Showing papers in "Critique of Anthropology in 1999"

Local knowledge in the environment-development discourse: From dichotomies to situated knowledges

Abstract: This article takes a critical look at the various approaches representing local knowledge as a scapegoat for underdevelopment or as a panacea for sustainability, these two representations characterizing the conventional environ-ment–development discourse. The static oppositions of local versus universal knowledge are challenged by establishing more diversified models to analyse the relationships of heterogeneous knowledges. The study emphasizes the complex articulation of knowledge repertoires by drawing on an ethnographic case study among migrant peasants in southeastern Nicaragua. Knowledge production is seen as a process of social negotiation involving multiple actors and complex power relations. The article underlines the issue of situated knowledges as one of the major challenges in developing anthropology as an approach that subjects fixed dichotomies between subject and object, fact and value, and the rational and the practical, to critical reconstruction.

‘We Wondered what Human Rights He Was Talking About’: Human rights, homosexuality and the Zimbabwe International Book Fair

Abstract: This article addresses the recent debates on homosexuality and human rights in Zimbabwe, particularly as they relate to the controversy surrounding the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) particip...

To Find an African Witch Anthropology, Modernity, and Witch-Finding in North-West Zimbabwe

Abstract: This article critically examines the emergent anthropological analytic that situates African witchcraft within modernity, global capitalism and state structures. Despite the contrast the authors of this analytic make with what theycall the older anthropological analytic that viewed witchcraft as a sign of traditional African social organization, I suggest that both approaches neglect the various social projects, social identities and power relations involved in witchcraft, including those surrounding anthropology as a discipline. I elaborate this point through discussing some of the overlapping and contesting forms of authority, including my own as anthropologist, involved in a witch-finding exercise that took place in the early 1990s on commercial farms and Communal Lands in Hurungwe District, northwestern Zimbabwe.

The Mondragón model as post-fordist discourse : Considerations on the production of post-fordism

Abstract: This article is intended as a contribution to the ethnography of contemporary capitalism I analyze the case of the Mondragon cooperative model and consider what its international fame tells us about the regime of post-Fordism I explore the constitution of the Mondragon model through the singular discourse of labor–management cooperation I show how the model is produced by the discursive practices of omission and decontextualization Mondragon can only be constructed as an alternative to and critique of capitalism if (1) workers’ experiences are erased; (2) politics are marginalized; and (3) the cooperatives are de-territorialized from the global economic context By providing the missing contexts, I offer a competing narrative, portraying cooperation as a class-interested discourse that undermines workers’ power My account of how the Mondragon model was produced is a revealing case of the production of global capitalist discourses in a period of economic and ideological shifts to post-Fordism

From ‘Cultures of Fear and Terror’ to the Normalization of Violence: An ethnographic case

Abstract: This article critically examines the widespread usage of such constructs as ‘culture of terror’ and ‘culture of fear’ to characterize settings in which state power is based on the intimidation of civilians ‘Cultures of fear and terror’, it is argued, are at once inflationary and reductive tropes which obscure the political agency and cultural resources that are called upon to end regimes of coercion As an alternative, it is suggested that state-authorized aggression is neither equivalent to culture nor a characteristic of a cultural group, but a historically specific means and rationale for disciplining particular categories of people Ethnographic evidence from the rural Philippines is presented in support of a more practice-oriented approach toward conceptualizing what scholars now term ‘civil wrongs’

Enacting solidarity : Unions and migrant youth in Thailand

Abstract: The A. examines the activities of some young migrant workers, participants in Thailand's labor movement, and their strategies for solidarity in the face of economic insecurity. Activities sponsored by some independent Bangkok unions and labor solidarity groups draw upon both modern urban commercial forms as well as traditional ritual practices to promote class-based unity within a predominantly youthful and migrant labor force. Though limited in both means and opportunity for effective oppositional expression, unionized migrants explore new ways of thinking about themselves and their experiences through creative enactments of solidarity. In the process, migrant youth rework dominant symbols and practices in ways that contest hegemonic authority. Their grassroots actions reveal a dynamic struggle to produce and engage an alternative discourse of class-based identity by members of a workforce widely deemed to have little potential for collective action.

