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Showing papers in "Ethnos in 2017"


Journal ArticleDOI
08 Aug 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that it is important for the anthropology of infrastructure to find ways of bringing their world-changing capacities into view, and argue that these transformations are often slow and incremental, they often unfold under the radar of anthropological analysis.
Abstract: Infrastructures have conventionally been viewed as material substrates underlying social action. On this basis, cultural anthropology has engaged infrastructure as vehicles through which political values and symbols are made manifest. In contrast, this introduction, and the contributions that follow, specifies an orientation to infrastructures as ontological experiments. At issue is a view of infrastructures as experimental systems that integrate a multiplicity of disjunctive elements and spin out new relations between them. The result is the creation and transformation of different forms of practical, materialized ontologies, which give shape to culture, society, and politics. Given that these transformations are often slow and incremental, they often unfold under the radar of anthropological analysis. However, we argue that it is important for the anthropology of infrastructure to find ways of bringing their world-changing capacities into view. The paper ends with a brief introduction to the con...

127 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
28 Jul 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the affective force of infrastructural intervention, focusing on the construction, successful in one case, locally stalled in the other, of so-called independent roads along Kyrgyzstan's porous land-border with Tajikistan.
Abstract: This article explores the affective force of infrastructural intervention. It focuses on the construction, successful in one case, locally stalled in the other, of so-called ‘independent roads’ along Kyrgyzstan's porous land-border with Tajikistan. Chinese-built and funded through an array of international lending organisations, such roads are determinate interventions in the social life of a marginal border region. They are also the site of intense local anticipation: the object both of hope for a materially secure future and of anxieties of entrapment. The very alignments that enable a new road to come into being – the mobilising of elected representatives, the appeal to languages of abandonment and territorial loss – are themselves anticipatory and experimental moves. The category of ‘infrastructural hope’ is developed to explore this articulation of material politics with diffuse elite and vernacular desires for a territorially secure future. The article considers the implications of this entanglement...

56 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
08 Aug 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the efforts of the Japan International Cooperation Agency to improve Phnom Penh's run-down sewage infrastructure and offer an example of what a decentred anthropology of infrastructure might look like.
Abstract: Focusing on the efforts of the Japan International Cooperation Agency to improve Phnom Penh's run-down sewage infrastructure, this paper offers an example of what a decentred anthropology of infrastructure might look like. The sewage infrastructure brings together a very diverse set of features, including pipes, road networks, economic considerations, demographic change, geography, climate change, flows of sludge and the lives of people in the city. Giving rise to significantly unpredictable and deeply material relations, the paper brings into view infrastructure as sites of immanent ontological experimentation; junctures where relations between society, technology and nature emerge in variable forms. The paper explores these relations by paying close attention to intersecting activity trails. Kandal market in central Phnom Penh is one site where trails of sewage and garbage collection converge with heavy flows of water during the rainy season. Pipe dreams, too, are generated at this conjunction, ...

49 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
08 Aug 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, a case study drawn from the wastelands of Ghana's city of Tema is presented, where an expansive privately owned public toilet complex turned hostel, school room, meeting place, communal kitchen, and fledgling biogas plant are analyzed.
Abstract: Can infrastructure provide the basis of urban public life and the foundation for the commonwealth? And how might this be possible in contexts of modernist failure marked by the evacuation of resources, rights, and state investments and the accumulation of waste, from human excreta to industrial discharge and the detritus of everyday consumption? These questions are explored through a case study drawn from the wastelands of Ghana's city of Tema. At the heart of the analysis is an expansive privately owned public toilet complex turned hostel, school room, meeting place, communal kitchen, and fledgling biogas plant. Akin to Hobbes’ Leviathan, here we see a putative ‘state of nature’ transformed into an infrastructure-based commonwealth of waste. Replete with political possibility despite its unstable and unfinished form, this ontological experiment re-assembles social relations by making tangible, scalable, and public the collective force of bodily waste.

42 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Atsuro Morita1
08 Aug 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the central role of floating rice has been elucidated in the formation of water management infrastructure in the Chao Phraya delta in Thailand, and the particular multispecies relations between water management infrastructures, farmers and rice in the delta were examined.
Abstract: This paper aims to elucidate the central role floating rice has played in the formation of water management infrastructure in the Chao Phraya delta in Thailand. Operating in the background of everyday activities, infrastructures often remain overlooked by the actors that rely on them. However at certain moments, such as breakdowns, infrastructures make visible usually hidden connections between humans and non-humans. In recent years, the infrastructural role of floating rice has become a matter of concern for many actors in and around the Chao Phraya delta. This paper examines the particular multispecies relations between water management infrastructure, farmers and rice in the delta. In particular, the paper traces moments of infrastructural inversion that shed light on rice's involutions as part of a multispecies infrastructure. Attention to these involutions, the paper argues, facilitates a reconsideration of infrastructure's relationship with nature.

