Showing papers in "Ethnos in 2010"

Making the Global City: Urban Citizenship at the Margins of Delhi

Abstract: There is a growing scholarly interest in the spatialisation of class relations in post-industrial cities. Gentrified suburbs exclude the poor and re-work notions of public property and urban citizenship to the advantage of the rich. My study moves beyond the sanitised places of the inner city and shows how the cleaning mission affects life in the new spaces of deprivation. I analyse home making in a resettlement colony of Delhi. After being removed from the hubs of the labour market and with little state support, resettled slum dwellers struggle under harsh conditions for survival. Those who can afford this expensive venture embrace home ownership at high personal risks und by exploiting the channels of the informal economy, hoping that possessing a legal dwelling will root them more firmly in the city. In practice, the new status is an often uneasy fusion of a formal and informal status and thus remains essentially precarious in an environment that criminalises informality.

‘Reproachable Victims’? Representations and Self-representations of Russian Women Involved in Transnational Prostitution

Abstract: The article investigates how the concept of victimhood is constructed within debates on transnational prostitution and trafficking, and how representations of victimhood intersect with representations of the person/self, class, ethnicity, gender and nationality. Using research findings based on observation and interviews with women from post-Soviet societies involved in prostitution in Norway, we discuss how the women embrace, resist or rework dominant representations of migrant prostitution and attendant notions of victimhood, as well as how they relate to multiple notions of the person/self, femininity and nation through their handling of the stigma of prostitution

‘The Family of Denmark’ and ‘the Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics

Abstract: Applying insights from newer anthropological kinship studies, this article suggests that the current Danish immigration regime is based on and legitimized by a certain kind of ‘kinship images’ that are used and reproduced in Danish public and political discourses. Since 2002, every Danish citizen applying for family reunification with foreign spouses has been met with a ‘requirement of national attachment’, which basically distinguishes within the pool of citizens between the ‘real’ and the ‘not-quite-real’ Danes. The article discusses the possibilities of ‘integration’ in the current situation where Danish legislation and public discourses tend to distinguish between Danish citizens on the basis of their family history and national attachment. The article furthermore discusses different strategies of ‘kinning’ through which the ‘not-quite-real’ can aspire to become ‘real’ Danes.

From Sub- to Super-Citizenship: Sex Hormones and the Body Politic in Brazil

Abstract: Sex hormones in Brazil are mobilised as modes of regulatory control and to discipline subjectivites. Their packaging effectively differentiates between two forms of citizenship. The first, available to those with private health, is founded on notions of personal autonomy, individual choice and self-enhancement, while the second frames decisions in terms of the individual’s moral responsibility to the wider collectivity. Here, technical and biomedical interventions on middle-class bodies have personalising tendencies, while those effected on the bodies of the urban poor can be read as modes of inclusion through standardisation. Personalisation, in the Brazilian sense, concerns the attribution of privileges which place a person above the undifferentiated mass of individuals. The paper critically engages with approaches to bio-citizenships developed in contexts where biological inclusion is predicated on patient activism and shows how, in Brazil, complying with medical regimes is an integral part of constituting oneself as a citizen

Taxpayers, Thieves, and the State: Fiscal Citizenship in Contemporary Italy

Abstract: As, burdened by its massive public debt, the Italian state nears the verge of default, the debate on taxation and distribution raging in this country's public sphere provides citizens with a means to conceptualize their responsibilities and rights vis-a-vis the state as well as each other. Italian fiscal citizenship thus emerges as an unstable relational category that is negotiated along and across the split between the rhetoric of fiscal and distributive fairness on the one hand, and its actual denial on the other. By fostering the breakdown of solidarity and the intensification of ethnic chauvinism, the failure to implement equity in taxation and distribution shows the extent to which the Italian state is implicated in the divisiveness of social categories that cast each other as an impediment to the fulfillment of their respective rights.

Towards an Ethics of Being-With: Intertwinements of Life in Post-Invasion Basra

Abstract: In this paper, I turn to Oum Hassan, a woman who works as a cleaner in a hotel in Basra, and show that her life is as much a life for her niece and sister as it is about maintaining her own existence in the face of tremendous pressures. Where anthropologists have insisted on the primordiality of social relationship to the constitution of personhood, I am wanting to recast some of this interest into a language of an ethics of life and being-with.

Learning Courage: Child Labour as Moral Practice in Northeast Brazil

Abstract: This article explores the moral dimensions of child labour as cultural practice in Northeast Brazil. It reveals a link between children's participation in labour and local constructions of childhood as a period of ontological uncertainty and impending transition. Through detailed ethnographic exegesis, the article reveals the symbolic dimensions surrounding children's engagement in productive endeavours, and shows how the local opposition between ‘work’ and ‘play’ arises out of an encompassing moral process. The article critiques the tendency within protectionist influenced anthropological literature to acknowledge the important contribution that children make towards material survival, while denying that contribution any deeper cultural significance.

