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APLA Newsletter

Impact factor: 0.743 Print ISSN: 1081-6976 Publisher: Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing)

Subject: Anthropology

Most recent papers:

  • The Fight Against Poverty and the Gendered Remaking of Community in Mexico: New Patriarchal Collusions and Gender Solidarities.
    Holly Dygert.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    Mexico's antipoverty program Oportunidades (previously Progresa, and now Prospera) was designed to reduce poverty rates by augmenting the “human capital” of poor children. The program targets women in an effort to achieve this end, and employs a conditional cash transfer (CCT) mechanism to incentivize new kinds of care work. The program's creators intended for this maternalist approach to supplant community‐based initiatives, thereby shifting the locus of poverty alleviation from communities to mothers. Nonetheless, this article shows how Oportunidades’ maternalist approach intersected with a community‐based public health initiative to position recipients as new kinds of communitarian citizens in a Ñuu Savi (Mixtec) village. Other villagers and officials colluded in using the CCT mechanism to transfer previously communal responsibilities to the “poor women” designated as program beneficiaries. Without concomitant access to decision‐making processes, the women came to occupy a truncated form of communitarian citizenship. Program recipients took advantage of the contradictions that this created to form new solidarities with municipal officials and to stake out a new voice in the process.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12206   open full text
  • Sovereignty and the Vicissitudes of Recognition: Peoplehood and Performance in a De Facto State.
    Michael Bobick.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    In this article, I examine the issues of statehood, sovereignty, and recognition through the case of Transnistria, an unrecognized, de facto state located in eastern Moldova. This article explores the relationship between sovereignty and (the lack of) recognition by examining the forms recognition takes vis‐à‐vis the Transnistrian state and its constituents. I argue that a monopoly on coercion is not sufficient for sovereignty. Rather, a distinct people and form of peoplehood must exist and be recognized as such. This article presents an ethnographic approach to recognition that examines the interplay between sovereignty, performance, and peoplehood in Transnistria. The relationship between recognition and state sovereignty is, I argue, fourfold, and includes (1) international recognition by other states, (2) the recognition of a state's sovereign authority by its own population, (3) the recognition of a degree of collective “peoplehood” by the population themselves, and (4) the consequent recognition of this peoplehood by the state.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12204   open full text
  • The Politics of Russian‐Language Film Showings in Post‐Soviet Georgia.
    Perry Sherouse.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    A law was implemented in Georgia in 2011 that required all foreign films to be shown with Georgian state language dubbing or subtitling. At that time, Russian was the default language of film showings. A year later, the largest movie theater in Tbilisi was fined for showing films in Russian language without Georgian state language subtitling or dubbing. This fine, however, had little effect on film‐showing practices. I describe how media‐language politics involved collaboration among social actors in the Georgian Ministry of Culture, the movie theater industry, and the film‐dubbing industry. To do so, I develop the concept of dormant law: a mostly unenforced hard law that codifies aspirational conditions. Through the possibility of selective activation, dormant law functions as a latent instrument of politics. In political and popular discourse during President Saakashvili's era (2004–2013), social actors framed Russian as a potentially hazardous symbolic resource embedded in infrastructure, whereas they framed English as either harmless or enriching to “Georgianness.” In film‐language debates, citizens and politicians reflected on the meanings of “international” languages, in contrast with Georgian. The Film Law manifested a hierarchy of social value in which English and Russian were competing codes, iconic of possible future Georgian modernities.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12209   open full text
  • Façade Egalitarianism? Mafia and Cooperative in Sicily.
    Theodoros Rakopoulos.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    What happens when a criminal organization operating through hierarchical relations establishes a cooperative institution committed to equal participation? This article explores the organizational intersection of a Mafia cooperative, drawing from a trial case involving several Sicilian mafiosi sharing a social life (convivenza) with laypeople in an agrarian winemaking cooperative. This intersection begs exploration of the Mafia's striving for social consent, which is a relatively understudied feature of organized crime. The Mafia's use of egalitarian practices and lawful organization reveals a process of converting cooperative egalitarianism into a hierarchy. This article explores the Mafia cooperative as a paradoxical institution, and it examines the empirical collapse of conceptual dichotomies of coercion–consent and hierarchical–egalitarian systems of social organization. By investigating a Mafia cooperative and its associated convivenza, the article moves beyond such apparent dichotomies to analyze complex outcomes of this social life and to propose a Gramscian attention to consent rather than the traditional focus on violence in Mafia studies.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12207   open full text
  • Scaling Statelessness: Absent, Present, Former, and Liminal States of Somali Experience in South Africa.
    Daniel K. Thompson.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    This study analyzes how Somalis in South Africa perceive states and statelessness, and how their assertions of authority based on statelessness come into confrontation with competing antiforeigner claims, producing differentiated spatial domains of opportunity. Claims to the legal condition of statelessness provide putative Somalis—including other eastern African migrants who embed themselves in Somali‐dominated neighborhoods and economic networks—protection as refugees in South Africa. Nevertheless, statelessness takes on multidimensional and competing meanings as South Africans accuse refugees of embodying the chaos attributed to their countries of origin, and as migrants mobilize claims to belonging that describe forms of stateness as differentially present and absent rather than uniformly encompassing. Somali migrants’ experiences in urban South Africa's segregated landscapes highlight ways in which assertions about state presence and absence travel across scaled spatial frames (from nation‐states to migrant neighborhoods and individual bodies), and shape patterns of collective action and opportunity within differentiated spaces. Foregrounding assertions involved in scale‐ and place‐making imaginaries, I argue that statelessness, like the state, may at times function as an assertion that generates spatial domains and structures life opportunities in these domains.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12202   open full text
  • Ayotzinapa and the Criminalization of Racialized Poverty in La Montaña, Guerrero, Mexico1.
    Mariana Mora.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    This article situates the dramatic case of the forced disappearance of forty‐three peasant and indigenous students from the teachers college, Ayotzinapa, in the city of Iguala, in Guerrero, on September 26, 2014, in a broader context of state violence in Mexico. What are the forces that operate to classify indigenous and peasant lives as waste, hence rendering permissible such atrocities? The article draws on ethnographic evidence collected over six years in La Montaña, Guerrero, Mexico. It points to the racialized spatial forms of governance that articulate state security punitive measures, to neoliberal antipoverty programs, and to the social imaginaries that represent indigenous regions as inherently backward, violent, and ingrained with cultural deficiencies. Drawing from Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism, this article argues that the effects of these racialized geographies engender the conditions for the permissibility of state‐sanctioned death.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12208   open full text
  • Testimony, Disbelief, and Opaque Peace Building in Postgenocide Rwanda.
