Showing papers in "Ethnos in 2014"
TL;DR: In this article, a case study of self-organisation in the besieged outskirts of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, traces inhabitants' yearnings for "normal lives" and their efforts to allow the latter to unfold.
Abstract: Anthropological dealings with the state often convey hope by replicating the hope of their subjects against the state. This libertarian paradigm provides effective analytical tools to grasp people's evasion of state grids, through cultural resilience-in-authenticity and/or autonomous self-organisation. Yet it cannot conceptualise their affective and practical investments in ordering statecraft, i.e. their hope for the state. Through a case study of self-organisation in the besieged outskirts of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article traces inhabitants’ yearnings for ‘normal lives’ and their efforts to allow the latter to unfold. I focus on schooling and its temporal calibration of routines, framed in the vertical encompassment of statecraft. Against the reduction of hope to hope against the state, the complementary analytical tool of ‘gridding’, I propose, allows an alternative form of replication, capturing people's yearnings for the convergence of top-down and upward/outward organisation...
78 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the late revolutionary paradox is a product of an undue analytical emphasis on the ideological content of revolutionary discourse, with its mantra-like evocations of process, change, emancipation, and other discursive projections into the future.
Abstract: With reference to the experience of the Cuban Revolution, this article addresses what may be called the ‘late revolutionary paradox’: How can so many people in countries such as Cuba continue to pledge visceral allegiance to their revolution while at the same time expressing deep disaffection with it? My main claim is that the paradox is a product of an undue analytical emphasis on the ideological content of revolutionary discourse, with its mantra-like evocations of ‘process’, ‘change’, ‘emancipation’ and other discursive projections into the future. Seen from the point of view of its form as a socio-political event, I argue, revolution turns on a deeper premise, namely the commitment to self-sacrifice, i.e. the assumption that revolutionary subjects are defined by their potential death in defence of the revolution. The premise of self-sacrifice, I argue, lends revolutionary politics a peculiar ontological foundation that makes it radically different to, broadly, ‘liberal’ understandings of politics. Thi...
39 citations
TL;DR: In a context in which most women were discouraged from leaving the house without a reason, the ability to drive oneself rather than call upon a male escort has pushed the gendered boundaries of acceptable behaviour for young women outwards, metaphorically and literally.
Abstract: The recent explosion in the number of scooters on the road in the Kathmandu Valley signifies a transformation of women's mobility. Scooters allow women to move from the back of a motorbike to the driver's seat. In a context in which most women were discouraged from leaving the house without a reason, the ability to drive oneself rather than call upon a male escort has pushed the gendered boundaries of acceptable behaviour for young women outwards, metaphorically and literally. This paper analyses young, unmarried women's newfound mobility and their capacity to drive to peripheral, ‘out-of-the-way’ places that offer respite from the bustle and pollution of the city, scenic views of the valley below, and something rarely achieved in the past – privacy. Scooters offer a way out of the policed realm of a young woman's home and neighbourhood, leading to exploration and a new space for the creation of intimacy.
39 citations
TL;DR: The laboratory has extended its walls to the whole planet as mentioned in this paper, and the instruments are everywhere in the world, houses, factories, hospitals have become so many subsidiaries of the labs.
Abstract: The laboratory has extended its walls to the whole planet. Instruments are everywhere. Houses, factories, hospitals have become so many subsidiaries of the labs. Think, for instance of global posit...
37 citations
32 citations
TL;DR: In the book Race in the 21st Century, anthropologist John Hartigan, Jr. as discussed by the authors offers an insightful assessment of the role that cultural dynamics play in order to understand the shifting meaning(s) and experiences of race in the USA.
