God,Fatherland, Home: revealing the dark side of our anthropological virtue

The article uses ethnographic research on right-wing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect more generally on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the relevant epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged as an important disciplinary current. It then goes on to consider how and why the author's research on right-wing political practice in Bolivia diverged from the disciplinary expectations of engaged anthropology. After reflecting on the implications of this shift, the article concludes by arguing for a methodological recalibration that allows anthropologists to take seriously the ideologies and cultural logics of contemporary right-wing mobilization, particularly social and political movements that are animated by what Edmund Burke described as ‘just prejudice’.     

Kinship and a counter-hegemonic social order: former revolutionaries in southern Oman

Critical reinterpretations of kinship studies questioned earlier ideas that kinship relations reflect and reproduce a dominant social order. ‘New’ kinship studies have nevertheless shown how even non-traditional family forms can reproduce traditional ideas about relatedness, values, and social hierarchies. Promising grounds for resisting ongoing tendencies to link kinship with conservative social reproduction arise from better understanding the circumstances under which kinship relations reproduce a counter-hegemonic social order. Kinship practices of former militants of a defeated revolutionary liberation movement in Dhufar, Oman, make visible veterans’ networks and relations which transgress dominant tribal, ethnic, racial, and gendered hierarchies. These practices show how, even in inauspicious circumstances of political defeat and marginalization, kinship relations can reproduce a counter-hegemonic social order – as well as a social afterlife of defeated revolution.     

Video Ethnography and Critical Research for More Democratic Urbanization: The Case of Milan’s Chinatown

This article reflects on the notion of urban democracy through a video-ethnographic study of the conflicts that followed the 2007 riots in Milan’s Chinese neighborhood. I explore how the theoretical and methodological union of critical urban ethnographies with social documentary techniques can contribute to praxis for more democratic urbanization. Through selected video-ethnographic vignettes, I discuss how such an approach involves issues of ethics, voice, form and politics. The documentary exposes the material effects of inequality and domination in a unique and vivid manner; it also offers alternatives and encourages the ethnographer to assume a clear position in intervening on hegemonic practices. The conclusion explains how the production and consumption of such video-ethnographies affect the social, moral and, most importantly, political perception of a particular urban setting.     

Catching the pulse: money and circulation in a Sri Lankan marketplace

This article traces the movement, management, and generation of money in a Sri Lankan wholesale vegetable market, pulling into focus certain local economic and moral logics. What traders do with cash is revealing. I argue that how traders use money – the way it is handled, risked, spent, and lent – exhibits skill, implies hierarchy, and cultivates social connections. Exploring idioms of economic activity such as ‘catching the pulse’ and ‘rolling the money’, the article examines relations between different kinds of trader. Moving money through businesses permits participation in the complex communication network of the market. This is central to existing in the social world of the trader. I argue that following money notes – rather than commodities – as they travel around the marketplace and between the hands of transactors renders ethnographically observable the formations of personhood and long‐term relations that take place in the market.     

When Silence Becomes Law: Moral Constructions of the Violent Individual

Western law constructs the individual as an agent who can assume responsibility for action independently of context, thus creating an accessible place for hiding systemic political violence. This article considers how individual surrogates of political violence who silence the messages of a Oaxacan assassination emerge from reflexivity as a self-discipline that creates individual agency, law's notion of individual responsibility, and the personalizing processes of bodily violence. Thirty-two years after the assassination, its ethnographer confronts unwelcome knowledge revealed when the silence is broken. Reexamination of his own experiences the night of the murder uncovers ideological levers through which those who become the ‘individuals’ of events are led to detach their behaviors from experience to accept legal constructions of societal relationships.     

