course of a sale would render haram or unlawful any profit gained from it. It was no surprise that Hamdi’s position was identical to his father’s; he deferred unquestioningly to his father and often seemed to be a model of filial obedience and devotion, opening the shop early each day before his father arrived, greeting him respectfully, and executing his instructions without delay. For his part, Fuad acted as a pedagogue to his sons in the shop, offering moral instruction and guidance, reminding them to pray and to keep precise accounts. He prided himself on this, telling me, “This is one of the few markets in Aleppo where you still see fathers sitting alongside their sons, instructing them.”

The two positions Fuad adopted in the shop—refusing to bargain on price and commanding the labor and obedience of his sons—may appear to be separate issues, but they were connected. In both, Fuad approximated the ideal of a man

whose “word is not two words” (kalimatuh mu kalimatayn)—who was not unstable or inconsistent in his speech but whose words were definitive and decisive, worthy at once of trust and obedience. This was an idiom of masculine maturity. In Aleppo’s markets, merchants and shopkeepers tended not to recognize an arbitrary age of majority; a person was no longer a boy (walad), no longer young or small (sghir), simply when it could be said of him that “his word is not two words.” The unchanging speech was also an idiom of patriarchal authority; a father whose instructions were challenged or questioned by his children could say, “don’t try and discuss it, my first word is my last” (literally: “my word will not become two words” [la tnaqishni, kalimati ma btsir itnayn]). A patriarch was a man of whom it could be said that “his word is heard” (kalimatuh tusma‘); in other words, trusted and obeyed.

On one level, Fuad’s refusal to bargain could be read as an instance of religious morality. He and his family were adherents of a Sufi piety movement, which censured bargaining in the name of sincerity (al-sidq). In the words of one adept, “when you tell the client a price higher than what you would take, this means you have an evil intention in your heart and are also forcing him to do the same by offering a price lower than the one he would pay” (Pinto 2006, 169). But there is more to Fuad and Hamdi’s refusal to bargain than a religiously sanctioned moral precept of honesty. There is also a language ideology—a culturally specific notion of language, of what language is and does, and of what is signified by different ways of speaking. Language ideologies are “shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world” (Rumsey 1990, 346) or “cultural representations of the nature of language” (Robbins 2001, 592). Hamdi’s maxim that “in Islam you are held to account for every word that you say” conveyed an understanding of language as accountable, irrevocable, and having an irreducible moral weight. Once spoken, words cannot be taken back, and they are always in the balance on the Day of Judgement. The patriarchal ideal of having trusted and socially consequential speech—a word that “would not become two words,” and a word that was “heard”—conveyed an understanding that what language does is to bind the self and move others. Crucially, as the sociolinguist Kathryn Woolard observed, “ideologies of language are not about language alone” but rather “enact ties of language to identity” (1998, 3).1 Aleppine traders, for example, constituted social categories through their language ideologies: a real merchant (tajir) was someone whose first word was his last, while a trader whose speech was insubstantial and unreliable chatter (haki) was closer to a child (walad) than a merchant.

It is hard to speak of language ideologies in this context without also speaking of what we might call commerce ideologies: culturally specific notions of what commerce is, and of what is signified by different ways of trading. By commerce

ideologies I mean sets of ideas about the moral and social characteristics associated with par ticu lar forms of trade: including, for example, what constitutes civilized or uncivilized, authentic or inauthentic, respectable or unworthy ways of trading. Language ideologies and commerce ideologies were closely interwoven in Aleppo’s bazaar; ideas about speech were drawn into culturally specific construals of what it meant to trade and to be a real merchant. For Fuad, to trade was to put one’s honor at stake through speech; to be a reputable merchant in a retail setting was to have unwavering speech and to refrain from bargaining. Within this ideological construal of respectable commerce, ways of trading could also constitute social categories, much as sociolinguists have argued about modes of speaking. Fuad sometimes made caustic remarks about shopkeepers who “say a hundred lire for something worth ten,” referring to them not as merchants (tjjar) but as deceivers or the rip-off crowd (ghashashin). Here the social categories of real merchants and deceivers were constituted through a culturally specific notion of what trade was and what was signified by different modes of transacting and speaking. Similar cultural construals of commerce could also be seen in wholesale markets in Aleppo’s bazaar. Wholesale merchants often emphasized the importance of reputation and trust, priding themselves on an image of commerce in Aleppo in which reputation still counted for something, and trade was still made by verbal promises, rather than on collateral, by bank guarantees, or simply in cash. This was a commerce ideology—a culturally specific representation of what it meant to trade; namely, to transact by verbal commitment or by word (bi’l-kalimeh), on reputation, by trust (‘a-l-thiqa). In an Islamic formulation, referencing virtues associated with the Prophet Muhammad, trade could be described simply as sincerity and trustworthiness (al-sidq wa’l-amaneh). In another formulation, trade was synonymous with keeping one’s word, illustrated by the ethical precept that “whoever has sold has sold, and whoever has bought has bought” (illi ba‘ ba‘ wa illi shtara shtara). In other words, trade meant keeping promises to buy or sell at a certain price even if the price in the wider market changed before the goods were handed over.

