Published by A.K.M. Skarpelis
American Journal of Sociology, 2023
Racial purity and supremacy were core to Nazi Germany’s claims to European dominion. At the same ... more Racial purity and supremacy were core to Nazi Germany’s claims to European dominion. At the same time, their very own “racial scientific” research showed that most Germans were “mixed-race.” Given the dissonance between phenotypical aspirations to a Nordic ideal and the reality of a largely non-blond German population, how did the National Socialist regime maintain legitimacy to rule? Anthropologists, bureaucrats and artists resolved this racial misalignment through horror vacui racialization, an excessive social classification that manifested as a racializing turn inwards aimed at Christian Germans. I theorize the role of culture and art in stabilizing race-based rule in authoritarian and colonial contexts through racial repair that realigns desired and actual racial self-understandings. The article shows how an ostensibly biologically essentialist regime strategically used racial relativism in science, politics and popular culture. I outline the sociological implications for the sociologies of culture; race and ethnicity; theories of the state and of empire and science and technology studies.
Qualitative Sociology, 2020
History's epistemological dilemma equally applies to sociology: how can we make claims about pers... more History's epistemological dilemma equally applies to sociology: how can we make claims about persons, events, and processes on the basis of archival records? This article develops a framework called Life on File that combines sociological strengths in qualitative methodologies and an interest in how states shape populations, with library and information sciences' attention to documentary production and anthropological and historical insights into the intersections of archives, knowledge, and power. The framework has three components: the act of recovery of life, processes, and events; the turning of life into a record; and the movement of a file from collection to preservation and use. The result is a methodologically rigorous and globally mobile theory. Empirically, the piece draws on comparative historical fieldwork on state-led racial classification and naturalization practices preserved in Japanese and German archives. While the framework is grounded in research on state archives, its utility extends across types of archives and records. In addition, it provides sociologists with a roadmap on how to use archives in single case as well as comparative and transnational research. The archive is like a raw material, which is not the same as saying that it is an originary material or an unworked-upon material; rather it is what has been made available, what has been thus presented to us, a kind of gift, which is to say also-for future constituencies, future publics-a kind of debt. (Osborne 1999, 57) Cast in the image of the humans who create them, archives are mortals with aspirations to immortality. (Daston 2017, 329)
Against the Background of Social Reality. Defaults, Commonplaces and the Sociology of the Unmarked, 2020
Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History. Alt/Histories, 2020
The Second World War is a frequent site for historical revisionism. In the
case of the traumatic ... more The Second World War is a frequent site for historical revisionism. In the
case of the traumatic Dresden aerial bombings of 13–15 February 1945,
the German far-right has been trying to rehabilitate the aggressor nation
in a twisted variation on #metoo in which the suffering of German
victims is invoked to assert the moral equivalence of all war victims, all
the while casting aside questions of agency and their governments’ war
responsibility. Somewhat surprisingly, since 2000 the group managed to
mobilise a highly cosmopolitan alliance around a rhetoric of compassion
for civilians harmed in armed conflicts. In this opportunistic coat-tailing
on the purportedly morally unproblematic memorialisation of innocent
civilians, a disconcerting rhetorical overlap between the left and the far right emerged around the trope of the refugee-victim.
Here, I draw on contemporary memorialisations of the Dresden
bombings as one instance of this attempted reclaiming of war casualties
and compare it to the fate of the victims of the Japanese atomic bombings.
When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
the city’s residents occupied a similar moral position to that of victims
in other aerial bombings. However, Hiroshima has since the bombing
become an international symbol for peace and the abolition of nuclear
weapons. In addition to this symbolic transition for the city itself, those
who perished in the bombings were anointed as morally innocent, while
the casualties of the Dresden bombings did not. Hiroshima’s transformation from perpetrator-nation city to symbol of world peace is extraordinary, and one that Dresden could not emulate in spite of continued
rehabilitation attempts.
