Showing papers in "Cultural Anthropology in 2010"

The emergence of multispecies ethnography

Abstract: Anthropologists have been committed, at least since Franz Boas, to investigating relationships between nature and culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, this enduring interest was inflected with some new twists. An emergent cohort of “multispecies ethnographers” began to place a fresh emphasis on the subjectivity and agency of organisms whose lives are entangled with humans. Multispecies ethnography emerged at the intersection of three interdisciplinary strands of inquiry: environmental studies, science and technology studies (STS), and animal studies. Departing from classically ethnobiological subjects, useful plants and charismatic animals, multispecies ethnographers also brought understudied organisms—such as insects, fungi, and microbes—into anthropological conversations. Anthropologists gathered together at the Multispecies Salon, an art exhibit, where the boundaries of an emerging interdiscipline were probed amidst a collection of living organisms, artifacts from the biological sciences, and surprising biopolitical interventions.

Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond "Politics"

Abstract: In Latin America indigenous politics has been branded as “ethnic politics.” Its activism is interpreted as a quest to make cultural rights prevail. Yet, what if “culture” is insufficient, even an inadequate notion, to think the challenge that indigenous politics represents? Drawing inspiration from recent political events in Peru—and to a lesser extent in Ecuador and Bolivia—where the indigenous–popular movement has conjured sentient entities (mountains, water, and soil—what we call “nature”) into the public political arena, the argument in this essay is threefold. First, indigeneity, as a historical formation, exceeds the notion of politics as usual, that is, an arena populated by rational human beings disputing the power to represent others vis-a-vis the state. Second, indigeneity's current political emergence—in oppositional antimining movements in Peru and Ecuador, but also in celebratory events in Bolivia—challenges the separation of nature and culture that underpins the prevalent notion of politics and its according social contract. Third, beyond “ethnic politics” current indigenous movements, propose a different political practice, plural not because of its enactment by bodies marked by gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality (as multiculturalism would have it), but because they conjure nonhumans as actors in the political arena.

ECOLOGIES OF EMPIRE: On the New Uses of the Honeybee

Abstract: This essay examines the rise of the honeybee as a tool and metaphor in the U.S. “war on terror.” At present, the largest source of funding for apiary research comes from the U.S. military as part of efforts to remake entomology in an age of empire. This funding seeks to make new generations of bees sensitive to specific chemical traces—everything from plastic explosives, to the tritium used in nuclear weapons development, to land mines. Moreover, in an explicit attempt to redesign modern battlefield techniques, the Pentagon has returned to the form and metaphor of the “swarm” to combat what it takes to be the unpredictability of the enemy in the war on terror. At the same time, honeybee colonies are collapsing. Rethinking material assemblages of bees and humans in the war on terror, this essay moves beyond the constrained logic and limited politics of many epidemiological investigations of colony collapse. Honeybees are situated within a more expansive understanding of the role of and consequences for the animal in modern empire building.

NATURALCULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN BALI: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology

Abstract: Examining the interface between humans and other primates can illuminate how interspecies relationships create and maintain complex social and ecological spaces. Humans and macaque monkeys share ecologies that include cultural, historical, and physiological dimensions. In this essay, I examine such ecologies while undertaking an ethnoprimatological project in Bali, Indonesia. This multispecies ethnography of humans and macaques demonstrates that human perceptions and land use intertwine with macaque social behavior and pathogen physiologies to affect local ecologies and economies for both species. In these contact zones where any clear boundary separating nature/culture is difficult to discern, I use the concept of “niche construction” and an ethnoprimatological lens to explore and understand these relationships. This article also serves as an invitation to move an ethnoprimatological approach away from the periphery and into a broader primatological and anthropological engagement with naturalcultural relations.

VIRAL CLOUDS: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia

Abstract: Through an index case in Tangerang, West Java, the Orthomyxoviridae virus H5N1 influenza became visible in Indonesia and propagated rapidly across the archipelago. This viral event incited fears of a human influenza pandemic, disrupting existing arrangements among species, peoples, institutions, and nations, and remaking their biopolitical relations and specific ontologies along the way. On the basis of ethnographic field work in technoscientific, agricultural, and security communities in Indonesia, this essay examines how a set of strains and species—the H5N1 influenza virus, wild birds, domestic poultry, and, finally, humans—combined with one another, and with ongoing Indonesian and transnational concerns over pandemic preparedness, biosecurity, and national integrity, to create a multispecies cloud. The concept of multispecies cloud refers to the narratives and material practices floating around the H5N1 event and its multiple species companions in Indonesia. As I conceptualize the cloudiness of H5N1, its key feature is the uncertainty of precisely what social and biological forms were interacting in the outbreak scenario or might consequently emerge as a consequence of entering into engagement with the virus. The influenza virus, as a quasi-species or cluster of genomes in any case of infection, is a potent source for exploring an array of biopolitical concerns in human communities that emerged alongside the virus. Risk, scale, and speculation are discussed in turn as rubrics for understanding the microbial and multispecies sociality of H5N1 influenza. Examples are drawn from the sciences of virology and ornithology, and the global health practice of disease communication, as well as from poultry agriculture.

