and Greece. For anybody who has studied even a little history, such geographically determined con... more and Greece. For anybody who has studied even a little history, such geographically determined conflations of vast and diverse ancient states with radically different modern populations and national ethno-imaginaries can seem bizarre. However, for many, the argument from precedence that "we were always here" remains a dominant and ontologically powerful political narrative. Counter-intuitively for Israel, a nation founded in 1948 with a language cobbled together from sacred religious texts and modern polyglot idiomatic expressions, a land whose boundaries were first created by the United Nations, and a population recruited from refugees, idealistic youth, Anglo-American army officers, and adventurers from across the planet, there may be no nation on earth with an older historic memory. It is this set of wild contradictions that has led the French Intellectual historian and Israeli post-Zionist writer Shlomo Sand to spend the last decade and a half tilting at the windmill of Jewish national essentialism and the biblical-theocratic foundations of the Israeli state. In this time, he has produced three fascinating historiographic volumes which provide an original synthesis of secondary sources that subject Jewish nationalist myths to an empirically based, historical social constructionist analysis. His goal is to "normalize" or denationalize Jewish history and reinstate Judaism into a more conventional secular-rationalist history of Abrahamic religions in the Old World. Sand's critical post-Zionist historiographies are extremely heterodox, highly controversial and have generally been met with approval by Marxian historians and
The following article recounts our struggles in New York City and Atlantic City, New Jersey betwe... more The following article recounts our struggles in New York City and Atlantic City, New Jersey between 2008 and 2012 to conduct finely grained, intersubjectively engaged, and ethical empirical research into the lives of sex worker minors while adhering to contemporary laws and research protocols governing child sex trafficking that dictate reticence, aloofness, and avoidance by adults who are not licensed authorities or trained professionals. We argue that these laws and protocols systematically impede the type of engaged, ethical, situated, and contextually nuanced research that is necessary to developing effective and appropriate evidence-based policy. In contrast to this regime of fear and avoidance, we argue for the “personhood” of mature minors and the need for a science that is ethically engaged with that personhood, rather than built around protecting their childhood and instantiating their victimhood.
This article revisits one of the key discussions that emerged during the homeless crisis of the 1... more This article revisits one of the key discussions that emerged during the homeless crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, that of shelterization, or the potentially demoralizing and desocializing effects of congregate emergency housing. Many of the fundamental assumptions ...
Abstract: This article looks at the "unhappy marriage&am... more Abstract: This article looks at the "unhappy marriage" between the anthropology of poverty in the United States and Marxist social science. It examines the theoretical and methodological assumptions of poverty studies that have excluded a Marxist analysis and identifies the ...
In the United States, the pimp represents one of the key tropes of black masculinity, alternately... more In the United States, the pimp represents one of the key tropes of black masculinity, alternately representing the lowest form of racialized degradation and the highest expression of masculine power. In the mid-twentieth century, bestselling novelists like Jack Kerouac, Donald Goines, and Robert Beck publicly enshrined the black pimp in the pantheon of ghetto personalities, while towering figures of civil rights like Malcolm X and Huey Newton, copped to, boasted about, and struggled against their autobiographical pimp narratives. However, very little empirical research ever emerged on the topic. By the 1980s the pimp was being declared dead. Instead, there was a focus on the victim of improved employment opportunities and expanded legal rights for women according to some scholars and the victim of the crack epidemic and dropping commercial sex prices according to others. However, the international coordination against human trafficking that came to be a key part of post-cold war governance revived interest in this colorful and largely forgotten troglodyte among scholars, policy-makers and law enforcement officials, leading to numerous anti-pimp tracts. This lead to increased prosecution and much longer prison sentences in the United States. Globally, the proliferation of anti-trafficking laws, practices, institutions, and compliance instruments also produced a renewed concern about the presence of male third party facilitators in commercial sex markets, but with a continued absence of rigorous empirical social science research. However, the past half-decade has seen the emergence of a small group of researchers who together and independently have begun to address this lacuna. The following essay introduces their contributions and some key themes taken up in the first book to anthologize.
