As the urbanization of the globe draws together increasingly populous and dense agglomerations of human activity, a mutual interdependence in constrained spaces requires shared infrastructure, both tangible and intangible. The physical and mental shifts required of individuals transitioning from an agrarian to an urban life are significant. While agrarian communities certainly work as mutually dependent collectivities, establishing long-term work-sharing arrangements and natural resource management regimes and practices that both sustain the local economies and ecologies and solve numerous collective problems, these ties are often broken with the added pressures of density. That is, the objectives and problems to be solved through collective action can change substantially from rural to urban situations. Throwing trash out of the window in the city, for example, has always had much greater social impact than doing so in a rural setting. This fact suggests that previously rural populations moving to urban communities must develop new associations, institutions and relationships based on a new set of collective challenges. Gone are the needs for collective irrigation for agricultural production in relatively large spaces; in their place are the distinct needs for collective management of household water supplies and environmental pollution in relatively cramped quarters.

The confluence of individuals in constrained urban space both creates the daunting challenge of compromise with numerous new groups, often simultaneously, and at the same time creating the opportunity of significant new economies of scale not present in agrarian communities more dispersed among environmental resources. Even when cities face the challenge of developing better ways of coordinating the actions among millions of individual actors and thousands of communities, they are comforted in knowing that if they are able to solve these city-wide collective-action problems, they stand to reap the rewards of huge per-person reductions in cost and, as we will see in the case studies, citizens committed to the goal of improving the life of the collective. These cost and efficiency gains due to density are not just financial. The dense urban form vastly increases the density of human interactions and transactions of residents, leading to community-level associations on almost every aspect of life: economic, cultural, social and political.

Urbanization of the Agrarian South: An Urban Transition

The urban transition is most visible in the large agrarian regions of the world. SSA and SEA differ in terms of history, language, culture and positions in the contemporary global economy. Nevertheless, they share important historical legacies that inform contemporary development debates surrounding urbanization.

In 1947, when it approached the United Nations for advice about Palestine, the British Government felt constrained to explain its status there, and how the Palestine mandate could be seen as a lawful exercise of authority. In a memorandum it prepared for the United Nations about the mandate, the Government wrote:

Britain here confirmed that the League Council action of 24 July 1922 related only to the mandate's terms, but that it was not an action that held legal significance for Britain having a mandate, since peace with Turkey was yet to be concluded. That distinction has been missed by many analysts, including Shabtai Rosenne, the first Legal Adviser to Israel's Foreign Ministry. Rosenne wrote that “the Mandate for Palestine was confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations and entered into force on 24 July 1922.” As the 1947 British document correctly stated, however, the Council did not purport to confirm a mandate to Britain on 24 July 1922, or to give it any legal effect on that date.

Fourteen months later, on 29 September 1923, the Council did purport to give “effect” to the mandate itself. In 1945, on another occasion when the British Government was explaining its status in Palestine, it said that on 29 September 1923 the mandate “came formally into operation.” The British Government never clarified what this characterization meant. The Crown had, as we saw, announced a mandate on 1 July 1920. Was the mandate “provisional” in some sense for three years? Was it only an “informal” mandate, if such a term had any legal meaning? If the mandate lacked “effect” prior to 29 September 1923, did Britain regard itself as a belligerent occupant until that date, despite what it said on 1 July 1920?

It was a cool November day in 1947 and I had just turned seven-years old. It was the first time in my life I felt out-of-touch. What was I to do now, I wondered? To this day I can still picture myself in Crooks’ drive-way playing basketball with my neighborhood pals, some of my age, others older and bigger. It was the first time in over six months that I had seen my friends, but it felt so odd. I could understand what they were saying but they couldn't understand me.

My mother, older brother and I had just gotten back from a six-months stay in Norway. In my eagerness to play with Norwegian boys of my age, who of course couldn't speak English (I bet they could today), I had to learn to speak Norwegian, and in so doing, I had forgotten my English. We hadn't intended to stay that long in Norway but passenger ship availability was quite uncertain in those times right after WW II. So here I was speechless with my old friends. Fortunately, it didn't take very long for all my spoken English to return and I was back to being a regular kid once again. (Note: if this country is interested in teaching foreign language skills—this is another example why instruction should begin at an early age.)

Yes, it was but a small piece in the puzzle of one's life that you put together as the years and decades pass. But, it was significant in that it was the first time I felt alone facing a problem on my own. Up to then, I, as most other boys and girls, relied on their mothers and fathers to look out for us. The first “fright” remained with me. The second time I felt such a foreboding was when after finishing graduate school my draft status changed from “student deferment” (2S) to “available, fit for general military service” (1A).

