Showing papers in "American Anthropologist in 2017"

Multimodality: An Invitation

Abstract: This section used to be called Visual Anthropology. Its new name—Multimodal Anthropologies—reflects changes in the media ecologies we engage as anthropologists, changes that have broadened our perspective to include other forms of media practice, while remaining inclusive of visual anthropology. Many of these changes can be linked to three developments: (1) the (relative) democratization and integration of media production; (2) the shift toward engagement and collaboration in anthropological research; and (3) the dynamic roles of anthropologists vis‐a‐vis both the profession and the communities in which they work. Together, these changes suggest a new framework, multimodal anthropology, by which we mean not only an anthropology that works across multiple media but one that also engages in public anthropology and collaborative anthropology through a field of differentially linked media platforms. This is not, however, a decisive “break” with the past. Many of us already practice multimodal anthropology (Collins and Durington 2014; Cool 2014; Edwards 1997; Pink 2011; Postill 2011; Stewart 2013). When we consider the different opportunities and possibilities for engaging with ethnographically intended media in the age of diverse tools and platforms, we see multimodal anthropology. When we look at the transmedia installations of Ethnographic Terminalia, we see articulations of multimodal anthropology. Multimodal anthropology is also encapsulated within the numerous visual, aural, and tactile media that anthropologists produce, post, and share—the growing decoupage of social media that is one symptom of a changing anthropological practice. Multimodal practice is not limited to self‐identification as a visual anthropologist. Rather, it encompasses this subdiscipline and also invites practitioners from within and outside anthropology. Finally, we see multimodality in the ways communities of non‐anthropologists interact with us, from para‐anthropological productions to critique and commentary. In what follows, we lay out our vision and ever‐expanding areas of interest for this section as we explore the transformative potentialities of the multimodal. It is meant less as a provocation than an invitation to submit works that engage multimodal possibilities.

Signaling Safety: Characterizing Fieldwork Experiences and Their Implications for Career Trajectories

Abstract: Numerous studies use quantitative measures to evaluate retention, advancement, and success in academic settings. Such approaches, however, present challenges for evaluating the lived experiences of academics. Here, we present a qualitative thematic analysis of self-reports of positive and negative experiences that occurred while conducting academic field research. Twenty-six semistructured interviews highlighted two central themes: (1) variability in clarity of appropriate professional behavior and rules at fieldsites, and (2) access, or obstacles therein, to professional resources and opportunity. In some instances, respondent narratives recalled a lack of consequences for violations of rules governing appropriate conduct. These violations included harassment and assault, and ultimately disruptions to career trajectories. A heuristic construct of a traffic light describing Red, Yellow, and Green experiences illustrates the ramifications of this distribution of clarity and access within fieldsite contexts. These results extend the findings from our previously reported Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE) about the climates and contexts created and experienced in field research settings. Moreover, this study addresses specific tactics, such as policies, procedures, and paradigms that fieldsite directors and principal investigators can implement to improve field experiences and better achieve equal opportunity in field research settings. [work environment, gender, field experiences, harassment]

Acculturation and health: the moderating role of socio-cultural context.

Abstract: Acculturation represents an important construct for elucidating the determinants and consequences of health disparities in minority populations. However, the processes and mechanisms underlying acculturation's effects on health are largely undetermined and warrant further study. We integrate concepts from anthropology and statistics to describe the role of sociocultural context as a putative modifier of the relationship between acculturation and health. Sociocultural context may influence the extent to which exposure to host culture leads to internalization of host cultural orientation, and may influence the extent to which acculturation leads to stress and adoption of unhealthy behaviors. We focus on specific aspects of sociocultural context: (1) neighborhood ethno-cultural composition; (2) discrimination; (3) discrepancy between origin and host environments; (4) discrepancy between heritage and host cultures; (5) origin group, host group, and individual attitudes towards assimilation; (6) variation in targets of assimilation within host community; (7) public policy and resources; (8) migration selection bias. We review and synthesize evidence for these moderation effects among first- and later-generation immigrants, refugees, and indigenous populations. Furthermore, we propose best-practices data-collection and statistical-analysis methods for this purpose, in order to improve our understanding of the complex, multilevel aspects of the relationship between acculturation and health.