Declarations of dependence: labour,personhood, and welfare in southern Africa

Dependence on others has often figured, in liberal thought, as the opposite of freedom. But the political anthropology of southern Africa has long recognized relations of social dependence as the very foundation of polities and persons alike. Reflecting on a long regional history of dependence ‘as a mode of action’ allows a new perspective on certain contemporary practices that appear to what we may call ‘the emancipatory liberal mind’ simply as lamentable manifestations of a reactionary and retrograde yearning for paternalism and inequality. Instead, this article argues that such practices are an entirely contemporary response to the historically novel emergence of a social world where people, long understood (under both pre‐capitalist and early capitalist social systems) as scarce and valuable, have instead become seen as lacking value, and in surplus. Implications are drawn for contemporary politics and policy, in a world where both labour and forms of social membership based upon it are of diminishing value, and where social assistance and the various cash transfers associated with it are of increasing significance.     

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.     

Sometimes Similar,Sometimes Dangerously Different: Exploring Resonance,Laminations and Subject-Formation in South India

This paper explores the ways in which particular individuals or groups are cast as problematically other at certain times by exploring the relationship between empathy and antipathy – identified as products of ‘resonance’, or a certain kind of responsiveness to embodied encounters with others and also to concerns, ideas and discourses that originate locally or from elsewhere. Consequent effects on subject-formation and affordances of social possibilities are explored through an intensive focus on one Muslim man. The notion of a ‘laminated subjectivity’ is presented and elucidated. The paper draws on ethnography conducted in a Tamil town and is set against the backdrop of Hindu–Muslim relations in India.     

Unsettling Power: Domestic Violence,Gender Politics,and Struggles over Sovereignty in Ghana

This article provides a new lens for analyzing power formations in human rights practices by examining Ghanaian struggles over a Domestic Violence Bill. While the hegemonic character of human rights advocacy is well-established, we know less about exercises of power in discourses and practices that oppose rights. I analyze how the Ghanaian government constructed the discourse of cultural sovereignty and deployed it against women's rights. The government legitimated this discourse by appropriating the voice of ‘the people’ and superimposing notions of ‘foreignness’ onto both the Bill and Ghanaian women's rights activists. Drawing on the historiography of colonialism and ethnography of political performance, I argue that this case illustrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty is mobilized in a struggle over shifting configurations of gender, political activism, and state sovereignty.     

Fraternity and Terror: The Organization of Violence in Everyday Life

This paper was inspired by participant observation in the Coalfields towns of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. It is an attempt to demonstrate the significance of violence in the political practice of coal-miners. This significance has been overlooked in the recent enthusiasm for studies of ‘dominant ideologies’. Beyond this, the paper is an attempt to theorize the role of routine violence in the formation, maintenance and dissolution of social groups. The processes of group formation are an important subject for any theory of political practice.     

Time for Self-Sacrifice: Temporal Narratives,Politics and Ideals in African Prophetism

In this article I propose an approach to sacrifice through notions of time, memory and expectation, moving away from classical formalist definitions that highlight the ‘nature and function’ of sacrifice, and into ideas of meaning and experience and their insertion in particular ideologies of time. I will argue that sacrifice entails particular temporalities, participating in political and experiential realms of memory and expectation. For this, I will invoke a particular regime of sacrifice: the notion of self-sacrifice, as it circulates among a prophetic and messianic Christian movement of Angolan origin, the Tokoist Church.     

Unemployment,deindustrialization, and ‘community economy’ in eastern Germany

Drawing from an evening of fieldwork at an eastern German Protestant churchin the rapidly deindustrialized city of Leipzig, this article finalyzes a discussion among church leaders, former ‘dissidents,’ and unemployed workers on the subject of ‘community economy’ (Gemeinschaftsökonomie), a concept people interpret to represent a potential solution to the crisis of mass unemployment. Such local debates on unemployment offer a frame for understanding the re-negotiation of labor and social welfare in eastern Germany following socialism's end. finalyzing this discussion within the context of theoretical debates on ‘civil society,’ I follow Burawoy's and Gramsci's lead in fillustrating that the imagined economic sphere of ‘community economy’ is an ideological battle ground, where hegemonic discourse supporting economic neoliberalism may be either reinforced or subverted.     