    Laura Eramian.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    Following the 1994 genocide, a peace‐building industry emerged in Rwanda, one characterized by networks of local and international agents, institutions, and forms of knowledge. This article investigates the politics of peace building in postgenocide Rwanda through ethnographic study of two local civil society‐level organizations. These peace‐building organizations aim to produce testimony from genocide survivors and perpetrators to demonstrate radical personal transformations and newfound capacities to reconcile because of the organizations’ teachings. I call these public performances “reconciliation spectacles.” However, ambiguity and opacity surround the conditions under which this testimony is produced, which gives rise to corruption charges against peace‐building staff and their disciples. I argue that the opaque relationship between peace‐building organizations’ interventions and the outcomes of those interventions engenders not only accusations of ill‐gotten gains but also the power and moral authority of organization staff and their work. The analysis uncovers how irresolvable tensions emerge between guiding principles of the global peace‐building industry and the everyday practices of the local agents who enact them.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12201   open full text
  • Bureaucratic Speech: Language Choice and Democratic Identity in the Taipei Bureaucracy.
    Anya Bernstein.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    This article illuminates the social nature of bureaucratic practice by analyzing the everyday speech of bureaucrats in a polyglossic society. My ethnographic analysis shows how Taipei city government administrators mobilize ideologies associated with Taiwan's two primary languages, and stereotypes associated with bureaucracy, to undermine both. Instead, they present themselves as a postethnonational and postbureaucratic avant‐garde of their new democracy. In doing so, they draw on local values and tropes of legitimation, which place a premium on the personalistic relations and social imbrication of government actors—relations that democracy, for all its potential to spawn dangerous chaos, is seen to facilitate. They represent their government employer not by claiming a superordinate status for it but by situating it as one participant within a complex of institutions, networks, and values. In illuminating both the internally and the externally social nature of government bureaucracy, I highlight the creative and progressive possibilities hidden within the drab government office.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12203   open full text
  • Geographies of Discretion and the Jurisdictional Imagination.
    Jeffrey S. Kahn.
    APLA Newsletter. May 18, 2017
    The modernist ideal of liberal constitutionalism affords jurisdiction a special place as the organizing principle behind the distribution of official state power. Nonetheless, little attention has been paid to the intricate spatial infrastructures that give jurisdiction its form. In this article, I argue that the complex architectures that undergird various jurisdictional registers combine to segment material and virtual landscapes into historically specific, multilayered geographies of discretion, dictating where, when, and to whom various institutions are permitted to speak the law. Looking to politicized litigation and advocacy over the rights of Haitian asylum seekers in the United States, I demonstrate how battles over jurisdictional cartographies can both instantiate and remake the spatiality of nation‐states and the cosmologies of liberal sovereignty on which they rest.
    May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12205   open full text
  • Sociality of Enforced Waiting in Rwanda's Postgenocide Legal Architecture.
    Kristin C. Doughty.
    APLA Newsletter. February 28, 2017
    This article brings together recent anthropological scholarship on waiting as a social and political practice and on legal forums and social repair. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Rwanda between 2004 and 2008 with gacaca (grassroots genocide courts) and comite y'abunzi (mediation committees), this article asks: What practices of sociality are produced through enforced waiting in legal forums, and what does waiting reveal about legal architectures and social reconstruction? I argue that the legal architecture of postgenocide Rwanda produced enforced waiting as an integral part of people's engagement with grassroots legal forums. This enforced waiting combined state surveillance and control with generative forms of social engagements, and thus was a practice central to how people reshaped relationships with one another and with the state. The simultaneously generative and oppressive dimensions of waiting could unsettle the temporal grounding of the legal architecture itself—characterized by linearity, rupture, and boundedness—which draws attention to the processual nature of social repair. Analytic attention to the sociality of waiting in legal architectures is particularly important as people increasingly interface with legal and quasi‐legal grassroots institutions around the world, whether in the name of transitional justice, alternative dispute resolution, or customary law.
    February 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/plar.12199   open full text
  • From “Deportability” to “Denounce‐ability:” New Forms of Labor Subordination in an Era of Governing Immigration Through Crime.
    Sarah B. Horton.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    The highly publicized 2008 Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) worksite raid in Postville, Iowa, signaled a new strategy in interior immigration enforcement. Rather than merely deport the unauthorized workers it apprehended, ICE arrested them on charges of working under stolen documents (aggravated identity theft) and invented Social Security numbers (Social Security fraud) and imprisoned them prior to their deportation. Drawing on interviews with forty‐five migrant farmworkers and six labor supervisors in a migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, this article explores how unauthorized migrants obtain the work documents they must provide to labor supervisors in order to work. This article shows that the poverty and marginalization of migrant communities has led to the mutually beneficial exchange of work authorization documents between donors with legal status and recipients without legal status. Using ethnography to recontextualize these document loans, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the criminal charges levied in Postville. Because voluntary document exchanges may be misrepresented as involuntary theft, labor supervisors use their knowledge of identity loan to suppress identity recipients’ workers’ compensation claims. This article examines the effect of the criminalization of immigration on labor discipline, suggests that migrant “denounce‐ability” has joined migrant “deportability” as a powerful new tool of labor subordination.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12196   open full text
  • Kinship of Paper: Genealogical Charts as Bureaucratic Documents.
    Liviu Chelcea.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    Ethnographies of groups who draw genealogical charts are relatively common in anthropology. Bringing the ethnographic gaze to bear on genealogical charts drawn up by bureaucratic and legal institutions, however, is a fairly rare methodological strategy in both the anthropology of bureaucracy and kinship studies. Hybridizing these two bodies of anthropological theory and using ethnographic material on post‐socialist housing restitution in Romania, I describe how bureaucratic and legal institutions co‐create genealogical charts and use them as tools to make the composition of kin networks legible and to verify and validate them. Several articles of the Civil Code strictly regulate inheritance, amounting to what might be called, after Malinowski, the state's bastard algebra of kinship. These legal prescriptions inscribe kinship in bureaucratic certificates, documents, and genealogical charts, which help state institutions reach legal certainty about the flow of inheritance rights. Rather than simply dismissing genealogical charts as false science, anthropologists might approach them as a mundane form of statecraft and as bureaucratic inscriptions able to author social worlds and make law active in everyday life.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12195   open full text
  • “We Follow Reason, Not the Law:” Disavowing the Law in Rural China.
    Andrea E. Pia.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    Recent debates about the moral climate in China have focused on its citizens’ purported loss of traditional values and interest in the public good. Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, is described in terms of a moral vacuum: the absence of shared values through which citizens’ public behavior might contribute to the nation's greater good. The Chinese state is reforming its judicial system with the aim of making it more accessible to its citizenry, so that law and legal rights create bonds between individuals and the collectivity. This approach envisions legal mediation as a vehicle to bring law to the countryside. This article, however, shows that in rural Yunnan, the law and legal rights are seen as instruments of disenfranchisement. This article demonstrates that Yunnanese rural society is better described as a moral “plenum” than as a “vacuum.” It also shows that Chinese law, via temporary use rights to local resources, is ousting alternative regimes of resource management. These alternative regimes are predicated on local villagers’ participation in and responsibility for the public good.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12194   open full text
  • Speaking of Justice: Encounters in a Legal Self‐Help Clinic.
