The Social Life of Death on Delhi's Streets: Unclaimed Souls,Pollutive Bodies,Dead Kin and the Kinless Dead

ABSTRACT

How does the status of ‘street children’ in life inflect the narrative representation of their deaths? Street-dwelling children's interactions with death in North India reveal much about how their identities are produced in public domains. In this paper, I examine several instances of ‘homeless child’ death to illuminate the place of such subjects in society and urban space, and to interrogate the degree to which they can be rendered ‘recognizable’ or ‘grievable’, in Butler's (2010) terminology. In particular, I explore the presence or absence of kin in the ways that child death is narrated. I also explore the related question of how living ‘vagabond (aawara) children’ situate their status in narratives of death and loss. I conclude with discussions of how children negotiate their orientations towards death through ghost narratives, and of the space-, economy- and age-bound assignment of pollutive tasks once reserved for low castes to street-dwelling children.     

`Two Laws‘, Ontologies,Histories: Ways of Being Aranda Today

At Hermannsburg, in central Australia, Western Aranda people frequently propose that they live by ‘two laws’, Aranda law and God's law. This is a common phenomenon remarked throughout northern Australia and analysed by a number of anthropologists in the past. This discussion throws new light on the issue by interpreting `two-laws' talk in terms of a culture of encompassment that marks the emergence of historical or ‘ethnic’ identities as Aboriginal people make the transition from an autonomous world to one in which they must engage in the practices of European orders that can come to dominate their lives. The discussion deploys ‘ontology’ and ‘ethnicity’ in order to mark different magnitudes of difference that can shape Aboriginal experience today.     

‘It's true,I'm English… I'm not lying’: essentialized and precarious English identities

This article explores relationships between Englishness and racialization in order to consider the potential for English identities that are progressive in anti-essentialist or multicultural terms. The article draws on data from interviews in which people from a South London area talk about Englishness. I will examine how English identities are understood by participants who are white and participants who are not white. While white participants experience Englishness as a taken-for-granted identity, for participants who are not white English identities are a more calculated, precarious performance. I will then examine discussions of ‘who can be English’. While most participants argue that ‘anyone can be English’ in principle, this is not necessarily the case in practice. It will be suggested that talk of Englishness is particularly constrained by relationships between Englishness, whiteness and ancestry, but that for those who experience Englishness as precarious there are signs that this is not necessarily the case.     

Skin colour and race as analytic concepts

White working-class people have been portrayed in the media and political discourse as unable to keep pace with the demands associated with living in multicultural Britain. In this article, I shall challenge such representations of white working-class people's attitudes towards racialized ‘others’. To do this I explore the views of the members of a white working-class family to the changing racial composition of their once ethnically homogenous council estate (municipal housing). My ethnographic attention is directed to the connections, affective ties and emotional investments that the members of this family have with the estate and its community, and the ways in which BrAsians become configured in these narratives of belonging. I will show how analytical attention to the connections and attachments that white working-class people form with those whom they identify as ethnic and racial ‘others’ provides an account of white working-class identities that undermines popular representations of ‘them’.     

Cruising: ‘Moral Panic’ and the Cronulla Riot

In this paper I draw on ethnography I undertook amongst locals in the Cronulla area after the riot of December 2005. A number of the young beach goers I came across had been on a P&O ‘schoolies cruise’ at the time of the riot. For two weeks the students depended on the media for information about what was going on in their suburbs. Sailing back, I was told, a pumped‐up chorus of ‘Shi‐ire!’ and ‘White Pride!’ rang out over Sydney Heads, as expectations climbed high of the ship being met by gangs of Middle Eastern youths, ready for the fight. Back on the beach, months later, bodies baking in the sun try to reconcile the thought of riot with what they know about Australia, and Cronulla, as a place of laid back, leisurely, lazily tolerant people. How can the two scenes of bodily excess be brought together? What are the limits of the ‘moral panic’ idea, in relation to the Cronulla riot? How do the competing truths of major discourses on Cronulla misrepresent the community in question?     