Rather than seeing these concepts of commerce simply as expressions of Islamic tradition or culture, I ask about their intertwining with language ideologies, their role in constituting social identities, statuses, and hierarchies, and the historical conditions under which they gained traction in society. This book is a study not of the morality of exchange, but of exchange ideologies—commerce ideologies and their intertwining language ideologies—among Aleppo’s merchants during the first decade of Bashar al-Asad’s rule in Syria (2000–2009). It approaches exchange ideologies as the structured and socially situated ways in which processes of commerce and exchange were construed and represented, assigned morally and

politically charged characteristics, and linked to categories of social identity and difference. The book documents commerce/language ideologies in everyday interactions, inquiries into their historical conditions of possibility, and identifies their social effects; for example, in drawing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and buttressing or challenging social hierarchies.

Patriarchal Structures of Market Membership

An impor tant reason to pay attention to commerce and language ideologies in this period is because they played a role in the reproduction and legitimation of social hierarchies, and in par ticu lar hierarchies of patriarchy. By patriarchy I do not mean only domination of women by men, but a structure of father-authority, “a system of government in which men rule socie ties through their position as heads of households” (Walby 1989, 214, referring to Weber [1947] 2009), requiring the subordination of ju nior men as well as of women. Among Aleppo’s merchants, patriarchal social structures orga nized access to credit, credit guarantees, information, and—through patriarchally structured informal arbitration mechanisms—commercial rights in the market. The book focuses on two patriarchal forms that organized access to these goods: the extended patrilineal merchant family or house (bait) and the gathering (jama‘a), a leader-centered network of loyal peers and dependents that revolves around a fraternal patriarch. These structures enabled merchants to become legible and locatable to others, and also organized access to political support.

The book analyzes these as structures of social membership in the market, following feminist scholarship on citizenship in the Middle East, which argues patriarchal families often mediate membership of the polity, as the state recognizes and interacts with citizens as members of families, through their fathers, rather than directly as rights-bearing individuals. Suad Joseph (2005, 149) describes state-citizen relations as governed by a kin contract in which persons belong to families before they belong to the state; thus, citizenship depends on family membership (Joseph 1996a, 7). This kin contract of citizenship is connected to a system of family relations which she calls “patriarchal connectivity,” which fosters “selves with fluid boundaries who defer to males and elders” (Joseph 2005, 154; see also Joseph 1993, 1994). Although much scholarship in this vein focuses on the ways in which women are brought into the nation-state as second-class citizens, this book brings patriarchy into the discussion of markets.2 It analyzes the ways in which patriarchal authority operated within markets,

arguing that membership of markets often depended on membership of families or networks that subscribed to ideals of kin-like connectivity.

The book’s empirical focus is mainly on relations among men rather than relations between women and men. Women were often excluded from or marginal to the commercial sociality of the merchant strata described here. They did not participate in merchants’ spaces of sociability beyond the family.3 From the perspective of the milieu of mercantile sociability, women’s main role was to ensure family respectability through embodying modesty.4 In market spaces, women were visible as tourists, tour guides, and customers—predominantly as retail customers, with some small wholesalers visiting from provincial towns within Syria, and some female importers visiting from abroad, especially from Turkey, Russia, and Central Asia. Women played other less publicly visible roles in the market, supplying tailoring and machine labor for textile businesses. In some cases, they provided capital, but as a rule they did not manage it.5 I encountered one rare case of a female industrialist (see chapter 3), but even she had to negotiate patriarchal norms to participate in the market. The book addresses this gendered exclusion indirectly by analyzing structures of social membership of the market and the exchange ideologies coproduced with them.

Patriarchal structures and their associated ideologies of commerce and language were not an ingrained cultural form, but a function of the ways in which the state simulta neously intervened in and kept its distance from the market and managed relations with merchant elites. In addition to access to commercial goods, patriarchal hierarchies structured access to political elites, as the regime recruited merchant patriarchs as relays of state-society relations, allowing them to channel petitions on behalf of their constituencies. This structure of statemerchant interaction reinforced the authority of patriarchal leaders vis-à-vis their constituencies. Patriarchal norms also became salient in the market because of the absence of a reliable juridical state and a robust framework of individual rights, which might have challenged vested interests among regime elites. Without access to dependable formal legal institutions, Aleppo’s merchants instead relied on their own constructs of reputation and creditworthiness to regulate commerce. Reputation was typically conceived of as a patrilineally transmissible good—as an asset a father could pass on to sons. This conception justified senior men’s interventions in the lives of ju nior males on behalf of the family name; it had the effect of buttressing patriarchal hierarchies in the family and the market. Patriarchal structures and ideologies of commerce had room to flourish because the regime lacked either the capacity or the willingness to institute reliable formal legal institutions, instead leaving the function of market regulation to families and kinship-like forms such as the mercantile gathering.

