Introduction: On irreconciliation

Most post-conflict reconciliatory exercises make it incumbent upon survivors to forgive, and seek closure as a demonstration of ‘moving on’. Various anthropologists have criticized reconciliation and related forms of ‘alternative justice’ extensively but within the framework of maintaining social bonds and the rule of law. In this introduction, I reflect critically on the interdisciplinary scholarship on reconciliation, apology, and forgiveness, and theorize irreconciliation as a less examined lens of analysis. Rather than being in opposition to ‘peace’, irreconciliation allows us to interrogate the status quo by refusing to forgive endemic impunities, particularly in the aftermath of staged processes of justice and the absence-presence of the rule of law. In this special issue of the JRAI, I ethnographically explore irreconciliation's links with law, aesthetics, temporality, resistance, and control to locate its multiple analytical manifestations. Irreconciliation allows an important examination of the rule of law within processes of unresolved genocidal injustices and debates relating to slavery, Black Lives Matter, and institutional responses.     

Social Responsibility and the State's Duty to provide Healthcare: An Islamic Ethico‐Legal Perspective

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights asserts that governments are morally obliged to promote health and to provide access to quality healthcare, essential medicines and adequate nutrition and water to all members of society. According to UNESCO, this obligation is grounded in a moral commitment to promoting fundamental human rights and emerges from the principle of social responsibility. Yet in an era of ethical pluralism and contentions over the universality of human rights conventions, the extent to which the UNESCO Declaration can motivate behaviors and policies rests, at least in part, upon accepting the moral arguments it makes. In this essay I reflect on a state's moral obligation to provide healthcare from the perspective of Islamic moral theology and law. I examine how Islamic ethico‐legal conceptual analogues for human rights and communal responsibility, ?uqūq al‐’ibād and far? al‐kifāyah and other related constructs might be used to advance a moral argument for healthcare provision by the state. Moving from theory to application, I next illustrate how notions of human rights and social responsibility were used by Muslim stakeholders to buttress moral arguments to support American healthcare reform. In this way, the paper advance discourses on a universal bioethics and common morality by bringing into view the concordances and discordances between Islamic ethico‐legal constructs and moral arguments advanced by transnational health policy advocates. It also provides insight into applied Islamic bioethics by demonstrating how Islamic ethico‐legal values might inform the discursive outputs of Muslim organizations.     

Rendering the absent visible: victimhood and the irreconcilability of violence

Contemporary justice-making processes often focus on reconciliation or legal retribution, but not on the complexity of victimhood beyond individual subjectivity or refusals of state propositions for social repair. In Colombia, where drug cartels and state-sponsored violence had terrorized the population for over fifty years, it was not forgiveness and acceptance that punctuated the turn of the twenty-first century, but the refusal to reconcile with the state's duplicity regarding the disappearance and death of thousands. This essay illustrates how irreconciliation as an affective sentiment is taking shape in Colombia through forms of reattribution that take the form of victim visibilizations. In analysing the strategic use of victim visibilizations as a refusal of state accountability, their expansion of the notion of victimhood, and their politics of irreconciliation, I show how even with the state's remorse-driven discourses, the public's understanding that political, judicial, and social accountability was not possible and pushed them to chart new strategies for disclosure and healing.     

Reconciliation and third‐party affiliation in carrion crows

Conflicts are costly because they can damage social relationships. To buffer conflicts, various species use post‐conflict behaviour, such as reconciliation or third‐party affiliation. Both behaviours have predominantly been studied in non‐human primates. However, recently, studies revealed post‐conflict behaviour in other mammalian and some bird species (e.g., corvids). While third‐party affiliation has been reported in several corvid species, reconciliation has only rarely been observed. The social structure of the studied groups has been postulated as a reason for the absence of reconciliation. Here, we investigated whether post‐conflict behaviours in corvids indeed mirror the relationship structure. We studied the behaviour of a newly established group of juvenile carrion crows (Corvus corone corone), where pair bonds had not yet been established. We applied a combination of observations and food monopolisation experiments to quantify the use of post‐conflict behaviours. Provisioning food in one or two pieces induced different patterns of aggression during feeding and differently affected the affiliation patterns after feeding. Specifically, victims of severe aggression affiliated with third parties after conflicts in the two‐piece condition, while aggressors affiliated with victims of mild aggression in the one‐piece condition. We thus provide the first evidence that a corvid species, crows, flexibly engage in both third‐party affiliation and reconciliation.     

Respect of law or respect through law?