‘Not anymore,not yet’: Australian–Hungarians rediscover the ‘old‐new’ Hungary

This article examines the return visits of Australian‐Hungarians to their homeland after 1989 and the different types of homecoming experiences after an extended period of separation. The focus of the paper is returnees’ perceptions of changes to Hungary or lack thereof. I analyse the distinction between the ‘desired/nostalgic past’, which Hungarian returnees nurtured during the decades of separation and expected to rediscover upon return, and the ‘disdained past’ of the Communist dictatorship, which they had fled and hoped never to encounter again. The findings demonstrate that people interpret both past and present in relation to hopes, expectations and disappointments situated within particular nationalist imaginaries, political projects and ideological prisms. This allows us to analyse the nexus between local, national and diasporic belonging through post‐socialist identities, orientations toward democracy and understandings of ‘nation’.     

Self and Illness: Changing Relationships in Response to Life in the Community Following Prolonged Institutionalisation

Increasingly since the 1950s mentally ill people in the Western world have been removed from institutional care. In this paper I am concerned primarily with the response of psychiatric patients to living in a ‘normal’ community environment, in particular the extent to which they are able to assume new social roles and identities after long periods of institutional care. I conclude that despite persistent mental illness, deinstitutionalised patients have developed new roles and new identities, a new sense of independence, new coping abilities and a capacity to articulate future goals and desires. The findings are drawn from two and a half years fieldwork in an Australian capital city, where a group of long‐stay psychiatric in‐patients, who would not normally be considered for discharge, were given the opportunity to live in mainstream society. This accompanied the reduction of in‐patient beds and the eventual closure of a large psychiatric hospital as it amalgamated with another hospital nearby.     

‘Playing’ at the ethnic boundary: strategic boundary making/unmaking among ethnic Chinese groups in Australia

The sociological literature has constructed a systematic typology of ‘modes’ and ‘means’ of strategic ethnic boundary making/unmaking. Through exploring different strategies, scholars illustrate the processes and contexts of boundary expansion or contraction. Other scholars also distinguish ethnic elements and ‘moral' values attached to certain ethnicities but not to others. This paper acknowledges dynamic boundary making/unmaking and moral aspects of ethnicity, while exploring the different degrees to which national and pan-national identity nest within each other among ethnic Chinese groups, as well as how ethnic boundary becomes a field where people ‘play' in their everyday interactions. Based on participant observations and in-depth interviews from two pan-Chinese worksites in Australia, the paper argues that different interpretations of ethnic identity as well as how different identities (national and pan-national) are nested give people room to ‘play' at the ethnic boundary and result in different outcomes. This paper also shows that people can cross the ethnic boundary (between Taiwanese/Hong Kongese and PRC-Chinese) without expanding/contracting the existing categories or ‘repositioning/transvaluing' their ethnic statuses.     

Making the Baruya great again: From glorified great men to modern suffering subjects?

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of ‘making great men.’ Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being ‘last place’ (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being ‘the greatest people’ of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to ‘be great’ reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a ‘suffering slot’, the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship.     

Pocket calculator: a humdrum ‘obviator’ in Papua New Guinea?

This article examines the significance of pockets for controlling money in Highland Papua New Guinea. Contextualizing elaborate ‘systems’ for compartmentalizing monies in separate pockets, I draw upon the connection Highlanders make between transaction and skin. Pockets, I argue, offer opportunities to hide one's wealth reserves while gifting, keeping intentions opaque and leaving interlocutors guessing at the meaning of donors' speech, and forcing recipients to perceive their gift as ample. The article suggests that expectations are deliberately conventionalized in order to be exceeded, drawing parallels with Roy Wagner's notion of obviation. After characterizing Gorokan pockets and their gifting ‘logic’, I analyse how pocket‐users are themselves conventionalized as forthright or selfish in local discourse, based upon the pockets they display and where their clothes come from. Giving people clothing that includes pockets is therefore a way to regain control over their capacity to reveal wealth from their pockets.     

