Showing papers in "Cultural Anthropology in 2009"

“CORPORATE SECURITY BEGINS IN THE COMMUNITY”: Mining, the Corporate Social Responsibility Industry, and Environmental Advocacy in Indonesia

Abstract: In 2002, male village leaders and youth living near a transnational mining corporation's operation in rural Indonesia attacked a group of visiting environmental activists. I analyze the moral commitments of the corporate managers who provoked the attack and the village elites who organized and executed it, turning to the context of the burgeoning Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) industry to grasp the broader dimensions of the beliefs and practices through which managers and elites legitimized their actions. This essay shows that the CSR industry is coevolving alongside environmental advocacy campaigns and grassroots corporate security models.

Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia

Abstract: This essay argues that the convergence of religious ethics and business management knowledge illustrate the formation of what are termed spiritual economies. Spiritual economies conceptualize how economic reform and neoliberal restructuring are conceived of and acted on as matters of religious piety and spiritual virtue. The spiritual economy described consists of producing spirituality as an object of intervention, reconfiguring work as a form of religious worship, and inculcating an ethic of individual accountability and entrepreneurial responsibility among workers. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, the majority of which took place at Krakatau Steel in Banten, Indonesia, this essay describes a moderate Islamic spiritual reform movement active in state-owned companies, government bureaucracies, and private enterprises in contemporary Indonesia. Proponents of spiritual reform consider the separation of religious ethics from economic practice as the root of Indonesia's economic crisis because this disjunction resulted in rampant corruption, inefficiency, and a lack of discipline at the workplace. The essay analyzes these efforts to inculcate Islamic ethics in combination with western management knowledge that is expected to enhance economic productivity, reduce endemic corruption, and prepare employees of state-owned enterprises for privatization.

CODE IS SPEECH: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers

Abstract: In this essay, I examine the channels through which Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers reconfigure central tenets of the liberal tradition—and the meanings of both freedom and speech—to defend against efforts to constrain their productive autonomy. I demonstrate how F/OSS developers contest and specify the meaning of liberal freedom—especially free speech—through the development of legal tools and discourses within the context of the F/OSS project. I highlight how developers concurrently tinker with technology and the law using similar skills, which transform and consolidate ethical precepts among developers. I contrast this legal pedagogy with more extraordinary legal battles over intellectual property, speech, and software. I concentrate on the arrests of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and on the protests they provoked, which unfolded between 1999 and 2003. These events are analytically significant because they dramatized and thus made visible tacit social processes. They publicized the challenge that F/OSS represents to the dominant regime of intellectual property (and clarified the democratic stakes involved) and also stabilized a rival liberal legal regime intimately connecting source code to speech.

POTATO ONTOLOGY: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia

Abstract: Asked to explain the mechanisms of everyday survival in Russia, many people answer with one word: “potato.” Potato is a key factor in subsistence throughout postsocialist countries, but potato discourses and practices serve as well to dramatize the stark devolution of state–society relations and the ceaseless industry of the population. This essay posits potato as an axis of practice, around which myriad gestures of labor, exchange, and consumption are organized; it also presents potato as a complex system of knowledge, embedded in historical memory and encapsulating local theories of economic devolution. Several ethnographic and economic studies have analyzed the significance of postsocialist food growing; this essay focuses on the chief product of that labor and the narratives that circulate around it. It argues that although potato conveys popular critiques of social stratification, it also frames experiences of personhood.

Economy of words

Abstract: In this essay I introduce the notion of “the economy of words” as the means by which central banks model linguistically and, hence, communicatively economic phenomena operating at the limits of calculation and measurement. In this economy “at large” or “in the wild,” words perform the decisive function of creating context—countless contexts—that frame data series, statistical measures, and econometric projections. Within this analytical framework—inspired by J. M. Keynes and Michel Callon—words are employed not merely for expressing interpretative accounts or commentaries: they create the economy itself as a communicative field and as an empirical fact. Through the technical mediation of an economy of words—a monetary regime has, thus, come to be endowed with reflexive voices. The current financial situation highlights the role of the communicative practices in formulating policy to influence the severity, the breadth, and the duration of the destructive storm.

