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Showing papers in "American Ethnologist in 2010"



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the outcomes of Egyptian women's practices of sociality are analyzed in the context of economic empowerment of women via finance, and they are shown to serve as an economic infrastructure for projects oriented around the pursuit of profit.
Abstract: In this article, I draw on ethnographic research in Cairo to analyze outcomes of Egyptian women's practices of sociality. In Cairo, “phatic labor” creates a social infrastructure of communicative channels that are as essential to economy as roads, bridges, or telephone lines. Projects to empower Egyptian women via finance made these communicative channels visible as an economic infrastructure for projects oriented around the pursuit of profit. A social infrastructure that had functioned as a kind of semiotic commons became visible as a resource that could be privatized or formatted as a public good.

243 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examined the experiences and strategies of unemployed young men in the north Indian city of Meerut and argued for an ethnographically sensitive political-economy approach to the study of youth, culture, and neoliberal transformation, attuned to both the durability of social inequalities and counterintuitive cultural practice.
Abstract: Unemployment among educated young men has become a central feature of globalization. In this article, I examine the experiences and strategies of unemployed young men in the north Indian city of Meerut. Many of these men complain that they are “just passing time” (doing “timepass”) in run-down government universities. But they also use this idea of themselves in limbo to fashion novel cultures of masculinity that partially bridge caste divides. I use a discussion of these young men's predicament to argue for an ethnographically sensitive political-economy approach to the study of youth, culture, and neoliberal transformation, one attuned to both the durability of social inequalities and counterintuitive cultural practice.

232 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Matei Candea1
TL;DR: The authors argue that treating detachment and engagement as polar opposites is unhelpful both in this ethnographic case and, more broadly, in anthropological discussions of ethics and knowledge making.
Abstract: Relationship, connection, and engagement have emerged as key values in recent studies of human–animal relations. In this article, I call for a reexamination of the productive aspects of detachment. I trace ethnographically the management of everyday relations between biologists and the Kalahari meerkats they study, and I follow the animals’ transformation as subjects of knowledge and engagement when they become the stars of an internationally popular, televised animal soap opera. I argue that treating detachment and engagement as polar opposites is unhelpful both in this ethnographic case and, more broadly, in anthropological discussions of ethics and knowledge making. [human–animal relations, science, media, ethics, engagement, detachment]

224 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examine the process in spoken discourse about U.S.-bound migration produced by nonmigrants in the Mexican city of Uriangato, and show that acts of position taking vis-a-vis these social personae are fundamentally expressed through the ways speakers deploy the modernist chronotope and, thus, become emplotted in its imaginative sociology.
Abstract: The globalization literature spotlights the way that the experiences of transnational actors are refracted through lives inhabitable elsewhere. In this article, I examine this process in spoken discourse about U.S.-bound migration produced by nonmigrants in the Mexican city of Uriangato. This talk is organized around a “modernist chronotope” that pits “progress” against “tradition,” producing images of space–time grafted onto images of persons, or social personae. I show that acts of position taking vis-a-vis these social personae are fundamentally expressed through the ways speakers deploy the modernist chronotope and, thus, become emplotted in its imaginative sociology—a practice that constructs speakers as certain gender and class types. [discourse, chronotope, transnational migration, modernity, social positioning, gender and socioeconomic class]

142 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors consider three recent collections, one edited by anthropologists, one by an art historian, and one by a philosopher, that reflect on what might be called "the media turn" in religious studies.
Abstract: In this review essay, I consider three recent collections, one edited by anthropologists, one by an art historian, and one by a philosopher, that reflect on what might be called "the media turn" in religious studies. I situate these collections in relation to broader trends and interests within anthropology, religious studies, and media studies, focusing in particular on the idea of religion as mediation, which involves, in part, a turn away from conceptions of belief and toward materiality and practice. [religion, media, materiality, belief, the public sphere]