41 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
08 Aug 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic study of attempts to bring new waste infrastructures into being in the Cusco region of Peru is presented, which explores the attempts by engineers, municipal functionaries, and local communities to engage waste both as decomposing matter and as material resource.
Abstract: Drawing on an ethnographic study of attempts to bring new waste infrastructures into being in the Cusco region of Peru, this article considers the specific material and social articulations that such infrastructures imply. The ethnography explores the attempts by engineers, municipal functionaries, and local communities to engage ‘waste’ both as decomposing matter and as material resource. The article traces the tensions that emerge in experiments to produce new material and economic forms that reorient the agency of decomposing matter to new productive ends. In practice, this proposed reconfiguration of materials and of social relations draws attention to the divergent and disjunctive practical ontologies that inhere in waste infrastructures. The proposal to transform existing waste infrastructures disturbs existing modes of social accommodation and requires people to explore how the tensions between economic growth and environmental care might be re-negotiated in spaces of distributed sovereignt...

25 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
15 Mar 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper chart the changing meanings of meat in contemporary urban China and explore the role played by Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in shaping these changes, highlighting the central role of Buddhism in discourses on karmic retribution for taking life and in a non-confrontational approach that sought to accommodate these discourses with the importance of food in Chinese social life.
Abstract: This article charts the changing meanings of meat in contemporary urban China and explores the role played by Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in shaping these changes. In Kunming, meat has long been a sign of prosperity and status. Its accessibility marked the successes of the economic reforms. Yet Kunmingers were increasingly concerned about excessive meat consumption and about the safety and quality of the meat supply. Buddhist vegetarian restaurants provided spaces where people could share meat-free meals and discuss and develop their concerns about meat-eating. While similar to and influenced by secular, Western vegetarianisms, the central role of Buddhism was reflected in discourses on karmic retribution for taking life and in a non-confrontational approach that sought to accommodate these discourses with the importance of meat in Chinese social life. Finally, the vegetarian restaurants spoke to middle-class projects of self-cultivation, and by doing so potentially challenged associations bet...

25 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
15 Mar 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: The papers that make up this collection were already long in development when the European 'horsemeat scandal' in early 2013 threatened to derail still further what fragile trust there remained in....
Abstract: The papers that make up this collection were already long in development when the European ‘horsemeat scandal’ in early 2013 threatened to derail still further what fragile trust there remained in ...

23 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
27 May 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how urban youth in the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam negotiate the terms of transactional intimacy, that is, heterosexual relations in which men are expected to provide for women materially.
Abstract: This article examines how urban youth in the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam negotiate the terms of transactional intimacy, that is, heterosexual relations in which men are expected to provide for women materially. Using the concept of ‘affect’, I argue that this negotiation involves different levels of male providership, as well as moral values attached to notions of ‘true love’ and the Swahili concept of tamaa. Poor men and women view their agency differently within transactional intimacy, with women describing themselves as exploited by men who do not fulfil their end of the transactional bargain, and poor men portraying themselves as deeply disempowered in comparison to wealthier men. Yet women and men also produce shared cultural discourses to portray men's meagre providership in a positive light, and to place upon women the moral onus of sacrificing material aspirations in order to choose ‘true love’.

20 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, a small, grassroots neighbourhood-watch "pilgrimage" created by and for older adults in Kyoto, Japan was used as a primary case study to examine practices of watching and walking as aesthetic staging grounds for the embodiment of social values, well-being and aged subjectivities.
Abstract: This article examines practices of watching and walking as aesthetic staging grounds for the embodiment of social values, well-being, and aged subjectivities. Using a small, grassroots neighbourhood-watch ‘pilgrimage' created by and for older adults in Kyoto, Japan as my primary case study, I describe how the sacred meanings of pilgrimage come to inhabit spaces of civic social engagement (and vice versa) and elder subjectivity through practices of mapping, record-keeping, and ritual. I argue that following these practices with the older adult pilgrims leads us beyond what Coleman [2002. Do You Believe in Pilgrimage?: From Communitas to Contestation and Beyond. Anthropological Theory, 2(3):355–68] referred to as a theoretical ‘pilgrimage ghetto’, and creates openings to engage with multiple registers of intersubjective practice: watching and being watched over; grounding and transcending. Watching and walking also contest the marginality, dependence, and precarious invisibility that dominate popula...

