Showing papers in "American Anthropologist in 2020"

Tentacular Faces: Race and the Return of the Phenotype in Forensic Identification

Abstract: The face, just like DNA, is taken to represent a unique individual. This article proposes to move beyond this representational model and to attend to the work that a face can do. I introduce the concept of tentacularity to capture the multiple works accomplished by the face. Drawing on the example of DNA phenotyping, which is used to produce a composite face of an unknown suspect, I first show that this novel technology does not so much produce the face of an individual suspect but that of a suspect population. Second, I demonstrate how the face draws the interest of diverse publics, who with their gaze flesh out its content and contours; the face engages and yields an affective response. I argue that the biologization of appearance by way of the face contributes to the racialization of populations. [race, phenotype, material-semiotics, facial typologies, forensics genetics, DNA phenotyping].

Myths of Meritocracy, Friendship, and Fun Work: Class and Gender in North American Academic Communities

Abstract: Using the example of Andean archaeology, this article focuses on subtle forms of inequality that arise when academic communities are conceptualized as friendship-based and egalitarian, rejecting explicit hierarchy. I describe this as performative informality and argue that it stems from a meritocratic ideology that inadvertently reproduces Euro-American white-male privilege. In a discipline that prides itself on its friendliness, openness, and alcohol-fueled drinking culture, those who find themselves unable to enact or perform informality appropriately are at a distinct disadvantage. Drawing from a multisited ethnography of Andeanist archaeologists, I make the case that it is the ephemerality and plausible deniability of performative informality that makes it hard to recognize and thus mitigate against it. In doing so, I draw on and contribute to the theorization of gender/class intersectionality in anthropology and science studies, US conceptualizations of meritocracy in academia and higher education, and feminist Jo Freeman’s concept of “the tyranny of structurelessness.” [anthropology of science, ethnography of archaeology, class, gender, anthropology of work and education] RESUMEN Usando el ejemplo de la arqueología andina, este artículo se enfoca en las formas sutiles de la desigualdad que surgen cuando las comunidades académicas se conceptualizan como basadas en la amistad e igualitarias, rechazando la jerarquía explícita. Describo esto como informalidad performativa y argumento que proviene de una ideología de meritocracia que reproduce inadvertidamente el privilegio de hombre blanco euroamericano. En una disciplina que se enorgullece de su amabilidad, apertura, y una cultura impulsada por el consumo de alcohol, aquellos que se ven así mismos incapaces de actuar o representar la informalidad apropiadamente están en una desventaja distinta. Basada en una etnografía multilocal de arqueólogos andinos presento el argumento de que es la efimeralidad y la deseabilidad plausible de la informalidad performativa lo que hace difícil reconocer y por tanto mitigar en su contra. Al hacerlo, me baso en y contribuyo a la teorización de la interseccionalidad de género/clase en antropología y estudios de las ciencias, conceptualizaciones estadounidenses de meritocracia en academia y educación superior, y el concepto feminista de Jo Freeman de “la tiranía de la falta de estructuras”. [antropología de la ciencia, etnografía de la arqueología, clase, género, antropología del trabajo y la educación] D a 2011 interview, a North American1 Andeanist archaeologist,who I’ll call Hannah, described an early experience that almost led her to leave archaeology. I’m always respectful and I was always eager. But unfortunately, with the boss of the project, he sort of requires, and really really AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 000, No. 0, pp. 1–15, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. © 2020 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13455 likes, if you kiss ass.That was really hard. Because the other graduate students, they were much older than me and were like, “Well, you need to kiss more ass.” Very blatantly, like, “If you want to make it in this field, you need to be doing this, you need to be...” And I was like, “Are you kidding me? I’m here every day, I do my work, I’m respectful, I’m eager.”...And it was implied that this is how [archaeology] works, but especially with someone with such 2 American Anthropologist • Vol. 000, No. 0 • xxxx 2020 a status [as] this person. For example, one of the other graduate students would read in the evening something that the professor wrote, and then come in the morning like, “I had this really great idea!” Something sort of related to what the professor had initially written, and he’d be like, “Oh, I totally agree!” And then they’d get in this discussion. It was obviously a game. (February 2011) At the time we spoke, Hannah was nearing the end of her PhD at a North American university and had established a solid reputation for herself.With some satisfaction, she remarked that the bullying students who’d told her to “kiss ass” were no longer working in archaeology at all. The moral she’d taken from this story was that hierarchies and nepotism do not, in fact, have a place in archaeology, and a successful career is best forged through hard work. Later in the same interview, I asked how she’d met the various mentors who’d invited her on their projects or encouraged her graduate applications. In response, she described a series of chance encounters at conference parties or dinners