Altern: Familie, Zivilgesellschaft und Politik, 2009
In diesem Artikel wird die Alterung der Mitgliedschaft von ausgewählten Parteien und Gewerkschaft... more In diesem Artikel wird die Alterung der Mitgliedschaft von ausgewählten Parteien und Gewerkschaften zwischen 1980 und 2005 dargestellt. Einem absoluten Mitgliederverlust in unterschiedlichen Altersgruppen steht eine Zunahme des relativen Anteils an älteren Mitgliedern gegenüber. Eine zunehmende Politisierung der Alten in der Form von Mitgliederbeitritten im fortgeschrittenen Alter lässt sich aus den Daten nicht ablesen. Die Verschiebung des relativen Gewichtes zugunsten der Älteren lässt sich zu einem großen Teil durch niedrigere Eintrittsquoten und kürzere Verweildauer bei jüngeren Altersgruppen erklären.
… , training and new approaches to pay, Jan 1, 2008
Book Reviews by A.K.M. Skarpelis
Social Science Japan Journal, 2014
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2009
Czech Sociological Review, Jan 1, 2008
Conference papers by A.K.M. Skarpelis
The paper takes up the uses of race around the question of miscegenation between Koreans and Japa... more The paper takes up the uses of race around the question of miscegenation between Koreans and Japanese throughout Japanese colonial tenure. Initially rejected at the time of Korean annexation but later enthusiastically embraced by the colonial government, racial mixing provides a fertile case to display how various groups strategically used the competing racial discourses of ‘mixed nation’ theory and ‘pure blood’ theory to justify imperial expansion and effectively manage total war. I explore how race mixing becomes problematic in a non-Western colonial context, and how the problem is partially solved through the restructuring of the Korean legal system.
Beginning in 1936, Governor-General Minami Jirō began aggressively promoting miscegenation between Koreans and Japanese in colonial Korea as fundamental to achieving rapid assimilation. Yet, the number of actual marriages remained low in Korea but increased rapidly in Japan, coinciding with the conscription of young Korean men and women into forced labor. This paper traces struggles between colonial scholars and Japanese bureaucrats over the promotion of mixed marriages throughout Japanese rule over Korea (1910-1945) to reveal so far unexplored racial dimensions of Japanese colonial governance. Existing sociological accounts of Japanese colonialism have either neglected, or failed to understand, the racial subtleties of Japanese colonial governance, and have moreover overstated the role of Western colonialism in shaping it.
Somewhat paradoxically, eugenicist thought gained considerable importance in early 20th century Japan. Despite the Anglo-American variant of eugenics’ view of the Japanese as racially inferior, Japanese eugenicists still appealed to the same current of thought to legitimate the superior position of Japan vis-à-vis vis-à-vis its Asian neighbors. Rather than looking to the West’s concrete implementation of colonial practice, Japanese colonialism, both in terms of early legitimation and practice, was based around a Japanese variant of eugenics.
Sociological accounts of Japanese colonialism maintain that one of the core differences between it and other national iterations are based around Japan’s stressing of racial similarity in assimilating other nations. While racial similarity was strategically used as rhetorical device to legitimate Japanese colonial expansion into Asia, it was racial difference, rather than similarity, that underpinned Japanese colonial practice. The paper uses a variety of Japanese sources – mainly legal texts and colonial thought – to trace Japanese interventions into the Korean legal system and jurisprudence. It shows how colonial-era Korean family law – in particular on matters of nationality, property and succession rights – was rewritten by the Japanese to promote assimilation in strategic sectors, all the while refusing to accord Koreans equal rights.
Drawing on moral philosophy, the history of concepts and ideas, this paper sets out to capture va... more Drawing on moral philosophy, the history of concepts and ideas, this paper sets out to capture various dimensions of welfare state development through social network analysis. It is an effort at situating core concepts of the welfare state in relational fields (‘words in their sites’, Hacking), which allows us to trace (1) different contexts of use (relational aspect), and (2) the semantics and genealogies of individual concepts. Empirically, the method I develop is applied to old age pensions in Germany from their foundation until the advent of the Second World War. It consists of a combination of qualitative content analysis of government and pensioners’ statements, statistical analysis and visualization through social network analysis (SNA); the outcome is a detailed picture of the changing landscape of pension rhetoric.
What emerge are three sets of outcomes: First, a more nuanced picture of actor logics shifting over historical time. Rhetoric of different actors are visualized as registers of meaning in network diagrammes; change over time becomes visible as certain registers (e.g. victimization, or the religious dimension) change shape or emerge where they previously did not exist. Second, we find a shift in moral underpinnings of the welfare state (at the example of the distributive dimension: who is responsible, who is entitled and on what grounds?). Third, we can trace the semantic trajectories of individual concepts. I argue that such a subtle understanding of changes and their diachronic development is a necessary complement to quantitative and narrative-historical analyses to understand policy development.
