Perverse Frictions: Pride,Dignity, and the Budapest LGBT March

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) marches are critical and contentious events throughout post-socialist Europe: key sites of emerging sexual politics, shifting tensions between national and transnational meanings, and competing visions of citizenship. Since 1997 a ‘Pride March’, in 2008 Budapest's LGBT march was renamed the ‘Dignity March’. Taking this change as its focus, this paper explores debates within and outside Hungary's LGBT community about the meanings of ‘Pride’, ‘Dignity’, and sexuality. I argue these debates reveal competing efforts to negotiate the perilous boundaries between national and transnational discourses of identity, politics, and belonging. Situating them within Hungary's shifting political context, including recent violent attacks on the March, I suggest the move from the politics of Pride to the politics of Dignity has failed to escape the frictions of intersecting global and local discourses, instead invoking new cultural–political tensions, exclusionary boundaries, and dilemmas of identity, belonging, and politics for Hungarian LGBT people and activism.     

Performing Place: Staging Identity with the Kuranda Amphitheatre

This paper is part of a wider study exploring the politics of place and identity in Kuranda, the small North Queensland town in which my extended family has been settled for the past 25 years. I focus on activities associated with the Kuranda amphitheatre as an attempt by people in Kuranda to define their place and their community in the context of a shire in which they felt ‘out of place’. The amphitheatre is for Kuranda people more than just a venue for the performing arts. It is a place where ideas of ‘community’ get played out and contested, where place is performed, and where experiences of ‘the difference within’ are produced. I argue that, whether they be on the stage or off it, performances are not the mere reflection, nor even a representation, of given structurally and/or cognitively encoded identities. Rather, they are generative phenomena, experientially constitutive of such identities.     

GIS and the ‘Usual Suspects’-[Mis]understanding Land Use Change in Cambodia

GIS-RS techniques offer great potential for providing insights into the spatiality and temporality of the messy realties of deforestation. However, rather than positing that the land use maps produced using these novel technologies can cut through politics, it is argued that the map is merely an artifact of the broader process of land use planning which is constitutive of politics. This article critically reflects on a major land use mapping exercise that the two authors were involved with, in central Cambodia. It argues that GIS analysts need to go beyond merely a concern for ‘the local’, and have their own ‘honest’ teleologies that can navigate the complexities of environmental politics. This article shows how particular categorizations of land use that the analyst creates in accordance with their own desires and the technical limitations of GIS, are often bound up in techniques of government.     

Interior Landscapes and External Worlds: the Return of Grand Theory in Anthropology1

This paper argues that the retreat from ‘theory’ characteristic of the postmodernist turn in anthropology has not had the impact on the ethics and politics of disciplinary practice that was hoped for. One reason for this is the problematic relationship between cultural relativism and identity politics which has paralysed the critical project in the discipline and prevented a more radical interrogation of two fundamental questions: ‘what is anthropology?' and ‘who is the anthropologist?'. Discussions in anthropological writing on hybridity and postcoloniality have more often highlighted the hybrid nature of `informants' than that of ‘anthropologists’. Feminist, native and minority writing in the discipline are areas where these questions have been seriously addressed through debates on positionality and location. However, the impact of these discussions on the politics of knowledge in the discipline are rarely recognised by ‘mainstrean anthropology’. One particularly noticeable lacuna is the fact that so little attention is paid to disciplinary education and its impact on theorising. Anthropology, rather than turning away from theory, should spend more time ‘anthropologising’ the concepts of ‘value’, ‘relativism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘comparison’ which underlie disciplinary theorising. The paper concludes by arguing for a return to theory in anthropology accompanied by a critical politics.     

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.     

Defining immigrant newcomers in new destinations: symbolic boundaries in Williamsburg,Virginia

Abstract

This article examines media representations of immigration in Williamsburg, Virginia, a ‘new immigrant destination’ in the USA. Through a content analysis of coverage in Williamsburg's local newspaper, we explore how reporters, columnists and readers draw on nationally and internationally circulating discourses to produce public interpretations of immigration issues and construct symbolic boundaries between and among in-groups and ‘others’ in the community. ‘National boundaries drawn locally’ captures how media actors use nationally recognizable frames to interpret local issues and define the parameters of community and national belonging. ‘Localized symbolic boundaries’ take their meanings from place-based, cultural understandings, specific economic conditions and demographics in the local setting. Newspaper discussions in Williamsburg distinguish between ‘deserving’ foreign student workers (primarily from Eastern Europe and Asia) and ‘undeserving’, racialized, Latino ‘others’. Our analysis advances theories of boundary construction and holds implications for the politics of belonging more generally in other immigrant-receiving contexts.     

Indigenous in the city: the politics of urban Mapuche identity in Chile

In this article, I analyse how urban Mapuche indigenous organizations in Chile conduct politics, both externally in relation to the state and internally in relation to other Mapuches. I suggest that the state creates the context for their politics through enacting centuries of policies that put Mapuche identity ‘under siege’. My analysis shows that urban Mapuche organizations respond to this context in three central ways. Some organizations refuse the moniker ‘urban’ and are temporarily urban. Others embrace their urbanity and are adamantly urban. Still others try to overcome the rural-urban divide to become reconciled urban. Each of these strategies deploys ideas of authenticity in different ways, opening possibilities for different kinds of political alliances. My research argues that when the stakes are high for claiming a racial or ethnic identity, choosing which aspects of identity on which to base political demands has profound political consequences.     