‘Music is my AK‐47’: performing resistance in Belfast's rebel music scene

This article examines how some Irish republicans have used ‘rebel songs’ as a means to resist the hegemonic power of the British state, and how militant republicanism is invoked musically, through sonic and physical references to gunfire. It explores how the use of rebel songs has changed, the inherent tensions within today's scene, and how republicans attempt to co‐opt other conflicts as a means to strengthen their claim as resistance fighters. The article also analyses more nuanced resistances within the rebel music scene, exploring how competing republican factions use the same music to express opposing political positions, and why some musicians ultimately leave the scene on account of the musical and political restrictions placed upon them. In so doing, the article connects with ongoing attempts to rethink, remap, and develop new approaches to resistance within anthropology, while contributing to the developing subfield of ‘ethnomusicology in times of trouble’.     

In memoriam: Gustaf Bolinder 19/12 1888–16/7 1957

Veena Das's work on suffering suggests that the appropriate approach to the subject is one that grounds research in social experience. To honor this pitch of anthropology, I examine the global mediatization of the trauma of political violence and its moral implications. I also describe the professional appropriation of suffering that transforms political economic conditions into medical realities. Because social experience is itself undergoing a profound alteration in the present period of disordered capitalism, the very phenomenological conditions that we have assumed as an ‘existential’ basis for responding to human misery are also being ominously transformed.     

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

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

John W. Burgess,the racial state and the making of the American science of politics

This article examines the place of racial ideas in the constitution of political science as an academic discipline in the USA. For the Gilded Age generation that built the first PhD-granting departments in political science in the country, ‘race’ was the source of sovereignty, the basis of democratic legitimacy and a tool for delineating democracy's borders. It was also an important element of that cohort's aspiration to a ‘science’ of politics, distinct from what they viewed as the ‘abstract and formal’ theorizing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moreover, while the brand of racialism that characterized this founding moment came to seem outmoded within a few decades, in the 1920s political scientists seeking once again to claim an empirical, scientific basis for their discipline – and for American democracy – turned to new accounts and sciences of race.     

Paths of Relationship,Spirals of Exchange: Imag(in)ing North Pentecost Kinship

In Stone Men of Malekula: Vao (1942), a text that was published more than twenty‐five years after he carried out long‐term fieldwork in Vanuatu, John Layard introduced a new technique for rendering kinship data in diagrammatic form. Inspired in part by Gregory Bateson, his ‘circular technique’ was derived from diagrams drawn up according to the genealogical method, and was designed to overcome certain structural problems identified within these. One important implication of the ‘circular technique’ that is not made explicit in Layard's analysis is a resonance with many of the idioms and metaphors that ni‐Vanuatu evoke in talking about relationships of exchange and kinship. Where processes of birth, death, marriage and exchange are conceptualised in terms of a broad flow of departures and returns across discernible trajectories, images incorporating circles and spirals are utilised as key metaphors for understanding social relationships through space and time. Focusing on the Raga‐speaking district of North Pentecost, Vanuatu, this article explores such idioms while presenting a revision of Layard's circular technique.     

Genomic patenting and the utility requirement

This paper analyses the ways in which genomic knowledge is portrayed as useful knowledge in gene patenting in order to fulfil the ‘utility’/‘industrial applicability’ requirement for patentability. It gives examples of utility claims in gene patents and asks whether genomics (as opposed to genetics) changes our ideas about what is useful and what can be patented. It puts forward a provisional classification of different types of utility and argues that merely identifying the physiological function of a gene diverges radically from our commonsense understanding of what it is for an invention to be useful. Furthermore, social, political and ethical issues inevitably arise when discussing the utility requirement, because an invention cannot be useful in isolation from a social context.     

Postcoloniality,National Identity,Globalisation and the Simulacra of the Real

The focus of this paper is a famous boys' boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross section of post-colonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern’ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that contemporary social analysis needs to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their dissolution as an ‘inevitable’ by-product of ‘globalisation’; this seems to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so-called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘post-coloniality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation-state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ in order to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition where analyses of the relationship between nation-states and of the asymmetries within them continue to be important political tasks.