Paul Pierson entered a charged debate on welfare state development with the claim that welfare st... more Paul Pierson entered a charged debate on welfare state development with the claim that welfare state retrenchment follows a different logic to that of expansion, as politicians will try and claim credit for expansion but will attempt to deflect blame during retrenchment, so as to not get punished electorally. Is this an accurate description of political rhetoric? And if so, what kind of justificatory frames do politicians use during episodes of retrenchment? In particular, how do they characterize the target population, their un/deservingness and needs? This paper will take the case of pension reforms through periods of expansion (1945 - early 1970’s) and retrenchment (> 1975) in Japan and analyze whether the two logics argument holds true. Beyond testing Pierson’s claims, the merit of this paper lies in tracing collective definitions of target groups by the government that make them legible for a broader audience, and in disentangling political narratives of causation in times of reform to justify unpopular changes. This is useful because it will provide a fundament for insights into how valuing rhetoric of politicians on collectivities can ‘make’ citizens (reactivity argument made by the ‘policies make citizens’ school, for example Bruch et al., 2010 and Campbell, 2003) and also contribute to the burgeoning literature on the ‘cultural’ side of policymaking (see for example Steensland, 2006) that challenges existing institutionalist and structuralist accounts (e.g. Estevez-Abe, 2008). We will see how collectivities come to be constituted, and how they are related to other social groups of the margin and mainstream.
When Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme went down, we heard little in terms of deceived investors askin... more When Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme went down, we heard little in terms of deceived investors asking the state to be bailed out for their losses - for a variety of reasons, their claims would have seemed rather weak and unconvincing. There is however historical precedent for a group whose plight was in parts similar, and who successfully lobbied the government to cover for them: the Kapitalrentner (capital pensioners) of interwar Germany.
The capital pensioners of Weimar Germany were a group of roughly half a million bourgeois who had lost nearly all capital assets to the hyper inflation that ravaged the country in the early 1920’s. Their case is an interesting one not only due to the groups’ previous lack of involvement in politics, but also because it is hard to conceive of this group as deserving special treatment compared to returning war veterans. Still, they rather successfully define their plight through story-telling as that of a group of citizens for whom the state is obligated to care on a higher level than for all other groups.
Counter-intuitively given their social and educational background, the capital pensioners turn to a strategy favoured by the the ‘weak’ to make their interests politically heard: letter-writing to the government. These letters offer a unique lens on identity-construction (that eventually lead to concerted collective action), as well as to changing conceptions of gender, nationalism, and the introduction of the idea of functional equivalents to work. The paper traces various aspects in the progression of the pensioners’ narratives in letters (changing demands, rhetoric, letter structure, literary devices) between 1919 and 1943 through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, visualized through graphs created in Processing, and network analysis.
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Published by A.K.M. Skarpelis
case of the traumatic Dresden aerial bombings of 13–15 February 1945,
the German far-right has been trying to rehabilitate the aggressor nation
in a twisted variation on #metoo in which the suffering of German
victims is invoked to assert the moral equivalence of all war victims, all
the while casting aside questions of agency and their governments’ war
responsibility. Somewhat surprisingly, since 2000 the group managed to
mobilise a highly cosmopolitan alliance around a rhetoric of compassion
for civilians harmed in armed conflicts. In this opportunistic coat-tailing
on the purportedly morally unproblematic memorialisation of innocent
civilians, a disconcerting rhetorical overlap between the left and the far right emerged around the trope of the refugee-victim.
Here, I draw on contemporary memorialisations of the Dresden
bombings as one instance of this attempted reclaiming of war casualties
and compare it to the fate of the victims of the Japanese atomic bombings.
When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
the city’s residents occupied a similar moral position to that of victims
in other aerial bombings. However, Hiroshima has since the bombing
become an international symbol for peace and the abolition of nuclear
weapons. In addition to this symbolic transition for the city itself, those
who perished in the bombings were anointed as morally innocent, while
the casualties of the Dresden bombings did not. Hiroshima’s transformation from perpetrator-nation city to symbol of world peace is extraordinary, and one that Dresden could not emulate in spite of continued
rehabilitation attempts.
