Of wildmen and white men: cryptozoology and inappropriate/d monsters at the cusp of the Anthropocene

People on the Indonesian island of Halmahera claim that the hairy and barely human giants that are said to roam the jungle are seventeenth-century Portuguese colonizers. Employing the feminist concept of ‘inappropriate/d’, I show how the appropriation of the Portuguese wildman into village narratives, regional political history, and national development plans as well as into global discourses of science and media in each case inappropriately collapses the boundaries that the white wildman is implicated in maintaining: those between human and animal, the colonial sovereign and ‘the primitive native’, cryptozoology and the politics of the real. The wild-yet-Western figure, I argue, is inappropriate/d – is ‘on the loose’ – across local, regional, and global registers of reality in ways that trouble linear histories of the wildman as fading from reality into allegory. Like so many other monsters of the Anthropocene, the truthlikeness, or verisimilitude, of the white wildman is enhanced rather than attenuated by recent turns in politics and media.     

Time at a Standstill: Loss,Accumulation, and the Past Conditional in an East Berlin Neighborhood

This article reconsiders the question of nostalgic consumption in East Germany as embedded not within a national or a regional (post-socialist) politics of time, as much literature has done, but rather within a global post-Fordist reconfiguration of the relation between time, consumption, and politics. Examining an underclass East Berlin neighborhood that has come to epitomize ‘pastness’, I show the salience of material prosperity – or its lack – in shaping the senses of time of its inhabitants. Especially for the younger generation, nostalgic commodities mediate the growing abyss between loss and accumulation, futures and pasts, nostalgic longings and unrealistic aspirations. I argue that the nexus of time, politics, and consumption has been transformed with the fading away of what has been called the future perfect (the political temporality of utopian projects) and its metamorphosis into what I term here the past conditional, the temporality of lost futures, irredeemable opportunities, and vanquished political imaginaries.     

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.     

A Din of Whispers: The In-Group Manifestation of Sorcery in Rural Banyuwangi

In rural Banyuwangi, East Java, Indonesia, sorcery and the reprisals for it occur amongst neighbours, kin and acquaintances. When illness occurs following a dispute between these people, sorcery may be suspected. The people who identify and take action against the suspected sorcerer are usually the suspected sorcerer's own family members, neighbours or acquaintances. By describing an instance where malevolent magic occurs within rather than between social groups, I contribute to the documentation of instances of such in-group manifestations. I also analyse the implications of the fact that violence and suspicion, as much as solidarity and trust, may characterise relations among the people who are closest.     

'What else do we Bengalis do?' Sorcery, overseas migration, and the new inequalities in Sylhet, Bangladesh

In Sylhet, Bangladesh, remittances sent home by sons and husbands working abroad have led to new inequalities conducive to the proliferation of sorcery accusations. In cases of illness, sorcery is often the preferred diagnosis. The virilocal rule of residence positions the son's wife as an outsider and, as such, she has been traditionally viewed as the prime suspect in cases of sorcery. This structural tension has been intensified by overseas migration as sons working abroad increase the isolation and vulnerability of their wives. Patients and their families do not passively act out structural contradictions but actively pursue a sorcery diagnosis. Through a detailed case study of one woman's struggle to come to terms with infertility, I show how a diagnosis of sorcery acts as a face-saving mechanism in situations of material inequality between kin.     

Athenian democracy and its critics

Taking the Greeks to be progenitors of a legacy of ethno-national political inequality, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy brings to light the endurance of the Athenian conjuncture of democracy and exclusion in comparative politics. Agreeing that the Greeks are progenitors of this legacy, I suggest that they are also progenitors of its critique.     

Review article: Polonia studies and the collapse of Communism

This paper asks to what extent Suriname's consociational democracy still rests on its historically shaped meta-ideology of ethnic essentialism. Based on ethnographic data of the country's national elections in 2010, I suggest that the ‘ethnic taboo’ of ethnic mobilization by politicians was present to a certain extent. However, this taboo was challenged by the nationalist turn of Desi Bouterse's National Democratic Party. Furthermore, when considering voting behaviour and that of ethnically mixed Doglas in particular, we see that Surinamese politics is more complex. I will argue that while we have been thinking about Surinamese politics as being on a par with ethnic groupings, these 2010 elections were not simply about ethnicity. Ethnicity may have informed but did not fully explain people's political choices, because people are too complex to be captured in an exclusively ethnic category, and because the Surinamese political system is too complex to maintain clear ethnic categories.     

