The emergence of political homophobia in Indonesia: masculinity and national belonging

This paper explores an unprecedented series of violent acts against ‘gay’ Indonesians beginning in September 1999. Indonesia is often characterized as ‘tolerant’ of homosexuality. This is a false belief, but one containing a grain of truth. To identify this grain of truth I distinguish between ‘heterosexism’ and ‘homophobia,’ noting that Indonesia has been marked by a predominance of heterosexism over homophobia. I examine the emergence of a political homophobia directed at public events where gay men stake a claim to Indonesia's troubled civil society. That such violence is seen as the properly masculine response to these events indicates how the nation may be gaining a new masculinist cast. In the new Indonesia, male–male desire can increasingly be construed as a threat to normative masculinity, and thus to the nation itself.     

“With AIDS I am happier than I have ever been before”

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of ‘dark anthropology’: that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins ( 2013 ), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of ‘anthropologies of the good,’ which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV—in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives.     

From Racing to Rugby: All Work and No Play for Gogodala Men of Western Province,Papua New Guinea

In this article, I analyse how Gogodala men in Western Province approach the sport of rugby league football as an extension of the practice of canoe racing. Despite colonial changes and mission attempts to redeem canoe racing by labelling them ‘cultural games’, canoe races continue to embody clan relations and demonstrate inner masculine strength, collective clan power and a local work ethic. Although there has been a general lack of attention given to studies of sport in Papua New Guinea, a discourse has emerged that analyses sports competitions as either a modern form of play and a replacement for past ritual activities or as a contemporary exemplar of warfare and other eradicated practices. As the Gogodala have not practised headhunting or warfare for over one hundred years, I want to contribute to this discussion by exploring how contemporary canoe racing and rugby league form an integral part of conceptualisations of work and dala ela gi, or ‘the male way of life’.     

The Social Life of Rights: ‘Gender Antagonism’, Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.     

Third‐way neoliberalism and conditional cash transfers: The paradoxes of empowerment,participation and self‐help among poor Uruguayan women

The Latin American literature on Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) welfare programs has typically involved the quantitative evaluation of social and economic impact, with fewer studies addressing the qualitative and gendered impacts of CCTs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in poor squatter settlement communities in Uruguay, this article explores the everyday social realities of poor single mothers who have been disconnected from their kinship networks and must rely on CCT payments for survival. I locate these women's experiences within the third‐way neoliberal discourses of ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’ and ‘self‐help’ espoused by the state, and the various structural conditions, including crime, violence and unequal gender relations, that impact negatively on women's abilities to comply with their social and civic duties. I argue that rather than producing responsible and empowered subjects, Uruguay's recent CCT welfare program has paradoxically limited some women's participation in civic and public life and reproduced their dependent relations with men.     

Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists.     

Wa Grotesque: Headhunting Theme Parks and the Chinese Nostalgia for Primitive Contemporaries

ABSTRACT

The Wa people have long occupied a special place in the state-directed political spectacle of minority nationalities, in both China and Burma. This fascination builds on older views of the Wa as dangerous barbarians, and closely evokes other primitivisms from around the world. In China and in neighbouring countries, state policy has recently combined with commercial entrepreneurism to cultivate a new, selective nostalgia for ‘primitive-exotic’ peoples like the Wa. In this paper, I discuss mainly China, and how the ‘wild’ Wa headhunting paraphernalia prohibited by the Chinese in the 1950s now reappear as kitsch. Some Wa of older generations see such revivals as dangerous, but younger people may embrace the revival. I discuss the new Chinese repackaging of primitive violence and the different Wa understandings of these staged exoticizations of their culture, including ways the staged representations are taken up in Wa attempts to revive aspects of their cultural past.     

Disenfranchised grief and social inequality: bereaved African Canadians and oppositional narratives about the violent deaths of friends and family members

This article discusses how disenfranchised grief, that is grief that has been invalidated in some manner, is experienced by African Canadians who have lost friends and family to gun-related violence. It is based on research findings suggesting that the violent deaths of young black men are partly rooted in racial stratification and perceived criminality. These factors have implications for how the deceased person is grieved. Covictims, the bereaved families and friends of deceased people, are impacted by the treatment they receive as a result of their social location as raced bodies. Police scrutiny of co-victims and the media representation of the victims as ‘known to police’ are just two of the ways in which grief is invalidated. The analysis points to the complexities of coming to terms with the death of loved ones in a liberal racial state where a group's precarious status signifies social meanings in life and death.     

