Minneapolis council vows police dismantling as protests continue

AFP / Kerem YucelA man raises his fist during a memorial for George Floyd after a day of demonstrations on June 7, 2020 in Minneapolis

Councilors in the US city of Minneapolis pledged late Sunday to dismantle and rebuild the police department, after the death in custody of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests about racism in law enforcement, pushing the issue onto the national political agenda.

Floyd was killed on May 25 when white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on the unarmed black man's neck for nearly nine minutes. Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder and is to appear in court Monday.

"We committed to dismantling policing as we know it in the city of Minneapolis and to rebuild with our community a new model of public safety that actually keeps our community safe," Council President Lisa Bender told CNN, after a majority of councilors committed to the effort.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, however, is against getting rid of the department, and the head of the city's powerful police union, Bob Kroll, appeared on stage last year with President Donald Trump.

The vow by the majority of councilors came a day after Frey was booed at and asked to leave a "Defund the Police" rally. He later told AFP he supported "massive structural reform to revise this structurally racist system" but not "abolishing the entire police department."

AFP / Jose Luis MaganaHundreds of demonstrators walk down 16th Street NW during a rally north of Lafayette Square near the White House to protest police brutality and racism, on June 7, 2020

Bystander video of the incident -- which captured Floyd calling for his mother and saying he could not breathe -- has sparked two weeks of mostly peaceful demonstrations across the country.

On Sunday, protesters in cities including Washington, New York and Winter Park, Florida, began focusing their outrage over the death of the unarmed Floyd into demands for police reform and social justice.

Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah, joined a group of Christian protesters marching toward the White House. He tweeted photos of himself in the procession, along with the simple caption, "Black Lives Matter."

Although Romney has been a rare Republican voice of opposition to Trump, he was joined last week by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who said criticism of Trump was overdue.

Trump's tough approach to putting down protests continued to draw exceptional rebukes from top retired military officers, a group normally loath to criticize a civilian leader.

Former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell joined them Sunday, saying Trump had "drifted away" from the Constitution. Powell, a Republican moderate, said Trump had weakened America's position around the world and that in November's presidential election he would support Democrat Joe Biden.

- 'This isn't a battlefield' -

AFP / Kerem YucelA woman cries in front of an installation created by Anna Barber and Connor Wright called 'Say Their Names' to honor victims of police brutality on June 7, 2020 in Minneapolis

Condoleezza Rice, who succeeded Powell as secretary of state under President George W. Bush, told CBS she would "absolutely" oppose using the military against peaceful protesters, adding, "This isn't a battlefield."

The president has ordered National Guard troops to begin withdrawing from the nation's capital, whose Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat who jousted with Trump over the use of force in her city, told Fox News there had been no arrests on Saturday despite the protests which saw thousands moving through the capital's streets.

A week earlier, however, there were fires and vandalism.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told ABC that Washington had been "a city out of control" and denied a problem of systemic racism among police.

The Trump administration has proposed no specific policy changes in response to the widespread outrage over Floyd's death.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) said they would introduce legislation in the House of Representatives on Monday to make policing more accountable.

The legislation is expected to make it easier to sue police officers over deadly incidents, to ban the sort of choke holds that led to Floyd's death, and to establish a national database to record police misconduct.

- 'A lot of work to do' -

One member of the caucus, Representative Val Demings of Florida, a former police chief in the city of Orlando, told ABC that "systemic racism is always the ghost in the room."

AFP / Gal ROMAExample of the "use of force continuum", a recommended series of actions that guide US police in handling situations at hand, according to the National Institute of Justice (US Department of Justice)

"What we have to do as a nation is hold police accountable," said Demings, who has been mentioned as a possible running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

It is unclear what support the proposed reforms might find in the Republican-controlled Senate -- or whether Trump might sign such legislation into law.

Some jurisdictions have moved already to embrace reforms -- starting with bans on the use of tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters Sunday that he would cut the city's police budget and shift some funds to youth and social services, local media reported.

Trump seized on the call by some protesters to slash police funding to attack Biden, tweeting without evidence that "not only will Sleepy Joe Biden DEFUND THE POLICE, but he will DEFUND OUR MILITARY!"

The president is scheduled to host a roundtable with law enforcement on Monday.

Biden, who has accused Trump of fanning "the flames of hate," plans to travel to Houston on Monday to visit Floyd's family. He will also record a message to be read at Floyd's funeral on Tuesday.