Justice, Transaction, Translation: Blackfoot Tipi Transfers and WIPO's Search for the Facts of Traditional Knowledge Exchange

In this article, I examine the complexities and politics of enrolling one socially embedded form of transaction and knowledge into the terms or practices of another. I look at the correspondences and divergences in how the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) transposed the "facts" of Blackfoot tipi-transfer practices in efforts to harmonize global intellectual property (IP) regimes and to achieve "justice" and "empowerment." WIPO's translation work is set against a case where Piikani Blackfoot tipi holders used relational transfer practices to effect a use arrangement, bypassing the means and ends of IP. I argue that looking at WIPO's practices helps us to see anthropology's own epistemological, instrumental, and political constraints, while looking at Piikani transfers helps us to conceive of alternatives. This has bearing across anthropology's disciplinary spectrum where problems of knowledge translation are commonplace.     

A Psychology of Ghosts: The Regime of the Self and the Reinvention of Spirits in Indonesia and Beyond

The afterlife is currently being psychologised on a global scale. Based on a comparison of recent transformations in the reality of ghosts in eastern Indonesia and in contemporary Hollywood ghost series, this paper explores the links between spirits and changing conceptions of self in a global world. In Indonesia, ghosts are becoming traumatised, while in the West spirits increasingly struggle with emotional problems. In different ways, the paper suggests, spirits are becoming implicated in the globalisation of an interiorised and psychologised understanding of what it means to be human. As humans are encouraged to think of themselves as psychological beings, human spirits and ghosts are reinvented in a variety of ways—East and West. I argue that, ironically, it is the very hegemony of the powerful discourses and institutions that drive the globalisation of a psychological understanding of the self into ever more contexts and locations that is leading to these new forms of re-enchantment. The new kinds of ghosts that are currently emerging in the folds of global governmentality do so, it would seem, not in spite of the power of governmental reason, but by virtue of it.     

Make Afrikaners great again! National populism,democracy and the new white minority politics in post-apartheid South Africa

This article on national populism in South Africa brings a view from the South to scholarship overwhelmingly concentrated on the north Atlantic and European world. While in white majority contexts, national populism seeks to capture formal political power, the white minority’s lack of political leverage in post-apartheid South Africa sees an assertion of white autonomy emerge in the civil society arena. The article examines the discursive strategies of the Solidarity Movement, a broad-based social movement which claims to represent the white minority, particularly white Afrikaans-speakers, amid black majority rule. It shows how through a reinvention of the past, recasting of race, and reformulation of nationalist narratives by neoliberal logics the Movement discursively undermines black majority rule, and seeks to create spaces in which white privilege, power and identities are maintained. These findings provide new insights into the relation between populism and democracy, and hold important lessons for the increasingly multicultural global North.     

Desire,Envy and Punishment: A Matsigenka Emotion Schema in Illness Narratives and Folk Stories

Accumulating evidence suggests that folktales in some societies are characterized by a culturally constructed underlying emotional structure, or Cultural Emotion Schema. In this paper we argue that Matsigenka illness narratives and folk stories share an underlying emotion schema, in which death and suffering result from conflicts between strong-willed individuals prompting anger and aggression. Analysis of illness narratives collected by Izquierdo in the Matsigenka community of Kamisea in the Peruvian Amazon between 1996 and 1999 reveals a common pattern in which envy and frustration lead to the belief in sorcery as the main cause of illness and death. This pattern contrasts with the typical stories of a previous generation collected by the Johnsons among the Matsigenka of Shimaa and other Matsigenka researchers, where sorcery beliefs were virtually absent. Our argument is that important changes in ecology, community, politics, and religion have led to a systematic rise in feelings of envy and frustration, and that these have increased the likelihood that sorcery accusations will occur. We explore the likelihood that such beliefs increase as egalitarian peoples become more crowded into settlements where they are likely to experience greater inequality, more competition for resources and increased societal and personal stress.     

The perils of payoff: corruption as a threat to global biodiversity

Corruption is a worldwide phenomenon, particularly in many developing countries, which contain a large proportion of global biodiversity. Most alarming, from a biodiversity-conservation perspective, is the frequent corruption of government officials who manage valuable natural resources, such as timber, oil and precious minerals. A recent study by Joyotee Smith and colleagues describes rampant corruption in the timber industry of Indonesia, and shifts in the prevalence of different types of corruption as the country has become destabilized politically. By placing corruption into a conceptual framework, Smith et al. provide important insights into how developing nations and their natural resources can be besieged by corruption.     