Historical Ecology of Cultural Keystone Places of the Northwest Coast

Abstract: For many Indigenous peoples, their traditional lands are archives of their histories, from the deepest of time to recent memories and actions. These histories are written in the landscapes’ geological features, contemporary plant and animal communities, and associated archaeological and paleoecological records. Some of these landscapes, recently termed “cultural keystone places” (CKPs), are iconic for these groups and have become symbols of the connections between the past and the future, and between people and place. Using an historical-ecological approach, we describe our novel methods and initial results for documenting the history of three cultural keystone places in coastal British Columbia, Canada: Hauyat, Laxgalts'ap (Old Town) and Dalk Gyilakyaw (Robin Town) (territories of Heiltsuk, Gitga'ata, and Gitsm'geelm, respectively). We combine data and knowledge from diverse disciplines and communities to tell the deep and recent histories of these cultural landscapes. Each of CKPs encompasses expansive landscapes of diverse habitats transformed by generations of people interacting with their surrounding environments. Documenting the “softer” footprints of past human-environmental interactions can be elusive and requires diverse approaches and novel techniques.

“The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”: A Multispecies Approach to Territorial Peace in Colombia

Abstract: I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with a social movement, the Peaceful Process of Reconciliation and Integration of the Alta Montana, to explore practices of peacebuilding in rural Colombia. I use a multispecies lens to interrogate the discourse of territorial peace (paz territorial), revealing the ways in which both violence and peace intertwine human and nonhuman lives and relations in the Alta Montana. Through analysis of the everyday assemblages forged between people, animals, forests, and crops, I demonstrate how the multispecies approach to peacebuilding found in the Alta Montana sharpens our understanding of the mutually reinforcing processes of violent conflict and environmental degradation. As a result, I argue that multispecies anthropological analysis also enables a capacious conceptualization of peace, one that recognizes the full life-worlds of people as they seek, in their everyday lives, to reweave—and create anew—the social and ecological fabric of their communities. [violence, displacement, multispecies, peacebuilding, Colombia]

A Qualitative Analysis of How Anthropologists Interpret the Race Construct.

Abstract: This article assesses anthropological thinking about the race concept and its applications. Drawn from a broader national survey of geneticists' and anthropologists' views on race, in this analysis, we provide a qualitative account of anthropologists' perspectives. We delve deeper than simply asserting that "race is a social construct." Instead, we explore the differential ways in which anthropologists describe and interpret how race is constructed. Utilizing the heuristic of constructors, shifters, and reconcilers, we also illustrate the ways in which anthropologists conceptualize their interpretations of race along a broad spectrum as well as what these differential approaches reveal about the ideological and biological consequences of socially defined races, such as racism in general and racialized health disparities in particular. [race concept, social construction, racism, health disparities].

But Some of Us Are Broke: Race, Gender, and the Neoliberalization of the Academy

Abstract: Anthropologists have paid increasing attention to neoliberalism in our research, yet we have been less willing to apply this lens to our own academic positioning and the ways these roles are shaped by privatization and market models. Lives and livelihoods in the American academy are increasingly determined by neoliberalism, and it is vital that we be both reflexive about and engaged around our positions within this project. This article explores the divides that separate various forms of academic labor (secure versus nonsecure, contract, etc.) as well as the raced and gendered implications of these tracks—in particular, the stark ways in which neoliberal transformations negatively affect women of color in the academy. [neoliberalism, academy, race, gender, contingent labor]

Temporal Patterns of Mexican Migrant Genetic Ancestry: Implications for Identification