128 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examined the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya and argued that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect relationships.
Abstract: In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect relationships. In text messages, then, English and local African tongues are sometimes treated as foils for each other, suggesting that, rather than merely being mimicked, the English medialect is flavored by distinctly local concerns. Indeed, among many Giriama elders, the poetic patterns of text messaging are construed as a special breed of witchery in which hypermobility and linguistic innovation threaten ethnic coherence and even sanity itself. I suggest, however, that the use of Kigiriama in text messaging may point not to the abandonment of ethnicity but to new ways of being Giriama that are simultaneously local and modern. [mobile phones, text messaging, globalization, Kenya, witchcraft, language ideology, code switching]

128 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that women bear unusual semiotic burdens at the borders of materiality and piety, and reveal how pious Indonesian women must frame acts of pious consumption as disavowals of consumption and as expressions of beauty and modesty.
Abstract: Islamic consumption promises to correct the ills of consumption yet relies on the logic of consumption for its appeal. Fashionably pious women in Indonesia have become figures of concern, suspected of being more invested in the material, and hence superficial, world than their virtuous appearances suggest. Arguing that consumption and religion are interdependent systems of faith, I show that women bear unusual semiotic burdens at the borders of materiality and piety. This approach reveals how pious Indonesian women must frame acts of pious consumption as disavowals of consumption and as expressions of beauty and modesty.

112 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokast er with the main checkpoint on the Albanian-Greek border is presented.
Abstract: This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokast er with the main checkpoint on the Albanian-Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

109 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, an ethnography of the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar in Cairo is presented to understand its ethical authority and challenge conventional oppositions between authority and ethical agency.
Abstract: Prevailing approaches to the fatwa construe it as primarily an instrument of Islamic doctrinal change and reform, as bridging the constant gap between a settled doctrinal past and a future of continual novelty. Underpinning these approaches are familiar but questionable assumptions about temporality, imitation, creativity, and tradition that obscure the fatwa's integral ethical dimensions and our understandings of its pervasive authority. This article unsettles these assumptions and, through ethnography of the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar in Cairo, offers a different view of the fatwa that helps us both understand its ethical authority and challenges conventional oppositions between authority and ethical agency.

107 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article analyzed how their criticism is undermined in the process of designing the naturalization ceremony, the form of which continues to express a culturalist message of citizenship, despite organizers' explicit criticism or ridicule.
Abstract: In 2006, the Dutch government introduced a naturalization ceremony for foreigners wishing to become Dutch citizens. Local bureaucrats who organize the ceremony initially disapproved of the measure as symbolic of the neonationalist approach to migration. I analyze how their criticism is undermined in the process of designing the ritual, the form of which continues to express a culturalist message of citizenship, despite organizers’ explicit criticism or ridicule. Using the concept of "cultural intimacy," I show how nationalism builds on a shared embarrassment among local bureaucrats, from which the new citizens are excluded by way of the ceremony.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examine how pious Muslim French women reconcile the dominant secular oppositions between personal autonomy and religious authority, and between the true self and religious norms, as they constitute themselves as religious subjects.
Abstract: Through an analysis of the practice of veiling, I first examine how pious Muslim French women reconcile the dominant secular oppositions between personal autonomy and religious authority, and between the “true” self and religious norms, as they constitute themselves as religious subjects. I then turn to the 2004 law banning headscarves in public schools, and to the attendant public debates, exploring how this Muslim French religiosity was rendered incommensurable in secular law and unintelligible in public discourse. In so doing, I bring into focus both the underlying assumptions and exigencies of French secularity as well as some of its aporias.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine loss, the vicissitudes of empathy, and the existential complexity of one's subjective life in relation to the lived experiences of others, and argue for the significance of recognizing that empathy is rarely an all or nothing affair.
Abstract: In this article, I examine loss, the vicissitudes of empathy, and the existential complexity of one's subjective life in relation to the lived experiences of others. I focus specifically on some observations I made about the dynamics of empathy and the experience of grief during a recent trip back to the island of Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia. In so doing, I argue for the significance of recognizing that empathy is rarely an all or nothing affair. Nor is it necessary that it be based on some set of homologous experiences shared between individuals. It is, instead, a process that is temporally arrayed, intersubjectively constituted, and culturally patterned. Even in the face of mutual misunderstanding, possibilities still exist for moments of empathetic insight to arise.

