Aboriginal women and Asian men: a maritime history of color in white Australia.

In 1901, Broome­a port town on the northwest edge of the Australian continent­was one of the principal and most lucrative industrial pearling centers in the world and entirely dependent on Asian indentured labor. Relations between Asian crews and local Aboriginal people were strong, at a time when the project of White Australia was being pursued with vigorous, often fanatical dedication across the newly federated continent. It was the policing of Aboriginal women, specifically their relations with Asian men, that became the focus of efforts by authorities and missionaries to uphold and defend their commitment to the White Australia policy. This article examines the historical experience of Aboriginal women in the pearling industry of northwest Australia and the story of Asian-Aboriginal cohabitation in the face of oppressive laws and regulations. It then explores the meaning of "color" in contemporary Broome for the descendants of this mixed heritage today.

South Africa: a legacy of family disruption.

This article draws together unusual characteristics of the legacy of apartheid in South Africa: the state-orchestrated destruction of family life, high rates of unemployment and a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. The disruption of family life has resulted in a situation in which many women have to fulfil the role of both breadwinner and care giver in a context of high unemployment and very limited economic opportunities. The question that follows is: given this crisis of care, to what extent can or will social protection and employment-related social policies provide the support women and children need?

Who cares in Nicaragua? A care regime in an exclusionary social policy context.

In Latin American countries with historically strong social policy regimes (such as those in the Southern Cone), neoliberal policies are usually blamed for the increased burden of female unpaid work. However, studying the Nicaraguan care regime in two clearly defined periods ­ the Sandinista and the neoliberal eras ­ suggests that this argument may not hold in the case of countries with highly familialist social policy regimes. Despite major economic, political and policy shifts, the role of female unpaid work, both within the family and in the community, remains persistent and pivotal, and was significant long before the onset of neoliberal policies. Nicaragua's care regime has been highly dependent on the 'community' or 'voluntary' work of mostly women. This has also been, and continues to be, vital for the viability of many public social programmes.

Surveillance as cultural practice.

This special section of The Sociological Quarterly explores research on "surveillance as cultural practice," which indicates an orientation to surveillance that views it as embedded within, brought about by, and generative of social practices in specific cultural contexts. Such an approach is more likely to include elements of popular culture, media, art, and narrative; it is also more likely to try to comprehend people's engagement with surveillance on their own terms, stressing the production of emic over etic forms of knowledge. This introduction sketches some key developments in this area and discusses their implications for the field of "surveillance studies" as a whole.

Maternalism, race, class and citizenship: aspects of illegitimate motherhood in Nazi Germany.

This article juxtaposes three types of illegitimate motherhood that came in the wake of the Second World War in Nazi Germany. The first found institutional support in the Lebensborn project, an elite effort to raise the flagging birth-rates, which at the same time turned a new page in the history of sexuality. The second came before the lower courts in the form of paternity and guardianship suits that had a long precedent, and the third was a social practice that the regime considered a 'mass crime' among its female citizenry: namely, forbidden unions between German women and prisoners of war. Through these cases the article addresses issues such as morality, sexuality, paternity, citizenship and welfarism. The flesh-and-blood stories have been culled from the Lebensborn Dossiers and Special Court files, as well as cases from the lower courts.

The evolution of human warfare.

Here we propose a new theory for the origins and evolution of human warfare as a complex social phenomenon involving several behavioral traits, including aggression, risk taking, male bonding, ingroup altruism, outgroup xenophobia, dominance and subordination, and territoriality, all of which are encoded in the human genome. Among the family of great apes only chimpanzees and humans engage in war; consequently, warfare emerged in their immediate common ancestor that lived in patrilocal groups who fought one another for females. The reasons for warfare changed when the common ancestor females began to immigrate into the groups of their choice, and again, during the agricultural revolution.

The neoliberal state and the penalization of misery.

The strategy adopted by the neoliberal state to maintain social order and safeguard private property in a context of economic deregulation and social precariousness has destroyed the welfare state and aggravated poverty, depriving the masses of any form of social protection while subjecting them to repression. The reinforcement of the repressive state apparatus is associated with the social instability provoked by the lack of social policies, the degradation of living conditions for the great majority of the population, and the amplification of income and property inequalities both in the so-called capitalist periphery and in the richest industrialized countries. The penalization of misery is revealed as a new expression of class domination.