If patriarchal structures were elicited and reinforced by the regime’s modes of managing merchant constituencies in Aleppo, exchange ideologies of language and commerce were an impor tant means by which these structures were reproduced in everyday life as meaningful and legitimate social forms. To the extent that traders such as Fuad associated unwavering speech both with real merchants and with patriarchs, this commercial virtue was construed in a way that buttressed a gendered social hierarchy. In this commerce/language ideology, a respected merchant was imagined as one whose word was heard, both in the market—where he could do deals through uncollateralized verbal commitments, and where he refused to enter into bargaining conversations with retail customers—and in the family, where he demonstrated his authority over family members. In this cultural construal of the respected merchant as a patriarch, a trader commanded credit from peers and trust from retail customers as he commanded obedience from sons. This is not to say that all merchants who could command uncollateralized credit in the market had sons or presided over their family labor in their shops. Rather, patriarchal social hierarchies, which were pervasive in the market, were made to appear natural by language/commerce ideologies, which figured trusted and unwavering speech both as an essential component of real and virtuous commerce and as a patriarchal characteristic. One social effect of commerce and language ideologies, then, was to legitimize and naturalize gendered social hierarchies entailed by the regime’s mode of interacting with Aleppo’s merchant bourgeoisie.

Patriarchal ideals were also coproduced with cultural conceptions of Aleppine commerce as a domain of autonomy from the state. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Baathist state had rooted itself in Damascus and marginalized the northern hub of Aleppo, which became a center of opposition to the state; in the 1980s, the regime put down an Islamist revolt in the northern cities of Aleppo and Hama. Even in the 2000s, merchants in Aleppo still understood their counterparts in Damascus to be more closely associated with and more reliant on the Baathist state for their access to commercial opportunity and financing. Several prominent merchant families prided themselves on a pre-Baathist commercial heritage, articulating this in terms of the city’s authenticity (al-asala) and its autonomy through the sentiment that “the state is far from here.” They placed cultural value on the provision of credit and dispute resolution informally, from within merchant networks, in a way that was independent of and illegible to the state. Among the city’s leading merchants, cultural conceptions of Aleppine identity developed, in which commerce was construed as a domain of autonomy from the state and its juridical and financial institutions. Consequently, it was construed as properly depending on uncollateralized verbal commitments, and on trust and reputation among merchants, rather than on bank guarantees.

Three QuesTions wiTh

STUART BLUMIN & GLENN ALTSCHULER authors of The Rise and Fall of

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

The friendship between Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and Rabbi Leopold Wintner; Frederick Douglass’ speech to a packed house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the relative importance to Brooklyn of the Brooklyn and the Williamsburg bridges; the coming of Sunday major league baseball to Brooklyn; and certainly the arrest of Margaret Sanger for opening a birth control clinic.

Protestant Brooklyn

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

Truth be told, we are far more interested in writing history that is important, that gets it right, and that is interesting to intellectually curious readers and to us than we are in using our time to try to change the field.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

That reading every single issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for 86 years would take as it long as it because a single issue, which was about 12 pages in the 1840s. It increased to Sunday editions that sometimes surpassed 120 pages. That said, we learned so very much from this source that was laden with information about the lived experience of Brooklynites.

We learned so very much from this source that was laden with information about the lived experiences of Brooklynites.

TRACING HISTORIC PATHWAYS THROUGH ROME

by Allan Ceen

This book is an attempt to answer the question: If all roads lead to Rome, what happens to them when they get there?

Research indicates that they either terminate at the edge of the city, or they penetrate it, so as to become Urban Pathways which, over time, have developed the actual plan of Rome, hence the subtitle of this book: Tracing Historic Pathways Through Rome.

The term “Historic” implies that these Pathways evolved over time, so as to produce the plan of the city which the 1748 map of Rome by Giambattista Nolli best portrays. This map is used to analyze the urban development of the city, and many of its details appear throughout the book.

An attempt has been made to provide two approaches that may be used in analyzing the evolution of this, and perhaps other cities as well.

These are: A set of nine Pathways representing different historic periods in the city’s Urban Development. Four of these are Ancient, two are Medieval, and one is Renaissance. The ninth pathway was generated by students in the cartography course I teach. Evidence to reveal what may be termed Urban Reciprocity, which is the interactive relationship between solids and voids (buildings and spaces). To be thoroughly understood, Rome’s complex topography needs to be examined not only with a written description, but more importantly with images (consisting of maps, prints, and photos). These tools provide a sense of immediacy, which the written word alone, does not. They also illustrate a way of looking at Rome that differs from the traditional treatment of the city as a collection of distinct buildings and selected piazze.

Consider the appearance of Rome’s symbolic Colosseum: Duperac’s 1577 map shows its dilapidated condition at the time that it was being used as a quarry for its well-squared blocks of stone, readily usable for building contemporary buildings. Pietro del Massaio’s 1469 drawing shows an intact structure, as it must have appeared in antiquity. The 1977 TCI guidebook gives only a written description. The 1993 edition of that guidebook has two elevations (front and side) of the adjacent Arch of Constantine, but no image of the Colosseum itself, to illustrate the written description.

Apart from the Colosseum, every tourist visits the Basilica of St. Peter’s, which is usually incorrectly referred to as “the Vatican.” Marten Van Heenskerck’s sketch (ca.1534) shows the Early Christian church with the three-level portico built at the time of Pope Pius II.