FINGERYEYES: Impressions of Cup Corals

Abstract: In When Species Meet (2008) Donna Haraway proposes that creatures’ identities and affinities emerge through their encounters, their relationships. Following Haraway's lead, I attend to how different species sense and apprehend one another, leaving impressions—concrescences of perceptual data, or texture. This essay reports on fieldwork alongside marine biologists and with a population of cup corals (B. elegans) housed at the Long Marine Laboratory, Santa Cruz, California. While I assisted researchers who were studying metabolic rates and reproductive strategies in coral communities, these cup corals simultaneously taught me that being and sensing are inextricably enfolded. We were variously situated—corals generating generations, me interpretations. We met through a material-semiotic apparatus I call “fingeryeyes.” As an act of sensuous manifesting, fingeryeyes offers a queer reading of how making sense and sensual meaning are produced through determinable and permeable species boundaries.

AMERICAN STIOB: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West

Abstract: To those of us weaned during the Cold War there are few certainties more bedrock than the antithetical character of liberalism and socialism. For some four decades,liberal‐capitalistregimesandstate‐socialistregimesmarshaledenormous pedagogical and ideological resources to educate their citizens in this singular truth that legitimated the polarized geopolitics of the second half of the 20th century. The gist of this truth was that nothing could be farther from the constitutive liberal rights and freedoms of Western democracy than the tyranny and group think of communism or, seen from the other side, that nothing could be more opposite from the internationalist communitarian values of socialism than the predatory self-interestedness and class warfare of capitalism. It is no small testament to the success of this Cold War pedagogy that the certainty of antithesis has outlived by decades the geopolitics that inspired it. Even as the Cold War geopolitics crumbled in the years 1989 to 1991, a victorious liberalism spared no opportunity to remind the world of its fundamental oppositeness from communism’s “evil empire.” Liberal historiography has subsequently memorialized 1989‐91 as an end-of-history extinction event for socialism (Fukuyama 1992; Kornai 1992), as vindication not only of the idea that the philosophical premises of liberalism amount to human nature but also of the idea that socialism’s experiments to improve human sociality have been absolutely defunct and defrauded. Twenty

"They Come in Peasants and Leave Citizens": Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China

Abstract: When at dusk the neon lights come on in Shenzhen, China, they look from the top of its tallest building like small fires dotting a mist-shrouded landscape. The massive city of dreams lends itself to naturalistic metaphor—the eye scans skyscraper groves amid fields of striated worker housing and middle-class midrises like dragons playing, according to one interpretation, or like the undulating peaks of Guilin, interrupted by the clusters of tight, jumbled, low-growth of the so-called urban villages (chengzhongcun). Sixty-nine stories below the cityscape sparks, oozes, and shudders along rivulets of light refracted in the humidity, the inky black of Hong Kong’s New Territories across the border accentuating the lustrous Leviathan that is Shenzhen. It all fuses together in urban rhythm and meter,remindingmeofadescriptionIencounteredinagovernment-issuedcoffeetable book about Shenzhen’s Central Business District: “Construction is a poem, written by poets, who wrote them with steel and cement” (Shenzhen Municipal Government 2005a:14). A hoary slogan, but with echoes of early 20th‐century fascinations with urbanization and form, from Russian constructivists to Bauhaus. Construction as poem captures Shenzhen as a paean to modernity, for it is, in its ownway,theveryequivalentof1920sBerlinorNewYorkinitsurbanintoxication,

The Double Bind of American Indian Need-Based Sovereignty

Abstract: This essay examines a double bind that faces indigenous peoples in the Anglophone settler states, the double bind of need-based sovereignty. This double bind works as follows: indigenous sovereigns, such as American Indian tribal nations, require economic resources to exercise sovereignty, and their revenues often derive from their governmental rights; however, once they exercise economic power, the legitimacy of indigenous sovereignty and citizenship is challenged within settler society. Through analysis of Florida Seminole gaming and the threatened severance of Seminoles’ governmental status by mid-1900s federal “termination” policy, I show how economy-linked limits to indigenous sovereignty and citizenship rest on debates over culture, over what it is that renders American Indians distinctive as individuals and as collectives. Today, as during termination debates, Seminoles and other American Indian peoples struggle to position their economic well-being not as an anomaly or an abandonment of indigenous ways but, rather, as the result of an ongoing commitment to collective self-governance. With the sounds of termination echoing in gaming debates, it is possible to identify the reemergence of need-based sovereignty as a key modality of settler colonialism in the United States.

FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP IN DUBAI: Neoliberal Subjectivity in the Emerging “City‐Corporation”

Abstract: This essay addresses subjectivity in the context of the emergence of neoliberalism in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The appropriation of neoliberal values and policies in Dubai offers data on cultural processes that demonstrate the highly localized ways neoliberalism is inflected, challenging theories of neoliberal policies as monolithic instruments of global integration. Unlike other national contexts such as Singapore, local inflections of neoliberalism in Dubai are governed more by notions of ethically “valuable” citizenship and authentic identity than by economically “valuable” citizenship. The essay focuses on the young corporate employees of some of Dubai's leading corporations, who I call Dubai's “flexible citizens.” First situating the genealogy of neoliberalism and its flexible citizens in the colonial history of Dubai, the essay goes on to analyze the ways Dubai's flexible citizens appropriate neoliberal discourses to mediate local ambiguities and tensions of social and gender identity. The essay concludes with a discussion of how neoliberal Dubai is evolving in the wake of the 2008 world economic crisis.

THE EMERGENCE OF INDIGENEITY: Public Intellectuals and an Indigenous Space in Southwest China

Abstract: Old Wang squatted over a wild banana stalk, slicing it up to feed the pigs. He wore a knit polyblend cap and blue sports coat over his tall gaunt frame, and his machete maintained a rhythmic pattern as he told me of his youth. In the 1930s, Wang had lived in a small upland village. He would travel to a town near the banks of the Mekong River to buy supplies like salt, lead for bullets, and Thai cloth, and during one of these journeys he saw a group of men point at him. They talked among themselves, but loud enough to be heard by him and others. Wang put down his machete and repeated in a whisper what they had said about him decades earlier: “Look, there is one, a tu zhu ren, from the mountains.” He spoke with both embarrassment and anger, indicating the term’s clearly pejorative connotations. Earlier that month, in an office in the provincial capital of Kunming, I had heard the same term, although it was used more positively, albeit tentatively, by Chinese employees at an international environmental organization. Fortheseemployees,tuzhuren(nowaseldom-usedterm)wasapossibletranslation of the term indigenous people, a social category used around the globe. International organizations in China and elsewhere regularly attempt to determine whether their projects include indigenous people. Some organizations seek out indigenous people for specially tailored projects, and advocate for their rights. Recently, projects by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank in China were modified or stopped when they were found to involve indigenous people, and increasingly, environmental NGOs have tried to collect “indigenous knowledge” and strengthen land rights for those, like Old Wang, whom they might classify as indigenous.

The Rhythmic Beat of the Revolution in Iran

Abstract: This essay investigates three methods for reading topical events, in this case events in Iran in 2009. Timing, as in music, is part of the trick of Iranian (as also other) politics, In Part I, breaking news is read in terms of historically and structurally informed social theory, with an eye to how civil society and public spheres are structured. There is an aesthetics to these spheres, not simply a calculus of interests or a space where rational debate can be abstracted from the civil society into a political public sphere. The (dis)harmonics of the Karbala Paradigm and the Islamic and pre-Islamic reference system of the 1979 revolution have been rescored in the aftermath of the June 2009 elections. Part II draws out the technical infrastructure, both low tech and hi tech, within which social and cultural action happens and civil society is restructured. It calls attention to the way in which the Green Wave was a confluence of civil society movements of women, labor, students, and journalists, among others. Iran is seen as a key test bed for struggles over the control of the Internet, as state control becomes more flexible, targeted, and pervasive. Part III plays with a futuring method—like the scenario methods used in industry and the simulation techniques used in the sciences—to plan for and evaluate alternative social logics that can play out in uncertain and underdetermined futures. The scenario method, to be used iteratively with several axes, helps clarify where there is need for better mapping of the networks of the players and their “small worlds” (“six or two degrees of difference”) cross-faction relationships.