MOSCOW'S ECHO: Technologies of the Self, Publics, and Politics on the Russian Talk Show

Abstract: This essay examines the practices and politics of self-help in Russia. It interrogates the status of “neoliberalism” in Russia as it relates to the remaking of subjectivity 17 years after the collapse of communism by analyzing a radio talk show called For Adults about Adults hosted by a psychotherapist. An analysis of host–caller exchanges reveals a deployment of robust neoliberal technologies. The talk show not only incites autonomous, responsible, self-esteeming subjects but it also advocates alternative social relations, practices of intimacy and visions of “civil” society. Yet at least two factors indicate a more complex discursive field: The host's technologies of self aimed not as much at a rational-choice actor as a liberal-democratic citizen. And caller responses posed competing visions of selfhood, social life, emotions, and politics. These point to the multiple pulls on subjectivity in post-Soviet Russia. Projects that appear to be “neoliberalizing” also articulate with other political rationalities to form particular assemblages. Nonetheless, at the intersection of national politics under the Putin-Medvedev tandem, where political liberalism remains a dirty word, the effects of this particular assemblage appear depoliticizing: The host's pedagogy of self-cultivation dovetails with a federal interest in making Russians into entrepreneurial subjects, although his “autonomized” politics—referring to the forms of community-based politics neoliberal governmentality is supposed to engender—are blunted. A psychotherapeutically inspired, liberal-progressive vision of a future Russia appears to serve the call to sacrifice all for the economy. This anti-political effect attests to the promiscuous and dynamically assembled nature of neoliberalism—an effect that is seen here to take shape inside the subject.

INSCRIBING SUBJECTS TO CITIZENSHIP: Petitions, Literacy Activism, and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil India

Abstract: This essay examines how activists in rural southern India have sought to reshape the field of political communication by encouraging lower-caste women to submit written, signed petitions to district-level government offices, and so represent themselves to the state. I argue that contradictions between democratic recognition and the will to development that inhere to the political structure of contemporary governance in rural India correspond to tensions within the semiotic structure of signature itself, between constative representation and performative creation. Governmentality and the forms of communication that it requires often rest on the notion that written self-representation constitutes an act of political agency. But the limits of a governmental communicative reason that would conflate written subject and agent become especially clear in postcolonial contexts where the construction of those citizens that would be represented is in fact a product of the very act of representation. It is the narrative of development-as-pedagogy that holds out the promise of a future alignment of communicative frameworks, technologies, and participant roles, allowing for the transparent self-representation of an already-constituted citizen. By tracking the ambivalent experience of one group of women in particular, this account focuses on how the logic of signature as self-representation has served to recontextualize the marginality of petitioners as something within the state's broader field of power.

The impulse of philanthropy

Abstract: In practices of philanthropy and charity, the impulse to give to immediate others in distress is often tempered by its regulation. Although much of what is written on charity and philanthropy focuses on the effects of the gift, I suggest more attention be paid to the impulse of philanthropy. To coerce the impulse to give into rational accountability is to obliterate its freedom; to render giving into pure impulse is to reinforce social inequality. The only solution is to allow both to exist, and to create structures to encourage them. This essay examines the power of the spontaneous and fleeting impulse to give and its regulation through an analysis of contemporary practices of philanthropy and their relation to sacred conceptions of dān (donation) in New Delhi. When scriptural ideas of disinterested giving intersect with contemporary notions of social responsibility, new philanthropic practices are formed. On the basis of ethnographic research with philanthropists who built temples, started NGOs, and managed social welfare programs, as well as families who gave dān daily out of their homes, this essay documents how both NGO and government efforts to regulate one of the most meritorious forms of dān, gupt dān (or, anonymous dān) expresses critical issues in philanthropy between the urge to give in response to immediate suffering and the social obligation to find a worthy recipient for the gift.

Sympathy, State Building, and the Experience of Empire

Abstract: What is the role of sympathy in imperial state building? In this essay, inspired by the empiricist philosopher David Hume and the anthropologist Nancy Munn, I develop a materialist concept of sympathy in an effort to cast new light on the expansion of colonial rule. I deploy this concept in an analysis of reports written just before WWII by officials charged with extending the Netherlands Indies government's reach within western New Guinea. Along with gifts and outright acts of coercion, these officials made sympathy into a central component of their practices. Instead of avoiding the natives' gaze, they sought out more or less intimate moments of identification with their subjects; they tried to adopt the Papuans' perspective to reform Papuan ways. In teasing out the causal force of sympathy, as these officials viewed it, I make causal claims of my own about the impact of this experience of empire on the Netherlands' subsequent policy in New Guinea. In doing so, I advocate an approach to anthropological analysis that is empirical, if not empiricist, one that insists on the power of circumstances to shape the imagination, and the power of the imagination to shape the world.