 Armenians – Aryans. The “Blood Myth”, the Race Laws of 1938 and the Armenians in Italy

ENRICO FERRI


Armenians – Aryans. The “Blood Myth”, the Race Laws of 1938 and the Armenians in Italy
https://novapublishers.com/shop/armenians-aryans-the-blood-myth-the-race-laws-of-1938-and-the-armenians-in-italy/

Enrico Ferri
University “Niccolò Cusano” (UNICUSANO) – Rome, Italy

Series: Focus on Civilizations and Cultures
BISAC: HIS003000

Binding
Hardcover CLEAR

$210.00
Publication Date: October 2016
Status: Available
162 pages

ISBN: 978-1-63485-252-4Categories: Focus on Civilizations and Cultures, European History, History, HumanitiesTags: 9781634852524, 9781634857062, european history


Details
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Several laws “in defense of the race” were readily enacted in Germany (1935) and successively applied further in Italy (1938). The hypothetical existence of a primeval Indo-European language was assumed to be associated with a similar ancestral Aryan race. Its psycho-physical traits and characteristic vision of the world were typical of the warrior race; a sense of honor, penchant for risk, willingness to emerge and respect for hierarchy were highly valued. These were the traits that identified with the race’s primacy. While the Aryan race split up into various ethnic groups, its constituent characteristics continue to be visible in most European populations today. In the 1930s these somewhat frail bases, besides a number of pseudo-sciences, such as phrenology, physiognomy and other ill-conceived theories on race, contributed to establishing the criteria according to which peoples were considered Aryans or Semites. These doctrines formed the ideological background for the discrimination, segregation and persecution of entire populations and communities, like the Jews and the Roma people. The following study traces the complex framework within which the Armenian community developed in Italy and Europe, highlighting the various arguments that emerged in favor of or against the inclusion of the Armenian people in the Aryan family and the historical milieu in which the debate took place. (Imprint: Nova)

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and the Urbanization of Chicago

https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/theodore-dreiser-s-sister-carrie-and-the-urbanization-of-chicago

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser, an influential and at times infamous author of literary naturalism, was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1871. The eleventh of thirteen children, he had an unhappy childhood shaped by poverty. At age fifteen, he left home. After several years of menial labor and some college, in 1892 he started as a journalist at the Chicago Globe. Interested in the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, Dreiser began writing fiction that explored ideas of social determinism and the “survival of the fittest,” particularly during a period of intense urbanization across the country.

Sister Carrie (1900) was Dreiser’s first novel, and it reflects the ideas of literary naturalism through its attitude of scientific objectivity toward human behavior. The novel centers on Carrie Meeber, a young woman from rural Wisconsin who moves to Chicago to earn money. First seduced by a traveling salesman on her train ride into the city, Carrie quickly adapts to her new environment, where she learns to make use of other men and the opportunities she encounters. The novel shows the attractions and dangers of big city life in the late nineteenth century, with its glittering department stores, theaters, dance halls, and other opportunities to mingle with the opposite sex without supervision. The novel ends with Carrie becoming a successful stage actress in New York City, while one of her lovers spirals downward and commits suicide.

Dreiser’s frank treatment of sex and materialism, and his refusal to punish characters for their behavior, shocked readers. Sister Carrie was attacked by censors for its immorality, and the book was banned in New York City and Cincinnati in 1916. Dreiser continued to court controversy throughout his career. In 1929 he was subject to an obscenity trial for his bestselling novel An American Tragedy (1925). He was increasingly drawn to social justice efforts in the 1930s, including letter-writing campaigns as an anti-war activist, supporting the American Communist Party, and fighting racial injustice in the Scottsboro Boys case.

Pioneers in Criminology XV--Enrico Ferri (1856-1929) 

Thorsten Sellin (1958)
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4636&context=jclc

THE JOURNAL OF  CRIMINAL LAW, CRIMINOLOGY, AND POLICE SCIENCE

VOL. 48 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1958 NO. 5

PIONEERS IN CRIMINOLOGY

XV-ENRICO FERRI (1856-1929)

THORSTEN SELLIN

Professor Sellin is chairman of the Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania; editor of

the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (since 1929); and president of

the International Society of Criminology. From time to time, during the last thirty years he has pub-

]ished articles in the Journal on a variety of subjects of interest to criminologists.

The accompanying photograph by Giacomo Brogi, Florence, is reproduced from "The Italy of

the Italians", published by Charles Scribners and Sons. It represents Ferri in middle thirties.

