Most recent papers:

• Social impact without social justice: Film and politics in the neoliberal landscape.
  Sherry B. Ortner.
  American Ethnologist. August 14, 2017
  Many filmmakers and producers hope to create some kind of social or political impact with their films. This is the case with a Los Angeles–based production company that seeks to bring about social change through its films and related “social action” campaigns. Despite its good intentions, however, its efforts often fail. In this respect, the company resembles other kinds of entities that seek to “do good,” such as development NGOs, humanitarian organizations, and philanthropic foundations, which anthropologists have critiqued. The problem of social enterprises like this one is exacerbated under various conditions of the world reordered under neoliberalism. [social impact, social justice, social enterprise, film, politics, neoliberalism, United States]

  August 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12527   open full text
• An offer of pleasure: Islam, poetry, and the ethics of religious difference in a Kurdish home.
  J. Andrew Bush.
  American Ethnologist. August 14, 2017
  Recent conflicts between Islamist and secularist parties in Iraqi Kurdistan have politicized pious and nonpious orientations to Islamic traditions. In public debate and domestic relations, tensions pervade relations between Muslims who pursue piety and those who do not. Yet affects of pleasure and joy also play a key role in the ethics of domestic relations. Evidence from the life of a Kurdish man and his family demonstrates that their orientation to Islam is inseparable from their orientation to one another. It also shows that affective pleasures linking the poetic imagination to household life are central to the ethical task of sustaining intimate relations. Within the household, Muslims with different orientations to Islam accept and accommodate one another through an “ethos of reception.” [poetry, pluralism, ethics, kinship, Sufism, Islam, Iraqi Kurdistan]

  August 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12526   open full text
• Sacralizing kinship, naturalizing the nation: Blood and food in postrevolutionary Iran.
  Rose Wellman.
  American Ethnologist. August 14, 2017
  In Iran, ideas and practices of the family are integral to religious nation‐making. State elites and supporters (here members of the Basij, Iran's paramilitary organization) tie the blood of kinship to the blood and sacrifice of Iran‐Iraq War martyrs. They harness blood's relational and sacred properties in museum displays and commemorations to delineate and sanctify an Islamic nation composed of pure, kindred citizens. Food has similar efficacy: pious acts of sharing food at home infuse the rituals of state power, creating “what should be”—that is, citizens who embody familial piety, purity, and closeness to God. The Iranian case compels us to consider how a full spectrum of immaterial qualities, substances, and acts of kin making can inform the nation and its politics. [kinship, nation, blood, food, Basij, Islam, Iran] Women pray and stir votive soup for teething children in Fars‐Abad, Iran, April 28, 2010.

  August 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12525   open full text
• Beyond cultural intimacy: The tensions that make truth for India's Ahmadi Muslims.
  Nicholas H. A. Evans.
  American Ethnologist. August 14, 2017
  How should anthropologists write about the public self‐presentation of minority groups? In the Indian town of Qadian, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community—a marginal group with a long history of persecution in South Asia—uses visual media to counter hostility and produce images of its members as exemplary Muslims. That such images are artificially produced is an intimate secret shared by the town's residents. Understanding this secret without undermining the political struggle that Ahmadi Muslims are engaged in means moving beyond the idea that truth must be located in either the everyday or the public. For Ahmadis in Qadian, the disjuncture between these realms is a space of possibility that reveals truth. [cultural intimacy, visual media, exemplarity, self‐representation, Ahmadiyya, Islam, India] The White Minaret of Qadian, India. This is a symbol of the global Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and a sign of the coming of the Messiah. Behind it is a Hindu temple. December 2010.

  August 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12524   open full text
• Glossolalia and cacophony in South Korea: Cultural semiosis at the limits of language.
  Nicholas Harkness.
  American Ethnologist. August 14, 2017
  In Christian traditions of “speaking in tongues,” glossolalia refers to an explicitly linguistic form of involvement with the deity, one carried out through denotationally unintelligible behavior. Its religious legitimacy depends on its being speech and not merely speech‐like. South Korean Christians practice glossolalia widely across denominations, commonly in cacophonous settings of group prayer. Combined, glossolalia and cacophony impose limits on “normal” linguistic functions while reinforcing ideological commitments to language itself. Glossolalia should be conceptualized as cultural semiosis that is said to contain, and can therefore be justified by, an ideological core of language, but that is in fact produced at the ideological limits of language. This dynamic shapes how practitioners discern the nature of communication with their deity and with one another. [speaking in tongues, noise, unintelligibility, intensity and intensification, Pentecostalism, Yoido Full Gospel Church, South Korea] 기독교의 방언기도 전통에서 ‘방언(方言)’이란 특정 지역에서 쓰는 사투리를 의미하는 것이 아니라 명시적으로 이해할 수 없는 행동을 통해 신과 직접 관계를 맺는 언어 형식을 가리킨다. 방언기도의 종교적 정당성은 그것이 단순히 말과 유사한 행위가 아니라 진짜 말이라는 것에 달려 있다. 한국 기독교에서 방언기도는 여러 교단에서 널리 행해지는데, 일반적으로는 서로의 말을 알아들을 수 없는 집단 기도 상황에서 일어난다. 서로의 말을 알아들을 수 없는 성질과 방언기도가 결합됐을 때, 그것은 “일반적인” 언어적 기능을 제한하는 한편 언어 자체에 대한 이념적 헌신은 강화시킨다. 인류학적 분석을 위해 방언기도는 문화적 세미오시스로 개념화되어야 한다. 이 문화적 세미오시스는 언어의 이데올로기적 핵심을 담고 있고 그러므로 그에 의해 정당화된다고 간주되지만 실제로는 언어의 이데올로기적 한계에서 생산되는 것이다. 이러한 역학은 화자들이 신과 자신 사이의 의사소통, 그리고 서로 간의 의사소통의 성격을 파악하는 방식을 형성하는 데 중요한 영향을 끼친다. [방언기도, 소음, 불가해성, 강렬함과 강화, 오순절주의, 여의도 순복음교회, 한국]

  August 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12523   open full text
• Keeping God's distance: Sacrifice, possession, and the problem of religious mediation.
  Joel Robbins.
  American Ethnologist. August 14, 2017
  Much contemporary work in the anthropology of religion explores how human experience of the divine is mediated. One question rarely asked, however, is why people distance the divine from themselves in the first place, such that complex practices of mediation are necessary to make it present. An answer to this question is provided by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss in their book Sacrifice, which I read as a key precursor to current work on religious mediation. Hubert and Mauss focus on how religious mediations model and shape social mediations. I demonstrate the usefulness of an approach to mediation that draws on their work by examining a shift from sacrifice to possession as forms of mediation among Pentecostal converts in Papua New Guinea. I also show that this approach can help us further develop broader anthropological theories of mediation and social life. [religion, mediation, sacrifice, possession, Pentecostalism, Papua New Guinea] Planti ol saveman husat i stadi ol kainkain lotu, ol i tok olsem: long olgeta kain lotu ol bilipman i save ting ol god na tewel samting i stap longwe liklik. Tasol dispela lain saveman ol i no save askim: bilong wanem ol god save stap longwe na ol bilipman i mas hatwok long i stap klostu na toktok wantaim ol god? Long tingting bilong mi, wanpela buk bilong Henri Hubert na Marcel Mauss, ol i kolim Sacrifice, em inap long helpim yumi bekim dispela askim. Hubert na Mauss tok olsem, wei bilong wokim koneksen wantaim god, em i save sanap olsem wanpela piksa i soim wei bilong wokim koneksen namel long ol manmeri. Sapos yumi bihainim dispela tingting bilong Hubert na Mauss, dispela em inap long helpim yumi kisim save long wei bilong lotu bilong ol Pentekostal, na long wanem as planti ol i save lusim wok bilong givim ol ofa i go long god na ol i save go insait long wok bilong kisim spirit (ol i kolim ‘possession’ taim spirit i kisim ol). Na tu, mi ting olsem dispela luksave long koneksen wantaim ol god samtink inap em helpim yumi tingting gut long ol kainkain koneksen i stap namel long ol manmeri. [ol kainkain lotu, koneksen wantaim god, wok bilong givim ol ofa i go long god, wok bilong kisim spirit, ol Pentekostal Kristen, Papua Niugini]

  August 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12522   open full text
• Professional apartheid: The racialization of US law schools after the global economic crisis.
  Riaz Tejani.
  American Ethnologist. August 14, 2017
  After the 2008 global financial crisis, US law schools suffered a steep drop in enrollment. In response, many professional law programs, especially so‐called fourth‐tier institutions, turned to ethnoracial minorities as a new market for student recruitment. They relaxed admissions standards, enabling more “diverse” students to finance their studies with guaranteed federal student loans. By raising diversity in a lower‐status “southern hemisphere” of legal education and services, however, this new approach replaced outright exclusion with a racialized professional dualism justified by the neoliberal ideology of market access. Some have called this an “apartheid model”—a freighted term with broad theoretical and ethical entanglements. This pairing of race and free‐market logics resembles wider, specious extensions of market citizenship into the global peripheries. [law, education, professions, neoliberalism, race, markets, United States]

  August 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12521   open full text
• Homework: Toward a critical ethnography of the university.
  Hugh Gusterson.
  American Ethnologist. August 14, 2017
  Anthropologists have not systematically studied universities, and ethnographies of the university focus too much on student life. The literature on the Cold War university, broadly concerned with the relationship between power and knowledge, could serve as a model for a critical anthropology of the neoliberal university. Such an anthropology would investigate various important issues—including the changing character of public and private universities, the rise of casual labor and corporate employment practices on campus, the student‐debt crisis, the university's role in increasing socioeconomic inequality and class immobility, and the relationship that such disciplines as economics and political science maintain with the state and capital. [university, neoliberalism, Cold War, class, debt, adjunct, United States] Los antropólogos no han estudiado la universidad sistemáticamente, y las etnografías de la universidad se enfocan demasiado en la vida estudiantil. La literatura sobre la universidad durante la Guerra Fría, generalmente centrada en la relación entre el poder y el conocimiento, puede servir de modelo para una antropología crítica de la universidad neoliberal. Tal antropología investigaría diferentes temas importantes —incluyendo la transformación de las universidades públicas y privadas, el aumento del trabajo temporal y de las prácticas corporativas de empleo en el campus universitario, la crisis de endeudamiento estudiantil, el rol de la universidad en el agravamiento de la desigualdad social y económica y la relación que mantienen disciplinas como la economía y la ciencia política con el estado y el capital—. [universidad, neoliberalismo, Guerra Fría, clase, deuda, profesores adjuntos, Estados Unidos]

  August 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12520   open full text
• Plant matters: Buddhist medicine and economies of attention in postsocialist Siberia.
  Tatiana Chudakova.
  American Ethnologist. May 03, 2017
  Buddhist medicine (sowa rigpa) in Siberia frames the natural world as overflowing with therapeutic potencies: “There is nothing in the world that isn't a medicine,” goes a common refrain. An exploration of sowa rigpa practitioners’ committed relations with the plants they make into medicines challenges human‐centric notions of efficacy in anthropological discussions of healing. Their work of making things medicinal—or pharmacopoiesis—centers on plants’ vital materialities and requires attention to the entanglements among vegetal and human communities and bodies. Potency is thus not the fixed property of substances in a closed therapeutic encounter but the result of a socially and ecologically distributed practice of guided transformations, a practice that is managed through the attentive labor of multiple actors, human and otherwise. In Siberia, pharmacopoiesis makes explicit the layered relations among postsocialist deindustrialization, Buddhist cosmologies, ailing human bodies, and botanical life. [plants, environment, medicine, postsocialism, Buddhism, Buryatia, Russia] Тибетская медицина (Сова Ригпа) в Сибири представляет окружающий мир, как обильный источник терапевтических свойств: «в мире нет ничего, что не могло бы быть лекарством,» гласит распространённая цитата из коренного учения по тибетской медицине. Исследование отношений экспертов в области тибетской медицины к растениям, которые они используют для составления лекарств помогает переосмыслить антропоцентрический подход к вопросам лечения. Труд, требующийся для создания «лекарственности»—описанный здесь как «фармакопоэзис»—концентрируется на витальной материальности растений, и освещает взаимосвязь человеческих и ботанических сообществ и организмов. В данном контексте, эффективность лекарства не является фиксированным атрибутом веществ в определенных терапевтических ситуациях, а экологически и социально распределенной практикой направляемых изменений, которые контролируется разными социальными акторами. В Сибири, фармакопоэзис делает очевидным сложное пересечение постсоциалистических процессов, Буддистского осмысления мира, переживания болезней, и жизнедеятельности растений. [растения, экология, медицина, постсоциализм, Буддизм, Бурятия, Россия]

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12483   open full text
• Can the subaltern listen? Self‐determination and the provisioning of expertise in Papua New Guinea.
  James Slotta.
  American Ethnologist. May 03, 2017
  Voice is a major concern in contemporary liberal‐democratic politics, one that stresses the political importance of speaking (“giving voice,” “speaking up”). But in the Yopno valley of Papua New Guinea, where NGO and government projects are expanding, people's sense that they are losing control of their future has led them to worry about their capacity to listen, not their capacity to speak. In largely acephalous villages, people's self‐determination seems particularly threatened by their ignorance of the true nature of their own actions. From a perspective in which the antecedents and the consequences of action are deeply unclear—a perspective stressed in the provisioning of expertise prevalent in political discourse—self‐determination hinges on listening and gaining the understanding needed to shape one's future. [political communication, expertise, self‐determination, voice, listening, Papua New Guinea, Melanesia] Long tingting bilong planti saveman bilong demokratik politiks na arapela manmeri tu, toktok em i as bilong paua bilong ol manmeri. Tasol, ol manmeri i stap long Yopno veli, wanpela hap bilong Papua Niugini, ol i no save wari tumas long tokaut. Maski gavman na NGO i laik wokim planti samting long hap, ol i no tingting planti long toktok tumas. Tasol, ol i wari planti long harim: ol inap long harim toktok na i stap fri o nogat? Long hap, ol lida bilong ples na gavman, ol i nogat paua long bosim ol manmeri bilong ples. Ol manmeri i ken bihainim laik bilong ol. Tasol, ol i wari olsem, nogut tingting bilong mipela i paul na mipela i no save gut long wei bilong kamapim ol samting mipela laik kamapim. Ol i lukim olsem paul tingting na nogat save em i wanpela kain kalabus. Olsem na, ol save tok olsem, ol mas harim gut toktok bilong ol saveman na kisim save. Dispela em i rot bilong bihainim tru laik bilong ol na kamapim samting ol i laik kamapim bihain. [toktok, saveman, bihainim laik, tokaut, harim toktok, kisim save, Papua Niugini]

