Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

In the last decade there has been much interest in the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘essentialism’ and the ways in which these notions have been appropriated by Aboriginal people to demarcate a specifically Aboriginal space (Cowlishaw 1986; Lattas 1993; Langton 1981; Morris 1988; Muecke 1992). Central to these concerns is the issue of black/white relations and the specificities of racial oppression. Following these concerns in this article I explore the nexus between the metaphorical dismemberment of self and the corporeal dismemberment of sickness which is reflected in the high mortality rates and disease patterns of Aboriginal people. I extend Fanon's concept that racism has the power to alienate ‘a man of colour’ from his own self-image to argue that it more than metaphorically breaks the human body (Fanon 1991). I provide a window into a much neglected area of research: how notions of illness and social relatedness are constructed in particular socio-historical circumstances. I explore the meanings of illness as expressed at the level of community and as a form of embodiment associated with unequal colonial relations. I focus on indigenous exegeses which articulate Aboriginal women's experience of illness and their sense of identity. I draw on the work of Leder (1990) to foreground a phenomenological view where selfhood is continually confronted by circumstances that make present the ‘body’ as a ‘sharp and searing presence threatening the self’. I also apply Sansom's (1982) model of illness and the significance of carers in an Aboriginal community to demonstrate a world-view of personhood that is diffused with other persons and things rather than a world-view that entails a highly individuated and bounded self. In this world-view adequate healing requires a reconstitution of social relations and a re-ordering of the racialised status quo.     

Activating dark earths: somatosoils and the carbonic loops of Amazonian ecologies

Inspired by the fertility and climate change-mitigation properties of the so-called Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs), soil science has devised a technoscientific replica, a soil amendment known as biochar, intended to improve agricultural sustainability and carbon storage in the biosphere. Drawing on fieldwork with Afroindigenous horticulturalists, this article shows, however, that the activation of these soils’ vibrant ecology responds to looping, carbonic, and socially mediated forms of human and other-than-human corporeal interplay. With an ethnography of swidden horticulture in Amazonia, I propose the notion of ‘somatosoils’ to consider that the fertility and other metabolic properties of ADEs might be located not in the soil, but in the relations between the earth's bodies and the specific human gestures that stimulate these soils’ inner life.     

Omarakana revisited,or ‘do dual organizations exist?’ in the Trobriands

Omarakana is arguably the most renowned village in the Trobriand and anthropological worlds. It is the very centre and wellspring of the North Kiriwinan universe and thus a sacred site, serving as the home of the Tabalu chiefly paramountcy. For us anthropologists, it is ground zero for our field methodology, thanks to Malinowski's pioneering research, and probably Melanesia's most hierarchical polity. Ironically, though, very little is actually known ethnographically about Omarakana's spatial layout. In this article I seek to compensate for that deficiency, arguing that Omarakana's seemingly concentric contours encode transformations of indigenous symbolism involving recurrent metaphors drawn from at least three conjoined semantic contexts of wide distribution across the Austronesian sphere and beyond: the double bisection of ‘male’ versus ‘female’; the botanical imagery of ‘base’, ‘body’, ‘tip’, and ‘fruit’; and various elements of ‘canoe’ symbolism. This alternative view of Omarakana's spatio‐temporal plan sheds new light on various additional dimensions of Trobriand sociality and cosmology while elaborating classic and contemporary anthropological theories of dualism.     

Ethnonationalism,ethnic nationalism,and mini‐nationalism: A comparison of Connor,Smith and Snyder

Some terms have been coined to highlight the important relation between nationalism and ethnicity. However, there has been much confusion as to the meaning of such concepts as ‘ethnonationalism’, ‘ethnic nationalism’ and ‘mini‐nationalism’. This article compares the three terms, as used respectively in the works of Walker Connor, Anthony Smith and Louis Snyder. These scholars are selected not only because of their well‐respected position in the study of nationalism but also because their works are representative of each of the three concepts. The comparison finds that since both Connor and Smith emphasized the ethnic dimension of nationalism, their ideas can be presented in one analytical framework. In fact, Connor's ‘ethnonationalism’ and Smith's ‘ethnic nationalism’ overlap with each other. However, Smith's theory of nationalism is comprehensive enough to take care of the fact that the nationalisms of many new states of today's world have no ethnic base at all, whereas Connor's analysis makes no mention of this. In this respect, Smith's model is preferred to that of Connor. Finally, Snyder's ‘mini‐nationalism’ is seen as the least useful concept, since the use of size rather than ethnicity to classify nationalisms does not increase our understanding of the concept.     