18 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
27 May 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana, by focusing on the relationship between rhythm and practice, and show that by attending to the rhythmicity of activities in the yard, the station dwellers accommodate motional inputs that take shape hundreds of kilometres away.
Abstract: In this article, I explore the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana, by focusing on the relationship between rhythm and practice. In Accra's station, departures do not follow pre-designated scripts of clock-time but are timed collectively by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow diverse rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served from the station. I show that by attending to the rhythmicity of activities in the yard, the station dwellers accommodate motional inputs that take shape hundreds of kilometres away. They do so by way of kinaesthetic enskilment, hence a tacit way of attuning to movements and rhythms. This link between rhythmanalysis and the anthropology of the senses, I suggest, offers a useful conceptual gateway for understanding West African practices of road travel.

Journal ArticleDOI
15 Mar 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, a longitudinal qualitative research conducted at a multi-species, multi-faith ashram, and in dialogue with recent ethological research which challenges dominant understandings of nonhuman subjectivities, is suggested that animals, especially those traditionally classified as "livestock" can acquire the status of producers, consumers and consumed in ways which challenge normative expectations and practices of production and consumption.
Abstract: Anthropological engagements with nonhuman animals in religious contexts have tended to focus on animals either as sacrificial offerings, whose physical bodies are consumed by suppliants and the divine, or as symbolic entities whose physiological or behavioural characteristics are consumed by human imaginations. More generally, animals, especially those classified as livestock, constitute ‘animal products’ – their flesh, milk, eggs and skins readily consumed by both humans and those nonhumans privileged enough to be our close companions. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative research conducted at a multi-species, multi-faith ashram, and in dialogue with recent ethological research which challenges dominant understandings of nonhuman subjectivities, it will be suggested that animals, especially those traditionally classified as ‘livestock’ can acquire the status of producers, consumers and consumed in ways which challenge normative expectations and practices of production and consumption.

Journal ArticleDOI
27 May 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: New York Stories as discussed by the authors is an ethnographic attempt to research and represent the everyday experience of living with HIV/AIDS in New York's Lower East Side by examining the complex trajectories of thinking and being that are played out in public spaces but are not necessarily externalised.
Abstract: New York Stories aims to research and represent the realms of inner expression that constitute people's lived experiences of urban space but remain beneath the surface of their public activity The capacity for a complex inner lifeworld – consisting of inner speech, inchoate trajectories of thought, unarticulated moods, random urges, unsymbolised thinking, imagination, sensation, memory – is a distinctive feature of human experience that mediates many realms of everyday life, action and practice By placing the problem of interiority directly into the field and turning it into an ethnographic, practice-based question to be addressed in collaboration with informants, New York Stories can be seen as an ethnographic attempt to research and represent the everyday experience of living with HIV/AIDS in New York's Lower East Side by examining the complex trajectories of thinking and being that are played out in public spaces but are not necessarily externalised

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: Based on research in London and Paris with mothers from an international breastfeeding support organisation, the authors explores the narratives of women who breastfeed their children "to full term" (typically for a period of several years) as part of a philosophy of attachment parenting.
Abstract: Based on research in London and Paris with mothers from an international breastfeeding support organisation, this paper explores the narratives of women who breastfeed their children ‘to full term’ (typically for a period of several years) as part of a philosophy of ‘attachment parenting’. In line with wider cultural trends (in the UK, at least), one of the most prominent ‘accountability strategies’ used by this group of mothers to explain their full-term breastfeeding is the claim that this is ‘most natural’, drawing on an evolutionary ‘hominid blueprint’ of care, as well as an ecological perspective on social life more broadly. What follows in the paper is a reflection on how notions of ‘natural’ parenting are given credence in narratives of mothering, and how this is used adaptively in local contexts as part of women's ‘identity work’. If in the UK the ‘natural’ is used as a moral grounding for action, the same cannot be said for women in France. Using a comparative perspective, the argument is...