Comedians, pastors, and the miraculous agency of charisma in ghana

Abstract: This essay traces Charismatic preaching and the moral importance of the fake pastor across public spaces and genres in Accra, Ghana. I argue that fear of the fake pastor creates a local theory of moral performance that sets the conditions of possibility for the legitimacy of the pastor as a public figure. Although rapid circulation generates anxiety about spiritual sincerity, it also produces continual hope for the miraculous and the potential for morally legitimate agency. The specter of the fake pastor provides a symbolic nexus for the transformation of spiritual into economic value in privatizing Ghana. This transformation occurs in the language of public moral belonging. A pastor's moral authority relies on public style and performance to connect spiritual power, moral sincerity, and economic potency. Fakery appears as the margin, the horizon against which a moral center is clarified. The fake's centrality to public moral discourse is rooted in the possibilities and dangers of individuated agencies associated with Ghana's liberalization.

Suicide, risk, and investment in the heart of the african miracle

Abstract: This essay considers new forms of investment, risk, and self-determination, among Botswana's middle and aspirant classes, as well as the loneliness and rage that are at stake when they fail. In it, I use specific instances and more widespread talk of suicides and murder–suicides contemplated, attempted, and accomplished as a vehicle for pondering the social dimensions of investment, and the perils of secrecy and the loneliness that shadow it. Amid a new regime of risk, investment, and self-determination brought by discontinuities of economic boom and widespread AIDS death over the past decade, Batswana are facing new questions about how to invest in relationships, selves, and futures. The essay concludes with a radically different context, a cancer ward, where Batswana seek to exile suicide and nihilism from the beds, minds, and hearts of patients through processes of socialization and paternalism that deny self-determination, while at the same time questing for and demanding investment in high-tech biomedicine.

DISLOCATING SOUNDS: The Deterritorialization of Indonesian Indie Pop

Abstract: Anthropologists often read the localization or hybridization of cultural forms as a kind of default mode of resistance against the forces of global capitalism, a means through which marginalized ethnic groups maintain regional distinctiveness in the face of an emergent transnational order. But then what are we to make of musical acts like Mocca and The Upstairs, Indonesian “indie” groups who consciously delocalize their music, who go out of their way, in fact, to avoid any references to who they are or where they come from? In this essay, I argue that Indonesian “indie pop,” a self-consciously antimainstream genre drawing from a diverse range of international influences, constitutes a set of strategic practices of aesthetic deterritorialization for middle-class Indonesian youth. Such bands, I demonstrate, assemble sounds from a variety of international genres, creating linkages with international youth cultures in other places and times, while distancing themselves from those expressions associated with colonial and nationalist conceptions of ethnicity, working-class and rural sensibilities, and the hegemonic categorical schema of the international music industry. They are part of a new wave of Indonesian musicians stepping onto the global stage “on their own terms” and insisting on being taken seriously as international, not just Indonesian, artists, and in the process, they have made indie music into a powerful tool of reflexive place making, a means of redefining the very meaning of locality vis-a-vis the international youth cultural movements they witness from afar.

THE SONGS OF THE SIREN: Engineering National Time on Israeli Radio

Abstract: This article explores how Israeli radio stations regulate national time in accordance with Jewish–Zionist temporal regimes. Informed by an ethnographic study of popular music programming on national and regional radio stations it is shown how broadcasting schedules operate as a uniform pendulum alternating between everyday life and times of commemoration or emergency. Following examples of music broadcasting during Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, the first Gulf War and terror attacks during the second Palestinian Intifadah the author explores a practice of “mood shifting” that is borrowed from the bureaucratic logic of commemoration rituals to times of war and terror attacks. The mood shift activates a commemorative mode that echoes sacred mnemonic devices of Jewish remembrance. Consequently, it is argued that times of emergency in Israeli culture are represented through and subordinated to sacred experience, substituting a political interpretation of terrorism with a mythic framework.

From the Enemy's Point of View: Violence, Empathy, and the Ethnography of Fakes

Abstract: This essay looks at the social, aesthetic, and violent life of fake documents. It suggests that fakes and forgeries, both as a general phenomenon and in the specific context of communal violence, offer a useful analytical site for an investigation into the relationship between empathy, power, and authenticity. Based on an analysis of a series of false letters that appeared in the lead-up to violent conflict in Indonesia, I approach the politics and poetics of forgery by setting the fake letters within a broader political discourse about falsity in Indonesia and beyond. Exploring the dynamics of empathy and intimacy that are necessary for the production and validation of fake documents and letters during conflict, I suggest that, contrary to received wisdom, empathy may be closely associated with violence. I also argue that empathy arises within particular political ontologies and specific forms of cultural intimacy that circulate in and beyond nation-states. An ethnographic enquiry into the social life of fake documents is therefore a useful starting point for an inquiry into the emotional aspects of instigation as well as for a political ethnography of empathy.