Journal ArticleDOI
Jane Dyson1
TL;DR: This paper examined the relationship between friendship, cultural production, and social reproduction through reference to the everyday practices of girls working in the Indian Himalayas, focusing especially on girls’ work collecting leaves.
Abstract: In this article, I examine the relationship between friendship, cultural production, and social reproduction through reference to the everyday practices of girls working in the Indian Himalayas. I build on 15 months of ethnographic research in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand. Focusing especially on girls’ work collecting leaves, I stress the importance of contextualizing friendship with reference to lived everyday actions and environments. Friendship among girls in Bemni is a contradictory resource: a medium through which girls reproduce gendered norms and a basis for improvised cultural practice and effective cooperation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue for skepticism vis-a-vis the "realistic" stance that is now employed to evaluate the success of development-oriented applications of the Internet in India.
Abstract: Against the view that the millennium brought only unrealistic hype around the socially transformative potentials of the Internet, I argue for skepticism vis-a-vis the “realistic” stance that is now employed to evaluate the success of development-oriented applications of the Internet in India. Focusing on the heyday of ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development) projects, I move beyond the stalemate of hype versus debunking to suggest, instead, that although the discourse of development helped to legitimize the Internet as an “appropriate technology,” its emphasis on functional solutions also helped to obscure the Internet's more ambiguous emergent potentials.


Journal ArticleDOI
Tobias Rees1
TL;DR: The authors developed an "ethical analysis" to show that the emergence of adult cerebral plasticity was a major mutation of the neurologically human, a metamorphosis of the confines within which neuroscience requires all those who live under the spell of the brain to think and live the human.
Abstract: Throughout the 20th century, scientists believed that the adult human brain is fully developed, organized in fixed and immutable function-specific neural circuits. Since the discovery of the profound plasticity of the human brain in the Late 1990s, this belief has been thoroughly undermined. In this article, combining ethnographic and historical research, I develop an "ethical analysis" to show that (and in what concrete sense) the emergence of adult cerebral plasticity was a major mutation of the neurologically human-a metamorphosis of the confines within which neuroscience requires all those who live under the spell of the brain to think and live the human.

Journal ArticleDOI
Jie Yang1
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how Chinese state enterprises sustain social stability in the wake of mass unemployment caused by privatization and examine how state enterprises translate labor unrest into a crisis of masculinity and the sustaining of stability into governing men and masculinity.
Abstract: In this article, I examine how Chinese state enterprises sustain social stability in the wake of mass unemployment caused by privatization. At the same time that China, in its attempt to sustain stability, unmakes, or remakes, state workers into entrepreneurial subjects, it attempts to remake itself as a benevolent patriarchal government exercising kindly power. State enterprises translate labor unrest into a crisis of masculinity and the sustaining of stability into governing men and masculinity. For men, mass unemployment has meant the loss of virility associated with life-tenured employment, and this loss of livelihood and virility results in social instability, which is embodied in the unemployed male. Male workers then use the language of gender and family and translate it back into an expression of class antagonism.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The increasing migration of indigenous people from Latin America to the United States signals a new horizon for the study of indigeneity, complexly understood as subjectivities, knowledge, and practices of the earliest human inhabitants of a particular place and including legal and racial identities that refer to these people as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The increasing migration of indigenous people from Latin America to the United States signals a new horizon for the study of indigeneity—complexly understood as subjectivities, knowledge, and practices of the earliest human inhabitants of a particular place and including legal and racial identities that refer to these people. Focusing on indigenous migration to San Francisco, California, I explore how government, service providers, and community organizations respond to the arrival of new ethnic groups while also contributing to an expanding Urban Indian collective identity. In addition to reviewing such governmental practices as the creation of new census categories and related responses to indigenous ethnic diversity, I illustrate how some members of a diverse Urban Indian population unite through participation in rituals such as the Maya Waqxaqi’ B’atz’ (Day of Human Perfection), transplanted to San Francisco from Guatemala. The rituals recall homelands near and far in a broader social imagination about being and belonging in the world. The social imagination, borne in part through migration and diaspora, acknowledges the local and the particular in a framework of shared values about what it means to be human. I analyze this meaning making as cosmopolitanism in practice. By merging indigeneity and cosmopolitanism, I join other scholars who strive to decenter classical notions of cosmopolitan “worldliness,” drawing attention to alternative sources of beneficent sociality and for cultivating humanity.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that patients' coping strategies were informed by a cultural expectation of productivity that I call the "John Wayne Model," indexing disease as something to be worked through and controlled.
Abstract: Is coping with illness really a matter of agency? Drawing on ethnographic research among people with rheumatological and neurological chronic diseases in the United States, I argue that patients’ coping strategies were informed by a cultural expectation of productivity that I call the “John Wayne Model,” indexing disease as something to be worked through and controlled. People able to adopt a John Wayne–like approach experienced social approval. Yet some people found this cultural model impossible to utilize and experienced their lack of agency in the face of illness as increasing their suffering, which was made all the worse if their sickness was invisible to others. Unable to follow the culturally legitimated John Wayne model, people fell into what I call the “Cultured Response”—the realm beyond the agency embedded in cultural models, in which people do not resist but embrace as ideal the cultural expectations they cannot meet and that oppress their sense of value in the world. [suffering, cultural models, agency, chronic illness, United States, cultural anthropology, medical anthropology]

