Volume 49 supplement 13 (2004)

Summaries

Sean Chabot, Framing, Transnational Diffusion, and African-American Intellectuals in the Land of Gandhi

Most of the contentious politics scholars who pioneered the study of framing in social movements now also recognize the importance of transnational diffusion between protest groups. Interestingly, though, they have not yet specified how these two processes intersect. This article, in contrast, explores the framing-transnational diffusion nexus by highlighting three historical moments of interaction between African-American intellectuals and Gandhian activists before Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to India in 1959. After briefly reviewing the relevant literature, it illustrates how three different types of "itinerant" African-American intellectuals - mentors like Howard Thurman, advisors like Bayard Rustin, and peers like James Lawson - framed the Gandhian repertoire of nonviolent direct action in ways that made it applicable during the American civil rights movement. The final section considers possible implications for social movement theory and fertile areas for further research.


Marc Becker, Indigenous Communists and Urban Intellectuals in Cayambe, Ecuador (1926-1944)

This case study provides an example of how people from two fundamentally different cultures (one rural, indigenous, Kichua-speaking and peasant, and the other urban, white, Spanish-speaking and professional) overcame their differences to struggle together to fight social injustices. Rather than relating to each other on a seemingly unequal basis, the activists recognized their common interests in fighting against the imposition of an international capitalist system on Ecuador's agrarian economy. Emerging out of that context, activists framed collective interests, identities, ideas, and demands as they worked together to realize common goals. Their actions challenge commonly held assumptions that leftist activists did not understand Indigenous struggles, or that Indigenous peoples remained distant from the goals of leftist political parties. Rather, it points to how the two struggles became intimately intertwined. In the process, it complicates traditional understandings of the role of "popular intellectuals," and how they interact with other activists, the dominant culture, and the state.


Oskar Verkaaik, Reforming Mysticism: Sindhi Separatist Intellectuals in Pakistan

This article examines the revival of Sufism and mysticism by the Sindhi separatist movement in South Pakistan. It explores the emergence of a network of young intellectuals from rural and mostly peasant background, and focuses on two pioneers of Sindhi nationalism and Sufi revivalism: G.M. Syed and Ibrahim Joyo. Influenced by Gandhian as well as Marxist ideas on social reform and national identity, these two leaders transformed the annual urs celebration at local shrines into commemorations of the martyrs of Sindh. The article traces their relationship as well as their pioneering role as political leaders, education reformers, and teachers. Analysing their ideas as a particular form of Islamic reform, the article discusses the way they adapted and innovated existing cultural ideas on Islamic nationalism, ethnicity, and social justice.


Baz Lecocq, Unemployed Intellectuals in the Sahara: The Teshumara Nationalist Movement and the Revolutions in Tuareg Society

In the past four decades the Tuareg, a people inhabiting the central Sahara, experienced dramatic socio-economic upheaval caused by the national independence of the countries they inhabit, two droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, and prolonged rebellion against the state in Mali and Niger in the 1990s. This article discusses these major upheavals and their results from the viewpoint of three groups of Tuareg intellectuals: the 'organic intellectuals' or traditional tribal leaders and muslim religious specialists, the 'traditional intellectuals' who came into being from the 1950s onwards, and the 'popular intellectuals' of the teshumara movement, which found its origins in the drought-provoked economic emigration to the Maghreb, and which actively prepared the rebellions of the 1990s. By focusing on the debates between these intellectuals on the nature of Tuareg society, its organisation, and the direction its future should take, the major changes in a society often described as guarding its traditions will be exposed.


Joanne Rappaport, Between Sovereignty and Culture: Who is an Indigenous Intellectual in Colombia?

Recent studies of Latin American indigenous intellectuals affiliated with social movements demonstrate that while the hold that national intellectuals have as mediators between the state and civil society may be precarious, intellectuals from subordinated minorities are intermediaries between the national society and minority groups, successfully articulating ethnic strivings within national arenas and building ethnic discourses in local communities. But in order to comprehend the success of indigenous intellectuals, it is necessary to inquire into how their discourse is developed internally. To achieve this, we must pay close attention to the heterogeneity of the indigenous movement, in which an array of different types of intellectuals interact and debate issues in a range of ethnic organizations. This article explores the complexities of the negotiation of ethnic discourse by intellectuals within the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca, a Colombian indigenous organization, focusing on a conflict in which indigenous cultural activists and politicians come at loggerheads over the nature of indigenous political autonomy.