Abstract: Motivated by the humanitarian crisis along the US–Mexico border and the need for more integrative approaches to migrant death investigations, we employ both biological and cultural anthropology perspectives to provide insight into these deaths and the forensic identification process. We propose that structural vulnerabilities linked to ethnicity impact the success of identifying deceased migrants. Using forensic genetic data, we examine the relationships among identification status, case year, and ancestry, demonstrating how Native American and European ancestry proportions differ between identified and unidentified migrant fatalities, revealing an otherwise unrecognized identification bias. We find that Mexican migrants with more European ancestry are more often successfully identified in recent years. We attribute this bias in identification to the layers of structural vulnerability that uniquely affect indigenous Mexican migrants. By demonstrating the impact that social processes like structural violence can have on the relative success of forensic casework along the US–Mexico border, our work underscores the fact that forensic casework is itself a social process. Research undertaken with the intent to improve forensic identification protocols should consider social context, a factor that could significantly impact identification rates. This study shows the need for collaboration between forensic practitioners and those working closely with affected communities. [US–Mexico border, forensic anthropology, migration, admixture, DNA]

Diaspora and the Afterlife of Violence: Eritrean National Narratives and What Goes Without Saying

Abstract: This article explores the legacies of political violence, the workings of state power in mobilizing identities around collective suffering, and the effects of political culture that reside in people even after they have left the time and space of war. I interrogate the silence on Eritrean diaspora websites regarding personal suffering related to the war that produced Eritrea as an independent nation, elevated its current president and ruling party to government leadership, and established the Eritrean diaspora. I argue that national narratives of the Eritrean state that celebrate sacrifice for the nation operate on Eritreans as a secondary form of violence that renders their personal losses unspeakable. Eritrean websites reveal complex communicative terrains where power is constructed and contested in ways that cannot be captured by the opposition between the diaspora and the homeland, between online and offline, or between silence and speech. [political violence, suffering, diaspora, internet, war, Eritrea]

Behavioral Ecology, Technology, and the Organization of Labor: How a Shift from Spear Thrower to Self Bow Exacerbates Social Disparities

Abstract: Self-bows replaced spear throwers as primary terrestrial hunting weapons on nearly all continents at different time periods throughout human prehistory. Many scholars have debated whether this transition occurred because of a shift in resource exploitation toward smaller fauna or because of the bow's supposedly superior performance in warfare. Before causal hypotheses explaining this technological shift can be tested, performance characteristics of atlatls versus bows must be well understood. Studies of performance characteristics often address topics such as the range, accuracy, or maintainability of weapons systems, but this study quantitatively compares the learnability of each weapon. Learning curves for spear throwers and bows are established using contemporary data generated by archers from the Society for Creative Anachronism and atlatlists from the World Atlatl Association. The hypothesis that spear throwers are easier to learn and can be wielded effectively by a wider segment of human populations than bows is supported. Implications for the organization of labor are contextualized in light of socioecological changes generally characterizing the conditions under which shifts from atlatl to self-bow technology occurred in prehistory. [learning curve, division of labor, atlatl, performance characteristics, skill]

Anthropological Ethics and the Communicative Affordances of Audio-Video Recorders in Ethnographic Fieldwork: Transduction as Theory

Abstract: This article contributes to the development of professional anthropological discourses about audio-video recording technologies in ethnographic research. Synthesizing scholarship on ethnographic partiality, doing ethnography in sound, and multimedia technologies, the article reflexively applies the concepts of transduction and affordance to analyze how recorders may be theorized as part of fieldwork encounters. This is based on fieldwork with a Zulu gospel choir comprised of people living with HIV in South Africa. Here, I discuss how research participants guided my use of recorders amid inequality and HIV stigma. I analyze the ethical-communicative affordances of recording technologies, examining how the design of audio-video technologies intersects with cultural and communicative conventions for use and evaluation of use of these technologies. This analysis suggests that the ethical-communicative affordances of transducers yield both an extension of an ethnographer's social self and a disconnect from that self in ways that can be productively navigated during fieldwork. [ethnographic methods, technology, stigma, ethics]

A Dog's Life: Suffering Humanitarianism in Port‐au‐Prince, Haiti

Abstract: In the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, most residents are dependent on humanitarian and foreign assistance for food, services, aid, and jobs. Yet, some residents feel that the conditions under which such aid is provided actively blocks their ability to live a life they find meaningful. In this article, I explore how some Haitians theorize this humanitarian condition through the figure of the dog, an animal that exemplifies, for Haitians, the deep history of violence, dehumanization, and degradation associated with foreign rule. I then contrast this with how foreign aid workers invoke the figure of the dog to illustrate their compassionate care for suffering others. Drawing on research among Bel Air residents and foreign aid workers in the years after a devastating earthquake destroyed much of Port-au-Prince, I show how the figure of the dog is central both to Haitian critiques of humanitarian aid and to the international humanitarian imaginary that responds to forms of suffering it deems cruel. [humanitarianism, suffering slot, anthropology of ethics, compassion and cruelty, Haiti]

