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CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2012 SECTION AWARD
WINNERS!
Barrington Moore Book Award
Yang Su, 2011. Collective Killings in Rural China
during the Cultural Revolution. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Publisher's
summary: The violence of Mao's China is well
known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968,
during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings
were widespread in rural China in the form of public
execution. Victims included women, children, and the
elderly. This book is the first to systematically
document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data
from local archives, government documents, and
interviews with survivors in two southern provinces.
This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that
challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass
killings and contributes to the historiography of the
Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly
focused on events in urban areas.
Honorable Mention:
Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, 2011. Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of
Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Publisher's
summary: In 1949, Romania's fledgling communist
regime unleashed a radical and brutal campaign to
collectivize agriculture in this largely agrarian
country, following the Soviet model. Peasants under
Siege provides the first comprehensive look at the
far-reaching social engineering process that ensued.
Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery examine how
collectivization assaulted the very foundations of
rural life, transforming village communities that were
organized around kinship and status hierarchies into
segments of large bureaucratic organizations, forged by
the language of "class warfare" yet saturated with
vindictive personal struggles.
Collectivization not only overturned property
relations, the authors argue, but was crucial in
creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms
of rule, and the "new persons" that were its subjects.
The book explores how ill-prepared cadres, themselves
unconvinced of collectivization's promises, implemented
technologies and pedagogies imported from the Soviet
Union through actions that contributed to the excessive
use of force, which Party leaders were often unable to
control. In addition, the authors show how local
responses to the Party's initiatives compelled the
regime to modify its plans and negotiate outcomes.
Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and
ethnographic data, Peasants under Siege sheds new light
on collectivization in the Soviet era and on the
complex tensions underlying and constraining political
authority.
Honorable Mention:
James Mahoney, 2010. Colonialism and Postcolonial
Development: Spanish America in Comparative
Perspective. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Publisher's
summary: In this comparative-historical analysis
of Spanish America, Mahoney offers a new theory of
colonialism and postcolonial development. He explores
why certain kinds of societies are subject to certain
kinds of colonialism and why these forms of colonialism
give rise to countries with differing levels of
economic prosperity and social well-being. Mahoney
contends that differences in the extent of colonialism
are best explained by the potentially evolving fit
between the institutions of the colonizing nation and
those of the colonized society. Moreover, he shows how
institutions forged under colonialism bring countries
to relative levels of development that may prove
remarkably enduring in the postcolonial period. The
argument is sure to stir discussion and debate, both
among experts on Spanish America who believe that
development is not tightly bound by the colonial past,
and among scholars of colonialism who suggest that the
institutional identity of the colonizing nation is of
little consequence.
Charles Tilly Article Award
Nicolas Hoover Wilson, 2011. "From Reflection to Refraction: State
Administration in British India, circa 1770-1855."
American Journal of Sociology 116(5):1437-77.
Statement
from award committee: We are pleased to announce
Nicolas Wilson's article, "From Reflection to
Refraction: State Administration in British India,
circa 1770-1855," published in the American Journal
of Sociology as the winner of the 2012 Tilly Prize
for best article in comparative and historical
sociology. Wilson's paper examines colonial
administration of land revenues in British India,
constructing a novel "refraction" model that emphasizes
colonizers' perceptions of subject populations as key
to understanding the organizational form of the
colonial state. The Committee noted the paper's nuanced
and original theoretical argument, as well as its
careful marshaling of historical materials to support
its argument. The Committee also admired the paper's
finegrained account of concrete institutional
processes, attentive to temporal and spatial variation.
This is comparative and historical sociology executed
with a high level of craft.
Honorable Mention:
Hazem Kandil, 2011. "Islamizing Egypt? Testing the limits of
Gramscian Counterhegemonic Strategies." Theory and
Society 40(1):37-62.
Statement
from award committee: The Committee also awards
honorable mention to Hazem Kandil's article,
"Islamizing Egypt: Testing the Limits of Gramscian
Counterhegemonic Strategies" published in Theory
and Society. Kandil's provocative paper uses the
case of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to interrogate
a narrowly cultural reading of Gramsci's notion of
counterhegemonic strategies. While not denying the
importance of cultural tactics in oppositional
movements, Kandil argues that many appropriations of
Gramsci have not come to terms with the problem of
state coercion. The Committee was impressed by the
paper's clearly delineated theoretical argument and by
its use of historical materials to address an issue of
contemporary significance.
Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award
Stephan Bargheer, 2011. "Moral Entanglements: the
Emergence and Transformation of Bird Conservation in Great
Britain and Germany, 1790-2010." Ph.D. Dissertation,
Sociology, University of Chicago. (Dissertation Chair:
Andrew Abbott.)
Statement
from award committee: Stefan Bargheer's "Moral
Entanglements" is an elegantly powerful study of the
social origins and transformative trajectories of bird
conservation in Great Britain and Germany over the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contra prevailing approaches in environmental
history and the study of social movements, which tend
to treat conservation movements as a form of
environmentally conscious blowback against the
degradations of industrialized capitalism, Bargheer
demonstrates convincingly that the "forms of valuation
that dominate bird conservation are a continuation of
the institutional forms of valuation that initially
contributed to the decline and extinction of wild
birds" (p. 51). That is, rather than representing a
contemporary moral awakening and successful
mobilization by virtuous movements, the development of
bird conservation was shaped over time through
institutionally patterned and iterative social actions
that were continuous with the contextually-specific
practices, valuations, and institutions of high
modernity. This study is thus about much more than
birds. In a superb introductory chapter, in which he
draws on pragmatist theories of action to develop both
a "leisure theory of value" and a consideration of "the
banality of good," Bargheer provides the theoretical
basis for his dissertation's empirical examination of
how the social valuation of the objects of human
experience is shaped by institutionally situated
practices over time. And in an equally compelling
methodological chapter, he elaborates a refreshingly
straightforward treatment of the complex
epistemological problems of historical process,
continuity, and change--including a frank discussion of
the promises and pitfalls of, and potential solutions
for, the mode of historical ethnography on which he
relies. These initial chapters set the stage for a
historically rich, interpretively subtle, and
analytically sophisticated dissertation that stands as
a model for how to tackle big historical questions in a
way that opens up new puzzles and possibilities for
future research.