    Alyse Bertenthal.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    This article explores a new form of legal aid commonly referred to as “legal self‐help.” Through ethnographic research in a legal self‐help clinic, I examine the techniques through which help to legal self‐help is produced, sustained, and sometimes even challenged as a means of better understanding and critiquing the reformist ideal of “access to justice.” In exploring this new context for the negotiation of legal disputes, I show how the shift from legal help to legal self‐help blurs the boundaries between professional and lay people, between procedure and substance, and between rules and relationships. By tracking the discursive movement across and through these categories, I explore the logic of legal self‐help as a form of access to law and the legal process.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12193   open full text
  • The Politics of Livability: Tutoring “Kinwork” in a New Delhi Women's Arbitration Center.
    Katherine Lemons.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    This article provides an analysis of dispute adjudication in a women's arbitration center, or mahila panchayat, in New Delhi, India. In analyzing two exemplary cases from my fieldwork, I argue that mahila panchayat adjudication tends to tutor kinwork as a means of producing livable lives within a context of material and ideological constraint. Successfully adjudicated cases culminate in contracts that explicitly enumerate the demands of marriage and the requirements of reconciliation, thereby rendering disputants responsible subjects who are accountable to the contracts’ terms. This formal conclusion to the adjudication process reflects the mahila panchayat's politics of livability, which entail teaching women to live with and through kinship norms by recognizing and rationally relating to them.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12192   open full text
  • Indigenous Claims: Hearings, Settlements, and Neoliberal Silencing.
    Fiona McCormack.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    This article investigates the double‐edged potentiality of the Waitangi Tribunal, an indigenous claims forum in New Zealand, and combines an ethnographic background to a recent claim with an anthropological interpretation of the meanings and outcomes of this encounter. I suggest that the legal justice framework of the claims proceedings and the political aspect of settlements are distinct yet contingent phenomena. Both are inherently embedded in the neoliberalization of society. I suggest that marae (meeting‐house complexes where tribunal hearings are held)—albeit symbolizing singular Māori spaces and distinctive loci where indigenous identity is reproduced—are equally sites where cultural and economic struggles articulate with neoliberal logics. I draw attention to the persistence of alienation in Māori society irrespective of the comparative generosity of the reparative justice program; I also consider the contradictory spaces opened for indigeneity under neoliberal governance and their unintended consequences, inventions, and creative hybridizations. I argue that a fruitful way to foreground the precarity of this engagement is by paying attention to silences. Such silences are multilevel, prefigure the claims process, are expressed as inequalities in the hearings, conscribe a particular version of a postcolonial economy, and reference a broader pattern of economic deprivation.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12191   open full text
  • Tell It to the Judge: Procedural Justice and a Community Court in Brooklyn.
    Avram Bornstein, Anthony Marcus, Ric Curtis, Sarah Rivera, Rachel Swaner.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    Based on direct observation inside and outside the courts and on interviews with one hundred residents and two hundred previous offenders, this article examines the performance of procedural justice in a community court in the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Results show that the community court is widely praised compared to the downtown Brooklyn courts and in sharp contrast to police enforcement. The content of this praise suggests that the community court cultivates legitimacy by treating people respectfully and by helping to mitigate problems with powerful institutions such as the police and the New York City Housing Authority. In light of these results, this article considers intertwined debates about procedural justice and how these ideas articulate with legal anthropologists’ understanding of hegemony.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12190   open full text
  • Political Documents and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurs: Lobbying the European Parliament during Turkey's EU Integration.
    Bilge Firat.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    The European Union's (EU) accession negotiations with Turkey attract a lot of attention from all over Europe to the European Parliament, which serves as a modern agora wherein interests, information, and influence frequently exchange hands. Fine negotiations over what is important to European publics and powerful interests in and outside of the EU are revealed in amendments to sequential drafts of parliamentary reports; these take place through formal and informal communicative channels via lobbying. Complementing ethnographic observations with analysis of EU documents at different stages, I argue that political documents are a means for and contribute largely to bureaucratic politics in both the EU and Turkey, and actors increasingly rely on them to sustain communication between otherwise reluctant parties while maintaining an enduring demand for their expertise.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12189   open full text
  • Mobilities and Risks in Coastal Kenya: Jumping Scales Versus Staying Local.
    Dillon Mahoney.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    Removed from the roadsides by waves of “city cleaning” in the early 2000s, Kenyan crafts traders have spent their careers struggling for market access within the port city and tourism hub of Mombasa. An Indian Ocean city in which the mobile and immobile of the global economy converge and interact, some Kenyan traders strive to “jump scales” into international networks, made more possible in the last decade with the help of digital technologies such as cell phones and e‐mail. Based on research conducted between 2001 and 2014, this article explores the stories of two Kenyan crafts traders and how they negotiate the changing relationships and risks of different types of mobility, from everyday travel around Mombasa and Kenya to the mobility made possible by new telecommunication technologies. I focus on emergent strategies for economic advancement and the need to negotiate a variety of formal and informal political, legal, and economic barriers. I demonstrate that translating the new forms of digital technologies and mobility into economic success is contingent on the types of risks accompanying these new mobilities and the capacity for individuals’ social networks to help in gaining access to jobs, land, and new social connections.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12188   open full text
  • The Spectacle of a Good Half‐Widow: Women in Search of their Disappeared Men in the Kashmir Valley.
    Ather Zia.
    APLA Newsletter. November 21, 2016
    After militancy for self‐determination and Independence started in 1989 in the Kashmir Valley, more than eight thousand Kashmiri men have been subjected to enforced disappearance by the Indian Army. In 1994 the Association of Parents of the Disappeared Persons (APDP), a female‐dominated movement, began to search for these disappeared men. In this article, I trace the everyday agency and activism of an APDP activist amid the entrenched militarization of Kashmir. In mainstream Western feminist understanding, gendered agency is often seen as aggressive and openly subversive. In this analysis, agency emerges as more nuanced than, and thus different from, a simple notion of confrontational resistance to oppression. I use the Foucauldian paradigm of micropolitics, specifically focusing on its biopolitical aspect, to ethnographically illustrate how a particular APDP activist performs and sustains her public activism. By theorizing the Kashmiri language's term Asal Zanan, which translates as “a good woman,” I illustrate how a finer understanding of agency emerges, which may not only appear in stereotypical and confrontational forms but also with deeply contextual and cultural nuances.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12187   open full text
  • Translating “Best Interest”: Child Welfare Decisions at the US–México Border.
