Articles from the Institute Letter

By Elizabeth Bernstein 

"Rescued" sex workers in lockdown in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

In recent years, the trafficking of women and children into the sex sector has become the focus of a steady spate of media coverage, the subject of abundant policy interventions, and the target of local, national, and transnational activist campaigns uniting highly diverse constituencies. From the political left to the far right, from secular feminists to evangelical Christians, sex trafficking is frequently described as “modern day slavery” and is considered to be a moral question that is “beyond politics,” something no one could possibly claim to be “for.” This unity is all the more striking given the fact that definitions of the term remain murky, with many states and activists applying it not only to forced but also to voluntary forms of sexual labor. Despite this ambiguity, sex trafficking has risen to a position of cultural and political prominence that it has not held since the “white slavery” panic similarly circled the globe at the turn of the last century.

This surge of interest presents sociologists and other scholars with some vexing social and historical questions. If prostitution is the “oldest profession,” why the resurgence of interest in it now? How has the issue of sex trafficking come to unite constituencies that otherwise have opposing politics and interests, especially in relation to matters of sex and gender (as ongoing political controversies over gay marriage and abortion powerfully reveal)?

By W. Anthony Sheppard 

The original tune sheet, listing the song titles in nonstandard transliteration and in Chinese characters, of the Morris Museum's music box

When I arrived at the Institute last September, I thought I knew exactly what I would accomplish as a Member in the School of Historical Studies—I would complete my book, Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination, and would launch a new project on vocal timbre in twentieth-century music. By January, having made reasonable progress, these goals still appeared attainable. However, through a chance encounter with a nineteenth-century musical artifact, my carefully crafted research schedule was completely derailed. This opportune encounter led me to make a series of discoveries concerning two of Puccini’s operas and to develop insights into the global circulation of music over the past two centuries.
My wife and I had promised our children we would occasionally visit our home during the year. The distance between Pownal, Vermont, and Princeton, New Jersey, proved crucial to the direction my research would take. The drive is just long enough to invite stops at cultural and natural attractions in northern New Jersey. As graduate students at Princeton in the early 1990s, we had visited the Morris Museum in Morristown to view its collection of American art. I was aware that the museum had since dramatically expanded its holdings to include the Guinness Collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata, and so we decided to visit again last January. I soon discovered that scholarly serendipity may strike in surprising settings.