The place of politics: powerful speech and women speakers in everyday Pa'ikwené (Palikur) life

This article focuses on the practice of female scolding in a community of Pa'ikwené (or Palikur), a native Amazonian people (French Guyana and Brazil), in order to explore ideas about power and speech and the phenomenon of political speaking. The article takes issue with claims that politics are to be equated specifically with the formal public arena, and that political discourse is the exclusive province and prerogative both of leaders and of men, whether institutionally 'authorized' or not. It is argued, on the contrary, that the everyday speech of common villagers, in this case women, is among other things integrally political, and no more powerless in effect than the so-called 'empty' speech of Amerindian chiefs postulated by Clastres. It is further proposed that Pa'ikwené women's scolding not only embodies their own power but also regenerates symmetrical gender relations, and thus the polity itself.     

The Extractive Imperative in Populous Indigenous Territories: The Shuar,Copper Mining,and Environmental Injustices in the Ecuadorian Amazon

During the past three decades, mines have increased in number at the same time that indigenous populations have grown in size and acquired more land. The intersection of these two trends suggests that, increasingly, mining companies have tried to exploit mineral deposits on lands populated and controlled by indigenous peoples. These ventures touched off conflicts between organized indigenous peoples and state supported miners. The copper mining controversy in the Ecuadorian Amazon exemplifies this pattern. Legacies from earlier mestizo land invasions in the form of active NGOs and an extensive land base made Shuar resistance to the mines much more likely. Increasingly assertive national political leaders, pursuing an extractive imperative, reinforced the miners’ efforts to extract copper from deposits near Shuar settlements. To reduce the probability of violent conflict between these parties, indigenous people should have a seat at the table when negotiations between the mining companies and the state occur.     

Hallucinogenic plants of the Shuar and related indigenous groups in Amazonian Ecuador and Peru

Banisteriopsis caapi, Brugmansia suaveolens, andNicotiana tabacum are the principal hallucinogens used by the Shuar and related ethnic groups in Amazonian Ecuador and Peru. These three species are common hallucinogens throughout northwestern Amazonia.Banisteriopsis caapi (natem) is the hallucinogen most frequently employed by the Shuar. The Shuar drink the juice ofN. tabacum duringnatem healing ceremonies. They also believe that smoke fromN. tabacum cigarettes repel evil spirits.Brugmansia suaveolens is the strongest Shuar hallucinogen. Considered very dangerous, it sometimes is added tonatem mixtures or it may be taken alone. Other plants used in hallucinogens or in narcotic beverages includeBrunfelsia grandiflora, Cyperus spp.,Diplopterys cabrerana, Heliconia stricta, Herrania spp., andIlex guayusa.     

Autonomy and Leadership: Political Formations among the Ashéninka of Peruvian Amazonia

This article examines notions of hierarchy and leadership among Ashéninka people in Peruvian Amazonia. It considers the apparent disjunction between individuals' preference for a peaceful and autonomous everyday existence and the Ashéninka's renowned ability to form large-scale cooperative groups under powerful leaders. Responding to recent anthropological writings that recognise the variability of political forms both across and within Amazonian societies, the article focuses on the social and political preoccupations that can be seen to underlie both social forms among the Ashéninka. It argues that individuals believe that peaceful social reproduction is best achieved by acting independently and respecting the autonomy of others but that aggregation and differentiation remain an option in circumstances where individual action would be ineffectual. The article also examines how the Ashéninka use outsiders as effective organisers that also symbolise the problems of coercive power.     

Paperwork,patronage, and citizenship: the materiality of everyday interactions with bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu,India

This article explores the material practices through which lower-caste and poor villagers engage with bureaucracy in contemporary India. We take documents and paperwork – such as ration cards and community certificates – as a ‘lens’ through which to explore how paper materiality is infused with the politics of power, patronage, and identity. The article brings ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, South India, in conversation with two bodies of literature: one on the materiality of bureaucracy and one on the nature of political mediation in contemporary India. We demonstrate how everyday engagements with paperwork as well as processes of applying, form filling, and securing recommendations are constitutive of social and political relationships and, ultimately, of citizenship itself. Political mediation around paperwork and bureaucracy generates a hierarchy of citizens rather than equal citizenship for all, yet ordinary villagers transpire as anything but passive. Drawing on patronage networks, engaging in affective performances, and navigating a politics of identity, they actively negotiate access to the state in an attempt to claim their rights as citizens.     

