How ‘The Urge to Kill’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">Feels</Emphasis>: Articulations of Emic ‘Appetitive Aggression’ Experiences Among Former Forcefully Recruited Children and Youth in the Acholi Region of Northern Uganda

Based on 10 months of fieldwork in the Acholi region of northern Uganda among youth and adults who were forcefully recruited into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) during the war, this article provides qualitative details to research on ‘appetitive aggression.’ Through two case-stories the article unfolds first person articulations of how ‘appetitive aggression’ is experienced as ‘the urge to kill’ and how it relates to the emic Acholi spiritual concept of ‘cen’; a local Luo expression used to describe places and human beings possessed by evil spirits. The analysis illuminates what the individual and social implications of ‘the urge to kill’ and ‘cen’ entail for two Acholi men; first in a militia and then in a civil post-war context. The analysis then relates these findings to soldier experiences across cultures and time periods. While our analysis supports the findings in ‘appetitive aggression’ studies that appetitive aggression serves as a resilient protective factor against developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this study documents that once the former forcefully recruited return to civilian life, ‘appetitive aggression’ and ‘the urge to kill’ precipitate individual and at times lethal social and moral complications in a fragile post-war community. Thus, the article argues that appetitive aggression and the emic perceptions and experiences of it among the local population are essential to consider in studies, processes and programs targeting demobilization, rehabilitation, reconciliation and re-integration.     

Chewing over the Future: Khat Consumption, Anxiety, Depression, and Time Among Young Men in Jimma, Ethiopia

This article draws on qualitative and quantitative research to examine the relationship between the consumption of khat, symptoms of depression and anxiety and the experience of time among young men in urban Ethiopia. Young men claim that khat, a mild stimulant, both causes and alleviates symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, our quantitative data indicate that there is not a direct relationship between khat and symptoms of depression and anxiety. We analyze this apparent contradiction in terms of young men’s experiences of time. Long-term ethnographic research indicates that khat consumption and mental distress have a close relationship with young men’s temporal problems. In a context of high urban unemployment, young men struggle to negotiate overabundant amounts of unstructured time in the present and place themselves within a narrative in which they are progressing toward future aspirations. These temporal struggles generate symptoms of depression and anxiety. For young men, khat consumption functions to reposition them in relation to time, both in the present and the future. Ultimately, we argue that the relationship between khat and time has implications for the economic issues that underlie young people’s symptoms of depression and anxiety.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

Cyprus,ethnic conflict and conflicted heritage

This article examines the dominant heritage discourse in Cyprus concerning preservation and destruction, and its implications for ethno-cultural identity construction and promotion. By exploring two heritage sites (one north and one south of the Buffer Zone) it suggests that heritage practice is more complex than commonly presented. Specifically, it shows how ethnic conflict has not only been responsible for heritage destruction but also for the preservation of it as an unintended consequence of ‘freezing’ development. It also examines how ethnic groups and individuals may come to evaluate their ‘own’ heritage negatively, specifically as an inconvenient cultural load, in efforts to develop ideologically specific or socially ‘progressive’ identities.     

Contesting the ‘model minority’: racialization,youth culture and ‘British Chinese’/‘Oriental’ nights

While racialized youth are often central in debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and belonging, those ascribed as ‘British Chinese’ are constructed as model minorities, lacking a hybridized culture but insulated from racism, and thus invisible in these discussions. This article argues, however, that the model minority discourse is itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that revives ‘yellow peril’ discourses on the capacities of particular ‘Oriental’ bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young people challenge these constructions, by drawing on popular culture to organize and participate in what they call ‘British Chinese’ and, more provocatively, ‘Oriental’ nightlife spaces. It analyses how through these spaces participants forge a sense of identity that allows them to reimagine themselves as racialized subjects. It demonstrates how these spaces constitute transient sites of experimental belonging, facilitating new cultural politics and social identifications that at once contest reified conceptions of British Chineseness yet also create new exclusions.     

‘Beach-Boy Elders’ and ‘Young Big-Men’: Subverting the Temporalities of Ageing in Kenya's Ethno-Erotic Economies

ABSTRACT

In the 1980s, Samburu men from northern Kenya began migrating to coastal tourist resorts to sell souvenirs and perform traditional dances for European tourists. Many of them engaged in transactional sex or marriages with European women attracted to the image of the exotic African young male warrior. Through relationships with European women, some Samburu men managed to rapidly accumulate wealth, becoming so-called ‘young big-men’. As a way to transform their wealth into more durable forms of respectability, these men used their money to marry local women and speed up their ritual initiation into elderhood. Meanwhile, there also emerged the figure of ‘beach-boy elders’, men who aged before accumulating sufficient wealth. They returned to coastal tourist resorts, dressed as young warriors, and waited to find European partners. In the article, I argue that beach-boy elders and young big-men produce queer moments in the temporalities of ageing, in that they subvert normative expectations of ageing at the very same time that they seek to produce them.     