GIFTS INTERCEPTED: Biopolitics and Spirit Debt

Abstract: Stories of emigrants from Laos and Cambodia living in the United States are charged with an awareness of material indebtedness to the dead, especially those who died violent or inadequately attended deaths during wartime. At stake in this indebtedness is a sociality of living and dead that involves ongoing responsibility and care. Lao, Khmer, Kmhmu, and Hmong emigrants address both wartime violence, and the structural violence of minoritization and poverty in the United States through a reciprocity of living and dead. This reciprocity is intercepted by the biopolitical protocol of hospitals and funeral homes, which negates the social existence of the dead in ways that echo violations of the dead during wartime. In the United States, violation of the dead is linked not just to sciences of sanitation and death causation, but to latent theological presumptions about body and spirit. The presumption of a radical rupture between corpse and spirit enables the treatment of the corpse as inert matter with a purely symbolic relationship to the social person. The separation of matter and spirit that organizes the biopolitical management of death is also linked to mourning practices that emphasize memorialization over a bodily intimacy with the dead as social beings. Furthermore, current critiques of biopolitics following Agamben, although useful for addressing the devaluation of the living, prove inadequate to address socialities of living and dead. It is through their concrete participation in social encounters with the dead that emigrants respond to the material reverberations of past violence in the present.

STORIES AND COSMOGONIES: Imagining Creativity Beyond “Nature” and “Culture”

Abstract: What does it mean to create? Who or what could be said to create? God? Artists? Evolution? Markets? The Dialectic? Do things “just happen” and if so is that a kind of creativity? Taking storytelling as its point of reference, this essay considers the notion of creativity as it applies both to the productions of the human imagination, especially stories, and to the self-making of the material universe. I define creativity broadly as the bringing forth of new material, linguistic, or conceptual formations or the transformation of existing ones and as calling, not for a “cultural poetics,” but for a more broadly conceived poetics of making (poesis, in its most inclusive sense), encompassing both the natural and cultural realms as conventionally designated, a poetics capable of articulating the stories human beings tell with cosmogonies detailing the coming-to-being of the physical universe. Extending the purview of creativity beyond the human realm to include the processes shaping the material universe allows us to envision creativity itself in terms of a generative multiplicity that resists articulation in binary oppositional terms and that demands therefore to be thought as ontologically prior to any possible differentiation between the domains of nature and culture, or between reality and its cultural–linguistic representations, challenging us to reimagine not only the relationship between nature and culture but also the problematic of representation that continues to inform much work in the humanities and social sciences. Such a reimagining might proceed precisely from an enlarged understanding of creativity—and in particular of storytelling—and I consider some of the epistemic and writerly implications of this claim for anthropology as a discipline concerned preeminently with exploring and documenting the varieties of human being-in-the-world.

The Face of Money: Currency, Crisis, and Remediation in Post-Suharto Indonesia

Abstract: In the period of transition following Suharto's resignation as president of Indonesia in 1998, the image of the 50,000Rp bill bearing his face became a visual shorthand for the corruption and abuse of power that had characterized his regime. Accessible, decentralized consumer technologies enabled people to alter money's appearance, transforming it from a fetish of the state into a malleable surface available for popular reinscription. As the medium of money was “remediated”—absorbed into other media, refashioned, and circulated along new pathways—it became a means by which people engaged questions of state power, national integrity, political authenticity, and economic relations opened up by the crisis of Reformasi (Reform). The essay argues that remediations of public forms play a crucial role in times of political transition by enabling people to materialize alternative visions of political authority and authenticity. Moreover, remediated forms have become a characteristic modality of political communication in the post-Suharto period under conditions of democratization and an increasingly diversified media ecology.

Fathers, sons, and the state: discipline and punishment in a Wolof hinterland.