Canvases of Political Competition: Image Production as Politics in Tamil Nadu,India

In this article, I explore the production of political images in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The state is known for the ubiquitous presence of banners, murals and posters in its public spaces, featuring prominent politicians and actors. It is commonly argued that these images help to convey the heroic or exclusive status of political leaders. However, such images are actually produced by party workers and therefore do not simply transpose status and image. Instead, political supporters praise their leader via these images and act as ‘kingmakers’ in constructing reputation and power. Simultaneously, by putting political images on display, supporters also authorise their own power. While praise is important in showing a person's dedication to a political party, the images, in the motivations of their producers, are suffused with ambivalence and competition as well. Hence, I argue, political image practices are not representative of politics, they are politics.     

Accurate judgments of intention from motion cues alone: A cross-cultural study

One of our most fundamental cognitive adaptations is the ability to infer the intentions of others. Whole-body motion is a reliable, valid, easily perceived source of information about intentions because different kinds of intentional action have different motion signatures. In this study, we report four experiments that examined the ability of German adults, German children, and Shuar adults from Amazonian Ecuador to distinguish, on the basis of motion cues alone, between six categories of intentional interaction: chasing, fighting, courting, following, guarding, and playing. Naturalistic motion trajectories were elicited from untutored participants in a game-like situation with performance-based monetary payoffs and were categorized by other participants in a forced-choice design. On a six-category task, German adults correctly categorized intention 75% of the time (where 17% represents chance performance). On a four-category judgment task, children's performance was above chance by age 4, with a mean of 64% correct. A final study compared the judgments of German adults with those of Shuar hunter-horticulturalists. Performance was identical and well above chance in both populations, suggesting that cognitive adaptations for inferring intention from motion deserve further research as possible universal components of human psychology.     

NATURAL TIME, POLITICAL TIME: CONTESTED HISTORIES IN NORTHERN ITALY

This article explores the ways in which a post-peasant society in the Trentino region of northern Italy reworked its past history at a time of political turmoil when the rise of regionalist parties with an Italian version of Thatcherism in their agenda challenged the legitimacy of the Italian state. It illustrates how making a regional, local history entails representing the past as a period characterized by the repetitiveness of events. It is argued that everyday accounts of the past, because they centre on the ideas of social and political order and private property, form the background against which 'official' politics is understood. In this sense, everyday local-level discourses about the past are as political as the 'official' ones of party leaders. In making this argument, the article shows that 'repetitive time' also represents a device through which social actors place themselves outside 'national history' and cast the encompassing nation-state as the outsider.     

Ergonomics policy in Indonesia

Workers' conditions in accordance with their place of work are different from one area to another, especially in this reformation era where there are immense alterations in politics shown from the centralized government shifting to decentralization and district autonomy. Ergonomics problems in Indonesia are reviewed. In home industries, workers have to adjust themselves to their jobs, and ergonomic improvement may face significant impediments especially in small-scale industries. It is necessary to create or identify the most plausible model to be implemented in accordance with the conditions of districts, including low awareness about the relation between ergonomics and workers' productivity in producing goods and services and working processes scattered often at their own houses. As conditions conducive to ergonomics programs, district-level willingness to improve and increase the wealth of their society, recognition by businesses about the impacts of ergonomics on productivity and reduction of medical treatment costs may be mentioned. Labor unions support ergonomic improvements at production processes, and professionals and academicians are ready to assist, whereas national banks and foreign investment may encourage new technologies including ergonomics aspects. It is important to strengthen ergonomic improvement efforts in Indonesia through establishing district ergonomics improvement networks and ergonomics peer leaders with the support of continual training starting from the training of core leaders at the province level and extending to peer leaders at district level. This training should be made as simple as possible in order to facilitate innovations toward changes. Finally assistance is needed by the mentor teams in order to periodically monitor the improvements undertaken.     

Nationalism,development, and social policy: The politics of nation-building in sub-Saharan Africa

This article examines the relationship between nation-building and social policy in post-independence sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It argues that post-independence nationalist leaders used health, housing, and education programmes to foster a sense of national unity that would transcend the existing ethnic divisions created by the arbitrary drawing of state boundaries during colonization. Yet, in SSA, the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s favoured the decline of state-level integration and solidarity, which helped trigger territorial mobilization and fragmentation. As a consequence, the politics of welfare retrenchment in SSA does more than simply reduce benefits and increase inequalities; it also potentially weakens national unity.     