Nationalism remixed? The politics of cultural flows between the South Asian diaspora and ‘homeland’

This article examines ‘Asian electronic music’, a generally progressive diasporic South Asian scene which fuses electronic dance music beats with instruments/sounds traditionally associated with the subcontinent, and how it became embedded into ‘majoritarian’ Indian nationalism. In India, the music's perceived ‘fusion’ aesthetic became emblematic of an emergent India which was economically prosperous while ‘respecting’ its cultural heritage. Using the case of an album which remixed India's national song, Vande Mataram, this article explores the convergences and divergences between Asian electronic musicians in Delhi and Hindu nationalists. The article concludes that the musicians in Delhi did not lend to Hindu nationalism. However, they perhaps gave secular Indian nationalism a ‘cool’ gloss. Ultimately, the production and consumption of Asian electronic music in Delhi raises significant questions regarding the scene's relationship to Indian nationalisms.     

Kombinowanie: agency,informality, and the poetics of self in Highland Poland

This article asks what role local models of agency and subjectivity play in the structure and interpretation of informal economic practices, and how this influences the ways in which people narrate their behaviour to others. Exploring the use of a common Polish idiom for informal activities – kombinowanie – amongst villagers in the Carpathian Highlands, it argues that the term acts as a ‘master‐trope’ for local identity, providing villagers with a narrative model for asserting and broadcasting their social agency to peers. Furthermore, it shows how in this particular ethnographic context, the retelling of instances of informal or illegal activity as kombinowanie can be seen as part of a Highlander ‘poetics of self’, in that each manifestation of the term carries with it a series of implicit sociohistorical and normative meanings that relate to notions of ‘typical’ Górale (Highland) behaviour. By characterizing kombinowanie as a type of tactics, I open up the term for comparative analysis with other local conceptions of agency which value insubordination.     

Taste Tests: Pizza and the Gastropolitical Laboratory in Mumbai

Abstract

This article is about experiments in taste. Focused on the cultural politics of pizza in Mumbai, it highlights the visceral work required to naturalize consumer choice as a catalyst of social futures in contemporary India. It emerges out of interviews and observations among food marketers and among customers and workers in a pizza restaurant. Guided by the concept of ‘experimentality’ elaborated in medical anthropology and science and technology studies, the article reframes definitions of food in experimental terms through two ethnographic registers. The first narrative focuses on the marketing of pizza, and explains how marketers turned their restaurants into laboratories of cosmopolitan cultivation. The second narrative shows how laboring bodies become enrolled in that laboratory, as young adults recruited from low-income neighborhoods come to work at a pizza restaurant. Such experiments blur the lines between evidence and enjoyment, and ultimately add up to a revaluation of public eating itself.     

Roadwork: expertise at work building roads in the Maldives

This article engages critically with concepts of ‘skill’, ‘expertise’, and ‘capacity’ as they operate as markers of distinction and domination and shape migratory labour relations among road construction workers from across South Asia in the Maldives archipelago. The article examines roadwork at three levels: the professional biographies leading to ‘flexible specialization’ rather than technical expertise amongst Maldivian managers; the technical expertise and social incorporation of ‘skilled’ Sri Lankan supervisors; and the key material expertise of ‘non-skilled’ Bangladeshi labourers in precarious employment. Whilst discussions of South Asian labour migration have been dominated by caste and class, this article argues that it is important to consider how the cultural production and understanding of concepts such as ‘expertise’, ‘capacity’, and ‘exposure’ at worksites can (also) become distinguishing factors in (hierarchical) migratory labour relations.     

Night life in southern urban Mali: being a Muslim maquisard in Bougouni

Alcohol has been part of local culture in southwest Mali since precolonial times. In the last century, when Islam spread into the region, it became a ‘haram’ (forbidden) substance; therefore its consumption moved to the margins of society. Based on an ethnography of night life in discreet bars called ‘maquis’ where power, wealth, and alcohol become juxtaposed during the night in the small town of Bougouni, this article explores how Muslims handle their participation in forbidden activities from within a local Muslim community. Analysing the social significance of the darkness of the night in relation to a public Islam based on sight, it illustrates how forbidden activities are handled through strategies of diurnal conformity and nocturnal discretion in urban Mali. Exploring the fact that a Muslim can at the same time be known as a respectable member of the local community and a suspected drinker during the night, this analysis aims to demonstrate that the interplay between display and secrecy is an important component of morality in urban Mali, while the wealth and power of m?g?baw (big men) often work as veils that cover their forbidden activities. Besides studying the ways Muslims strive to be pious, this article finally stresses the need to explore also the field of haram as an integral part of a Muslim life so as to develop a humanly wider and more complete understanding of Islam's relationship to contemporary Muslim societies.     