Between state power and popular desire: tobacco in pre-conquest Manchuria, 1600-1644.

Tobacco entered Manchuria on the same wave of early modern globalization that brought it from the Americas to other parts of Eurasia in the early seventeenth century. Introduced into northeast Asia sometime after 1600, it began to circulate widely in Manchuria precisely at a time when Hong Taiji (1592-1643) was building the early Qing state. This essay examines Hong Taiji's efforts to criminalize tobacco in the 1630s and 1640s, arguing that these prohibitions were largely directed at gaining state control over a valuable economic resource. However, within the commercialized milieu of seventeenth-century Liaodong, a region with ties to broader transregional circuits of trade, tobacco's lucrative profits and its pleasurable allure simply overpowered state efforts to monopolize it. As in most other early seventeenth-century Eurasian societies, the Qing tobacco bans quickly gave way to legalization and taxation.

South Africa's abortion values clarification workshops ­ an opportunity to deepen democratic communication missed.

A rich literature exists on local democracy and participation in South Africa. While the importance of participation is routinely built into the rhetoric of government, debate has increasingly focused on the dysfunctionality of participatory mechanisms and institutions in post-apartheid South Africa. Processes aimed ostensibly at empowering citizens, act in practice as instruments of social control, disempowerment and cooptation. The present article contributes to these debates by way of a critique of the approach used by the South African state, in partnership with the non-governmental sector, in what are called abortion "values clarification" (VC) workshops. This article examines the workshop materials, methodology and pedagogical tools employed in South African abortion VC workshops which emanate from the organization Ipas ­ a global body working to enhance women's sexual and reproductive rights and to reduce abortion-related deaths and injuries. VC workshops represent an instance of a more general trend in which participation is seen as a tool for generating legitimacy and "buy-in" for central state directives rather than as a means for genuinely deepening democratic communication. The manipulation of participation by elites may serve as a means to achieve socially desirable goals in the short term but the long-term outlook for a vibrant democracy invigorated by a knowledgeable, active and engaged citizenry that is accustomed to being required to exercise careful reflection and to its views being respected, is undermined. Alternative models of democratic communication, because they are based on the important democratic principles of inclusivity and equality, have the potential both to be more legitimate and more effective in overcoming difficult social challenges in ways that promote justice.

Between affiliation and autonomy: navigating pathways of women's empowerment and gender justice in rural Bangladesh.

Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent." They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilization organizations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. It draws on their narratives to explore the collective strategies through which these organizations sought to empower the women and how they in turn drew on their newly established "communities of practice" to navigate their own pathways to wider social change. It concludes that while the value attached to social affiliations by the women in the study is clearly a product of the societies in which they have grown up, it may be no more context-specific than the apparently universal value attached to individual autonomy by many feminists.

What was uniform about the fin-de-siècle sailor suit?

The sailor suits widely worn by children in late-nineteenth-century Britain have been interpreted at the time, and since, as expressions of an Imperial ethos. Yet, a closer examination of the ways that these garments were produced by mass manufacturers, mediated by advertisers and fashion advisors and consumed by families makes us question this characterization. Manufacturers interpreted sailor suits not as unchanging uniforms but as fashion items responding to seasonal changes. Consumers used them to assert social identities and social distinctions, selecting from the multiple variants available. Cultural commentators described sailor suits as emulating Royal practice­but also as 'common' and to be avoided. A close analysis of large samples of images and texts from the period 1870­1900 reveals how these different meanings overlapped, making the fin-de-siècle sailor suit a garment that undermines many of our assumptions.

Within salvation: girl hawkers and the colonial state in development era Lagos.