that all led to career-changing invitations. I met some people at a conference.... I don’t know how it happened,but I started talking to someone on the project and they had me over to dinner....We went and ate dinner with the [project] crew, completely casual. Then, from there I went down [to their excavation] because I had this one contact [from the dinner].... They gave me a scholarship, meaning I didn’t really have to pay to come down. (February 2011) When applying to graduate school, Hannah reached out to potential faculty advisors. One could not take her that year, but: Hannah (H):He put [me] in contact with Sam. I came down to visit [Sam’s university].... I had put in my application but they hadn’t done the selection yet. I’m like, “Well, I’m going to be in town,” because I was driving [to that state anyway]. Obviously, it’s not straight passing through. I had to make a detour. I know showing your face makes a big difference. Mary (M):How did you know that showing your face and emailing people beforehand ... ? H: I think that any way that you can set yourself out from the pack helps because, otherwise, I’m sure the majority of applications are all good, or you wouldn’t even be applying to grad school, you wouldn’t have letters of recommendation. It was just an intuition thing. No one ever told me, “You should do this,” but I had the understanding that you shouldn’t apply to grad school unless you have someone who wants to accept you and work with you.... I just figured that if I can make any sort of impression personally, it’s going to help my application because [my GRE scores2] weren’t all that stellar. There’s things that could count against me, you know what I mean? So I figure, you know, do anything you can.We actually went out and we partied all night.We had a great time, I hung out with [Sam] and [another archaeology professor] and they all responded really well to me. M: They took you out drinking? H: We had a great time.... Anyway, I was very fortunate. I think that really made a difference because they only accepted two people that year. I don’t think that I would have gotten in if I hadn’t done that. M: The fact that you’d made the effort to come and met with him made the difference? H: Could be, but I think they had at least a feeling about me. They had had a conversation with me. I really don’t think that I would have gotten in if they hadn’t done that. (February 2011) In this article, I explore subtle forms of inequality that arise when academic communities are conceptualized as friendship-based: built not through explicit hierarchy but through informal forms of sociality that are considered “casual” and “intuitive.” An ability to “fit in” determines who is present in the lab, field, or classroom—who, at themost fundamental and insidious level, is positioned to create knowledge. As Hannah illustrates, and research on “cultural fit” argues (Garth and Sterling 2018; Friedman and Laurison 2019; Rivera 2012), in the United States, this ability to fit in is invariably ascribed to an individual’s personality rather than their gender, race, class, or nationality. Andean archaeology is thus an interesting case study to contrast with sociological studies of fit and meritocracy in middle-class professions; as anthropologists, the members of this professional community are, for the most part, aware of and committed to inclusive, feminist, anticolonial work. When inequalities arise, they do so in subtle, hard-to-pin-down ways. Drawing from theories of gender/class intersectionality in anthropology and science studies, US conceptualizations of meritocracy in academia and higher education, and feminist Jo Freeman’s concept of “the tyranny of structurelessness,” I explore how and why subtle inequalities arise, using a concept I term performative informality. “Performative” emphasizes how informality is a norm remade through each instance of enactment and draws attention to how such enactments are a negotiation of power.When a profession like archaeology is understood to be fun, open, friendly, and meritocratic, an individual’s success depends on inhabiting or enacting that professional community’s specific kind of informality correctly. Performing informality correctly underpins whether people have a “good feeling” about you. Other professional skills—academic grades, publications, and so on—are important, but formal professional opportunities, such as invitations to join excavations or encouragements to apply to graduate school with a particular professor, often stem from informal friendship-based contacts. My goal is to contribute to the current debate in archaeological practice surrounding discrimination and inequality, as exemplified by both the #MeTooSTEM movement and the reaction to Kawa et al.’s (2019) analysis of biased hiring of graduates from “elite” universities, and a broader anthropological conversation about how meritocratic ideology perpetuates and masks class and gender discrimination in the United States. The North American Andean archaeologists I studied performed a Euro-American, middleclass, and male sociality. Women, people of color, people from working-class backgrounds, and foreigners found it harder to “do” this informality correctly.Archaeologists who were comfortable and successful in this community were not consciously excluding others; rather, e

Abandoning Endangered Languages: Ethical Loneliness, Language Oppression, and Social Justice

Abstract: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: 'Abandoning endangered languages: ethical loneliness, language oppression, and social justice', American Anthropologist 122.1 (2020): 164-69 which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13372. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions

Panics over Plastics: A Matter of Belonging in Kenya

Abstract: Anthropologists have shown how recent efforts to tell apart foreigners from autochthons have played out, often subtly disguised, in panics over objects that may seem trivial: “alien species” of fish, trees, or plants that endanger “local” nature. Little has been said about plastic’s dominant position among these objects. In Samburu county, northern Kenya, “plastic boys” are unemployed men whom others despise for being unattached, “useless paupers,” who, not unlike plastic itself, have allegedly no capacity to grow roots and thrive. Analyzing this subject position against a wider background of objects and afflictions deemed “foreign”—including plastic bags, plastic rice, plastic hair, plastic smiles, and homosexuality as a “plastic pollutant”—I show how different troublesome objectifications of plastic resonate with one another and their wider context. I argue that panics over plastics and the politics of belonging shape one another, producing new, less-obvious forms of inclusion and exclusion. [belonging, materiality, plastic, Samburu, Kenya] MUHTASARI Waantropologist wameonyesha vile, mara nyingi, watu wakiongea kuhusu samaki, miti, ama mboga, kusema kwamba vile vitu ni vya vigeni, vimetoka ng’ambo, na vinachafu mazingira yao, kwa kweli wale watu wanaongea kuhusu mambo mengine: yaani, wanajaribu kutofautisha watu gani kati wao wametoka penginepo na gani ni wenyeji. Lakini waantropologist hawajafuata maana ya plastiki kati ya vitu hivi. Katika wilaya ya Samburu, Kaskazini mwa Kenya, “plastic boys” ni wanaume ambao wanakosa kazi na wanaotukaliwa na wengine kuwa watu bila familia na “bila maana.” Yaani, watu wanasema hawa wanaume wanafanana plastiki kwa sababu hawawezi kukua na kustawi. Kwa mahala hayo, ninaelekeza maana ya “plastic boys” kwa kuonyesha uhusiano wao na taabu tofauti watu wanazoelewa ziwe “ya kigeni”: mifuko ya plastiki, mchele wa plastiki, nywele za plastiki, tabasamu ya plastiki, na gayism kama “uchafuzi wa plastiki.” Ninaonyesha vile maana za vitu hivi tofauti “vya plastiki” zinafanana. Ninaonyesha pia vile hofu juu ya plastiki na siasa za utambulisho wa jamii zinaundana. [utambulisho wa jamii, kiini ya vitu, plastiki, Samburu, Kenya] RÉSUMÉ Des études anthropologiques récentes montrent que les efforts visant à distinguer les étrangers des autochtones génèrent de la panique autour d’objets anodins comme des “espèces étrangères” de poissons, d’arbres ou de plantes qui polluent la “nature indigène.” Peu a été dit à propos de la prédominance du plastique parmi ces objets. À Samburu, au nord du Kenya, les “garçons plastiques” sont des hommes sans emploi que la population considère comme des “indigents inutiles” qui, à l’instar du plastique lui-même, n’auraient aucune capacité de s’enraciner et de prospérer. J’étudie ces hommes dans un contexte plus large d’objets et de souffrances perçues comme “étrangères”: les sacs et riz en plastique, les “sourires plastiques” ou l’homosexualité vue comme un “polluant plastique.” J’argumente que la panique sur les différentes formes de plastique et la politique d’appartenance résonnent les unes avec les autres et par conséquent produisent des nouveaux genres d’inclusion et d’exclusion. [appartenance, matérialisme, plastic, Samburu, Kenya] AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 122, No. 2, pp. 222–235, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C © 2020 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13381 Meiu • Panics over Plastics 223 RESUMEN Antropólogos han mostrado cómo esfuerzos recientes para distinguir extranjeros de autóctonos se han desarrollado, a menudo sutilmente disfrazados, en pánicos sobre objetos que pueden parecer triviales: “especies foráneas” de peces, árboles o plantas que ponen en peligro la naturaleza “local.” Poco se ha dicho sobre la posición dominante del plástico entre estos objetos. En el Condado de Samburu, norte de Kenia, los “chicos plásticos” son hombres desempleados que otros desprecian por no estar conectados, “paupérrimos inútiles”, quienes a diferencia del plástico en sı́ mismo, tienen supuestamente una no capacidad de echar raı́ces y progresar. Analizando esta posición de sujeto contra un fondo más amplio de objetos y aflicciones considerados foráneos –incluyendo bolsas plásticas, arroz plástico, cabello plástico, sonrisas plásticas, y homosexualidad como un contaminante plástico”– muestro cómo diferentes objetivaciones problemáticas de plástico resuenan entre sı́ y con su contexto más amplio. Argumento que los pánicos sobre plásticos y la polı́tica de pertenencia, se modelan unos a otros, produciendo nuevas, menos obvias formas de inclusión y exclusión. [pertenencia, materialidad, plástico Samburu, Kenia] P plays a central role in contemporary struggles over belonging and citizenship. Anthropologists have shown, for example, how recent efforts to tell apart foreigners from autochthons have played out, often subtly disguised, in panics over objects that seem otherwise trivial: “alien species” of fish, trees, or plants that endanger “local nature” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Death 2017; Geschiere 2009; Lavau 2011). Little has been said, however, about plastic’s dominant position among these objects. Concerns with plastic pollution are often about more than the substance’s environmental impact. Globally overabundant, plastic is now deeply imbricated in our perceptions of space and time, in how we acquire political subjectivities and imagine futures (Barthes 1988; Davis 2016; Gabrys, Hawkins, and Michael 2013; Hawkins 2001 Meikle 1995). Amid late-capitalist politicaleconomic transformations in Africa, as elsewhere, plastic has also become emblematic of new modes of consumption and new forms of moral disorder (Braun and Traore 2015; Weiss 1996). “Plastic,” Anand Pandian (2016) argues, “embodies, like no other substance, the arc of utopian hope and deep despair around the very possibility of fundamental change in modern times.” It is important, then, to examine what plastic’s historical salience reveals about the politics of belonging today. Consider a set of recent events in Kenya: On August 28, 2017, Kenya’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) banned the manufacture, importation, and use of plastic bags in the country. International media called this “the world’s toughest ban on plastic bags.” Simply carrying them became punishable with fines of up to US$40,000 or prison terms of up to four years. “We will go to the extent of raiding defiant premises,” threatened NEMA officials, as police inspected shops, markets, and vehicles. At borders, too, “foreigners are now to be stripped of plastic bags before entering Kenya.” Many Kenyans met the excessive force and incendiary language of the government’s infamous “war on plastic” with enthusiastic support. Journalist Pauline Kairu describes plastic bags as “an unruly monstrosity that stared at Kenyans almost everywhere”—dangerous things “woven into the fabric of our lives.” “They hang on trees and trenches,” says Kairu, “the winds ever so blithely unhesitating to blow them to undecided destinations.” So, plastic bags must be eliminated before they destine Kenyans to catastrophic futures. Citizens also called on local governments, as one man wrote on social media, to “completely remove [any] plastic materials [from] our habitat.” The ban on plastic bags coincided with a set of rumors and scandals in which plastic figured prominently. First, the same year, a panic erupted over so-called plastic rice. After a severe drought had damaged crops across the country, videos circulated on social media showing rice granules melting in boiling water when cooked. “Some people are bringing in cheap and fake rice [from China],” claims a Kenyan blog, “and packaging it as if it was grown in Kenya.” Speculations on the rice’s Chinese origin are significant when, for over a decade, the Chinese government has invested in Kenya’s infrastructure, taking over responsibilities Kenyans expect their state to fulfill. In this context, plastic rice objectifies what appears as Chinese infiltration in Kenyan lives in a form other than itself. Packaged to appear homegrown, the foreign(er) now appropriates the appearance of the autochthon and, thus disguised, comes dangerously close to real citizens’ bodies to poison them. Second, over the previous decade, as political leaders prepared to ban plastic bags, panics over another so-called foreign import, homosexuality, have also borrowed the language and imaginary of plastic. “Gayism,” one man wrote on social media, is “a fatal plastic import from the West” that does not fit “the chemistry of Africans.” Others suggest that microplastics consumed in water cause homosexuality. It is not surprising that in 2018, in an event that perfectly 224 American Anthropologist • Vol. 122, No. 2 • June 2020 mirrored the Kenyan state’s governance through moral securitization, the terrorist organization Al-Shabaab banned, on the same day, homosexual acts and plastic bags, making them both punishable by death. Accordingly, homosexuality and plastic—the latest hindrances to moral utopias— became similar, mutually constitutive, if not partly overlapping, foreign afflictions against which an ideal order could be imagined. Thus, anxieties over different foreign contagions have resonated with and intensified people’s support of the plastic-bag ban. Plastic’s association with the foreign and its afflictions is not new. Since 2005, as part of my research on ethnicity, sexuality, and belonging in the town of Maralal, Samburu county, northern Kenya, I have worked with so-called “plastic boys.” “Plastic boys” are men in their twenties through early forties who make a meager living selling antiques and plastic artifacts. If locals use the noun “boys”—a mode of reference initially deployed by white colonials in subjecting male Africans (Meiu 2015, 480)—to infantilize these men, the adjacent “plastic,” as will become clear shortly, tells a more complex story. In