Locations of Hegemony: The Making of Places in the Toba's Struggle for La Comuna, 1989-99

In this article, I examine how hegemonic fields and the forms of contention they generate are active forces in the production of places. I focus my analysis on an indigenousgroupof the Argentinean Chaco, theTobaof the Pilcomayo River, and their recent struggles to gain control over the municipality of the region, locally known as la comuna. I examine how these struggles reproduce and simultaneously contest forms of state hegemony and, in so doing, define the contours of la comuna in tension with another place: the surrounding bush where the Toba focus their hunting and gathering practices. Because of the hegemonic values that inform these struggles, I argue that in this process the bush is being reconfigured in a contradictory way: on the one hand, as a locality gradually undermined by the influence of productivist discourses and, on the other hand, as a place of autonomy from "the government" This tense spatial configuration, in turn, informs Toba political discourses and practices. A central point of this article is that hegemony has spatial dimensions that are crucial in the unfolding of processes of ideological domination, accommodation, and resistance. {Key words: hegemony, place, ethnic politics, Argentina. Gran Chaco, Toba]     

Tribal hands and minority votes: ethnicity,regionalism and elections in Iran

Ethnic politics is a serious domestic challenge in Iran. Non-Persian communities are mobilizing to claim their rights and to demand representation in a system that activists claim is biased against minorities and the peripheral regions. Yet the inner workings of contemporary Iranian ethnic politics are largely understudied. This article explores recent evolutions in the role that ethnicity, regionalism and tribalism plays in Iranian domestic politics. It focuses on how these interconnected factors figured in the 2013 presidential and local council elections in Iran in a particular province that has a history of ethnic tensions. Incidentally, these elections brought Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric, to power as president. Among his electoral promises was to end the securitization of the minority issue. This article illustrates some of the barriers to a transformative ethnic politics – barriers that political leaders will have to overcome to enact real change.     

Predicaments of secularism: Muslim identities and politics in Mumbai

Most of the debate about secularism and the secular state in India has remained at a general level, leaving a great many gaps in our knowledge of the actual meanings and practices associated with secularism in India. This article argues that secularism in India is premised on an unstable separation of a realm of politics from a supposedly unpolitical realm of culture, where communities have been represented in rather static and undifferentiated terms. Discussing ethnographic material from Muslim neighbourhoods in Mumbai the author shows how the separation between 'pure' culture and 'dirty' politics is breaking down in the face of a new political assertiveness among ordinary, low-status Muslims. This challenges the position of religious leaders and it also questions widely held assumptions of the relative coherence of the Muslim community.     

Anthropology and the politics of facts,knowledge, and history

Conclusions In this paper I have tried to discuss several levels of the politics of facts, knowledge and history in relation to contemporary anthropology. Taking off on the current school of anthropology known as interpretive anthropology or anthropology as text, I have suggested that issues involving the representation and documentation of knowledge and history are not primarily found in the process of writing an ethnographic text, but in the arenas of power relations which fall outside of ethnographic production. The power dynamics of unequal language as described by Asad operate in the political, economic, cultural and social lives of real individuals who carried on a historical existence before the entrance of the anthropologist and who continue to struggle, day to day, to survive and retain a sense of autonomous identity after the anthropologist leaves.Here the politics of facts, knowledge, and history have been explored in relation to my own fieldwork in the Zapotec community of Teotitlan del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. My discussion focused on the power relations of history and language reflected in the community archives, the ways in which different sectors of the community use history to defend their own agendas and differential access to power in a gendered and economically stratified community, and the ways in which collaborative projects can highlight different bases of linguistic and historical authority within a community.Unlike many indigenous peasant communities in Mexico, Teotitlan is not in the throes of an economic or political crisis. In fact, it probably has one of the highest standards of living of all the indigenous communities in Oaxaca. The community's protection of its many histories has been used, particularly by the merchant sector, as a way of asserting a claim to Zapotec weavings. The cultural claim to the textiles has been used to facilitate the community's insertion into the international capitalist economy. A claim to Zapotec ethnicity has been critical to the community's autonomy struggle as it has worked to gain independence from the Mexican state, first through circumventing documentation of production, and later, by avoiding deep involvement in craft development programs, which put the state in the role of middleman.Other indigenous communities and populations in Mexico and throughout Latin America face a much more severe crisis of autonomy, usually linked first to physical survival, and secondly, to maintaining control over natural resources. In the state of Oaxaca, significant numbers of the human rights violations which have occurred in the 1970s and 1980s involved indigenous peoples who were murdered, beaten, jailed or harassed for ethnically based political activities. Particularly outstanding were abuses leveled against the Trique living in and around San Juan Copala who have engaged in confrontations involving 13,705 hectares of disputed woodlands and communal land.For indigenous communities waging battles for self-determination and autonomy, the representation of history and facts are linked to political struggles to improve material conditions and gain greater control over their place in the larger political-economy. At the level of struggle at which the Trique are engaged in the crisis over authority and representation is played out in armed incursions by troops, police and gunmen, assassinations of Triqui leaders, torture, and rape. In the community of Teotitlan, it is played out more subtly in negotiations with American importers and within the community over prices and who controls the production and distribution of Zapotec weavings. In both instances the politics of facts, knowledge, and history reappear in the colonial encounter people live on a day to day basis and which anthropologists focused on in the 1970s. While the enterprise of ethnography winds itself through changing epistemologies in the pages of journals and at conferences, the lives of indigenous peasants continue in a struggle of empowerment against a history of marginalization.Lynn Stephen is Professor of Anthropology, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.     

