Dialectical Anthropology - Top 5 Downloads: Subscription Articles
On the heels of our last update (Top 5 Downloads: Open Access (this opens in a new tab)), we wanted to do a partner update sharing the top 5 downloads: subscription article edition. As part of our Free Trial Access program, these articles will be free to access through the end of July 2022 (no membership or paywall barrier). While the articles in both these updates are taken directly from our top 20 downloaded articles, note the differences in the number of downloads per article between open access and traditional subscription articles. Downloads for the top 5 OA articles range from 68,781 (top highest) to 12,705 (5th highest). Given that sort of impact, we are working very hard to make more funding opportunities available for authors to publish open access with Dialectical Anthropology. If you are interested in publishing open access, please reach out to us for more information on potential OA funding opportunities that might be open to you.
Kirsch, Stuart. Sustainable Mining (this opens in a new tab). 34, 87–93 (2010). Downloaded 5209 times.
Abstract: The mining industry moves more earth than any other human endeavor. Yet mining companies regularly claim to practice sustainable mining. Progressive redefinition of the term sustainability has emptied out the concept of its original reference to the environment. Mining companies now use the term to refer to corporate profits and economic development that will outlast the life of a mining project. The deployment of corporate oxymorons like sustainable mining is one of the key strategies corporations use to conceal harm and neutralize critique.
Powell, Kathy. Brexit positions: neoliberalism, austerity and immigration—the (im)possibilities? of political revolution (this opens in a new tab). 41, 225–240 (2017). Downloaded 4459 times.
The UK referendum on European Union membership exposed profound social and political divisions, rooted in the establishment of a neoliberal consensus that eclipsed the left and arguments against inequality, and intensified over several years of post-crisis austerity’s assault on the working poor, the disadvantaged and the immigrants. The narrow vote to leave confounded expectations on both sides of the referendum campaign, provoking a political crisis that has empowered a far right unlikely to address grievances, incited intense hostility between triumphant ‘leavers’ and dismayed ‘remainers’, and produced profound uncertainty about the future. This paper argues that while ‘Brexit’ has been characterized as a ‘people’s revolt’ against capitalist globalization, the decision to leave the EU has been aligned by a discourse of nativist nationalism and attempts to re-entrench an authoritarian Conservative hegemony; these attempts are, however, floundering which poses both opportunities and challenges for a resurgent parliamentary left and for radical grassroots politics going forward.
Levy, Jay, and Pye Jakobsson. Abolitionist feminism as patriarchal control: Swedish understandings of prostitution and trafficking (this opens in a new tab). 37, 333–340 (2013). Downloaded 4289 times.
In this special issue, we note some recurrent themes in international political and discursive engagement with a moral panic concerning human trafficking, notably a conflation of forced and free prostitution, alongside calls to abolish the sex industry through a criminalisation of the purchase of sex. We here specifically examine Sweden’s sex purchase criminalisation, with Sweden being the first state globally to legislate according to this call. Proclaimed as a measure to attack demand for prostitution and trafficking alike, this law is justified by an abolitionist radical feminist understanding of prostitution as a form of patriarchal violence against women. We argue that radical feminist discourse has been used as a means by which to posture as a progressive state, putatively recognising the apparent harms of the sex industry. In reality, however, radical feminist discourse is applied selectively and circumstantially in Sweden, with sex workers seen both as passive victims of gendered violence (per radical feminist discourse), and as dishonest and immoral. These constructions are used interchangeably, to justify displacing and controlling women perceived to be deviant and disruptive to normative hegemonic masculinity.
Wendel, Travis, Geert Dhondt, Ric Curtis, and Jay Hamilton. “More drugs, less crime”: why crime dropped in New York City, 1985–2007 (this opens in a new tab). 40, 319–339 (2016). Downloaded 3682 times.
The crime drop in New York City has produced a whole academic literature that is unable to explain the decline. This article argues that this literature has ignored the simplest explanation of all: a simultaneous increase in the supply, and decrease in demand for illegal drugs led to a drop in the price of illegal drugs, which in turn led to a drop in crime. We use ethnography to document the drop in demand, secondary literature to document the increase in supply, and econometric analysis to illustrate Granger causality between drug prices and crime rates. While crime dropped across the nation and internationally, our article is focused on New York City.
Olaveson, Tim. Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of Ritual and Society in Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner. (this opens in a new tab) 26, 89–124 (2001). Downloaded 3641 times.
The author delineates a previously unnoticed equivalency between Emile Durkheim's concept of collective effervescence and Victor Turner's communitas. The processual model of ritual and society contained within Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, similar to the one later developed by Turner, is then outlined. Durkheim's and Turner's models are compared, including their emphases on the alienating nature of social structure, and the necessity of a dialectical tension between it and collective effervescence/communitas. Finally, the models are considered in light of recent scholarship in transpersonal anthropology and the anthropology of consciousness.