‘I was celebrating the justice that the victims got’: exploring irreconciliation among Bangladeshi human rights activists in London

This essay investigates transnational human rights activist networks seeking justice for war crimes committed during the Bangladesh War of 1971, especially in light of the International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Focusing on activists in London, it demonstrates the need to engage with transitional justice initiatives discursively and ethnographically in order to avoid losing sight of the ways in which uses of human rights concepts can veil power dimensions through universalist legalistic abstractions. The essay explores engagements with atrocities of the war by mapping the travel and uses of human rights tropes to articulate claims of justice. It showcases how in addressing the violence of the Bangladesh War, victor justice and punishment are emphasized while futures are imagined in which enemies no longer exist. In the examples, a language of justice is employed to call for prosecution, but justice is reframed so that it is equated with the impossibility of reconciling people on opposing sides during the war.     

‘Where are you from’ or ‘when did you come’? Temporal dimensions in migrants' reflections about settlement and return

In this article we explore the added value of foregrounding temporal dimensions in migration research. Age at the time of migration, length of stay in the country of settlement and individual life-cycle stages matter for migrants' settlement and return considerations. However, these factors are rarely put centre stage in analyses. We draw on data from sixty-seven informants with different country backgrounds, who had either immigrated recently, arrived as children, or were born in Norway. We find that the implications of temporal dimensions cut across national and ethnic backgrounds. Age at the time of migration and the relative proportion of life spent in the origin and in the settlement country play an important role in migrants' considerations about settlement and return; as does being single, a parent with small children, or retired. An approach foregrounding temporal dimensions thus reveals the changeability of considerations over time and highlights similarities and differences beyond ethnicity.     

‘Structure liberates?’: mixing for mobility and the cultural transformation of ‘urban children’ in a London academy

Abstract

This paper explores how the creation of a socially and ethnically mixed student body relates to mobility within the context of Beaumont Academy. This authoritarian school opened in 2004 under the ethos ‘structure liberates’. Based in a predominantly deprived, ethnic minority area of London, Beaumont seeks to culturally transform its students. With its outstanding GCSE results, the school has been championed as a blueprint for reform, yet the cultural implications underlying this approach remain unexamined. The ethos pathologizes the surrounding area while essentializing itself as an ‘oasis in the desert’ liberating students through discipline. The paper explores how mobility is embodied by students and the alterations or eliminations necessary to achieve it. These alterations produce raced and classed positions and bring them into focus, highlighting who needs to ‘adjust’ themselves to accrue value. Uncritical celebrations of mixed-ness conceal structural inequalities lingering beneath the rhetoric of happy multiculturalism and aspirational citizenship. These inequalities are exacerbated by a marketized education system.     

How to ‘catch’ floating populations? Research and the fixing of migration in space and time

Abstract

The recent ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences suggests that research always fixes mobility somehow in time and space, in order to understand it. Migration, being a form of mobility, has to be fixed on certain times and spaces in order to make it possible to define and research it. Being a geographer, I build on this insight in the first part of the article to re-read the critiques on post-war methodological nationalism. Reflecting on my own past research practice, I argue in the second part that leaving behind the methodological nationalism paradigm does not mean leaving behind the necessity to fix migration in time and space, on either the ontological or the practical methodological level. New ways of fixing are chosen and, out of recurring ontological and methodological choices, new migration stereotypes are developing such as what might be called ‘methodological ruralism’ in the case of Romanian migration.     

The meeting of Eastern Europe and Yemen: ‘Idealistic workers’ and ‘natural workers’ in early Zionist settlement in Palestine

This study questions the customary thesis according to which the dominant status of the ashkenazim (European Jews) over the mizrachim (Middle Eastern and North African Jews) in Israeli society is to be explained by the earlier arrival of the former in Palestine. It does so by demonstrating that an early wave of Yemenite Jews, who arrived in Palestine simultaneously with the founding fathers, remained in a subservient social position. Archival sources, memoirs, and contemporary newspapers are used to explain the low status of Yemenite Jews by reference to the broader context of the Jewish‐Arab conflict as it took shape in Palestine's labour and land markets.     