Journal ArticleDOI
20 Oct 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In the context of the exchange between the living and the dead, the concept of "affinity muertos" as mentioned in this paper has been used to describe a dynamic and multiple field of identifications and differentiations, wherein the dead slowly become dead in a parallel process of un-becoming living, through becoming ‘affinity’ muerto of their living counterparts.
Abstract: In Cuba one might encounter a lively exchange occurring between the living and the dead (los muertos), one which is often described in terms of ‘affinity’. This involves a reciprocity among the biographies of the former, the past (biographies) and present condition (‘necrography’) of the latter, who are not in the least limited to ancestors or previously intimate to the living persons. The intensification of such exchange takes place within a dynamic and multiple field of identifications and differentiations, wherein the dead slowly become dead in a parallel process of un-becoming living, through becoming ‘affinity’ muertos of their living counterparts. This could be said to be the point of what is going on, but things, when they get so radically mobilised through exchange, might also go beyond the point of conclusion.

Journal ArticleDOI
15 Mar 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: The authors examines how in whaling debates varying anthropological conceptions of culture have been exported to the public realm and used to justify Japanese claims to whaling traditions as cynical invocations of cultural rights, while anti-whaling activists grant ‘indigenous peoples' modest allowances based on the protections of cultural relativism.
Abstract: Likely the world's most controversial meat, debates concerning whale consumption frequently revolve around discourses regarding the ‘localness’ of food, invoking long-standing anthropological constructs concerning the meaning and significance of ‘culture’. Constituencies at the forefront of opposition to whale consumption are elsewhere among the strongest defenders of diverse food traditions, framing ‘Endangered foods’ as the culinary equivalent of Endangered Species and emblematic of endangered cultures – a reinforcing equivalence that is problematized when food traditions are constituted of meats viewed as morally unfit for consumption. While anti-whaling activists grant ‘indigenous peoples’ modest allowances based on the protections of cultural relativism, Japanese claims to whaling traditions are disparaged as cynical invocations of cultural rights. Thus, this paper examines how in whaling debates varying anthropological conceptions of culture have been exported to the public realm and used to...

Journal ArticleDOI
15 Mar 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw out some of the fine-grained distinctions made by my informants in relation to meat eating, which suggest that its consumption is shaped not only by caste and religion, but also by gender, age, status and other personal considerations.
Abstract: Meat eating in India cannot be analysed simply as a marker of ritual impurity: the culinary experiences of South Indian Christians also indicate the importance of meat in forging positive identities. In this paper, I draw out some of the fine-grained distinctions made by my informants in relation to meat eating, which suggest that its consumption is shaped not only by caste and religion, but also in relation to gender, age, status and other personal considerations. Second, I attempt to situate these practices within wider contexts: the cross-cutting influences of national anti-cattle slaughter campaigns and reactions against them; a growing movement of environmentalists and food activists; and the economics of meat production, which are rapidly changing in relation to new farming methods and other ecological shifts.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: This paper analysed how interviewees drew on the natural concept of the maternal bond to make nuanced and contingent claims about motherhood and the ethics of surrogacy based on ethnographic fieldwork in Scotland.
Abstract: This article analyses how interviewees drew on the ‘natural’ concept of the maternal bond to make nuanced and contingent claims about motherhood and the ethics of surrogacy Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Scotland with people who do not have personal experience of surrogacy, it describes how they used this ‘natural’ concept to make claims about the ethics of surrogacy and compares these claims with their personal experiences of maternal bonding Interviewees expected that because of the experience of pregnancy, mothers have a ‘nine-month head-start’ in bonding with their children While this valorises it, it also reproduces normative expectations about the nature and ethic of motherhood

Journal ArticleDOI
Noa Vaisman1
15 Mar 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In the mid-1990s Argentine human rights activists faced a daunting task: achieving some measure of justice for the crimes committed during the last civico-military dictatorship (1976-1983).
Abstract: In the mid-1990s Argentine human rights (HR) activists faced a daunting task: achieving some measure of justice for the crimes committed during the last civico-military dictatorship (1976–1983). Their struggles gave birth to the escrache – a rebellious demonstration that targets the perpetrators of HR crimes, denounces their deeds and exorcizes them from the social body. Three kinds of justice are braided together in this practice: social justice, historical justice and a demand for judicial accountability. Through an ethnographic exploration of the practice the paper offers an analysis of these three kinds of justice and the changes they underwent in the past two decades. By offering a grounded analysis of justice in the pre- and the post-transitional justice phases in Argentina the paper contributes to ongoing debates about the meaning of justice and the possibility of reconciliation in post-conflict situations.