Law, Language, and a Nonsovereign Caribbean

Abstract: This article argues that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), a tribunal serving twelve independent primarily Anglophone Caribbean states, uses a variety of linguistic techniques in its pursuit of a regional future. Created upon a complicated (post)colonial landscape and charged with resolving the nonsovereignty of its member states, which, for the most part, continue to utilize the United Kingdom’s Privy Council for their final court of appeal, the CCJ does not view sovereignty as a solution. Instead, as I demonstrate through several examples of the Court’s use of, talk about, and abstention from language, the CCJ’s judges and employees seek to constitute a yet-to-befully-defined nonsovereign region that carves out a Caribbean people, pointedly rejects ongoing British legacies and logics, refuses to adopt the legal practices associated with sovereignty, and strives to remain untethered to either nation-state or suprastate. [law, language, sovereignty, region, Caribbean] RESUMEN Este artículo argumenta que la Corte de Justicia del Caribe (CCJ), un tribunal al servicio de doce estados independientes primariamente anglófonos del Caribe, usa una variedad de técnicas lingüísticas en la búsqueda de un futuro regional. Creado sobre un paisaje (post)colonial complicado y encargado de resolver la no soberanía de sus estados miembros, la cual, en su mayor parte, continúa utilizando el Consejo Privado del Reino Unido para su corte final de apelaciones, el CCJ no ve la soberanía como una solución. En cambio, como lo demuestro a través de varios ejemplos acerca del uso de la Corte de, hablar sobre, y de la abstención de lenguaje, los jueces y empleados de la CCJ buscan constituir una región no soberana, aún por definir enteramente, que forja un pueblo caribeño, rechaza intencionalmente lógicas y legados británicos, rehúsa adoptar las prácticas legales asociadas con la soberanía, y lucha por permanecer libre de ataduras al Estado nación o al supra-Estado. [ley, lenguaje, soberanía, región, el

Toward Reflexivity in the Anthropology of Expertise and Law

Abstract: T contemporary period is one in which truth is deeply contested as disputes over what constitutes “fact”—and who gets to decide—enter previously hegemonic spheres of knowledge and authority. As we see in the contributions to this special section, conflicts and transformations such as those highly visible in the media sphere, where highoffice public declarations against “fake news” challenge fundamental assumptions about veracity, are also playing out in other neoliberal Western institutions, notably in the realm of law. As contributor Charles R. Hale argues, these tensions may be indexing the rapid decline of neoliberal multiculturalism, with profound implications. From paramilitary white supremacists marching on #charlottesville to the youth-catalyzed global solidarity of the #climatestrike, we are in a historical moment of intense mobilizations aimed at either opening or limiting the opportunities for social, environmental, and political change. Even as this moment inspires activist academics to find new ways of engaging our expertise toward real-world impacts, this moment concurrently raises urgent questions about unintended impacts and whether and how “change from within” is possible. The discipline of anthropology remains uniquely positioned to reveal and grapple with these issues at every scale, from the embodied to the discursive and from the hyperlocal to the global.The voices in this section collectively provide a rich, sophisticated, and nuanced examination of how particular forms of expertise and identity—including that of the activist anthropologist—are dialectically shaped through strategic engagement with Western legal institutions, and to what effects on subaltern and anti-imperial forms of ordering social relations. I share with these authors the experiences of being both ethnographer and at times advocate within this milieu. We ask ourselves: What is traded when we seek to facilitate urgent legal outcomes for the individual while participating in frameworks that may delimit long-term potential for systemic change? When a “cultural expert” assesses, for example, whether an asylum seeker’s

Between Will and Thought: Individualism and Social Responsiveness in Amazonian Child Rearing

Abstract: This essay provides an ethnographic account of how moral dispositions towards independence and social responsiveness are forged during infancy and toddlerhood among the Runa, an indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I will show how two local concepts, munay (will) and yuyay (thought) shape children’s early experiences of the self and the self in relation to others. In particular, I will argue that, unlike middle class Anglo-Americans who repute paternal responsiveness to be necessary for a “healthy” child development, Runa adults strategically chose not to respond to children’s will in order to make them “thoughtful”. Such state of thoughtfulness, I argue, emerges from socialization practices which stress a child’s unique will while at the same time forcefully encourage the development of social responsiveness.