Gender and the dynamics of mobility: reflections on African migrant mothers and ‘transit migration’ in Morocco

By describing the everyday lives of African migrant mothers and their children in Morocco, this paper highlights how migration and ‘immobility’ in so-called ‘transit countries’ are gendering and gendered experiences. Relying on migrants' narratives, the paper demonstrates how migrants' transitions to motherhood create both specific and gendered spaces for agency and particular and gendered constraints upon agency that shape women migrants' mobility dynamics in space and time.     

‘For her protection and benefit’: the regulation of marriage-related migration to the UK

This paper argues that a two-tier system has evolved dividing intra-UK/EU marriages from extra-UK/EU marriages. For the former, marriage is a contract between two individuals overseen by a facilitating state. For the latter, marriage has become more of a legal status defined and controlled by an intrusive and obstructive state. I argue that this divergence in legislating regulation is steeped in an ethnicized imagining of ‘Britishness’ whereby the more noticeably ‘other’ migrants (by skin colour or religion) are perceived as a threat to the national character. The conceptualization of women as legally ‘disabled’ citizens (1870 Naturalisation Act) for whom a state must act as responsible patriarch, is a fundamental part of this imagining of the nation. The paper therefore examines the social (gendered and ethnicized) assumptions and political aims embedded within the legislation.     

‘So you are a mestiza’: Exploring the consequences of ethnic and racial clumping in the US academy

This paper intends to open a dialogue about the use of two specific labels in the US (i.e. ‘Chicanas’ and ‘Latinas’), with a special emphasis on how they are used in the US academy as both markers and identities. More specifically, this paper explores recent trends in the US academy by which women of Latin American descent are lumped together under the rubric Latinas, and in many cases assumed to be equivalent to Chicanas. Arguing that academia must learn to be more thoughtful when creating, defining and adopting categories, the article warns against recreating the very power dynamics we find in mainstream US society by way of these specific labels. Finally, ‘So you are a mestiza’ reminds its readers that, as a practice, social justice asks for a fundamental recognition of a culturally pluralist, democratic society. In this kind of society, histories must endure and multiple realities must be acknowledged.     

‘Failure in the air’: activist narratives,in-group story-telling,and keeping political possibility alive in Lebanon

Failure is often taken as an endpoint: anathema to political organizing and the death knell of social movements. To the degree that radical movements themselves dwell on failure, participants often consider the focus pathological. This article explores how, in the aftermath of the falling apart of long-term initiatives, Lebanese political activists were able to maintain their capacity to engage in transformative action. At a time when activists felt ‘failure in the air’, narrating prior political experiences communally, in formal and informal contexts, became crucial to (re)imagining one another as activists. Such stories narrated failure to compel collective action in the future, making failure itself a political resource; not the end, but a beginning. Throughout, this article engages in an affirmative anthropology that keeps alive the costs of failure even as it shows how radical political actors generate their capacity to act and their potential to imagine otherwise.     

‘Us’ and ‘Them’: The role of religion in mediating and challenging the ‘model minority’ and other civic boundaries

This article examines how Korean Americans use the cultural resources of religious communities to mediate race, ethnic, and socio-economic boundaries that have consequences for civic life. Specifically, I compare involvement of Korean Americans in second-generation Korean congregations to those in multiethnic churches. I find Korean Americans who participate in second-generation Korean churches use religion to largely reproduce images of Korean Americans as model minorities, and implicitly distance themselves from those whom they perceive as less financially successful. In contrast, Korean Americans in multiethnic congregations use religion to emphasize the commonality Korean Americans have with other minorities. By using a cultural framework that allows for the agency of individuals in identity and group boundary construction, this work more generally shows the potential for new Americans to use the cultural resources of local organizations to change existing ethnic and racial boundaries in the United States.     