BRANDING THE MAHATMA: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity

Abstract: This essay is an exploration of the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi as a contested figure in present-day Indian public culture and Gandhi as himself an innovative technician of mass publicity. I begin with an analysis of the scandal that erupted in early 2002 when one of the Mahatma's descendants appeared to have signed a deal with a U.S. corporation to license Gandhi's name and image for use in consumer goods advertising. I proceed to situate that controversy within the larger field of recent Gandhian reference in India, focusing on the complex connections between his iconization and his demonization. The second half of the essay turns the analysis around to inquire into what I call “Gandhian publicity.” I show that although Gandhi's thinking on communicative efficacy is nowadays often assimilated into a commercial brand logic, Gandhian publicity remains irreducible to such appropriation. Ultimately, I argue that the scandal of “branding Gandhi” has less to do with any violation of his supposed saintly otherwordliness than with the “untimely” provocation posed to consumerist publicity by his understanding of the intimate relationship between the management of corporeal energies and socially transformative mass communication.

Cosmopolitanism, remediation, and the ghost world of bollywood

Abstract: This essay considers the process of remediation in two North American reproductions of the song-and-dance sequence Jaan Pehechaan Ho from the 1965 “Bollywood” film Gumnaam. The song was used in the opening sequence of the 2001 U.S. independent film Ghost World as a familiar-but-strange object of ironic bewilderment and fantasy for its alienated teenage protagonist Enid. But a decade before Ghost World's release, Jaan Pehechaan Ho had already become the lynchpin of a complex debate about cultural appropriation and multicultural identity for an “alternative” audience in the United States. I illustrate this through an ethnographic analysis of a 1994 videotape of the Heavenly Ten Stems, an experimental rock band in San Francisco, whose performance of the song was disrupted by a group of activists who perceived their reproduction as a mockery. How is Bollywood film song, often itself a kitschy send-up of American popular culture, remediated differently for different projects of reception? How do these cycles of appropriation create overlapping conditions for new identities—whether national, diasporic, or “alternative”—within the context of transcultural media consumption? In drawing out the “ghost world” of Bollywood's juxtapositions, I argue that the process of remediation produces more than just new forms and meanings of media, but is constitutive of the cosmopolitan subjects formed in its global circulations.

PRENDAS‐NGANGAS‐ENQUISOS: Turbulence and the Influence of the Dead in Cuban‐Kongo Material Culture

Abstract: Cuban-Kongo praise of the dead in Havana turns insistently around complex agglomerations of materials called "prendas,""ngangas," and "enquisos." This article addresses the ontological status of "prendas-ngangas-enquisos," which practitioners of Cuban-Kongo affliction practices care for as entities that determine the very possibility of their healing and harming craft. Cuban-Kongo societies of affliction, in Havana collectively referred to as "Palo," stake their claim to influence others in and through these entities. In this essay I seek to position the influence generated in prendas-ngangas-enquisos as a problem for Euro-American materialism, to be addressed not through symbolic or representational solutions but, rather, by refocusing the problem itself via alternate distributions of its epistemological, historical, and ethnographic elements. Contextualized within ethnographic description, I first propose that prendas-ngangas-enquisos do not conform to dialectical logic, and should thus be positioned conceptually as something other than "objects" or "fetishes." From there, I consider Creole turns on the term prenda and explore scholarly accounts of 19th-century Cuban slavery and manumission, which I place alongside what is known about pawn slavery among BaKongo people prior to and during the Atlantic slave trade. Having established a basic series of conceptual and historiographic coordinates, I then suggest ethnographically how prendas-ngangas-enquisos come to command others, thereby guaranteeing Cuban-Kongo healing and harming sovereignty in Cuba today.

The cross politics of ecuador's penal state

Abstract: This essay examines inmate "crucifixion protests" in Ecuador's largest prison during 2003-04. It shows how the preventively incarcerated-of whom there are thousands-managed to effectively denounce their extralegal confinement by embodying the violence of the Christian crucifixion story. This form of protest, I argue, simultaneously clarified and obscured the multiple layers of sovereign power that pressed down on urban crime suspects, who found themselves persecuted and forsaken both outside and within the space of the prison. Police enacting zero-tolerance policies in urban neighborhoods are thus a key part of the penal state, as are the politically threatened family members of the indicted, the sensationalized local media, distrustful neighbors, prison guards, and incarcerated mafia. The essay shows how the politico-theological performance of self-crucifixion responded to these internested forms of sovereign violence, and were briefly effective. The inmates' cross intervention hence provides a window into the way sovereignty works in the Ecuadorean penal state, drawing out how incarceration trends and new urban security measures interlink, and produce an array of victims. Language: en

REMAINS: TO BE SEEN. Third Encounter between State and “Customary” in Northern Mozambique

Abstract: This essay presents a history of articulations between the state apparatus and the realm of the “customary” in northern Mozambique, throughout periods of colonial rule, Socialism, civil war, and postcolonial democratic regimes. The analysis pivots around the ethnographic study of magico-religious rituals combined with postsocialist political rallies. In Mozambique, current recognition of chieftaincy and the “customary” by the state, supported by international donors, reverses decades of postcolonial ban on indigenous authority and practice. This peculiar case presents a paradigmatic perspective on the complex trajectory of indigeneity in postcolonial Africa, where local autochthonous structures and identities are entangled within a history of colonial violence, political oppression, and recent harsh conflict.