Sick Again,Well Again: Sorcery,Christianity and Kinship in Northern Aboriginal Australia

This article concerns the ways in which Yolngu people of the Galiwin'ku settlement in northern Australia employ contemporary constructions of sorcery doctrines and Christian practices to rearticulate their kinship relations. In particular, I discuss the adaptation of sorcery ideas and accusations to present-day circumstances and the Christian healing processes that have emerged alongside traditional healing behaviours and biomedicine. Sorcery and Christianity at Galiwin'ku, I argue, are intertwined ethical models that enable the person and community to heal over and over again in accordance with the vicissitudes of postcolonial life. They continue the moral imperative of ‘looking after’ kin even as the net of ‘looking after’ has expanded to encompass new experiences, behaviours, and persons.     

How an Egalitarian Polity Structures Tourism and Restructures Itself Around It

ABSTRACT

Korowai of Papua, Indonesia, are famous in tourism and mass media circles for their ‘tree houses’, and for other ways they match globally circulating stereotypes of primitive humanity. This article examines how tourism intersects with Korowai egalitarian politics. Korowai spatial dispersion and concern with equality mean that tourists' visits to the land of certain people and not others is politically sensitive. I describe new forms of differentiation arising around tourism, such as emergence of clans specializing in hosting tour groups, and of individual Korowai specializing as tourism mediators. Across these and other areas, what is most striking is how Korowai people's egalitarian political sensibilities have fostered complex forms of interlocal cooperation around tourist visits, innovated and agreed upon in a decentralized manner. This case illustrates a broader pattern that intersocietal articulations are often mediated by the social organization of difference and heterogeneity in people's home locations.     

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism

The link between Islam and terrorism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds of "culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating 'good Muslims" from "bad Muslims, rather than terrorists from civilians. The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims. This article suggests that we lift the quarantine and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head. Beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and bad Westerners, I question the very tendency to read Islamist politics as an effect of Islamic civilization—whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization. Both those politics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood outside of the history of that encounter. Cultural explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues. Thinking of individuals from "traditional" cultures in authentic and original terms, culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political identities. This article places the terror of September 11 in a historical and political context. Rather than a residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, terrorism is best understood as a modern construction. Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project. [Keywords: Muslims, culture talk, Islamist politics, political identities, terrorism]     

Sustainability,equity, and natural resource development in Northwest Siberia and Arctic Alaska

Today, the search for new energy sources continues unabated throughout the North. At the same time, scientists are increasingly concerned over the degradation of the Arctic and sub-Arctic environment stemming from fossil fuel and other large-scale energy projects already underway. Similar apprehensions are expressed by indigenous peoples who have often suffered from the impact of such development. While the most dramatic evidence of environmental devastation and social disruption is found in the Russian North, serious problems are by no means confined to that area alone. Nor are these negative effects necessarily limited to the borders of the country in which they originated. Indeed, the deleterious environmental impact of our global industrial economy has become sufficiently profound that social analysts are beginning to ask whether development strategies that cause such harm to the Arctic and sub-Arctic region should continue; and if not, what should replace them. This article addresses these issues as they relate to questions of sustainability, equity, political empowerment, and human rights in northwest Siberia and northern North America.     

Eugenics, politics and the state: social democracy and the Swiss 'gardening state'

This article explores the connections between eugenics, politics and the state, taking the Swiss case as a particular focus. It is argued that Switzerland provides a historical example of what Bauman [Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press.] describes as 'gardening states': states that are concerned with eliminating the 'bad weeds' from the national garden and thereby constructing sharply exclusionary national identities. The Swiss experiments with eugenics (1920s-1960s) can be seen as an example of an ongoing struggle against 'difference'. Against this backdrop I will examine, first, the ways in which state regulation of reproductive sexuality, and other eugenic measures, became central mechanisms for dealing with cultural and other 'differences' in the Swiss nation. Second, I will analyse the gendered nature of such mechanisms, as well as the preoccupation with racial 'difference' exemplified by eugenic policies towards 'Gypsies'. To conclude, I will examine the impact of political institutions and political ideology, in particular, social democracy, on these eugenic gardening efforts.     

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.     

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.     

A house is more than a house: aesthetic politics in a Northeastern Thai railway settlement

This article examines debates over architectural aesthetics between residents of Thai railway communities, state urban planners, and NGO activists. It interrogates the designs, colours, objects, and materials these groups use as they attempt to upgrade these settlements as part of a participatory urban housing project. I argue that through aesthetic practices, residents, planners, and activists propose, debate, and enact distinct political and moral orders. Houses, real and imagined, reflect these actors’ provisional attempts to answer contentious questions about what constitutes a legitimate political actor and what it means to live a good life in contemporary Thailand. Aesthetic practices thus constitute a ‘politics in the making’ that offers a means for actors to debate lived configurations of the political while simultaneously intervening upon it.