What is the role of law and legality in social resilience? This review essay highlights how a sociology of law, culture, and institutions underwrites many of the findings of Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil &; Israel. The book provides a trenchant analysis of group boundaries, stigma, and destigmatization across three cities worldwide. I suggest that in addition to the role of formal law and legal constraints that the book identifies, we can attend to how legality offers a repertoire for resilience on which people draw when faced with stigma, discrimination, or contentious situations, even when formal law falls short. In this way, combining a sociology of law with a sociology of culture can provide us with an understanding of how societies offer social resilience, and how this resource varies across social, national, and legal contexts.     

Sex Differences in Reconciliation and Post-Conflict Anxiety in Bonnet Macaques

Rates of reconciliation vary widely between different types of opponents, and post‐conflict anxiety has been proposed to mediate individual variation in reconciliation rates. We investigated the form and function of reconciliation in a wild, provisioned group of bonnet macaques (Macaca radiata) with the prediction that sex differences in post‐conflict anxiety would be associated with sex differences in conciliatory tendency. Individuals in the study group had a conciliatory tendency of 29.3%. Victims avoided their former opponents at a higher rate following aggression than during matched‐control samples, and reconciliation decreased the rate of avoidance. Although victims showed a higher rate of anxiety‐related behavior than did aggressors, anxiety‐related behavior was elevated after aggression and reduced following reconciliation in both victims and aggressors. Female–female opponents showed higher rates of anxiety‐related behavior before reconciliation than they did following unreconciled aggression. In contrast, male–male and female–male opponents showed increased anxiety‐related behavior following aggression regardless of the occurrence of reconciliation. Moreover, female–female opponents had a higher conciliatory tendency than did female–male opponents. The elevated post‐conflict anxiety shown by female–female opponents before reconciliation, along with their high conciliatory tendency, suggests that post‐conflict anxiety promotes reconciliation. In sum, the sex differences in post‐conflict behavior found in this study support the hypothesis that variation in post‐conflict anxiety mediates differential rates of reconciliation.     

Reconciliation in Male Stump‐tailed Macaques (Macaca arctoides): Intolerant Males Care for Their Social Relationships

Recent research has shown that social relationships may exert positive effects on fitness. Therefore, it is expected that animals make efforts to develop and preserve close social bonds. Reconciliation is a conflict resolution mechanism, which allows buffering the negative effects of aggressive conflict on social relationships. As socioecological theories claim that intrasexual competition and conflict‐shaped social interactions among macaque males, postconflict behaviour should reflect the effects of these evolutionary forces. Here, we present the results of a study on a provisioned group of Macaca arctoides in Thailand focusing exclusively on male postconflict behaviour. Through an Information Theory–Model Selection approach, we evaluated the relative support for three predictions about the occurrence of reconciliation and the quality of the opponents' social relationships. The strength of the opponents' affiliative relationship was the only variable predicting reconciliation occurrence. This agrees with the main prediction of the valuable relationship hypothesis for the function and distribution of reconciliation, which states that the opponents sharing high‐quality relationships are more likely to reconcile, and this interaction is aimed to repair the disturbing effects of previous aggression on their relationship. The conciliatory tendency found among these wild males is much lower than reported previously for this species from captive conditions, matching more closely the rates reported for species with an intolerant‐despotic dominance style. The results offer strong support for the importance of developing and preserving valuable relationships, even among rather intolerant males.     

The river echoes with laughter: a child‐centred analysis of social change in Amazonia

This article examines radical social, cultural, and political changes taking place in Amazonia from the perspective of indigenous children and youth: a group who, despite their demographic prevalence, have received limited attention in the regional literature. Drawing on fieldwork with Matses people in Peru, I consider how children and youth are playing a critical role in the transition from a hunter‐gatherer, forest‐based society towards a riverine lifestyle that is increasingly engaged in trade, the market economy, and exchanges with chotac, or non‐indigenous people. I argue that by engaging with their surroundings through playing and working, Matses children are becoming affectively attached to some parts of the world rather than others. This represents a purposeful shift from the lifestyle and worldviews of older generations and highlights how children are active agents who shape possible future directions of Matses society and transform the community's relationships with the world. Accordingly, I propose a child‐centred view of social change that seeks to demonstrate the implications of children's creativity and agency for society at large and its future development.     

Reflections on Grant Evans’ The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos since 1975

In this article I reflect on Grant Evans’ landmark and influential The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos since 1975, the way in which this book relates to the transformation from socialism to post‐socialism in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (LPDR), to the crisis of legitimacy of the communist regime, and to issues of social memory, Buddhism, nationalism, iconography, and ethnic minorities. I also consider how other scholars have engaged with The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance both critically and supportively since the publication of the monograph in 1998 . I include in my analysis some observations on Evans’ quite radical change in political views over his career as a student, journalist and academic, culminating in his critique of socialism in general and the LPDR in particular and his controversial sympathy for the Lao monarchy.     