Spectres of Seppo: the afterlives of Finland's nuclear waste experts

This article examines how Finland's nuclear waste repository safety assessment experts summoned memories of Seppo: a deceased colleague whose ‘spectre’ was said to still ‘haunt’ their workplace. First, it tracks how Seppo appeared in predecessor parables: cautionary tales told about his death, which conveyed value judgements about how experts ought to act, engage, and aspire. Second, it explores how Seppo's long-time ‘right-hand man’ Gustav still felt haunted by his colleague's affective intensities, scientific vision, and sharp tongue. This led Gustav to prod his workmates to reconsider how they modelled Finland's ecosystems many millennia into the future. Studying this ethnographically revealed how traces of Seppo's past life infused living experts with emotions, opened them to alternative futures, and spurred them to rethink their professional values. This article concludes by introducing expert afterlives as a temporal, epistemic, and affective nexus that can shape how technocratic projects are organized and how expert knowledge is made.     

Seeing Oneself Seeing Oneself: White Nihilism in Ethnography and Theory

This essay dwells on the intersection of three historical contemporaries: (1) American anthropology's ‘reflexive turn’; (2) the rise of Michel Foucault's motif of ‘the gaze’ within anthropology; and (3) the spread of the aesthetics of ‘white nihilism.’ The intersection materializes in the visual trope of self-reflexivity. White nihilism, according to one account, is a self-loathing kind of reflexive gaze, preemptive of criticism and desirous of self-possession. The paper argues that Foucault's idea of the panoptic gaze had a similar effect on anthropological self-reflexivity. The essay contrasts the American reception of Foucault with the case of Francophone anthropology – including ‘the Other Foucault’ – in which self-reflexivity involves self-loss or self-division.     

How can we meet ‘the demands of the day’? Producing an affective,reflexive, interpretive,public sociology of ‘race’

This article argues for a public sociology of ‘race’ that can respond to Weber's injunction that sociology should ‘meet the demands of the day’. While the author's version of these demands – for a society of autonomous individuals and groups, living as equals – is utopian, the main argument offered here is that a sociology of ‘race’ should be a modified version of Burawoy's ‘public sociology’. Adopting Bauman's notion of a sociology of interpreters, a further suggestion is that this type of sociology needs to be reflexive and affective. Based on an analysis of his own sociological education in the late 1960s, his participation in social and political movements in which ‘race’ was key, and with brief reference to the sociology of ‘race’, the author argues that the emotions that circulated in each arena need to be examined, acknowledged and incorporated if theoretical and practical progress is to be made.     

Giving the silent majority a stronger voice? Initiatives to empower Muslim women as part of the UK's ‘War on Terror’

Abstract

This article provides a gendered analysis of the ‘War on Terror’ in the UK context. Specifically it looks at initiatives to empower Muslim women, which were part of New Labour's Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda, the impetus for which stemmed from the idea that, as ‘the silent majority’, women need to be given a ‘stronger voice’. Based on analysis of qualitative interviews, this article situates these initiatives within a broader policy landscape of debates on multiculturalism, community cohesion and Britishness. It explores interviewees' understandings of Muslim women's silence in relation to those suggested by policy discourse, considering the ways in which the state's attempt to ‘give voice’ worked in practice. I argue that the operation of such initiatives continued to constrain Muslim women's voices, restricting ‘voice’ to a narrow range of speakers speaking about a narrow range of issues.     

Social representations of ‘mixed-race’ in early twenty-first-century Britain: content,limitations, and counter-narratives

Over the last two decades, lay and professional interest in Britain's ‘mixed-race’ population has markedly increased, following dramatic growth in mixing and mixedness. As is often the case with new phenomena, agencies in the sphere of popular culture have stepped in to offer the wider public interpretative representations of this ‘new’ group. Drawing on challenging concepts, like demographic growth rates and projections, the family ‘norm’, the ostensible benefits of heterozygosity, and the drawbacks of claimed ‘in-betweenness’, they have offered us a picture of the ‘mixed-race’ population that is sometimes at variance with lived experiences or the harder image of statistical reality. Social representation theory is used to explore the limitations of these representations and to offer a number of counter-narratives that are grounded in the evidence base.     

Motherlands? Some Notes on Women and Nationalism in India and Africa

The relation of women to nationalism is problematic, both in political adjudications of nationalism and in women's status both as subjects and as objects of signification, in narrating the nation. This is nowhere more poignantly patent than in the relation of motherhood and nationalism. This paper compares some recent approaches to representations of ‘mothers of the nation’ in India and South Africa. Three aspects of the problem are highlighted. Firstly, how far images of the mothers of the nation are masculinist creations, rather than ones which women themselves author? Secondly, how does the glorification of the mother in nationalist representations relate to the corporeal experiences of real mothers? Thirdly, how far does such imagery unite or divide women in its rhetorical stress on their identity as mothers?     