-EDITOR.


ENRICO FERRI

When Enrico Ferri died, April 12, 1929, one of

the most colorful and influential figures in the

history of criminology disappeared. Born at San

Benedetto Po in the province of Mantua, February

25, 1856, his active life spanned more than half a

century, beginning with the publication of his

dissertation in 1878 and ending with the fifth

edition of his "Criminal Sociology," which was

being printed when he died. During the intervening

five decades he became the acknowledged leader of

the so-called positive school of criminal science,

a highly successful trial lawyer and Italy's perhaps

greatest contemporary forensic orator, member of

Parliament, editor of the Socialist newspaper,

"Avanti," indefatigable public lecturer, university

professor, author of highly esteemed scholarly

works, founder of a great legal journal, and a

tireless polemicist in defense of his ideas. His was a

rich and varied life, to which no brief article can

do justice.

In the book, which Ferri published in 1928 on

the "Principles of Criminal Law,"' a work which

contained the systematic presentation of the legal

principles of the positive school, he listed what he

himself regarded as his most important contributions.

They were the demonstration that the concept of freedom

of will has no place in criminal

law; that social defense is the purpose of criminal

justice; the three types of factors in crime causation;

the classification of criminals in five classes;

penal substitutes as means of indirect social defense;

motivation, rather than the objective nature

of the crime, as the basis for sanctions; the demand

that farm colonies be substituted for cellular

isolation of prisoners by day; the indeterminate

sentence instead of the dosage by fixed terms o

institutionalization; the demand that hospitals


1 PRINCIPI IIDI DIRITTO CRIMINALE. xvi, 848 pp.

Torino: UTET, 1928.


SOCIOLOGY THEORIES OF CRIME AND DEVIANCE
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-sociology/chapter/theories-of-crime-and-deviance/

Enrico Ferri and Criminal Sociology - Northwestern Pritzker ...

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu › cgi › viewcontent

by G Nicotri - ‎1929 - ‎Cited by 3 - ‎Related articles

The recent death of Enrico Ferri brings to a close a period of struggle and partial though continuous conquests for the science that seeks to combat the for-.

An excerpt from Enrico Ferri's *Socialism and Positive Science ...

https://dp.la › primary-source-sets › sources

Ferri explains principles of Herbert Spencer's theory of social Darwinism, often reduced to the mantra of “survival of the fittest.” This theory sought to apply ...

Popular Science Monthly/Volume 49/October 1896/Enrico Ferri on Homicide II

< Popular Science Monthly‎ | Volume 49‎ | October 1896https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_49/October_1896/Enrico_Ferri_on_Homicide_II

ENRICO FERRI ON HOMICIDE.

By HELEN ZIMMERN.

SECOND PAPER.

FERRI passes in review 1,711 individuals, of whom 711 are soldiers, 699 criminals, and 301 madmen. In this minute examination of anthropometric data he discusses almost every case, pointing out its specific characteristics by means of ample comparisons, which justify his methods of research and his conclusions, as well as throw light on the difficult and not yet firmly established study of criminal anthropology. To close this section of his learned work, he devotes a portion to the reaffirmation of the inferiority of criminal as compared with normal man, and to the analogy that certain anomalies and delinquent characteristics present, deducing thence criminal degeneracy. Very remarkable are the differences of cephalometric characteristics between a certain number of soldiers examined, among whom were some students. The superiority of the latter was incontestably proved by the great anterior semicircumference of the head, by the greater cranial capacity, by the larger frontal diameter, and the minor development of the upper jaw. Worthy of note, too, in regard to this last point is the result of the examination of homicidal murderers as respects recidivistry. The former showed less cranial capacity and a minor frontal diameter, while their upper jaws were more developed.

Having examined these chronic anomalies in criminals in reaffirming the conclusions arrived at by the modern school of criminal anthropology, Ferri gives us the physiognomy of murderers in their characteristic traits, calling to aid the help of photography. It is an interesting series of pictures that he has thus grouped together. Here is the apish type; there the half-mad; there one with large jaws, the most characteristic and frequent feature; the type with receding forehead, etc. The study of temperament and of race in the order of delinquency, which represents the bio-psychic personality of an individual and of a people, is not yet well matured, as opinions with regard to their influences are many and varied. Still, some progress has been made. 