Proximations of Public Religion: Worship, Spiritual Warfare, and the Ritualization of Christian Dance

Abstract: This essay is about a group of neo-Pentecostal evangelists who decided to represent their church in the New York Dance Parade, which they regarded as an opportunity to promote worship as the true purpose of art and engage in spiritual warfare. Their participation was predicated on a distinction between “performance” and “ministry,” privileging the latter. I argue that upholding this distinction in the immersive context of a secular festival required a process of intensive ritualization, involving physical and spiritual preparations and symbolic boundary maintenance. I further argue that anthropological perspectives on such instances of public religion should seek to account for how ritual forms produce and are shaped by the effects of what I call proximation, a condition of “closeness” between categories of activity otherwise regarded as separate and autonomous (e.g., religion and the arts). The concept is a means to explore how religious ministries are influenced by ostensibly external factors and the need to manage them, and by the various opportunities, tensions, and moral associations that arise when ritual strategies evoke comparisons with secular genres and domains. The proximations of religion highlight the ethnographic significance of ideal-typical categories and spheres, including their potential to intersect, which is a byproduct of how they have been differentiated. [Christianity, ritual, performance, evangelicalism, secularism]

Subjects of Debt: Financial Subjectification and Collaborative Risk in Malaysian Islamic Finance

Abstract: This article argues the Malaysian state has developed Islamic finance in conjunction with two distinct strategies of subject formation In its first phase, in the 1980s, a central objective was the financial inclusion of Malays Islamic finance was part of an identity-building project and intended to integrate this disadvantaged indigenous majority into the national economy By the 2000s the state had succeeded in fostering a Malay Muslim middle class through aggressive affirmative action policies Currently, Islamic finance is being redeployed as a technique for the neoliberal entrepreneurialization of the Malay Muslim population Empirically, this shift is evident in efforts by experts to move Islamic finance away from a reliance on what they call “debt-based” devices to ones referred to as “equity based” This entails substituting devices that reformers contend replicate the credit and lending instruments characteristic of “conventional finance” with instruments instead premised on investment, partnership, and risk sharing that they argue more faithfully adhere to the discursive tradition of Islam [Islam, development, neoliberalism, Islamic finance, debt]

Uncertain Futures: The Unfinished Houses of Undocumented Migrants in Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract: Migration often leads to new transnational patterns of consumption, because migrants create new ways in which they, and their families, relate to material objects. The literature on migration and materiality has documented migrants constructing and reconstructing their identities, and creating relationships based on the acquisition of material artifacts. However, little is known about the affective component involved in the construction of migrants’ houses, especially when they are unfinished. In this article I provide an ethnographic analysis of the relationship between unfinished houses, migration trajectories, familial obligations, and future aspirations of migrants and their families in Oaxaca, Mexico. Unfinished migrant houses populate the landscape of Oaxacan migrant communities as a reminder of the difficulties of migration. They also give hope to the families of migrants that dream of seeing their children return to a finished house. The house, and the process of building it, is entangled in emotions of presence and absence, success and failure, cruel optimism and hopeful aspirations. I argue that by looking at unfinished houses, and what they represent to migrants and to their families, we can expand our understanding of the relationship between undocumented migration, materiality, and the creation of multiple futures in uncertain contexts. [migration, materiality, houses, kinship, futurity ]

Visualization and Movement as Configurations of Human–Nonhuman Engagements: Precolonial Geometric Earthwork Landscapes of the Upper Purus, Brazil