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12482   open full text
• Walking like a Christian: Roads, translation, and gendered bodies as religious infrastructure in Papua New Guinea.
  Courtney Handman.
  American Ethnologist. May 03, 2017
  Homologies between so‐called soft infrastructures like language and hard ones like roads depend on ethnographically variable metaphors of circulation. In these homologies, speakers understand language to propel or inhibit forms of physical movement, affecting the embodied experiences of transportation or locomotion. In the case of Guhu‐Samane Christians in Papua New Guinea, people focus on language as a kind of infrastructure as they grapple with postcolonial feelings of disconnection from divine powers that were once manifest in a New Testament translation. They channel this sense of disconnection into ongoing complaints about their lack of a vehicular road and the pain of walking, particularly walking like a heavily burdened woman. If a road were built into their valley, this would signal the New Testament's transformation into Christian infrastructure. [infrastructure, language, translation, gender, religious mediation, Christianity, Papua New Guinea] Long sampela hap ol i ting olsem rot bilong kar na toktok i wankain: tupela samting i helpim ol long mekim dispela kain koneksen. Na tu, ol i ting olsem ol kain konekson bilong toktok i ken kamapim koneksen bilong rot na senisim pasin bilong wokabaut. Ol Kristen manmeri long Waria veli i save tok: taim ol lain bilong SIL i tanim tok bilong Nupela Testamen i go long tok ples Guhu‐Samane, dispela em i opim rot i go long heven. Tasol nau sampela lain long hap i wari olsem dispela rot i pas na God i no ken harim tok bilong ol. Ol i save tok olsem long wanem planti yia i go pinis na God i no helpim ol long wanpela rot bilong kar i go insait long Waria veli. Dispela ol lain i wok long singaut long pen bilong wokabaut long lek tasol na ol i sori long ol mama i karim draipela bilum pulap long kaikai. Sapos God i wokim rot i go insait long veli, orait dispela em i mak olsem rot bilong Nupela Testamen i stap op yet na rot bilong Kristen toktok inap long kamapim rot bilong kar. [ol rot samting, toktok, wok bilong tanim tok, pasin bilong man na pasin bilong meri, koneksen wantaim God, ol Kristen, Papua Niugini]

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12481   open full text
• Modal reasoning in Dar es Salaam's power network.
  Michael Degani.
  American Ethnologist. May 03, 2017
  In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, residents, electricians, and power‐utility workers tolerate some unofficial forms of modifiying the electrical network, such as unsanctioned reconnections and extensions. These practices, which can also involve theft, bribery, and other illegal activities, both undermine and sustain an increasingly expensive public infrastructure that is in disrepair and subject to routine bureaucratic neglect. But such modifications also have their tacit limits, and people judge as foolish those who have exceeded them. The limits reveal a modal reasoning at work in the relationship among technical systems, urban ethics, and informal economic arrangements. In each of these domains, people use modal reasoning to simultaneously alter and preserve an emergent future. Such reasoning illustrates how infrastructures constitute wholes that emerge from, but are not reducible to, their constituent parts. [infrastructure, electricity, modality, reasoning, urbanism, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania] Dar es salaam, Tanzania, wakazi, mafundi umeme, na wafanyakazi wanaosambaza umeme wanaendekeza kufanya aina za marekebisho ya mifumo ya umeme isiyo rasmi, kwa mfano kuongeza idadi ya watumiaji wa umeme na kuwarudishia huduma ya umeme wale waliokatiwa bila ya kuingia nao mikataba na bila ya idhini kutoka shirika la umeme. Lakini marekebisho haya pia yana ukomo wa ukimya na watu wanawaona wale ambao wamezidi kama vile hawana busara. Ukomo huu unadhihirisha aina ya fikra ya kimfumo katika mahusiano ya nyanja za kiufundi, maadili ya kazi, na mipangilio ya kiuchumi isiyo rasmi. Katika hali hizi nyanja, watu wanatumia fikra za kimfumo kwa wakati huo huo kubadili na kutunza wanachokusudia hapo mbeleni. Fikra hii inaonyesha kwamba miundombuni ni mjumuisho unaotokana na mahusiano ya vipengele mbalimbali na sio vipengele vilivyokaa kipekee. [miundombinu, umeme, mfumo, fikra, mjini, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania] A stockpile of utility poles at a regional office of Tanzania's electric utility, October 14, 2011.

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12480   open full text
• Torn dollars and war‐wounded francs: Money fetishism in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
  Joshua Z. Walker.
  American Ethnologist. May 03, 2017
  Currency in the Democratic Republic of Congo does not have a face value only: people also evaluate it according to its physical properties—worn or torn money has a lower value than clean, new bills. This constitutes a shift away from fetishizing the state as money's backer to fetishizing money's materiality as a source of value. Such fetishizing of banknotes is a form of social creativity, one in which Congolese have established new norms regarding money in order to supplant or circumvent the state as a guarantor of currency's value. In doing so, they reveal the dialectic of materiality and immateriality at the heart of the money form, demonstrating that the fetish is not irreducibly material. [money, value, materiality, fetishism, currency, Congolese franc, Democratic Republic of Congo] En République Démocratique du Congo, la monnaie n'a pas seulement une valeur nominale : les gens l’évaluent aussi en fonction de ses propriétés physiques, et l'argent usé ou déchiré a une valeur inférieure aux billets propres et neufs. Ceci constitue un décalage du fétichisme de l’État en tant que garant de la devise vers un fétichisme de la matérialité de l'argent en tnant que source de valeur. Cette fétichisation des billets de banque est une forme de créativité sociale, par laquelle les Congolais ont établi de nouvelles normes concernant l'argent afin de supplanter ou de contourner l’État comme garant de la valeur de la devise. Ce faisant, ils révèlent la dialectique de la matérialité et de l'immatérialité au sein même de l'argent, démontrant que le fétiche n'est pas irréductiblement matériel. [argent, valeur, matérialité, fétichisme, devise, franc congolais, République Démocratique du Congo] Mu Kongù wa cìnsàngasànga musanga nteta, mushinga wà màkùtà kawèna ùlonda àmu bìdì bifùnda pa dibèjì dyàwù to. Bantu bàdi bătwa mushinga bilondèshìla mubidi wàwù—màkùtà mapandìka àdi nè mushinga mukesà mushààdìla ku wà màkùtà àà tubèji tupyatùpya. Eci ke cìdì cìleeja nè bantu kabèna kàbìdì buumìnyìna àmu ku nè mbùlàmàtadì ke udi ufùnda mushinga wà mabèjì àà màkùtà, kàdi bàkaadi buumìnyìna ku mubidi wà dibèjì diinà dyà màkùtà bu nè ke ùdì ùàpèèsha mushinga mwinà. Mwènenu ewu wa màkùtà ùdi ùswa kuleeja nè beena Kongù nyewù badìswìkila pààbù mikenji ìdì kayìyi mimanya kùdì mbùlàmàtadì bwà kwamba nè a'a màkùtà àdi nè mushinga, à’a kaèna nè mushinga wàwù ùdì mufùnda pa dibèjì to. Bàdi bànyènga mbùlàmàtadì bukòòkeshi bwèndè. Ngenzèlù ewu ùdi ùtùleeja patòòka nè kùdi dikòkangana pankacì pàà mubidi nè mushinga wà màkùtà, ùdi ùtùjandwila kaùyi mwà kwela mpatà nè bantu kabèna bùùminyina àmu ku mubidi wà màkùtà mu wôwu cyanànà. [màkùtà, mushinga, mubidi, cyà kuumunyina, dibèjì dyà màkùtà, màkùtà àà mu Kongù, Kongù wa Cìnsàngasànga]

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12479   open full text
• Parody after identity: Digital music and the politics of uncertainty in West Africa.
  Jesse Weaver Shipley.
  American Ethnologist. May 03, 2017
  The FOKN Bois are an irreverent, cosmopolitan hip‐hop duo from Ghana. They came to fame as part of the digital‐music boom centered in Nigeria that has dominated African popular culture since the mid‐2000s. Their most popular track, “Thank God We're Not a Nigerians,” mocks the national rivalry between Ghana and Nigeria and the idea of national allegiance itself. The song's production and circulation reveal that digital parody is increasingly central to how a rising generation of urban Africans live. Through sounds and images circulating on social media, young cosmopolitan Africans rely on a smartphone‐driven social media–scape to reimagine national territorial identity in virtual terms. The FOKN Bois’ work shows that uncertainty and contradiction can be modes of knowing.

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12476   open full text
• Outside Timbuktu's divine cover: The negotiation of privacy among displaced Timbuktians.
  Andrew Hernann.
  American Ethnologist. May 02, 2017
  During the armed conflict in northern Mali in 2012 and 2013, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees from the town of Timbuktu had to make sense of and negotiate the hardships of occupation and displacement. They did so through a social‐metaphysical ethic of privacy called sutura, which informs everyday attitudes and practices, particularly those relating to work and the built environment. Although sutura framed displacement, it made certain hardships more difficult to overcome, since it became almost impossible for people to maintain sutura outside the sacred space of Timbuktu. Privileging sutura as a local religio‐cultural framework within the context of crisis links broader structural issues with everyday lived experience. It also identifies existential limitations that displaced communities might encounter when attempting to navigate certain hardships. [crisis, displacement, ethics, lived space, sutura, privacy, Islam, Timbuktu, Mali] Pendant le conflit armé dans le nord du Mali en 2012 et 2013, les personnes déplacées et les réfugiés de la ville de Tombouctou ont dû subir et négocier les difficultés de l'occupation et du déplacement. Ils l'ont fait à travers une éthique sociale‐métaphysique de l'intimité appelée sutura, qui a informé les attitudes et les activités quotidiennes, en particulier celles relatives au travail et à l'environnement bâti. Bien que sutura a encadré l'expérience du déplacement, certaines obstacles (problèmes) ont devenus plus difficiles à surmonter, à cause de l'impossibilité pour les gens de maintenir sutura en dehors de l'espace sacré de Tombouctou. Privilégier la sutura en tant que cadre religio‐culturel local dans le contexte de la crise, peut relier les problèmes structurels plus larges avec l'expérience quotidienne vécue. Il identifie également les limites existentielles que les communautés déplacées pourraient rencontrer lorsqu'elles tentent de surmonter certaines difficultés. [crise, déplacement, éthique, espace habité, sutura, intimité, Islam, Tombouctou, Mali]

  May 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12478   open full text
• Governing three‐wheeled motorcycle taxis in urban Ethiopia: States, markets, and moral discourses of infrastructure.
  Daniel Mains, Eshetayehu Kinfu.
  American Ethnologist. May 02, 2017
  Taxi drivers in Hawassa, Ethiopia, have come into conflict with government administrators over the strict regulation of their three‐wheeled motorcycle taxis, known as Bajaj. Their conflict with the government is best conceptualized not through a state‐market binary but in relation to competing moral discourses concerning modernity, reciprocity, and the right to a livelihood. Such discourses are mediated by the particular characteristics of the Bajaj, an inexpensive, flexible, and labor‐dependent transportation technology. These discourses have emerged in a context in which urban Ethiopians and their social networks act as the infrastructure that enables cities to function. The encounter between these social networks and vital technologies such as the Bajaj is fundamental to the politics of infrastructure.

  May 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12477   open full text
• The impunity effect: Majoritarian rule, everyday legality, and state formation in India.
  Moyukh Chatterjee.
  American Ethnologist. January 24, 2017
  Since the anti‐Muslim violence in Gujarat, India, in 2002, NGOs, activists, and survivors have relied on India's criminal‐justice system to hold Hindu perpetrators accountable. But lower courts in the city of Ahmedabad effectively immunized perpetrators from prosecution. This impunity effect, which allows public, even spectacular violence to go unpunished, is produced by three interrelated techniques: documentation, temporality, and proceduralism. These forms of legality allow postcolonial regimes to inscribe, frame, and repackage exceptional violence against minorities to reinforce and deepen a form of state power based on the explicit subordination of minorities. The Gujarat case reveals a distinctive style of postcolonial state formation, one that is based on the ability of a range of actors, state and nonstate, to reconcile majoritarian rule with everyday legality. “Say with pride, We are Hindus,” reads a billboard at a busy intersection in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat state, India. The billboard, pictured here on February 16, 2016, was sponsored by the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), a powerful Hindu‐nationalist organization.

  January 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12430   open full text
• Marginality as a politics of limited entitlements: Street life and the dilemma of inclusion in urban Ethiopia.
  Marco Di Nunzio.
  American Ethnologist. January 19, 2017
  Marginality is commonly understood as a condition of outsideness. But it is better understood as something internal: the ways poor people are integrated into the wider society define forms and experiences of marginality. In urban Ethiopia, marginality is a historical outcome, contingent on the ways that decades of integration policies have codified poor people's membership in society through an enduring politics of limited entitlements. Such inclusion can marginalize, and dissecting what poor people are included in is key to imagining new grounds for progressive politics. While marginality endures, it also remains a contingent historical product that can be challenged by questioning hegemonic understandings of what it is right to give to the poor. A partial view of inner‐city Addis Ababa and its long‐standing architectural features, October 16, 2010.

  January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12428   open full text
• Self‐governance, psychotherapy, and the subject of managed care: Internal Family Systems therapy and the multiple self in a US eating‐disorders treatment center.
  Rebecca J. Lester.
  American Ethnologist. January 17, 2017
  “The self” has seen a surprising resurgence in recent anthropological theorizing, revitalizing interest in whether and how it can be studied ethnographically. These issues are brought to the fore by a newly popular psychotherapy technique, Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS), as practiced in a US eating‐disorders clinic. There, clinicians and clients negotiate tensions between this model's understanding of a multiple, refracted self and managed‐care companies’ insistence on personal responsibility. In considering the moral and pragmatic work of IFS in the clinic, a new critical anthropology of selfhood illuminates the vectors through which economic and political commitments become imbricated in the self. They do so in ways that resist both psychologism and subjectivism while holding them in productive—albeit sometimes troubling—tension.

