Up in smoke?

Focaal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (73) ◽  
pp. 12-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Keene
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Region I ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
Back To The Land

This paper draws on the work of E. P. Thompson to understand anticapitalist resistance in northern California in the 1960s and 1970s. Through an analysis of the back-to-the-land movement in a region I call “Claytown,” I show how the making of a rural moral economy was in part enabled by the presence of a nascent marijuana industry. However, whereas a relatively small-scale marijuana industry helped forge anticapitalist resistance in the 1960s and 1970s, this industry has become a form through which values of capitalist political economy are being instantiated and reasserted. I situate my ethnographic analysis within a broader historical and legal framework to show how a contemporary moral economy is made and increasingly unmade in the context of late capitalism.

Tools of Transformation: Appropriate Technology in U.S. Countercultural Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Peter Mortensen
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Appropriate Technology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Environmental Transformation ◽  
Buckminster Fuller ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Environmentally Sound ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Second Wave

This essay takes its cue from second-wave ecocriticism and from recent scholarly interest in the “appropriate technology” movement that evolved during the 1960s and 1970s in California and elsewhere. “Appropriate technology” (or AT) refers to a loosely-knit group of writers, engineers and designers active in the years around 1970, and more generally to the counterculture’s promotion, development and application of technologies that were small-scale, low-cost, user-friendly, human-empowering and environmentally sound. Focusing on two roughly contemporary but now largely forgotten American texts Sidney Goldfarb’s lyric poem “Solar-Heated-Rhombic-Dodecahedron” (1969) and Gurney Norman’s novel Divine Right’s Trip (1971)—I consider how “hip” literary writers contributed to eco-technological discourse and argue for the 1960s counterculture’s relevance to present-day ecological concerns. Goldfarb’s and Norman’s texts interest me because they conceptualize iconic 1960s technologies—especially the Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome and the Volkswagen van—not as inherently alienating machines but as tools of profound individual, social and environmental transformation. Synthesizing antimodernist back-to-nature desires with modernist enthusiasm for (certain kinds of) machinery, these texts adumbrate a humanity- and modernity-centered post-wilderness model of environmentalism that resonates with the dilemmas that we face in our increasingly resource-impoverished, rapidly warming and densely populated world.

American Indian Soundchiefs

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-411
Author(s):  
Josh Garrett-Davis
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
Red Power ◽  
American Media ◽  
Home Recording ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Sound Media ◽  
The 1960S

American Indian Soundchiefs, an independent record label founded by the Rev. Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) in the 1940s, developed a remarkable model of Indigenous sound media that combined home recording, dubbing, and small-scale mass production. Alongside other Native American media producers of the same era, Soundchiefs built on earlier engagements with ethnographic and commercial recording to produce Native citizens’ media a generation prior to the Red Power era of the 1960s and 1970s. This soundwork provided Native music to Native listeners first, while also seeking to preserve a “rich store of folk-lore” sometimes in danger of being lost under ongoing colonial pressures. Pauahty’s label found ways to market commercial recordings while operating within what music and legal scholar Trevor Reed (Hopi) calls “Indigenous sonic networks,” fields of obligation and responsibility.

scholarly journals Deindustrialization, the Linwood Car Plant and Scotland’s Political Divergence from England in the 1960s and 1970s

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Phillips ◽  
Valerie Wright ◽  
Jim Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
Industrial Restructuring ◽  
British History ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Empirical Ground ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract Scotland’s political divergence from England is a key theme in late twentieth century British history. Typically seen in terms of the post-1979 Thatcher effect, this in fact developed over a longer timeframe, rooted in industrial changes revealed by analysis of the Linwood car plant in Renfrewshire. Conservatism and Unionism was an eminent political force in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s. But in all general elections from 1959 onwards the vote share of Conservative and Unionist candidates was lower in Scotland than in England. From the late 1960s onwards there were also ambitions for constitutional change. This article breaks new conceptual and empirical ground by relating these important markers of political divergence to popular understanding among Scottish workers of deindustrialization. A Thompsonian moral economy framework is deployed. Expectations were elevated by industrial restructuring from the 1950s, with workers exchanging jobs in the staples for a better future in assembly goods. Labour governments earned a reputation in Scotland as better managers of this process than Conservative governments. The 1979 general election showed that Labourism was growing in popularity in Scotland just as its appeal faded in England. At Linwood moral economy expectations were compromised, chiefly by intermittent redundancy and recurrent threat of closure, which was averted in 1975 by Labour government intervention. When the plant was shut in 1981 criticisms of UK political-constitutional structures and Conservativism were intensified.