The Empire of Direct Sales and the Making of Thai Entrepreneurs

Abstract: This article offers an ethnographic investigation of contemporary capitalist discourses about entrepreneurship by exploring the expanse of the direct sales industry into Thailand Direct selling is

Bittersweet harvest : Children, work and the global march against child labour in the post-apartheid state

Abstract: This article explores recent transformations in child labour legislation in the wake of rapid democratic political change in South Africa. It reflects on working children’s agency and their defence of their rights to work, drawing on ethnographic research in the wine lands of the Western Cape Province. The article argues that recent anti-child labour campaigns in South Africa fail to provide economic solutions for destitute black and coloured children who depend on remunerated vineyard work to sustain household economies. It contends that international legislation prohibiting child labour is myopic because it ignores the key role that children play in the global flexible labour market and, by disaggregating child from adult exploitation, perpetuates the economic conditions which give rise to child labour.

Migrant labor takes a holiday. Reworking modernity and marginality in contemporary Thailand.

Abstract: This paper examines the practice of working-class group excursions in Thailand, organized by and for rural labor migrants in Bangkok. These trips involve traditional forms of Buddhist ceremonial as well as more self-consciously "modern" sightseeing activities in distant regions of the country. More than just a welcome respite from the drudgery and discipline of factory jobs, these excursions allow labor migrants to make important claims about their experiences as members of the Thai nation-state. As tourist-consumers, migrant workers appropriate powerful signs and symbols of modern Thai identity and status, in doing so they contest (and at least partly rework) their material and ideological marginalization within contemporary Thai society.

‘It Takes a Serb to Know a Serb’: Uncovering the roots of obstinate otherness in Serbia

Abstract: In this article I discuss two domains of knowledge that my Serbian informants labelled as impenetrable to Western knowledge: carousing in Gypsy bars (a practice called lumpovanje) and Serbian histo...

Agency, power and personhood : Discourses of gender and violence in a fishing community in South India

Abstract: This article examines the prevalence of domestic violence in a fishing community in Kerala, south India. Understanding violence here necessitates understanding something about local ideas of gender, personhood and agency; ideas which are strongly resistant to change. Violence is linked by people to the embodied nature of gender difference, the inevitably greater ‘heat’ of men’s bodies, and also the ways in which men and women are bound to each other in marriage, the actions of each being elicited by the other. Violence here seems inevitable and men are not usually seen as to blame. More recently, activist discourses condemning violence have become common, but the collision between a feminist inspired criticism of male violence and local understandings of person and agency has led to a focus on alcohol as the root of the problem, with men still perceived to be personally not at fault.

Digitizing ‘Development’ Balinese water temples, complexity and the politics of simulation

Abstract: This article examines a recent use of computer simulation in modeling the ecological dynamics of a rural indigenous community. It takes as its central example anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing’s mo...

Children and the Politics of Violence in Haitian Context: Statist violence, scarcity and street child agency in Port-au-Prince

Abstract: An anthropology of children and violence must address the specific conditions under which children are more (or less) likely to be nurtured and protected, rather than abused, battered or exposed. The Lafanmi Selavi orphanage project in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, provides a useful focal point for the anthropological reckoning of both concerns. Founded by Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1986, the program was instituted in order to provide housing, food, education and a political safe haven for numerous street children who had found themselves targeted for state violence. Soundly based in liberation theology, Lafanmi Selavi includes both Christian social ethics and democratic mobilization in its curriculum, drawing the often violent ire of rightist Haitian state polities and their civil proxies. This article is a study of past and continuing state violence against the children of Lafanmi Selavi, and it situates the Haitian street child as a cultural and political agent of national discourse.