“If One Does Not Fulfil His Duties,He Must Not Be a Man”: Masculinity,Mental Health and Resilience Amongst Sri Lankan Tamil Refugee Men in Canada

Refugee men face unique mental health stressors in the pre- and post-migratory periods. However, there has been little in-depth research on the mental health of refugee men in Canada. Given this situation, the overall aim of this study is to explore the psycho-social experience of Sri Lankan Tamil refugee men in Canada. Particular objectives include better understanding any inter-relationship between war-trauma, migration, concepts of masculinity and mental health. The study employed a two-phase participatory action research design based on the grounded theory approach. Phase 1 involved an 8-month ethnography conducted in Sri Lanka. Phase 2 consisted of qualitative interviews with 33 Sri Lankan Tamil refugee men living in Canada. Consistent with grounded theory, analysis was conducted inductively and iteratively. Four specific themes emerged from the data (i) gendered helplessness of war: participants commonly reported ongoing negative rumination regarding experiences where they were unable to adequately protect loved ones from physical suffering or death; (ii) reduced capacity: participants frequently felt unable to fulfill culturally sanctioned duties, such as supporting their family, due to ongoing pre- and post-migratory stress; (iii) redundancy: many participants felt that they were useless in Canada, as they could not fulfill typical masculine social roles (e.g. provider) due to factors such as unemployment and underemployment; (iv) intimate criticism: some participants reported that their spouses would often attempt to ‘shame’ them into greater achievement by constantly reminding them of their ‘failures’. Many found this distressing. These various failures culminated in a state that we label “depleted masculinity”, which participants linked to emotional and behavioural problems. Participants reported that they actively tried to rebuild their masculine identity, for example by adopting leadership roles in community organizations, which fostered resiliency. Results suggest a need to review and rebuild masculine identity to support the mental health of refugee men.     

Inequality from the top down and bottom up: towards a revised Wacquant

In this response I focus on two major themes in Wacquant's trilogy: (1) punishment and the state; and (2) territorial stigmatization. I discuss evidence that supports elements of Wacquant's argument, while at the same time demonstrating the need for an account that brings mediating institutional processes of the state, violence, the civil sphere and neighbourhood mechanisms more fully into the larger theoretical picture. I conclude that ‘bottom-up’ processes of inequality must be integrated with ‘top-down’ forces of the state to advance our theoretical understanding of penality and spatial marginality in federated and unitary governments alike.     

The construction of Dominican state power and symbolisms of violence*

Maurice Bloch has argued that, under certain circumstances, aspects of a particular cosmology can become an idiom for expressing and justifying the necessity of using bodily violence in relationships of domination and subordination. This article seeks to develop this key idea with the aid of historically and ethnographically specific material from the Dominican Republic. The author attempts to show that both hegemonic Dominican nationalist imagery and hegemonic Dominican masculinity imagery contain certain ‐ different ‐ ideas about conquest. These ideas have supplied idioms for the legitimation and exacerbation of state violence and terror. The article also argues that symbolic and social complexes familiar to anthropologists under the labels of ‘religion’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘gender’, can furnish idioms for the legitimation of the illegitimate. We should not primarily conceptualize and study forms of political violence as phenomena outside a daily and ritually constructed reality of a particular kind, but, on the contrary, as practices and meanings which belong to a cultural, social, and political logic.     

History as Resource: Moral Reckonings with Place and with the Wartime Past in Oro Province,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

Located in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu Station is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of 21 local Orokaiva men convicted – by the Australian administration – of treason during the Second World War. Eight years after the executions, the nearby Mount Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu. Today the place remains uninhabited but laden with memory and meaning, a site of ambivalent moral reckonings both with the colonial past and with the postcolonial present. These moral reckonings, in turn, intersect with peoples’ experiences of, and hope for, ‘development’. In Oro Province, history is becoming a resource – not unlike gold, or the oil palm plantations that extend across the landscape – which might attract outsiders, and with them forms of wealth and possibilities for realising the good life. Accordingly, Higaturu landowners work to attract outsiders to the site of the eruption and the hangings. At the same time, however, they worry that the outsiders they attract – including anthropologists – will exploit and profit from their history in the ways that so many outsiders have profited from the Province's other resources. Commercial considerations inform these hopes and worries, but the mobilisation of history-as-resource also speaks to other concerns, including about the relationships of insiders and outsiders across time, and the proper attributions of guilt, responsibility, and entitlement within colonial and postcolonial landscapes of remembrance.     

Dragging Drag: The Performance of Gender and Sexuality in the Cook Islands

Kia Orana day is an annual event on the island of Aitutaki. It consists of performances from a number of government departments to an audience of locals and the occasional tourist. The Kia Orana day described here featured a drag show by the Ministry of Outer Islands Development. Drag shows are prevalent in the Cook Islands and they are performed by both ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ men. This paper explores some of the reasons for their popularity through an examination of gendered ideologies that structure Cook Islands social life—in particular the ways in which gender is embodied in everyday movement and dance. The examination of forms of sexuality and gender presented in public life are used to explain the comic currency of drag. I present a number of different interpretations of the Kia Orana performance and suggest that although it may have a similar appearance to Western drag, it has different meanings in the Cook Islands. These meanings suggest drag revolves around notions of gender which are not necessarily defined by sexuality. Cook Islands drag, I propose, must be contextualised in terms of Cook Islands notions of personhood.     