Intention and Moral Enhancement

Recently philosophers have proposed a wide variety of interventions referred to as ‘moral enhancements’. Some of these interventions are concerned with helping individuals make more informed decisions; others, however, are designed to compel people to act as the intervener sees fit. Somewhere between these two extremes lie interventions designed to direct an agent's attention either towards morally relevant issues – hat‐hanging – or away from temptations to do wrong – hat‐hiding. I argue that these interventions fail to constitute genuine moral enhancement because, although they may result in more desirable outcomes – more altruism, more law‐following, and/or less self‐destructive behavior, they ignore a person's intentions, and often what makes an action right or wrong is the intent behind it.     

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.     

‘The Mind of Christ’: Financial Success,Born-again Personhood,and the Anthropology of Christianity

In this article, I contribute to the emerging project of the anthropology of Christianity by exploring the subject of born-again personhood. As a nascent field of inquiry, the anthropology of Christianity must delimit what theoretical opportunities exist for comparative research. I argue that a focus on personhood offers a promising series of questions toward this end. To illustrate this claim, I use the case study of one Evangelical Sunday school teacher – Rick Betcher – and his life as a ‘Christian businessman.’ Anthropologists and other scholars have shown great interest in how matters of money figure in the culture of Protestantism. Using Rick's self-designed Sunday school class, The Mind of Christ, I argue that conceptions of personal financial success among born-again Christians are structured by the prevailing model of born-again personhood – the New Mind.     

Reconciliation in Wolves (Canis lupus): New Evidence for a Comparative Perspective

Social animals gain benefits from cooperative behaviours. However, social systems also imply competition and conflict of interest. To cope with dispersal forces, group‐living animals use several peace‐keeping tactics, which have been deeply investigated in primates. Other taxa, however, have been often neglected in this field research. Wolves (Canis lupus) with their high sociality and cooperative behaviour may be a good model species to investigate the reconciliation process. In this study, we provide the first evidence for the occurrence of reconciliation in a group of zoo‐kept wolves. The conciliatory contacts were uniformly distributed across the different sex‐class combinations. We found a linear dominance hierarchy in the colony under study, although the hierarchical relationships did not seem to affect the reconciliation dynamics. Moreover, both aggressors and victims initiated first post‐conflict affinitive contact with comparable rates and both high‐ and low‐intensity conflicts were reconciled with similar percentages. Finally, we found that coalitionary support may be a good predictor for high level of conciliatory contacts in this species.     

Veiled Nannies and Secular Futures in France

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious symbols to childcare. Controversies over ‘veiled nannies’ serve as points of departure for investigating laïcité – French secularism – through which religion is regulated. The investigation is based on fieldwork among Muslim women in Marseille and on the analysis of legal decisions, official documents, and media. The debates on whether to legislate on religious symbols in the domain of childcare reveal how the line between religion and politics, and private and public is continuously redrawn through state efforts to cultivate and govern (secular) Republican selves. Drawing on Agrama’s [2012a. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] conceptualisation of secularism as a ‘problem-space’, I argue that legal regulation of religious symbols institutionalises a ‘secular suspicion’ at the heart of efforts to imagine and govern French society and its future, a future in which Muslims increasingly find it difficult to imagine themselves.     

Phylogeography of the Temminck’s Stint (Calidris temminckii): historical vicariance but little present genetic structure in a regionally endangered Palearctic wader

Aim We study the population differentiation and phylogeography of the Temminck’s Stint (Calidris temminckii). Specifically, we seek signs of past and present population size changes and dispersal events and evaluate management and conservation unit status of the populations. We also study the possibility of introgression as the origin of two mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages found and estimate the divergence time of the lineages. Location Northern Eurasia. Methods We analysed 583 bp of mtDNA control region domains I and II and 11 microsatellite loci from 13 localities throughout the breeding range. In addition, we used mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI), a barcoding gene, to search for signs of introgression. Results More population differentiation was found from microsatellites than from mtDNA, although differentiation was weak in both markers. Signs of past population growth were observed, in addition to more recent decline in some areas. Both control region and COI sequences revealed two maternal lineages coexisting in Fennoscandia and in north‐west Siberia. No signs of introgression were detected. Lineage divergence time was estimated to have occurred during the glacial periods of Pleistocene. Main conclusions Slight differences in mtDNA and microsatellite differentiation and diversity may reflect different features – such as the mutation rate and effective population size – of the markers used, or female‐biased dispersal pattern and high male site‐fidelity of the species. The coexistence of the two mitochondrial lineages is most likely a consequence of post‐glacial mixing of two refugial Pleistocene populations. Based on genetic information alone, global conservation concerns are not imminent. However, fast decline of a marginal Bothnian Bay population and the smallness and remoteness of a Central Yakutian population warrant conservation actions.     