Duperac’s 1577 map reveals the Renaissance church to be under construction by Giacomo Della Porta, with Michelangelo’s incomplete dome (cylindrical drum, but no hemispherical dome), and Piazza S. Pietro,

empty except for a fountain. The map shows no obelisk yet, which was not erected until Pope Sixtus V (reigned 1585-1590). That same view includes a part of the original Early Christian church nave (with its courtyard) not long before the start of its Renaissance reconstruction.

Falda’s 1676 view-map shows the completed Piazza S. Pietro designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini, significantly labelled “Piazza e Teatro di S. Pietro” a title which reveals the theatrical character of so many Baroque architectural projects. The same view indicates that Bernini had already decided not to include the “Terzo Braccio” (third arm) of the piazza, which appears in his original plan.

Street and/or building interactions illustrate a way of looking at Rome that differs from the traditional treatment of the city as a collection of distinct buildings and selected piazze. This alternate approach might be termed an urban versus a monumental view of the city. Searching for “urban reciprocity” yields insights into site limitations and urban constraints that architects working in Rome had to face in developing their designs. Apart from being the obvious starting point for a particular design project, these constraints frequently prove to have been the determinant for some of its major aspects. They could serve as a source of inspiration for formal schemes. At the same time they could guide the architect away from strict formal symmetry. Attentive analysis of maps and drawings proves to be an essential tool for finding these variations on formal designs. No document is as valuable in this respect as the 1748 plan of the city by Giambattista Nolli, whose proven accuracy yielded many of the observations discussed here.

Pathways through Rome, as distinct from single streets, provide a way of coming to terms with the complexity of the city. Unlike a gridded town where movement is limited to two perpendicular axes and their parallels, Rome’s multidirectional street network is, at first glance, quite random. Pathways as discussed here can begin to give a sense of order to this daunting complexity. They not only lead from one point to another, but also act as borders between different sections of the city, thus allowing the visitor to obtain a clearer grasp of its layout. At the same time, since these paths were the carrying framework for the city’s street net during most of its existence (excluding the post-1870 period), some of Rome’s urban history may emerge from their study. The pursuit of these paths offers a unified image of Rome that is an alternative to the usual piecemeal treatment of the city.

Both approaches are time-related in the sense that both street/building interactions and pathways are to be considered as evolving over the course of the city’s development. Marked on a map of the overall city, the nine pathways instantly reveal the changing location of the city center in two major periods.

Roma ritrovata

Following these paths both on foot and in historic maps of the city can provide the student and visitor with a notion of the topographical and historical relationship between these contrasting urban centers, as well as an understanding of how modern clearance projects and archaeological excavations have tended to sunder that connection. To the thoughtful architect and planner, it might suggest ways of reestablishing that relationship through carefully scaled urban interventions that would restore these paths, and even turn them into pedestrian-only ways through the city, offering a Roma ritrovata, or Rome recovered. To the urban historian, it could provide an alternative to the usual study of individual monuments as indicators of the gradual development of the city.

Major Renaissance/Baroque urban developments along four of the pathways illustrate six examples of street/building relationships. It should be noted that these were not chosen because of their location along the pathways treated in this essay. The fact that they do occur along four of the nine pathways suggests a connection between the two approaches. This in turn points to the possibility of finding other street/ building relationships along the other five paths.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

writing collaboratively, challenging the norm

Maria Avila

For the past decade, I have been on a quest to challenge myself to break the academic norm of writing about those who take part in our research, and instead write with them as coauthors and co-researchers. This book gave me the opportunity to write with my research participants as we reflected together about the ways the projects in which they participated built collective leadership and contributed to creating more collaborative and organizing cultures both in our academic institutions and in community, nonacademic organizations. I am fortunate that many of those who participated in five of my research-in-action projects were up to the challenge, and through a reflective, collaborative writing process, they wrote about the projects in which they participated in chapters 3–7. I began this process by meeting with the authors of each chapter to explain my thoughts on writing collaboratively, while also reflecting with them about their experiences in their respective projects. In addition, the first authors of each chapter agreed to take a leading role in coordinating communications, writing, and meetings with their chapter coauthors. These five colleagues communicated with me as needed. This is a different, more in-depth level of writing collaboratively, and therefore it makes sense to list their names on the cover of the book. This multilayer

reflective and writing process led to something different than an edited book. To elaborate, while I write the framing and concluding chapters, the rest of the chapters are focused on the specific projects in which the authors participated. They are all connected to my research, and they all used an intentional approach to writing collaboratively.

The authors of the five chapters include faculty and community partners, and their writing includes examples related to students, academic administrators, policy makers, and funders. Participating faculty teach and research in psychology, sociology, information systems, nursing, community health sciences, mathematics, cognitive science, anthropology, and American studies and ethnicity. I teach social work. Several of us have had administrative and other leadership roles in our respective institutions. All faculty members are tenured; four of us were untenured when we began writing this book. Through our diversity of disciplines, we all make reference to our own particular inquiry methods, our teaching pedagogies, and our community engagement definitions and approaches. Participating community partners work or have worked in not-for-profit organizations related to education, electoral politics, policy, social services, and parent and student organizing. We are diverse in other ways too, including gender, race, nationality, and age, and regarding the populations we work with as faculty and as community partners.

