|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global
market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy
passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the
normalization of a once shadowy practice. Our lives are in
countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to
affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our
chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But
for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho
Low, but also countless unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a
question of price. More than a dozen countries, many of them small
islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Pacific, sell
citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Through six years of
fieldwork on four continents, Kristin Surak discovered how the
initially dubious sale of passports has transformed into a
full-blown citizenship industry that thrives on global
inequalities. Some “investor citizens” hope to parlay their new
passport into visa-free travel—or use it as a stepping stone to
residence in countries like the United States. Other buyers take
out a new citizenship as an insurance policy or to escape state
control at home. Almost none, though, intend to move to their
selected country and live among their new compatriots, whose
relationship with these global elites is complex. A groundbreaking
study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the
nouveaux riches, The Golden Passport takes readers from the details
of the application process to the geopolitical hydraulics of the
citizenship industry. It’s a business that thrives on uncertainty
and imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny
states desperate for investment. In between are the fascinating
stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all ready to profit from
the citizenship trade.
The tea ceremony persists as one of the most evocative symbols of
Japan. Originally a pastime of elite warriors in premodern society,
it was later recast as an emblem of the modern Japanese state, only
to be transformed again into its current incarnation, largely the
hobby of middle-class housewives. How does the cultural practice of
a few come to represent a nation as a whole?
Although few non-Japanese scholars have peered behind the walls of
a tea room, sociologist Kristin Surak came to know the inner
workings of the tea world over the course of ten years of tea
training. Here she offers the first comprehensive analysis of the
practice that includes new material on its historical changes, a
detailed excavation of its institutional organization, and a
careful examination of what she terms "nation-work"--the labor that
connects the national meanings of a cultural practice and the
actual experience and enactment of it. She concludes by placing tea
ceremony in comparative perspective, drawing on other expressions
of nation-work, such as gymnastics and music, in Europe and Asia.
Taking readers on a rare journey into the elusive world of tea
ceremony, Surak offers an insightful account of the fundamental
processes of modernity--the work of making nations.
The tea ceremony persists as one of the most evocative symbols of
Japan. Originally a pastime of elite warriors in premodern society,
it was later recast as an emblem of the modern Japanese state, only
to be transformed again into its current incarnation, largely the
hobby of middle-class housewives. How does the cultural practice of
a few come to represent a nation as a whole?
Although few non-Japanese scholars have peered behind the walls of
a tea room, sociologist Kristin Surak came to know the inner
workings of the tea world over the course of ten years of tea
training. Here she offers the first comprehensive analysis of the
practice that includes new material on its historical changes, a
detailed excavation of its institutional organization, and a
careful examination of what she terms "nation-work"--the labor that
connects the national meanings of a cultural practice and the
actual experience and enactment of it. She concludes by placing tea
ceremony in comparative perspective, drawing on other expressions
of nation-work, such as gymnastics and music, in Europe and Asia.
Taking readers on a rare journey into the elusive world of tea
ceremony, Surak offers an insightful account of the fundamental
processes of modernity--the work of making nations.
|
|