Journal ArticleDOI
Tsipy Ivry1
TL;DR: This case prompts a reconsideration of scholars’ tendency to view biomedicine in hegemonic terms and shows how hands-on rabbinic interventions transform doctor–patient relations into rabbi–doctor– patient relations and introduce a network of power relations into clinical practice.
Abstract: Drawing on my ethnography of rabbinically mediated fertility treatments for observant Jewish couples in Israel, I illuminate two simultaneous processes: the koshering of medical care and the medicalization of rabbinic law. My findings show how hands-on rabbinic interventions transform doctor–patient relations into rabbi–doctor–patient relations and introduce a network of power relations into clinical practice, at times empowering and at times disempowering patients. This case prompts a reconsideration of scholars’ tendency to view biomedicine in hegemonic terms.


Journal ArticleDOI
Scott Simon1
TL;DR: In this article, the state-indigenous relations in local elections in Taiwan are studied and the dialogic relationship between indigenous groups and the state as well as the minideals that constitute the social contract are discussed.
Abstract: In this article, I look at state-indigenous relations in local elections in Taiwan. In studying elections, one learns about the dialogic relationship between indigenous groups and the state as well as about the minideals that constitute the social contract. Elections have become a part of indigenous life, even as they introduce new forms of political actors to a formerly egalitarian society. Repeated elections permit parties and state actors to negotiate deals with local individuals, groups, and factions. The electoral system, however, does not contribute to indigenous nationalism. It may even detract from its legitimacy if voters perceive indigenism as merely a campaign strategy.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors deal with the tension in rural China between vernacular practice in local sociality and official representations related to processes of state formation and with the ways in which this tension is revealed and concealed through gestures of embarrassment, irony, and cynicism.
Abstract: In this article, I deal with the tension in rural China between vernacular practice in local sociality and official representations related to processes of state formation and with the ways in which this tension is revealed and concealed through gestures of embarrassment, irony, and cynicism. Such gestures point toward a space of intimate self-knowledge that I call a “community of complicity,” a concept derived from Michael Herzfeld’s outline of “cultural intimacy.” I illustrate how such communities are constituted with examples involving Chinese geomancy (fengshui), funerary rituals, and corruption. I contrast this approach with arguments made about “state involution” in China.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider how the Diola tendency to circumscribe information both challenges external development objectives and contours the ways Diola themselves confront their declining economic conditions, and propose a solution to this problem.
Abstract: Development practitioners are eager to “learn from farmers” in their efforts to address Africa's deteriorating agricultural output. But many agrarian groups, such as Diola rice cultivators in Guinea-Bissau, regulate the circulation of knowledge—whether about agriculture, household economy, or day-to-day activities. In this article, I thus problematize the assumptions that knowledge is an extractable resource, that more knowledge is better, and that democratized knowledge leads to progress. I consider how the Diola tendency to circumscribe information both challenges external development objectives and contours the ways Diola themselves confront their declining economic conditions. [agrarian change, knowledge, development, Africa, secrecy, Guinea-Bissau]

