Green Gold, Green Hell: Coca, Caste, and Class in the Chaco War, 1932–1935

2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-245
Author(s):  
Andrew Ehrinpreis

This article investigates the use of coca by the Bolivian Army during the Chaco War of 1932–35. I present research that reveals the surprising extent to which the Bolivian Army provisioned coca to its soldiers as a substitute for adequate nutrition; as a morale booster; as a stimulant; and as a medicine. The article explores the social and cultural implications of mass coca consumption by Bolivian soldiers, many of whom were mestizos who had never before chewed the leaf. Ultimately, I argue that the pervasiveness of coca within the traumatic popular experience of the Chaco War sowed the seeds of a historic transformation of the politics of coca in Bolivia. The Chaco War initiated a process by which coca in Bolivia was transformed from a neo-colonial marker of the Indian caste to a material and symbolic element of an emergent interethnic working class. Through a comparative analysis of the Bolivian army's use of coca in the Chaco War with the German army's use of methamphetamine during World War II, this article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the present case study expands our understanding of the crucial but under-studied historical relationship between drugs and warfare.

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne van den Bogaard

The ArgumentThe Netherlands has been a pioneering country in the development of macroeconometric modeling and its use in economic policy. The paper shows that the model was used to overcome the fragmented culture of Dutch pillarization. It proves that the specific use (and institutionalization) of modeling in the policy process is at least partly shaped by a nation's (historical) social structure. The case study relates to the outcome of a controversy within the social democratic pillar in the Netherlands in the period 1930–50 as to how to plan the economic system in the context of the social developments leading up to the crisis, World War II, and the postwar recovery.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Shannon Whiley

This paper is a biographical case study that explores the distinct experiences of three Australian-born Japanese (hereafter, Nikkei-Australians) who volunteered for Australian military service during World War II: Mario Takasuka, Joseph Suzuki and Winston Ide. It examines the social and political context in which these soldiers lived, concluding that they faced a disconnect between the way they were viewed by the government, their local communities and themselves. Notions of identity and nationalism are also explored in the context of World War II and the White Australia Policy, and are compared with the experiences of non-European soldiers in Australia and Nikkei soldiers abroad. The paper also highlights the ambiguous position of Nikkei-Australian soldiers with respect to military enlistment. At the time, legislation allowed for Nikkei-Australians to be variously classified as loyal citizens capable of enlistment, as not sufficiently ‘Australian’ for duty, or as enemy aliens, depending upon how it was applied in each case. Because there was no uniform approach within the government for applying these laws, the experiences of Nikkei-Australians vastly differed, as illustrated by the stories of the individuals profiled in this study. These stories are important as they add to the growing body of knowledge around non-white Australians who served in World War II, and remind us of how the pro-white, anti-Japanese atmosphere within Australia at the time affected those within the community who did not fit the mould of the White Australian ideal.


Geografie ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miloslav Šerý ◽  
Veronika Klementová

The article is focused on the phenomenon of regional identity and its relationship with processes of socio-historical development. The objective is to compare the regional identities of the inhabitants of two typologically specific regions located in Czechia. These regions’ specific characteristics are defined by dramatic interruptions in their development that occurred during the twentieth century. The existing regional identity of the inhabitants was assessed with regard to the role of the regions based on four principles used in the process of identity construction. Primary empirical data was obtained via questionnaire and subjected to further comparative analysis. In its conclusion, the article notes that the regional identities of the inhabitants of regions that experienced a discontinuity in their socio-historical development can vary considerably. In our conclusions, we augment the existing knowledge concerning the forms that the regional identities of inhabitants can take in regions with interrupted continuity in their development.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siarhei Danskikh

The article discusses the influence of the process of urbanization on the Belarusian nationality. Due to some historical conditions the Western cities‐communes have not formed in Belarus. At the beginning of the New Ages the Belarusian city has had Magdeburgian law and the trading relations, it has been the centre of the political life, the residence of the State officials and the provinces. Through the social‐economical backwardness of the Russian empire the peasants of Belarus could not move into the towns from the country. The towns and the cities in Belarus were not Belarusian but Jewish and Polish ones. Due to the World War II there have emerged the Polish Holocaust, repatriation and the Soviet industrialization which have made some auspicious conditions for the overtaking modernization in Belarus. During only one generation the peasant Belarusian nation has become the urban one. Such overtaking process of the urbanization has been preventing the formation of the standards and the traditions of the Belarusian city. The basis of the social and cultural life of Belarusians has been forming the traditions of the Soviet culture. That is why we can come to the conclusion that the overtaking modernization is closely related to the radical changes of the national identity. The more overtaking is modernization of the cities and the whole State, the more dangerous is the deprivation of the national peculiarity. The nation whose spiritual life is not utterly formed can hardly successfully adapt itself to the social and economical changes, which are determined by the overtaking modernization. These alterations do absolutely not correspond to its spiritual way of life.


Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.


Author(s):  
Christel Lane

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199214
Author(s):  
Kim Schoofs ◽  
Dorien Van De Mieroop

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.


2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Rynkiewich

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.


2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Fontaine

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document