Abstract: In the book Race in the 21st Century, anthropologist John Hartigan, Jr offers an insightful assessment of the role that cultural dynamics play in order to understand the shifting meaning(s) and experiences of race in the USA. Hartigan showcased this in the book by using a variety of ethnographic researches and cultural analysis, to highlight how race is reproduced and contested in social interactions, and in specific locales. Altogether, a thoughtful reappraisal of ethnographic approaches to race informs the main thrust of the book. In the book, a cultural analysis of race operates through analyzing the interactional, performative, and associational processes, by which we make sense of other people and ourselves. Understanding the dynamics of these processes, cautions Hartigan, will require a combined analysis of ‘three interrelated, basic operations’, which involves, ‘body work, spatializing practices, and the determination of belonging and difference’ (33). Hartigan provides in the book an array of ethnographic studies and vignettes in order to highlight the cultural dynamics that permeate these three operational practices. He describes cultural practices as the means by which we interact with each other, perform various identities, and in the process, reproduce a range of social relations, which are fundamental to how race works. The chapters in the book are thematically arranged. This makes reading less cumbersome as each chapter is written to thematically interlace and connect the reader to the next. Hartigan begins the book with a strong call for ethnographic research, seeing this as a way to highlight how place-specific practices both shape and are reflected in the ways race is experienced in everyday activities. In the first half of the book, in Chapters 1–3, Hartigan discusses how the understanding of race may shift in meanings and experience across geographical locations, social status or class, and gender. Hartigan maintains that the analysis of each of these meanings underscores the important role culture plays in how we think about or are oblivious to race. By developing what he refers to as ‘the interactive aspect of race’, Hartigan seeks to emphasize that the ways we respond to and project race in/unto social interactions, will either strengthen or challenge prevailing assumptions on race. For Hartigan, the benefits of ethnographic research on race, as well as a cultural analysis of race, are that such a study goes beyond the sociological focus on people’s attitudinal realms. Hartigan also draws critical attention to and engages the reader with how culture works in relation to race. The emphasis in this part of the book is to guide the reader through how race is lived, experienced, and interpreted. Hartigan declares race as ‘preeminently a matter of culture’ (83) that works with
30 citations
TL;DR: The Securing the City as mentioned in this paper is an important contribution to the growing field of urban studies and in/ security and would work well on the curriculum of a class on urban studies.
Abstract: together. Most articles are vividly written. They cross-reference each other where relevant and together they offer a comprehensive understanding of perceptions of urban spaces in present-day Guatemala City and beyond. As such, the book is an important contribution to the growing field of urban studies and in/ security and would work well on the curriculum of a class on urban studies. There is not much ethnographic analysis of Guatemala City in general and, as such the anthology is also important as a rare contribution to the regional literature. The focus on the urban spaces of Guatemala City is a welcoming contribution to the field of urban studies in Guatemala, a country that has been dominated by studies of the rural, predominantly Mayan, population or of the country’s violent political past and subsequent Peace Accords. Theoretically, the anthology is symptomatic of the interest in neoliberalism and spatial forms of social exclusion that characterizes North American academia in particular. Yet it provides a refreshing addition to the literature on the segregation of social lives in so-called postmodern cities. Securing the City contests persuasively that neoliberalism necessarily results in bounded urban societies, a point scholars have made about Los Angeles (Low 2003) and Sao Paolo (Caldeira 2000). This anthology differs from these studies by its emphasis on how different urban spaces as well as Guatemala City and the countryside are inextricably linked and mutually constitutive. As such, the anthology makes the important suggestion that one needs to analyze securitization as neither bounded nor unbounded. And yet, the anthology’s analytical focus on neoliberalism may also come with its own ‘blind spots’ in this regard. Having lived six years in Mexico City with the problems of ‘strong arm’ tactics against crime, many of the facets emphasized in this book are all too familiar to me, which make me wonder whether the analytical insistence that cityscapes are circumscribed by neoliberalism blinds us from analyzing more fully the cultural dynamics of circumscription that go beyond neoliberalism as well as those dynamics that are temporal rather than spatial.
29 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show how residents of a slum in Recife interpret and deal with the state project of registered citizenship, which finds its material expression in the compulsory carrying of identity cards.