Aspects of the semantics of emotions and feelings in Dalabon (South‐Western Arnhem Land,Australia)

This article describes two of the principal roots allowing the expression of emotions and feelings in Dalabon, an endangered language of South‐Western Arnhem Land. The first root, kangu, ‘belly’, is depicted linguistically as the location of emotions induced by interpersonal relationships. The belly is thus presented as the locus of good and bad moods generally and of conflict more specifically. Furthermore, the material properties of the belly—its fluidity in particular—impact on one’s temper and ability to deal with others in an ideologically prescribed manner. Speakers describe ritual manipulations undertaken on the belly of young infants in order to shape their temper. Kangu‐no may thus be described as a malleable interface between the person and the outside world, principally other people. The second root, yolh, may at first sight translate as ‘feelings’, either good or bad, but also means ‘appetite’, ‘drive’, ‘pep’. Yolh‐no is associated with the most intimate part of the person, one’s own aspirations that are independent of interactions with others. Although yolh‐no connotes the core self and kangu‐no, the belly, connotes relatedness to others, they are conceived as physiologically connected, so that material properties of the belly impact on the self. Thus, the semantic analysis of Dalabon, along with related anthropological observations, unveils an explicit conceptual and cultural attention to the distinction between emotions and feelings (as respectively defined in the article) and to the autonomy of the person within a constraining social framework. The article shows how this concern echoes and challenges both anthropological and philosophical considerations.     

Telling Warlpiri Dog Stories

Ostensibly about dingoes and dogs, this paper explores aspects of the contemporary social world of Warlpiri people in the camps of the central Australian settlement of Yuendumu (Northern Territory) through canines. Analyses of dog socialisation, kinds of domestication, and the roles that camp dogs perform (such as protector, family, and witness) provide insights into Warlpiri notions of moral personhood and are employed to reflect about the ethical foundations of how the oppositional categories of Yapa (self, Indigenous, Black, colonised) and Kardiya (other, non-Indigenous, ‘whitefella’, coloniser) are conceptualised.     

The play of ‘dirty politics’: ordinary ethics and the evidence of experience on the workfloor in New Delhi,India

This article explores the tensed sociality amongst precariously employed service economy workers in the retail outlets of a prominent eyewear company in New Delhi, India. The bickering staff label the ongoing interpersonal strife ‘dirty politics’. Linked to this are their confident assertions that, in fact, all politics is dirty, and dirty politics is the only type of politics possible – rejecting formal party politics and labour unions as morally vacuous and motivated by utilitarian individualism. Engaging with the anthropology of ordinary ethics, the article demonstrates how the affectively charged experience and talk of petty politicking on the neoliberal workfloor provides critical ‘evidence’ that ‘confirms’ such a politico-ethical view.     

‘The best borough in the country for cohesion!’: managing place and multiculture in local government

Abstract

In the interface between national and local levels of UK government, narratives of place are made to fit particular tropes of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ at multiculturalism. Thinking through ‘community cohesion’ policy in England between 2001 and 2010, this article shows how (reputations of) relative success at ‘living together with difference’ become a medium through which local government practitioners negotiate the space between national and local priorities, needs and ambitions, by examining how practitioners in English local authorities negotiate narratives of ‘failed multiculturalism’ associated with the places they work and, in doing so, how they re-inscribe or subvert local reputations and their ‘elsewheres’.     

Ethnic identity on display: West Indian youth and the creation of ethnic boundaries in high school

The black immigrant population in New York City has grown exponentially since 1990, such that West Indians now compose the majority of the black population in several neighbourhoods. This article examines how this ethnic density manifests among youth in high school, and how it has influenced ethnic identity formation among second-generation West Indians. My findings are based on twenty-four interviews and eight months of participant observation in two Brooklyn high schools from 2003 to 2004. The results show that in both schools, Caribbean island identities have become a ‘cool’ commodity within peer groups. Further, although it was important to express pride in one's island identity, these young people often blurred their national origin boundaries by drawing on Jamaican popular culture as way of projecting a unified ‘West Indian identity’. The research also uncovers evidence of a de-stigmatization of Haitianness as a way to incorporate them as cultural insiders into the larger Caribbean collective.     

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.