‘Shrinking Worlds’: Cronulla,Anti‐Lebanese Racism and Return Visits in the Sydney Hadchiti Lebanese Community

By drawing on observations gained from ethnographic fieldwork in western Sydney with immigrants who are Maronite Catholics from Hadchit, North Lebanon, I demonstrate the pervasiveness of anti‐Lebanese racism in Australia and the way it cuts across class, gender and religion within the Lebanese community. My fieldwork was conducted around the time of two pivotal events: the 2005 Cronulla Riots in Sydney and the July 2006 war in Lebanon. By focusing on the experience of racism within the Hadchiti community, I show that the problems the Lebanese face in Australia cannot be attributed only to their economic disadvantage, low education and religious difference. On the contrary, the Hadchiti experience shows that Australia has a ‘glass ceiling’ and that there are distinct limits to the ability of successful Lebanese to translate their success into national belonging in Australian society. This has been particularly acute for the second generation of Hadchitis in Australia and has contributed to their search for transnational belonging back in Lebanon. During return visits to Hadchit, members of the second generation strive to find a place in the society their parents left behind, only to discover that they are considered to be ‘Australian’ rather than ‘Lebanese’. Thus, they are trapped in a migration process that renders them out of place in both Australia and Lebanon.     

History and ‘Mentawai’: Colonialism,Scholarship and Identity in the Rereiket,West Indonesia

This paper takes a critical look at the discursive construction of the identity of ‘the Mentaiwaians’ who are purported to inhabit the Mentawai islands in Western Indonesia. Out of a range of possible indigenous representations of identity ‘Mentawaian’ is the one that travellers and scholars universally use. I trace the formation of this representation in the very early literature on the islands authored by traders, travellers, scholars and missionaries. I then go on to examine the (hegemonic) effects of this on the way in which anthropologists have subsequently come to construct discursively the ‘culture’ of the ‘Mentawaians’. As an alternative, I propose that anthropological scholarship needs to take greater heed of the ways in which the local inhabitants construct their own identities. I briefly illustrate this through the example of my own work which describes a shifting and contextual construction of local identity in a particular locale on Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai islands.     

On Shifting Ground: Changing Formulations of Place in Anthropology

This article explores the ways in which anthropologists have formulated ‘place’. In recent years, place and its companion concept ‘home’ have become themes conceived in terms of fluidity, unboundedness and multiplicity. These formulations are most apparent in that body of literature concerned with people who move between geographical and cultural worlds. The nature of recent conceptions I argue, is a necessary adaptation if anthropologists are to capture meaning in a world of increasing transnational flux.     

Positionings of the black middle-classes: understanding identity construction beyond strategic assimilation

This paper explores the identities of Britain’s black middle-classes. Drawing upon interviews with seventy-two participants, I theorize a ‘triangle of identity’. This triangle emphasizes how black middle-class identities are constructed within the dynamics of three poles. Firstly, there is the class-minded pole whereby class comes to the fore as a conceptual scheme; secondly, there is the ethnoracial autonomous pole whereby ‘race’ is central to one’s identity and whiteness is actively resisted; and lastly there is the strategic assimilation pole, where one continually moves between classed and racialized spheres of action. This tripartite approach to identity builds upon previous research by further exploring the social, cultural and phenomenological distinctions within Britain’s black middle-classes.     

Racialized national identity construction in the ancestral homeland: Japanese American migrants in Japan

This article examines Japanese Americans in Japan to illuminate how ‘Japanese American’ – an ethnic minority identity in the US – is reconstructed in Japan as a racialized national identity. Based on fifty interviews with American citizens of Japanese ancestry conducted between 2004 and 2007, I demonstrate how interactions with Japanese in Japan shape Japanese Americans’ racial and national understandings of themselves. After laying out a theoretical framework for understanding the shifting intersection of race, ethnicity, and nationality, I explore the interactive process of racial categorization and ethnic identity assertion for Japanese American transnationals in Japan. This process leads to what I call racialized national identities – the intersection of racial and national identities in an international context – and suggests that US racial minority identities are constructed not only within the US, but abroad as well.     