After the ‘Raskol’ Feast: Youths’ alienation in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

Abstract: Youths’ alienation from both the exchange networks of their kin and the wage economy in urban Papua New Guinea depletes their spirit and will, thereby challenging that aspect of personal identity which establishes their relations to others. Their thefts, violence and gluttony exceed conventional habits of consumption and distinguish many youth as ‘rascals’ (in Tok Pisin, raskols), who have ‘no shame nor respect’ (nogat sem). In this article I analyse the practice of excessive consumption in light of the ethos of sem amongst kin in village mortuary feasts and amongst friends in urban settlements, thereby showing that nogat sem approximates the condition of alienation in Melanesia. By assessing consumption theory in light of its ability to account for alienation, I conclude that practices of consumption not only produce and reproduce mutually recognized hierarchical relations, but also fracture those relations and dismember the actors’ identities.

Under the Law Teen prostitution in Kensington

Abstract: This paper seeks to investigate the effects of a changing economy on youth labor. With increased pressure on the nuclear family, which emerged out of a capitalist framework, financial responsibility is shared by youth. This economic unit was once dependent on male wage earners but now is no longer able to sustain itself due to deindustrialization. Because of existing governmental parameters on youth labor, many young women choose marginal labor such as prostitution. This paper addresses various monocausal explanations which fail to explain why teens enter into sex work such as drug abuse, sexual abuse and failing family values. Using a Marxist framework, I contend that teens choose prostitution in reaction to economic constraints on the family unit. Entering into sex work changes the relationships that youth have with their families, communities and with the state. It is hoped that this paper will unveil the effects capitalism has on youth labor as well as the conditions in which these youth live.

Rethinking Child Labor in an Age of Capitalist Restructuring

Abstract: Child labor is hardly a new issue, but it is one that has grown in scale and infamy during the latest phase of international capitalist expansion. As corporate strategies for profit have shifted toward ever-cheaper sources of labor worldwide, only international conventions against slavery and labor/concentration camps stand in the path of the logical trajectory. The international scope of child labor is underscored by the cases at hand: unemployed teenagers in Papua New Guinea, vineyard workers in South Africa, street children activists in Haiti, rural migrant union activists in Thailand, and sex trade workers in the USA. In this setting, the expanded use of child labor is symptomatic of worldwide deterioration of workers' rights and immiserization of working class communities. Corporate immunity from local consequences of moving offshore, diminishing state intervention in ameliorating conditions of work, and dwindling compensation packages contribute to the displacement of adult workers. No one is arguing that child labor is desirable, although work-study arrangements have helped working class students in a range of contemporary welfare states complete their higher education. But debates in international agencies such as the United Nations center on outlawing child labor, not on the well-being of these children and their kin when access to work is removed. The rush among liberal politicians to ban child labor is suspect. Veterans of women's rights campaigns will understand that legal bans do not address social, economic, and political conditions creating the familial and community pressure placed on someone to work. Far more important would be regulations that ensure benefits (living wages, medical and pension rights, unionization) for workers in those industries regardless of age, or liabilities placed on mobile capital to enforce responsibility to abandoned working communities. The articles in this issue consider a range of issues in child labor. What sets of circumstances shape who becomes seen as a child? What changing configuration of social forces creates ‘acceptable’ levels and expectations of child labor? What dimensions of worker exploitation are unique to being defined as either categorically dependent or as categorically a child? Where does respect for children's own agency fit into workers' rights and human

Ceci n’est pas Jimmie Durham

Abstract: The A. examines the idea that there can (or cannot) be an authentic cultural identity. Debates about identity and authenticity are particularly prevalent in North America where the idea of authentic (and inauthentic) Native identities is very strong, both inside and outside Native communities. This is particularly so in terms of debates about treaty rights and resources wherein the issue of authenticity can be used as a benchmark for recognizing (or not recognizing) the claims of an individual, group or community. These questions will be explored by looking at how they are approached by the artist and writer Jimmie Durham, within the context of a piece of legislation known as the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (PL 101-644). This legislation and Durham's responses, provide a useful viewpoint in terms of contributing to the ongoing debates about authenticity, identity and the politics of representation. The A. will attempt to demonstrate that these issues, although grounded in the art world, draw many parallels with the cultural, social, economic and political control and marginalization of North America's indigenous peoples.