    Naomi Glenn‐Levin Rodriguez.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    “Best interest” is a principle that plays a central role in judicial decisions about child welfare and custody determinations. It figures prominently in court cases involving children in the United States foster care system, as well as child migrants applying for legal residency status. This article explores best interest as a site of translation, one that enables social workers and legal actors to make seemingly value‐free legal decisions that, in fact, codify a perception that the United States is necessarily the best place for all children to be raised, regardless of their specific circumstances.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12177   open full text
  • The Production of Indigenous Land Rights: Judicial Decisions across National, Regional, and Global Scales.
    Laurie Kroshus Medina.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    This analysis explores the circulation of legal arguments, instruments, and decisions across national, regional, and global scales to reveal the mutual interdependence of these scales and their associated bodies of law in the production of indigenous land rights. Anthropologists studying the production of international human rights law have focused primarily on the drafting and implementation of rights instruments within the UN system, but this article engages a different site for the production of rights: the judicial arena. Highlighting the role played by judicial decisions and the arguments of legal scholars in the production of indigenous land rights, this article traces the trajectory of a petition for recognition of indigenous rights to land by Mopan and Q'eqchi’ Maya of Belize, as it moved from Belize to the Inter‐American Commission on Human Rights. The resulting decision circulated through subsequent indigenous rights cases within the Inter‐American system to solidify regional jurisprudence on indigenous rights. The IACHR decision also returned to Belize, where the Supreme Court engaged it to reach its own decision on Maya land rights. In turn, the Belize Supreme Court ruling was launched into global circulation, shaping arguments concerning the content and status of international indigenous rights law.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12176   open full text
  • Local Tea Party Groups and the Vibrancy of the Movement.
    William H. Westermeyer.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    The Tea Party Movement (TPM) is often discussed in terms of Americans for Prosperity, the Republican Party, and other well‐funded, national groups. Yet, grounded ethnographic research reveals vibrant, independent, local organizations, which, while they do draw on nationally disseminated cultural images and discourses, are far from simple agents of the larger organizations and media. Relying on eighteen months of fieldwork among eight local Tea Party groups in central North Carolina, I argue that these small, locally situated groups are crucial components in the TPM and its effects. Using theoretical concepts from social movement studies and social practice theory, I analyze the ways personal and Internet‐based social networks, media, and elite organizations are cocreating new political subjects, and demonstrate the importance of local, face‐to‐face political organizations in cultivating and animating these subjects. I suggest that localized political groups are important for long‐lasting political transformations. [social movements, right wing movements, identity and agency, United States, American South]
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12175   open full text
  • Human Rights, Colonial Criminality, and the Death of Kwementyaye Briscoe in Custody: A Central Australian Case Study.
    Sarah Holcombe.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    The intersection of colonialism, legal systems, and human rights is revealed in the Alice Springs Watch House, a place for the temporary custody of, usually intoxicated, Aboriginal men. “Kwementyaye Briscoe” became the fourth death in custody since 1999; and this article draws on his coronial inquest. The post‐mortem humanity of the coroner is contrasted with the uncaring disregard of the police for Briscoe while he lived. These contradictory postures reveal the contingency of Aboriginal people's human rights in the neoliberal colonial state. Critical criminology has revealed that the Australian legal system has been complicit in establishing and reproducing the Aboriginal “criminal”. Relative to colonial relations of power, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the associated machinery of international law are relatively recent phenomena. This articles questions: What can a consideration of the discourse of human rights bring to an understanding of the treatment of an Aboriginal man in custody, and is this discourse complicit? Also, would sanctioning human rights in national law, via, for example, a bill of rights, legitimize human rights while simultaneously revealing their tacit assumptions? Agamben's concept of “bare life” sheds light on the paradoxes of human rights, as they are intensified in this custodial context.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12174   open full text
  • Public Secrets, Muzzled Science: Agnotological Practice, State Performance, and Dying Salmon in British Columbia.
    Maximilian Viatori.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    This article examines recent efforts by the Canadian government to silence a federal scientist from publicly speaking about her research on the decline in Fraser River sockeye salmon. I argue that the information embargo through which Canadian officials silenced government science not only served an agnotological function of demobilizing the opposition by promoting public ignorance about ecological issues, but also functioned as a means of state making by producing an image of the state as a unitary and powerful actor. This performance of secrecy represents a critical component of contemporary governance, and its examination has much to reveal about the central role that the production of a state effect plays in neoliberalism.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12173   open full text
  • An Injury to One Is an Injury to All? Class Actions in South African Courts and Their Social Effects on Plaintiffs.
    Rita Kesselring.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    This article contributes to one of the key issues in recent scholarship on the relation between law and society: how does engagement with the law trigger shifts in subjectivities? Scholars suggest that as groups and individuals seek recourse to the law, their subjectivities are legalized. They are skeptical of the global increase of social issues being taken to court. I critically review these theories of ‘legalization’ by empirically tracing the implications of procedural rules onto forms of sociality among apartheid‐era victims today. With the example of a class action, an emerging legal remedy in South Africa I will show that, on the hand, procedural pressure to personalize injuries may indeed disrupt solidarity. The reason why the law is effective in producing a suspicious subject position, however, cannot be attributed to the ‘quasi‐magical power’ of the law, as Bourdieu called it, but has to be searched for in historically grown social and political circumstances apartheid victims’ find themselves in today. The law does not simply impose its logic onto the social, it can only legalize for pre‐existing societal reasons.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12172   open full text
  • Reluctant Bureaucracy: Accounts, Narrative, and Negotiation in Serbian High School Classrooms.
    Rachel George.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    Despite anthropologists’ increased interest in bureaucracies, the pervasive role of talk for resolving policy–practice gaps and structuring citizen–bureaucrat encounters has been underanalyzed in the literature on the everyday practices of the state. This article examines classrooms in Belgrade, Serbia, as examples of sites in which some locally recognized features of bureaucratic interactions can be enacted and reproduced. I argue that frequent student‐teacher negotiations over grades, attendance, and behavior render the classroom a space for reluctant bureaucracy. Teachers, even those who criticize the bureaucratic rules that govern education, spend much of their time enforcing and interpreting an oft‐confusing set of state‐mandated school policies, while students use excuses, justifications, and narratives to negotiate outcomes. This situation parallels many Serbs’ experiences in government offices, where they believe the law is rarely applied fairly and success depends on making a persuasive case. Although student–teacher negotiations may reproduce some common features of bureaucratic interactions, teachers also demonstrate ambivalence toward the practice of negotiation—and its political implications—through an alternation of what I call the institutional voice and the intimate voice. Through this alternation, teachers critique the system that they simultaneously perpetuate and train students to manage.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12171   open full text
  • Multimodality, Transparency, and Food Safety in China.