Journal ArticleDOI
Miho Ishii1
08 Aug 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate spirit worship in a special economic zone (SEZ) in India by considering practices of care around specific constellations of nature and infrastructure: fluid, contingent assemblages of the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ environments.
Abstract: This paper investigates spirit (būta) worship in a special economic zone (SEZ) in India by considering practices of care around specific constellations of nature and infrastructure: fluid, contingent assemblages of the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ environments. Occult phenomena in modern settings have often been interpreted as metaphorical critiques of modernity by neophyte proletarians. In the SEZ, however, it is not workers but executives who undertake the primary role in būta rituals. In addition, the rituals’ main aim is towards not division but connection among modern technology, nature, and divinities. The SEZ management assumes the role of primary caretaker of an assemblage which constitutes both industrial plants and spiritual landmarks. The rituals enable the people to manage the entanglements of infrastructure with spirits and nature, which are not only modern but also untamed and divine. In the process of caring for these entanglements, people experiment with novel ontological arrangements.

Journal ArticleDOI
27 May 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: The authors argue that these archives reinforce homonationalist discourses which contain a highly delimited, classed and raced definition of sexual and gendered identity that is folded into some nation states' discourses of the good immigrant and proper citizen, simultaneously creating its opposite, the bad immigrant and deviant citizen.
Abstract: Anthropologists and social scientists are regularly asked to submit ‘expert’ reports focusing on social, cultural or political conditions in refugee-producing nation states on behalf of human rights organisations or lawyers representing refugee claimants in the Global North. In this paper I reflect on my own participation in the production of these reports and the cumulative effect of expert documents on sexual orientation and gender identity refugee claims as they accrue in the paper and electronic folders of courts, and state immigration and refugee departments, producing a governmental archive of knowledge on sexual orientation and gendered identity. I argue that these archives reinforce homonationalist discourses which contain a highly delimited – neo-liberal, classed and raced – definition of sexual and gendered identity that is folded into some nation states' discourses of the good immigrant and proper citizen, simultaneously creating its opposite, the bad immigrant and deviant citizen.

Journal ArticleDOI
27 May 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia and argue that debt has acquired a gift-like nature in Ulaanbaatar, and show how the temporality of such generalized debt is inseparable from the neo-liberal deregulation of residential spaces in this and other postsocialist cities.
Abstract: Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar curtailment or other formalization. The result is that ‘no one pays back what they owe’, as people complain. Departing from the seemingly peculiar fact that people nonetheless keep on lending others money – including debtors they hardly know or with a bad reputation – I argue that debt has acquired a gift-like nature in Ulaanbaatar, and show how the temporality of such ‘generalized debt’ is inseparable from the neo-liberal deregulation of residential spaces in this and other postsocialist cities.

Journal ArticleDOI
Suma Ikeuchi1
08 Aug 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: Temporal tandem as mentioned in this paper is defined as a process of joint temporalization by which seemingly disparate projects of migration and conversion become interlocked, which is a case study of Pentecostal converts among Brazilians of Japanese descent in Japan.
Abstract: This article contributes to the emerging area of research in the anthropology of Christianity that focuses on mobility and temporality. It does so by elaborating on the concept of ‘temporal tandem', which is defined as a process of joint temporalization by which seemingly disparate projects of migration and conversion become interlocked. Pentecostal converts among Brazilians of Japanese descent (Nikkeis) in Japan will serve as a case study to delineate this concept. Temporality figures as a central theme in their stories of migration to the supposed ancestral homeland as well as in their narratives of conversion in Japan. I will illustrate the ways in which conversion addresses common concerns regarding time among the migrant converts, such as ‘putting aside living for the future'. The article concludes with an observation that Nikkeis often experience Pentecostal conversion as a ‘return to the present', where life is no longer perceived to be suspended.