Abstract: In Brazil, citizenship rights and the institutionalisation of citizen participation have advanced significantly under the democratic regime. However, many of the urban poor are still alienated from the state and its legal system. This article argues that, to understand the citizenship of these ‘half-citizens’, it is necessary to take account of an unofficial realm of practices. I show how residents of a slum in Recife interpret and deal with the state project of registered citizenship, which finds its material expression in the compulsory carrying of identity cards. Carrying these cards is surrounded by fear of violent police control. However, obtaining identity cards through informal procedures is associated with a longing for personalised relationships with the police and other state representatives. The relationship of these residents with their identity cards is thus both fearful and affectionate, which allows us to understand their citizenship as a confluence of fear and intimacy.
29 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines how youth navigate between tensions of modernity and culture, showing that they employ a range of strategic practices and tactics that provide space for expressing desires for modernity, while simultaneously securing cultural loyalty.
Abstract: In India's northwest border region of Ladakh, norms of sexuality are changing, which is resulting in the emergence of new sexual practices, such as dating, ‘roaming’, and the dramatic elopements of Buddhist and Muslim youth. This has caused the emergence of youth policing the perceived sexual infractions of others, through targeting particular zones of intimacy – marriage, religious identity, and mobility. Yet, youth policing is uneven, targeting those considered to be the most ‘at risk’ for moral transgressions, including Buddhists, the elite, and those pursuing education. Ladakhi youth are in a tenuous position, where they negotiate their desires to be ‘modern’ with the community pressure to maintain a strong sense of cultural identity. This paper examines how youth navigate between tensions of modernity and culture, showing that they employ a range of strategic practices and tactics that provide space for expressing desires for modernity, while simultaneously securing cultural loyalty.
28 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue for a renewed focus on the "other side of sacrifice" as a means of understanding better how sacrifice emerges beyond ritual and enters into the full gamut of social life.
Abstract: While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally ‘sacrificed sacrifice,’ for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice – whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between – remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environment, sacrificial tropes frequently emerge as key means of mediating and propagating various forms of power, moral discourse, and cultural identity. This paper lays out reasons for retaining sacrifice as an analytical concept within anthropology, and argues for the importance of a renewed focus on the ‘other side of sacrifice’, as a means of understanding better how sacrifice emerges beyond ritual and enters into the full gamut of social life.
26 citations
TL;DR: In the more recent Occupy Movement, the use of digital video has gained popularity as a tool for physical confrontation with the police, referred to as "riot porn" as discussed by the authors, which refers to videos depicting the most physical confrontations with police.
Abstract: From the globalization protests of the previous decade to the more recent Occupy Movement, activists have embraced the use of digital video. Many appropriations of the technology, including those by human rights advocates, rest on the theory that ‘seeing is believing’ and understand video to be uniquely suited to forms of truth telling such as witnessing, documenting and reporting. While I encountered such realist uses of video during fieldwork with direct action movements in the former Yugoslavia, activists are also preoccupied with videos depicting the most physical confrontations with the police, videos they sometimes referred to as ‘riot porn’. They engage these videos for the sensory, affective and bodily experiences they facilitate. Indeed, activist practices around and claims for video indicate that they understand video as a technology of the self, using it to forge emotional relationships with activists elsewhere, steel themselves for physical confrontation and cultivate new political des...
TL;DR: Overall, the paper concludes, the contemporary faith in pharmaceuticals perpetuates a colonial governmentality of bodies, medicines, and healthcare that burdens poor women with undue risk as misoprostol becomes a substitute for required structural and economic transformation of Pakistan's healthcare system.
Abstract: The off-label use of the drug misoprostol has effectively turned homebirths in ‘resource-poor’ nations into unmarked and un-enunciated zones of experimentation. Misoprostol has become the public health solution in response to medico-humanitarian discourses that construct homebirths as responsible for high maternal mortality. In the absence of proper safety tests, advocating its routine administration against postpartum haemorrhage in homes around Pakistan functions to erase the distinction between service delivery projects and experimentation. Drawing on ethnographic research in Balochistan, I argue that promoting misoprostol in contexts of structural inequality, particularly where excessive artificial labour induction prevails, constitutes the enactment of a kind of ‘medical relativism’. This medical relativism entails an experimental practice that burdens poor women with undue risk as misoprostol becomes a substitute for required structural and economic transformation of Pakistan's healthcare sy...