Book Reviews by A.K.M. Skarpelis
Conference papers by A.K.M. Skarpelis
Beginning in 1936, Governor-General Minami Jirō began aggressively promoting miscegenation between Koreans and Japanese in colonial Korea as fundamental to achieving rapid assimilation. Yet, the number of actual marriages remained low in Korea but increased rapidly in Japan, coinciding with the conscription of young Korean men and women into forced labor. This paper traces struggles between colonial scholars and Japanese bureaucrats over the promotion of mixed marriages throughout Japanese rule over Korea (1910-1945) to reveal so far unexplored racial dimensions of Japanese colonial governance. Existing sociological accounts of Japanese colonialism have either neglected, or failed to understand, the racial subtleties of Japanese colonial governance, and have moreover overstated the role of Western colonialism in shaping it.
Somewhat paradoxically, eugenicist thought gained considerable importance in early 20th century Japan. Despite the Anglo-American variant of eugenics’ view of the Japanese as racially inferior, Japanese eugenicists still appealed to the same current of thought to legitimate the superior position of Japan vis-à-vis vis-à-vis its Asian neighbors. Rather than looking to the West’s concrete implementation of colonial practice, Japanese colonialism, both in terms of early legitimation and practice, was based around a Japanese variant of eugenics.
Sociological accounts of Japanese colonialism maintain that one of the core differences between it and other national iterations are based around Japan’s stressing of racial similarity in assimilating other nations. While racial similarity was strategically used as rhetorical device to legitimate Japanese colonial expansion into Asia, it was racial difference, rather than similarity, that underpinned Japanese colonial practice. The paper uses a variety of Japanese sources – mainly legal texts and colonial thought – to trace Japanese interventions into the Korean legal system and jurisprudence. It shows how colonial-era Korean family law – in particular on matters of nationality, property and succession rights – was rewritten by the Japanese to promote assimilation in strategic sectors, all the while refusing to accord Koreans equal rights.
What emerge are three sets of outcomes: First, a more nuanced picture of actor logics shifting over historical time. Rhetoric of different actors are visualized as registers of meaning in network diagrammes; change over time becomes visible as certain registers (e.g. victimization, or the religious dimension) change shape or emerge where they previously did not exist. Second, we find a shift in moral underpinnings of the welfare state (at the example of the distributive dimension: who is responsible, who is entitled and on what grounds?). Third, we can trace the semantic trajectories of individual concepts. I argue that such a subtle understanding of changes and their diachronic development is a necessary complement to quantitative and narrative-historical analyses to understand policy development.
The capital pensioners of Weimar Germany were a group of roughly half a million bourgeois who had lost nearly all capital assets to the hyper inflation that ravaged the country in the early 1920’s. Their case is an interesting one not only due to the groups’ previous lack of involvement in politics, but also because it is hard to conceive of this group as deserving special treatment compared to returning war veterans. Still, they rather successfully define their plight through story-telling as that of a group of citizens for whom the state is obligated to care on a higher level than for all other groups.
Counter-intuitively given their social and educational background, the capital pensioners turn to a strategy favoured by the the ‘weak’ to make their interests politically heard: letter-writing to the government. These letters offer a unique lens on identity-construction (that eventually lead to concerted collective action), as well as to changing conceptions of gender, nationalism, and the introduction of the idea of functional equivalents to work. The paper traces various aspects in the progression of the pensioners’ narratives in letters (changing demands, rhetoric, letter structure, literary devices) between 1919 and 1943 through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, visualized through graphs created in Processing, and network analysis.
case of the traumatic Dresden aerial bombings of 13–15 February 1945,
the German far-right has been trying to rehabilitate the aggressor nation
in a twisted variation on #metoo in which the suffering of German
victims is invoked to assert the moral equivalence of all war victims, all
the while casting aside questions of agency and their governments’ war
responsibility. Somewhat surprisingly, since 2000 the group managed to
mobilise a highly cosmopolitan alliance around a rhetoric of compassion
for civilians harmed in armed conflicts. In this opportunistic coat-tailing
on the purportedly morally unproblematic memorialisation of innocent
civilians, a disconcerting rhetorical overlap between the left and the far right emerged around the trope of the refugee-victim.
