'We don't know our descent': how the Gitanos of Jarana manage the past

Although Gypsies have often been described as people 'oriented towards the present', the question of how their approach to the past might illuminate their particular mode of being in the world has been left largely untheorized. In fact, understanding how Gypsies manage the past is essential to understanding the processes through which they survive as a group in the midst of non-Gypsy society. In this article I analyse how the Gitanos of Jarana (Madrid) work upon the past so as to remove certain past events and periods from the communal gaze and to ensure that others receive only limited elaboration. I also explore the links between these Gitanos' downplaying of the past in their accounts of themselves and their particular ways of organizing social relations. Therefore, my focus lies on the relationships between the past and the imagined community, and between the latter and its structural supports.     

REMEMBERING WITHOUT COMMEMORATION: THE MNEMONICS AND POLITICS OF HOLOCAUST MEMORIES AMONG EUROPEAN ROMA

Much has been written in recent years about the ways Gypsies (Roma) relate to their past. One important study of Holocaust memory has used the Roma as a paradigmatic case of a people who forget rather than remember their history. Rather than examining processes of 'obliterating' or downplaying the past, the approach taken here is to consider ways in which, despite Gypsy 'presentist' rhetoric, the past is 'remembered' among Gypsy populations. Following Maurice Bloch's call for greater integration of psychological and anthropological work, this article considers what can be gained from seeing memory as a socially distributed function in which the role of 'implicit' memories, embedded in dealings with others, is significant. This approach enables us better to grasp how Romany communities, which were persecuted by the Nazis and their allies during the Second World War, 'remember' the past even though they may not commemorate it.     

Consuming the nation: Holidays,sports, and the production of collective belonging

The purpose of this article is to explain how Romanian and Hungarian university students in the ethnically mixed town of Cluj, Romania, experience and constitute collective national belonging at national holiday commemorations and international football competitions. Holidays and sports are important venues for the propagation of national, and sometimes nationalist, sensitivities. But neither the resurgence of nationalist politics in post-communist east Europe nor the nationalist inclinations of past generations of university students guarantee that the current generation will experience them – or themselves – in the same national terms. While much has been written about the production of holiday and sporting events, less has been said about the creative ways in which their audiences consume them. My aim in this study is to shift attention to the university students themselves and the modalities through which they constitute (and subvert) national cohesion through participation in (and avoidance of) holiday and sporting events.     

‘I'm American,not Japanese!’: the struggle for racial citizenship among later-generation Japanese Americans

Abstract

As one of the oldest Asian American groups in the USA, most Japanese Americans are of the third and fourth generations and have become well integrated in mainstream American society. However, they are still racialized as foreigners simply because of their Asian appearance. Their Asian phenotype continues to have a foreigner connotation because of large-scale immigration from Asia and an American national identity that is racially defined as white. This paper analyses how later-generation Japanese Americans are racialized as outsiders in their daily interaction with mainstream Americans, which is often accompanied by essentialized assumptions that they are also culturally foreign. In response, they engage in everyday struggles for racial citizenship by demanding inclusion in the national community as Americans despite their racial differences. It is uncertain whether such attempts to contest their racialization will cause current mono-racial notions of American identity to be reconsidered in more inclusive and multiracial ways.     

The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money

Offering money to gods, ancestors, and ghosts is an increasingly important part of everyday life in Vietnam. When it concerns the traces of a violent war, this custom is believed to help the spirits of the dead become liberated from their grievous histories. This article discusses the role of money in death commemoration, focusing on how money-offering takes on different meanings between gods and ancestors, on the one hand, and displaced, grievous ghosts, on the other. Based on this discussion, the article will explore the current situation where replica US dollar notes have become a pre-eminent ritual currency in parts of Vietnam and how this situation is related to changing political relations in the imagined world of the dead.     

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.     

International migration,the economic crisis and the state: An analysis of Mediterranean migration to Western Europe

This article deals with the experience of German minorities in Britain and the USA during World War I. The introductory section points to the fact that serious racial persecutions have taken place during total war in the twentieth century. The subsequent sections detail the experience of Germans in the USA and Britain respectively, pointing to the development of ethnic groups before 1914 and moving on to demonstrate the persecution that they faced from governments and public opinion in both countries. The conclusion compares the wartime experience of Germans in Britain and the USA, and suggests that in terms of strength of hostility, British and US treatment of enemy aliens remains similar. The main difference concerns the much smaller number of Germans in Britain and the greater ethnic diversity of the USA. These two factors, especially the former, meant that the British government could deal with its German population more thoroughly than could the Wilson administration in the USA.     