TL;DR: Safari hunters' acute awareness of the widely held negative perceptions of their practice has led to their development of strong justifications and defensive assertions in favour of hunting as discussed by the authors, and they claim that safari hunting in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, can be seen as an exemplary form of ecotourism, which benefits local communities, facilitates environmental conservation and provides the ultimate nature experience for participants.
Abstract: Safari hunters’ acute awareness of the widely held negative perceptions of their practice has led to their development of strong justifications and defensive assertions in favour of hunting. Far from being a primarily destructive practice, they claim that safari hunting in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, can be seen as an exemplary form of ecotourism, which benefits local communities, facilitates environmental conservation and provides the ultimate nature experience for participants. While research supports their claims to an extent, the ethical quandaries evinced by hunters themselves, the complex dialectic between local and global controls, and the elite, racialised and gendered nature of hunting speaks to a more complex and conflicted situation.
TL;DR: In this paper, experimental modes of sociality in a transnational Indian assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinic as a contact zone between elite doctors, gestational surrogates, and transnational commissioning parents are examined.
Abstract: This article marks experimental modes of sociality in a transnational Indian assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinic as a contact zone between elite doctors, gestational surrogates, and transnational commissioning parents. It examines efforts within one ART clinic to separate social relationships from reproductive bodies in its surrogacy arrangements as well as novel social formations occurring both because of and despite these efforts. Draft regulative legislation in India marks a shift in the distribution of risk among actors in the clinic that parallels a shift in medical practice away from a technique of caring for the body to producing bodies as instruments of contracted service. The clinic provides an opportunity to observe forms of sociality that emerge as experiments with modernities, with different relationships to the body and the social meaning of medicalized biological reproduction, and with understanding the role of the market and altruism in the practice of gestational surrogacy.
TL;DR: This paper explored how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies and how these embodied practices become imbricated in exchange relations with family members, health workers, and the larger community.
Abstract: This article explores how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies. Women conspicuously enhance their beauty in an attempt to defend themselves against the violence of social exclusion. Moreover, they do so in order to forge safe, loving, and prosperous relationships with their boyfriends, husbands, and families. My goal is to understand how intimacy, as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state, characterises these women's corporeal and sartorial acts. Further, I question how these embodied practices become imbricated in exchange relations with family members, health workers, and the larger community. To describe these routinised toils and triumphs as women seek to care for themselves and others, I employ the term ‘intimate labour’. I demonstrate how women gain access to social and economic resources by attending to and capitalising on the sensual and bodily desires and needs of others.
TL;DR: How the clinic's director and patients from around the globe continue to successfully pursue embryonic stem cell therapies, despite intense media speculation and scientific scrutiny labelling the clinic as a maverick experimental site is addressed.
Abstract: Drawing on Foucault's notion of subject formation or subjectification, this article shows how a process of experimental subjectification, a wilful submission and participation in seemingly experimental treatments, produces both empowering and life-affirming experiences as well as a critique of established scientific norms and practices. The article examines processes of experimental subjectification in the narratives of patients pursuing clinical application of human embryonic stem cells in India to treat chronic spinal cord injury and in the narrative of the director of the clinic providing the treatment. The article addresses how the clinic's director and patients from around the globe continue to successfully pursue embryonic stem cell therapies, despite intense media speculation and scientific scrutiny labelling the clinic as a maverick experimental site.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose an approach to sacrifice through notions of time, memory and expectation, moving away from classical formalist definitions that highlight the nature and function of sacrifice, and into ideas of meaning and experience and their insertion in particular ideologies of time.