Waimiri-Atroari resistance in the presence of an indigenist policy of 'resistance'

Abstract: This article examines the resistance of the Waimiri-Atroari Indian people in a situation where government indigenist policy has been subordinated to the interests of large-scale economic development projects (the giant Pitinga mining complex of the Paranapanema Group and the Balbina hydroelectric scheme). The administration has appropriated a rhetoric of Indian ‘resistance’ to mask a situation of extreme domination and to sell images of a model assistance programme. The native strategy of learning the rules of the game of th official indigenist policy is examined, not as a passive but as an active reaction of accommodation to a situation of extreme domination, reflecting the immense power of large companies in controlling the destiny of Indian peoples.

Introduction to Sharryn Kasmir's and Ara Wilson's Articles

Abstract: For more than a decade, scholars have struggled to understand the specific complexities of contemporary capitalism, a form often characterized as ‘post-Fordist’ or as a regime of ‘flexible accumulation’. Some have suggested that, given the enormous variety of capitalist accumulation strategies and their specific historical and cultural registers, we should view these as different capitalisms. Others identify such decentralization as itself a manifestation of capitalist logic. Whatever the outcome of these debates, these analyses, most of which have emerged outside of anthropology proper, point to the increasing intricacy of the economic, social, and cultural systems associated with capitalism. The recognition of the close and shifting link between culture and capitalism – or between regimes of discourse and regimes of accumulation – highlights the need to carefully explore, through specific ethnographic analyses, the relationship between changing economic arrangements and changing cultural forms. Much recent work by cultural anthropologists has addressed these questions, in part because the presence of the global economy has become overt in even the most ‘remote’ communities, but also in an effort to make contemporary capitalism the object, not simply the context, for anthropological research. (A partial but suggestive list includes Blim, 1990; Iglesias Prieto, 1997; Kasmir, 1996; Kondo, 1990; Martin, 1994; Miller, 1997; Nash, 1989; Ong, 1987; Ong and Nonini, 1997; Rothstein and Blim, 1992; Rouse, 1995). The two articles that follow join this growing body of work, which could be called the ethnography (or ethnographies) of capitalism. These pieces illustrate and analyze the ways that post-Fordist capitalism is constituted through and by particular narratives, figures and tropes revolving around decentralization and flexibility. We suggest that these expressive forms are usefully conceptualized as capitalist discourses. Each article situates the production, translation and reception of these discourses in specific ethnographic contexts. Introduction

Cultural preservation reconsidered : The case of Canadian aboriginal art

Abstract: Hybrid art forms are emerging more than ever now that advances in global communication link the world’s societies. James Clifford, Trinh T. MinhHa, Valerie Dominguez and other eminent scholars champion such hybrid culture. They argue that it leads to greater acceptance of others and otherness, and destroys notions of ‘others’ as aesthetically unsophisticated. While there is merit in such claims, this article sheds a different light on the nature of hybrid culture. It argues that in some instances, such culture is the by-product of cultural imperialism – first-world socio-economic and cultural policies imposed on ‘Second’ and ‘Third World’ communities. The article concentrates on the dichotomy between native Canadian and Anglo-American Canadian mass culture and adopts Minh-Ha’s claim that a First World and a Third World can exist in the same country.