Relevant to the narrative inquiry methodology of this book, all chapters include personal and professional stories. The five chapters also discuss specific skills and practices participants used and/ or developed in the projects in which they participated, as well as stories about the authors’ work and experience, such as creating a culture of organizing in a school board district (chapter 4); integrating community engagement in their anthropology and

the Norm sociology classes (chapter 6); participating in a national project focusing on math as a social justice issue (chapter 5); creating a civic engagement minor integrated into general education (chapter 7); creating a student-based organization at a research institution to counter the feeling of isolation and lack of community (chapter 5); creating a community partnership project that led to creating a community-based museum (chapter 5); learning how to work collaboratively with different stakeholders including students, faculty, administrators, and community partners (chapters 3 and 7); learning how to integrate personal and professional narratives in their teaching and research (chapter 3), and taking lessons learned about being collaborative to other areas of their work (chapters 3 and 7). All five chapters relate work experiences about shifting from in-person to online delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and about the ways in which the anti-racist movement that took force in the summer of 2020 influenced their work.

When we began working on this book, all of us were aware that we were engaging in a process that was to unveil itself to us as inquiry, even as we may have asked ourselves at various points of our collaborative reflections and writings whether we would end up with a finished product. And if we did, we wondered, what would it look like? We were also fully aware that this is not the “usual” way in which books are written. Most of us had published before, and some of us have collaborated with other academic colleagues on research projects and in the writing of the findings. None of us had engaged in reflective, collaborative writing as inquiry.

If you are reading this introduction, I invite you to read this book with awareness and openness to what might feel different or foreign compared to other academic publications you may be more familiar and perhaps more comfortable with. Maybe the stories we share here will resonate with your work in some way.

Maybe they will inspire you to build collective leadership to create culture change where you work. Our hope is that what we share in this book will be helpful to you and applicable to your own contexts.

With this brief introduction to the book and the broad range of diversity and backgrounds from those participating in this book, we hope to reach out to an equally broad and diverse audience. This book is for you if you are:

• Faculty teaching research methodologies and movement building–related courses in several disciplines, including education, sociology, urban studies, social policy, social welfare, mathematics, and public health.

• Faculty interested in cocreating reciprocal and mutually beneficial community partnerships through your teaching and/or research.

• Faculty and civic/community engagement–related staff interested in building multi-stakeholder collaborative spaces for collective leadership on your campus.

• Academic administrators interested in supporting communityengaged scholarship, and in working with different stakeholders to build more collaborative cultures on your campus.

• Community organization or school leaders interested in reaching out to faculty and administrators for reciprocal and mutually beneficial partnerships.

• Leaders/staff of faculty development–related centers or offices interested in cocreating more relevant faculty and student-related programming.

• Undergraduate or graduate students interested in learning about collaborative and action research methodologies and applying them to your research projects.

• Interested in diversity and equity-related work on your campuses or community organizations.

• Philanthropists interested in finding ways to build reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationships with your grantees.

• Government-related leaders looking for ways to increase collaborative, action-oriented relationships with your constituency.

• Hungry and open to collaborative facilitation approaches as teachers, or as workshop or meeting facilitators.

• Interested in joining or creating a movement to create more collaborative and humane cultures in academia and in community organizations.

Finally, the approach offered here is relevant for academics and nonacademics concerned about the state of our democratic society and the level and quality of democratic participation in our institutions, organizations, and society at large in the United States and in many other countries.

Purpose and Overview

Maria Avila

Kêytê-aya [as used by the Cree Elders] teach us that it is important to begin any process by acknowledging our place of knowing and identifying who we are and our purpose.

—Cindy Hanson, Chantelle Renwick, José Sousa, and Angelina Weenie

Iamoften inspired by the teachings of indigenous communities, perhaps first ignited by one such teaching I had in Mexico as a student of social work. My classmates and I took a field trip to the mountains in the state of Chihuahua where the Tarahumara Indians live. Although too young then to fully comprehend the significance of this experience, I do remember a myriad of conflicting feelings while being at a Catholic mass conducted fully in the Tarahumara language and not understanding a word of it. Then I tried to mix and mingle afterward, only to realize no one seemed to want to talk to me. I did not know if they did not speak Spanish or if they just did not want to talk to me. I was a foreigner in my own country. This is when I first became aware of the privileges I enjoyed as a “mestiza” (of Spanish and Indigenous descent). In the United States, my awareness and education about American Indians and Indigenous peoples of the world has evolved through

Three QuesTions wiTh PATRICIA STRACH & KATHLEEN SULLIVAN authors of The Politics of Trash

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

This book really made us think about the politics of garbage cans. When New Orleans’ garbage ordinance required that residents sort their garbage, residents bristled. They didn’t want to buy the requisite garbage can, and they were salty that the collector wouldn’t pick up shoes or bottles or tin cans. Everybody was talking about it, especially the housewives. The local newspaper published an ode to “The Garbage Box.” Citizen resistance eventually toppled the mayoral regime. But even in cities that weren’t in crisis, the reluctance of

with presumptions about what counts as political development. We thought that a city with municipal collection had a lot more state capacity than a city that contracted out garbage collection. We were surprised to find that our city with municipal collection had trash in the streets and sent the garbage down the river in leaking scows, while the city that contracted it out invested in the innovative infrastructure of garbage reduction. And the city that was classed as having “no municipal collection” licensed privately organized scavengers who are still in operation today. In being surprised, we rethought our own conceptual tools for identifying political development.

residents to comply with the rules of putting out their garbage can, in the proper lidded receptacle, at the right time, in the proper spot vexed sanitarians. Cities could come up with newfangled mechanisms for picking up garbage, they could hire engineers and garbage collectors, but if residents didn’t put out their garbage, none of it would work. The sanitary engineer Charles Chapin called garbage cans “one of the commonest forms of nuisance.”

