Adivasis,Communists, and the rise of indigenism in Kerala

Although the notion of the ‘adivasi’ has come under academic scrutiny and the ‘dark side’ of indigeneity discourses is increasingly criticized, there has been relatively little attention to the question of why, under adverse circumstances, activists have nevertheless started articulating their political program in the language of adivasi-ness while surpassing the particularistic politics of earlier tribal movements. Explaining the emergence of indigenist politics as a new democratic force is all the more pertinent for the case of Kerala since this state has the Communist movement as an obvious alternative for the articulation of such a transformative political agenda. This article therefore seeks to explore the forces that gave rise to the politics of indigenism. It begins with a discussion of shifts in the structural power context shaping subaltern activism in Kerala—particularly the impact of neoliberal restructuring and the new ideological environment created with the demise of the Communist block. The paper then moves to consider the political dynamics operating within this structural context that led indigenist activists to form a separate political movement. It looks particularly at the sense of both ideological and material disillusionment these activists feel toward the Communist party in Kerala.     

Who's invited to the (political) party: race and party politics in the USA

ABSTRACT

From the political behemoths of the Democratic and Republican Parties, to the Civil Rights Era racially progressive Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and reactionary American Independent Party, to the contemporary third party Green and Libertarian Parties, party politics in the USA has a long and storied relationship to the reproduction and contestation of racial domination. Recent works illuminate the strategic use of racial discourse by major party political elites, their deployment of racialized political platforms, and the relationship of these phenomena to power dynamics and racial interests but have yet to fully move beyond the two-party system and engage with innovations in political and cultural sociology. We outline openings for an empirically-grounded sociology of political parties that would reveal the micro- and meso-level features of racialized party politics and the operations of discursive and performative power within both major and minor political parties.     

Ethnocentrism and ideology*

Ethnic politics is a paradoxical phenomenon in France. While predominant French ideologies and institutional arrangements reinforce a ‘no ethnic politics’ model, there have been substantive challenges to this traditional model, including changes in state practices, and the political emergence of Franco‐Maghrebis and the immigrant association movement. Using the affaire des foulards [headscarves affair] of 1989 as a case‐study, the article seeks to clarify the ethnic politics paradox in France. I argue that the emergence and configuration of ethnic politics in France are being shaped by a series of constraints. These constraints are reflected in the ways in which the headscarves affair was created, defined, and managed. I suggest that the constraints are rooted not only in French ideologies and institutional arrangements, but also in the ‘nationalist logic’ of contemporary French immigration politics, the integrationist strategies of Franco‐Maghrebi groups, and the immigré perspective of the state and political community.     

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.     

‘[Not] talking like a Motorola’: mobile phone practices and politics of masking and unmasking in postcolonial Kinshasa

The expression ‘talking like a Motorola’ (koloba lokola Motorola) was long used during the reign of President Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo/Zaïre to indicate the undesired disclosure of information. It manifests the perception of many Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) that the Motorola handset was only deployed by Mobutu's secret service agents in order to detect and report critics of the regime. Today, mobile phones are no longer the preserve of political agents. Nearly everybody can have one. The idiom is thus outdated. Yet other lines between ‘what can be said [over the phone]’ and ‘what cannot be said’ are being drawn in Kinshasa's political society. Indeed, transformations in practices of secrecy, concealment, and, their counterpart, the divulging of information – all three significant axes of the production of power and contestation of authority – are key, both in state actions and in strategies of civil society. In this article, I attempt to locate the mobile phone within Kinshasa's political society, and analyse how relations to the Congolese state are articulated through the politics of cell phone technology and uses of the handset.     

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.     

A ‘kinship anthropology of politics’? Interest,the collective self,and kinship in Argentine unions★

In this article I argue for a kinship anthropology of politics, understood as a focus on the day‐to‐day imbrications of kinship and politics in a given political space, and the implications of that for the construction of political subjects. I describe kinship within shop‐floor‐level trade union delegations of state employees in Argentina in three different ways: first, languages of kinship mobilized to describe political allegiance and dispositions, especially inheritance; second, family connections in recruitment and activism; and, third, practices of kinning as relatedness. The combination of these three kinship modes creates the union as kin group, and enables it to act on the world politically in order to transform it.     