    Megan Tracy.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    In September 2008, revelation of melamine‐contaminated milk supplies in China's dairy industry rocked its manufacturing sector still reeling from highly publicized food and safety scandals in 2007. Despite state and corporate interventions, regulatory and quality management issues highlighted in these earlier scandals remained. Local government and corporate actors’ attempts to suppress information about the scandal highlighted concerns about transparency, accountability, and corruption. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 in Beijing and Shanghai and across 2012 and 2013 in Beijing and China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. My goals are twofold. First, I seek to move forward discussions of transparency in China, which often suffer from easy dismissals by academics, the media and the public alike. Second, I aim to broaden our understanding of transparency as not just fulfilling multiple functions but also as multimodal in that it is actively produced across different scales of experience and through diverse mechanisms. Using data focused on the production and monitoring of food safety, I describe the structural challenges that led to the 2008 scandal, the measures implemented in the industry to prevent future problems, and the broader discussions and interventions designed to improve China's overall food safety record.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12170   open full text
  • Best Practices for Besting the Bureaucracy: Avoiding Military Service in Israel.
    Erica Weiss.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    This article considers the evasion of mandatory military service in Israel. Exemption from service is granted on a number of grounds at the discretion of military bureaucrats. Each year, many young people seek to obtain such an exemption for a wide variety of reasons, both ideological and pragmatic. At their disposal is a body of knowledge, collectively assembled by young recruits who have previously encountered the bureaucracy; that is, a best practices guide to navigate the exemption process. This article examines the creation and deployment of this body of knowledge. These best practices include information about legitimate exemptions and evaluation criteria, bureaucratic procedures, a typology of bureaucrats who a young recruit will encounter, advice about the type of persona to present to the military bureaucrats, as well as the key elements of the performance of this persona. Many ethnographic accounts describe the ways the bureaucratic gaze controls, disciplines, and frustrates clients attempting to accomplish their goals. This article considers the ways clients return the gaze of the state through their own surveillance and knowledge production, and in doing so flip the script on bureaucratic control.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12169   open full text
  • Between Children and Transnational Economic Actors:The Discounted “Belongings” of Young Chinese Migrants.
    Michele L. Statz.
    APLA Newsletter. September 23, 2016
    Each year, approximately 1,500 Chinese youth (typically aged 15–17) migrate alone and clandestinely to the United States. While most intend to advance themselves and their families socially and economically, not all are immediately successful: some are apprehended and placed in removal proceedings. Here, immigration cause lawyers are tasked with presenting clients who might otherwise be termed “economic migrants” as uniquely vulnerable and deserving of legal status. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, this article confronts a disconnect between the forms of belonging many young Chinese migrants prioritize—belonging to the workforce and to transnational kin and peer networks—and lawyers’ strategic disregard for these situated identities. It asks: How do young migrants reconcile their largely autonomous maneuvering with the accounts put forth by their attorney—accounts of cultural coercion, parental deficiency, and unagentive “children”? What forces give rise to these narratives, and what are their consequences for clients, and for lawyers? Tracing the utilization and suppression of meaningful identities in various institutional, kin, and community contexts, this article illuminates the ways in which young migrants’ pursuit of one form of status, namely legal, powerfully impacts their valuation and attainment of other, more discrete markers of success.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12168   open full text
  • Temporary Measures: The Production of Illegality in Costa Rican Immigration Law.
    Caitlin E. Fouratt.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    This article examines the everyday lives of Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica to understand the temporal aspects of illegality produced by immigration law. Two sets of temporary measures highlight the temporality of both law and illegality. First, frequent legal reform, temporary immigration measures, and the bureaucratic labyrinth of immigration administration create a sense of Costa Rican immigration law as temporary. The ongoing temporary character of law and the forms of immigrant illegality it generates create uncertainty about the boundaries between legality and illegality among migrants in Costa Rica. Second, Nicaraguans in Costa Rica respond to the indeterminacy of the law and their economic and social position in relation to it through their own temporary measures. These measures constitute two forms of waiting: first, immigrants feel “locked up” by the shifting legal and administrative complexities of immigration; and second, they create quasi‐legal ways to navigate immigration law during the long process of legalization of their status.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12136   open full text
  • The Making and Unmaking of Patent Ownership: Technicalities, Materialities, and Subjectivities.
    Laura A. Foster.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    Feminist sociolegal studies have recently taken up the technicalities of doctrines, documents, and regulations to better understand the law. In an affiliated move, feminist science studies turned to the materialities of theories, practices, and nonhuman organisms to make critical sense of science. These methodological turns focus not on gender, per se, but on precise mechanisms of law and science that structure, reinforce, and reconfigure power and inequality. Drawing on these methodological approaches, this article attends to the technicalities and materialities of patent ownership and benefit sharing in South Africa in regards to San peoples’ struggles over the patenting of the Hoodia gordonii plant. An examination of patent documents, benefit‐sharing agreements, legislative appendixes, and the biology of plants generates an understanding of how patent ownership, rather than being natural or value‐neutral, is a historical and sociocultural process shaping, refashioning, and being inscribed across multiple scales of nation‐state jurisdictions, divergent ways of knowing, and biochemical orderings of plants.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12135   open full text
  • Experiences of Discrimination in an Emerging Latina/o Community.
    Laura Macia.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    In this article I explore how members of an emerging community of Latina/o immigrants in Pittsburgh, a small but rapidly growing population, understand and respond to discrimination. Both documented and undocumented Latina/o immigrants reported experiencing discrimination and facing challenges in addressing these experiences. However, personal context has an impact on specific grievance processes. I specifically explore three main topics: (1) the difficulty expressed by many Latina/o immigrants in using the name–blame–claim continuum for discriminatory acts; (2) how discriminatory incidents tend to reinforce the intrinsic inequality at the root of discrimination; and (3) how acts of discrimination and the responses to them actively shape the Latina/o identity within their own community and by their American‐born counterparts.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12134   open full text
  • Mediating Indigeneity: Public Space and the Making of Political Identity in Andean Peru.
    Eric Hirsch.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    This article investigates the relationship between political identity and public space in the communities of the Colca Valley, in Peru's rural Andes, by examining two moments in which the built environment became a medium for formatting and engaging a local indigeneity. The first is the colonial invasion, during which the reducción plan condensed and dispersed “unruly” native subjects around a public square and a church. The second is the contemporary moment, in which that same space is used to stage audits, evaluations, and competitions in the context of a development paradigm shifting from service provision to investing in indigeneity by financing the promotion of entrepreneurial and agricultural practices that organizations classify as typically indigenous. This article offers two arguments: (1) in the colonial era, notions of indigenous identity configured efforts to improve and regulate daily life—or, to achieve development; and (2) through changing historical contexts, the built environment is used as a medium for defining Colcan indigeneity, deploying it to generate strategic knowledge and regulatory force, and investing it with the potential for various kinds of salvation. This approach suggests that transnational paradigms do not simply “touch down,” but also, adjust and push existing dynamics through the local media at their disposal.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12133   open full text
  • The Specter of Surveillance: Navigating “Illegality” and Indigeneity among Maya Migrants in the San Francisco Bay Area.