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

We were glad to be surprised about what we did not know. We walked into the archives in Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and San Francisco

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

There’s a real emphasis in political science on national politics and elections. But politics is all around us, even in those places that do not seem political. The fact that most Americans routinely take their trash out to the curb at the appointed day and time using the proscribed receptacle, yet don’t see it as political or an exercise of government power, is a truly significant accomplishment of American municipal governments. We would like to see studies define politics more broadly and study it in places that may not seem at the outset as particularly political.

Cities could come up with newfangled mechanisms for picking up garbage, they could hire engineers and garbage collectors, but if residents didn’t put out their garbage, none of it would work.

Three QuesTions wiTh BENJAMIN HEGARTY author of The Made-Up State

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

In sharing her photographs from the 1980s with me, Mak Tadi, my close friend and interlocutor, introduced me to the worlds of friendship and love that sustain waria life then as now. They depict many warias on city streets, in homes, and in photographic studios. She would often repeat to me, “I didn’t stand in the dark like the others. I always stood in the light.” With grace and humor, waria contest the regulations that target their class and gender appearances to exclude them from public space. In these photographs, we can observe how public gender is not only a way for the state and other institutions to impose order

to understand trans history in Indonesia. It is good to remember that these efforts to impose a monopoly over recognition usually fail, instead giving rise to tender forms of attachment, relationality, and desires for other forms of collective mobilization.

– cis/trans, male/female – but an alternative route to recognition by family, kin, lovers, and neighbors.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

During Dutch colonial rule, the colonial state and municipal governments imposed various regulations concerning dress – basically, the right to wear European attire was limited to Europeans and others with significant status (e.g. ruling elite). In the early 20th century, Indonesians of all kinds began to adopt European dress, prompting significant anxiety from the Dutch colonial state. I wish I had known that this historical relationship between colonial histories of governing race and postcolonial concern about public gender – and their shared thread of concern to impose a monopoly on recognition – is crucial for any effort

How do you wish you could change your field?

As an anthropologist working across trans studies and Southeast Asian studies, I want to decenter assumptions about what counts as theory and who gets to produce it. I want to seek out gaps and spaces where we can work against dominant forms of knowledge production that are clearly entrenched in colonial structures.

With grace and humor, waria contest the regulations that target their class and gender appearances to exclude them from public space.

THE EXCERPT

THE STRENGTH AND FLEXIBILITY OF NEIGHBORHOOD GOVERNANCE IN URBAN CHINA

At 10 a.m. on January 23, 2020, two days before the Chinese New Year, the Chinese government announced a lockdown of the city of Wuhan, with a population of more than ten million due to the frightening emergence and spread there of COVID-19. Within a short time, pandemic prevention and control became a nationwide priority for all levels of government. The entire country applied tough measures to control population movement and prevent social gatherings. In the next two months, most Chinese cities became isolated from each other with the temporary closure of public transportation and highways. They canceled public celebrations for the Chinese New Year, closed shops and restaurants, postponed the start of schools and work, and forbade all kinds of social gatherings. All those living in China at the time experienced six to eight weeks of mandatory isolation at home imposed by the government.

How did the government manage to apply all these restrictions on its population of 1.4 billion? The answer lies in the most local and basic governance unit of Chinese society: residential compounds and neighborhoods. In Chinese cities, it was the residential compounds (shequ) that carried out pandemic prevention and control measures, together with local police and staff from government offices. Across the country, government employees accompanied by property management company (wuye gongsi) staff went to individual apartments to check residents’ information and body temperature. They also monitored residents’ outdoor activities, checking people and cars coming into the residential compounds and denying the entry of visitors. Resident volunteers and resident Communist Party members joined them to facilitate ser vice deliveries to the residents and to pass

on information about government policies and regulations to individual residents (CCTV News 2020; The Economist 2020). Neighborhoods, as always, became the frontlines of complicated urban governance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Through an analysis of new trends and dynamics of urban neighborhood governance in China since the 2000s, this book examines the key mechanisms currently operating at the grassroots level that contribute to the regime survival of an authoritarian state. After more than four decades of China’s economic reform, the party-state’s control of political power shows no signs of weakening. Rising inequality, corruption, social tensions, a crisis of ideology, and political repression observed during this period have led to heated debates, especially among scholars outside China, on whether and to what extent China is going through a regime crisis. Surprisingly, to date most studies show that the Chinese partystate still manages to receive strong public support from the majority of the Chinese people (e.g., Nathan 2003; Chen 2004; Chen and Dickson 2010; Chen 2011; Tang 2016). Empirical studies adopting different analytical approaches have revealed the consistent finding that Chinese citizens are generally satisfied with the Chinese central government. And this satisfaction, to a large extent, is the source of public support for the current regime, despite their discontent or anger toward local governments.