Thus it is popularly held that full-blooded, passionate, energetic temperaments are more prone to homicide, while the truth really lies in the opposite direction; the physiological character of this determination is rather a general denutrition of the organism and of the nervous system which originates that irritability and that lack of inhibition by which men react with more difficulty against the murderous impulse.

Race, whose marked influence in biological and social manifestations is, however, denied by many eminent scientists, is nevertheless one of the concurrent factors in the determination of a crime and one which can not be overlooked. Race is not the only factor in the distribution of homicide in Europe, for side by side with this run the social economical conditions induced in their turn by this very race. In this distribution there are manifest three distinct ethnographical groups—the Græco-Latin, the Germanic with the Anglo-Saxon, and the Slav—which stand for the three large zones of homicide. In the first place for the greater frequency of homicide stand the Latin peoples—Italy, Spain, Roumania, Portugal, France, and Belgium; in the medium zone the Slav people of Russia and Austria; for the minor frequency of this crime, the peoples of Germanic origin of Germany, Holland, and England. The sad supremacy pertains not to Italy but to Spain.

Modernity and Technology 
edited by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.477.723&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The volume draws on an international workshop held at the University of Twente in the Netherlands in November 1999, which brought together a diverse group of scholars from the communities of modernity studies (philosophy, cultural studies, and social theory) and technology studies (history, sociology, anthropology); see www.iit.edu/~misa/ twente/ . This workshop was made possible by financial support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (grant SES-9900894), the University of Twente, and the Dutch Graduate School for Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). Our collective efforts to understand technology and modernity go back to a seminar series that Pieter Tijmes, Johan Schot, and Tom Misa organized at Twente in the spring of 1997. At Twente we would especially like to thank Gerdien Linde-de Ruiter for a thousand small acts of kindness and assistance in planning and preparing the workshop, as well as the friendly and expert assistance of Femke Merkx in conducting the workshop. Many workshop participants freely shared their own ongoing research and reflections, giving our authors invaluable insights.

Acknowledgments vii
Workshop Participants ix
1 The Compelling Tangle of Modernity and Technology 1
Thomas J. Misa
I Modernity Theory and Technology Studies
2 Theorizing Modernity and Technology 33
Philip Brey
3 Modernity Theory and Technology Studies: Reflections on Bridging
the Gap 73
Andrew Feenberg
4 Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology Studies 105
Barbara L. Marshall
II Technologies of Modernity
5 Modernity under Construction: Building the Internet in
Trinidad 139
Don Slater
6 Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society 161
David Lyon
7 Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization
in the History of Sociotechnical Systems 185
Paul N. Edwards
6641 FM UG 9/12/02 5:38 PM Page v
vi Contents
8 Creativity of Technology: An Origin of Modernity? 227
Junichi Murata
III Changing Modernist Regimes
9 The Contested Rise of a Modernist Technology Politics 257
Johan Schot
10 Technology, Medicine, and Modernity: The Problem of
Alternatives 279
David Hess
11 The Environmental Transformation of the Modern Order 303
Arthur P. J. Mol
12 Technology, Modernity, and Development: Creating Social
Capabilities in a POLIS 327
Haider A. Khan
13 Modernity and Technology—An Afterword 359
Arie Rip

    ESSAY'S IN CRIMINOLOGY 

Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni - Matias Bailone

www.matiasbailone.com › dip

Occupying War: Representing U.S. Militarism since 1989

Caitlin Marie Cawley, Fordham University            https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI27540472/   

Abstract

“Occupying War” is a cultural study of contemporary American militarism that offers one answer to the question, how did Americans get from the 1960s, a period that saw the largest antiwar movement in U.S. history, to our current era, in which many civilians cannot name our wars, let alone challenge them? It reads seminal war films and literary works alongside military reports, government documents, and news media coverage to trace two lines simultaneously: the practices and official discourses that distinguish America’s post-Cold War wars and the political and military actors involved in these campaigns, and the cultural existence of these wars, the aesthetics, narratives, and forms that literary, cinematic, and visual artists have used to represent them. By bringing these two lines into conversation, “Occupying War” argues that occupation—a uniquely incoherent form of warfare—is a driving force behind the tidal recess following the Vietnam War. More specifically, by reading Dispatches, Going After Cacciato, The Short-Timers, Full Metal Jacket, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Jarhead, Restrepo, Redeployment, and War Porn, among other works, within the context of occupying militarism, this dissertation offers a fuller understanding of why American civilians in the twenty-first century struggle to apprehend and resist our current state of “permanent” war.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Film studies|American studies