Book Review: Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina

Abstract: In their generality academics have been sniffy of sport unless donned more or less like a fashion accessory to prove some allegiance or demonstrate at least a hint of humanity. Intellectuals more widely, however, have often used it to form the backbone of some vast historical panorama such as Don DeLillo’s use of baseball in his novel Underworld (1998). There is, though, increasing evidence that some change is afoot. Anybody who has read Eduardo Archetti’s marvellous social history of the guinea-pig (Archetti, 1997) will realize that his work is not easy to pigeonhole. In his latest book, Masculinities, he emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of his enterprise, a study of football, polo and the tango in Argentina. The study grew out of his own interest in football and the sudden realization that here was more than just a game. The sport, he saw, played a role in the very construction of Argentinian national identity. Buenos Aires was a city which had grown at a phenomenal rate, expanding from an 1869 population of 180,000 inhabitants to almost 3 million by 1930. Of these, 1 million were European immigrants. If Paris was the cultural heart of Europe at the turn of the century, Buenos Aires sought to offer a similar range of pleasures for its burgeoning cosmopolitan mix and set a standard for other Latin American capitals. In this respect it was a modern city, planned along European lines, and the expansion of the city was to eclipse the narratives of national identity which had their roots in the pampas. The gaucho tales so beloved of Jorge Luis Borges were at their height when in reality these knife-wielding free spirits were being incorporated into the expanding hinterland of the cities, the arrabal. With its history of immigration, discussion of hybridity is nothing new in the Latin American context and Archetti warns readers familiar with the use of the term in cultural studies that it is dangerous simply to emphasize the subversive aspects of hybridity (as he accuses Hall, Gilroy and Bhabha of doing). ‘Hybrids’, he writes, ‘have unique, special or exceptional qualities, and can be seen as ideological constructions of social order – and in this way also producers of tradition’ (p. xvi). In Buenos Aires, cultural diversity generated a linguistic Babel. While English was the technical and commercial language, and French the choice of those with pretensions to culture, the majority communicated in a mixture of Mediterranean dialects. Football may have been introduced into Argentina by the British, but it is for these southern Mediterraneans that it became an obsession and the dominant signifier of both their nationhood and their masculinity. Archetti’s book is an attempt to understand how this came about and the shape and form of the hybridizing cultural processes which are in play. For this reason his analysis combines participant observation, interviews and textual analysis. Nationalist writers of the first two decades of the century were wary of the new waves of migrants. For some they threatened the neat symmetry of the nativist discourse of nationhood that was emerging in earlier decades, while others foresaw imminent chaos. Whatever the case, desperate measures were needed to integrate the migrants into the modernizing Argentinian state. Some were moved to make grave suggestions. The nationalist writer Gálvez suggested that declaring war on Brazil would be a good way of integrating migrants, their ‘cosmopolitan spirit would be destroyed beneath the vast patriotic fervor’ (p. 33). For Archetti, sport has been the mechanism which has assisted the integration of Latin American states into Book Review

Book Review: On the Edge of the Auspicious: Gender and Caste in Nepal

Abstract: book to ‘Francine, Heidi, Joshua, Freya/Without whom, nothing’). But I cannot share his image of the good life of (pre-modern) communitarianism. I would rather celebrate and vaunt a Western social life of individual privacy, where I can empathise with Sartre that ‘hell is other people’. What does this say, furthermore, about my ability to appreciate Michael Jackson’s latest offering – besides stating the obvious that it is innovative in its conception and highly accomplished in execution? Not just that I have more sympathy than does he with Nietzschean attempts to write the transcendent ego, and less sympathy with the mysticism of French systemicism (its ‘obscure summons’), but also that I would like to challenge a communitarian or relational understanding of such summations of Jackson’s as: ‘we exist solely in relation to others’ (p. 75); ‘only by seeing things from others’ points of view can one enter into viable relationships with them’ (p. 65); ‘what eventuates in intersubjectivity is largely the result of culturally conditioned mindsets’ (p. 99); and ‘we are social exactly as we are bodies’ (p. 45).