Magical Pursuits: Legitimacy and Representation in a Transnational Political Field

ABSTRACT  In this article, I examine the strategies of Salvadoran state actors to contain and control transnational political subjects in the postwar period. The civil war in El Salvador (1980–92) precipitated massive emigration, most of it to the United States. Most Salvadoran migrants have been excluded from formal participation in national politics in both El Salvador and the United States. However, they have become important transnational political actors, owing in no small part to the increasing dependence of El Salvador on migrant remittances. This contradiction between their formal exclusion and their informal influence shapes an emergent regime of transnational governmentality, a system of domination that submits mobile subjects to the tactics of containment and control traditionally reserved for nonmobile citizens. This transnational governmentality depends on the appropriation of popular forms of organizing and expression associated with civil society as a way to mask the inequality at the heart of this relationship.     

Are second-generation Filipinos ‘becoming’ Asian American or Latino? Historical colonialism,culture and panethnicity

Abstract

This article examines how second-generation Filipinos understand their panethnic identity, given their historical connection with both Asians and Latinos, two of the largest panethnic groups in the USA. While previous studies show panethnicity to be a function of shared political interests or class status, I argue that the cultural residuals of historical colonialism in the Philippines, by both Spain and the USA, shape how Filipinos negotiate panethnic boundaries with Asians and Latinos, albeit in different ways. Filipinos cite the cultural remnants of US colonialism as a reason to racially demarcate themselves from Asians, and they allude to the legacies of Spanish colonialism to blur boundaries with Latinos. While the colonial history of Filipinos is unique, these findings have implications for better understanding racialization in an increasingly multiethnic society – namely, how historical legacies in sending societies interact with new racial contexts to influence panethnic identity development.     

'Remembering to forget': public secrecy and memory of sexual violence in the Bangladesh war of 1971

This article explores the processes through which the 'public secrecy' of rape during the Bangladesh war of 1971 operates within the present-day ethnographic context. It examines contemporary commemorations of the war and of women who have achieved local and national fame as rape victims (euphemistically referred to as 'war heroines'). The article analyses the discrepancy between raped women's national position as icons of 'honour' and their local reception through sanctions and constant khota (sarcastic/censorious remarks expressing scorn and evoking the unpleasant events). By exploring the relationship between scorn, honour, rape, sexuality, narratives of remembrance, and the emergence of 'public secrets'– and how these are interwoven by the subjectivity of the raped – the article argues that memories of rape are simultaneously located within the ambiguities of revelation and of concealment which are indispensable to the operations of power. In the process the article establishes the relationship between secrecy and memory. Further, a focus on the intersubjective domain of memory provides methodological and ethical tools with which to engage with narratives of the past relating to wartime violence.     

Primitive Warfare and the Ratomorphic Image of Mankind

The most influential current explanations of preindustrial violence and warfare see it as determined by factors and forces entirely external to human beings and their motives and purposes. This article critically examines the most prominent of these approaches—behavioristic, sociobiological, and ecological-functional—and some of the assumptions underlying them. Then, drawing on ethnographic data from a society known for its peacefulness—the Semai Senoi—the article offers an alternative conception of action, one that views human behavior, including warfare and nonviolence, as purposive, and that sees human beings as active decision makers picking their ways through fields of options and constraints in pursuit of individually and culturally defined goals in a culturally constituted reality which they themselves are actively constructing.     

The sociality of the wage: money rhythms,wealth circulation,and the problem with cash on the Zimbabwean‐South African border

While wage labour and money have received much anthropological attention, the same cannot be said of wages themselves – actual banknotes and coins distributed in workforces. This article traces wages' social productivity among farm workers on the Zimbabwean‐South African border. In this migrant‐labour setting, money's form matters. Because currency objects are physically the same, it is difficult for workers to store them in an insecure environment, leading them to turn to one another. As they manage their earnings, workers attempt to establish themselves as social persons while maintaining future options in uncertain circumstances. Workforce ties both shape and are constituted by flows of cash and the rhythms and circuits of the wage. Seen in terms of form, wages are highly personal – the very stuff of sociality.     

Performing the Nation: Unauthorized Mexican Migration and the Politics of Language Use and the Body along the US–Mexico Border

ABSTRACT

Given the harsh environment for Mexican migrants in the US state of Arizona, migrants must think carefully about instantiating their identities in White public space through clothing, bodily movements, and language. This article explores the ways some unauthorized Mexican migrants in Arizona perform belonging to the USA by performing Chicano. Performing Chicano means passing as a US citizen, and migrants’ well-being can depend upon the recognition of those performances. Other unauthorized migrants perform the Supermexicana, to pass as Mexicans who are shopping in the USA, and need to hide the fact that they clandestinely live there. This article examines how some migrants perform a commitment to the USA in public while privately disavowing it, and how others perform a commitment to Mexico that they simply cannot have. This analysis argues that the experiences of unauthorized migrants in the USA can be productively seen through the lens of national performativity.     

