Anthropology, Criminology, and Sociology

Using evidence from four ethnographically rich case studies of people who conduct shifting agriculture and swidden cultivation in the borderlands of South, East, and Southeast Asia, this introduction to the Special Forum argues that state territorialization of peripheral societies in Asia produces similar effects in spite of varying political, national, economic, and geographical contexts. In addition, in contrast to the large body of literature on agrarian change, which focuses on economic, political, and ecological changes in agricultural societies, this forum is particularly—but not singularly—devoted to understanding social, religious, and cosmological change. The four case studies demonstrate how the latter are intertwined with the more infrastructural dimensions as a total “way of life.” As part of the state territorialization of peripheral areas, in all four cases this “way of life” gets partially replaced, and changes become embedded in moral discourses of “modernity,” “civilization,” and “development,” which also involve multiple economic, political, social, cosmological, and religious dimensions. In spite of these powerful new hegemonic discourses, as the case studies demonstrate, contradictions and unexpected consequences frequently arise, showing that state control is never fully realized, and that social processes are always complex and in flux.

This paper addresses a fundamental empirical question using data collected in a northeastern US city: does deliberation occur in online forums? While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are few empirical studies that address its online counterpart. Deliberation is supposed to foster an educative, rational, open and inclusive dialogue that leads to legitimate policy outcomes. In this paper, the authors develop and operationalize a measure of deliberation in order to investigate the extent to which it is manifested online. In particular, the authors study five regionally defined web forums hosted by the primary newspaper of a mid-sized northeastern US city. Drawing a two-week sample of posts from these forums, the authors then examine them for indicators of deliberation. Firstly, this paper addresses research about if and how the internet affects social life, including traditional notions of deliberation. Next, the authors argue that sociological studies of democratic participation require conceptualization of lived deliberation, and outline a Symbolic Interactionist approach to studying online, deliberative interaction in order to do so. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this work for future theory and empirical investigation.

This paper addresses a fundamental empirical question using data collected in a northeastern US city: does deliberation occur in online forums? While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are few empirical studies that address its online counterpart. Deliberation is supposed to foster an educative, rational, open and inclusive dialogue that leads to legitimate policy outcomes. In this paper, the authors