Only one Mayweather: a critique of hope from the hopeful

Professional boxing offers hope of vast wealth and global mobility for aspiring athletes in Accra, hopes bolstered by the understanding that Ghanaians are particularly suited to boxing's attrition. However, when boxers become active in the global industry, they encounter power relations which locate them as cheap, subordinate labour, and stymie their championship hopes. As boxers build lives through the sport, they reflect critically on the role their hopes of ‘making it big’ play in perpetuating industry inequalities, recognizing what I call the ideological function of hope. Despite this, they remain committed to hopes of dramatic success. Their simultaneous optimism and cynicism complicates contemporary accounts of hope as a strategy of resilience in contexts of profound uncertainty. Building on ethnographic research with Accra boxers, I theorize hoping as a paradoxical experience of critique and optimism in equal measure, to account for the contradictory ways people act when orienting themselves towards better futures.     

Relationship between Serum Testosterone, Dominance and Mating Success in Père David's Deer Stags

We conducted an experiment in the Beijing Milu Park to study the social behavior of male Père David's deer, and related social behavior to social position and serum testosterone level of the stags during rut. We classified the stags into three rank classes according to their rutting behavior: ‘harem master’, ‘challenger’ and ‘bachelor’. We monitored the behaviors of four ‘harem masters’, five ‘challengers’ and five ‘bachelors’, and analyzed serum testosterone levels in blood samples of those 14 stags using radioimmunoassay. We defined the effectiveness value, E = A/T, to assess the effectiveness of herding or mating attempts made by stags (‘T’ represents the frequency of herding or mating attempts made by a stag and ‘A’ represents the frequency of herding or mating attempts accepted by hinds). We found that: (1) the ‘harem masters’ and the ‘challengers’ displayed more frequent rut and locomotive behaviors but fewer ingestion behaviors than the ‘bachelors’; (2) serum testosterone levels in the ‘harem masters’ and the ‘challengers’ were higher than that in the ‘bachelors’; (3) effectiveness value of herding attempts differed significantly between the three types of stags, being highest in the ‘harem masters’ and the lowest in the ‘bachelors’; and (4) effectiveness value of mating attempts was significantly greater for the ‘harem masters’ than for the ‘challengers’. We conclude that: (1) reproductive behavior of the Père David's deer stags is strongly associated with social rank; (2) social roles of Père David's deer stags during the rut are related to the testosterone secretion; and (3) rank class affects the mating opportunity of the stags.     

The impasse of modernity: personal agency,divine destiny,and the unpredictability of intimate relationships in Morocco

Following the romantic vicissitudes of Ghizlan, a professional woman in her thirties, this article explores the expectations and unexpected outcomes of love in a rapidly changing Moroccan town. Imagined as a pure and elective union between two individuals, love manifests itself in Ghizlan's lived experience as a dangerous adventure along the thin line between human agency and divine destiny, personal desires and social constraints. In the wake of the Islamic revival, a purified idea of ‘Islamic modernity’ provides the religious imagination and vocabulary with which Ghizlan recomposes the unfulfilled promises of love and discusses recent developments in Morocco. Interweaving love and destiny, Ghizlan's reflections reveal a perspective on agency and (inter)subjectivity that exceeds intentionality, desire, and rational understanding. Highlighting the fundamental roles of human passions and transcendental powers in people's ethical and existential journeys, this article hopes to contribute to an emerging ‘anthropology of ethics and freedom’. It broadens current anthropological debates by interrogating the very meanings of choice, freedom, and responsibility in a world where personal agency meets human powers, divinely preordained futures, and material contingencies.     

HIV,Embodied Secrets,and Intimate Labour in Northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article explores how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies. Women conspicuously enhance their beauty in an attempt to defend themselves against the violence of social exclusion. Moreover, they do so in order to forge safe, loving, and prosperous relationships with their boyfriends, husbands, and families. My goal is to understand how intimacy, as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state, characterises these women's corporeal and sartorial acts. Further, I question how these embodied practices become imbricated in exchange relations with family members, health workers, and the larger community. To describe these routinised toils and triumphs as women seek to care for themselves and others, I employ the term ‘intimate labour’. I demonstrate how women gain access to social and economic resources by attending to and capitalising on the sensual and bodily desires and needs of others.     