Recommended Citation

Cawley, Caitlin Marie, "Occupying War: Representing U.S. Militarism since 1989" (2020). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI27540472.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI27540472

In the Valley of the Moon:

Enclosure, Temperance, and the American War

 on John Barleycorn

by
Zita M. Worley
Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History
University of California, Riverside, June 2015
Dr. Molly McGarry, Chairperson

https://escholarship.org/content/qt3tn7q346/qt3tn7q346.pdf

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

The history of temperance and prohibition has long been constructed as either a rural
backlash against modernity or a defining feature of middle-class culture. Early
scholarship inaccurately denounced prohibition as a consequence of rural discontent in an
increasingly urban immigrant America. More recent scholarship has relocated
temperance in middle-class culture and politics, often to the neglect of the agrarian
sector. Using an exploration of the production of space, this dissertation reexamines the
place of temperance in the transition of the North American colonies from a largely
subsistence-oriented society to a modern market-centric nation-state. I contend that as a
middle-class movement, temperance emerged out of the enclosure and improvement
movements and trace the movement’s history as a cultural arm of enclosure through to
the passage of national prohibition. As shown herein, dry crusaders of the early republic
were antagonistic to the subsistence farmers who were viewed as a threat to the national
project. This antagonism was extended to new stock immigrant farmers who arrived in
waves through much of the 1800s. In an attempt to redefine American farms and fields, 
across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, temperance advocates pushed farm
commercialization and the transformation of farming and food systems to meet the needs
of an industrial society. But because temperance ideology failed to address the very real
economic concerns of farmers in their struggles with the transition to commercial
production, agrarian America remained ambivalent to temperance up to and following the
passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. 

The problem of disenchantment: scientific naturalism and esoteric discourse, 1900-1939.

Asprem, E. (2013). 

https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/2010817/117215_thesis.pdf

6. Five Schools of Natural Theology: Reconciling Science and Religion................................... 196
The Institutions of Natural Theology .......................................................................204

Five Schools of Natural Theology.........................................................................................................................205
I. Ether Metaphysics .............................................................................................................................................206
II. Psychic Enchantment .....................................................................................................................................224
III. Theologies of Emergence ................................................................................................232
IV. Modern Alchemy ..............................................................................................247
V. Quantum Mysticism.....................................................................................

The Theological Underpinnings of the New Natural Theologies: Panentheism and
Cosmotheism...........................................................................................................282

III. LABORATORIES OF ENCHANTMENT
7. Against Agnosticism: Psychical Research and the Naturalisation of the Supernatural. 292
The Agnosticism Controversy and the Epistemology of Scientific Naturalism ...............................295
Psychical Research as Open-Ended Naturalism............................................................................................302
Strategies of Naturalisation....................................................................................................................................311
Anti-Agnosticism and the Slippery Road to Psychic Enchantments ....................................................319
8. Laboratories of Enchantment: Parapsychology in Search of a Paradigm........................... 322
Three Generations of Psychical Research ........................................................................................................322
William James and the Failure of the First Generation ..............................................................................328
The Fragmentation of Psychical Research: The Second Generation....................................................332
The Statistical Turn: Quantitative Experimentalist Programmes in Psychical Research...........357
Enchantment and the Reign of Quantity...........................................................................................................378
9. Professionals Out of the Ordinary: How Parapsychology Became a University
Discipline...........................................................................................................................................................385
How to Become a Scientist When Your Field Does Not Exist..................................................................385
Against Agnostics, Sceptics, and Spiritualists: The Boundary-Work of a Conservative
Contrarian ......................................................................................................................................................................389
Reactionary Networks: How Psychical Research Can Save Western Civilisation (According
to W. McDougall).........................................................................................................................................................399
Professionals at Last: The Inauguration of the Rhine Era.........................................................................411
Enchantment in Old Dixie........................................................................................................................................422

IV. ESOTERIC EPISTEMOLOGIES
10. Esoteric Epistemologies...................................................................................................................... 428
Esotericism 3.0 and the Problem of Disenchantment.................................................................................428
Rejected Knowledge: Esotericism and Establishment ...............................................................................434
Worldviews: The Disenchantment of Esotericism? .....................................................................................439
Epistemology: Gnosis and the Expansion of Reason...................................................................................446
Esoteric Knowledge between Naturalisation and Disenchantment.....................................................457
11. The Problems of a Gnostic Science: The Case of Theosophy’s Occult Chemistry........... 460
Science and Higher Knowledge in First-Generation Theosophy ...........................................................464
Visions Beyond Sight: Occult Chemistry and the Problem of Representation.................................470
Science contra Gnosis: Conceptual Revolutions and the Stagnation of Theosophical Science.489
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................................................496