    Deanna Barenboim.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    This article explores how indigenous migrants experience the sociopolitical and existential condition of “illegality” in the United States. Drawing on the experiences of Maya migrants from Yucatán, Mexico, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I argue that the specter of state surveillance and the threat of law enforcement produce a particular politics of (im)mobility for indigenous migrants. This local politics of mobility takes form through spatial tactics of invisibility and visibility. Tracing migrants’ tactical maneuvers through public space, I show how their relations to space, place, and movement alter cultural sensibilities of tranquilidad (tranquility),and further instantiate “illegality” as a site of exclusion. This analysis of the experiential effects of anticipated surveillance provides a deeper understanding of the power of the state to enforce migrant “illegality” even in cities that promise official sanctuary.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12132   open full text
  • Exploring Nature, Making the Nation: The Spatial Politics of Ecotourism in Lebanon.
    Kristin V. Monroe.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    This article explores how Lebanese ecotourism sites and excursions present a spatial narrative marked by aspirations for a consolidated nation that connects the rural and the urban across a diverse ecological terrain. Employing several ecotourism projects as case studies, I argue that ideas about nation‐making that are rooted in embodied interaction with and awareness of the natural landscape engender a form of national territorialization that relies not upon staying “in place” but rather through the very mobility of the citizen‐traveler across the national space. A central aim of my analysis of ecotourism, in a country strained by geographical divisions entangled with complex issues of national belonging, is to broaden the conversation within anthropology about the political life and spatial dimensions of domestic tourism within the Global South.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12131   open full text
  • Carbon as a Metric of the Human.
    Jerome Whitington.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    In this article, carbon management is framed as a domain in which active reflection on the uncertain significance of climate change takes material form in the construction of new infrastructures of carbon accounting and carbon markets. “Carbon” refers not to a chemical, per se, but to an imaginative space of global atmospheric relations rendered material. The historical ontology of carbon and atmosphere together form a distinctive global medium, as I describe. The atmosphere as medium is manifest in the informational spaces of digital platforms meant to do work on the human subjects of climate change. I describe the carbon accounting practices of two Beijing‐based enterprises that are involved in building out the infrastructure of carbon accounting for the purpose of decarbonizing Chinese industry. Carbon is at the center of a contemporary formation that is imaginative, materialist, heavily quantified, and oriented toward the technical modification of human affairs. It supposes that humans as planetary agents have become significant in terms of collective activity that is historically recent, highly unequal, and global in scope. The human is configured not as a biological species, such as in debates on “life itself” or distinctions between humans and other species, or even in terms of an essential humanity that can provide the transcendent bonds of a moral community. Rather, carbon accounting formulates the human ecologically and geologically with an eye toward imagining the future forms these relations might take. Hence, climate change has identified the human as a contemporary problem with particular urgency.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12130   open full text
  • What Is Carbon Dioxide? When Is Carbon Dioxide?
    Gökçe Günel.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    In this article, I focus on carbon capture and storage (CCS), a controversial climate change mitigation technology that operates by collecting carbon dioxide from point sources and depositing it in underground locations, such as depleting oil reservoirs. Specifically, I investigate the ways in which certain CCS professionals imagine and demand a reconceptualization of carbon dioxide: not as waste or as dangerous material that should be taxed and exchanged in carbon markets, but as a neutral gas that can be bought and sold as a commodity, and perhaps used as a drilling additive for the oil and gas industry. CCS professionals suggest that carbon dioxide has multiple legal, political, and chemical meanings and existences across different points on a CCS network, and they acknowledge how this condition makes it difficult to produce the molecule as a commodity characterized by exchange and commensurability. In studying the commodification of carbon dioxide, I show how these professionals do not intend to create “sameness” across the market, but instead wish to commodify the molecule through “linking” various versions of carbon dioxide together. By tracking carbon dioxide as it moves within a CCS network, I explore the moral logics of CCS technologies, which obscure how energy‐intensive models of life triggered climate change in the first place.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12129   open full text
  • Climate Politics in the Anthropocene and Environmentalism Beyond Nature and Culture in Brazilian Amazonia.
    David Rojas.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    This article examines the work of a group of scientists who contributed to influential climate policy approaches while taking part in groundbreaking research on climate transformations. The scientists promoted a policy approach known as REDD+, which was designed to slow climate change by paying forest landholders to not cut their forests. These scientists also made important contributions to the science of the Anthropocene, which is premised on the idea that humanity has become a geological force that is transforming the planet in disruptive ways. I argue that their science and policy efforts are at odds with anthropological critiques that view environmentalists as experts who see themselves as bearing exceptional “cultural” capacities and therefore as capable of protecting or improving “Nature.” In a region of Amazonia, the science of the Anthropocene and the associated REDD+ projects moved beyond ontological understandings that divide the world into the opposing spheres of Nature and Culture. The scientists did not see themselves as inhabiting a “cultural” sphere from which they could protect Amazonia as a “natural” object, but rather they used REDD+ projects to immerse themselves in what they felt were irreversible, uncontrollable, and disruptive socioenvironmental transformations.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12128   open full text
  • What Does Climate Change Demand of Anthropology?
    Jerome Whitington.
    APLA Newsletter. May 23, 2016
    There is no abstract available for this paper.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/plar.12127   open full text
  • Whitewashing Indigenous Oklahoma and Chicano Arizona: 21st‐Century Legal Mechanisms of Settlement.
    Jean Dennison.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    This article interrogates the various tactics settler colonial legal systems use in establishing and entrenching authority over territories. By comparing a recent Osage Nation reservation court case with Arizona House Bill (HB) 2281, enacted into law as Ariz. Rev. Stats. § 15–112, which has been used to ban Mexican American/Raza Studies (MARS) from the classroom, it is possible to illustrate the varied processes by which legal systems attempt to render U.S. control of land an indisputable norm. In the context of both Oklahoma and Arizona, settler authority over territory is entrenched through the outlawing of institutions that contest its neutrality and universality. This article challenges U.S. settlement by making visible some of the legal processes by which it operates.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12056   open full text
  • Documenting “Community” in the ≠khomani San Land Claim in South Africa.
    Daniel Huizenga.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    In this article I explore how documents created in support of ≠khomani San land claimants, located in the southern Kalahari Desert, represent a specific way of knowing that contributes to a socio‐legal construction of “community.” The documents that I use in this article have been authored by government organizations and NGOs, and compiled into a single repository of community information. By tracking the use of the term community throughout the repository, I demonstrate that the term is articulated through and across various fields of knowledge to achieve different social, political, and legal ends. This field of diverse motives, I argue, is neutralized and obscured through the standardized form of the documents themselves, contributing to a socio‐legal construction of community wherein notions of indigeneity are both exclusive and temporally fixed.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12055   open full text
  • Codifying Consensus and Constructing Boundaries: Setting the Limits of Appellation d'origine contrôlée Protection in Bordeaux, France.