Abstract: Producing geometric designs and images on materials, such as pottery, basketry, and bead artwork, as well as the human body, is elemental and widespread among Amazonian Indigenous peoples. In this article, we examine the different geometric forms identified in the precolonial geoglyph architecture of southwestern Amazonia in the context of geometric design making and relational ontologies. Our aim is to explore earthwork iconography through the lens of Amerindian visual arts and movement. Combining ethnographic and archaeological data from the Upper Purus, Brazil, the article shows how ancient history and socio-cosmology are deeply “written” onto the landscape in the form of geometric earthworks carved out of the soil, which materialize interactions between nonhuman and human actors. We underline skills in visualization, imaginative practices, and movement as ways to promote well-balanced engagements with animated life forms. Here, iconography inserted in the landscape is both a form of writing and also emerges as an agent, affecting people through visual and corporal practices. [geometric designs, earthworks, visualization, movement, Amazonia]

Drawing as Radical Multimodality: Salvaging Patrick Geddes's Material Methodology

Abstract: [Extract] This essay, which is accompanied by a collective online sketchbook on the American Anthropologist website, is about drawing as a research methodology.1 Drawing, like writing, is a craft that can be learned. It is a radical social research method, recalling the lost, undisciplined roots of research into "folk, work, place" in Britain—roots that this essay explores through the Foundations of British Sociology: The Sociological Review Archive at Keele University (Keele University 2010). Too many scholars now research "materiality" as an armchair topic. Multimodality—a young, cross‐disciplinary, and still unformed aggregation of research topics, designs, methods, and methodologies—is threatened by the haste to adopt ever‐new technologies. Through "slowest" practice, we can begin to understand, first, how salvaged methodologies might transform current practices and, second, how human capacities are limited, channeled, and lost in the race to innovate. Through practicing and developing material methodology, researchers can reshape dominant theories of modernity, because how we make knowledge is critical for fashioning alternative pasts, presents, and futures.

Dr. Esperanto, or Anthropology as Alternative Worlds

Abstract: In this 2015 presidential address, I use the story of so-called artificial (invented, constructed) languages to discuss anthropology as an act of imagining alternative worlds. I argue that this activity becomes particularly salient at moments of crisis in liberal democratic capitalism and takes a variety of forms according to the position of social actors with respect to the political economic conditions they face. From Esperanto to Klingon and beyond, artificial languages illustrate some key dilemmas and responses, of which anthropology is a part. [Presidential Address, language, anthropology, artificial languages]

Sociocultural Anthropology in 2016: In Dark Times: Hauntologies and Other Ghosts of Production

Abstract: This essay reflects on sociocultural anthropological scholarship in 2016. The review does not create categories or rubrics—as some reviewers have done in the past. Rather, it narrativizes emergent issues and offers a number of ways of considering how a range of analytics have predetermined our anthropological practice. I survey “dark” anthropology through the ontological turn this year and conclude by amplifying the research and call to decolonize and engage our methodologies. Through this review, I revisit particular conceptions of structure and agency, especially in the context of neoliberal capitalism, and consider how that has forced us to rethink the classic tension between culture and materiality. The year 2016 was marked by a certain specter of death at the interstices of life, crisis, and a burgeoning urgency and sense of reflection on the various kinds of reifications the production of anthropological knowledge manifests. As such, the year saw important pleas, correctives, and reengagements of anthropological discourse and thematic production. The operative framework for this review deploys an anthropological hauntology, a modality through which to make sense of the specters of our discursive being. This raises questions about ethnographic research in relation to its modes of production. [sociocultural anthropology, ontology, death, decolonizing methodology, disenchantment, crisis]

Anthropological Archaeology in 2016: Cooperation and Collaborations in Archaeological Research and Practice

Abstract: Ideas of collaboration and cooperation are often implicit, taken-for-granted elements in archaeological models and theorizing. Overshadowed by a growing archaeological preoccupation with warfare, violence, conflict, and crisis, cooperative acts and collaborative dispositions appear to lack the same emotional resonance and change-stimulating properties that attract archaeological attention. Nonetheless, many archaeological publications in 2016 directly take on notions of collaboration in thinking about the past and our roles as archaeologists and as citizens of the future. This review underscores the significance of thinking about collaboration and cooperation as ambiguous, ambivalent, multiscalar, and dynamic. At issue is not just the creation of community but also of getting things done and, of course, celebrating, revising, or reworking the intended or unintended consequences of those actions over the generations. [archaeology, collaboration, cooperation]

Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street

Abstract: This article seeks to expose the “fallacies of synchrony” that often accompany the analysis of human remains In approaching a cemetery, for example, we all too easily think of the bodies there as a “community,” even when they belong to different generations or geographic contexts This simple point has major implications, especially for the bioarchaeology of urban landscapes Here, chronologically disparate elements accumulate in vast melanges, offering innumerable examples of the “non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous,” an idea developed by Karl Mannheim ([1928] 1952) and Alfred Schutz (1967), and now extended to archaeology by Gavin Lucas (2015) To escape the fallacies of synchrony and explore the shifting rhythms of city life, I turn to the case of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church in Manhattan When the church burial vaults (ca 1820–1850) were unexpectedly unearthed in 2006, they seemed to represent a ready-made “congregation” Yet Spring Street was actually a “catchment zone” of mingled and mangled temporalities Though placed together in death, the bodies there had only occasionally crossed paths in life By following some of their traces to and from the site, we may come to understand what it means to gather, work, and worship together in a society of strangers

Histories of a Burnt House: An Archaeology of Negative Spaces and Dispossession

Abstract: The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented interest in the archaeology of the contemporary past. Here, building on that scholarship, I present a diachronic analysis of a fire that partially destroyed a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century house in the city of Arica, Chile. Combining historical, archaeological, and ethnographic methods, I produce the frame for a biographic storytelling that lets the house tell about its life and take center stage in the fabrication of notions like morality and belonging, attesting to the production of social space. I contend that the house and its materiality have historically played a decisive role in the production of the mechanisms of dispossession and the displacement of its inhabitants through a negative portrayal. I conclude with some thoughts about how archaeology's privileged viewpoint of contextual historical scrutiny provides nuanced insights about the repercussions of current phenomena of gentrification and heritage making.

Steering Clear of the Dead: Avoiding Ancestors in the Moquegua Valley, Peru

Abstract: Ancestors are a central and recurring theme in scholarship on mortuary practices in the pre-Hispanic Andes. Archaeological and ethnohistoric data indicate that in many times and places the dead were critical social actors. Physical interaction with the bodies and spaces of ancestors was important in legitimizing claims to heritage, land, resources, and status. Yet, relatively neglected in the literature on Andean attitudes to the dead is how people dealt with other people's ancestors. To address this, I examine how a Late Intermediate Period community, who circa AD 1250 occupied an earlier terminal Middle Horizon village in southern Peru, managed interactions with their predecessors’ dead. Excavations at the site reveal considerable evidence for active avoidance of cemeteries associated with the older village, which contrasts with the re-utilization of earlier domestic space. Moreover, aversion to the ancestors of others was practiced alongside active engagement with the new community's “own” dead. Drawing on Lau's recent (2013) discussion of alterity in the ancient Andes, I propose that just as interacting with one's own ancestors is frequently interpreted as a way of reifying belonging, steering clear of the dead can be equally powerful in community building and identity negotiation during major sociopolitical upheaval. [alterity, funerary practice, Andean South America]

Una Gabacha Sinvergüenza (A Shameless White‐Trash Woman): Moral Mobility and Interdiscursivity in a Mexican Migrant Community

Abstract: This article explores a process that typifies social worlds during late-capitalist globalization: people's lives regularly involve the negotiation of conflicting visions of ethico-moral life Such negotiations require people to reckon with complex social differentiation, wherein the boundaries between “good” and “bad” are overlapping, contradictory, and ever shifting In the face of such complexity, we need ways to understand the assemblages that emerge as actors construct ethico-moral people and collectivities inside acts of reckoning A crucial activity highlighted in assembly is reflexivity: the ability to step outside of and critically evaluate unfolding events and one's place(s) in them Existing scholarship spotlights the importance of conscious moments of reflection In this article, I highlight a different source of reflexivity: the implicit forms of positioning and critique entailed in language practices My central claim is that the production of ethico-moral assemblages relies fundamentally on a form of linguistic reflexivity called interdiscursivity, through which actors lay claim to and can be read as possessing multiple, overlapping, and potentially contradictory forms of ethico-moral personhood I show that the construction of “proper Mexicanness” unfurls in relationship with imagined foils of immoral US personhood, producing hierarchical distinctions that are raced, classed, and gendered [migration, morality, ethics, interdiscursivity, assemblages]