Turkey’s Small Capital, A Player from the Start: Relations with the State and Big Capital

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-108
Author(s):  
EMRE BALIKÇI
Keyword(s):  
State Policies ◽  
The State ◽  
Early History ◽  
Business History ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
State Involvement ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Shed Light

This article aims to shed light on the early history of small-scale capital in Turkey. Turkey’s paradigm of development in the 1960s and 1970s, as in other belatedly industrializing countries, meant active state involvement, generally in favor of big capital. This emphasis on the large players has caused small capital’s influence on the era’s state policies to be largely overlooked. This article argues that small capital, popularized in the 1990s with the concept “Anatolian capital,” has deeper roots in Turkish economic and business history than formerly thought.

scholarly journals Covid Conversations 3: Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-222
Author(s):  
Elizabeth LeCompte ◽  
Kate Valk ◽  
Maria Shevtsova
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Wooster Group ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American System ◽  
The North ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Stage Direction ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Elizabeth LeCompte co-founded The Wooster Group with like-minded pioneers in New York in 1975, leading and directing its collaborators as deaths, departures, and new arrivals have changed its composition and emphases over the decades, segueing into a world-wide uncertain present. Kate Valk joined in 1978, the last representative of The Wooster Group’s foundational period, apart from LeCompte herself, who is still a key member of the company. References in this conversation are primarily to works after 2016. LeCompte briefly remarks on the importance of Since I Can Remember – one of the Group’s ongoing works in progress in 2021 – as an archival project that draws on Valk’s memory of how Nayatt School was made during her formative years. Having become, since then, a quintessential Wooster Group performer, Valk extended her artistic skills to stage direction, undertaking, most recently, The B-Side (2017). Both the initiative and idea for the piece came from performer Eric Berryman, who had brought Valk the collection of blues, songs, spirituals, and preachings on the 1965 LP made from the research of scholar folklorist Bruce Chapman. Berryman had been inspired to approach Valk because of her exclusive use of unadulterated historical recordings in Early Shaker Spirituals (2014), her directorial debut. The main work in rehearsal during 2020 and which was still locked down by the Covid-19 pandemic at the time of this conversation is The Mother, a Wooster Group variant of Brecht’s dramatized version of Gorky’s novel, directed by LeCompte. LeCompte discusses the current situation, emphasizing the increased vulnerability of independent artists and small-scale theatre, while giving a glimpse of the disadvantages for such groupings built into the North American system of project funding. The Wooster Group is a salient example of small-scale theatre that, despite continually precarious conditions, which the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated, has achieved its creative goals and has defined its place in the exploratory avant-garde flourishing vigorously in the 1960s and 1970s. This particular avant-garde, LeCompte believes, has seen various important developments over the years but might well now be counting its last days. The conversation here presented was recorded on 31 October 2020, transcribed by Kunsang Kelden, and edited by Maria Shevtsova, Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

scholarly journals Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Alexander ◽  
Maja Hojer Bruun ◽  
Insa Koch
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Moral Communities ◽  
Loan Terms ◽  
The Face ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis

Struggles over housing are one of the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time. Yet questions over access to, plus the redistribution and maintenance of secure housing have only recently begun to be considered anthropologically. Drawing on E.P. Thompson's concept of moral economy, this special issue addresses these questions and considers how contemporary moral economies of housing play out. Citizens try to make their demands for adequate and safe housing heard, but such aspirations are often undermined by, political rhetoric, state officials, loan terms and the law. People claim allegiances to particular moral communities, thus (re)constituting themselves as deserving of secure tenure and proper homes, often in the face of stigma, laws or policies that construct them as the very reverse. By placing fine-grained ethnographic analysis in conversation with the political economy of housing, we redefine housing as an essentially contested domain where competing understandings of citizenship are constructed, fought over and acted out.