Ah—But Let Me Begin at the Beginning

I was born on November 2, 1940, in Wausau, Wisconsin. I was the second son, my brother, Arne, having been born two and one-half years before me. Our parents were both born in Norway; my father in Bergen, my mother in Oslo. My father, a chemist, was educated at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

Recorded 1 June 2011

Translated and annotated by Josh Stenberg

Lecturer

Liu Yilong 劉異龍 (b. 1940) has for many years been a leading chou 丑 of the Shanghai Troupe. Born in Jiangxi, outside kunqu's core area, he had to acquire the Suzhou dialect as a young man. In theatre school he cycled through numerous role types before settling into the chou repertoire. He studied with “chuan” generation (chuan zi bei 傳字輩) performers, including Hua Chuanhao 華傳浩 and Wang Chuansong 王傳淞 [Appendix H]. His stage collaborations with the versatile dan 旦 Liang Guyin 梁谷音 [see Lecture 11], including for this scene, are particularly well known.

Synopsis

“Descending the Mountain” (“Xiashan” 下山) is one of the most popular comic scenes in kunqu. Since Chinese monasteries and nunneries are usually (and in narratives, reliably) located on hills and mountains, reference to “descending the mountain” already implies escape from religious life.

“Descending the Mountain” can refer to the whole scene or just to a solo section for the monk Benwu 本無, which can also be called “The Little Monk Descends the Mountain” (“Xiaoheshang xiashan” 小和尚下山). When specified as “Double Descending the Mountain” (“Shuang xiashan” 雙下山), also known as “Monk Meets Nun” (“Sengni hui” 僧尼會), a second part is performed during which Benwu is joined by the nun Sekong 色空. “Descending the Mountain” is closely linked to Sekong's scene, “Longing for the Ordinary World” (“Si fan” 思凡), which takes place previously, and in which Sekong prepares to leave the abbey and rejoin the ordinary world.

Both scenes had become popular in kunqu by the eighteenth century (Goldman 2001). Older versions ended with karmic retributions for the characters for their sins, perhaps extracted from or related to the Mulian narrative. In the scenes as extant in repertoire (which do not treat their later lives at all), that harsh judgment is absent in favor of the celebration of the characters’ amorous rebellion against the strictures of religion, since they were given to the temples as children (to save their lives) and have no religious vocation.

The semiotic theory of humor is allied to the cognitive theory. Semiotics asks how meaning is generated in daily life and, for our purposes, in any text. It seeks to answer this question by analyzing the signification found in a given text and by trying to elicit the polar oppositions (or sets of paired opposites) implicit in any work. It also seeks to understand the way the narrative functions (when there is one). These two operations involve investigating the paradigmatic (or oppositional) and the syntagmatic (or linear, narrative) aspects of the text. According to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the syntagmatic analysis of a text tells us the manifest content, what the text (a joke or any other form of humor) is about, and the paradigmatic analysis tells us the latent content, what the joke “really” means. And this meaning is hidden; it is not the same as the subject of the joke or work of humor or text.

An Overview of Semiotics

Since many people are not familiar with semiotics, I offer here an overview of some of its basic concepts.

Ferdinand de Saussure's book, Course in General Linguistics, published in 1915 (and in an English translation in 1959) is not known to the general public. And Saussure is not a name that many people are familiar with—the way they are with Freud, Darwin, Einstein or Marx. But this book is, we now recognize, a seminal book, one of the most important books published in the twentieth century, and Saussure's ideas have influenced scholars not only in linguistics but in many other disciplines.

Saussure is the founding father of semiology—which means, literally, “words about” or “the study of” (logos, logy) signs (sēmeȋon). Sēmeîon is the Greek word for sign. An American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, developed a different theory of signs, which he called semiotics, and it is semiotics that is now accepted as the term to be used for the study of signs.

But what's a sign? And how do signs function? For our purposes, let me define a sign as “anything that can be made to stand for something else.

Kunqu, recognized by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2001 as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is among the oldest and most refined traditions of the family of genres known as xiqu. For many connoisseurs, kunqu represents the towering achievement of the Chinese traditional stage. Its texts are refined and literary, its stage movements distinctive and graceful, its music haunting and mellifluous. It can make a serious claim to being both an ancient and a comprehensive art, with gesture and gaze observed and regulated as much as pitch or timbre. These qualities give it a prestige that has successfully passed from late imperial literati culture to the arts cognoscenti of today's Chinese cities.