Abstract: In this article I propose an approach to sacrifice through notions of time, memory and expectation, moving away from classical formalist definitions that highlight the ‘nature and function’ of sacrifice, and into ideas of meaning and experience and their insertion in particular ideologies of time. I will argue that sacrifice entails particular temporalities, participating in political and experiential realms of memory and expectation. For this, I will invoke a particular regime of sacrifice: the notion of self-sacrifice, as it circulates among a prophetic and messianic Christian movement of Angolan origin, the Tokoist Church.
TL;DR: In the Brazilian Catholic tradition, the challenge is not how to self-sacrifice, but how to make one's mundane life of self sacrifice visible whilst keeping one's gift of suffering "free" as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: There is no such thing as an accidental sacrifice. Sacrifice is always pre-meditated, and if not entirely goal-oriented, at the very least inherently meaningful as a process in itself. This paper is about how we might begin to understand sacrifices that do not conform to these rules. It concerns the question: does sacrifice exist outside of its (often) dramatic, self-conscious elaboration? Within the Brazilian Catholic tradition everyday life – ideally characterised by monotonous, undramatic, acts of self-giving – is ‘true sacrifice’. For ordinary Catholics, the challenge is not how to self-sacrifice, but how to make one's mundane life of self-sacrifice visible whilst keeping one's gift of suffering ‘free’. In this paper I describe, ethnographically, the work entailed as one of ‘revelation’ and use the problems thrown up to reflect upon both the limits and advantages of Western philosophical versus anthropological understandings of Christian sacrificial practices to date.
TL;DR: This article examined the role of women in the Icelandic fishing fleet and how multiple factors such as social change, fisheries policy, technology, mobility, and economics are affecting women's ability and desire to fish.
Abstract: Icelandic women have been a part of the Icelandic fishing fleet since before the seventeenth century and continue to hold positions at all levels of the fishing industry. This appears to be different from any other group of female fishers about whom a study has been done in the industrialized world. This article examines the role of these women and how multiple factors such as social change, fisheries policy, technology, mobility, and economics – including Iceland's 2008 dramatic economic crash – are affecting these women's ability and desire to fish. This article demonstrates the importance and implications of a gendered perspective when considering the effects of fisheries policy, practice, and any potential for sustainable fisheries that includes diverse factors including communities, economics, social change, and the natural environment.
TL;DR: The authors reframes definitions of food in experimental terms through two ethnographic registers, focusing on the marketing of pizza and how marketers turned their restaurants into laboratories of cosmopolitan cultivation, and how laboring bodies become enrolled in that laboratory, as young adults recruited from low-income neighborhoods come to work at a pizza restaurant.
Abstract: This article is about experiments in taste. Focused on the cultural politics of pizza in Mumbai, it highlights the visceral work required to naturalize consumer choice as a catalyst of social futures in contemporary India. It emerges out of interviews and observations among food marketers and among customers and workers in a pizza restaurant. Guided by the concept of ‘experimentality’ elaborated in medical anthropology and science and technology studies, the article reframes definitions of food in experimental terms through two ethnographic registers. The first narrative focuses on the marketing of pizza, and explains how marketers turned their restaurants into laboratories of cosmopolitan cultivation. The second narrative shows how laboring bodies become enrolled in that laboratory, as young adults recruited from low-income neighborhoods come to work at a pizza restaurant. Such experiments blur the lines between evidence and enjoyment, and ultimately add up to a revaluation of public eating itself.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that witch-hunts can be seen to share certain aspects with the realm of sacrifice, arguing that witchhunts are the other side of sacrifice in more than one sense.
Abstract: In this article, the issue is whether witch-hunts can be seen to share certain aspects with the realm of sacrifice. With resource to recent developments in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, it is argued that witchcraft is ‘the other side of sacrifice’ in more than one sense: firstly, as the witch is sacrificing its victim and breaking through to the social world from a world beyond and, secondly, as the witch-hunt is a movement with the purpose of sacrificing the accused witch for the healing of the community. The argument hinges on the alignment of the space intended by sacrifice and the space revealed by the appearance of the witch – as both articulating an engagement with ‘the very source of life’ (Hubert & Mauss 1964: 98).
