TY - JOUR
T1 - Ambivalences of smallness
T2 - population statistics and narratives of scale among American Jewry
AU - Kravel-Tovi, Michal
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2023/3
Y1 - 2023/3
N2 - Small things loom large as a distinct category in social and cultural analysis. However, the social construction and effects of this idiom of scale commonly remain vague and underexplored. Bringing the literature on quantification in conversation with the literature on scale-making, this article offers a theoretically-informed analysis of how smallness consolidates as a publicly salient social attribute, and how it feeds collective narratives. The empirical focus is on American Jewry – an ethnoreligious minority group whose leaders and experts have invested in its quantification, including its representation as a small population. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, as well as on interviews and fieldwork, I show that American Jewish research bodies and public figures engage in a myriad of comparative arithmetic exercises and spectacles of scale to assert the smallness of the population. Deploying smallness as a generative narrative tool allows them to engage with the ambivalences implicated in the American-Jewish post-Holocaust, minority, and diasporic experience. In particular, exercises around notions of numerical negligibility, disproportional success, and numerical inferiority elicit protean narratives around endangerment, power, and a questioned diasporic future. The broader theoretical intervention of this article is to offer scalemaking as a valuable prism for understanding the narrative potency and poignancy of arithmetically-based constructs such as smallness. Instead of emphasizing the assumed epistemological strengths of numbers, this article considers the narrative work that statistics do when they lend themselves to multimodal scaling. It argues that through scaling, statistics are infused with perspective, relevance and meaning, descriptively and prescriptively.
AB - Small things loom large as a distinct category in social and cultural analysis. However, the social construction and effects of this idiom of scale commonly remain vague and underexplored. Bringing the literature on quantification in conversation with the literature on scale-making, this article offers a theoretically-informed analysis of how smallness consolidates as a publicly salient social attribute, and how it feeds collective narratives. The empirical focus is on American Jewry – an ethnoreligious minority group whose leaders and experts have invested in its quantification, including its representation as a small population. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, as well as on interviews and fieldwork, I show that American Jewish research bodies and public figures engage in a myriad of comparative arithmetic exercises and spectacles of scale to assert the smallness of the population. Deploying smallness as a generative narrative tool allows them to engage with the ambivalences implicated in the American-Jewish post-Holocaust, minority, and diasporic experience. In particular, exercises around notions of numerical negligibility, disproportional success, and numerical inferiority elicit protean narratives around endangerment, power, and a questioned diasporic future. The broader theoretical intervention of this article is to offer scalemaking as a valuable prism for understanding the narrative potency and poignancy of arithmetically-based constructs such as smallness. Instead of emphasizing the assumed epistemological strengths of numbers, this article considers the narrative work that statistics do when they lend themselves to multimodal scaling. It argues that through scaling, statistics are infused with perspective, relevance and meaning, descriptively and prescriptively.
KW - American Jewry
KW - Jewish continuity
KW - Quantification
KW - Scale-making
KW - Small; Statistics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143226209&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11186-022-09473-5
DO - 10.1007/s11186-022-09473-5
M3 - ???researchoutput.researchoutputtypes.contributiontojournal.article???
AN - SCOPUS:85143226209
SN - 0304-2421
VL - 52
SP - 293
EP - 331
JO - Theory and Society
JF - Theory and Society
IS - 2
ER -