  January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12423   open full text
• Resonant worlds: Cultivating proximal encounters in planetary science.
  Lisa Messeri.
  American Ethnologist. January 17, 2017
  Planetary scientists are adept at producing knowledge about objects that are far removed from their lived experience of place and time. Sometimes, they overcome this distance by positioning Earth as a planet that can stand for other worlds. Encountering Earth becomes an encounter with another planet. When scientists experience the Earthly as otherworldly, they sometimes feel an excitement here described as “resonance.” Fully felt resonance is rare, but scientists devote much time and effort to preparing for it so as not to miss its fleeting instances. Just as resonance affords scientists the possibility of experiencing the distant, it also describes moments when the anthropologist is in harmony with what had previously been strange. Thus, resonance is a mode of cognitive and affective reasoning that collapses distance and transforms the similar into the same. Dressed in simulated spacesuits, Stoker, Julia, and Devon return home to the Mars Desert Research Station after testing soil samples in the San Rafael Swell in Utah. (Lisa Messeri).

  January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12431   open full text
• The right to know: Suffering, human rights, and perplexities of politics in Lebanon.
  SHEA McMANUS.
  American Ethnologist. January 17, 2017
  For decades, families in Lebanon have fought in vain for the release of information about their missing relatives. Their struggle has become increasingly entangled in a transnational configuration of experts, discourses, and practices, a configuration that is sustained by the humanitarian imperative to alleviate suffering and by an appeal to trauma, victimhood, and human rights. This appeal animates new legal and judicial forms of activism that have expanded the scope of the families’ rights, compelled the government to release long‐held information, and urged it to enact reforms in accordance with international standards. The convergence of these processes extends a framework of compassionate global governance that is supposed to work on behalf of subjects who are construed as victims and whose experience is essentially one of suffering. The cover of Never Forgotten: Lebanon's Missing People, a report published in 2011 by Amnesty International. (Amnesty International).

  January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12429   open full text
• Ambivalences of mobility: Rival state authorities and mobile strategies in a Saharan conflict.
  Alice Wilson.
  American Ethnologist. January 17, 2017
  How do ongoing histories of physical mobility in economic and political life affect rival state authorities’ claims over a disputed territory? In the conflict over Western Sahara, wide‐ranging strategies of mobility challenge familiar tropes of migration scholarship, in which states constrain people's movements while subjects seek to escape such control. Both the Moroccan state and its rival, the liberation movement Polisario Front, have curbed mobility while their mobile Sahrawi subjects evade their authority. Simultaneously, however, both these state authorities encourage people to circulate in order to support claims over territory, while Sahrawis move to strengthen their position vis‐à‐vis either state authority. Mobility, then, emerges as an ambivalent means of mediating and transforming power relations, especially between governing authorities and their subjects. ¿Cómo afectan las historias actuales de movilidad física, en la vida económica y política, a las pretensiones de dos autoridades estatales sobre un territorio en disputa? En el conflicto sobre el Sahara Occidental los tropos familiares de la investigación sobre migraciones se ven desafiados por amplias estrategias de movilidad, en las que los estados intentan restringir los movimientos de la gente mientras que los sujetos tratan de escapar a ese control. Tanto el estado marroquí como su rival, el movimiento de liberación Frente Polisario, ponen trabas a la movilidad, mientras que sus móviles sujetos saharauis escapan a su autoridad. Sin embargo, simultáneamente estas dos autoridades estatales animan a las personas a circular para apoyar pretensiones sobre el territorio, mientras que los saharauis se mueven para reforzar su posición frente a cualquier autoridad estatal. La movilidad aparece, entonces, como un medio ambivalente para mediar con las relaciones de poder y transformarlas, especialmente entre autoridades gubernamentales y sus sujetos. [movilidad, Estado, soberanía, territorio, Frente Polisario, Sahara Occidental, Marruecos] A group of Sahrawi refugees take a break to enjoy tea in the pastures near Afraijat Albashir, Western Sahara, April 2008. (Alice Wilson).

  January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12427   open full text
• Routine and rupture: The everyday workings of abyssal (dis)order in the Palestinian food basket.
  Irene Calis.
  American Ethnologist. January 17, 2017
  A strategic method of governing Palestinian lives in the West Bank is to maintain a relationship between spectacular and routinized forms of violence. The dissonant interplay of these forms comprises a particular system of control and terror as Israeli authority employs both coercive and administrative methods, which rupture social life while becoming an ordinary part of it. Key to the administration of these dissonant practices is bureaucracy, which codifies a social order of racial supremacy through seemingly mundane measures. “Order” here is itself predicated on an abyssal national order, a dynamic enterprise that is remade through changing policies as well as soldiers’ variable behavior. The combined effects of military (dis)ordering practices enact a systemic attempt to wear down both one's ability and will to live. Palestinian farmers in the West Bank village of Jayyus wait at the south gate, a military‐controlled access point to their agricultural lands behind the Israeli Wall, October 2006. (Irene Calis).

  January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12426   open full text
• Competing ethical regimes in a diverse society: Israeli military refusers.
  Erica Weiss.
  American Ethnologist. January 17, 2017
  All Jewish military refusers in Israel defy state law and incur public acrimony for their transgression. Yet different social groups use distinct ethical regimes to justify this controversial act. While liberal Ashkenazi refusers cite personal conscience, ultra‐Orthodox refusers rely on scriptural authority, and Mizrahi refusers often appeal to familial responsibilities. In addition, refusers of different groups condemn one another as ethically misguided, despite their shared act. The stakes of these ethical rifts concern not only questions of military service and legitimate refusal but also larger issues of cultural hegemony, the social contract, and collective legitimation within the Israeli state. The framework of “competing ethical regimes” captures the intersection of the ethical and the political, revealing the deep entanglement of cultural values and civic virtues.

  January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12425   open full text
• Psicoeducación in the land of magical thoughts: Culture and mental‐health practice in a changing Oaxaca.
  Whitney L. Duncan.
  American Ethnologist. January 16, 2017
  At a time of uncertainty and change in Oaxaca, Mexico, mental‐health practice dovetails with political‐economic projects to reflect and produce tensions around “culture.” Promoting mental health is linked to goals for economic development, and notions of culture and modernity are co‐constructed in ways that cast culture as a barrier to mental health. “Psychological modernization” efforts therefore seek to flatten cultural difference in the interests of national advancement. Not only do psy‐services in Oaxaca provide means of self‐understanding and technologies for self‐cultivation in the context of modernity, but they also actively seek to produce the psychological conditions for modernity. Yet many professionals attribute Mexico's mental‐health problems to the very processes of modernization, development, and globalization that their projects seek to facilitate. En tiempos de incertidumbre y cambio en Oaxaca, México, la práctica de la salud mental se acopla con los proyectos económicos y políticos para reflejar y producir tensiones en torno a la “cultura”. La promoción de la salud mental está vinculada a objetivos para el desarrollo económico. Las nociones de cultura y modernidad se construyen conjuntamente en formas que configuran a la cultura como una barrera para la salud mental. Los esfuerzos de “modernización psicológica”, por lo tanto, buscan aplanar las diferencias culturales en pro del progreso nacional. Los servicios psicológicos en Oaxaca no sólo proveen medios para el autoconocimiento y tecnologías para el autocultivo en el contexto de la modernidad, sino que también buscan activamente producir las condiciones psicológicas para la modernidad. Sin embargo, muchos profesionales atribuyen los problemas de salud mental de México al proceso mismo de modernización, desarrollo y la globalización que sus proyectos intentan facilitar. [gubernamentalidad, salud mental, modernización, multiculturalidad, psicología, psiquiatría, México]

  January 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12424   open full text
• Good ramps, bad ramps: Centralized design standards and disability access in urban Russian infrastructure.
  Cassandra Hartblay.
  American Ethnologist. January 09, 2017
  Accessible design seeks to reconfigure the social by restructuring the material. As the idea moves globally, it becomes entwined in local logics of moral obligations between citizens and the state. Wheelchair users in the city of Petrozavodsk, in northwestern Russia, talk about inaccessible infrastructure as being embedded in moral relationships. In their stories, hierarchies of expertise diffuse responsibility for outcomes and devalue user knowledge. When accessible design elements are installed to meet minimum standards, they are “just for the check mark” and often do not “work.” Wheelchair ramps produce value for businesses or governments by representing an idea of access that circulates as a commodity. Failed accessible design draws attention to a moral field governing the responsibilities of actors to produce a “good” built environment, imbricated in teleologies of progress. [disability, design, infrastructure, access, ramps, postsocialism, Russia] Смысл идеи создания «доступной среды» заключается не просто в реконструкции материальных объектов и создании нового удобного дизайна, но, главным образом, в перестройке паттернов мышления и социальных отношений. Глобальное продвижение данной идеи в отдельных странах и культурах сопровождается столкновением новых смыслов с уже существующими местными представлениями о моральных обязательствах между государством и его гражданами. Так, жители северо‐запада России, города Петрозаводска, использующие инвалидные коляски (инвалиды колясочники) рассказывают о недоступности местной инфраструктуры, которая существует именно из‐за устоявшихся моральных порядков. В своих интервью инвалиды колясочники объясняют, что внедрение новых стандартов «доступной среды» происходит централизовано, без обращения к опыту самих людей с инвалидностью, что в итоге приводит к рассеиванию ответственности за конечные результаты. Зачастую элементы доступной среды устанавливают только «для галочки» — ради соблюдения стандартных требований, делая их при этом совершенно непригодными для использования. Таким образом, установка пандусов для маломобильных групп населения, символизируя собой идею «доступности», становится товаром и используется власть имущие (бизнес и государство) лишь с целью формирования собственной положительной репутации. Подобные неудачные примеры реализации идеи «доступной среды» сосредоточивают наше внимание на «неписаных» моральных правилах, которые регулируют деятельность лиц, ответственных за создание «хороший дизайн» городской среды, при этом всегда тесно переплетаются с существующими в конкретном обществе приоритетами развития. [инвалидность, дизайн, инфраструктура, доступность, пандус, постсоциализм, Россия]

  January 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/amet.12422   open full text
• Expert evidence on trial: Social researchers in the international criminal courtroom.
  Richard Ashby Wilson.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  Social researchers often feature as expert witnesses in international criminal trials, and they can exert a strong influence on a court's understandings of mass atrocities. Analysis of over 400 expert appearances shows that, overall, international judges prefer experts who use scientific methods, but when social researchers are called, courts favor qualitative researchers over quantitative ones. In two international speech‐crimes trials, a language expert was preferred to a quantitative sociologist because the former did not challenge the sovereignty of judges or the status hierarchy of the courtroom. When excluding quantitative experts, judges cite “common sense” as the basis of facticity and knowledge. The prevailing epistemological framework at international criminal tribunals results from the knowledge strategies of legal actors operating in a structurally fragile context.

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12387   open full text
• From humanitarianism to humanitarianization: Intimacy, estrangement, and international aid in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  Andrew C. Gilbert.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  In 2002, Bosnia and Herzegovina was the site of massive housing‐reconstruction projects run by international aid organizations as part of a plan to move refugees back to their prewar homes. Alongside the usual technical tasks of such projects, aid workers spent considerable time and effort establishing and stabilizing the categorical distinction between things humanitarian and things political. Analysis of these efforts by one aid organization reveals the often‐overlooked social and cultural work necessary to maintain a humanitarian field of operation, demonstrating that the humanitarian status of aid projects is never more than provisionally settled. This unstable, provisional nature of humanitarian action constitutes an underexplored dynamic shaping and limiting international responses to suffering and need. [humanitarianism, politics, ethics, international aid, refugee return, Bosnia and Herzegovina] Tokom 2002. godine, međunarodne organizacije u Bosni i Hercegovini organizovale su masovne obnove kuća kako bi ostvarile plan povratka izbjeglica u njihove predratne domove. Pored uobičajnih tehničkih zadataka vezanih za ovakve projekate, zaposleni u ovim organizacijama proveli su mnogo vremena i truda na uspostavljanju i utvrđivanju kategoričkih razlika između humanitarnog i političkog. Analiza ovih napora, koju je sprovela jedna od tih organizacija, daje uvid u često previđen društveni i kulturni rad koji je neophodan da se humanitarno djelovanje održi, ukazujući na to da je humanitarni status projekata pomoći uvijek samo privremen. Ova nestabilna, privremena priroda humanitarnog djelovanja sastavni je dio nedovoljno istražene dinamike koja oblikuje i ograničava odgovore međunarodnih organizacija na patnju i potrebu. [humanitarizam, politika, etika, međunarodna humanitarna pomoć, povratak izbjeglica, Bosna i Hercegovina] Returning refugees surround the US ambassador on a visit to the Stari Grad neighborhood of Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina, May 15, 2002. (Andrew Gilbert).

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12386   open full text
• Producing iyashi: Healing and labor in Tokyo's sex industry.
  Gabriele Koch.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  Women working in the Japanese sex industry provide deeply gendered affective labor to male white‐collar workers. Their services center on iyashi (healing), a carefully constructed performance of intimacy that commingles maternal care with sexual gratification. Sex workers value this labor as providing socially necessary care to men who work in valorized sectors of the Japanese economy. Yet their own labor is produced within conditions of economic precarity. Moreover, intimate encounters in the sex industry are never divorced from the terms of a gendered economy. Sex workers use gendered discourses of productivity that reflect hierarchies of the value of labor to shape their performances of intimate care. These discourses demonstrate the centrality of gendered assumptions to conceptions of production and the economy. [affective labor, gender, sex work, productivity, care, precarity, Japan] 現代の日本性風俗業界で働いている女性は、 ジェンダー化された感情労働を、とりわけホワイトカラー層の男性客に提供している。セックスワーカーのサービスは「癒し: healing」を中心として成り立っている。ここで議論される 「癒し」とは、母性的なケアと性欲処理を混合させる事によって親密さを入念に演出する、構成されたパフォーマンスである。セックスワーカー達は、自身の労働が日本経済において重要な地位を占める男性から必要とされているのだから価値があると思っているが、性風俗の仕事は経済的に不安定な条件の中で営まれている。それに加え性風俗業界内での親密な出会いは、ジェンダー化された経済の条件から切り離す事はできない。セックスワーカーは生産性に関するジェンダー化した言説を用いるが、それは彼女らの親密なケアを形成する労働の価値の階層を映し出している。これらの言説は、「生産」や「経済」の概念形成の中心に、ジェンダー的前提が存在していることを明証している。「感情労働、ジェンダー、セックスワーク、生産性、ケア、不安定さ、日本」 A billboard located prominently across from a train platform at busy Shibuya Station, Tokyo, July 2011. In this advertisement for Vanilla, an employment website for the sex industry, the “cute” graphics highlight innocence, naïveté, and access to a consumer lifestyle. The text reads in part, “Get information on high‐paying work!! I want to earn more! I really love money! Access us now and get information by searching ‘vanilla’ and ‘wanted ads.’” (Gabriele Koch).