Having survived the turmoil of the Chinese twentieth century, kunqu's musical and performance traditions are currently passed on by senior artists in the professional troupes of several major cities of the Yangtze River basin as well as Beijing and Chenzhou (Hunan). Since research has largely focused on the textual basis of performance, the transmission of kunqu performance technique, and the shifts and refinements of kunqu tradition have been only patchily understood outside of theatre circles.

Despite the efforts of generations of performers, academics, translators, community organizers, and connoisseurs, it remains difficult to initiate a student or an actor who does not read Chinese into the world and logic of kunqu. Materials in English often require a great deal of philological knowledge and are not very reflective or practical. By providing access to experienced actors’ lectures, this book constitutes an attempt to give insight into the history, society, and practical considerations of kunqu as seen from the perspective of contemporary actors. Each chapter contains a lecture by a master performer on how to perform a particular kunqu scene, thus shedding light on the human processes—technical, pedagogical, ideological, social—that create a particular piece of theatre and transmit it over time. These translations allow kunqu actors’ voices to be heard for the first time in international theatre and performance studies. Meanwhile, the annotations help the reader to place these narratives in historical, literary, discursive, and aesthetic contexts.

The reference to the Balfour Declaration in the 1948 statement proclaiming Israeli statehood was premised on the Balfour Declaration as a document carrying normative force. As we saw, the 1948 statement began from the 1897 assertion of Jewish rights and then said that that assertion of rights was recognized in the Balfour Declaration. As for the British Government, its view of the Balfour Declaration was less clear. It would seek, as we shall see, to gain acceptance of the national home concept by others but without claiming legal force for the Balfour Declaration itself. Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter 17, the British Government appeared to regard the Balfour Declaration as a policy statement, a policy that could be reversed if circumstances warranted.

Nonetheless, the supposedly binding nature of the Balfour Declaration became an element of the Narrative. Britain was said to have committed itself to a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Yoram Dinstein provided a legal underpinning. The Balfour Declaration, Dinstein wrote, “had a binding force as far as that country was concerned.” Dinstein said that this was so because later British governments said so. “The British intention to be bound by the text (formally acknowledged and reiterated by successive British governments) can easily be ascertained.” The commitment was based, Dinstein wrote, on the international law principle that a state can be bound by a promise it makes, so long as it intended to bind itself. “Under international law (as elucidated in two subsequent decisions of the International Court of Justice, in the Eastern Greenland case and in the Nuclear Tests cases),” he continued, “a unilateral declaration issued by the competent authorities of a state can have a binding effect upon that state, if such was the intention behind it.”1 The Balfour Declaration hence was said to be binding not as a two-party legal act, but as a unilateral commitment.

Dinstein's argument to that point was sound. A state can indeed be bound by a commitment made unilaterally. The Balfour Declaration did include the statement that Britain intended to apply its “best endeavours” to “facilitate” a national home” for the “Jewish people” in Palestine, hence Dinstein could find a way to see it as a unilaterally made commitment.

Can Tho is a rapidly growing city in a heavily agricultural region and resembles a provincial town more than an urban mega region. Ha Noi, however, has grown at a similar rapid rate but from a much larger base and consequently shows a different kind of adaptation to the high demands for urban water supplies.

The city of Ha Noi has grown rapidly since the beginning of market reforms in the late 1980s in Viet Nam, and the city has begun to incorporate new peri-urban areas without basic urban services. In Tu Liem District's Co Nhue Ward, a neighborhood located in the peri-urban area of Ha Noi, people paid a higher water tariff than the standard citywide one, which had been regulated by the Ha Noi People's Committee. Although supplying piped water for Co Nhue commune residents since 1997, the Ha Noi Water Business Company (HWBC) did not directly manage the piped-water network in the commune, which was built by the Ha Noi Department of Public Works and Transportation. Instead, the company developed a lease contract with the Co Nhue People's Committee (CPC) and provided water in bulk to the com-mune's piped network through a master water meter. The local CPC then established a local water supply management unit (WMU) to retail water to domestic household users. While initially functional, eventually the local water retailer became overwhelmed by the increasing demands and needed to be taken over by the larger HWBC. This case represents a local, ward-level government playing an entrepreneurial, yet temporarily useful, role between the larger municipal utility and local residents.