Homo Nullius or `Where Have All the People Gone‘? Refiguring Marine Management and Conservation Approaches

In Australia, much has been said and written about recent events which finally brought about the rejection of the Western legal concept of terra nullius. The legal recognition of native title in Australia and elsewhere, does not necessarily signify a corresponding and dramatic change in the social status and political position of indigenous peoples. This discontinuity between legal and social discourses is particularly evident when it comes to matters concerning conservation, resource management and sustainable development in a marine environment. All too often in these situations indigenous peoples are ignored and their concerns are dismissed as obstacles to development. They are, to all practical extents and purposes, homo nullius. Drawing upon a range of material from Indonesia and Australia, I argue that in order to understand the phenomenon of homo nullius it is instructive to examine the way we and others think, talk and write about such things as the sea, marine species and the indigenous peoples who possess and use these spaces and resources. In this connection, I focus upon two particular discourses which not only inform marine management and conservation approaches but which also have a tendency to create similar kinds of effects in terms of power, knowledge and agency.     

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross‐cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and ‘translated’ into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of ‘translation’ raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation‐state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.     

Women and the Iranian Revolution: A village case study

Conclusion All in all, the activism of the Aliabad seyyid women in the Iranian Revolution followed the lines of traditional concerns, traditional methods, and traditional constraints on the activities of women. Women hoped for improved justice, safety for their families, and restoration of a semblance of peace in the village and the nation as a whole. Women's political methods were those of social interaction and use of their verbal abilities, emotional displays, and physical presence to show support. They followed the usual constraints on their behavior by marching in the company of their usual network of companions, separate from men and covered with their chadors, and did not neglect their families and households.The two changes were in the level of political involvement: national rather than local level, and the locus of political activity—Shiraz rather than the village of Aliabad. The local level of political activity was no longer the level at which policy and forces determined the safety and welfare of their family and relatives. With the Shah's centralization program, power over the lives of villagers lay at higher levels. With the merging of local level politics and national level politics during the incidents of violence on December 7 and 8, 1978, women began to realize that the target of their political activism must also be at higher levels. In hopes of having some effect on national level politics and thereby on the safety and welfare of their family members, the Aliabad seyyid women traveled into Shiraz to demonstrate in the revolutionary movement

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Moral Enhancement and Those Left Behind

Opponents to genetic or biomedical human enhancement often claim that the availability of these technologies would have negative consequences for those who either choose not to utilize these resources or lack access to them. However, Thomas Douglas has argued that this objection has no force against the use of technologies that aim to bring about morally desirable character traits, as the unenhanced would benefit from being surrounded by such people. I will argue that things are not as straightforward as Douglas makes out. The widespread use of moral enhancement would raise the standards for praise and blame worthiness, making it much harder for the unenhanced to perform praiseworthy actions or avoid performing blameworthy actions. This shows that supporters of moral enhancement cannot avoid this challenge in the way that Douglas suggests.     

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.     

Desire Work: Producing Heterosexuality in South African Pentecostal Gay Men

Gay men in Cape Town, South Africa joined a Pentecostal ministry in an attempt to produce what they understood as ‘natural’ heterosexual attraction. In this article, I explore how these gay men try to form new selves through what I call ‘desire work’, or physical and emotional micropractices and discipline. Desire is not ‘natural’, but it is produced through a multitude of engagements with cultural norms, public life, political economies, and social forces. New selves are built through concerted bodily changes and comportment [Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], and although gay Pentecostal men shared this process, their success was limited. I understand desire work as a response to a larger context in which many Pentecostals are disaffected with the post-apartheid government and withdraw from politics as a result. Their fears of the uncertainties of democracy pushed them to engage in optimistic fantasies of heterosexual lives, which were not often realised [Berlant, Lauren Gail. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press].     

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.     