TL;DR: The authors examines community debates about brothels and healthy sexuality in a rural coastal region where the state is expanding its reach into domestic life via the regulation of sexual intimacies and family violence.
Abstract: In the Ecuadorian public imaginary, Manabi province is constructed as a lawless frontier. Manaba men are characterized for their aggressive masculinity, robust and primitive sexuality, and their proclivity towards resolving conflict with violence. This paper examines community debates about brothels and healthy sexuality in a rural coastal region where the state is expanding its reach into domestic life via the regulation of sexual intimacies and family violence. Local debates about healthy sexuality embody the historically contested and currently changing nature of state–community relationships in this previously marginalized region. While certain community factions invoke modernizing discourses of women's rights in their struggle to shut down brothels and mitigate family violence, others argue for unregulated sexuality as a way to diminish violence. Drawing from over 10 years of ethnographic research on gender, violence, and human rights in Ecuador, this paper reveals the co-construction of rura...
TL;DR: Murri Aboriginal humour performances are expressive events in which bodily experiences of policing and agency are discursively commented on in ways that expose Australia's naturalised rationalisations of indigenous governance as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Murri Aboriginal humour performances are expressive events in which bodily experiences of policing and agency are discursively commented on in ways that expose Australia's naturalised rationalisations of indigenous governance. Drawing on the ‘out-of-the-way’ position of an indigenous minority encapsulated in the body of the nation-state and the Murri body's intimate ‘out-of-the-way’ folds and crannies, Murri humour delimits and mocks the marginal location Murri people are imagined to spatially and morally occupy within Australia. This work examines how gendered humour renders the Murri individual and social body legible to and for a Murri audience. Such humour performances engage the local and the global, the modern and the traditional, and the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic in ways that link intimacy, bodies and embodiments to these macro-processes. Unraveling such binaries produces a nuanced analysis in which embodied social actions and sly social critique are captured as they are experienc...
TL;DR: In this article, an actor-network theory (ANT) inspired approach to the analysis of emergent arrangements of human difference in contemporary northwest China is presented. But this approach is restricted to the case of Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China.
Abstract: This essay articulates an actor–network theory (ANT) inspired approach to the analysis of emergent arrangements of human difference in contemporary northwest China. Drawing inspiration from Law's work on method and Latour's program for reassembling the social, it enacts human difference as a fluid object in which every element is potentially situationally inessential. Moving beyond the focus on ‘ethnic’ (minzu) categories of much recent work on minority areas of China, it employs an inductive associographic method in order to provisionally disarticulate and reassemble the ‘units of common participation’ in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Ultimately, it both makes a case for the usefulness of after-ANT modes of description for work on classical (i.e. non-Science, Technology, and Society-derived) anthropological topics and pushes anthropologists of human difference in China and beyond to pay attention to the ways in which the shapes of their tools may affect the shapes of their projects.
TL;DR: This paper examined how ideals of belonging, assertions of historically inflected rights, and aspirations for mobility are all part of the everyday practice of citizenship in the post-Soviet Moldovan households.
Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic research among transnational Moldovan households in Moscow, this essay considers how ideals of belonging, assertions of historically inflected rights, and aspirations for mobility are all part of the everyday practice of citizenship. Mobile subjects encountering increasingly restrictive post-Soviet citizenship regimes often recall incorporation into a greater historical polity than their current passports would suggest. Three key areas are examined: the intersection of citizenship regimes and popular understandings of belonging; the sense of rights driven by cultural logics informed by previous history; and the way in which ideals and practices of citizenship are diverse among migrants from apparently homogeneous migration streams. The post-Soviet context where the Soviet promise of enfranchisement continues to inform how people on the margins view citizenship illustrates just how deeply citizenship regimes come to be incorporated into popular understandings of belonging ev...