Co Nhue Commune in Peri-Urbanizing Ha Noi

Situated in an area of approximately 615 hectares, 10 miles away from the center of the capital Hanoi, Co Nhue commune became a unit of administration of Tu Liem district, a western rural district of Hanoi, in 1961 (Pham et al., 1994). According to historical archives and documents kept in the local temple, shrines, and the Communal House, Co Nhue village, a unit of settlement of wet paddy cultivators, was established more than a thousand years ago. Like other traditional villages in the delta of the Red River, Co Nhue was constructed on elevated ground near the Nhuệ River, so that the villagers could easily access water for daily life and irrigation purposes, which was essential for wet rice cultivation.

I began this book after years of stumbling over the fundamental question of freedom in my writing, as well as in my teaching. Although many would immediately answer this question in political terms, that context, while of obvious importance (see Chapter 6), is far from the only one and, moreover, raises more questions than it answers, for example, Is one really free in a “free society”? And while, at a more personal level, many think that freedom is merely doing whatever one likes, most would agree that being able to do so for even a limited amount of time leaves one feeling more and more un-free. And so, while such commonplace notions of freedom are relevant and, as such, will all be considered here (including the notorious “free will” debate), the fundamental question of freedom eludes those simple and questionable forms of a freedom that is, one might say, free from those more recognizable definitions.

Because this question is so large and encompasses so many topics, disciplines, and areas of research I feel justified in approaching freedom from my own particular position as a professor in the “liberal (sc. free) arts” with a degree in comparative literature, which is basically the one field within the humanities which requires that one look at issues outside of the boundaries of any particular language or discipline—it is, by most accounts, the freest of all the liberal arts programs. As the arts play a central role in comparative literature in particular, and in the liberal arts in general, Part I of this book gives particular attention to freedom as a Kantian “aesthetic idea” that informs philosophical discussions of freedom in Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Isaiah Berlin, who coined the term (but not the idea) of “positive freedom.” In Part II of this work, I take up the more practical application of this notion to what I refer to as the various “zones” of positive freedom such as academia (“academic freedom”), religion (“religious freedom”), art (“artistic freedom”), “free speech,” “friendship” (etymologically related to freedom) and, of course, “political freedom.”

In Chapter 1, I described a public and scholarly debate on the various ways in which urban water supplies are provided throughout the world. This description explicitly linked the evolution and development of these ways to the evolution of new forms of resilient local governance emerging in rapidly urbanizing settlements and places. Moreover, these forms of governance, offer a range of investments made by the public, private and civic sectors and shed light more universally on how participatory development processes evolve.

The findings from Gresik, Can Tho, Ha Noi and Phnom Penh provide substantive detail to the ways in which partnership and co-production clearly identify the coordinated commitments by households, communities and governments must make to increase access to clean water. The debate on public or private provision of water described earlier often masks these important regional differences and ad-hoc arrangements within countries. My description of these cases, I hope, has refocused the debate away from the public–private dichotomy, on to the more important issue of scale, both geographic and organizational. Private water providers can range from small water vendors to multinational corporations, while state providers can range from local water corporations to municipal and national corporations.

Thus, rather than looking to a Western-generated debate on public–private management systems, the empirical evidence from SEA suggests we should look elsewhere for institutional principles moving forward. Looking toward the near-term and mid-term future—the timeframes needed to manage the urban transition most effectively—institutions governing the urban transition cannot be divorced from their agrarian economies and histories.

The Agrarian Roots of Urban Informality: Peri-urbanization and the Provision of Urban Infrastructure

Scholars of urban water governance in the Global South have much to learn from agrarian social economies and political networks. After all, it is these networks, habits and practices that the newly urbanized agrarian residents bring with them to the peri-urban settlements described above. The starting point for understanding these kinds of networks is in the indigenous economies—here, roughly speaking the agrarian ones—that have now become part of the global economy. In densely settled societies like those of Viet Nam, Indonesia and Cambodia, the growth of cities might best be seen as a kind of “agrarian urbanization” that marks an initial moment of rapid change resulting from the rapid growth of the agricultural and resulting food processing industries.

In his final lectures, Pierre Bourdieu reconsidered his opinion of Robert K. Merton (RKM). He confessed that early in his career, as “a newcomer in an international field dominated by Merton and structural functionalism,” he had had been unfair to Merton (Bourdieu 2004, 12). Since that time, he had developed new awareness of “the political conditions” under which he formulated his classic norms of science, which Bourdieu now saw “as a way of setting the scientific ideal in opposition to barbarism” (2004, 13). He had also learned about Merton's “personal trajectory.” The man he had first seen, at a conference in which he was “king,” as “an elegant, refined WASP was in reality a recent Jewish immigrant” who had adopted a refined “British” style, not unlike other “first-generation immigrants underdoing integration and eager for recognition”—a disposition that “was probably also at the root of his scientific practice and his exaltation of the ‘profession’ of sociology, which he wanted to establish as a scientific profession” (2004, 13). Bourdieu was not alone in attributing a kind of British elegance to Merton, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, nor in being ignorant of the political dimensions of Merton's classic early work.