Abstract: This essay builds on fieldwork in rural Senegal to examine three cases in which elder household heads called on gendarmes to physically discipline rebellious youths. These cases, which revolved around harsh acts of corporal punishment, invite inquiry into common assumptions about African families and states. The first assumption is the common dichotomy drawn between African youths, portrayed as modern and menacing, and African elders, portrayed as “traditional” and hence benign. The second assumption is the dichotomy drawn between the African family, conceived as solidary and nurturing, and the African state, conceived as alien and predatory. In examining these cases of discipline and punishment, this essay reveals the ever-shifting power relations that link Wolof household heads, dependent junior males, and state agents, and simultaneously introduces new questions about the morality of farmer–state relations and generational conflict. My analysis reveals the spatial geography of Senegal's youth crisis, which takes different forms in rural and urban locales. The anxiety of rural patriarchs is fed by a fear-mongering media obsessed with youthful anarchy in the cities, and a long-standing political rhetoric about the threat of rural out-migration. Elder men in the countryside, who experience diminishing household authority under neoliberalism, make proactive efforts to keep the urban youth crisis at bay. They seek to augment their domestic power by reestablishing links with a state that has long bolstered patriarchy but whose power is currently in decline. By lending patriarchs their coercive force, gendarmes attempt to accomplish through private, indirect means, what the postcolonial state is unable to do: maintain social order by reining in disruptive youths. The harsh disciplinary measures that gendarmes employ are not alien to Wolof culture, but integral to Wolof conceptions of child rearing.

Ethics, Iconoclasm, and Qur'anic Art in Indonesia

Abstract: My research in Indonesia was funded by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia

Abstract: In Aboriginal Northern Australia, request programs are a ubiquitous, marked format for Indigenous radio broadcasting. Emerging from the activist drive of Indigenous media producers, and often instrumentally geared toward connecting prison inmates with their families and communities, such request programs invariably involve performative “shout-outs” to close and extended kin. These programs bring together a lengthy history of Aboriginal incarceration and the geographic dispersal of kin networks with country and rock musics, the charged meaning of family in contemporary Indigenous Australia, and the emergent expressive idioms of radio requests. The essay discusses the performative, mediated interweaving of speech and country song in such request programs, analyzing their significance as recursive forms of an emergent, Indigenous public culture.

COINCIDENCE AND CONSEQUENCE: Marianism and the Mass Media in the Global Philippines

Abstract: In this essay, I examine several events involving Filipinos at home and abroad that organize themselves around convergences of mediation: sites and events where figures and practices of religious mediation interact with modern technologies of the mass media. Illustrating these at the center of the essay is an ethnography of a festival celebrating the Virgin Mary's birthday that was organized by a Filipino devotional group and took place in New York City. Framing this event in the essay is a seemingly unrelated incident: the kidnapping of an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) by a group demanding that the Philippine government withdraw its coalition forces from Iraq. One extraordinary coincidence and the appeal for divine intervention immediately links the two. What further draws these two events into relatedness, however, is that they both entail imaginaries of the global Philippines that are rooted in a shared history of transnational movement, but diverge owing to significant differences in socioeconomic status and physical vulnerability. For the religious imaginary wherein the Philippines is firmly and safely situated in a worldwide order of Marian redemption betokens the privilege to assume preemptive control over dangerous worlds via particular frameworks of interpretation. Using Filipino Marianism first as a lens through which to understand the range of affinities between religious and technological mediation, I then examine the ways in which such intermedial relationships reveal the associative paths that generate class-inflected interpretations of crisis and danger, as well as the strategies of power and control to which those paths give rise.

ON THE TRAIL OF LIVING MODIFIED ORGANISMS: Environmentalism within and against Neoliberal Order

Abstract: Environmental governance regimes concerned with the management of biological life have encouraged not only new forms of expertise, but also political activism and struggle. One such regime, the international Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (Biosafety Protocol), a subagreement of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), seeks to monitor the potential risks of releasing living modified organisms, such as transgenic seeds, into the environment. Drawing on market-oriented visions of environmental conservation and risk management, the Biosafety Protocol is closely tied to the development of new bioeconomies and the ascent of neoliberal principles globally. NGOs and environmentalists have played prominent roles in the Biosafety Protocol by occupying spaces designated for civil society participation, raising the question of how activists both disrupt and sustain the neoliberal logics embedded in new regimes of environmental governance. I explore this question through ethnographic research in Costa Rica among activists, biosafety officials, and private biosafety auditors, where activists have engaged biosafety as part of a campaign against transgenic seeds. Working with limited resources and a genuine concern to manage the risks of agricultural biotechnology, officials draw on strategies that position both the market and civil society as key mechanisms of biosafety monitoring. Despite opposing transgenics and the concept of biosafety, activists participate in the government biosafety commission as civil society representatives and informally monitor local fields. Officials have labeled activists “biovigilantes,” viewing them as parallel to private biosafety auditors who subsidize the lack of state capacity in biosafety. Recent research on civil society and governance suggests that discourses of participation have depoliticizing impacts, encouraging specific forms of self-conduct that reinforce a dominant order of things. Illustrating how activists occupy and negotiate civil society and biosafety expertise, I argue by contrast that their engagement with biosafety is uneven and contradictory, revealing an unsettled struggle, rather than some prevailing governmental logic.