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12385   open full text
• Documenting subjects: Performativity and audit culture in food production in northern Italy.
  Jillian R. Cavanaugh.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  Linguistic labor in both verbal and documentary forms is essential to contemporary capitalist production, occurring across commodity‐chain processes and helping to produce particular neoliberal worker‐selves. In the case of food production, linguistic labor in the form of documentation is required at every stage of production to ensure food safety. These documents performatively constitute and effectively govern what they purport to depict. But they also exist in dynamic tension with moments of economic sociability, that is, consequential verbal interactions that permeate the production process. Such interactions may or may not be represented by the documents. In northern Italy the interplay between documents and sociability helps to produce notions like food safety and highlights the complex constraints and creativities that characterize modern food production. [documents, subjectivity, neoliberalism, audit culture, meat, food production, Italy] Il lavoro linguistico—sia nella forma verbale che in quella documentaria, che ha luogo nella catena produttiva e che contribuisce a generare specifici “lavoratori‐persone”, propri del neoliberalismo—è essenziale nella produzione capitalista contemporanea. Nel caso della produzione alimentare il lavoro linguistico, sotto forma di documentazione, è obbligatorio in tutte le fasi di produzione per assicurare la sicurezza alimentare. Questi documenti costituiscono performativamente quello che affermano di rappresentare e lo regolano efficacemente. Ma allo stesso tempo si trovano in un rapporto di tensione dinamica con i momenti di sociabilità economica, cioè, con le normali interazioni verbali che pervadono i processi di produzione. Queste interazioni possono o meno essere rappresentate dai documenti. Nel Nord d'Italia, il rapporto tra documenti e sociabilità aiuta a produrre nozioni come quella di sicurezza alimentare ed evidenzia i limiti e la creatività della produzione alimentare moderna. [documenti, soggettività, neoliberalismo, cultura dell'audit, carne, produzione alimentare, Italia]

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12384   open full text
• Market's end: Fair‐trade social premiums as development in Dominica.
  Mark Moberg.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  On the island of Dominica, in the eastern Caribbean, the sale of fair‐trade bananas generates “social premiums” to fund projects that the government can no longer afford because of structural adjustment. Promoted as a means of democratic decision‐making, social premiums operate in an “awkward zone of engagement” between development policy and local practice. Their uses are constrained by fair‐trade certification, as well as by the gender, class, and political nexus of farmers’ groups and communities. As a development strategy and system of governance, fair trade invokes universal narratives of democracy and pluralism, but its effects are expressed through local dispositions of identity and material practice, as well as competitive “ethical” markets. For farmers, global competition and rigid certification standards signal an impending “market's end,” the closure of their last alternative as agriculturalists. [fair trade, social premium, Great Recession, neoliberal development, governmentality, Dominica, Caribbean] Nan zile Dominica nan Karayib la, peman sosyal ki soti nan ekspòtasyon bannann selon pratik komès ekitab finanse pwojè avèk ki gouvènman an pa ka koresponn poutèt ajisteman estriktirèl yo. Yo fè yo pase pou fason pou fè desizyon demokratik, men peman sosyal opere nan yon “zòn angajman dwòl” ki ant politik devlopman ak pratik lokal. Jan yo sèvi a jwenn limitasyon nan kesyon sètifikasyon komès ekitab, ak tout kesyon sèks, klas avèk kontèks politik gwoup fèmye yo ak kominote yo. Kòm estrateji devlopman ak sistèm gouvènans, komès ekitab sèvi ak diskou demokrasi ak “pliralis”, men efè li soti nan idantite lokal avèk pratik materyèl, ansanm ak konpetitisyon nan mache lokal. Pou fèmye yo, konpetisyon global avèk estanda sètifikasyon twò sevè anonse “fen yon mache” ki san lè rive, pwen final nan dènye posibilite yo kòm agrikiltè. [komès ekitab, peman sosyal, Gwo Resesyon, devlopman neoliberal, gouvernementalité, Dominica, Karayib]

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12383   open full text
• Between the ethical and the right thing: How (not) to be corrupt in Indonesian bureaucracy in an age of good governance.
  Sylvia Tidey.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  Is it possible to be corrupt yet ethical? Or good but unethical? In one of Indonesia's most corrupt towns, the answers to these questions are far from clear for young elite civil servants, who must navigate the moral‐ethical landscape of post‐Suharto bureaucracy. For them, anticorruption efforts heighten uncertainty regarding what corruption is and facilitate slippage between various constructions of ethical selfhood. The uncertainty arises at the intersection of local moral economies, national ideologies of state building, the particular global morality of anticorruption, and a conception of the good that inspires neoliberal ideas on governance. Finding themselves at this intersection, young civil servants can find no unambiguous contrast between being “good” and “corrupt.” [corruption, anticorruption, good governance, civil service, morality, ethics, Indonesia] Apakah mungkin seseorang yang melakukan praktek korupsi akan tetapi pada saat yang bersamaan menjadi seseorang yang etis? Atau sebaliknya; apakah mungkin menjadi seseorang yang baik akan tetapi juga tidak etis? Di suatu kota yang paling korup di Indonesia, jawaban terhadap pertanyaan di atas sangatlah tidak jelas dan sulit untuk diterangkan bagi elit Pegawai Negeri Sipil (PNS) muda, yang harus menavigasi tatanan moral dan etika dalam tubuh birokrasi pasca kekuasaan Soeharto. Bagi mereka, upaya gerakan antikorupsi justru meningkatkan ketidakjelasan tentang apa itu korupsi dan mempermudah tergelincir di antara beragam konstruksi dan makna etika. Ketidakjelasan itu timbul pada saat terjadi persinggungan antara ekonomi moral lokal, ideologi nasional tentang pembentukan negara, nilai moralitas antikorupsi global dan konsepsi tentang kebaikan, yang menginspirasi ide‐ide neoliberalisme tentang pemerintahan. Bagi PNS yang berada di tengah‐tengah persimpangan ini, mereka menemukan ketiadaan batas yang jelas antar menjadi “baik” dan “korup”. [korupsi, anti korupsi, good governance, Pamong Praja, moralitas, etika, Indonesia]

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12382   open full text
• Inalienable performances, mutable heirlooms: Dance, cultural inheritance, and political transformation in the Republic of Guinea.
  Adrienne J. Cohen.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  Dance in the Republic of Guinea is an object of cultural transmission that magnifies the inherent contingency of social reproduction and the plasticity of the heirloom. Long connected to the vicissitudes of Guinean politics, dance was violently appropriated by the postindependence socialist state (1958–84) as a tool of nation building. In postsocialist Guinea, where the nation‐state has relinquished its stake in the performing arts, young practitioners create new improvisational forms that emblematize shifting models of ideal personhood. Novel dance forms incite tension about intergenerational trust and cultural inheritance in a social context in which neither the heirloom nor the cultural identity it signals remains stable. [dance, inheritance, inalienability, personhood, postsocialism, Republic of Guinea, West Africa] La danse en République de Guinée sert de véhicule de transmission culturelle qui démontre la nature contingente de la reproduction sociale et la nature plastique de l'héritage culturelle. Longtemps liée aux vicissitudes de la politique guinéenne, la danse fut violemment appropriée par l’état socialiste pendant la période qui suivit l'indépendance (1958–84) comme outil pour la construction de la nation. En Guinée postsocialiste, où l′État‐nation a abandonné son mécénat des arts du spectacle, de jeunes danseurs créent des nouvelles formes d'improvisation qui révèlent des chagemements dans la conceptualisation de l'identité individuelle. Ces nouvelles formes de danse suscitent des problèmes de confiance entre les générations par rapport à la succession culturelle, dans un contexte où ni l'héritage ni l'identité culturelle sont stables. [danse, héritage culturel, inaliénabilité, notion de personne, postsocialisme, République de Guinée, Afrique de l'Ouest] Kabi a rakuya, fare nun mangɛya nu e boore malima la République de Guinée bɔxi ma. Première République waxati (1958–1984), La Guinée mangasanyi nu fare xa fe rawalima alako ɲama xa lan e boore ma, mangasanyi xa nɔ mixie mafa a mabiri. Kabi Sékou Touré xa waxati raɲɔnyi, mangasanyi mu artistya tide to alɔ singe ra. Kɔnɔ mixi wuyaxie bara naatɛ tongo fare xa fe ma, alako e xa nɔ masenyi tife ɲama ma duniɲɛigiri xa fe ma. Artiste tagi, lanlanteya mu na temui birin mixi mɔxie nun mixi mɔxitaree tagi. Naamunyie na masarafe; to maɲɔxunyi mu lanxi xɔrɔ maɲɔxunyi ma. Ɲama ki fan masarafe. Birin xa na kolon fare saabui ra. [fare, kɛɛ, lanyi, mixiya, postsocialisme, République de Guinée, Afrique de l'Ouest] Morelaye Diallo performs the improvisational dance form gigoteau at a dundunba ceremony, Conakry, Guinea, 2013. (Adrienne J. Cohen)

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12381   open full text
• The ends of cutting in Ghana: Blood loss, scarcity, and slow harm after NGOs.
  Saida Hodžić.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  Female genital cutting is waning in northeastern Ghana, even though NGO and state discourses suggest otherwise. Women who no longer perform the practice do not, as anthropologists often posit, resist anticutting advocacy. Rather, they critique what NGO and state interventions leave unaddressed. These women understand the ending of cutting as an index of food scarcity and governance that saps their blood and vitality. Cutting had to stop, they say, because they could no longer afford to lose more blood. Drawing on indigenous and biomedical understandings of health and popular notions of occult economies, they critique the contemporary governance that simultaneously invests in their lives and causes bodily attrition. “Slow harm” reveals how the invisible violence of neoliberal democracy produces ordinary crises and makes bodies vulnerable.

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12380   open full text
• There might be blood: Oil, humility, and the cosmopolitics of a Cofán petro‐being.
  Michael L. Cepek.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  A central directive of recent writings on cosmopolitics and ontology is that critically minded anthropologists should “humble” themselves and view their subjects’ statements as propositions that disclose multiple real worlds. An exploration of Cofán people's uncertainty regarding the idea that oil is the blood of a sacred mythological being—a position that romanticizing Westerners repeatedly attribute to them—calls into question the implications of the call for anthropological humility. Cofán discussions of oil's sanguinary nature demonstrate that the best way to comprehend the intellectual agency of our collaborators is to acknowledge, rather than ignore, the social, pragmatic, and epistemological contours of their discourse, cosmological or otherwise. [cosmopolitics, ontology, oil, indigeneity, Cofán, Ecuador, Amazonia] Una directriz central de escritos recientes sobre cosmopolítica y ontología es que los antropólogos con espíritu crítico deberían “humillarse” y tomar las afirmaciones de sus sujetos de estudio como proposiciones que revelan múltiples mundos reales. Explorar la indecisión que tienen los cofán acerca de la idea de que el petróleo es la sangre de un sagrado ser mitológico —posición que les atribuyen constantemente los occidentales románticos— cuestiona las implicaciones de esta llamada a la humildad. Las discusiones entre los cofán acerca de la naturaleza sanguinaria del petróleo nos muestran que la mejor manera de comprender la capacidad intelectual de nuestros colaboradores es reconocer, en vez de ignorar, los contornos sociales, pragmáticos y epistemológicos de su discurso, sea este cosmológico o no. [cosmopolítica, ontología, petróleo, indigeneidad, Cofán, Ecuador, Amazonia] Crude‐filled sludge from an abandoned oil‐well waste pit in Cofán territory, Ecuador, February 2016. (Bear Guerra)

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12379   open full text
• A civilized revolution: Aesthetics and political action in Egypt.
  Jessica Winegar.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  Acts of aesthetic ordering dominated Egyptian protest and civic activity in 2011, around the time of former president Hosni Mubarak's downfall. They played a central role in motivating collective political action, giving form to a nationalist utopian vision and legitimizing ordinary Egyptians as active agents and upright citizens. Yet they also reproduced exclusionary middle‐class aspirations tied up with state projects and related forms of citizenship that center on surveillance, individualism, and consumption. Examining such acts of aesthetic ordering reveals the tensions at the heart of many political movements, especially as people attempt to enact their utopian visions in public space. The precarity of both middle classness and utopian schemes of revolution render aesthetics a key battleground of political action. [activism, social movements, aesthetics, space, middle class, waste, Egypt] Youth brigades sweep Tahrir Square, Cairo, the day after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's departure, February 12, 2011. (Ahmed Asad/Apaimages/Polaris)

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12378   open full text
• The cross‐publics of ethnography: The case of “the Muslimwoman”.
  Lila Abu‐Lughod.
  American Ethnologist. November 22, 2016
  Engaged anthropology, public anthropology, and public ethnography are names for a long tradition of trying to make a difference beyond the academy. The passionate and polarized responses of both nonacademic publics and engaged scholars in adjacent fields to my attempt to intervene in public debates about Muslim women's rights raise questions about the ethics, politics, and potentials of ethnography's travels across fractured global publics. They illuminate the geopolitical terrain of current debates about feminism and Islamophobia and reveal that ethnography may be most effective in interrupting or unsettling hegemonic representations and political formations when it makes available alternative accounts of lives and communities that can then authorize and give substance to critics’ arguments. Does this instrumentalization of ethnography benefit those whose lives anthropologists share through fieldwork? [engaged anthropology, public ethnography, rights, ethics, feminism, Islamophobia, Muslim women]