Pablo S. Bose, Critics and Experts, Activists and Academics: Intellectuals in the Fight for Social and Ecological Justice in the Narmada Valley, India

The following paper examines the role of popular intellectuals in the rise of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a mass-based movement opposed to the building of large dams in the Narmada Valley of central India. In particular, it focuses on two of this struggle's most prominent public figures and spokespersons, Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy. The paper examines the relationship between these individuals and the movement itself-how issues have been framed by Patkar and Roy for local, national, and international audiences, how support for the anti-dam struggle has been mobilized, and how each of these figures are themselves perceived and portrayed. The paper will also examine some of the challenges faced by the movement and its leaders, not only from proponents of the dam projects, but also from other social activists and intellectuals. The latter have raised questions about representation, voice and strategy, as well as insider/outsider authenticity and legitimacy in the anti-dam movement, issues that this paper considers in some detail. Finally, the paper draws on the Narmada case to ask some broader questions regarding popular intellectuals and social movement organizing and strategy.


Quintan Wiktorowicz, Framing Jihad: Intra-Movement Framing Contests and al-Qaeda's Struggle for Sacred Authority

This article emphasizes the credibility of popular intellectuals as a point of contention in framing contests. A movement group - a faction, clique, sub-movement, network cluster, organization, etc. - asserts its authority to speak on behalf of an issue or constituency by emphasizing the perceived knowledge, character, and logic of its popular intellectuals while attacking those of rivals. Four basic framing strategies relevant to the credibility of popular intellectuals are identified: 1) vilification - demonizing competing popular intellectuals; 2) exaltation - praising in-group popular intellectuals; 3) credentialing - emphasizing the expertise of the in-group intellectuals; and 4) de-credentialing - raising questions about the expertise of rivals. Al-Qaeda's intra-movement framing struggle with non-violent Islamic fundamentalists over the permissibility of violence is used as a case study. In an attempt to assert its right to sacred authority, the movement portrays scholars who support its jihad as logical, religious experts of good repute while characterizing opposing clerical popular intellectuals as emotional, corrupt, naïve, and ill-informed about politics.


David Smilde, Popular Publics: Street Protest and Plaza Preachers in Caracas

Classic liberal conceptions of the public sphere generally miscast the public participation of popular sectors in the developing world as pre-modern, proto-political, or non-rational. The term "popular intellectual" is a useful corrective since it focuses attention on discourses and symbols that are consciously created and endure beyond the individuals and events which put them into play. The term "popular publics" - intentionally organized relational contexts in which specific networks of people from the popular classes seek to bridge to other networks, form coalitions and expand the influence of their discourse - preserves this emphasis but also changes the unit of analysis from individual or collective actors, to relational contexts. Here I use this concept to analyze two cases of popular public participation in late-20th century Caracas, Venezuela. In the first case we will look at a street protest in which dislocated members of the informal economy work to make their private concerns into public issues. In the second case we will look at plaza services in which Pentecostal Christians address Venezuela's contemporary social and political reality through an alternative rationality. Each of these cases challenge classic liberal concepts of the public sphere.


Rosanne Rutten and Michiel Baud, Concluding Remarks: Framing Protest in Asia, Africa, and Latin America

This volume has presented eight case studies of popular intellectuals on different continents who reflected on society in order to change it. They cover a broad range of people whose activist intellectual work has made a difference: from college-educated environmentalists to autodidact revolutionaries, from indigenous activists to Islamic fundamentalists. We believe there are good reasons to bring together these different historical actors, precisely because there is gain in this diversity: each article highlights specific themes that provide valuable insight in the social dynamics of ideological work. Here, we bring together a selection of these insights and explore, at the same time, how a focus on popular intellectuals allows us to better understand some salient aspects of social contention.