For almost two decades between the close of the Second World War and Nigerian independence in 1960, the British colonial state which faced a crisis of legitimacy in Lagos upheld city ordinances that made itinerant trading by young children in Lagos a punishable status offense. Although anti-trading regulations were gender-neutral in their language, girls were disproportionately sanctioned for engaging in street trading and related activities. In defending their concentration on girl sellers over boy sellers, colonial welfare officials painted a picture of the urban context as an inherently dangerous context and of girls as being particularly at risk of violent assault in the city, making them particularly in need of protection from town life. Sources which show that parents generally resisted or ignored the street trading regulations and continued permitting their daughters to sell despite entreaties, warnings, or fines from colonial officials, suggest that African parents and British colonial officials may have had conflicting views on the inherent danger of the city, on what constituted child endangerment, and on the gendered nature of childhood. This article argues that the girl saving campaigns of development era Lagos were as much about the legitimization of a colonial state facing a crisis of legitimacy as they were about debates between African parents and colonial welfare officials in Lagos concerning ideas of children and childhood and the dangers of street trading by African girls.

Managing a massacre: savagery, civility, and gender in Moro Province in the wake of Bud Dajo.

This article examines the delicate ideological maneuverings that shaped American colonial constructions of savagery, civility, and gender in the wake of the Bud Dajo massacre in the Philippines's Muslim south in 1906. It looks particularly at shifting notions of femininity and masculinity as these related to episodes of violence and colonial control. The article concludes that, while the Bud Dajo massacre was a terrible black mark on the American military's record in Mindanao and Sulu, colonial officials ultimately used the event to positively affirm existing discourses of power and justification, which helped to sustain and guide military rule in the Muslim south for another seven years.

Who pays for obesity?

Adult obesity is a growing problem. From 1962 to 2006, obesity prevalence nearly tripled to 35.1 percent of adults. The rising prevalence of obesity is not limited to a particular socioeconomic group and is not unique to the United States. Should this widespread obesity epidemic be a cause for alarm? From a personal health perspective, the answer is an emphatic "yes." But when it comes to justifications of public policy for reducing obesity, the analysis becomes more complex. A common starting point is the assertion that those who are obese impose higher health costs on the rest of the population­a statement which is then taken to justify public policy interventions. But the question of who pays for obesity is an empirical one, and it involves analysis of how obese people fare in labor markets and health insurance markets. We will argue that the existing literature on these topics suggests that obese people on average do bear the costs and benefits of their eating and exercise habits. We begin by estimating the lifetime costs of obesity. We then discuss the extent to which private health insurance pools together obese and thin, whether health insurance causes obesity, and whether being fat might actually cause positive externalities for those who are not obese. If public policy to reduce obesity is not justified on the grounds of external costs imposed on others, then the remaining potential justification would need to be on the basis of helping people to address problems of ignorance or self-control that lead to obesity. In the conclusion, we offer a few thoughts about some complexities of such a justification.

Spatial collisions and discordant temporalities: everyday life between camp and checkpoint.

How do we make sense of the colonial subject that is neither in revolt nor in open crisis? How do people reproduce their lives, fashion routines, etch out some meaning when the political is evacuated, when time is on hold? These questions loom over a contemporary disjuncture in Palestine, marked in part by the splintering and opening up of the field of subjective bonds, attachments and associations to new modalities of production, less circumscribed by previous normative parameters and engendering a host of complexities and ambivalences in politico-social relationalities. Yet most scholarship on Palestine remains caught up in reductive binaries of violence versus resistance and heavily reliant on rigid and aggregated categories, the bulk of it unable to capture entire assemblages of action, subjective dissonance, productive ambiguities and contingent vitalities that inflect so much of contemporary quotidian life. The refugee in particular has emerged as a destabilizing figure, capable of subversively using the spatio-temporality of the camp as the very resource through which to disturb ascribed categorizations. Reading the paradoxical multiplicity of actions that refugees ­ women, children and the elderly ­ perform in the space between Qalandia camp and its checkpoint provides an insight into some of what defines contemporary refugee subjectivities ­ flexibility, a readiness to take risks, an ability to maneuver through different temporal orders and instrumentalize the spatial fragmentation. These subjects, traversing and negotiating liminality in everyday life, point to lived and bodied affirmations of presence and visibility that cannot be understood through frameworks of recognition and rights.