The Death of the Big Men: Depreciation of Elites in New Guinea

Abstract: Recently, Tolai people of Papua New Guinea have adopted the term ‘Big Shot’ to describe an emerging post-colonial political elite. The emergence of the term is a negative moral evaluation of new social possibilities that have arisen as a consequence of the Big Shots’ privileged position within a global political economy. Grassroots Tolai pass judgment on the Big Shots’ through rhetorical contrast with idealised Big Men of the past, in a particular local version of a global trend for the emergence of new words to illustrate changing perceptions of local elites. As such the ‘Big Shot’ acts as an example of a global process in which key lexical categories that contest, trace and shape how global historical change is experienced are constituted through linguistic categories.

Aboriginal Music and Passion: Interculturality and Difference in Australian Desert Towns

Abstract: Aboriginal country, rock and reggae music makers in Central Australian desert communities often portray performances in regional white towns as desirable and rewarding occasions for engagements with a non-indigenous ‘mainstream’. Aboriginal popular music is also often understood as a tool for a marginalised minority to ‘talk back’ to non-Aboriginal powers, or for ‘sharing culture’ to achieve greater cross-cultural understanding. This article investigates what actually takes place at local Aboriginal music events in the town of Alice Springs. It shows how they, in fact, become powerful occasions for enacting certain blackfella forms of sociability that reinforce relations of estrangement between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people and domains. Addressing the question how to account for the lived experience of racial and cultural formations without resorting to notions of bounded or pre-existing categories, the author proposes an approach to difference as relational at the outset that can accommodate multi...

Finding Money: Business and Charity in Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea

Abstract: There is a growing consensus that money and the market principle have not led to a great transformation into modernity. Rather, market exchange is everywhere socially embedded. But what does this embedding consist of, structural limits, tactics of resistance, or moral boundaries? Auhelawa (Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea) have incorporated money into their local economy in a variety of ways which keep the logic of the market in check. The comparison between two modes of accumulation – business and charity – sheds light on the precise nature of embeddedness. Local entrepreneurs describe themselves as navigating dilemmas which arise from contradictions between accumulation and reciprocity. Church congregations, however, appear to have transcended this conflict by representing their charitable contributions of money as love-gifts which are not subject to reciprocity. While charity, like business, is an embedded form of accumulation, I argue that it creates links to an alternative hierarchy of values, and t...

The Plastic Eye: The Politics of Jewish Representation in Moroccan Museums

Abstract: This article explores the ways in which Jews are represented in two private Moroccan museums today. As forms of contestation that give visibility to Jews, these museums go beyond current anthropological understandings of museums as ‘state-projects’ of representation. I argue that this representational complexity and the Moroccan state's attitude toward the museums are best understood through the native Moroccan ethnometapragmatic concept ‘the plastic eye/‘ayn mika’, which combines not only the faculty of vision (the eye/‘ayn) but also the intentional act of ignoring what is exhibited (the plastic/mika), thus allowing Jewish history in Morocco to be simultaneously foregrounded and backgrounded as it is politically expedient.

‘Anthropologists Are Talking’ About Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in the New Europe

Abstract: The terms anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are common in the media, but what do they actually refer to? Has traditional anti-Semitism run its historical course while Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new unified Europe? Both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are phenomena of exclusion of minorities, but does that make them comparable? And if yes, in what ways can such an attempt at comparison escape the pitfall of analogizing the historical situation of the Jew and the contemporary situation of Muslims? These are some of the questions that are addressed in the following conversation between Prof. Matti Bunzl and Dr Bangstad, based on transcripts from an event at The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway, on 18 September 2009.

Seriously Laughing: On Paradoxes of Absurdity among Matsigenka People

Abstract: Laughing and humour are of great importance to most people in their everyday life and these phenomena have attracted attention from many social thinkers. It has been noted that laughter often is provoked by something that is considered to be absurd and paradoxical. This essay focuses specifically on the meaning of laughter among Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon. The paper discusses how absurdity is employed within narrative genres as a structuring principle within the specific ethos that is predominant among this people and how it serves to generate and manifest conviviality.