For the Chinese party-state, as noted, the pervasive reach of the state is considered an effective way to interact with citizens and avoid large-scale social unrest that may jeopardize the economic development and the stability of the regime. As a result, the state apparatus extends to all levels, from the national parliament to workplaces to the private realm such as residential compounds. At the grassroots level, both workplaces and residential compounds house agencies of government offices and party branches. The abstract concept of “the state” is encountered, felt, and experienced daily in urban work units (danwei) and neighborhoods. Since the 2000s, China’s development of a market economy and urbanization of the countryside have profoundly transformed the ways through which the Chinese partystate reaches, responds to, and interacts with its citizens. Overall, with the demise of the public sector’s control of urban housing, different types of urban residential communities associated with the economic means of their residents have become the common scenario in Chinese urban life since the late 1990s. Chinese grassroots governance, in turn, has experienced unprecedented changes in institutional setting, personnel structure, work tasks, and governance dynamics. During this process, urban neighborhoods have gradually become the cornerstone for new state–society relations and the most influential and basic government unit (Bray 2006; Heberer and Göbel 2011; Read 2012; Tomba 2014).

Focusing on new trends of neighborhood governance in urban China, this book introduces the thesis of hybrid authoritarianism to illustrate how and to what extent impor tant social and political mechanisms play out through everyday politics and generate public support for the Chinese party-state at the grassroots level; it also explores what impacts these mechanisms have on Chinese political life in general. In this book, I define and elaborate on hybrid authoritarianism by (1) emphasizing the unchanged ruling style of authoritarianism; (2) focusing on grassroots-level governance practices characterized by diversity, variability, and adaptability, especially relating to the involvement of non-state actors and di fferent forms of governance practices; and (3) highlighting the effects of those practices/measures in generating regime legitimacy and popu lar support under tightened political control. The hybrid authoritarianism thesis developed in this book addresses the topics of state–society relations and governance in reform- era China systematically, rather than exploring the isolated governance “innovation” practices documented by most existing studies.

Hybrid authoritarianism is situated in an intermediary governance space connecting the state and the society. It accommodates both state and non-state actors, deals with a wide range of governance issues, employs flexible governance strategies, and, at the same time, strengthens the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It operates through everyday politics within a defined political territory at the grassroots level. In Chinese cities, that defined territory is the neighborhood—usually translated as xiaoqu (small residential area) or shequ (residential community)—marked by both geographic and administrative boundaries. Depending on the number of residents, one shequ can cover one or several residential compounds. In other words, residential compounds are spatial units with physical boundaries, whereas shequ are administrative and governance units for the urban population residing within a defined residential space. In this book, the concepts of neighborhoods and residential communities are used interchangeably to refer to the territorial features of residential complexes and the political functions of shequ.

The unique political functions carried out by urban neighborhoods include implementing policy and government programs, carry ing out administrative duties, establishing social networks, and exercising social control among the residents (Bray 2006; Heberer and Göbel 2011; Read 2012). Political life in Chinese urban neighborhoods is largely organized by a Residents’ Committee ( jumin weiyuanhui or juweihui), the agent of the party-state at the grassroots level; it is supervised by the Street Office ( jiedao), which is the lowest level of government in the urban state apparatus. Through this kind of governance neighborhoods, the party-state has established and enhanced what Heberer and Göbel (2011) call

“state infrastructural power” at the grassroots level. In the past two decades, along with changes in social, economic, and political life in the PRC, neighborhoods in Chinese cities have become a more complex political arena accommodating not only the agents of the party-state such as Residents’ Committees but also emerging non-state actors and organizations, such as market groups, which include property management companies and remaining village collective organ izations; neighborhood ser vice providers including social organ izations (shehui tuanti or shehui zuzhi); and civil groups including homeowner associations, resident groups, and resident volunteers. Altogether they constitute important political intermediaries that are positioned in between the party-state and society and that facilitate interactions, negotiations, and sometimes collaborations between the two. As this book shows, neighborhood governance in the past two decades has incorporated key elements of hybrid authoritarianism that embrace governance issues directly or indirectly, use both authoritarian and relatively more democratic methods, and work to achieve governance outcomes aiming at both the party’s domination and the growing participation of civil society.

The hybrid authoritarianism thesis is born from the increasing complexity of Chinese society produced by two major economic and social transformations since the 2000s: the further development of Chinese market reforms that began in the 1990s and the urbanization of the Chinese countryside, which has become a nationwide initiative in the past two decades. Marketization and rural urbanization have transformed not only economic operations but also the social interactions and political participation patterns of Chinese society. As a direct result, those reforms produced two substantial social classes in Chinese urban society today: the middle class and landless farmers. These two groups have new economic, social, and political interests because of dramatic changes in property ownership; their interactions with the party-state are critical in shaping both state-society relations and regime stability. In turn, they form impor tant class bases for political life in Chinese urban society, which is characterized by “a mixed form of political rationality” combining both conventional political conditions and new governing apparatuses (Sigley 2006).