12. Perceiving Higher Worlds: Two Perspectives ............................................................................ 498
A Comparative Approach to Higher Knowledge ...........................................................................................498
Two Careers in Occultism.............................................................................................502
Steiner: Philosopher, Theosophist, Anthroposophist ...........................................................................502
Crowley: Prophet of a New Aeon....................................................................................................................508
Comparative Gnosis: Geheimwissenschaft versus Scientific Illuminism.............................................517
“Occult Science”: Steiner’s Devotional Road to Higher Knowledge ................................................518
Scientific Illuminism: Crowley’s Sceptical Road to Higher Knowledge.........................................532
On Reverence, Scepticism, and Reason Unbound: Concluding Comparisons ..................................546
Conclusion: Disenchantment and Problemgeschichte .................................................................... 555
Bibliography................................................................................................................................................... 583

Summaries (English and Dutch) ............................................................................................................. 626

Engineering Philosophy 
Theories of Technology, German Idealism, and Social Order in High-Industrial Germany 

ADELHEID  VOSKUHL

http://basu.daneshlink.ir/Handler10.ashx?server=2&id=50/article/637923/pdf

ABSTRACT:

 During the so-called “Second Industrial Revolution,” engineers were constituting themselves as a new social and professional group, and found themselves in often fierce competition with existing elites—the military, the nobility, and educated bourgeois mandarins—whose roots went back to medieval and early modern pre-industrial social orders. During that same time, engineers also discovered the discipline of philosophy: as a means to express their intellectual and social agendas, and to theorize technology and its relationship to art, history, culture, philosophy, and the state.

This article analyzes engineers’ own philosophical writings about technology as well as the institutions in which they composed them in 1910s and 1920s Germany. It emphasizes engineers’ contributions to well-known discourses founded by canonical philosophers, the role of preindustrial economies and their imagination in such philosophies, and the role of both the history and the philosophy of technology in engineers’ desire for upward social mobility.

If you own a slide rule and someone comes up with large claims or great
emotions, you say: “Just a moment please, first we want to work out the margin of error and the most probable value of all this!”—This was without a doubt a powerful idea of engineering. It served as the foundation for an appealing future self-image.
—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities1


Adelheid Voskuhl is associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology of
Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (2013), which won the Jacques Barzun Prize for best book in cultural history. She wishes to acknowledge the support by the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which funded the research for and writing of this article. She is particularly grateful to the three anonymous T&C referees for their insightful comments and criticism and to Barbara Hahn for sustained and invaluable editorial support.
©2016 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/16/5704-0001/721–52

Food and the commodification of health

Consumers and the conceptual and practical appropriation of functional foods 

Mari Niva

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/20929/consumer.pdf?sequence=1

1 Introduction

Food is more than just something to eat. It acquires countless meanings and expressions in different cultures, times and places. It is part of our social identity, a means of distinction and of distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘others’. It simultaneously embraces traditions and innovations, the everyday and the feast, asceticism and hedonism, individuality and commensality. It fascinates us all in the different roles in our lives, whether we are its consumers, producers or researchers.

The concepts and categorisations of food reflect the social and cultural environment in which we live (e.g., Douglas & Isherwood 1979, 66; Mäkelä 2002, 18). The visibility of health in the debate on food is a characteristic feature of modern consumer society (Warde 1997; 79). It is a regular, evenpervasive topic just as much in the media as in everyday discussions with members of the family, colleagues and friends. Healthy eating advice startsearly in life when parents tell their children to eat their vegetables and in Finland it continues at school, where nutrition education is part of domestic science lessons. The food sections of bookshops are full of guides to diet and dieting and cookbooks for healthy eating. National and internationalcommittees and task forces draw up nutrition recommendations and try to guide the public towards choosing healthy food. In addition, food and diet occupy a focal position in the prevention and treatment of many chronic diseases. We live in a world in which it is increasingly difficult to avoid the discourse on healthy eating in the media and everyday life. As the formed social norms, habits and traditions of eating have eroded, it has been asked whether it is the perspective of medicine that has begun to dominate food and eating in contemporary societies (Fischler 1980, 949).