and Greece. For anybody who has studied even a little history, such geographically determined con... more and Greece. For anybody who has studied even a little history, such geographically determined conflations of vast and diverse ancient states with radically different modern populations and national ethno-imaginaries can seem bizarre. However, for many, the argument from precedence that "we were always here" remains a dominant and ontologically powerful political narrative. Counter-intuitively for Israel, a nation founded in 1948 with a language cobbled together from sacred religious texts and modern polyglot idiomatic expressions, a land whose boundaries were first created by the United Nations, and a population recruited from refugees, idealistic youth, Anglo-American army officers, and adventurers from across the planet, there may be no nation on earth with an older historic memory. It is this set of wild contradictions that has led the French Intellectual historian and Israeli post-Zionist writer Shlomo Sand to spend the last decade and a half tilting at the windmill of Jewish national essentialism and the biblical-theocratic foundations of the Israeli state. In this time, he has produced three fascinating historiographic volumes which provide an original synthesis of secondary sources that subject Jewish nationalist myths to an empirically based, historical social constructionist analysis. His goal is to "normalize" or denationalize Jewish history and reinstate Judaism into a more conventional secular-rationalist history of Abrahamic religions in the Old World. Sand's critical post-Zionist historiographies are extremely heterodox, highly controversial and have generally been met with approval by Marxian historians and
The following article recounts our struggles in New York City and Atlantic City, New Jersey betwe... more The following article recounts our struggles in New York City and Atlantic City, New Jersey between 2008 and 2012 to conduct finely grained, intersubjectively engaged, and ethical empirical research into the lives of sex worker minors while adhering to contemporary laws and research protocols governing child sex trafficking that dictate reticence, aloofness, and avoidance by adults who are not licensed authorities or trained professionals. We argue that these laws and protocols systematically impede the type of engaged, ethical, situated, and contextually nuanced research that is necessary to developing effective and appropriate evidence-based policy. In contrast to this regime of fear and avoidance, we argue for the “personhood” of mature minors and the need for a science that is ethically engaged with that personhood, rather than built around protecting their childhood and instantiating their victimhood.
This article revisits one of the key discussions that emerged during the homeless crisis of the 1... more This article revisits one of the key discussions that emerged during the homeless crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, that of shelterization, or the potentially demoralizing and desocializing effects of congregate emergency housing. Many of the fundamental assumptions ...
Abstract: This article looks at the "unhappy marriage&am... more Abstract: This article looks at the "unhappy marriage" between the anthropology of poverty in the United States and Marxist social science. It examines the theoretical and methodological assumptions of poverty studies that have excluded a Marxist analysis and identifies the ...
In the United States, the pimp represents one of the key tropes of black masculinity, alternately... more In the United States, the pimp represents one of the key tropes of black masculinity, alternately representing the lowest form of racialized degradation and the highest expression of masculine power. In the mid-twentieth century, bestselling novelists like Jack Kerouac, Donald Goines, and Robert Beck publicly enshrined the black pimp in the pantheon of ghetto personalities, while towering figures of civil rights like Malcolm X and Huey Newton, copped to, boasted about, and struggled against their autobiographical pimp narratives. However, very little empirical research ever emerged on the topic. By the 1980s the pimp was being declared dead. Instead, there was a focus on the victim of improved employment opportunities and expanded legal rights for women according to some scholars and the victim of the crack epidemic and dropping commercial sex prices according to others. However, the international coordination against human trafficking that came to be a key part of post-cold war governance revived interest in this colorful and largely forgotten troglodyte among scholars, policy-makers and law enforcement officials, leading to numerous anti-pimp tracts. This lead to increased prosecution and much longer prison sentences in the United States. Globally, the proliferation of anti-trafficking laws, practices, institutions, and compliance instruments also produced a renewed concern about the presence of male third party facilitators in commercial sex markets, but with a continued absence of rigorous empirical social science research. However, the past half-decade has seen the emergence of a small group of researchers who together and independently have begun to address this lacuna. The following essay introduces their contributions and some key themes taken up in the first book to anthologize.
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