To date, there has been an impor tant trend in most English-language studies of the PRC that is rooted in a framework of contentious politics and considers the state and Chinese society as two opposing ends of the political spectrum. The hybrid authoritarianism thesis takes a di fferent analytical angle: it focuses on everyday politics taking place at the grassroots level in the form of nonconfrontational daily interactions between the party-state and citizens. China’s intensive economic and social reforms have resulted in a remarkable change in state–society interactions in which citizens have begun to negotiate directly with the grassroots

government presence (Cai 2010 Chen 2011; Tang 2016). This has significantly influenced mechanisms of grassroots governance, which in the previous socialist period had exerted control largely through work-unit governance (Walder 1986; Lü and Perry 1997). This book investigates how the Chinese party-state responds to new governance issues stemming from marketization and urbanization at the local level by carrying out governance in different ways for different groups of the urban population while securing the CCP’s leadership role across society. This is not to deny the importance of regime-level analysis or the study of contentious politics. Instead, it aims to increase understanding of contemporary China by showing how public support is generated at the grassroots level. Neighborhood governance shapes institutional settings, produces political actors, develops political actions and strategies, and generates political participation, all of which are very important for higher-level politics and regime legitimacy at large.

Marketization, Urbanization, and Urban Governance

In this book I explore these key research questions: What strengthens an authoritarian regime’s resilience at the grassroots level during economic liberalization? How does the Chinese party-state respond to governance challenges and secure its governance legitimacy at the local level? How do citizens experience and interact with the state in a socialist market economy? These questions gain urgency from the increasing heterogeneity of the urban population and their relations with the party-state produced by a series of critical reforms regarding property ownership, such as urban housing reforms and rural land expropriation. During the 1990s and the early 2000s, privatization and commercialization of urban public housing produced a nation of homeowners who purchased apartments heavily subsidized by their socialist work units. Official statistics reported that the homeownership rate in urban China reached 89  percent in 2010 (NBS 2011c), and another Chinese survey estimated that it was 85.4  percent in 2011 (Yang and Chen 2014). Studies in the Pearl River Delta found that in the mid-2000s, lower-income households owned their homes at nearly the same rate as middle-class households (88.9% versus 91.4%). Nearly 11 percent of middle-class households owned two or more properties (Liu 2018). In 2017 sales of residential buildings made up around 85  percent of the total sales of commercialized buildings in the country (NBS 2018).

Around the same time, urbanization of the Chinese countryside occurred with the expropriation of rural land for commercial and urban residential projects. Official statistics suggest that China’s urban built-up areas expanded 4.6-fold from

1985 to 2015 (NBS 1986, 1996). The national urbanization rate rose from 18 percent in 1978, to 36 percent in 2000, to 59 percent in 2017 (NBS 2018). This urbanization came at a cost, producing at least 52 million landless villagers between 1987 and 2010 (Ong 2014), and by 2014, this number was estimated to reach 112 million (Zhao 2015). The Blue Book of Cities in China (2013) argues that the landless villagers made up nearly 30  percent of China’s urban population by 2012. An official report showed that the permanent urban population increased three times between 1978 and 2015, reaching 770 million in 2015, 56 percent of the whole population (Gu 2017, 4).

As a direct result of marketization and urbanization, Chinese urban life has experienced diversification of the urban population with varying socioeconomic statuses, which determine the neighborhoods they reside in. Those social and economic transformations have been accompanied by rapidly increasing and widespread social tensions across the country. There has been an impressive surge of “collective incidents” (quntixing shijian) since the early 1990s and in various types of disputes (Shen 2007; Tang 2009; Gallagher and Wang 2011). According to the Ministry of Public Security, there were 10,000 incidents of social unrest and protests in 1994 (French 2007), 87,000 in 2005, and 180,000 in 2010 (Orlik 2011). In 2010, around 11 percent of the total population lived in protestaffected regions, of whom about one-third were directly or indirectly involved in some form of protest (Tang 2016, 109). Chinese urban neighborhoods have become a contested ground for new governance issues, a variety of governance actors, and governance strategies and methods.

How the party-state responds to those new governance issues and how those responses are communicated to the society on a daily basis are essential for regime survival and sustainability. As Wenfang Tang correctly points out, this type of situation requires a highly responsive government: “in an authoritarian political system where competitive elections are missing, the government struggles to maintain its political legitimacy by responding to public demand more quickly than in an electoral cycle.” (Tang 2016, 2). Since the 2000s, the party-state’s responsiveness has expanded from regime institutionalization (Yang 2004; Tsai 2006; Landry 2008; Shambaugh 2008) in terms of “adaptability, complexity, autonomy and coherence of state organizations” (Nathan 2003, 6) to a wide range of governance practices and discourses that can also significantly help produce social stability and regime survival, particularly in authoritarian regimes (Art 2012). Those include adapting globalization (Nathan 2006), increasing foreign direct investment (Gallagher 2005), keeping corruption under check (Manion 2004), employing informal institutions to facilitate formal institutional change (Tsai 2007b), co-opting capitalists (Chen and Dickson 2008), switching governance strategies from restricting movement of the rural population to subsidizing the countryside