TL;DR: In the context of shifting cultural anchors as well as unstable global economic conditions, new practices of intimacy and sexuality may become tactics in an individual's negotiation of conflicting desires and potentials as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the context of shifting cultural anchors as well as unstable global economic conditions, new practices of intimacy and sexuality may become tactics in an individual's negotiation of conflicting desires and potentials. This article offers reflection on the interface between global forces, powerful transcultural narratives, and state policies, on the one hand, and local, even individual, constructions and tactics in regard to sexuality, marriage, migration, and work, on the other. The article focuses on the life trajectory of Gudiya, an ambitious young Hindu woman who started out life with little social capital and few economic resources in a dusty corner of what was then the tiny kingdom of Nepal. Gudiya's story highlights the ways in which she has engaged in relational realignments aimed at bringing her closer to the life she imagines, even as she has encountered new and persistent forms of inequality both local and transnational in scale.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss how the multiple definitions and ways of organizing videophones within three sociotechnical systems mediate agency, and the resulting implications for inclusion and accessibility.
Abstract: Videophones and video interpreting services for Deaf people are defined as telecommunication technologies in the USA, but as different types of assistive technologies in Sweden and Norway. This article discusses how the multiple definitions and ways of organising videophones within three sociotechnical systems mediate agency, and the resulting implications for inclusion and accessibility. If the technology and related service are organised external to the system it is intended to give access to, material exclusion mechanisms are reinforced or remain unchanged. In contrast, organisation of the technology and service within an existing sociotechnical system places the users in a more equal position relative to others. The core thesis is that the greater the integration of systems of heterogeneous actors, the greater the flow of agency and the less disabled – or different – the actors become.
TL;DR: This paper explored the management of reproduction and sexuality as experimental political practice in Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, where vote bloc politics and a tenuous geopolitical context highlight the reproductive body's potential to maintain political and territorial control through demographic trends.
Abstract: This paper explores the management of reproduction and sexuality as experimental political practice. In Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, vote bloc politics and a tenuous geopolitical context highlight the reproductive body's potential to maintain political and territorial control through demographic trends. Conflict between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority is articulated partly through the regulation of fertility and sexuality. Population is described as a zero-sum game in which each side acquires or cedes territory; activists and religious leaders experiment with the body as a territorial tool. These projects collide with the hopes and fears of women and men considering love, marriage, pregnancy, and contraceptive use. This paper draws on research conducted in 2004 and 2007–2009 to explore how women's desiring and reproductive bodies are folded into geopolitical experiments, how women cope under this experimental regime, and the ways that they turn to a tactic of ‘not kno...
TL;DR: In practice, however, faith in this vision had to be reaffirmed in the face of Australian Aboriginal people who did not match the ideal as mentioned in this paper, and maintaining faith in a useable Aboriginal alterity thus required negotiating the tensions between competing constructions of the genuine as either personal authenticity, adherence to tradition, or genealogical essence.
Abstract: For many alternative spiritualists, it is axiomatic that indigenous peoples offer a radical alternative to Western materialism and alienation. Such a vision served some of the Australian alternative spiritualists in this research as both an auto-critique of modernity and a profound truth that could serve a range of personal and political projects. In practice, however, faith in this vision had to be reaffirmed in the face of Australian Aboriginal people who did not match the ideal. Maintaining faith in a useable Aboriginal alterity thus required negotiating the tensions between competing constructions of the genuine as either personal authenticity, adherence to tradition, or genealogical essence. Indeed, it was the movement between these different iterations of authenticity that ensured that the search for the real maintained its value as a framework for self-making at the same time as it tied Aboriginal people to a restrictive notion of culture and personhood.
TL;DR: In this article, a number of brief reflections on what we can know about sacrifice, in both its ritual and non-ritual and its violent and nonviolent aspects, reflections concerning its seriousness, reverberations, interpellation, temporality, naming, instrumentality, and heterogeneity.
Abstract: These stimulating essays provoke a number of brief reflections on what we can know about sacrifice, in both its ritual and non-ritual and its violent and nonviolent aspects, reflections concerning its seriousness, reverberations, interpellation, temporality, naming, instrumentality, and heterogeneity.