Segmented political assimilation: perceptions of racialized opportunities and Latino immigrants' partisan identification

Abstract

To account for Latino immigrants' assimilation into the American political mainstream, I derive social psychological factors from the contextual notion of ‘modes of incorporation’ in the segmented assimilation literature. These social psychological factors, perceptions of racialized opportunities (PROPs), relate to immigrants' adoption of political party identities (i.e. Democrat, Republican). I test these PROPs factors utilizing the 2006 Latino National Survey (N=5,717 immigrant Latino respondents). Multinomial logistic regressions predicting party identification, compared to either ‘Don't Know’ or ‘Don't Care’ options, indicate that PROPs are significantly related to Latino immigrants' identification as either Democrats or Republicans. High levels of identification with perceived white opportunities are related to Republican identity and high levels of identification with perceived black opportunities differentiate Democrats from Republicans.     

Corrective conversion: unsettling citizens and the politics of inclusion in Israel

Gauri Viswanathan's notion of religious conversion as an ‘unsettling’ political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively applied Viswanathan's understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation‐state, to focus too heavily on conversion's unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in which it might have rather settling effects. In contrast to the scholarly focus on conversion's disruptive qualities, this article offers an ethnographic account of the ‘settling’ ambitions and logics that underwrite the state politics of Jewish conversion (giur) in contemporary Israel. By looking ethnographically into the mundane discursive, pedagogic, and bureaucratic processes through which the Jewish state converts non‐Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I demonstrate how religious conversion works to restore the bureaucratic logic of Israeli nationalism, thereby reinstating unambiguous forms of Jewish belonging. Religious conversion can also be an act of taxonomic repair.     

Social and River Networks for the Trees: Wounaan's Riverine Rhizomic Cosmos and Arboreal Conservation

ABSTRACT   The effects of environmental conservation and development are of significant anthropological interest. Recent focus on the politics of knowledge and translation has shown the importance of cosmology in conservation encounters. I examine how Wounaan indigenous peoples and extralocal conservation practitioners "translate" eastern Panama based on their own cosmologies. ¹ Specifically, I explore how Wounaan's social and river-networked rhizomic cosmos is overlooked in the practice of forest-focused conservation. This results from Panama's environmental history, in which actors simplified early representations of a complex landscape to one characterized by forests, as well as a Western bias toward forests with scant attention paid to cosmology. Finally, I note how Wounaan negotiate this cultural disconnect by emphasizing their ties to forests. In so doing, they buttress the arboreal bias, in turn reinforcing power relations, but also giving themselves political leverage in conservation activities. These results inform recent discussion about politics and scientific praxis in conservation.     

Politics And Gastropolitics: Gender And The Power Of Food In Two African Pastoralist Societies

Male-centred aspects of political behaviour have generally remained the explanatory and interpretive focuses in analyses of the social organization of African pastoralists. While recent work on African pastoralists has shed increasing light on the lives of women, I argue that key assumptions underlying anthropological models of male dominance in these societies have been insufficiently challenged. Drawing on recent approaches in gender and social organization that highlight the mutual constitution of domestic and political domains, I examine comparative material from two well-known pastoralist societies: the Samburu of northern Kenya and the Nuer of southern Sudan. In doing so, I suggest strong linkages between male-dominated 'political spheres' and areas of domestic life in which the role of women is more significant – particularly processes of domestic food distribution. In re-examining central facets of Samburu politics – which are best known through Paul Spencer's seminal analysis of the gerontocratic aspects of Samburu political life – I suggest that the status and identities of Samburu men are in fundamental ways defined through their relationship to women as providers of food within Samburu households. Comparative material from the Nuer suggests, additionally, the strategic use of food by women in influencing male 'political spheres'. In comparing these cases, I suggest a more general model through which domestic processes of food allocation as realms of female-centred social action may be seen to play a central role in the forms and processes of pastoral 'political' life.     

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.     

Religion,ethnicity and politics: Hindu and Muslim Indian immigrants in the United States

This article focuses on the political struggles between Hindu and Muslim Indian immigrant groups in the United States over the definition of "Indianness". Hindu Indian American organizations define India as a Hindu society and are strong supporters of the Hindu nationalist movement in India. Muslim Indian American organizations, on the other hand, view India as a multi-religious and multicultural society. They are striving to safeguard India's secularism and towards this end, have entered into coalitional relationships with lower caste groups. Both types of organizations are working to influence American and Indian politics in line with their respective interests, leading to an exacerbation of the conflict between the two immigrant groups. This article examines the reasons for this development and its implications, both for the development of an Indian American community in the United States and for religion and politics in India.