    Erica A. Farmer.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    Legal geographical indication (GI) regimes are increasingly considered a promising tool to protect cultural heritage from outside appropriation. Yet such regimes have origins in a much more specific context: the structures and practices of wine‐making in the elite wine regions of France. This article examines the relationships between different types of communities and structures involved in boundary‐making under the prototypical GI system, appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC), in its place of origin, Bordeaux. Here, legal boundaries are simultaneously reinforced, created, and defined by the values and priorities of the society that created them. In this article I consider geographical indications in Bordeaux not only as communal rights but as communal emanations, both to highlight the idiosyncrasies of AOC as a legal system and some of the problems and possibilities status suggests for the future of intellectual property rights.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12054   open full text
  • Sovereign Silence: Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act and Legalizing Sex Work in Sonagachi.
    Simanti Dasgupta.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    Drawing upon ethnographic work with a grassroots sex workers’ organization in Calcutta, Durbar Samanwaya Samiti (Durbar), this article analyzes the relationship between subalternity and silence. I discuss how sex workers, especially new entrants, use silence as a subaltern strategy to resist state and non‐state surveillance intended to oppose trafficking. The increased surveillance is a direct result of the global anti‐trafficking narrative, led mainly by the United States, in which developing countries, like India, adopt measures to avoid being downgraded in the United States’ Trafficking in Persons Report. I contend that these national and international efforts have led to a quandary where the lives of these sex workers are rendered inaudible. Here I specifically examine the practices of the Self‐Regulatory Board, established by Durbar to identify new entrants who may have been unwilling trafficked and do not want to join the profession. I argue that the Board, in replicating state practices, in effect has created an environment where women prefer to embrace silence in order to confront its power.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12053   open full text
  • Sufficient Citizens: Moderation and the Politics of Sustainable Development in Thailand.
    Eli Elinoff.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    After the 1997 Asian markets crash, the theory of the “sufficiency economy” altered the discourse of development in Thailand. Emphasizing Buddhist notions of moderation and “enough” sufficiency recast development as a means to temper socio‐economic volatility by reforming consumer affect. Sufficiency theory pinned the nation's economic upheaval on excessive desires, attempting to intervene in these impulses through projects rooted in personal moderation and communality. In this article, I explore the relationship between politics, citizenship, and sufficiency. Through ethnographic analysis of cases from urban squatter settlements taking part in state‐driven participatory urban planning policies, I argue that sufficiency has become central to debates over citizenship in contemporary Thailand. Urban planners use sufficiency to attempt to produce what they term “personal development” and to attempt to defuse political claims by training the poor to moderate their demands by learning “enough.” I also show how residents of squatter communities use the language and practices of sufficiency to make political claims and to demonstrate their legitimacy as citizens with rights to the city. In doing so, I demonstrate how notions of sustainable development tied to moderation extend and potentially interrupt social inequalities.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12052   open full text
  • Islamic Finance and the Afterlives of Development in Malaysia.
    Daromir Rudnyckyj.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    Government regulators, Islamic scholars, finance professionals, and secular academics have recently taken steps to turn Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital, into a global hub for Islamic finance. This article describes some of the actions these actors have taken to position Kuala Lumpur as the central node in this emerging financial system. This article highlights key principles of Islamic finance and the debates in which practitioners are engaged while developing a shariah‐compliant financial system. It shows how these plans draw on previous efforts by the Malaysian state—in part in response to Islamist political critiques—to design techniques for the provision of capital commensurable with both Islam and capitalism. In so doing, Malaysia's Islamic finance project expresses four dimensions of the afterlives of development: the creation of alternative political and economic networks; a managerial role for the state; the creation of new forms of expertise; and the assemblage of religious and economic practices, two domains that earlier efforts toward secular modernization had presumed separate.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12051   open full text
  • Networks for Development: Volunteer Tourism, Information and Communications Technology, and the Paradoxes of Alternative Development.
    Sharon McLennan.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    The projecthonduras network identifies itself as “an alternative concept for the development of Honduras using information and communications technology (ICT) to identify, mobilize and coordinate all the available human capital in Honduras and around the world.” These ambitious goals reflect a wider commitment to non‐traditional, non‐state‐directed alternative development that calls on a network of volunteers, encouraging them to exercise their knowledge and compassion to aid in the development of Honduras. This article analyzes the promotion of volunteerism within the projecthonduras network, and the use of internet‐enabled networking to multiply the impact of volunteers in development. This is a contested assemblage in which the promises of technological opportunities and people‐led development are confronted by critiques of neo‐colonialism and modernization in the contemporary neoliberal context. The article ethnographically documents how, despite the promises of networking and volunteerism and the humanitarian foundations of the network, strong traces of modernist principles remain within projecthonduras. It casts light on the concept of networks for development, and illuminates a central paradox of the projecthonduras.com model for development: despite its goal to be an alternative model, its rhetoric and practices build on developmentalist legacies and contributes to the neo‐liberalization of Honduras.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12050   open full text
  • Designing Development: Humanitarian Design in the Financial Inclusion Assemblage.
    Anke Schwittay.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development problems in “innovative” ways: professional designers and the organizations that fund them. What has become known as humanitarian design is an instantiation of the afterlives of development, which redefines the problem of development as eliciting the needs of poor clients and creating mechanisms so that they can provide feedback on proposed solutions. This reframing results in hybrid forms of development knowledge that combine business and entrepreneurial objectives with concerns about designers’ moral responsibilities in the contemporary world. The use of humanitarian design in creating formal financial products and services for the poor is analyzed through the work of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12049   open full text
  • Counter‐Accounting with Invisible Data: The Struggle for Transparency in Myanmar's Energy Sector.
    Ken MacLean.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    This article examines the counter‐accounting methods one NGO, EarthRights International (ERI), uses to make Myanmar's notoriously opaque energy sector more transparent. ERI's methodological approach relies heavily on the identification of “invisible data,” which do not appear in the statistics that governments and foreign energy companies release concerning their joint ventures. However, the data leave patterned traces in other statistical financial data. ERI asserts that it is possible to reconstruct joint venture balance sheets by comparing these traces against what the principles have not disclosed, such as with the controversial Yadana pipeline and the precedent‐setting human rights lawsuit connected to it. The choices that ERI made illustrate how financial “facts” are fashioned rather than found, and that technical decisions regarding who does the counting, what gets counted, and what is disclosed to whom are profoundly political in nature. Such decisions also foreground key limitations of NGO‐led revenue transparency projects, especially in resource‐rich countries. Greater data disclosure does not necessarily result in increased transparency. Rather, the proliferation of structured and unstructured data sources (information that is organized and readily searchable versus information that is not) often leads to greater disagreement among key stakeholders regarding the relevance, neutrality, intelligibility, and verifiability of the numbers available for audit.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12048   open full text
  • Afterlives of Development.
    Daromir Rudnyckyj, Anke Schwittay.
    APLA Newsletter. April 30, 2014
    There is no abstract available for this paper.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/plar.12047   open full text
  • Navigational Tools for Central African Roadblocks.