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12377   open full text
• Precarity outside: The political unconscious of French academic labor.
  Eli Thorkelson.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  The concept of precarity has lately become prominent in anthropology as a way of theorizing neoliberal labor, affect, and subjectivity. But just what are the politics of this concept? In the context of French higher education and research, précarité is not only a designator for affect or labor relations. It is also a semiautonomous political concept with a political unconscious. Even as it mobilizes academic unions and makes claims on the French state, it fulfills covert ideological functions like political delegation, othering, sociological occlusion of race and class, and the universalization of elite disappointment. This in turn raises reflexive questions about precarity within Anglophone anthropology. [precarity, academic labor, reflexive anthropology, otherness, disidentification, political unconscious, France] Le concept de précarité est de plus en plus saillant en anthropologie car il permet de théoriser le travail, l'affect et la subjectivité néolibéraux. Mais quels sont les politiques de ce concept? Dans le contexte français de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche, la « précarité » n'est pas seulement un terme qui désigne l'affect ou les relations de travail. C'est également un concept politique quasi‐autonome doté d'un inconscient politique. Alors même qu'il mobilise les syndicats universitaires et qu'il porte des revendications auprès de l'Etat français, il a des fonctions idéologiques cachées telles que la délégation politique, la production de l'altérité, l'occultation sociologique de la race et de la classe sociale et l'universalisation du sentiment de déception chez les élites. Réciproquement, le cas français soulève des questions réflexives quant à la précarité au sein de l'anthropologie anglophone. [précarité, travail universitaire, anthropologie réflexive, altérité, désidentification, inconscient politique, France] “Precarious inside,” a parody of the Intel Inside logo. (French university activist art, source unknown, spring 2009)

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12340   open full text
• Settler agnosia in the field: Indigenous action, functional ignorance, and the origins of ethnographic entrapment.
  Grant Arndt.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  In the late 1930s a novice fieldworker from the University of Chicago wrote in his field notes that his collaboration with a Ho‐Chunk interpreter had failed because of the interpreter's “aggressions” in the struggle for “white class status.” The notes exhibit a pattern of perceptual failure that I call “settler agnosia,” elements of which have been noted in research on the obstacles facing Indigenous activists. The case shows that the tendency of older anthropological accounts of contemporary American Indian life to obscure evidence of both colonial oppression and Indigenous action may have originated as consequences of a form of functional ignorance triggered by interpersonal struggles over position in the everyday relations of settler society. An ethnographic investigation of the links between settler agnosia and the practice of settlerness connects perception in everyday interactions to larger issues of knowledge production in and of settler societies. [settler colonialism, field theory, Bourdieu, race, ignorance, indigeneity, Native North America]

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12339   open full text
• The postneoliberal fabulation of power: On statecraft, precarious infrastructures, and public mobilization in Brazil.
  João Biehl.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  In Brazil's hybrid government of social protection and market expansion, there is under way a fabulation of power, which ultimately serves to “de‐poor” people seeking care, working infrastructures, and justice while also shoring up state politics as usual. This process became evident through the failure of a collaborative research project that I coordinated on right‐to‐health litigation. In rethinking that failure as an experiment in public ethnography, I draw on core disagreements with public officials over the interpretation of our findings from a legal database. Analyzing these disagreements provides an entry point into the mechanisms of veridiction and falsification at work in Brazil, whose government sees itself as providing public goods beyond the minimum neoliberal state. Countering state mythology, public ethnography thus illuminates the improvised quality of postneoliberal democratic institutions and opens up new avenues for theorizing power and the political field. [public ethnography, judicialization of health, precarious infrastructures, postneoliberal statecraft, de‐pooring people, public mobilization, Brazil] Está em andamento no governo brasileiro—espécie híbrida de proteção social e expansão de mercado—uma fabulação do poder. Ela serve, em última análise, para “despauperizar” as pessoas que procuram por assistência à saúde, infraestruturas eficientes e justiça, enquanto que, simultaneamente, escora as políticas convencionais de Estado. Neste artigo, repenso um fracassado projeto de pesquisa colaborativa sobre a judicialização do direito à saúde como um experimento de etnografia pública. Para tanto, tomo as discordâncias interpretativas que tivemos com agentes públicos acerca de achados em um banco de dados de ações judiciais como uma janela para o entendimento dos mecanismos de veridicção e falsificação em atividade no Brasil, cujo governo se vê como provedor de bens e serviços públicos muito além do que um Estado neoliberal mínimo faria. Contrapondo mitologias estatais, essa etnografia pública ilumina o caráter improvisado das instituições democráticas pós‐neoliberais brasileiras, abrindo novos caminhos para teorizar o poder e o campo político. [etnografia pública, judicialização da saúde, infraestruturas precárias, estadismo pós‐neoliberal, despauperização, mobilização pública, Brasil]

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12337   open full text
• Policing the unstable materialities of digital‐media piracy in Brazil.
  Alexander S. Dent.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  Around the world, antipiracy NGOs train police to recognize the unauthorized use of music and films and to publicly destroy illicit CDs and DVDs. For those who enforce laws governing intellectual property (IP), music and film piracy underscores how digital reproduction can be conceived of as forgetful, inconstant, and promiscuous. In Brazil, discourses about “cleaning” (limpeza) unite incitements to greater security, more active governance, and stricter IP enforcement. Understanding the global dynamics of IP policing requires analysis of ideologies of material purity and the historicity associated with them. This ethnography of antipiracy NGOs, law enforcement, and informal economies in southern Brazil brings together the anthropologies of mediation and IP, arguing that producers and consumers of digital texts are becoming increasingly anxious about how those texts circulate. [intellectual property, policing, piracy, materiality, digital media, NGOs, Brazil] Em todo o mundo, ONGs anti‐pirataria capacitam as polícias para que estas reconheçam a utilização não autorizada de música e filmes e para que destruam publicamente CDs e DVDs ilícitos. Para aqueles que fazem cumprir as leis que regulam a propriedade intelectual (PI), a pirataria de música e filmes evidencia como a reprodução digital pode ser concebida como esquecida, inconstante e promíscua. No Brasil, discursos sobre limpeza unem incitamentos a uma maior segurança, uma governança mais activa, e um respeito mais estrito pela PI. Compreender as dinâmicas globais do policiamento da PI requer uma análise das ideologias da pureza material e da historicidade a elas associada. Esta etnografia de ONGs anti‐pirataria, cumprimento da lei e economias informais do Sul do Brasil junta as antropologias da mediação e da PI, argumentando que produtores e consumidores de textos digitais estão a ficar crescentemente ansiosos sobre a forma como esses textos circulam. [propriedade intelectual, policiamento, pirataria, materialidade, mídia digital, ONGs, Brasil]

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12336   open full text
• Forms of exclusion: Undocumented students navigating financial aid and inclusion in the United States.
  Andrea Flores.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  Excluded from public financial aid because of their immigration status, undocumented youth in the United States frequently depend on private schools’ merit‐based financial aid. This aid, which operates according to a neoliberal logic, provides them with a critical pathway to tertiary education and potentially to institutional and national inclusion. Yet this private‐sector inclusion ultimately harms their sense of public belonging, as shown by the experiences of undocumented Latino youth in Nashville, Tennessee. Students who do not meet the schools’ high standards cannot access either institutional or civic inclusion; those who can meet the standards experience inclusion as contingent on continued excellence. Their experiences reveal the critical role that private institutions play in mediating undocumented people's national inclusion and how neoliberal merit restricts the terms of this inclusion. [undocumented migrants, inclusion, exclusion, higher education, neoliberalism, bureaucratic documents, United States]

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12345   open full text
• Royal pharmaceuticals: Bioprospecting, rights, and traditional authority in South Africa.
  Christopher Morris.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  The translation of international biogenetic resource rights to a former apartheid homeland is fostering business partnerships between South African traditional leaders and multinational pharmaceutical companies. In the case of one contentious resource, these partnerships are entrenching, and in some instances expanding, apartheid‐associated boundaries and configurations of power. The state and corporate task of producing communities amenable to biodiversity commercialization and conservation is entangled with segregationist laws and spatial planning. Rather than exclusion and the closure of ethnic boundaries, resource rights in this context foreground forced enrollment and the expansion of indigenous group‐membership as modes of capitalist accumulation in an extractive economy. [pharmaceutical bioprospecting, Pelargonium sidoides, Convention on Biological Diversity, indigeneity, homelands, South Africa] Ukufezekiswa/ukuphunyezwa kwamalungelo egunya lwezimbiwa zendalo ezilapha, kwindawo ezisakuba yinxenye yamaphandle ocalu‐calulo, ikhuthaza ubuhlakani nolwahlulelwano phakathi kweeNkosi kunye neeNkampani eznkulu zamazwe angaphandle kweli. (Amalungelo abhekisa kulawo abantu inezimbiwa ezinjenge zityalo/mithi, ngokuzisebenzisa kwabo kwanobunini bazo.) Omnye umzekelo wesityalo obangela ingxabano, ngowokuba obubuhlakani/lwahlulelwano (iinkosi neenkampani zamazwe) bubangela ifuthe elityhala ngamandla lokude kwandiswe memida yemihlaba eyayisekiwe ngeloxesha lamaphandle ocalu‐calulo, kananjalo nesimo esitsha samagunya nolawulo lomthetho. Amalinge/imizamo kaRhulumente neeNkampani zamayeza/zamachiza okufumana abantu abangena ngci kwindlela yeengcinga zabo abasele benazo kakade, (abakwaziyo ukurhweba kwanokulondoloza indalo), utyhalwa lifuthe lomgaqo‐nkqubo ocalu‐calula abantu, kwanomgaqo‐nkqubo obona utyalo‐mali lusenzeka ikakhulu, ngaphandle kwezondawo zazisakuba phantsi kwamaphandle ocalu‐calulo ngokwemida. U Rhulumente ukhangeleka ngathi ufuna kwenza utyalo‐mali ikakhulu, ezixekweni/dolophini kweli le Mpuma Kapa, ngaphezu kwakwimimandla yeelali zelalisakuba liphandle localu‐calulo. Kunokuba iinkokheli zemveli noRhulumente zenze imali zodwa, ngokubashiya ngaphandle abahlali bale mihlaba, iinkokheli zemveli kwakunye noRhulumnte zizama ukwandisa inani lazo, labobantu baphantsi kwazo, okanye banyanzelise abantu bezondawo babephantsi kolawulo lweenkosi ngokwabantu bemveli yalondawo, ngeenjongo zokwenza ingeniso‐mali kwishishini lemveliso elikhupha/elomba izimbiwa zendalo eMzantsi Afrika. [Ushishino ngemithi/amachiza/izityalo zendalo kwaneengcambu zisetyenziselwa ukwenza amayeza (pharmaceutical bioprospecting),uvendle,eli ligama elisemthethweni le Nkomfa (Convention on Biological Diversity), imo yokuba ngowemveli yalo ndawo oknye inzalelwane yalapho kulo ndawo,amaphandle ocalu‐calulo (Bantustans),uMzantsi Afrika]

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12344   open full text
• Atmosphere: Context, detachment, and the view from above Earth.
  David Valentine.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  Since the 1950s, views of Earth from above have been critiqued for provoking detachment from and decontextualization of human, terrestrial concerns. These critiques thus establish Earth's enveloping atmosphere as the ultimate context for meaningful and grounded accounts of humanness, and outer space as a site for abstract, generalizable knowledge. But in outer space, the explanatory work done by “context” is put in question, because spacefaring humans must attend to basic and constantly shifting conditions for life that lie beyond “context” on Earth, including breathing. Attention to humans in real and speculative space environments reveals context as a naturalizing device that establishes universal nature/culture distinctions through recourse to grounding terrestrial ontologies. SpaceShipTwo attached to its carrier craft, WhiteKnightTwo, before a drop test at the Mojave Air and Space Port. (David Valentine)

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12343   open full text
• Memory, body, and the online researcher: Following Russian street demonstrations via social media.
  Patty A. Gray.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  The Moscow street demonstrations of 2011–12 were the largest public gatherings in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were also the largest‐ever gathering of Russians on social media. While using the Internet to follow such large‐scale social movements remotely, researchers experience social media as a context in which anthropology happens. They may think about “being there” in new ways that shift their focus to their own processes of memory making and sense of bodily presence. Experiencing and remembering social media in the body challenges the distinctions we might otherwise make between virtual and physical encounters. [body memory, protest, social media, digital anthropology, online research, Moscow, Russia] Московские уличные демонстрации 2011–12 стали наиболее многочисленными в России со времен распада Советского Союза. Они также объединили наибольшее число россиян в социальных сетях. Используя Интернет для изучения крупномасштабных социальных движений в удаленном доступе, исследователи одновременно рассматривают онлайн пространство социальных сетей как новое поле антропологии. Новые способы «присутствия» побуждают исследователей обратиться к своему собственному процессу производства памяти и собственному чувству телесности. Особые опыт и память телесности в социальных средствах коммуникации заставляют нас пересмотреть границы виртуального и физического опыта. [память тела, протест, социальные медиа, цифровая антропология, онлайн исследования, Москва, Россия;] Screenshot from a live UStream broadcast by Ridus, a Russian news agency, at the avtoprobeg (car rally) around Moscow's Garden Ring, January 29, 2012.