THE ANTISOCIAL PROFILE: Deception and Intimacy in Greek Psychiatry

Abstract: Based on field research in Greek Thrace, this essay examines the problem of deception in psychiatric care, in the context of national psychiatric reform. Over the last 25 years, psychiatric treatment in Greece has shifted from custodial hospitals to outpatient settings, challenging the mentally ill to help care for themselves as they adapt to life “in the community.” I explore the consequent reworking of therapeutic relationships outside custodial institutions through verbal negotiation, as against methods of confinement and constraint associated with inhumane institutional care. I argue that an ambivalent intimacy is fostered in these relationships by suspicions of deceit, which speak as well to a problem of knowledge in contemporary psychiatry globally. Working through the case of a Gypsy outpatient diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, whose life ended in a drug overdose, I trace suspicions of deceit across multiple terrains: from (neo)liberal reform, to clinical diagnosis, to constructions of minority culture. On these terrains, I do not attempt to determine the truth of speech in the clinic, but to discern the dynamics of suspicion through which that truth comes into question. Rather than clear refusals of responsibility, I show suspicions of deception in community-based care as refractions of psychiatric reform through a constitutive opacity in intimate ethical relations between patients and therapists.

Physical Training, Ethical Discipline, and Creative Violence: Zones of Self-Mastery in the Hindu Nationalist Movement

Abstract: Hindu nationalist parties, organizations, and institutions built on the interventions of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Ahmedabad just after Independence. Hindu nationalist leaders were able to rehabilitate the reputation of the movement through their participation in the Mahagujarat Movement which agitated for the formation of an autonomous state of Gujarat. In the 1958–1960 period, they collaborated with the Gujarati Marxist, Indulal Yagnik, to contribute to the formation of an autonomous state of Gujarat. Members of the Jana Sangh in particular were able to be associated with Yagnik, who was a reputed leader (if also considered eccentric), and undertake satyagraha for a cause that was undertaken in the name of all Gujaratis. The 1965 war with Pakistan, over its attempt to claim part of Kutch, also strengthened the hand of Hindu nationalists not only because the Chief Minister’s plane was shot down during the event, which caused much outrage among Gujarati Hindus, but also because the event brought to the surface suspicions of Pakistan and therefore of Muslims in Ahmedabad also.

Representation, Identity and Multiculturalism in Sarawak edited by Zawawi Ibrahim

Abstract: In Sarawak no one identifiable ethnic or religious group makes up more than a third of the population. I would even suggest that Sarawak is a true alchemy of multiculturalism by which paradoxical new identities and at times, irrational and interesting cultural realities are forged under the language of diversity. And all these are materializing under a meta-narrative that continues to politicize bangsa and religion, one that constitutes — to invoke Achille Mbembe (2001) insights on postcolonial societies — the violent cultural imaginary in Malaysia. Thus, for analytic purposes, what then compels the different ethnic and religious communities in Sarawak to construct their identities amidst their negotiations of living sanely within this violent cultural imaginary? How and in what ways are other communities conscripted by it? What power resides in the beholders of the state discourse given that it causes certain communities to identify themselves with the status quo? Equally important, how have their (multiple) identities changed and what possible analytic distinctions can we theorize to account for such transformation? I pose these questions in my attempt to review this book. As one reads Representation, Identity and Multiculturalism in Sarawak, most of the chapters not only attempt to contextualize and conceptualize the three themes but the book is also a gift to Zawawi Ibrahim, although I am not entirely convinced that it is a product of a labour of love. The history and materials Representation, Identity and Multiculturalism in Sarawak track is remarkably ambitious, at least from the editor’s vantage point, attempting as it does, to cast theories and post-modern critique on representation, identity politics, and a nuanced treatment of multiculturalism into one field of vision. As it turns out, the collection threatens to unravel into a set of topics bound by nothing more than the cover of the book. Even as some chapters appropriately deal with the themes suggested by the editor, others feel more like short reportages or encyclopedic entries. The