Artefacts

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison ◽  
John Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
Contemporary Past ◽  
The Relationship

In the Wrst part of the book we considered a number of influences on the emergence of an archaeology of the contemporary past, from the interests in contemporary small-scale societies that developed as part of the New Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s, to the use of contemporary case studies to address particular archaeological debates about the relationship between material culture and social behaviour posed by post-processual archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s. We have seen how the archaeology of the recent past began with a focus on the First and Second World Wars, and then the Cold War, eventually to encompass a Weld that is concerned with the archaeology of a much wider range of events that have only just passed or are still occurring today (e.g. Penrose 2007). In Chapter 3 we looked in detail at the sorts of Weld methodologies that are being applied by archaeologists of the recent and contemporary past, considering whether their Weld methods might be understood to be distinct from other forms of archaeology. In Chapter 4 we looked at the relationship between archaeology and other disciplines that focus on contemporary materiality, in particular anthropology, material culture studies, art, and documentary photography. And in Chapter 5 we explored some reasons why archaeologists might have developed an interest in the contemporary world, and the period of late modernity in particular, through an exploration of some of the conditions of late modernity that make it distinct from the periods that precede it. In the second part of the book, we look in more detail at how we might approach the archaeology of the contemporary world, with reference to a series of case studies. As you read through this second part, you will notice that one of its distinguishing features is its dual perspective. We consider on the one hand places and material practices that are essentially extinct or have ceased to function, and on the other those places and practices that are still functioning, or, in Tim Cresswell’s (2004: 37) words, are ‘still becoming’.

Concerning Der Spätkapitalismus: Mandel's Quest for a Synthesis of Late Capitalism

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-198
Author(s):  
Jan Willem Stutje
Keyword(s):  
Wave Theory ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
The Core ◽  
Long Wave ◽  
The Social ◽  
West Berlin ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Marxist Tradition

AbstractBetween 1940 and 1980, Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) studied many aspects of capitalism. With his magna opera, Traité d'économie marxiste (1962) and Der Spätkapitalismus (1972) he had a great impact on the social movements which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s of the last century. This article attempts to unravel the story of the development of Mandel's economic historical work. It follows the search for the synthesis of late capitalism, positions Mandel in the Marxist tradition and looks for what was innovative in his contributions. The Traité d'economie marxiste was a provocative experiment. The author shows how Mandel replaced history into the core of Marx's economic theory and how he supersedes Eurocentrism by independently asking for attention for Asia, Africa, the Islamic World and pre-Columbian America. Mandel worked on Der Spätkapitalismus for more than ten years. The article shows how Mandel rehabilitated the forgotten 'long-wave theory', which enabled him to offer an explanation for the exceptional postwar expansion, but also made him predict the end of the 'golden days of capitalism'. The study was completed in 1972 in a turbulent West Berlin, where as visiting professor at the leading Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft he defended his vision in lively debate with students and confrères and where the last theoretical differences were ironed out.

scholarly journals Political Economy and Technological Innovation: Implications for Development of High-tech Industries in Korea

1992 ◽  
Vol 7 (0) ◽  
pp. 73-97
Author(s):  
Chang Rok Soh
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Large Firm ◽  
Semiconductor Industry ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Technological Problem ◽  
Competitive Advantages ◽  
Firm Strategies ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Political economy is a key determinant to industrial competitiveness. Korean political economy produced concentrated structure of industries, large firm organizations and price-oriented firm strategies. Even though these conditions were important Korean competitive advantages in the 1960s and 1970s, these are not appropriate Far development of high-tech industries. Unless structure of industries becomes more flexible, it will be difficult to expect competitive high-tech industries in Korea. The case of semiconductor industry illustrates this point. The flexible industry structure in the U.S. and Japan has been the key for their successes in this industry. On the other hand, most European countries lack this flexibility and have not been successful as much. Korean semiconductor industry, despite huge investment and the enormous growth, lacks the capacity for technological innovation. This technological problem is a result of the structural vulnerability which has been induced by Korean Political economy.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document