Showing papers in "Ethnos in 2023"
TL;DR: Bridging Fluid Borders: Entanglements in the French-Brazilian Borderland as discussed by the authors , is a recent work that deals with the borderland of France and Brazil.
Abstract: "Bridging Fluid Borders: Entanglements in the French-Brazilian Borderland." Ethnos, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
1 citations
TL;DR: In this article , a cooperative used both labels and people to inform consumers about the ecological quality and trustworthiness of its food, thereby obtaining price premiums, and using information infrastructure as the common analytical vocabulary for exploring both certification and performances of face-to-face relations unearths unexpected commonalities amidst presumed otherness.
Abstract: Certification schemes and alternative food networks have often been studied separately or using different analytical concepts. Ethnographic research in Sichuan Province, China shows how a cooperative used both labels and people to inform consumers about the ecological quality and trustworthiness of its food, thereby obtaining price premiums. Using information infrastructure as the common analytical vocabulary for exploring both certification and performances of face-to-face relations unearths unexpected commonalities amidst presumed otherness. The infrastructure lens draws attention to the importance of scientific planning and materiality: the force of specific features of different crops and modes of production. Information infrastructures – whether labels or people – depend on, and affect, the materiality of whatever they are supposed to be informing about. They do not simply convey information, but shape value as they interact with and intervene in what is produced.
TL;DR: In this paper , the configuration of the "infrastructures of value" that underwrite the raspberries' spatio-temporal reach to distant markets is investigated, which contributes to economic anthropology by studying the interplay between agronomics and the cold chain and their differential weathering of historical transformations.
Abstract: Serbia has exported raspberries since socialism. Its production network withstood the post-Yugoslav property transformations and grew despite global competition. This article traces the configuration of the ‘infrastructures of value’ that underwrite the raspberries’ spatio-temporal reach to distant markets. Combining new and historical materialism, it contributes to economic anthropology by studying the interplay between two infrastructures – agronomics and the ‘cold chain’ – and their differential weathering of historical transformations. During socialism, the agronomists ‘infrastructured’ the environment in collaboration with farmers and plants, while the containment technologists upgraded the freezing infrastructure, solidifying the fruits into graded, storable, and transportable commodities. After socialism, private entrepreneurs replicated the cold-chain modules, while agronomic research and quality control became de-institutionalised. As the agronomic infrastructure stagnated, the cold chain went into overdrive. In this late-capitalist ‘infrastructural involution’, political-economic transformations reshaped multispecies infrastructures, devaluing the contributions of plants and rural labour while benefiting entrepreneurs and wholesalers.
TL;DR: This paper examined burning practices and perspectives of Aboriginal traditional owners, Park rangers, and cattle graziers in far north Australia and revealed the ideological underpinnings of different fire regimes.
Abstract: Fire management is a right and responsibility shared by all land managers in Cape York Peninsula, far north Australia, bringing together Aboriginal traditional owners, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers and settler-descended cattle graziers. The landscape of Northern Australia has been socialised by fire over millennia, resulting in a fire-adapted and fire-dependent landscape. While fire knowledge originated with Aboriginal traditional owners, decades of engagement in the multi-ethnic pastoral industry have resulted in contemporary burning practices that have been interculturally mediated. The Australian government’s carbon sequestration scheme has further transformed local burning practices, precipitating new forms of burning and new forms of critique. Through examining the burning practices and perspectives of Aboriginal traditional owners, Park rangers, and – in particular – cattle graziers, the ideological underpinnings of different fire regimes emerge. These insights disrupt some of the accepted wisdom around fire management and cultural burning in Australia.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors focus on the bottle as a container embedded within an infrastructure of containment, and emphasise how the bottle re-orders the space-time of circulation.
Abstract: On the market for quality wine, quality is generally defined by the liquid’s connection to a time, space, and person(s) of origin. This connection is achieved through material-discursive versions of terroir. While the consequences of this aesthetic regime have been well-studied, little attention has been given to the artefact through which the connection is enacted: the bottle. This paper, based on fieldwork with small-scale wine producers in Italy, asks what difference it makes for these artisanal producers to bottle their wine themselves. The analysis hones in on the bottle as a container embedded within an infrastructure of containment, and emphasises how the bottle as infrastructure re-orders the space–time of circulation. The result has implications for container-mediated processes of production-exchange-consumption everywhere.
TL;DR: The authors examine the ontological politics of "piloting" REDD+ by weaving together stories from their ethnographic fieldwork in Central Suau, Papua New Guinea and Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.