Accommodation and Resistance: Latinas Struggle for Their Children's Education

Accommodation and resistance are not dichotomous phenomena but, rather, interwoven strategies for immigrants trying to survive in a cultural environment different from their own. Both strategies are responses to conflict, especially in the education of children. This article examines these conflicts among two generations of Latinas, and the ways in which they capitalized on their funds of knowledge to resolve conflicts. The issues involve not only differences in cultural practices and beliefs but also how these are shaped by participants' social positions and the institutional forces that threaten their beliefs.     

Deconstructing membrane traffic

Intracellular movement of proteins and lipids between organelles is usually described in terms of cargo, carriers, traffic and docking, familiar terms that imply parallels to human activities. Over the past century, scientists have been criticized for constructing hypotheses that reflect too much of their current political and cultural values. In this article, concepts of membrane traffic are re-examined to see whether they reflect the cell’s view of the world or our own.     

Deconstructing membrane traffic

Intracellular movement of proteins and lipids between organelles is usually described in terms of cargo, carriers, traffic and docking, familiar terms that imply parallels to human activities. Over the past century, scientists have been criticized for constructing hypotheses that reflect too much of their current political and cultural values. In this article, concepts of membrane traffic are re-examined to see whether they reflect the cell’s view of the world or our own.     

Deconstructing membrane traffic

Intracellular movement of proteins and lipids between organelles is usually described in terms of cargo, carriers, traffic and docking, familiar terms that imply parallels to human activities. Over the past century, scientists have been criticized for constructing hypotheses that reflect too much of their current political and cultural values. In this article, concepts of membrane traffic are re-examined to see whether they reflect the cell’s view of the world or our own.     

Terror Warfare and the Medicine of Peace

Terror warfare's goal is to defeat political opposition by controlling populations through the fear of brutality. Mozambique's 1976–92 war stands as a prime example of this military strategy: over one million people, the vast majority of whom were civilians, were killed. Half of these casualties were children. Fully one-half of the population was directly affected by the war, and one-quarter had to flee their homes. As devastating as terror warfare is, it is destined to fail. People ultimately resist, and they do so in complex and creative ways. Rebuilding war-destroyed worlds, healing the wounds of violence, and crafting concepts of self-identity based on resistance to aggression become powerful conflict-resolution strategies among the average citizenry. The creative resources that Mozambicans developed to survive and end a very brutal war are among the most sophisticated I have seen anywhere in the world. Their war was against violence itself. [War, healing, creativity, conflict resolution, Mozambique]     

Monoclonal antibodies and the transformation of blood typing

Today, when monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have become one of the most important classes of therapeutic drugs, it is easy to forget how much they have transformed our healthcare in other ways. One of the first clinical areas, as this paper shows, where mAbs made their mark was in the field of blood typing. The adoption of mAbs for this purpose was done with little public fanfare or funding. Nonetheless, it radically transformed the accuracy and cost of blood typing and shifted the procedure away from a dependence on reagents made from human blood donated by volunteers. This paper argues that the development of mAbs as reagents for blood typing laid the foundation for the first large-scale production of mAbs thereby paving the way to the advent of mAb diagnostics and therapeutics.     

Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world health survey programme

Objective To provide an accurate estimate of violent war deaths. Design Analysis of survey data on mortality, adjusted for sampling bias and censoring, from nationally representative surveys designed to measure population health. Estimated deaths compared with estimates in database of passive reports.Setting 2002-3 World health surveys, in which information was collected from one respondent per household about sibling deaths, including whether such deaths resulted from war injuries.Main outcome measure Estimated deaths from war injuries in 13 countries over 50 years.Results From 1955 to 2002, data from the surveys indicated an estimated 5.4 million violent war deaths (95% confidence interval 3.0 to 8.7 million) in 13 countries, ranging from 7000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million in Vietnam. From 1995 to 2002 survey data indicate 36 000 war deaths annually (16 000 to 71 000) in the 13 countries studied. Data from passive surveillance, however, indicated a figure of only a third of this. On the basis of the relation between world health survey data and passive reports, we estimate 378 000 globalwar deaths annually from 1985-94, the last years for which complete passive surveillance data were available.Conclusions The use of data on sibling history from peacetime population surveys can retrospectively estimate mortality from war. War causes more deaths than previously estimated, and there is no evidence to support a recent decline in war deaths.