Making the Baruya great again: From glorified great men to modern suffering subjects?

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of ‘making great men.’ Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being ‘last place’ (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being ‘the greatest people’ of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to ‘be great’ reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a ‘suffering slot’, the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship.     

Sung Adornment: Changing Masculinities at Lake Kopiago,Papua New Guinea

In the space of 50 years, ideals of masculinity in the western end of the Southern Highlands have been radically transformed. Gone, for instance, is the bachelor cult where young boys were grown into men. Drawing upon ethnographic research undertaken over the past decade, in the Lake Kopiago sub‐district in the far north‐western corner of Southern Highlands Province, this paper seeks to document these changing masculinities and explore their portrayal by juxtaposing ‘traditional’ and contemporary growth enhancing spells and courting songs—particularly those composed and sung by men. In doing so, this paper also seeks to explore how guns, marijuana, discos and pornographic movies have come to figure centrally in contemporary notions of masculinity. It will also document how the proliferation of marijuana and small arms has transformed young men with otherwise very little standing in the community into self‐promoted leaders who have taken it upon themselves to publicly police the sexuality of women in increasingly violent ways.     

Anti-‘anti-witchcraft’ and the Maoist insurgency in rural Maharashtra, India

Dealing effectively with malignant mystical attack is an important concern in central India. This paper examines the ways in which the connections and conflicts between the Maoist movement, the police, and marginalised villagers in the state of Maharashtra, India, has led to a crisis in the identification of malfeasants such as witches. In response to the presence of the Maoist insurgency, state actors have become more involved in people’s lives than ever before. Police and others attempt to regulate activities such as witch-detecting and ghost-finding, which they regard as evidence of ‘backwardness’. In many respects of course, the Maoist movement is itself a commentary on ‘backwardness’. The paper therefore offers an insight into the lives of people involved in and affected by the circulation of this concept and the forms of transformation that result.     

Cultural Competency and Rural Disorder in PNG Health Promotion

ABSTRACT

Health workers in Papua New Guinea strongly emphasise their duty to provide services to the country’s rural majority. Trained to see rural communities as lacking modern discipline and order, they worry that rural people will resist, perhaps with violence, if health workers fail to ‘show respect for culture’. Examining cultural improvisation among nursing students on a rural experience practicum in the Eastern Highlands, I show how students and teachers tried to craft culturally respectful health education. However, when difficulties emerged, local people were described as unable or unwilling to harim tok (understand, heed or follow instructions). The capacity to follow instructions, cultivated through education and Christian faith, was cast as incompatible with Highlands culture. Rural health promotion activities, when they fail to foment major transformation, can help reproduce the ideological construction of the people of the hauslain (village, hamlet) as emotionally volatile and ungovernable.     

Explicating the Air: The new Smokefree (and beyond)

In this paper, I examine how the explication of the air has figured environments, places, politics and the constitution of ‘the public’ in the era of smokefree. I argue in this paper that an especial imaginary of the air, one that recalls and revitalises much earlier notions of the air as bearer of miasmatic pollution, and even earlier ideas about the physical quality of the air and its relationship to the political state, has shaped how persons and places are formed and subject to inclusion and exclusion as part of the new politics of ‘the public’. I draw attention to the ways in which these configurations of persons and places have relied upon the explication of the air itself, and to the consequences of explicating the air.     

On the double social life of failure

What might it mean to follow failure ‘out into the world’ (Alexander, introduction to this volume) in a way that is attentive both to its contingent and diffuse effects, and to the work involved in making it socially legible? This essay follows a moment of social breakdown, its reverberations in social life, and the forms of diagnosis it elicited as a way of exploring the double social life of failure. Focusing on the aftermath of Kyrgyzstan's 2010 ‘Osh events’ (Oshskie sobytiia) as they took hold in a multi-tenant and ethnically mixed dormitory apartment for migrant workers in Moscow, I follow failure forwards, exploring how a period of intercommunal violence reverberated in a context of protracted work migration, legal non-recognition, and the digital circulation of blame. I also track it backwards, attending to my interlocutors’ practices of diagnosis and excavation. Among Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Moscow, the Osh events figured as indexical of different kinds of failure – whether of protection, recognition, or proper state care. I take vernacular diagnoses of bardak – normative breakdown – as an ethnographic entry point for thinking about the spatial and temporal afterlives of violence, their articulation in an age of digital mediation, and the ethics of naming and diagnosing failure.