The discourse on food and health that consumers face in their everyday life is, however, becoming more and more fragmentary and the information increasingly detailed. Foods once condemned as unhealthy are found to contain health-promoting substances, and vice versa, and research into the links between food or food substances and specific diseases gains wide publicity. The gamut of increasingly detailed research findings on food and health in the media and the abundance of diet programmes on the market do not always support the basic message of the nutrition recommendation.

 Consumers and the conceptual and practical appropriation of functional foods tions, which has for decades been relatively constant. The optimist would say that modern consumers can choose the knowledge that best suits them and their lifestyle and use it as they see fit; the pessimist would argue that it is nowadays impossible for consumers to know what to believe. (E.g., Warde 1997, 83–84; Coveney 2000, 114–116; Nestle 2002, 67.)

The vast attention paid to healthiness and its antithesis, unhealthiness, reveals a change in our attitude to food in an age of plenty. As recently as the early decades of the 20th century, there were major shortcomings in the nutrition of the indigent Finns, and during the Second World War the question of whether the nation at large was getting enough to eat was a cause of considerable concern. Soon after the war, in the late 1950s, as shortages and rationing gave way to plenty, the problems familiar today began to emerge. People grew obese, their blood pressure and cholesterol levels rose and the number of deaths from cardiovascular diseases began to increase. In contrast, problems once common, such as goitre, rickets and night blindness gradually vanished as nutrition improved and foods weresupplemented with vitamins and minerals. (Suojanen 2003.)

Over the past few decades, the Finns’ eating habits have tended more towards the nutrition recommendations. We are eating more and more vegetables, fruit, vegetable oils and low-fat dairy products while consumption of such items as butter and full-fat milk has plummeted (e.g., Tike 2007 23–24). Modern consumers are more aware than ever of health and ways of promoting it. Most Finns can quote food, exercise, smoking, alcohol and restas factors that influence health (Aarva & Pasanen 2005, 61). The spread of information about health has not, however, meant that health now guides all our everyday practices. True, we are familiar with the guidelines, but applying them is laborious. Various eating-related problems, such as obesity and related diseases, are on the increase. Furthermore, there are social differences in their incidence. They are encountered differently by people on high and low incomes, with high and little education, with families and without. (E.g., Kokko & Räsänen 1996, S23, S26; Sarlio-Lähteenkorva 2007, 26; Prättälä & Paalanen 2007, 84–86.)

The emphasis on health is also visible in the range of foods on the market in Finland and elsewhere in advanced societies. Health and fitness have become increasingly commercialised and commodified into foods. In the early 1980s such relatively unprocessed basic foods as vegetables, fruit, wholemeal flour and (low-fat) milk traditionally known to be healthy were joined by processed products advertised as ‘light’ in which ingredients considered to be unhealthy or high in energy had been reduced. During the decade foods each lighter and lower in fat, salt and sugar content than the previous ones were increasingly vying for a place on the supermarket shelves. In flavour and consistency they imitated their models, but they were marketed as healthier alternatives to the customary products. (Heasman & Mellentin 2001, 60–61; Nestle 2002, 298–300.) 

As the 1990s dawned, a turning point was reached in the commodification of healthiness that has even been described as a revolution in nutrition (Heasman & Mellentin 2001, 55). It was then that functional foods, as they came to be called, entered the market, promoting not only general well-being but also providing targeted effects, relief from certain complaints and help in maintaining health. Functional foods differ from conventional and light foods that are marketed at most as ‘healthy’, as they do from the basic nutrition education according to which a healthy diet is one that is varied, balanced and moderate and avoids the excessive consumption of fat, sugar and salt. Whereas the established nutrition education emphasises the overall diet, pointing out that single choices neither make nor break a diet, functional foods carry the message that a single product can influence health now and in the future. Functional foods have in fact been marketed as a new, ‘positive’ way of promoting health (Sloan 1999, 55). According to this way of thinking, health is attained not by denying oneself and avoiding certain treats but by choosing the new, health-promoting

food products. In everyday life, the ‘nutritional revolution’ would mean the reconciliation of various views on healthiness and the adoption of new, targeted food products.