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12342   open full text
• The makeup of destiny: Predestination and the labor of hope in a Moroccan emigrant town.
  Alice Elliot.
  American Ethnologist. August 23, 2016
  As young women in a Moroccan emigrant town search for suitable husbands, they frame seemingly irreverent practices such as using makeup and premarital romances as ways to precipitate their unknown conjugal destinies. This complex “labor of hope” flows from the Islamic precept of predestination, which, far from being a fatalistic backdrop to social life, compels people to act in the human world in view of a future that has already been divinely determined. Here, destiny effectively “folds” Islam into the very texture of mundane practices that, on the surface, may seem not just distant from Islam but even antithetical to it. This phenomenon obliges us to recast Max Weber's argument on predestination and action, as well as to reconsider current anthropological debates on “everyday Islam.” [destiny, migration, hope, courtship, future, Islam, Morocco]

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12341   open full text
• Documents of indiscipline and indifference: The violence of bureaucracy in a Brazilian juvenile prison.
  K. Drybread.
  American Ethnologist. July 24, 2016
  Beatings and torture are common elements of prison discipline in Brazil. Yet the nation's juvenile inmates also suffer violence at the hands of prison staff and administrators in less obvious ways—through the production and circulation of institutional paperwork. Every relationship an inmate has with a professional who works in the juvenile‐justice system is mediated by documents in which the discursive and the material interact to construct subjectivities, define relationships, and establish values. Ethnographically attending to the production and circulation of such documents reveals the ways that paperwork participates in structural violence: it circumscribes the identities and the futures of institutional subjects and limits the professional trajectories of lower‐level bureaucrats. Moreover, official paperwork may in some cases contribute to the institutional violence that it purports to only record. [bureaucracy, disciplinary institutions, structural violence, youth crime, prison, courts, Brazil] Tortura e espancamento são estratégias disciplinares freqüentemente utilizadas nas prisões brasileiras. Além disso, adolescentes infratores detidos em unidades de internação permanente também sofrem nas mãos de funcionários e administradores de modo menos aparente—por meio da produção e da circulação de documentação institucional. Cada relação que um adolescente infrator tem com os profissionais da justiça é mediada por documentos nos quais o discursivo e o material interagem na construção de sujeitos, na definição de relações e no estabelecimento de valores. Estudar a produção e circulação desses documentos com um olhar etnográfico revela o modo pelo qual a documentação integra a estrutura da violência: circunscreve as identidades e os futuros dos sujeitos institucionalizados, bem como limita a trajetória profissional de burocratas dos níveis mais baixos. Além disso, os documentos oficiais podem em alguns casos contribuir para a violência institucional que pretendem apenas registrar. [burocracia, instituições disciplinares, violência estrutural, adolescentes infratores, prisão, tribunais, Brasil]

  July 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12335   open full text
• Crimecraft: Journalists, police, and news publics in an Argentine town.
  Ieva Jusionyte.
  American Ethnologist. July 24, 2016
  Crime narratives emerge from a collaborative process that involves diverse social groups across different locales. This diffused production of stories is captured by the concept of crimecraft, which helps illuminate the relationship among news media, organized crime, and police violence in postdictatorship Argentina. There, news makers must creatively maneuver between official reports and public secrets by shifting the story's authorship from themselves to their audiences. They do this with online news forums, which provide a space for readers to anonymously criticize brutal police practices, sometimes leading to public protests. Such is the negotiated and shifting relationship between law and violence, as well as the processual and performative character of knowledge production, which crimecraft helps unpack. [police, crime, violence, media, publics, journalism, Argentina] Relatos del crimen surgen de un proceso de colaboración que involucra a diversos grupos sociales en diferentes sitios. El concepto de crimecraft captura esta producción difusa de historias y ayuda a aclarar las conexiones entre los medios de comunicación, el crimen organizado y la violencia policial en Argentina. Allí, los encargados de noticias deben maniobrar de manera creativa entre los informes oficiales y secretos públicos desplazando la paternidad literaria de la historia de sí mismos a sus audiencias. Lo hacen con los foros de noticias online, que proveen un espacio para que los lectores critiquen prácticas brutales de la policía de forma anónima y que a veces lleva a las protestas públicas. Crimecraft sirve para esclarecer esta relación negociada e inestable entre la ley y la violencia, así como comprender el carácter procesual y performativo de la producción del conocimiento. [policía, crimen, violencia, medios de comunicación, públicos, periodismo, Argentina] Two female officers at the comisaría de la mujer (women's police station) in Puerto Iguazú, Argentina, June 29, 2010.

  July 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12338   open full text
• Catalonia's human towers: Nationalism, associational culture, and the politics of performance.
  Mariann Vaczi.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  Spain is facing the greatest challenge in the post‐Franco era to the nation's constitutional unity, as the Catalonian government in October 2015 issued a motion to unilaterally declare Catalonia's independence. The independence movement helped build support by using a 200‐year‐old cultural performance, the building of human towers (castells). The movement discarded other cultural performances (soccer, the sardana dance, and fire festivals), drawing from the human towers’ performative iconicity, associational culture, affective dimensions, and operative values to rally disparate social groups behind independence. In using human towers, the movement envisioned a solution to the ideological divisions of nationalist politics, but the instrumentalization of culture has a contradictory effect on politics. As European secessionist movements intensify, cultural performances reveal the objectives and risks of nationalist constructions. [human towers, associational culture, nationalism, performance, iconicity, Catalonia, Spain] Espanya s'enfronta al major repte de la seva unitat constitucional de l’època post‐franquista. A l'octubre del 2015, el govern català va aprovar una moció per declarar unilateralment la independència de Catalunya. Un esdeveniment cultural amb una història de dos‐cents anys, els castells, semblen haver‐se convertit en l'emblema dominant de la sobirania catalana. El moviment independentista ho prefereix a d'altres actuacions culturals, com ara la sardana, els festivals de foc, o esportives, com el futbol. La seva cultura associativa, les seves dimensions afectives, la seva iconicitat i els seus valors escènics fan que els castells serveixin per unir grups diversos, tot expressant la voluntat d'esdevenir una nació unida i sobirana. Alhora que el moviment casteller presenta una solució a les divisions ideològiques de la política independentista, la instrumentació política de la tradició cultural pot resultar problemàtica. Tanmateix, mentre els moviments secessionistes s'intensifiquen a Europa, la comunicació cultural identitària revela els objectius i els riscos de les manifestacions sobiranistes. [castells, cultura associativa, nacionalisme, performativitat, iconicitat, Catalunya, Espanya]

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12310   open full text
• The Juárez Wives Club: Gendered citizenship and US immigration law.
  Ruth Gomberg‐Muñoz.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  When US citizens sponsor their undocumented spouses for lawful status, they find themselves at the center of immigration petitions. They are invasively scrutinized, treated with bureaucratic indifference, and separated from their loved ones. As this “politics of exception,” which often targets migrants, is unleashed on US citizens, they learn that their citizenship offers little protection from dehumanizing treatment. Instead, restrictive immigration criteria, designed in theory to boost the value of US citizenship, in practice dehumanize US citizens and can alienate them from feelings of national belonging. This contradiction inevitably emerges when shared lives disrupt the boundaries of citizenship status, illuminating inconsistencies in normative conceptions of citizenship itself. [mixed‐status families, immigration law, gendered citizenship, legal exception, United States] Cuando los ciudadanos estadounidenses piden para sus cónyuges indocumentados un cambio de estatus legal, caen en el ámbito de los procedimientos de inmigración. Se les examina de forma invasiva, se les trata con indiferencia burocrática y se les separa de sus seres queridos. Cuando esa “política de excepción”, que normalmente se dirige en contra de los inmigrantes, se aplica a los ciudadanos estadounidenses, estos aprenden que su ciudadanía no les protege de tratos inhumanos. De hecho, los criterios restrictivos de inmigración, diseñados en teoría para aumentar el valor de su ciudadanía, en la práctica les deshumanizan y pueden hacer que se sientan despojados de sentimientos de pertenencia nacional. Esta contradicción surge inevitablemente cuando las vidas compartidas traspasan las fronteras del estatus de ciudadanía, poniendo al descubierto las incoherencias en las concepciones normativas de la ciudadanía misma. [familias de estatus mixto, ley de inmigración, género y ciudadanía, excepción legal, Estados Unidos] Figure 2. Children ask for their father's release outside the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Florida, as part of a rally held August 5, 2012, to expose the number of low‐priority immigrants who are detained and deported. (Steve Pavey/Hope in Focus Photography/www.stevepavey.com)

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12309   open full text
• The evangelical financial ethic: Doubled forms and the search for God in the economic world.
  Caitlin Zaloom.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  In evangelical churches across the United States, volunteers assist other church members in transforming household budgets into lenses that reveal God's kingdom on earth, reframing the force and volatility of markets as divine mystery. The strategies of financial ministry are distinctive, yet they engage a more general conundrum that pits economic success against conflicting ethical projects; they illuminate the process of ethical management in the financial economy. The ministries’ uses of budgets also challenge the idea that market devices gain power primarily by formatting economic transactions and establishing conditions for market exchange. Evangelical financial ministries show how, in everyday calculative practices, a device such as a household budget renders the spiritual economic, and the economic spiritual. In the exercise of evangelical ethics, financial ministry returns the divine touch to the invisible hand. [Christianity, economy, ethics, finance, households, markets, United States]

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12308   open full text
• Sharia, charity, and minjian autonomy in Muslim China: Gift giving in a plural world.
  Matthew S. Erie.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  In Marcel Mauss's analysis, the gift exists in the context of a homogenous system of values. But in fact, different types of normative systems can inhabit the same social field. This is the case among Hui, the largest Muslim minority group in China, for whom the “freedom” of the gift resides in the giver's capacity to follow the rules underlying gifting, in this case, the rules of sharia. I call this capacity “minjian (unofficial, popular) autonomy.” Hui follow sharia in pursuit of a good life, but their practices are also informed by mainstream Han Chinese gift practices and by the anxieties of the security state. In their gifting practices, Hui thus endeavor to reconcile the demands of Islamic, postsocialist, and gift economies. [gift economy, autonomy, sharia, charity, China, Islamic finance, ethics] 按照马塞尔·莫斯的分析, 馈赠存在于均质化价值观体系的背景中。但实际上, 在同一社会领域中可以存在着不同类型的社会规范体系。中国最大的穆斯林民族‐回族就是这样的案例, 对他们来说 馈赠的"自由"取决于馈赠者按照馈赠的深层次规则行事的能力, 在这里, 规则即指“设若尔提” (伊斯兰教法) 。我将这一能力称之为“民间自主权” (非官方的, 大众化的) 。在追求美好的生活时, 回族会遵循“设若尔提”, 但他们的做法同时也会受到汉族主流的馈赠礼物的做法和“安全国家”焦虑的影响。因此, 在馈赠礼物时, 回族人会努力协调伊斯兰教、后社会主义经济和礼物经济的不同要求。[礼物经济, 自主权, “设若尔提”, 慈善, 中国, 伊斯兰金融, 伦理] Figure 2. The accountant of a mosque in Lanzhou, China, recording donations in 2009.

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12307   open full text
• Fixed abodes: Urban emplacement, bureaucratic requirements, and the politics of belonging among West African migrants in Paris.
  Aïssatou Mbodj‐Pouye.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  Foyers, housing facilities for male migrants, are well‐known institutions of postcolonial France and critical nodes in West African migratory networks. A nationwide plan to renovate the foyers presents distinct challenges to the arrangements established by the generations of migrants who live in them, arrangements that have long sustained the social reproduction of transnational migration. In response, residents foreground their long‐established presence in Paris to stake claims in the renovation process. Their stories of urban dwelling are punctuated by postal addresses, bureaucratic tokens of identification that play a pivotal role both in migrants’ historical imagination and in the administrative modes of granting residency rights. The foyers are sites of emplacement, albeit fragile, and spaces from which West African migrants contest their political exclusion in present‐day France. [migration, emplacement, bureaucracy, residence, address, West Africans, France] Gollinŋaano mukkunu ku haayenu ku ni noqu nu yaayi i taxasintun ga ni gelli tubaabunun ku marayen kiyen dangi falle. Noqu senbentu ya ni i ga da terenden senben di afiriki kinxenna kitte ke di. Sirondu ku be jamaane ke ga da wutu katta haayenu ku a ña bartaade katta masalahanu ku be nu ga ñi ña na i noxo nu ku di gelli soro fano ku ma lenki kiye. Ken masalaha yan sigi o ga jaman gabe soron ñiini bitte ne haayenu ku noxon di. Kuuro i na killu kita i ga toqo doome, haayenu ku soron di i taxuye ke giilo ye ke ya ro kaane pari maran di. I da ken sabatindi i digan kaanu noxon di ti i taxuranu ku dereesunu ña : baawo dereesunu ku ni fo xoore ya ni faraansi golliranu di a do a kaayiti muuriranun di. Ken ña sabaabun ni dereesi ke toxon ga banŋe ne i digaamu be ga katta fi dangintun di, wolla katta kaayitin xibaaren ŋa, ma fi be ga katta taaxuranxa xibaaren ŋa. Ken ŋa tuyindini ti haayenu ku ni dingaranu ya ni xotan gi i kanma. Ken sabaabun ya ni afiriki kinxennan dunko ku be nu ga haayenu ku di i ga gajanŋa lenki, kuuro politiki gumu na taqe sigindi i xa da. [terende, taxura, kaayiti muuriye, dingira, dereesi, afiriki kinxenna, faraansi] Les foyers de travailleurs migrants sont des institutions bien connues de la France postcoloniale, et des points névralgiques des réseaux migratoires ouest‐africains. Un plan national de rénovation des foyers fragilise aujourd'hui les arrangements internes mis en place par des générations de migrants et qui contribuaient à la reproduction d'un système transnational de migration. A l'appui des revendications qu'ils formulent dans ce contexte, les résidents mettent en avant leur présence à Paris dans la durée. Les évocations de leur vie urbaine sont ponctuées de références aux adresses de leurs domiciles successifs ; composante essentielle des procédures bureaucratiques de l'identification, l'adresse intervient à la fois dans ces récits historiques et dans la gestion administrative du droit à la résidence, démontrant les formes, certes fragiles, d’« emplacement » qu'autorisent les foyers. Ceux‐ci constituent un espace depuis lequel les migrants ouest‐africains contestent en France leur exclusion politique. [migration, emplacement, bureaucratie, résidence, adresse, ouest‐africains, France] Figure 3. A retired Senegalese migrant in his room at the Foyer d'Hautpoul, a housing facility for migrants in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris, June 2013. (Anissa Michalon)

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12306   open full text
• Working for food stamps: Economic citizenship and the post‐Fordist welfare state in New York City.
  Maggie Dickinson.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  In the United States, the number of people receiving state‐subsidized food aid has risen dramatically since 2001. This increase complicates the well‐worn story that the post‐Fordist welfare state has been continuously cut back in the neoliberal era, indicating instead that it is expanding to subsidize poor workers’ participation in the formal labor market. In New York City, welfare office workers operationalize policies that ease access to food assistance for poor workers who can demonstrate that they are formally employed. Meanwhile, workfare programs punish the unemployed and marginal workers by making them work for food stamps. This conservative, paternalistic welfare regime commodifies labor, creates new patterns of stratification among the urban poor, and redraws the terms of economic citizenship. [welfare, poverty, citizenship, food policy, employment, social stratification, New York City]

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12304   open full text
• Everyday recomposition: Precarity and socialization in Thailand's migrant workforce.
  Stephen Campbell.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  As a site of manufacturing growth since the 1990s, the Mae Sot industrial zone in northwest Thailand has increasingly employed migrant workers from Myanmar. Yet the social dynamics of Myanmar migrant groups employed in Mae Sot's garment sector do not align with North Atlantic narratives of class fragmentation. Rather, labor flexibilization at this site has had socially constitutive effects. As flexibilization has expanded in Thailand, the very practices by which the country's garment companies have sought to create low‐wage, flexible workforces have themselves produced conditions of possibility for new forms of relationality and socialization among workers. The resulting social cohesion has formed, in turn, a basis for solidarity among workers when they carry out factory strikes. [flexible labor, precarity, solidarity, undocumented migrants, Thailand, Myanmar]