‘It is hard being the different one all the time’: gringos and racialized identity in lifestyle migration to Ecuador

This paper explores the identities that North American lifestyle migrants in Ecuador adopt as they adjust to life in a new racialized social environment. It is based on qualitative interviews with migrants from North America, as well as ethnographic field notes. North Americans describe their growing community in racialized terms and adopt a series of practices that demonstrate anxiety about their position in the racialized social order of Ecuador. The paper discusses the strategies that North American migrants engage in to diminish the importance of their racialized identities in Ecuador. I identify two main practices that complicate North American incorporation in Ecuador: self-policing practices that aim to optimize Ecuadorians' perceptions of them; and desires for integration and ethnic mobility, which seek to erase their ‘Otherness’.     

Negotiating belonging: plants,people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

This article focuses on human‐plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non‐Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human‐plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other‐than‐human relations in a more‐than‐human world.     

Fragments of a Composite Identity: Aspects of Australian Nationalism in a Sports Setting1

I argue that it is erroneous to view nations as culturally homogeneous entities. Rather, all nations are riven by multiple divisions. What characterises a nation is that the people constituting it believe that they share a sameness with their co-nationals. So, the idea of cultural homogeneity is a myth that breathes life into nationalism: it is a cohering leitmotiv, a predicate of the ‘imagined community’ that can be subscribed to in different ways by people of diverse social locations and of disparate interests. Whereas most writers on nationalism write from a top-down perspective, I side with Hobsbawm in posing the question of how ‘ordinary’ people embrace a belonging to their nation. I maintain that there is no single, simple axis of national cohesion: rather, in any nation, there are multiple ways of identifying with and intuiting the collectivity. The emergence of the axioms of Australian nationhood, particularly with regard to how ideas of Australian distinctiveness emerged in counterpoint to British based discourses, is explored. I suggest that people ‘lock-in’ to these axioms through the symbology of specific events and situations. Attention is directed to the Stawell Easter Gift professional running carnival as an event that, amongst other things, provides occasions that enable participants to ‘lock-in’ to the meta-discourse of national identity.     

Serial Callers: Communication Technologies and Political Personhood in Contemporary Uganda

ABSTRACT

Together, radio and mobile phones have been the object of many political expectations held by development actors in Africa. Stating that they enable ‘participation’ is, however, not enough to understand what is at stake in a given context. It is necessary to describe exactly the kind of participation taking place. Despite development projects inceptors’ intentions, the way people use ICT (information and communication technologies) objects sometimes leads to a rerouting of their political meaning. This article deciphers these sideway uses and what they imply in the Ugandan context. Based on the example of ‘serial callers' (people who intensively call in during radio talk shows), it demonstrates that ICT objects become the site of the elaboration of particular ways of conceiving one's roles, status and duties in the polity, as an ‘educator’ or a ‘representative’, blurring established distinctions between political representation and participation, and offers a nuanced picture of the complexities of patronage politics.     

Primitivist tourism and anthropological research: awkward relations★

Many anthropologists dislike the tourism depicted in the film Cannibal tours (1988), which values visited people for their supposed embodiment of an archaic mode of life, isolated from capitalist modernity. Here I approach such tourism through how its participants relate to anthropology, based on research into encounters between tourists and Korowai of Indonesian Papua. I juxtapose three patterns. First, Korowai sometimes assimilate me to ‘tourist’ or ‘tour guide’. Second, tourists often embrace ‘anthropology’ as an adjunct to their primitivist goals. Third, certain tourists investigate their own primitivism, in ways that parallel my research on that topic. This diversity of alignments of tourist, anthropologist, and Korowai calls for an analytic strategy not of seeking out the ultimate basic relations between these character-types, but of understanding categorization as a practice of its own, through which categorizers grapple with broader historical conditions.