Contact,trust and social capital in Northern Ireland: a qualitative study of three mixed communities

In a recent paper, Robert Putnam (2007) challenges the contact hypothesis by arguing that ethnic diversity causes people to ‘hunker down’ and essentially withdraw themselves from society. Drawing on qualitative data collected from three mixed communities in Northern Ireland, this paper explores the extent and quality of contact experienced by Protestants and Catholics in their everyday lives. Themes emerging from our data are generally consistent with the contact hypothesis. There is also some support for Putnam's theory that mixed environments can induce ‘hunkering down’ and that inter-group trust may be compromised. However, our data challenge Putnam's argument that these responses are a consequence of ‘anomie’ or ‘social malaise’. Rather, we find that withdrawal from social activity in the neighbourhoods we observed was a calculated response at times of threat, often aimed at protecting existent positive inter-ethnic relations.     

Templates and exclusions: victim centrism in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on ‘survivor’ experience in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of ‘survivor’, ‘cultural genocide’, ‘trauma’, and ‘healing’ became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canada's Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of ‘victim centrism’, including the ways that ‘truth‐telling’ can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canada's TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school ‘survivor’ as the focal point for understanding policy‐driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity.     

Max Weber in the thought of Edward Shils (1910–1995) and Ernest Gellner (1925–1995): the paradox of two Weberian approaches to the understanding of nations and nationalism?

This article traces the paradoxical impact of Weber's oeuvre on two major scholars of nationalism, Ernest Gellner and Edward Shils. Both these scholars died in 1995, leaving behind a rich corpus of writings on the nation and nationalism, much of which was inspired by Max Weber. The paradox is that although neither scholar accepted Weber's sceptical attitude to the concept of ‘nation’, they both used his other major concepts, such as ‘rationality’, ‘disenchantment’, ‘unintended consequences’, the ‘ethic of responsibility’ and ‘charisma’, in their very analyses of the nation and nationalism. And they both saw, each in his own way, the nation and nationalism as constitutive elements of modern societies. However, the paradox ceases being a paradox if one sees the integration, by Shils and Gellner, of concepts of the nation and of nationalism in the analysis of modernity, as a development of Weber's ideas.     

Scale and trends in species richness: considerations for monitoring biological diversity for political purposes

Switzerland's governmental ‘Biodiversity Monitoring’ program is designed to produce factual information on the dynamics of biodiversity within the country for governmental agencies, politicians, and the general public. Monitoring a complex issue like biodiversity in order to give relevant and accurate messages to the general public and politicians within a politically relevant timescale and at moderate cost means focusing on few elements. Because relevant human impacts on biodiversity operate differently at different spatial scales, we need at least three different indicators to observe changes over time in local (‘within‐habitat’), landscape (‘habitat‐mosaic’), and macro‐scale (‘regional’) diversity. To keep things as simple as possible, we use species richness as an indicator for all three levels of diversity, just defining three different spatial scales (10 m², 1 km², regions, respectively). Each indicator is based on a number of taxonomic groups which have been selected mainly on the basis of costs and the availability of appropriate methods.     

Kwaliteit van leven bij dementie

Different definitions of quality of life (QOL) are found in the literature. This raised the question which domains are viewed as really important by persons with dementia. In an explorative study the opinions of persons with dementia (community-dwelling and living in nursing homes), were compared to those of professional carers and instruments for QOL in dementia. Data were gathered through interviews, focus groups and literature study. Most QOL-domains mentioned as important by persons with dementia were also acknowledged by carers and in measurement instruments. Some domains, however, were not mentioned by the carers (‘sense of aesthetics’, ‘financial situation’, ‘being useful’ and ‘spirituality’), or not selected in the measuring instruments (‘security and privacy’, ‘self-determination and freedom’, ‘being useful’ and ‘spirituality’). This indicates differences in perspectives on quality of life between persons with dementia, professional caregivers and researchers. Subsequently it was studied to what degree professionals focus on the QoL-domains that persons with dementia consider essential. Caregivers working on 29 units and 3 day care facilities of 13 nursing homes and in 12 meeting centers filled out a questionnaire (N=374). They reported to focus at least to some degree on most domains considered important by persons with dementia. However, little attention was paid to the domains ‘financial situation’ and ‘being useful’. Professionals offering daytime activities focused more than 24-hour care staff on ‘attachment’, ‘enjoyment of activities’, ‘sense of aesthetics’, and ‘being useful’ This article is a translation and merging of 1) Dröes et al. Quality of life in dementia in perspective; an explorative study of variations in opinions among people with dementia and their professional caregivers, and in literature. Dementia: The International Journal 2006; 5 (4): 533–558, and 2) Gerritsen et al. Differences in perspective: do professional caregivers focus on the Quality of life domains that are important for people with dementia? American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias 2007; 22:176–183.