Browsing by Subject "Elites"
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Item Universities, status groups, and hierarchies of worth among college students in Mexico(2010-05) Rojas Ruiz, Francisco Javier; Roberts, Bryan R., 1939-; Adut, Ari; Camp, Roderic A.; Green, Penny A.; Sjoberg, Gideon A.This research investigated the basis upon which undergraduates construct notions of social honor and the role higher educational institutions play in the consolidation of status group cultures in Mexico. The topics I analyzed included the criteria college students use to evaluate the worthiness of their peers and friends and the meaning they attach to studying at certain higher educational institutions. This study drew primarily on 65 in-depth interviews and four focus group sessions with 15 students enrolled at socioeconomically stratified private and public higher educational institutions in a large city. I also relied on an institutional analysis of the higher educational institutions where I did my research to complement the analysis. The findings of this research show that there are institutional similarities in relation to the moral criteria undergraduates use to evaluate the worthiness of their friends and peers. However, there are important institutional differences showing that Mexico’s system of higher education attracts and trains at least four status groups. The status groups cultures associated with educational credentials show that there are significant cultural and socioeconomic distinctions within the high cost private sector. In particular, there is a clash between an old pedigree status group for which social connections are of outmost importance and a new emerging upper-middle class that competes through the rigorous academic training its undergraduates receive. The other two status groups are composed of lay and large public universities that attract middle-class students and demand-absorption institutions that train students who did not gain admission to public universities or who want to avoid the negative stereotypes associated with public universities. Undergraduates from these two last groups occupy the bottom of the occupational and prestige hierarchy. This research also shows that most of the internal hierarchies undergraduates use to rank their peers do not transcend the walls of a specific college. However, the testimonies of high class students revealed that members from this social stratum determine the worthiness of others based on residential location. This dissertation also shows that socioeconomic and cultural boundaries provide some of the most important sources of symbolic divisions among college students in Mexico.Item The unmaking of empire : nature and politics in the early Colombian imagination, 1808-1821(2011-05) Afanador, Maria Jose; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Deans-Smith, SusanIn this report I argue that during the independence wars from Spain and the first decade of republican rule, the learned elite of the viceroyalty of New Granada—present day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—articulated narratives of nature and science to debates over provincial hierarchies, to justify provincial unity, foreign commercial integration, and the creation of political symbols for the new polity. In the process of undoing the Spanish empire, the lettered elite conceived of their homeland’s natural bounties as key cultural capital, and as the language with which to frame their aspirations as political community, as part of a national polity or of regional patrias. By using newspapers, constitutional debates, scientific writings, and visual evidence, I place the elite’s sensibilities and concerns about their fatherland’s nature in the wider context of political transformations that took place from 1808 and on. In the first section, I explore eighteenth-century assessments of New Granada’s nature, offering an overview of key conceptions of New Granada’s geopolitical situation and nature that shaped the Creole imagination. In the second section, I characterize the reforms brought about by the Bourbon monarchy in New Granada, giving weight to the socialization of practices of the utility of science among the learned elite. The third section illustrates how Neogranadians deployed nature in assessing provincial fragmentation, and in the debate over the preeminence of Santafé as capital when the monarchic crisis exploded. The fourth section explores how nature was employed as an argument in debates over the integration of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador into a single republic, and the adoption of a federal or a central state. Finally, section five discusses the role of New Granada’s natural landmarks in discourses of provincial and foreign commercial integration, along with a reflection on the use of nature as political symbol for the new republic. My aim is to explore the ways that the lettered elite incorporated nature into geopolitical discourses of a polity separate from Spain, and to uncover the tensions embedded in the ways they imagined their desired nation.Item "We have a road map". Whiteness, biopolitics, and the rise of technocratic philanthrocapitalism: the emergent neoliberal governance project of the Guatemalan oligarchy(2013-12) Perera, Daniel Alejandro; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ballí, CeciliaScholars have tended to frame the rise of neoliberal governance in Guatemala as primarily shaped by the tangled, often contradictory relations between three main actors: multilateral organizations and international financial institutions, the state, and individual and collective subjects of rights. This thesis intends to contribute to the literature by focusing on a social actor that is seldom investigated academically—especially ethnographically—despite the determinant role that it has historically played in the destiny of Guatemala, namely, the oligarchy: an elite group of Guatemalans who by virtue of class position, family networks, and membership in business associations have “ruled since the conquest.” An ethnographic appraisal of elite discourses, attitudes, and practices, as well as an attunement to the affective dimension of elite subjectivities, can generate a better understanding of how historical relations of domination and exclusion in Guatemala are currently being reconfigured. Based on ethnographic research and a series of interviews with a dozen of its leading members in July and August of 2012, this thesis is an inquiry into the contemporary governance project of the Guatemalan oligarchy and the place that it allots to multiculturalism. In this sense, it has three main objectives: firstly, to characterize an increasingly coherent liberal discourse of national development, modernization, and corporate social responsibility emanating from the economic elite’s private foundations, think tanks and business associations. Secondly, it summarily compares this discourse to the general observable trends of capitalist accumulation around new dynamic “axes”: megaprojects (the construction of major infrastructure such as roads and highways, bridges, airports, seaports; as well as call centers, corporate tourism, malls, technological corridors, hydroelectric power plants); the agroindustrial production of mega-monocrops for agrofuels (sugarcane and African oil palm), and; extraction and commercialization of natural resources (minerals, oil, cement), as documented by other analysts. Finally, it examines the current status of multiculturalism and the ascendancy of whiteness within this emergent material and discursive landscape. I have termed this emergent model of neoliberal governance “technocratic philanthrocapitalism.”