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12303   open full text
• Tearful Sojourns and Tribal Wives: Primitivism, kinship, suffering, and salvation on Japanese and British reality television.
  Christopher Ball, Shunsuke Nozawa.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  The Japanese and British reality television programs Tearful Sojourns and Tribal Wives both feature protagonists’ adventures and residence in “tribal societies.” Each program constructs different primitivist images through distinct tropes of kinship; Tearful Sojourns fetishizes filiation and consanguinity, while Tribal Wives fetishizes marriage and affinity. The emphasis on descent and affinity reflects and contributes to cultural kinship crises—the breakdown of filial piety in Japan and of marriage in the United Kingdom—felt among their viewers. The shows subtly manipulate images of kinship, the primitive, and suffering to generate a globally mediatized primitivist discourse that purports to therapeutically help audiences find in the primitive Other something they have lost, providing a path to redemption. This discourse contributes in turn to popular perceptions of anthropology. [primitivism, kinship, reality television, media, United Kingdom, Japan] 日本のテレビ番組ウルルン滞在記とイギリスの番組Tribal Wivesでは主要登場人物の「原始的社会」における生活風景が描写されるが、この二つの番組におけるプリミティヴィズムの構築の仕方には親族関係の修辞において違いがある。ウルルンにおいては血族的系統に、Tribal Wives においては婚姻による婚戚関係に重点が置かれている。こうした修辞は、それぞれの社会において広く認識されている家族を巡る文化的危機 – 日本における孝行やイギリスにおける婚姻にまつわる危機の言説 – を反映している。親族関係や「原始的なもの」、苦難といったテーマの番組中の細かな演出は、グローバルな規模で媒介されるプリミティヴィズムの言説を喚起し、近代社会の喪失を「原始的」他者の中に投影する癒し救済の手解きとしてその視聴者に提供される。一方、こういった言説は人類学そのものの社会一般における理解にも影響を与える。[プリミティヴィズム、親族関係、リアリティ番組、メディア、イギリス、日本]

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12302   open full text
• SIM cards of desire: Sexual versatility and the male homoerotic economy in urban Congo.
  Thomas Hendriks.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  Despite its pervasive homophobia, everyday life in urban Democratic Republic of Congo is full of queer affordances that are of particular interest for understanding larger socioeconomic changes, shifting gender dynamics, and recurring cosmopolitan aspirations. Ethnographic fieldwork in Kinshasa and Kisangani reveals how male same‐sex desire is produced, distributed, and consumed in a “homoerotic economy” that generates its own characteristic instabilities. My interlocutors constantly renegotiate this economy's dominant logic of penetration and solve its underlying “problem” of sexual versatility through a creative vocabulary of erotic SIM cards. Closely analyzing these processes sheds new light on the hegemonic notions of sexual “activity” and “passivity” as particularly unstable markers of erotic belonging. [desire, masculinity, homosexuality, Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa] Malgré une homophobie omniprésente, la vie quotidienne urbaine en République Démocratique du Congo offre maintes opportunités queer, révélatrices de changements socioéconomiques plus larges, de transformations de genre et d'aspirations cosmopolites récurrentes. Cette étude ethnographique à Kinshasa et à Kisangani montre comment le désir sexuel entre hommes est produit, distribué et consommé dans le cadre d'une « économie homoérotique » qui engendre ses propres instabilités caractéristiques. Dans cette économie, mes interlocuteurs renégocient au quotidien sa logique dominante de pénétration et résolvent son « problème » inhérent de la versatilité sexuelle à travers un vocabulaire créatif de cartes SIM érotiques. Une analyse approfondie de ces processus démontre que les notions hégémoniques d’ « activité » et de « passivité » sexuelle sont des marqueurs d'appartenance érotique particulièrement instables. [désir, masculinité, homosexualité, République Démocratique du Congo, Afrique]

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12301   open full text
• Belonging in ethno‐erotic economies: Adultery, alterity, and ritual in postcolonial Kenya.
  George Paul Meiu.
  American Ethnologist. May 24, 2016
  In Samburu District, northern Kenya, men and women crafted collective belonging through and around colonial stereotypes of their ethnic sexuality. If administrators, missionaries, development workers, and journalists long invoked promiscuity and adultery to describe them as radical Others, rural Samburu turned to ritual to transform the implications of such stereotypes. In ceremonies called lopiro, they sought to end everyday adultery within particular generations and reimagine moral forms of collective belonging to age sets, clans, the state, and a world beyond Kenya. These ceremonies synthesized contradictions between the concrete socioeconomic and political struggles of rural Samburu families and the haunting colonial paradigms of their sexual alterity. Lopiro ceremonies demonstrate the central role of sexuality to autochthonous and ethnic forms of belonging in the postcolonial world. [sexuality, ethnicity, belonging, kinship, Samburu, Kenya] Katika wilaya ya Samburu Kaskazini mwa Kenya, wanawake na wanaume wamejijengea utambulisho mpya wa jamii yao kupitia mgongo wa dhana potofu zilizozushwa na wakoloni juu ya mahusiano ya kimapenzi baina ya wanajamii wa jamii hiyo. Kwa muda mrefu, maafisa wa serikali, wamisionari, wafanyakazi katika miradi ya maendeleo, na waandishi wa habari wamekuwa wakitumia dhana ya “uzinzi” na “uasherati” wa watu wa Samburu kama kigezo cha kusisitiza tofauti kubwa ya kimaadili kati ya jamii ya Wasamburu na jamii zingine nchini Kenya. Kufuatia haya, Wasamburu walizigeukia mila zao na kuzitumia kama chombo cha ukombozi ili kuharamisha uzushi huo. Katika sherehe zao zinazoitwa lopiro, Wasamburu waliazimia kuharamisha na kufuta kila chembe ya uasherati iliyokuwemo miongoni mwa vizazi vyao na hivyo kudiriki kujitengenezea mfumo mpya wa maadili ya jamii nzima kwa ajili ya rika zote, koo zote, taifa la Kenya, na dunia nzima kwa ujumla. Sherehe hizi zilipelekea kuwepo na ukinzani mkali baina ya hali duni, iliyokithiri, ya kiuchumi, kijamii na kisiasa miongoni mwa familia za Samburu vijijini na jinamizi la dhana potofu za kikoloni juu ya mahusiano ya kimapenzi ya watu wa Samburu. Sherehe za lopiro zinaonesha kinagaubaga dhima ya mahusiano ya kimapenzi kama mhimili wa namna ambavyo jamii za kiasili zilivyojitambulisha na kuhusiana baada ya ukoloni. [mahusiano ya kijamii, kabila, udugu, Samburu, Kenya] Im Samburu Gebiet im Norden Kenias stellten sich Männer und Frauen ihre kollektive Zugehörigkeit im Verhältnis zu kolonialen Klischees ihrer ethnischen Sexualität vor. Administratoren, Missionare, Entwicklungsarbeiter und Journalisten hatten die Samburu schon lange mit Promiskuität und außerehelichen Sex in Verbindung gebracht, um sie als kulturelle “Andere” zu beschreiben. Während der Kolonialherrschaft benutzten die Samburu Rituale, um die sozialen Folgen dieser Klishees abzuwandeln. In sogenannten “lopiro” Zeremonien versuchten die Samburu außerehelichen Sex zwischen bestimmten Generationen zu beenden und neue moralische Bezieungen zu Altersklassen, Clans, dem Staat and einer Welt jenseits von Kenia zu knüpfen. Diese Zeremonien stellten Widersprüche zwischen den konkreten sozioökonomischen und politischen Problemen der ländlichen Samburu Familien und einer kolonialen Weltanschauung ihrer sexuellen Alterität dar. Lopiro Zeremonien zeigen uns die wichtige Rolle der Sexualität im Bezug auf autochthone und ethnische Zugehörigkeit in der postkolonialen Welt. [Sexualität, Ethnizität, Zugehörigkeit, Verwandtschaft, Samburu, Kenia] Figure 5. Over the microphone, the master of ceremonies praises the gifts exchanged on the last day of the lopiro ceremony. Samburu District, Kenya, December 2010.

  May 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12300   open full text
• Bread‐and‐butter politics: Democratic disenchantment and everyday politics on an English council estate.
  Insa Koch.
  American Ethnologist. May 03, 2016
  Despite evidence of widespread disenchantment with formal politics among England's impoverished sectors, people on the margins continue to engage with elected representatives on their own terms. On English council estates (housing projects), residents mediate their experiences of an alien and distant political system by drawing local politicians into localized networks of support and care. While this allows residents to voice demands for “bread and butter,” personalized alliances with politicians rarely translate into collective action. The limits of one political party's bread‐and‐butter strategy highlight the precariousness of working‐class movements at a time when the political Left has largely been dismantled. They also demonstrate the need to account for the lived realities of social class in aspirational narratives for “alternative” democratic futures. [democratic crisis, neoliberalism, voting, working‐class movements, council estates, alternative democracies, United Kingdom]

  May 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/amet.12305   open full text
• Urban mosquitoes, situational publics, and the pursuit of interspecies separation in Dar es Salaam.
  Ann H. Kelly, Javier Lezaun.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Recent work in anthropology points to the recognition of multispecies entanglements as the grounds for a more ethical politics. In this article, we examine efforts to control mosquitoes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as an example of the laborious tasks of disentanglement that characterize public health interventions. The mosquito surveillance and larval elimination practices of an urban malaria control program offer an opportunity to observe how efforts to create distance between species relate to the physical and civic textures of the city. Seen in the particular context of the contemporary African metropolis, the work of public health appears less a matter of control than a commitment to constant urban maintenance and political mobilization. [multispecies ethnography, public health, malaria, Dar es Salaam, cities]Recent work in anthropology points to the recognition of multispecies entanglements as the grounds for a more ethical politics. In this article, we examine efforts to control mosquitoes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as an example of the laborious tasks of disentanglement that characterize public health interventions. The mosquito surveillance and larval elimination practices of an urban malaria control program offer an opportunity to observe how efforts to create distance between species relate to the physical and civic textures of the city. Seen in the particular context of the contemporary African metropolis, the work of public health appears less a matter of control than a commitment to constant urban maintenance and political mobilization. [multispecies ethnography, public health, malaria, Dar es Salaam, cities]

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12081   open full text
• When infrastructures attack: The workings of disrepair in China.
  Julie Y. Chu.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Residents fighting eviction in China often come into intimate knowledge of the insidious workings of infrastructure. This is especially true as redevelopment disputes are increasingly mediated through Chinese reforms emphasizing “rule by law.” Such reforms have worked to attune citizens, as well as city developers, to more distributed forms of agency in what could be termed the “infrastructuralization” of state power. I suggest that it is through the ambiguous signs of infrastructural disrepair that disputes over redevelopment increasingly play themselves out in contemporary China. By tracking the mundane and material effects of disrepair in citizen‐state struggles, I ultimately show how infrastructures operate not only in support of state projects of legibility but also to condition some surprising political sensibilities. [infrastructure, urban development, China, law, sensibility, materiality, state violence]Residents fighting eviction in China often come into intimate knowledge of the insidious workings of infrastructure. This is especially true as redevelopment disputes are increasingly mediated through Chinese reforms emphasizing “rule by law.” Such reforms have worked to attune citizens, as well as city developers, to more distributed forms of agency in what could be termed the “infrastructuralization” of state power. I suggest that it is through the ambiguous signs of infrastructural disrepair that disputes over redevelopment increasingly play themselves out in contemporary China. By tracking the mundane and material effects of disrepair in citizen‐state struggles, I ultimately show how infrastructures operate not only in support of state projects of legibility but also to condition some surprising political sensibilities. [infrastructure, urban development, China, law, sensibility, materiality, state violence]

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12080   open full text
• Performing dignity: Human rights, citizenship, and the techno‐politics of law in South Africa.
  Antina Von Schnitzler.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Since the end of apartheid, rights‐based languages of human dignity have often been central to articulating state obligation and making claims on the state in South Africa. In this article, I explore this moral–legal politics by focusing on a legal case brought against the City of Johannesburg by five Soweto residents on the basis of their constitutionally guaranteed right to water. Examining the epistemologies and evidentiary practices on which it was built, the debates and protests that surrounded it, and the residents’ informal articulations of their discontents, I use the legal case as a lens to explore how the political terrain has been transformed in South Africa in the context of this rise of human rights and the law as languages and modalities of politics. Thus, I explore how citizenship—as a set of techniques, imaginaries, and practices—is refashioned via languages of humanity, and I highlight the ambivalent ethical and political effects of this shift.

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12079   open full text
• Hostile remixes on YouTube: A new constraint on pro‐FARC counterpublics in Colombia.
  Alex Fattal.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Online video streaming marks a participatory turn in Colombia's propaganda war. To understand this shift, I analyze a video the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) produced of its kidnapping of 12 provincial parliamentarians in 2002, tracing fragments of that video as they “recombine” online in two other videos that antagonistically resignify the original. I conduct the same exercise with footage of the Colombian military's rescue of Íngrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages in 2008 and contrast its celebratory recombinations with those of the FARC video. Building on Michael Warner's theory of publics and counterpublics and Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of “re‐accentuation,” I argue that “recombinatory circulation” reproduces the biases of Colombia's mass media, constraining pro‐FARC counterpublics. I contextualize the circulation analysis with ethnography focused on former hostages, demobilized rebels, and military intelligence officials. Beyond Colombia, I argue for converting interactive circulation into an empirical and analytical prism to illuminate the politics of online publics.

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12078   open full text
• Mayan imaginaries of democracy: Interactive sovereignties and political affect in postrevolutionary Guatemala.
  Nicholas Copeland.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Mayan farmers in rural northwest Guatemala perceive the U.S. Department of Agriculture fruit‐fly eradication program, MOSCAMED, as a government and agribusiness scheme designed to addict them to agrochemicals by despoiling subsistence agriculture. This bitterly accusative view depicts the state, capital, and U.S. government as interlinked sovereigns willing to kill and harm hapless Mayas. Considering political processes in the town of San Pedro Necta in light of local mistrust of and engagement with MOSCAMED, I argue that neoliberal democracy extends an affective imaginary of defeat produced by decades of counterinsurgency warfare through targeted violence and by exchanging meager resources for complicity with racial dispossession. My research findings illuminate how Mayas live the violence of neoliberal democracy and navigate a thicket of sovereignties, including ones widely viewed as predicated on their collective misery. They also reframe Mayan participation in authoritarian politics since the 1996 peace accords.