    Louisa Lombard.
    APLA Newsletter. July 10, 2013
    This article explores the politics of roadblocks in the northeastern reaches of the Central African Republic. Over the past 30 years, roadblocks have become widespread in this area of extremely minimal state institutional presence; they are one symptom of broader processes of militarization. Building on work that sees the state as a set of practices with “magical” effects, I foreground the unpredictability and negotiation that characterize roadblock encounters to show how they challenge the dominant theories of governance in “stateless” spaces. Though roadblock workers invoke the idea of the all‐powerful state in order to qualify themselves with authorities to dispossess travelers, their practices end up strengthening noncentralized modes of rule, and particularly quests for personal profit.
    July 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/plar.12008   open full text
  • Being Part of the Parade – “Going Native” in the United Nations Security Council.
    Niels Nagelhus Schia.
    APLA Newsletter. July 10, 2013
    How do small states behave once they have a seat at the table? In this article, I describe how one small state—Norway—operated when it was a member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in 2001–02. From my anthropological fieldwork in this period, I present a number of arguments. The first one is that, substantively, Norwegian diplomats at the Council were caught in a bind between representing national interests, on the one hand, and being “team players” vis‐à‐vis the permanent members, on the other. I also argue that institutionally organizational designs shape political decisions in significant and often unexpected ways. Finally, in terms of theory and method, even in highly formalized diplomatic settings, such as the UNSC, informal processes are central to understanding how states operate, as well as how the Council functions.
    July 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/plar.12007   open full text
  • A Tale of Two Courts: How Organizational Ethnography Can Shed New Light on Legal Pluralism.
    Ido Shahar.
    APLA Newsletter. July 10, 2013
    This article argues that organizational ethnography, and an organizational perspective more generally, can help to shed new light on the phenomenon of legal pluralism. While the literature on legal pluralism has tended to focus on the interrelations between normative orders in situations of legal pluralism, this article directs attention to the organizational level, to the day‐to‐day routines in courts that operate under conditions of legal pluralism, and to the interorganizational relations between such courts. To demonstrate the utility of that approach to legal pluralism, the article presents an ethnographic case study from present‐day Jerusalem. Focusing on two sharī‘a courts, one Israeli and one Jordanian, that operate in the city and serve the same population, the article describes how legal pluralism unfolds in daily organizational life. It portrays the complex fabric of the interrelations between these courts and tracks the evolution of these interrelations that transformed over the years from mutual antagonism to mutual dependence. These processes are examined within the turbulent political context in Jerusalem.
    July 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/plar.12006   open full text
  • The Object of Activism: Documents and Daily Life in Namibian NGOs.
    Sabine Höhn.
    APLA Newsletter. July 10, 2013
    Documents play a key role in the life of every NGO: donor reports, constitutions, membership databases, and promotional leaflets not only represent organizational action, but also have become a major form of civic activism themselves. In Namibia, NGOs are particularly pressed to show impact vis‐à‐vis a strong developmental state and an efficient private sector. “To document” has thus become a major preoccupation in their daily routine. This article asks what purpose documents do in NGOs and, through attention to their aesthetics, how they do them; and it shows that documents delineate social actions and actively shape NGOs’ daily work. The article's aims are twofold. First, its ethnographic approach to NGOs argues for an expanded range of possible actors that shape NGO work and everyday life. Second, it challenges the common ontological distinction between active subjects and passive objects by demonstrating the agency of things in organizational life more generally.
    July 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/plar.12005   open full text
  • Past Loss as Future? The Politics of Temporality and the “Nonreligious” by a Japanese NGO in Burma/Myanmar.
    Chika Watanabe.
    APLA Newsletter. July 10, 2013
    This article examines ideas of the past in the development aid work of one of the oldest Japanese NGOs, the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement (OISCA), derived from a Shinto‐based new religion, and its training courses on sustainable agriculture in Burma/Myanmar. Whereas Japan's official discourses on aid focus on postwar national success, OISCA highlights a sense of national– cultural loss and proposes aid as a form of national renewal by using ideas about Japan's past to “redo” modernity elsewhere. This emphasis on pastness was an effect of OISCA staff asserting that it is a “nonreligious” organization and simply “Japanese.” This article demonstrates how hope for national renewal through development aid generates “redemptive dreams” and enacts a politics of temporality in which Japanese and Burmese aid actors contest over the past as resource for the future and over “Japaneseness” as a universal value, oscillating between oppressive and aspirational possibilities.
    July 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/plar.12004   open full text
  • Discourse, Organization, and the Welfare State in the Former East Berlin.
    Kenneth McGill.
    APLA Newsletter. July 10, 2013
    In this article, I examine the statements and actions of two key informants, both of whom direct welfare programs in a district of the former East Berlin. I argue that this evidence points to a particular modality of political rationalization, which I dub organizational discourse. The entanglement of organizational discourse and governmentality are explored, as is the place of organizational discourse within both the liberal welfare state and the bygone state socialist regime.
    July 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/plar.12003   open full text
  • Professional Discourses on Single Parenthood in International Adoptions in Spain.
    David Poveda, María Isabel Jociles, Ana María Rivas.
    APLA Newsletter. July 10, 2013
    This article examines psychologists’ and social workers’ discourses in relation to international adoptions by single parents in Spain. The analysis suggests that these professionals, who play a key role in moving forward (or not) the adoption process, work with a distinctive notion of “the best interest of the child” in which a heterosexual couple is taken as the normative referent of parental and family relations. The principle of the child's best interest is explicitly defined at the legislative level and is incorporated as part of child protection policies, though in interview discourses it intertwines with many other themes. Our analysis uncovered some diversity in psychologists’ and social workers’ discourses, which seem to be tied to their professional and experiential background, though an argument that portrays single parenthood in negative terms dominates their views. These representations are developed even though the available evidence from post‐adoption assessments does not support such bias.
    July 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/plar.12002   open full text
  • “It Wasn't Written for Me”: Law, Debt, and Therapeutic Contracts in Greek Psychiatry.
    Elizabeth Anne Davis.
    APLA Newsletter. July 10, 2013
    Since the international movement for patients’ rights began, law has played an ambiguous role in mediating conflicts over responsibility for the mentally ill. In Greece, this contention has been shaped by reforms designed to shift psychiatric treatment from custodial hospitals to outpatient settings, challenging patients to help care for themselves. This article addresses one of the normative techniques deployed by Greek therapists to foster patients’ responsibility in treatment: the therapeutic contract. By formalizing patients’ and therapists’ responsibilities to one other, contracts attach legalistic determinants to treatment that are said to have their own therapeutic efficacy. I examine the experiences of two patients in northeastern Greece who entered therapeutic contracts at moments of crisis in their treatment. Failures in these cases expose a conflict between the ethics of contract and the ethics of care. I argue that this conflict is intrinsic to the transactional model of public service relationships in liberal states.
    July 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/plar.12001   open full text