Beyond reified categories: multidimensional identifications among ‘black’ and ‘Indian’ groups in Columbia and Mexico

Analyses of multicultural state-dictated social categories are often governed by those same categories, even while they deconstruct them. Nonetheless, these categories are often used in public spheres such as national imaginary or ethno-political activism. Taking a different point of departure, that of representations rather than the categories themselves, the aim of our paper is to understand the modes of classification that are relevant among four populations in Colombia and Mexico who would, a priori, be categorized as ‘black’ or ‘Indian’. The daily reality of these groups indicates other possible internal, sometimes even intersecting, kinds of categorizations, which, far from naturalizing the ‘Indian’ and ‘black’ categories, in fact reveal place-based social identifications. These identifications seem closer to the everyday lives and practices of the people in question, and underscore the local conceptions of their presence and agency in a given spot.     

‘We all eat the same bread’: the roots and limits of cosmopolitan bridging ties developed by Romanians in London

This paper investigates the social ties forged by Romanians in London with migrants of different origins in work and non-work contexts to offer a more nuanced view of ‘bridging’ social ties and related discussions of ‘everyday’ cosmopolitanism. Contrary to the overemphasis on ethnic ties seen as a form of bonding in migration research, the paper shows how Romanians bridge informally with many other migrants based on shared ‘non-native’ status. Alongside non-ethnically marked commonalities, ethnicity emerges as an important ingredient of cosmopolitan socialization, yet without necessarily signalling coexisting ethnic identities, as commonly assumed. Romanians' experiences further show that despite providing significant social and cultural capital, bridging ties with migrants, rather than natives, rarely accrue effective resources for social mobility. The findings suggest the need to disaggregate and qualify current understandings of ‘bridging’ social ties usually depicted in positive terms and uniformly as cross-ethnic relationships, or only linked with the ‘mainstream’ population.     

Have you ever seen the rain? Stories of trees and the people who study them

You’ve heard of Chernobyl and the fall of Rome. Perhaps you know the intricacies of Meso-American depopulation or radiocarbon dating. But do you know how they are all related? Valerie Trouet certainly does, and she explains their intimate connections with tree-ring science in Tree Story.     

‘The Family of Denmark’ and ‘the Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics

More than broadly agreeing on the need for a critical deconstruction of the very foundations of anthropological theory and practice aimed at uncovering the elements implicitly excluded from analysis, the silences in a reasoning process and the blind spots in observations, the author stresses need to distinguish between this kind of deconstruction, which is positive and essential for any knowledge-building activity, and another deconstruction which can lead to hyper-relativism. The second tendency, baptized 'postmodernism' and highly popular in the USA, is a largely overblown enterprise of deconstructive dissolution which, if carried to its logical conclusion, threatens to submerge social anthropology in the rising tide of 'Cultural Studies'. Postmodernist theory is a somewhat eclectic mixture of (often contradictory) ideas borrowed from such French thinkers as Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard, which is advanced in support of the idea that a 'science of man', in other words, a set of systematic observations, analyses and findings subjected to testing and verification, is not possible. The author here explains why he takes the opposite view.     

‘Far and wide’: Social networking in the Early Neolithic of the Levant

Networking during the early stages of the Levantine Neolithic appears to have been encouraged by increasing demands for exotics, i.e. non-local commodities. The actual exchange of merchandise stimulated also transmission of knowledge, i.e. innovations. Together these were instrumental in affecting the social fabric of society. It appears that specific geographic settings as well as large-scale communal edifices played a pivotal role in sustaining and promoting Neolithic networking.     

Making sense of ‘mixture’: states and the classification of ‘mixed’ people

Caribbean diaspora intellectuals have contributed significantly to African-American political struggles over the years, despite arguments by some African-American intellectuals about what they discern as West Indian negativism, extremism, and divisiveness in American political life. This essay examines the legacy of a representative sample of diasporic Caribbean intellectuals since the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and culminating in the 1970s, notably, Garvey, members of the African Blood Brotherhood [ABB], C.L.R. James, and Walter Rodney, to demonstrate the phenomenal ideological vision, organizational capability, and political activism they have brought into fostering solidarity with African Americans in the struggle for fundamental change. The focus here is on their respective contributions to the debate on the relationship between class and race in America and the black diaspora generally, which has helped to shape the form, and orient the direction of African-American and Caribbean diasporic struggles for the better part of the twentieth century.