Mobilizations of Race, Place, and History in Santiago de Cuba's Carnivalesque

Abstract: I offer a model of racialization, the ongoing process of making race meaningful, by proposing the concept of micro-mobilities: people's movements through immediate lived space. I examine how qualities of movement in an annual carnival procession normalize racialized bodies and places. In Santiago de Cuba's carnival, neighborhood-based conga societies participate in official competitive displays and grassroots neighborhood activities. The grassroots Invasion evokes Cuba's wars for independence. Thousands join the Conga de Los Hoyos to process through the “territories” of other congas. I examine the Invasion as a performed diagram of “routes of Blackness” mapped onto a reenactment of Cuba's national “roots” to argue that it mobilizes the racialization of bodies, cultural forms, and neighborhoods. My focus on bodies in motion challenges static mappings of identity, place, and history to instead show how Blackness and whiteness are constituted in the relation between race as embodied experience and object of discourse. [race, racialization, mobilization, festive performance, Cuba]

Transposing Brazilian Carnival: Religion, Cultural Heritage, and Secularism in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract: This article discusses the rise of evangelical carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro in relation to spectacular carnival parades that feature Afro-Brazilian religious elements. The article exposes divergent intersections of religion and cultural heritage in Brazilian carnival. The first intersection aims to affirm the intrinsic connection between samba enredo carnival music and Afro-Brazilian religion by means of cultural heritage narratives, and the second type employs similar narratives to undo this connection, attempting to make samba enredo accessible to evangel-ical religious performance. The article demonstrates the important role secularism plays in upholding distinctions between " culture " and " religion, " and shows how evangelical carnival groups engage with such historical forma-tions by means of estra egia (strategy)—evangelical performances in cultural styles that are commonly perceived as " worldly. " This estra egia depends on and proposes a particular set of semiotic ideologies that allows for the separation of cultural form and spiritual content. Efforts to open up " national " cultural styles to different religious groups in light of multicultural politics are laudable, but advocates of such politics should keep in mind that cultural heritage regimes concerning samba push in the opposite direction and support a different set of semiotic ideologies. [religion, carnival, secularism, cultural heritage, Brazil] RESUMEN Este articulo discute el aumento de los desfiles carnavalescos evan elicos en Rio de Janeiro comparado con los desfiles carnavalescos espectaculares que exhiben elementos religiosos afro-brasil nos. El articulo expone intersecciones divergentes de religi on y patrimonio cultural en el carnaval brasil no. La primera intersecci on tiene el pro osito de afirmar la conexi on intrinseca entre la usica de carnaval samba enredo y la religi on afro-brasil na por medio de narrativas de patrimonio cultural, y el segundo tipo emplea narrativas similares para deshacer esta conexi on, intentando hacer la samba enredo accesible a las presentaciones religiosas evan elicas. El articulo de-muestra el importante papel que el secularismo juega en mantener las distinciones entre " cultura " y " religi on " y muestra omo los grupos carnavalescos evan elicos involucran tales formaciones his oricas por medio de una estra egia (estrategia)—presentaciones evan elicas en estilos culturales que son co unmente percibidos como " mundanos " . Esta estra egia depende de, y propone un juego particular de ideologias semi oticas que permite la separaci on de la forma cultural y el contenido espiritual. Los esfuerzos para abrir los estilos culturales " nacionales " a diferentes grupos religiosos a la luz de la politica multicultural son laudables, pero defensores de tal politica deberian tener presente que los regimenes de patrimonio cultural concernientes a la samba empujan en la direcci on opuesta y apoyan un diferente juego de ideologias semi oticas. [religi on, carnaval, secularismo, patrimonio cultural, Brasil]