Public Reason and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Racism in Latvia

Abstract: My paper is a critical analysis of anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives in Latvia. First, I trace the historical and geopolitical conditions that enable the emergence of two discursive positions that are central to arguments about racism – that of liberally inclined tolerance activists and that of Latvians with politically objectionable nationalist sensibilities. Subsequently, I argue that, plagued by developmentalist thinking, anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives fail in their analysis of contemporary racism. They posit backward attitudes as the main hindrance to the eradication of racism and displace racism as a constitutive feature of modern political forms onto individual and collective sensibilities. Instead of the fast track diagnosis of racism that animates liberal anti-racism, I suggest that an analysis of racism should integrate attention to the common elements of modern racism across political regimes and the historical particularities that shape public and political subjec...

God is in the Data: Epistemologies of Knowledge at the Creation Museum

Abstract: In contemporary American public culture, interest groups increasingly mobilise social constructionist arguments in order to discredit strains of scientific knowledge. According to Latour [2004. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, 30:225–48], the field of science studies has contributed to this trend by exposing the ways that scientific facts are socially mediated. In this article, I examine how a narrative of social construction is articulated in the Creation Museum, a young earth creationist museum in Northern Kentucky, USA. I compare the epistemology of science in the Creation Museum with that of conspiracy theory and of social constructionist science studies. I examine how, in the Creation Museum, social constructionist critique is combined with a framing of the Bible as a source of factual data. It is argued that science studies, conspiracy theory and creationism overlap in their critiques of the transparency and objectivity of science. Howe...

The biographical process of a Tibetan lama

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the social life of a deceased Tibetan Buddhist lama. It details the role of death and successive lives in a lifestory that ends not with the passing of the subject but with his rebirth. Ethnographic attendance to tales told about the lama's death and reincarnation, and their textualization in the Tibetan convention of hagiography, or namtar, draw attention to quintessentially Tibetan understandings of the lifecourse. I argue that posthumous forms of the lama challenge the notion of biological death, and, in so doing, demonstrate that life can continue in new mediums including relics, reincarnation and hagiographical representations.

Xará: Namesakes in Southern Mozambique and Bahia (Brazil)

Abstract: In Maputo (Southern Mozambique) and Bahia (Brazil), the most commonly used word to refer to namesakes is xara – a word of Amerindian origin. Although the institutions in question diverge considerably in each of these contexts, the two usages come together in that the sharing of a personal name establishes an alliance not only between the two persons involved but also among their relations. In this way, it is argued that the namesake institution is both supervening upon filiation and is a way of closing the local universe of relatedness upon itself. By superimposing a set of crossing ties, the namesake institution consolidates the entities at play and their relations. Nevertheless, much like filiation, upon which it is dependent, the namesake relation is one of co-responsibility and fusion between the partners, not of reciprocal responsibility. The latter is the product of the triangulation that such relations of alliance produce.

Contentious Europeanization: The Paradox of Becoming European through Anti-Patent Activism

Abstract: Through an ethnographic account of a pan-European activist campaign against software patents, I investigate how European identities emerge through contention rather than consensus I apply anthropological literature on Europeanization and on intellectual property rights in order to rethink conventional theories about the relationship between European integration and the formation of European identity I develop the term ‘contentious Europeanization’ to denote a set of identities and approaches to Europe that are intimately linked to EU policy-making, yet purport to develop an alternative Europe More broadly, I argue that information technology and intellectual property law operate as frameworks for the formation of contentious political subjectivities

Personifying Objects/Objectifying People: Handling Questions of Mortality and Materiality through the Archaeological Body

Abstract: Death and the bodies of the dead are managed and handled in contemporary Western society by various professions that include archaeology. The bodies of the dead exist in a variety of material forms, and generate conflicting responses from the archaeologists who work with them. Positioning archaeologists as professionals within a wider society, this article explores the relationship between the physicality of the body, the (de)construction of personhood and the problem of mortality in contemporary Western (British) society.

Pastoral Communities in the Sardinian Highlands (Italy): A View on Social Mobility

Abstract: For several decades the socio-economic and political organization of rural communities in the northern Mediterranean has been a central topic of ethnographic and modern historical research. Although the concept of (rural) class has generally been avoided, a scholarly picture has often been maintained of a sharp social stratification in local contexts. In this framework the notions of peasantry and patronage have frequently been applied. This article argues that on occasion rural communities in southern Europe showed a rather flexible social stratification and high amounts of social mobility in particular among shepherd groups. The case study is of the agro-pastoral community of Fonni in the central mountains of Sardinia (Italy), which has been characterized predominantly by a pastoral economy based on sheep and goat herding during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Scope of ‘Meaning’ and the Avoidance of Sylleptical Reason: A Plea for Some Modest Distinctions

Abstract: Syllepsis 1. Gram. and Rhet. A figure by which a word, or a particular form or inflexion of a word, is made to refer to two or more other words in the same sentence, while properly applying to or a...