Journal ArticleDOI
20 Oct 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how young people devise action in the context of ambiguity and uncertainty in the aftermath of war in Burundi, focusing on purposeful action in different periods of crisis.
Abstract: This article explores how (young) people devise action in the context of ambiguity and uncertainty in the aftermath of war in Burundi. The focus is on purposeful action in different periods of crisis. In Burundi, enduring crisis has given way to a range of practices that are geared at embracing rather than ridding ambiguity and uncertainty – such as preparing for alternative trajectories simultaneously or acting in a provisional way. In situations where the threat of potential violence is immediate, in looming crisis, however, these practices cannot be sustained. People have to make explicit, exclusive choices within a matrix of contradictions. Therewith, recurrent crises in Burundi have given rise to patterns of practices that are experienced as problematic; desired (ought to be) moral maps for acting no longer correspond to the expected (more frequent) maps. This further adds to the experience of incoherence and ambiguity in the already uncertain society.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: The authors examines the different ways in which young women and men take recourse to tactics in response to the tensions that arise as they deal with changing gender ascriptions in the midst of their relations with community and kin.
Abstract: Gender ideologies in Cape Verde are shifting. Individuals find themselves caught between changing tides, pushed and pulled in opposite directions by divergent gendered expectations. The article examines the different ways in which young women and men take recourse to tactics in response to the tensions that arise as they deal with changing gender ascriptions in the midst of their relations with community and kin. Women, in particular, are unevenly affected by traditional demands and expectations whilst they cross the boundaries of traditional gender roles in their pursuit of enhanced education and more sexual freedom. Yet, their actions are not characterized by an outright rejection of traditional gender ideologies, but rather by piecemeal tactical manoeuvres to plot a route through the centrifugal forces at play.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the patenting and genetic engineering of the plant taro (Colocasia esculenta), which Native Hawaiians consider their elder brother and ancestor Hloa, was investigated.
Abstract: This article investigates the patenting and genetic engineering of the plant taro (Colocasia esculenta), which Native Hawaiians consider their elder brother and ancestor Hāloa. It explores how molecular scientists at the University of Hawai‘i through their research activities inadvertently disrupted this relationship and concurrently provoked a resurgence of Native Hawaiians’ interest in their creation story Kumulipo and connection to their kin Hāloa. The juxtaposition of purportedly value-free scientific practices with a value-laden indigenous epistemology exposes the former's debatable characterisation as ‘objective'. Scientific practices such as patenting or genetically engineering taro are discussed as hybrids that are composed of molecular scientists with real intentions; a plant as kin, ancestor and embodied god Kāne; and an indigenous people with real kinship to a non-human being. In consequence, the described case exemplifies how scientific practices are as malleable and situated as the co...

Journal ArticleDOI
Morten Nielsen1
27 May 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce temporal topographies as an analytical heuristics for examining the oxymoronic constellation "urban times" and take them as theories that cities make of themselves without being able to totalize the spatio-temporal landscape.
Abstract: Whereas ‘urban’ is usually considered as designating a particular spatial environment composed by the agglomeration of human and non-human elements, the notion of ‘time’ suggests a processual dynamic of rhythms and velocities. However, if we take as a speculative premise that the oxymoronic idea of ‘urban times’ does capture a particular experiential modality, the analytical challenge is obviously to explore what its status might be and how it can be subjected to anthropological examination. In this article, I introduce temporal topographies as an analytical heuristics for examining the oxymoronic constellation ‘urban times’. Taken to constitute partially coordinated complexes of spatio-temporal rhythms, temporal topographies assert themselves as theories that cities make of themselves without being able to totalize the spatio-temporal landscape. It is, however, precisely because they are constantly on the verge of breaking down that temporal topographies give to urban life a particular and awkwar...

Journal ArticleDOI
20 Oct 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe a long-term collaboration with a variety of free culture activists in Madrid: digital artists, software developers and guerrilla architectural collectives, and describe how they re-functioned their ethnographic project into a "prototype" which functioned as boundary objects and zones of infrastructural enablement that allowed them to argue with their collaborators about the city at the same time as they argued through the city.
Abstract: The article describes a long-term collaboration with a variety of free culture activists in Madrid: digital artists, software developers and guerrilla architectural collectives. Coming of age as Spain walked into the abyss of the economic crisis, we describe how we re-functioned our ethnographic project into a ‘prototype’. We borrow the notion of prototype from free culture activism: a socio-technical design characterised by the openness of its underlying technical and structural sources, including for example access to its code, its technical and design specifications, and documentary and archival registries. These ethnographic prototypes functioned as boundary objects and zones of infrastructural enablement that allowed us to argue with our collaborators about the city at the same time as we argued through the city. Providing a symmetrical counterpoint to the actions of free culture hackers elsewhere in the city, our anthropological prototypes were both a cultural signature of the radical praxis...

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: The nature-culture dichotomy is perhaps one of the most critical legacies of anthropological thought and has long occupied a position of vital importance in the way in which people are understo...
Abstract: The nature–culture dichotomy is perhaps one of the most critical legacies of anthropological thought. Nature has long occupied a position of vital importance in the way in which people are understo...

Journal ArticleDOI
15 Mar 2017-Ethnos
TL;DR: Considering the important and dramatic events that international migration sets in motion on a political and individual level, when someone manages to surpass all obstacles and arrive in a new oft... as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Considering the important and dramatic events that international migration sets in motion on a political and individual level – when someone manages to surpass all obstacles and arrive in a new oft...