ABSTRACT
Engaging with a series of human–plant encounters in Berlin, this article explores possibilities for rethinking the heterogeneity of urban life in the ruins of European nationalism and ...capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and revisiting Berlin's postwar history of botanical research, I develop the concept of the ruderal and expand it for an anthropological inquiry of urban life. The term ruderal was originally used by Berlin ecologists after the Second World War to refer to ecologies that spontaneously inhabit disturbed environments: the spaces alongside train tracks or roads, wastelands, or rubble. Exploring Berlin as a ruderal city, I direct attention to the often unnoticed, cosmopolitan, and unruly ways of remaking the urban fabric at a time of increased nationalism and ecological destruction. Tracing human–plant socialities in encounters between scientists and rubble plants, in public culture, and among immigrants and their makeshift urban gardens, the lens of the ruderal directs ethnographic analysis toward the city's unintended ecologies as these are produced in the context of nation‐making, war, xenophobia, migration, environmental change, and contemporary austerity policies. Attending to ruderal worlds, I argue, requires telling stories that do not easily add up but that combine environmental perspectives with the study of migration, race, and social inequality—in the interest of mapping out possibilities for change. This framework thus expands a recent anthropological focus on ruins, infrastructure, and urban landscapes by highlighting questions of social justice that are at stake in emerging urban ecologies and an era of inhospitable.
Breaking Point Tsika, Noah; Schwartz Greene, Rebecca
2023
eBook
This book informs the public for the first time about the impact of American psychiatry on soldiers during World War II.
Breaking Point is the first in-depth history of American psychiatry in World ...War II. Drawn from unpublished primary documents, oral histories, and the author’s personal interviews and correspondence over years with key psychiatric and military policymakers, it begins with Franklin Roosevelt’s endorsement of a universal Selective Service psychiatric examination followed by Army and Navy pre- and post-induction examinations. Ultimately, 2.5 million men and women were rejected or discharged from military service on neuropsychiatric grounds. Never before or since has the United States engaged in such a program.
In designing Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1, psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan assumed psychiatrists could predict who might break down or falter in military service or even in civilian life thereafter. While many American and European psychiatrists questioned this belief, and huge numbers of American psychiatric casualties soon raised questions about screening’s validity, psychiatric and military leaders persisted in 1942 and 1943 in endorsing ever tougher screening and little else. Soon, families complained of fathers and teens being drafted instead of being identified as psychiatric 4Fs, and Blacks and Native Americans, among others, complained of bias. A frustrated General George S. Patton famously slapped two “malingering” neuropsychiatric patients in Sicily (a sentiment shared by Marshall and Eisenhower, though they favored a tamer style). Yet psychiatric rejections, evacuations, and discharges mounted.
While psychiatrist Roy Grinker and a few others treated soldiers close to the front in Tunisia in early 1943, this was the exception. But as demand for manpower soared and psychiatrists finally went to the field and saw that combat itself, not “predisposition,” precipitated breakdown, leading military psychiatrists switched their emphasis from screening to prevention and treatment. But this switch was too little too late and slowed by a year-long series of Inspector General investigations even while numbers of psychiatric casualties soared.
Ironically, despite and even partly because of psychiatrists’ wartime performance, plus the emotional toll of war, postwar America soon witnessed a dramatic growth in numbers, popularity, and influence of the profession, culminating in the National Mental Health Act (1946). But veterans with “PTSD,” not recognized until 1980, were largely neglected.
After the end of World War II, various iterations of hegemony studies focused on such topics as the connection between hegemonic powers and the provision of international public goods, the causes of ...war during hegemonic transitions, and the stability of hegemonic orders. In this article, we discuss and forward the emergence of a new wave of international hegemony studies. This research program concerns itself with the politics of hegemonic orders and hegemonic ordering. It treats hegemonic orders as means, mediums, and objects of cooperation and contestation. It sees hegemons as not simply order makers but also order takers whose domestic political processes significantly interact with the dynamics of international order. It incorporates insights about how different dimensions of hegemonic orders interact to shape the costs and benefits of hegemony. In short, it treats hegemony and hegemonic orders as objects of analysis amenable to multiple theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches.
This article builds on research demonstrating that high levels of economic and physical security are conducive to a shift from materialist to postmaterialist values—and that this shift tends to make ...people more favorable to important social changes. This article updates this research, demonstrating that: (1) These value changes occur with exceptionally large time lags between the onset of the conditions conducive to them, and the societal changes they produce—as previous work implies but does not demonstrate. The evidence suggests that there was a time lag of forty to fifty years between when Western societies first attained high levels of economic and physical security after World War II, and related societal changes such as legalization of same-sex marriage. (2) A distinctive set of “individual-choice norms,” dealing with acceptance of gender equality, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality, is moving on a different trajectory from other cultural changes. These norms are closely linked with human fertility rates and require severe self-repression. (3) Although basic values normally change at the pace of intergenerational population replacement, the shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms is now moving much faster, having reached a tipping point where conformist pressures have reversed polarity and are now accelerating changes they once resisted. We test these claims against data from eighty countries containing most of the world's population, surveyed from 1981 to 2014.
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