Abstract: Different goals and assumptions enable and legitimise the ways that climate change is understood and governed through increasingly urgent, experimental, and heterogeneous interventions. We examine the ontological politics of ‘piloting’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) by weaving together stories from our ethnographic fieldwork in Central Suau, Papua New Guinea and Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Weaving partial stories is a methodological technique to examine encounters and disputes over REDD+ activities that entangle land, livelihoods, people, non-human beings, sorcery, and carbon among other entities. We propose the term ethical distance to conceptualise and foreground how governance experimentation in REDD+ intersects with local lives in ways that can reproduce and reinscribe inequalities. By attending to more-than-human entanglements and partiality, we underscore ethical dilemmas and the need to slow down our reasoning in proposing solutions to climate change.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors argue that interspecies communication with bats as reservoirs of infectious diseases can be described through material environments, such as a bat shelter in Ghana and a bat refuge in Australia, rather than in short contacts between bats and "virus hunters".
Abstract: This article studies how zookeepers and wildlife rescuers build relations with bats using experimental apparatuses such as cages. Arguing that interspecies communication with bats as reservoirs of infectious diseases can be described through material environments, such as a bat shelter in Ghana and a bat refuge in Australia, rather than in the short contacts between bats and ‘virus hunters’, it questions how humans can take the perspective of bats in contemporary assemblages of biosecurity. While bat keepers in Accra take the perspective of bats through the viruses they carry as a colony, in a cynegetic logic of storage, bat carers in Australia take the perspective of bats by sharing bodily fluids, in a pastoral logic of care. What is shared in the interspecies communication is framed by the material design of the biosecurity apparatus.
TL;DR: In this paper , the synthesis presented in this collection reveals how infrastructures encode social, political, and cultural (as well as economic) values through social conventions, and how they facilitate and shape capitalist accumulation by connecting heterogeneous value worlds.
Abstract: Two of the most productive lines of social science inquiry in recent years come from the study of ‘values’ and that of ‘infrastructures.’ Not coincidentally, both are capacious terms. Values are plastic and dynamic, constantly and creatively deployed and reinterpreted – yet their power is legitimated by a seeming durability, their connection to something transcendent as recognised by social conventions. In turn, infrastructures are characterised by their durability – yet, they are constantly and creatively employed and repurposed in practice. Bringing these two approaches together, the synthesis presented in this collection reveals how infrastructures encode social, political, and cultural (as well as economic) values through social conventions, and how they facilitate and shape capitalist accumulation by connecting heterogeneous value worlds.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors explore the illegal harvesting of wild abalone and plans for an abalone farm in South Africa as examples of communities seeking to establish a livelihood in degraded landscapes, a hallmark of the Anthropocene.
Abstract: This study explores the illegal harvesting of wild abalone and plans for an abalone farm in South Africa as examples of communities seeking to establish a livelihood in degraded landscapes, a hallmark of the Anthropocene. The perspective of the reefs as multispecies ruins complicates the apparent dichotomy between the destructive character of illicit abalone harvesting on the one hand, and the constructive character of an abalone co-operative farm, on the other hand, and incorporates the impact of non-human organisms on communities’ engagement with the mollusc in pursuit of a livelihood. This investigation into multispecies ruins opens innovative angles for interdisciplinary research and knowledge production that can inform more holistic approaches to multispecies survival in sites of socio-economic and ecological debris.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors explore the relationship between both approaches, as they both capture entangled identifications, power structures and social dynamics, yet, from different angles, and suggest a heuristic framework for doing ethnography with a power-critical perspective in a transnational and globalised world.
Abstract: Social and cultural anthropology is a descriptive, theorising and comparative social science. It has a holistic orientation, i.e. it directs its gaze to complex interrelationships between different subfields of cultural dynamics. However, this understanding is not a stand-alone feature of the anthropological approach, but is also valid for the intersectionality framework. This article seeks to explore the relationship between both approaches, as they both capture entangled identifications, power structures and social dynamics, yet, from different angles. It, furthermore, carves out the benefit of bringing both approaches into dialogue: Intersectionality makes sense of holistic intersections in a way that carries hierarchical relationships to the core of research. By contrast, the anthropological angle gives special meaning to mutually constitutive identity formations and their related power systems through thick ethnographic data. By conflating the two, I suggest a heuristic framework in this article – Scaling Holistic Intersectionality – for doing ethnography with a power-critical perspective in a transnational and globalised world.
TL;DR: In this paper , an ethnographic research in Moldova has shown how value is produced through infrastructures that evidence the environmental features of a wine's place of origin in the form of terroir.
Abstract: Terroir can increase the exchange value of wine in competitive markets in global capitalism. Relying on ethnographic research in Moldova, this article shows how value is produced through infrastructures that evidence the environmental features of a wine’s place of origin in the form of terroir. In these processes, genericness and uniqueness prove to be mutually constitutive. While the Soviet wine industry used evidencing infrastructures such as laboratories and measuring devices to produce decent and affordable table wine, old infrastructures have been adapted and new ones introduced to evidence terroir through analyses of soils and yeasts. The focus on scientific infrastructures of value connects new and historical materialist approaches in the conceptualisation of human-environment relations. It contributes to a new historical materialist understanding of value by highlighting the interrelation of political economic, environmental and technological dimensions in the making of terroir, through evidencing, measuring and standardising physical features of the environment.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors focus on the mundane practices of handling wastewater and argue that these infrastructural relations are variously cared for in practice, but remain neglected as part of formalised wastewater management.