Honorable Mention:
Damon Maryl, 2011. "Secular Conversions: Politics,
Institutions, and Religious Education in the United States
and Australia, 1800-2000." Ph.D. Dissertation, Sociology,
University of California, Berkeley. (Dissertation Chair:
Margaret Weir.)
Statement
from award committee: While many have come to
see the secularization debate as passé, the place of
religion in politics remains a pressing issue. Damon
Mayrl's "Secular Conversions," breathes new life into
this topic by conceptualizing secularization as a
contingent and politically-mediated process rather than
an inevitable historical outcome. Mayrl begins by
posing a counter-intuitive puzzle: "why has Australia's
public school system retained both funding and
institutional support for religious schools, while
public schools in the United States have become
officially secular?" The dissertation proceeds by
reducing this main puzzle to a series of equally
compelling sub-puzzles that focus on concrete "secular
settlements": cases wherein each nation's
administrative, judicial, or electoral institutions
either advanced or prevented secularizing initiatives.
Based on these analyses, Mayrl concludes that it is
ultimately the relatively "permeable" nature of the
American state that accounts for the success of
secularizing initiatives in the United States, while
showing that the "insulated" nature of the Australian
polity prevented similar secularizing successes.
Mayrl's "Secular Conversions" is noteworthy for its
historical breadth, for the clarity of its analyses,
and for its loving attention to historical detail.
Additionally, the committee felt that the dissertation
wonderfully illustrates the analytical promise of
historical-comparative work: the ability to provide a
compelling answer to a difficult and counter-intuitive
question. In the process, Mayrl not only advanced
theoretical understanding of state institutions, but
also problematizes the terms of popular secularization
debates by illustrating a mismatch between heated
rhetoric and actual practice.
Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award
(Co-Winners)
Carly Knight (Harvard). "A Voice but Not a Vote: The
Case of Surrogate Representation and Social Welfare For
Legal Noncitizens Since 1996."
Statement
from award committee: Following the Personal
Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act in 1996, the
power to determine immigrant eligibility for social
welfare was devolved to the states. States proved far
more generous than scholars might have predicted, and
moreover, states' policies took quite different
trajectories over time. In "A Voice But Not a Vote,"
Carly Knight develops and tests a framework that
explains the adoption, maintenance, and retrenchment of
welfare benefits for noncitizens in the U.S. since
1996. Using an innovative and rigorous multi-method
analysis, Knight demonstrates the importance of
surrogate representation, defined as instances in which
an individual or group with access to political power
(e.g., voters or office-holders) acts on behalf of an
excluded group (e.g., noncitizens). States with
mobilized immigrant-citizen communities acting as
surrogate representatives were more likely to extend
benefits initially, and surrogate representation was
important for determining the trajectory of states'
policies over time. Policies extending benefits were
more likely to persist over time in the states in which
benefits were initially extended due to the
mobilization of immigrant co-ethnics. By contrast,
states that extended welfare benefits without the
mobilization of surrogates were likely to rescind such
rights later when the political and economic context
changed. The committee was particularly impressed with
the comparative scope and multi-method
conceptualization of the paper, which rigorously tests
alternative explanations and mechanisms through which
U.S. states adopted and then extended or curtailed
welfare benefits for noncitizens.
Diana Rodriguez-Francoz (Northwestern). "Internal Wars,
Taxation, and State Building."
Statement
from award committee: Internal wars are
generally considered to be quite detrimental to state
strength, state capacity, and development. Indeed,
civil war is widely viewed as a manifestation of state
disintegration and state failure. Diana
Rodriquez-Franco challenges conventional wisdom in
"Internal Wars, Taxation, and State Building," taking
up the rather provocative question: Do internal wars
build states? Through an intriguing case study of
Colombia, Diana Rodriguez-Franco traces the mechanisms
through which internal wars build elite solidarity for
paying taxes to support the state, which then
incentivizes the existing tax administration to
strengthen its infrastructural capacity and motivates
the state to expand into new areas of the country. In
this sense, internal wars, like external wars, can
stimulate state building. Yet unlike external wars, the
relationship between internal war and taxation is
complicated by the presence of domestic insurgents
(e.g., paramilitary, guerilla forces, etc.), who
essentially compete with the state over the ability to
tax elites. The aggregate level of taxation,
Rodriguez-Franco's central measure of state building,
varies depending on the relative balance of taxes
collected by the state and insurgents, respectively.
Ultimately, the state-building capacity of internal
wars depends heavily on elite responses to internal
war, and elite responses are in turn dependent on the
intensity of elite solidarity. The committee was
impressed with the originality of the paper, the
evidence marshaled to support the argument, and the
theoretical implications of this case study of state
formation, one of the most important issues in
comparative-historical sociology.