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.     

Migrant African women: tales of agency and belonging

Abstract

This paper explores issues of belonging and agency among asylum seekers and refugee women of African origin in the UK. It discusses the ways these women engendered resistance in their everyday life to destitution, lack of cultural recognition, and gender inequality through the foundation of their own non-governmental organization, African Women's Empowerment Forum, AWEF, a collective ‘home’ space.

The focus of this account is on migrant women's agency and self-determination for the exercise of choice to be active actors in society. It points to what might be an important phenomenon on how local grassroots movements are challenging the invisibility of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ lives and expanding the notion of politics to embrace a wider notion of community politics with solidarity.

AWEF is the embodiment of a social space that resonates the ‘in-between’ experience of migrant life providing stability to the women members regarding political and community identification.     

“How I Floated on Gentle Webs of Being”: Psychiatrists Stories About the Mental Health Treatment Gap in Africa

A strong movement has emerged recently which is highlighting the high levels of untreated mental illness in Africa and making proposals for reducing this ‘gap’ in mental health care. This movement has been criticised for insufficiently attending to the epistemologies embedded in its recommendations, and inadequately considering the views of practitioners ‘on the ground’. Employing a narrative-based approach, I accessed the stories about the mental health ‘treatment gap’ of 28 psychiatrists all working clinically in public mental health care settings in South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria or Ethiopia. Rather than focusing on the content of these stories, I was more interested in their underpinning meaning-codes and epistemological politics. Dominant thinking about the ‘treatment gap’ was heavily informed by a biomedical paradigm, and associated epistemological order of European Colonial Modernity. There were, however, cracks in this master narrative, which crystalised in the stories that were told by three particular psychiatrists. Their narratives operated within an alternative paradigm, one which appears to be informed by the tradition of phenomenology, and in particular the ideas associated with French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. This more marginalised thinking may offer important insights into reducing the mental health ‘treatment gap’ in Africa in ways very different from those created by current seats of power.     

Elite responsiveness or elite autonomy: British immigration policy reconsidered

In recent years, a wide variety of organizations (notably the UN and nongovernmental organizations) have used sport as an interventionist tool to nurture peacemaking across divided communities. This paper examines and theorizes these peacemaking initiatives across the expanding ‘sport, development and peace’ (SDP) sector. I begin by locating SDP projects within their historical contexts, and as significant elements within the emerging ‘global civil society’. I then set out three ideal-type models of SDP project; namely, the ‘technical’, ‘dialogical’, and ‘critical’. Each model is examined through a set of common social heuristics, such as its core objectives and paradigmatic methods. The models may be employed to analyse other peacemaking and development fields. The first two models are most influential among existing SDP projects; the potential benefits of the ‘critical’ model are also outlined.     

Post-race,post politics: the paradoxical rise of culture after multiculturalism

Declarations of the end of race ignore the continuing impact of racism upon socio-economic inequality in ‘racial states’. Nevertheless, the idea of post-racialism has gained ground in a post-9/11 era, defined by a growing suspicion of diversity. Clearly racialized, this suspicion is couched in cultural-civilizational terms that attempt to avoid the charge of racism. Hence, attempts to counteract the purported failure of multiculturalism in Europe today pose culturalist solutions to problems deemed to originate from an excess of cultural diversity. This is part of a deepening culturalization of politics in which the post-race argument belongs to a post-political logic that shuns political explanations of unrest and widening disintegration in favour of reductive culturalist ones. The culturalization of politics is elaborated by relating it to the displacement of the political that originated with the nineteenth-century ascendance of race, thus setting ‘post-racialism’ firmly within the history of modern racism.     

Slow food and the politics of pork fat: Italian food and European identity

This paper explores the emergence of the Slow Food Movement, an international consumer movement dedicated to the protection of ‘endangered foods.’ The history of one of these ‘endangered foods’, lardo di Colonnata, provides the ethnographic window through which I examine Slow Food's cultural politics. The paper seeks to understand the politics of ‘slowness’ within current debates over European identity, critiques of neo-liberal models of rationality, and the significant ideological shift towards market-driven politics in advanced capitalist societies.     

Is there a racial order? Comments on Emirbayer and Desmond

ABSTRACT

Emirbayer and Desmond’s THE RACIAL ORDER is a heroic but ultimately quixotic effort. The work relies upon an attempted synthesis of Deweyan pragmatism and Bourdieuian social capital theory. Emirbayer and Desmond deploy an uneasy combination of approaches, insisting upon ‘reflexivity’ in sociological study of race and racism (the pragmatism dimension), and crafting a dubious taxonomy of sociological ‘fields’ where racial conflict takes shape, and in which sociologists study race as well (the social capital dimension). A chapter on ‘racial reconstruction’ proposes to apply their understanding to concrete political struggles, in pursuit of an augmented ‘racial democracy’. While the book is tremendously erudite theoretically and provides a valuable literature review, it does not advance racial theory very much. The authors are distracted by Bourdieu’s scientism and obsession with classification. Although ‘racial order’ is revealed to be a chimera, there is still much to be learned here.     