Abstract: In this article, we pursue a route for understanding the decentralisation of wastewater treatment that moves away from thinking in terms of individual responsibility and technical determinism and mobilises the analytical lens of care to articulate more-than-human relationality as an organising principle of governing environmental infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch Flevopolder, we focus on the mundane practices of handling wastewater. We show how households are entangled in a multispecies infrastructure: they engage with wastewater as users of toilets, guardians of bacteria and reed beds, and technology-assisted monitors of pollution. We argue that these infrastructural relations are variously cared for in practice, but remain neglected as part of formalised wastewater management. Finally, we advocate a form of environmental governance that recognises and engages with the waste work undertaken by all stakeholders, as they configure an infrastructure in which unruly processes unfold, in a caring, rather than controlling, mode.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors develop the analytics of "infrastructures of value" on old terrain: agriculture, which facilitates valuation practices and enables valorisation as fixed capital, by connecting producers and consumers, separating contents, and communicating evidence of qualities of food.
Abstract: Exploring infrastructure has much to offer for economic anthropology. Inspired by the convergence of literatures on value and infrastructure in studies of financialisation, we develop the analytics of ‘infrastructures of value’ on old terrain: agriculture. Infrastructure facilitates valuation practices and enables valorisation as fixed capital. Material networks emerging from practices of infrastructuring also mediate value by facilitating, channelling, or hindering the circulation – movement and metamorphoses – of objects, people and ideas. Shifting attention from the social life of things to the infrastructure undergirding their circulation fills a major gap in David Graeber’s theory of value: it directs attention to how actions become incorporated into larger wholes. Various infrastructures and the frictions between them shape value by connecting producers and consumers, separating contents, and communicating evidence of qualities of food. Ethnographic attention to this material relationality of value invigorates dialogue between new and historical materialism and challenges binaries in economic thought.
TL;DR: In this article , a short-term ethnographic fieldwork in the small island nation of Palau in Western Micronesia was conducted to explore the relationship between humans and technology.
Abstract: Scuba diving offers new possibilities for being human. The diving equipment, making it possible to breathe and move about underwater, temporarily transforms divers into a kind of cyborgs, that is, integrated human–machine organisms. This transformation is here outlined by looking at both the experiential and structural aspects of recreational scuba diving. Though drawing on the occasional part-taking in scuba diving activities of different kinds over a period of fifteen years, the empirical examples in this article mainly come from a short-term ethnographic fieldwork in the small island nation of Palau in Western Micronesia. Scuba diving here emerges as a profoundly human form of cyborgism, enhancing both organic functioning and experiential possibilities, altogether creating a deeper feeling of meaningfulness in life for participants. An analysis of recreational scuba diving thereby opens up for a new way of thinking about not only cyborgism, but also the relationship between humans and technology.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors examine how conceptualisations of value; techniques of standardisation, classification and comparison; devices for measuring and calculating; templates and databases; social networks and relationships; as well as multiple materialities facilitate, legitimise and stabilise land value.
Abstract: This article investigates how valuation practices change as land becomes financialised in Australia. Financial investors bring their own assumptions on how land value should be ‘measured’ to enhance its fungibility as a financial asset. Importantly, this includes a shift to a ‘future income’ approach to value, which produces frictions with established land valuation practices. Combining valuation and infrastructure studies, I examine how conceptualisations of value; techniques of standardisation, classification and comparison; devices for measuring and calculating; templates and databases; social networks and relationships; as well as multiple materialities facilitate, legitimise and stabilise land value. These infrastructures of value are crucial for making new conceptualisations of value productive while both enabling and limiting change in valuation practices. Value further emerges as an important infrastructure itself. Shared understandings of value, embedded and expressed in valuation infrastructures, work as a ‘conduit’, a mechanism necessary for people to come to agreements in exchange processes.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors show how migration is entwined with the relations of indebtedness and care that are constitutive of moral personhood and expose the key paradox of care in migration contexts: migration creates distance and separation which results in the disjuncture between care as a material provision and care as an a ective performance of respect.
Abstract: Based on ethnographic fi eldwork in rural Tajikistan – the region where migration to Russia has become almost the only stable source of livelihood – this article contributes to a growing body of anthropological literature concerned with tensions, ambivalences and contradictions of care. Drawing on the ethnography of my interlocutor ’ s attempts to arrange care for his elderly parents, I show how migration is entwined with the relations of indebtedness and care that are constitutive of moral personhood. Attending to the complex entanglements of care, personhood, movement, and presence, I expose the key paradox of care in migration contexts: migration creates distance and separation which results in the disjuncture between care as a material provision and care as an a ff ective performance of respect. Men ’ s attempts to bridge this disjuncture can keep them ‘ stuck ’ in a loop of movement between Russia and Tajikistan and put a strain on their relationships, bodies, and sense of self.