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"Amy Singer"
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Imagining cultural wealth: producer perceptions and potential value in cultural markets
Whether the result of purposeful nation-branding projects or longstanding traditions, associations endure between specific nations and the particular goods they produce. Such associations can be harnessed on behalf of the symbolic and economic value recently recognized as national cultural wealth. Further, the cultivation of impression management strategies about geographical origins is requisite for specialty food firms: terroir is a foundational convention of the gourmet food industry, and its potential value is significant. For entrepreneurial firms in the specialty food market, the process of strategically connecting to cultural wealth would seem to depend upon their particular geographic location. But while some national origins add both symbolic and economic value to cultural products within the global marketplace, others potentially threaten that value. In this paper, I read closely the discursive data contained on a nearly complete collection of two case study firms’ food packages (N = 100) to illustrate the firms’ unexpectedly divergent perceptions of cultural wealth, despite their identical national location. I further analyze interview data to describe the vital (and potentially valuable) interaction between producer perception, imagination, and cultural production. By redirecting analytical attention toward profit-seeking producers, this paper aims to increase the analytical power of the concept of cultural wealth.
Journal Article
The lives of animals
The author of these lectures uses fiction to present a discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. The story draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals and her alienation from humans.
Book
A Novel Approach: The Sociology of Literature, Children's Books, and Social Inequality
This article discusses the complexity of literary analysis and the implications of using fiction as a source of sociological data. This project infuses literary analysis with sociological imagination. Using a random sample of children's novels published between 1930 and 1980, this article describes both a methodological approach to the analysis of children's books and the subsequent development of two analytical categories of novels. The first category captures books whose narratives describe and support unequal social arrangements; the second category captures those whose narratives work instead to identify inequality and disrupt it. Building on Griswold's methodological approach to literary fiction, this project examines how children's novels describe, challenge, or even subvert systems of inequality. Through a sociological reading of three sampled texts - Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, A Wrinkle in Time, and Hitty: Her First Hundred Years - readers learn how these analytical categories work and how the sociology of literature might be enriched by attention to structural forms of inequality within literary fiction. This essay investigates children's books in order to reinvigorate the discussion and use of novels by sociologists.
Journal Article
Poverty and charity in Middle Eastern contexts
Offering insights and analysis in a field that has only recently come into existence, this book explores the ideals and institutions through which Middle Eastern societies—from the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. to the present day—have confronted poverty and the poor. By introducing new sources and presenting familiar ones with new questions, the contributors examine ideas about poverty and the poor, ideals and practices of charity, and state and private initiatives of poor relief over this extensive time span. They avoid easy generalizations about Islam and the Middle East as they seek to set the ideals and practices in comparative perspective.
eBook
Giving Practices in Islamic Societies
Charitable giving in Islamic societies has become a popular media topic in the early twenty-first century. Sadly, the discussions there have most often been superficial and focused on the misuse of charitable funds while ignoring the more compelling aspects of Muslim practices of charitable giving. Yet, since the early Islamic era and continuing through to the present, beneficent giving has been a core aspect of Muslim belief and practice, rooted in the religious precepts and ideals articulated in the Qur'an and the reports of the words and actions of the Muhammad (hadith). Without an appreciation of this fundamental aspect of Islam, it would be difficult to have a full understanding of Islamic societies, either in the past or in the present. By drawing on a wide variety of historical and contemporary sources, one can discern a rich and complex panorama of charity as practiced by Muslims. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
Studying Turkey through a Graphic Lens
In Turkish Kaleidoscope, social anthropologist and novelist Jenny White has expanded her repertoire to the graphic novel format to create an account of the violence and political chaos that pervaded Turkey in the late 1970s.2 White builds here on her academic work and her own student experience at Hacettepe University in Ankara. Artist Ergün Gündüz has created visual interpretations of place, space, events, and emotions that bring the story to life. This review is a collaborative class exercise for “Turkey: From Atatürk to Erdoğan” at Brandeis University in the Spring 2021 semester. It reflects on the novel as a text for Turkish history; the format of the work; the aesthetic choices of artist and author; and the experience of encountering this work in the contemporary historical moment. The review incorporates student comments as direct quotations. It was co-authored by Chris Martin, a student in the course.
Journal Article
The Politics of Philanthropy
In any era, there is a politics of philanthropy that informs the way practitioners make decisions about benevolent actions. At the same time, there is a politics of philanthropy that shapes the way in which people think and write about philanthropy, whether they are scholars or popular authors. This discussion first provides succinct working definitions of key terms and institutions related to Muslim philanthropy. It then examines how the study of Muslim philanthropy has changed in response to the current politics of philanthropy. Ottoman imperial philanthropy provides well-documented historical examples of how the politics of philanthropy shaped choices about benevolence projects. The examples in this article are based on my own research and the publications of other scholars of Ottoman history. The advantage of the Ottoman case lies in the variety of evidence available, including the physical presence of many large, endowed building complexes, together with their endowment deeds and documentation of their functioning over time. A careful study of these endowments makes it possible to illustrate what the politics of philanthropy entailed for the Ottomans and also raises more general questions for consideration in other contexts. Deemphasizing the state as the necessary framework for politics, while acknowledging a politics of philanthropy, opens up rich possibilities for deciphering the ways in which specific benevolent actions are inseparable from the complex social, economic, and cultural interactions that configure human behavior.
Journal Article