Territorializing ethnicity: the imposition of a model of statehood on pastoralists in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia

The idea of the nation state has penetrated Kenya and Ethiopia deeply at a level much below the ‘nation’ state. In the colonial period districts and grazing reserves were delineated according to perceived ‘tribal’ boundaries, which were often only created in the process. Ethnicity in that process was not invented (as has been claimed for other parts of Africa) but it has changed: it has acquired a territorial character of a new kind. Ethnic territoriality in the mind of policy makers combined with ideas of preservation of the range which modern range ecology would regard as misconceived. These ideas led to policies that restricted the range of movement of pastoral nomads. This paper draws a line from colonial policies to modern politics, in which territorial subdivision continues. This process seems to be guided the interests of self-styled elites, while the pastoralists are adversely affected by them.     

Racialized political shock: Arab American racial formation and the impact of political events

This article explores significant factors influencing the process of Arab American racial formation. I bring into conversation theories of racial formation and ‘political shock’ in social movement scholarship to develop the notion of ‘racialized political shock’ as an important factor in how racial and ethnic groups mobilize and organize. Many moments of political shock are highly racialized and have the potential to reorder the racial and ethnic landscape in ways that can open opportunities or introduce constraints to mobilizations around racial formation. Drawing on existing studies of Arab Americans, this paper highlights how Arab American racial formation has been galvanized during moments of racialized political shock. In the Arab American case, these moments have led to a call for recognition outside the category of white. I conclude by outlining ways forward in the study of Arab Americans, who have been overlooked in studies of race and ethnicity in the US.     

Does education ‘trump’ nationality? Boundary-drawing practices among highly educated migrants from Turkey

Inspired by a super-diversity approach, this paper seeks to explore the influence of the ‘ethnic hierarchy’ of ‘old’ minority groups over the way ‘new’ migrants from Turkey negotiate their interaction in the daily life in three settings: Amsterdam, London and Barcelona. By focusing on highly educated migrants from Turkey who by virtue of their country of origin or religion are positioned at the bottom of ‘ethnic hierarchies’, it strives to understand the significance of these different sources of diversity in daily interaction. Applying boundary-drawing strategies developed for ethnic boundaries, this paper argues that education does not necessarily ‘trump’ nationality, but allows for substantial claims of difference. New migrants from Turkey carve out a space for themselves by on the one hand homogenizing Turkish or other Muslim communities through attributing ‘unwanted’ behaviours and on the other re-defining the boundaries of their individual identity with emphasis on different sources of diversity.     

A Bodhisattva on Horseback: Buddhist Ethics and Pragmatism in Northern Thailand

In Theravada Buddhism temporal power is viewed as indispensible to the creation of political and economic conditions for spiritiual advancement. But it is a necessary evil. The Buddhist response to the misuse of power is to subordinate it to Buddhist ethics and to deny politics autonomy from religion. Yut, in Buddhist Thailand, there is another tradition which justifies pragmatism and even the use of force. This paper concerns a local leader in Northern Thailand who has attempted to achieve some sort of balance between these to contradictory traditions – a goal that has proved elusive.     

Ambivalent moralities of cooperation and corruption: Local explanations for (under)development on a Philippine island

Concepts of development are inevitably loaded with value judgements concerning what constitutes ‘proper’ social and economic organisation. Focusing on the cultural politics of development on Siquijor, an island in the Central Visayas region of the Philippines, this paper explores these often tacit ideals. It considers one of the key idioms Siquijodnon use in explaining how development is brought about—cooperation—and some of its locally perceived opposites—‘crab mentality’, politicking and corruption—which contain powerful moral critiques of self and society. On Siquijor, local discourses of development have it that widespread poverty in the Philippines demonstrates a failing of Filipinos to live up to supposedly universal norms of ethical socio‐economic conduct. However, I argue that attention to local norms of moral economy reveal the ambivalence underlying these notions of development, particularly in relation to the roles of individualism and reciprocity in socio‐economic organisation.     

Sameness and difference in government equality talk

Abstract

This article discusses two sets of policy documents produced in the UK which form part of the ‘equality and diversity agenda' as it was articulated by the Labour government and which led to formulation of the 2006 and 2010 Equality Acts. These documents are critically examined in order to identify the underlying definitions and discourses of equality and diversity that they deploy. What definitions of ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ provide the legitimating discursive structure within which debates about human rights, inequality and discrimination take place? What does this tell us about the understanding of the relationship of sameness and difference to equality, and the relationship between different differences in government equality talk? I argue that, in both cases, gestures towards recognizing the central importance of difference and towards a more intersectional approach to those differences are ultimately subverted by the liberal terms within which these challenges are understood.