Migration in migration-related diversity? The nexus between superdiversity and migration studies

This article argues that the notion of ‘superdiversity’ implies an investigation of diversity that goes well beyond the nature of migration origins and trajectories. To probe the academic value of superdiversity, I situate it within broader academic debates, suggesting that it is necessary to distinguish between superdiversity as a malleable social science concept – a set of variables that researchers conjunctively investigate – and superdiversity as a context in which these variables play out in complex social patterns. I argue that complexity is an integral aspect of superdiversity, before explaining how innovative research methods were used to investigate superdiversity in a dual-site project in London and Toronto in order to explore its relevance for global comparative research.     

Yuyanapaq no entra: ritual dimensions of post‐transitional justice in Peru

The anthropology of transitional justice has emphasized the ritual aspects of truth commissions but offered less analysis of the conventions through which narratives produced by such institutions come to be viewed over time. A controversy in Peru that centred on a new national museum's possible incorporation of a photo exhibit (Yuyanapaq) created by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2001‐3) provides an opportunity to explore this problematic. Documenting the disagreements that ultimately led to Yuyanapaq's exclusion from the museum, I suggest that an emphasis on ritual outcomes – including perceived shortcomings and failures – is useful for understanding the long‐term trajectory of national reconciliation initiatives.     

The ‘Spirit’ of the Thing: The Boundaries of Aboriginal Economic Relations at Australian Common Law

Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least one native title case discussed in this paper. The pursuit by Aboriginal native title claimants of recognition at law of customary economic rights as inherent in, or an adjunct of, native title rights failed in Yarmirr and Others v. Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370 (the ‘Croker Island case’) for several reasons. The applicant's native title was found to be non‐exclusive of other interests, and a right to trade in resources of the sea was rejected. This case was argued in part by relying on historical material regarding Macassan trading arrangements. The profound alterity of Aboriginal relationships among persons and things, as the Croker Island evidence of property and trade relations demonstrates, have been re‐constituted in legal discourse as an absence of economic relations. In this paper, we argue that there is no sound basis for the distinction made between commercial and non‐commercial native title rights, whether in the Native Title Act 1993 (Commonwealth of Australia), or in recent judicial reasoning. We contend that native title rights and interests constitute a sui generis species of property relations that enable economic rights as conceived in Aboriginal tradition and custom to circulate in the modern market. Aboriginal customary economic relations of and between Aboriginal groupings are markedly distinct from, yet not incommensurable with, the normative conception of economic relations in the Australian market. We argue that a reformulation of the current Australian legal ideas about economic life is necessary for the recognition of Aboriginal economic institutions in native title claims and other economic arenas.     

Civil war and the non-linearity of time: approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation

At least 1 million people died during the Mozambican civil war (1976/7-92). Unfolding after gaining independence from Portugal (1975) and alongside experiments with Afro-socialism in the 1980s, the war, despite its brutality, has not been subjected to global templates of reconciliation processes. Thus it comprises a unique case to probe what irreconciliation might mean – both as a political horizon and as an analytical concept. This text juxtaposes ethnographic material from rural, central Mozambique from the late 1990s and early 2000s emphasizing reconciliation with material from the same spaces from the 2010s onwards, where I identify what I term a ‘politics of irreconciliation’. I will make three arguments. First, informed by Hannah Arendt, I approach irreconciliation as fundamentally about the rejection of a world of violence in search of a world shared in common. Second, drawing on recent anthropological theorizing about temporal regimes and chronopolitics, I argue for the salience of a non-linear understanding of the politics of irreconciliation to grapple with the fact that civil war violence is understood as dangerously uncontained rather than nominally past. Third, within the context of Mozambique, forgiveness and its other, irreconciliation, are not only intimately tied to the temporally past or present; they are also, as I show, produced by a tangible and intense absence of a productive future.     

Antihaitianismo: an embodied discourse

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that contemporary manifestations of social, political and economic discrimination – antihaitianismo – in the Dominican Republic towards their Haitian neighbours have become embodied responses which are reproduced through everyday actions. Using ethnographic fieldwork and phenomenology, I explore a variety of contexts in which antihaitianismo has become part of a Dominican existential background that is provoked to surface in situations of heightened tension, stress or discomfort. I also show how this embodied discourse has affected and affects a race-centred, essentialist form of governance. This article is supplemented by a short film which can be found at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlIH4fpwUlU