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12077   open full text
• Installing the insider “outside”: House reconstruction and the transformation of binary ideologies in independent Timor‐Leste.
  Judith Bovensiepen.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Across Timor‐Leste the reconstruction of ancestral origin houses has been a focus of immense personal and financial efforts since the end of the Indonesian occupation in 1999. I explore the rebuilding and inauguration of origin houses in the village of Funar, reoccupied by residents after their forcible resettlement elsewhere for over two decades. Examining how experiences of violence and displacement can engender new modes of identification, I consider the disparate assumptions about the nature and number of houses that came to the fore during these events. By juxtaposing monist and dualist presuppositions implicit in rival claims, I develop existing anthropological approaches to binary ideologies to conceptualize the ideological transformations that characterize postconflict recovery.

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12076   open full text
• The télèphone malgache: Transnational gossip and social transformation among Malagasy marriage migrants in France.
  Jennifer Cole.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Deepening poverty in Madagascar leads Malagasy coastal women to marry Frenchmen as a way to migrate to France. The télèphone malgache, an informal organizational and communicative structure, connects these marriage migrants to each other and to their families in Madagascar. Drawing from studies of gossip, on the one hand, and telecommunications, on the other, I argue that the télèphone malgache creates highly unstable social ties that regulate and transform Malagasy matrimonial migrants’ relationships with one another, their French families, and their Malagasy families back home. I show how the relations that women maintain with one another in France and with their kin in Madagascar are aspects of a single process. Far from simply connecting people to their homelands, these relationships also shape migrants’ integration into French society.

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12075   open full text
• Remitting wealth, reciprocating health? The “travel” of the land from Guinea‐Bissau to Portugal.
  Maria Abranches.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Homegrown food and other products of Guinea‐Bissau's natural world offer protection and well‐being to Guinean migrants in Portugal. In exploring this aspect of migration, I consider well‐being in relation to both body and mind, in terms of health and illness and of solidarity and its withholding. Drawing on a multisited ethnography that looked equally at migrants and their nonmigrant kin, I link food, body, and mind to relationships of giving and reciprocating across borders in ways that challenge the classic assumption that the primary value of transnational migrant exchanges is economic. I argue that the active role of home‐based kin in these exchanges and the travel of the materiality and symbology of the Guinean land that they facilitate are as central to migrants’ well‐being as migrants’ financial and material remittances are to the well‐being of those at home.Homegrown food and other products of Guinea‐Bissau's natural world offer protection and well‐being to Guinean migrants in Portugal. In exploring this aspect of migration, I consider well‐being in relation to both body and mind, in terms of health and illness and of solidarity and its withholding. Drawing on a multisited ethnography that looked equally at migrants and their nonmigrant kin, I link food, body, and mind to relationships of giving and reciprocating across borders in ways that challenge the classic assumption that the primary value of transnational migrant exchanges is economic. I argue that the active role of home‐based kin in these exchanges and the travel of the materiality and symbology of the Guinean land that they facilitate are as central to migrants’ well‐being as migrants’ financial and material remittances are to the well‐being of those at home.

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12074   open full text
• “The collective circle”: Latino immigrant musicians and politics in Charlotte, North Carolina.
  Samuel Byrd.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  Through their music making, Latino immigrant musicians and audience members in Charlotte, North Carolina, debate political questions relevant to their lives as workers and residents of a globalizing city. Despite contentious politics around immigration, Charlotte's Latino musicians are not active in the organized immigration‐reform movement. Looking at their ambivalent political positionality, I engage with five key themes: how “relationship songs” reveal musicians’ personal politics; the effect of everyday policing on immigrant communities and musicians’ responses to immigration enforcement policies; the politics of laboring as a Latino musician, including the training and professional ethics that accompany music making; the emergence of musicians as “grassroots intellectuals”; and the importance of the “collective circle”—a frenetic style of band–audience interaction—in helping constitute a sense of agency and shape the informal political stances that Latino musicians take.

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12073   open full text
• The U.S. car colossus and the production of inequality.
  Catherine Lutz.
  American Ethnologist. April 25, 2014
  The contemporary world is one of restless mobilities, radically morphing physical landscapes, baroque technologies, new forms of governance and subjectivity, and onerous inequalities. The automobile provides vivid insight into all five phenomena as well as into their relationship. I ask how the car‐dependent mobility system of the United States not only reflects but also intensively generates the inequalities that characterize U.S. society. I propose that “compulsory consumption” and the automobile's centrality to the current regime of accumulation can help account for this. Theories of inequality and mobility, I suggest, can be adapted to account for the automobile industry's capture of contemporary life. [mobility, transportation, inequality, automobile, regime of accumulation, political economy, United States]

  April 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/amet.12072   open full text
• The poetics of village space when villages are new: Settlement form as history making in Papua, Indonesia.
  Rupert Stasch.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  Resettlement of dispersed populations into centralized villages has been a watershed cultural change across many world regions, often occurring under pressure from states, world religions, and markets. Recent village formation processes among Korowai of Papua, Indonesia, have been caused by such pressures but have also been heavily structured by Korowai understandings of geography. This article takes Korowai villages as a case study in the semiotics of space. The power of villages to be the pivot of historical transformation flows from this spatial form's “poetic density,” meaning its ladenness with a multiplicity of social principles, structures of feeling, and models of extralocal geopolitical articulation. Additionally, Korowai strongly orient to space as a field of heterogeneity. Their expectation that different spaces are charged with otherness of order has shaped their village‐forming actions and their intense focus on villages in thinking about contemporary history at large.Resettlement of dispersed populations into centralized villages has been a watershed cultural change across many world regions, often occurring under pressure from states, world religions, and markets. Recent village formation processes among Korowai of Papua, Indonesia, have been caused by such pressures but have also been heavily structured by Korowai understandings of geography. This article takes Korowai villages as a case study in the semiotics of space. The power of villages to be the pivot of historical transformation flows from this spatial form's “poetic density,” meaning its ladenness with a multiplicity of social principles, structures of feeling, and models of extralocal geopolitical articulation. Additionally, Korowai strongly orient to space as a field of heterogeneity.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12039   open full text
• Reckoning with press freedom: Community media, liberalism, and the processual state in Caracas, Venezuela.
  Naomi Schiller.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  Community media producers who are aligned with and supported by the Venezuelan state must reckon with the notion of “press freedom.” I argue that rather than embrace dominant liberal norms, which hold that a “free press” requires autonomy from the state, community media producers in Caracas approach the state as a potentially liberatory process of collective engagement. This approach demands that they reexamine liberal norms for freedom and autonomy. They do so in a context in which social actors inside and outside official state institutions struggle with the limits and future of liberalism in Venezuela. The dilemmas of community media producers in this context offer an opportunity to develop a critical anthropology of press freedom.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12038   open full text
• The photographer's body: Populism, polarization, and the uses of victimhood in Venezuela.
  Robert Samet.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  Political antagonism between supporters and opponents of former president Hugo Chávez has been a defining feature of daily life in Caracas for more than a decade. Despite their different political orientations, the antagonistic poles of “chavismo” and “the opposition” share striking similarities, starting at the level of political practice. I argue that Venezuela's political polarization reflects the shared logic of populism. Through the story of Jorge Tortoza—a photojournalist killed during the failed 2002 coup d’état against President Chávez—I describe how the chavista–opposition divide is produced and policed through performances of victimhood, performances that are essential to populist mobilization in Venezuela.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12037   open full text
• Clean fake: Authenticating documents and persons in migrant Moscow.
  Madeleine Reeves.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  What does it mean for Kyrgyzstani migrant workers in contemporary Russia to be legally legible to the state when informal agencies market fictive residency documents and “clean fake” work permits? Examining the uncertainty around being authentically documented provides insight into a mode of governance in urban Russia that thrives less on rendering subjects legible than on working the space of ambiguity between life and law. This dynamic has significant social consequences for the way certain bodies come to be scrutinized as particularly untrustworthy, particularly liable to fakery, and, thus, particularly legitimate targets for document checks, fines, and threats of deportation. The ambiguity with which migrants are forced to live highlights the need to explore how documentary regimes, structures of feeling, and racializing practices coincide.What does it means for Kyrgyzstani migrant workers in contemporary Russia to be legally legible to the state when informal agencies market fictive residency documents and “clean fake” work permits? Examining the uncertainty around being “authentically” documented provides insight into a mode of governance in urban Russia that thrives less on rendering subjects legible than on working the space of ambiguity between life and law. This dynamic has significant social consequences for the way certain bodies come to be scrutinized as particularly untrustworthy, particularly liable to fakery, and, thus, particularly legitimate targets for document checks, fines, and threats of deportation.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12036   open full text
• Accounting for silence: Inheritance, debt, and the moral economy of legal redress in China and Japan.
  Yukiko Koga.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  Legal efforts seeking official apology and compensation for Japanese colonial violence have, since the 1990s, become a prime site of Chinese and Japanese attempts to come to terms with the past. This ethnography explores what it means to legally account for Japanese imperialism decades after the original violence ended with Japan's defeat in World War II. Examination of recent compensation lawsuits filed by Chinese war victims against the Japanese government and corporations shows how legal interventions publicly reveal artificially separated, yet deeply intertwined moral and monetary economies that present postwar compensation as a question of the generational transfer of unaccounted‐for pasts and accompanying debts. I elucidate how accounts and accounting address overdue responsibility for postwar generations and, against the background of generational shift and the changing balance of economic power between China and Japan, show how the crux of this issue has shifted from apology to inheritance and accountability.Legal efforts seeking official apology and compensation for Japanese colonial violence have, since the 1990s, become a prime site of Chinese and Japanese attempts to come to terms with the past. This ethnography explores what it means to legally account for Japanese imperialism decades after the original violence ended with Japan's defeat in World War II. Examination of recent compensation lawsuits filed by Chinese war victims against the Japanese government and corporations shows how legal interventions publicly reveal artificially separated, yet deeply intertwined moral and monetary economies that present postwar compensation as a question of the generational transfer of unaccounted‐for pasts and accompanying debts.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12035   open full text
• Recovering debts: Microfinance loan officers and the work of “proxy‐creditors” in India.
  Sohini Kar.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into financial networks at the global peripheries. As “proxy‐creditors,” loan officers in Kolkata, India, must produce and alienate debt relationships to create loan products. I argue that the process of financialization is articulated through local idioms of moneylending, care, and respect. Moreover, at the heart of this labor is the unresolved tension between capitalist expansion and ethical concerns for the everyday relationships that are used to extend credit to the financially excluded.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12034   open full text
• On Christianity and ethics: Rupture as ethical practice in Ghanaian Pentecostalism.
  Girish Daswani.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  Rupture, a common principle of the Pentecostal Christian faith, can also give rise to ethical disputes among believers. The study of such disputes provides insight into the ways ethical practice shapes the institutional continuities and the personal inconsistencies of a Christian life. All believers learn what Pentecostal rupture is, but they have different opinions about how it is achieved, and, once born again, they differ on what constitutes good or right religious observance. I suggest that approaching rupture as ethical practice allows for a better understanding of the religious subject's response to an incommensurability of values and practices internal to Pentecostalism.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12033   open full text
• The social aesthetics of eligibility: NGO aid and indeterminacy in the Greek asylum process.
  Heath Cabot.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  On the porous EU border of Greece, where both fiscal and migration management are said to be in a state of crisis, NGOs figure crucially in the provision of legal and social aid to asylum applicants. I explore the dialogical engagements underpinning the determination of client eligibility at one such NGO in Athens. As workers and aid candidates coproduce “pictures” of lives eligible for protection, profound uncertainties and indeterminacies emerge. I argue that this indeterminacy gives testament to an often overlooked form of agency: how aid candidates and service providers alike reshape and even refuse dominant images of deservingness, victimhood, and vulnerability from within systems of aid distribution.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12032   open full text
• How to do things to children with words: Language, ritual, and apocalypse in pediatric HIV treatment in Botswana.
  Betsey Behr Brada.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  Concerned that children understood the word AIDS to portend their imminent deaths, U.S. pediatricians in Botswana used ritual speech to reveal HIV‐positive children's diagnoses to them in an effort to ensure these children took their medications. They relied on euphemisms such as soldier and bad guy, gradually and methodically replacing them with biomedically derived terms. While the ritual was predicated on transparency and accuracy, pediatricians’ conviction that the word AIDS impaired children's ability to manage their infections led them to silence representations of the epidemic as anything other than a manageable condition in order to create a stable object of biomedical intervention.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12031   open full text
• The judicialization of biopolitics: Claiming the right to pharmaceuticals in Brazilian courts.
  João Biehl.
  American Ethnologist. August 09, 2013
  In Brazil, low‐ and middle‐income patients are not waiting for new medical technologies to trickle down. They are using free legal assistance and a responsive judiciary to access health care, now understood as access to pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceuticalization and judicialization of health reveal an experiential‐political‐economic field beyond the biopolitics of populations. At stake in this field are the ways in which government (qua drug regulator, purchaser, and distributor) facilitates a more direct relationship, in the form of technology access, between atomized and ambiguous political subjects of rights and the biomedical market. Not fully governed by either state or market, these subjects negotiate the constraints and possibilities of a technological society using jurisprudence. They work through available legal mechanisms and instantiate new social fields to engage and adjudicate their demands, concretizing abstract human rights. In the process, the judiciary is consolidated as a critical site of politics—and of political economy.In Brazil, low‐ and middle‐income patients are not waiting for new medical technologies to trickle down. They are using free legal assistance and a responsive judiciary to access health care, now understood as access to pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceuticalization and judicialization of health reveal an experiential‐political‐economic field beyond the biopolitics of populations. At stake in this field are the ways in which government (qua drug regulator, purchaser, and distributor) facilitates a more direct relationship, in the form of technology access, between atomized and ambiguous political subjects of rights and the biomedical market. Not fully governed by either state or market, these subjects negotiate the constraints and possibilities of a technological society using jurisprudence. They work through available legal mechanisms and instantiate new social fields to engage and adjudicate their demands, concretizing abstract human rights.

  August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/amet.12030   open full text