In this dissertation I analyse the ways in which consumers appropriate the new kind of healthiness commodified into functional foods. On the one hand, I examine consumers’ interpretations and opinions on functional foods, and on the other, I look at how functional foods have entered everyday life by examining the role of sociodemographic and food- and healthrelated background factors in the use of functional foods. I claim that the appropriation of functional foods is a complex process with, on the one hand, a conceptual dimension related to trust and the meanings of products, and on the other a practical dimension related to experience and everyday practices. The various modes of appropriation are not necessarily unidirectional or simultaneous, because consumers may personally adopt products yet still wonder whether these products merit their trust. Appropriation is an ongoing process in which consumers’ relation to healthiness and functional foods is moulded with time and even after the products have already become part of everyday life or have been rejected. Functional foods challenge the established concepts of healthiness and ways of promoting it but at the same time modify them.

This article provides a summary of the findings presented in the four original articles that are part of my doctoral dissertation and ties them together using the concept of appropriation. In the rest of Chapter one I present the background of the study by examining the concept of functional foods and the expectations and contradictions surrounding the new products, discuss the earlier consumer research on them, and present appropriation as a novel perspective on the way consumers receive and adopt functional foods. In Chapter two I describe the objectives of my research, its  Consumers and the conceptual and practical appropriation of functional foodsdata and the four original articles of the dissertation. Chapter three first examines the theoretical basis of the concept of appropriation in consumption research and in the sociology of consumption. It then addresses the perspectives of science and technology studies on appropriation and domestication and looks at the ways in which food has been studied in consumption research using appropriation as a theoretical approach. I end the chapter by making my own interpretation of the concept of appropriation and single out two analytically divergent dimensions of appropriation: the conceptual and the practical.

Chapter four concentrates on my findings. I summarise my empirical results concerning consumers’ conceptual and practical appropriation of functional foods. At the end of chapter four I reflect on my study, its data and methods and their limitations and present some thoughts about future research on functional foods. Based on the results, the fifth, concluding chapter deals with the changes in healthy eating from three angles. I examine the many different practices of eating and their significance for functional foods, analyse the role of routines and trust in appropriating functional foods, and discuss what the individualising tendencies, particularly the bioscientific visions of genetically tailored diets may mean for the practices of eating.

DARWINIAN CONSERVATIVE WROTE ON NIETZSCHE IN AMERICA

This evolutionary science of Human, All Too Human supports liberal democracy as the political regime that secures the individual liberty that allows for the fullest satisfaction of the evolved natural desires of human beings.  The purpose of the state is to protect individuals from one another (HATH, 235), which protects the majority from the tyranny of the minority, while also protecting the few (including "free spirits" like Nietzsche) from the tyranny of the majority.  This allows for the emergence of a higher culture in which free spirits can develop their superior talents without tyrannizing over others (HATH, 438-39).

Previously, Nietzsche indicates, the state claimed a transcendent religious authority to exercise absolute paternalistic rule over the people.  But now liberal democratic states claim no such transcendent authority, because they secure individual liberty, which includes the liberty for religious belief as part of private life free from governmental interference.  By contrast, Nietzsche warns against socialist regimes as tyrannical in claiming absolute state power, which will require brutal reigns of terror (HATH, 472-73).

Ratner-Rosenhagen notices that the first translations of Nietzsche's texts in America were published in Benjamin Tucker's periodical Liberty, beginning in 1892 and 1893.  Liberty was the leading American journal for advocating individualist anarchism and libertarianism.  It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the translations of Nietzsche in the journal were passages from Human, All Too Human.  The longest single passage was a complete translation of sections 472-473 of Human, All Too Human, which argued for limiting the power of the state and rejecting socialism (in Liberty, January 7, 1893).  At the same time, however, Tucker recognized that Nietzsche in his later writings turned away from the liberal individualism of his middle writings and embraced an illiberal stance that supported tyrannical statism (see Liberty, July, 1899).  Thus, Tucker saw how the aristocratic radicalism of Nietzsche's later writings could be appropriated by right-wing statists.

Ratner-Rosenhagen notices Tucker's ambivalence about Nietzsche, but she doesn't notice how this arises from the contrast between the liberal individualism of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human and the illiberal statism of his later writings (37-39).  Moreover, she does not notice how Nietzsche's liberalism was rooted in the Darwinian science of Human, All Too Human.

The recent revival and elaboration of Darwinian evolutionary psychology suggests the possibility of appealing to advances in Darwinian science as supporting Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism.

Many of my points here have been elaborated in previous posts that can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The complete archive of Tucker's Liberty can be found online.