International Sociology

This essay reviews three recently published books that chart the complexities of what it means to be indigenous today, focusing on the experiences of Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. Exploring the everyday lives of urban-based Māori (Gagné), the development of an indigenous mediascape (Hokowhitu and Devadas), and the challenges associated with the regeneration of Māori tribal identities (Kawharu), the three books offer a robust depiction of Māori life in ostensibly bicultural New Zealand, illustrating the complexities of indigenous cultural representation, rejuvenation, and survival in the present era. In addition, they have much to offer beyond a New Zealand context, for they speak to wider debates over identity and culture in ways that will be especially stimulating for students and scholars interested in contemporary manifestations, articulations, and expressions of indigeneity.

In this review essay, the problematic relationship between socialism and eroticism is discussed, in defense of the erotic. The purpose of this essay is to keep sociological focus on the erotic sphere as a central source of creativity and transformation. The erotic – the transfiguration of sexual energy into cultural inventiveness by the imagination – is thought of as containing the potential to mitigate everyday disenchantment in rationalized worlds such as socialism. Megan Daigle’s From Cuba with Love and Everett Yuehong Zhang’s The Impotence Epidemic are reviewed as two important, fascinating, and well-investigated accounts of the erotic sphere in societies in which socialist regimes imprint their schemes of rationalization. Through a discussion of their works, this essay seeks to find out what happens with the erotic when eroticism is outlawed and the body is governed according to socialist doctrines, and made available for state intervention.

This essay reviews two recently published books that focus on a range of pressures faced by individuals in a time of rapid social transformation brought on by technological disruption, which is taking place against a backdrop of unresolved social conflicts in areas as diverse as multiculturalism and postsecularism. Key themes addressed by these volumes include, among other things, narcissism and capitalist consumer culture, with the concomitant influence that the intersection of these is having on democracy; and the theory of recognition and its relevance to the question of how individual freedom can be reconciled with commitments to community interests and the promotion of the public good in areas such as education, religion, and employment. This essay argues that these books will be helpful to researchers studying the many social challenges that both individuals and communities are currently experiencing in times of socioeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. Furthermore, these books each contribute to the intellectual projects of authors such as Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, who are concerned with analyzing the tensions between communitarian conceptions of the social world and modernity’s commitment to individualism and progress.