Here, I draw on contemporary memorialisations of the Dresden
bombings as one instance of this attempted reclaiming of war casualties
and compare it to the fate of the victims of the Japanese atomic bombings.
When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
the city’s residents occupied a similar moral position to that of victims
in other aerial bombings. However, Hiroshima has since the bombing
become an international symbol for peace and the abolition of nuclear
weapons. In addition to this symbolic transition for the city itself, those
who perished in the bombings were anointed as morally innocent, while
the casualties of the Dresden bombings did not. Hiroshima’s transformation from perpetrator-nation city to symbol of world peace is extraordinary, and one that Dresden could not emulate in spite of continued
rehabilitation attempts.
Beginning in 1936, Governor-General Minami Jirō began aggressively promoting miscegenation between Koreans and Japanese in colonial Korea as fundamental to achieving rapid assimilation. Yet, the number of actual marriages remained low in Korea but increased rapidly in Japan, coinciding with the conscription of young Korean men and women into forced labor. This paper traces struggles between colonial scholars and Japanese bureaucrats over the promotion of mixed marriages throughout Japanese rule over Korea (1910-1945) to reveal so far unexplored racial dimensions of Japanese colonial governance. Existing sociological accounts of Japanese colonialism have either neglected, or failed to understand, the racial subtleties of Japanese colonial governance, and have moreover overstated the role of Western colonialism in shaping it.
Somewhat paradoxically, eugenicist thought gained considerable importance in early 20th century Japan. Despite the Anglo-American variant of eugenics’ view of the Japanese as racially inferior, Japanese eugenicists still appealed to the same current of thought to legitimate the superior position of Japan vis-à-vis vis-à-vis its Asian neighbors. Rather than looking to the West’s concrete implementation of colonial practice, Japanese colonialism, both in terms of early legitimation and practice, was based around a Japanese variant of eugenics.
Sociological accounts of Japanese colonialism maintain that one of the core differences between it and other national iterations are based around Japan’s stressing of racial similarity in assimilating other nations. While racial similarity was strategically used as rhetorical device to legitimate Japanese colonial expansion into Asia, it was racial difference, rather than similarity, that underpinned Japanese colonial practice. The paper uses a variety of Japanese sources – mainly legal texts and colonial thought – to trace Japanese interventions into the Korean legal system and jurisprudence. It shows how colonial-era Korean family law – in particular on matters of nationality, property and succession rights – was rewritten by the Japanese to promote assimilation in strategic sectors, all the while refusing to accord Koreans equal rights.
What emerge are three sets of outcomes: First, a more nuanced picture of actor logics shifting over historical time. Rhetoric of different actors are visualized as registers of meaning in network diagrammes; change over time becomes visible as certain registers (e.g. victimization, or the religious dimension) change shape or emerge where they previously did not exist. Second, we find a shift in moral underpinnings of the welfare state (at the example of the distributive dimension: who is responsible, who is entitled and on what grounds?). Third, we can trace the semantic trajectories of individual concepts. I argue that such a subtle understanding of changes and their diachronic development is a necessary complement to quantitative and narrative-historical analyses to understand policy development.
The capital pensioners of Weimar Germany were a group of roughly half a million bourgeois who had lost nearly all capital assets to the hyper inflation that ravaged the country in the early 1920’s. Their case is an interesting one not only due to the groups’ previous lack of involvement in politics, but also because it is hard to conceive of this group as deserving special treatment compared to returning war veterans. Still, they rather successfully define their plight through story-telling as that of a group of citizens for whom the state is obligated to care on a higher level than for all other groups.
Counter-intuitively given their social and educational background, the capital pensioners turn to a strategy favoured by the the ‘weak’ to make their interests politically heard: letter-writing to the government. These letters offer a unique lens on identity-construction (that eventually lead to concerted collective action), as well as to changing conceptions of gender, nationalism, and the introduction of the idea of functional equivalents to work. The paper traces various aspects in the progression of the pensioners’ narratives in letters (changing demands, rhetoric, letter structure, literary devices) between 1919 and 1943 through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, visualized through graphs created in Processing, and network analysis.