'Keeping the state away': democracy, politics, and the state in India's Jharkhand

This article explores why in India's Jharkhand, Mundas, often depicted as poor tribals, participate in elections to keep the state away, seeing it as foreign, dangerous, and juxtaposing its self-interested and divisive politics with a sacral polity, the parha . Munda disengagement with the state results from a complex combination of their contrasting the state with the sacral polity, historical experience of exploitation by state officers, and social relations with rural elites who, seeking to maintain dominance, reproduce Munda imaginings. The article thus draws attention to multiple co-existing notions of politics and the importance of a local political economy in the social production of cultural imaginings of the state.     

The ethnobotany ofCarludovica palmata Ruíz & Pavón (Cyclanthaceae) in Amazonian Ecuador

All of Ecuador’s indigenous Amazonian people use Carludovica palmata Ruíz & Pavón. The most frequent use is for roof thatching. Fibers from the petiole also are used to make baskets and to tie small timbers. The Shuar, Achuar and Quichua make mammal and fish traps from the petiole. The bases of unopened leaf buds and the fruits are edible. The buds have a taste similar to palm hearts. Carludovica palmata grows in open, disturbed sites often in alluvial soil. Ecuador’s indigenous people often protect the plant when clearing fields. They also intentionally plant it. The commercial use of its buds for food and the marketing of native crafts made from C. palmata could rival the plant’s importance in the Panama hat industry.     

Whose autonomy,whose interests? A donor-focused analysis of surrogacy and egg donation from the global South

This article provides a donor-focused analysis of how transnational reproductive donation intersects with issues central to bodily autonomy of surrogates and egg donors from the global South. Little is known about the autonomy of surrogates and egg donors, especially among those from the global South. This article addresses this gap by examining two key issues on surrogacy and egg donation—conflict of interest and recruitment market. With these issues, this paper presents contexts of the reproductive body as a space of contestation for autonomy. Analysis reveals that bodily autonomy is not an absolute entitlement available for surrogates and egg donors from the global South. Having bodily autonomy is a privileged disposition rather than a universal liberty for reproductive donors. The discussions in this work encourage further examination to understand the multi-layered experiences of reproductive donors from the global South, towards deeper interrogation of the processes of reproductive industry.     

On heterochrony: birthday gifts to Stalin, 1949

Gift relations have been traditionally theorized as antinomial to modernity or, within modernity, in the spheres of the personal relations and ideologies of altruism which dwell on the contrast with commodity and often cast themselves as residual, 'traditional' domains. This article explores claims to modernity that were made by public gift-giving to a modern head of state. It examines birthday gifts to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he received from both his Soviet subjects and international leaders and movements and that were put on public display in 1949-53 in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. This article interprets gift-giving to Stalin as a dramatic example of socialist intervention in the modernist temporality, and it theorizes the notions of time that were culturally constructed through the socialist state gift economy. This article reflects part of an ongoing research project on gift-giving to Soviet leaders. It is based on fieldwork, oral-historical and archival research with designers, artisans, and ordinary citizens who were involved in the production of the gift items, as well as with curators and other specialists involved in this exhibition and in preservation of these gifts in different Russian state museums.     

Assessing the Potential of Indigenous-Run Demographic/Health Surveys: the 2005 Shuar Survey,Ecuador

Despite improved national censuses and “micro-demographic” studies, demographic processes and health conditions among indigenous populations in Amazonia and elsewhere in lowland Latin America are not well understood. A new source of demographic and health data has emerged in the past decade, namely meso-scale surveys initiated and administered by indigenous organizations. These surveys offer the potential for filling information gaps, shedding light on culturally specific factors that shape demographic processes and health, and empowering indigenous organizations with data that could inform health initiatives. This article assesses the indigenous-run survey “2005 Health Analysis of the Shuar and Achuar Nations” of eastern Ecuador in which the authors were involved, which reached 1,943 households in 257 communities in Morona-Santiago Province. We present findings on fertility, migration, sanitation, and health, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the survey. We argue that despite flaws in the survey design and implementation, this survey revealed important linkages among fertility, migration, and health. Such surveys have the potential to provide much needed detail, representativeness, and cultural specificity that macro and micro data sources cannot provide. We conclude with recommendations to improve surveys of this type.