Neither Merton's Jewishness nor his politics are straightforward matters, and both changed over his lifetime. Nonetheless, I’ll argue that delving into them throws important light on his life and work, a case I’ll make by investigating them in the contexts of his formative, early years—from his birth in 1910 through the publication of the first edition of Social Theory and Social Structure (1949; STSS). One of his ablest interpreters, Alan Sica, suggests that “Merton was already Merton at a young age” (2010, 65; see also 1998, 2019). I agree but add two caveats. First, we don't fully understand how “Merton was already Merton” without seeing how he carried forward elements of freethinking American Jewish culture as it played out in the first decades of the twentieth century. Second, there were changes in the politics of Merton's sociology from the preto the post-1949 period.

I grew up in a small town (4,200 people) in post-WWII Appalachia, and I remember that there was universal respect for military service. Most fathers served in the military and virtually every family was somehow impacted by the War. The War was a shared experience. As a youngster in the early 1950s, I did not sense there was any distinction among persons who volunteered, were drafted or did not serve at all. Furthermore, there was great respect for President Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander.

Although the Vietnam War created divisions within the country as to the support of the War, the military and the draft, most of that was not apparent in our small town of mostly blue collar and farm workers. Most draft age men expected to serve upon graduation from high school except for the small percentage, 10 percent, who would attend college. My perspective on the draft was limited to observation of others as nothing beyond my registration was expected other than a college deferment. Then before graduation from high school a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) scholarship was awarded to me. In fact, I naively thought the draft card was related to draft beer. For, along with a driver's license, it was the ticket to be able to purchase six percent beer at 18 years.

Ancestral and Immediate Family Military Experiences

As far as I know, no ancestors of mine served in the military prior to my parents except an ancestor of my paternal grandmother who fought in the Revolutionary War qualifying her for the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). My paternal ancestors were farmers who were early settlers in West Virginia. My maternal grandparents emigrated from Italy as children. An apprentice watchmaker, my father joined the Army in December 1941, gave up a stateside clerk's job on a command staff to go to OCS (Officer Candidate School). He served in combat in Italy earning the French Croix de Guerre for leading his company in the rescue of French troops being overrun. My mother was an Army nurse and they met when he was hospitalized after being wounded. They married in Bari, Italy and I was my mother's ticket home early as they did not want pregnant nurses on active duty. After father returned from overseas, three sisters were added to the family.

Correspondence between Lectures in This Book and Masters’ Lectures

“After the victory of the Allied Powers in World War I—and pursuant to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations,” wrote Yoram Dinstein, “the former Turkish territories in the Middle East were placed under the Mandates system. Palestine was assigned as a Mandate to Britain.” Per the Narrative, in line with Dinstein's claim, Britain's assumption of a governance role in Palestine came about because of the League's mandate system and through an assignment of Palestine to Britain.

Dinstein's statement conflated two separate issues. One is Britain's right to rule Palestine. The other is the mandate system. The mandate system was not a route to gaining a right to rule territory. It could be used only by a state that held sovereignty over the territory it wanted to place under mandate. Dinstein's wording, however, implied that Britain gained the right to govern through the mandate system.

The League Covenant did, to be sure, suggest that it was desirable that Turkey's Arab provinces, once under new sovereignty, should be administered as mandates rather than as colonies. But the League did not “place” territories under the mandate system. The League had no power to require any state that was holding territory to opt for the mandate system. The League of Nations had no role in determining which states would take on mandates. Nor, as we saw in Chapters 6 and 7, did the Allies have standing to “place” Palestine under Britain's control.

The decision to bring the mandate system into play for Palestine was made by Britain alone. As the San Remo meeting ended, Britain finished a draft of a peace treaty under which it would gain sovereignty from Turkey. The Supreme Council handed the draft to Turkey on May 11, hoping for an immediate signature. Turkey asked for time to respond. Britain was being pressed by the Zionist Organization to “regularize” its tenure in Palestine. From the time the guns of war fell silent, the Zionist Organization lobbied Britain to take practical steps in Palestine that would lead to Jewish statehood. From April 1918, Britain sponsored what was called the Zionist Commission, made up of Zionists from Europe.