Journal ArticleDOI
David Nugent1
TL;DR: In this article, state officials in the northern Peruvian Andes came to believe that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by APRA, an outlawed political party forced underground by government repression.
Abstract: During the regime of Manuel Odria (1948–56), state officials in the northern Peruvian Andes came to believe that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by APRA, an outlawed political party forced underground by government repression. Officials concluded that the party had elaborated a subterranean political apparatus of remarkable scope and power, one that was largely invisible to the naked eye. I draw on officials’ fears of a dark and dangerous counterstate to cross-examine the literature on state formation. State theory has been predicated on the inevitability of state power, which makes it difficult to account for state crisis and also to grasp the highly contingent nature of successful efforts to rule. Much can be learned about state formation by examining moments in which political rule falters or fails, for it is then that the lineaments of power and control that otherwise remain masked become visible.

Journal ArticleDOI
Jaap Timmer1
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze emulations of state legal culture in local labor and land tenure arrangements among Bugis migrants in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, to challenge the assumptions of a World Bank report on nonstate justice in Indonesia.
Abstract: In this article, I analyze emulations of state legal culture in local labor and land tenure arrangements among Bugis migrants in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, to challenge the assumptions of a World Bank report on nonstate justice in Indonesia. I focus, in particular, on how and why nonstate actors emulate aspects of the governmentality of the state to construct a new realm of participation in the region and the state as well as of rights and citizenship. In contrast to conclusions reached by the World Bank, I find that this tendency may increase rather than reduce legal pluralism and does not guarantee that those involved acknowledge the state's ideal of the rule of law.

Journal ArticleDOI
Matt Hodges1
TL;DR: The authors examine popular modernist invocations of epoch in rural France, those positing traditional pasts against fluid presents with uncertain future, and reveal an additional critique in this periodization, one that valorizes enduring social time over processual temporalities with implications for the temporal frameworks and ideology of anthropologists.
Abstract: With recognition that historical consciousness, or “historicity,” is culturally mediated comes acknowledgment that periodization of history into epochs is as much a product of cultural practice as a reflection of historical “fact.” In this article, I examine popular “modernist” invocations of epoch in rural France—those positing traditional pasts against fluid presents with uncertain futures—which scholars frequently subordinate to analyses of collective memory and identity politics. Submitting this “response” to French modernity to temporal analysis reveals an additional critique in this periodization, one that valorizes enduring social time over processual temporalities, with implications for the temporal frameworks and ideology of anthropologists.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze regulatory interactions in a U.S. construction project, including the procedure for formally certifying buildings as energy efficient and sustainable, to bring into focus the sometimes-paradoxical effects that highly rationalized regulations have on those obliged to comply with them.
Abstract: One expression of the spread of auditing and bureaucratic accountability in global society is the emergence of certifications of virtue, typically after completion of a review process designed to ensure objectivity. In this article, I analyze regulatory interactions in a U.S. construction project, including the procedure for formally certifying buildings as energy efficient and “sustainable,” to bring into focus the sometimes-paradoxical effects that highly rationalized regulations have on those obliged to comply with them. The case illustrates how virtue is reduced to a checklist of measurable properties whose integrity is maintained through rituals of verification and rigorous risk management. The issues involved lead me to reflect on anthropologists’ inclination to demonize bureaucratic regulation in their ethnographic accounts even as they insist on formal accountability in their own communities and professional networks.

Journal ArticleDOI
Casey High1
TL;DR: This article examined the ways in which young Waorani men in Amazonian Ecuador express specific generational forms of masculinity in reference to past violence, urban intercultural relations, and global film imagery.
Abstract: In this article, I examine the ways in which young Waorani men in Amazonian Ecuador express specific generational forms of masculinity in reference to past violence, urban intercultural relations, and global film imagery. By drawing on Amazonian and anthropological conceptualizations of "gendered agency," I consider how emerging masculine fantasies point to young men's reduced ability to demonstrate particular forms of agency associated with male elders and ancestors. I suggest that a Waorani "masculinity crisis" in the wake of social and economic transformation has not led to the gendered antagonisms and violence toward women familiar to studies of "hegemonic" masculinities.