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.     

Follow the money: international donors,external homelands and their effect on Romani media and advocacy

ABSTRACT

While Roma are both Europe’s largest minority, there is no “homeland” state that claims to guard their interest. The lack of “an external national homeland” [Brubaker, R. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] to watchdog and safeguard their rights has a particular effect on how Roma engage as political actors and subjects. International donors/foundations have assumed the role of “external homeland”. This article explores the effect that donors’ funding priorities have on Romani advocacy – specifically Romani journalism. Drawing upon multi-sited fieldwork in five countries, extensive document analysis, and interviews, Idemonstrate that the change in Romani media content over the past two decades reflects the shift in funders’ priorities, particularly in relation to the European project. “The Roma” become a tool for donors and European institutions to build a “European” identity while Romani-led advocacy becomes increasingly marganilized.     

At the Edge of Safety: Moral Experimentation in the Case of Family Therapy

“At the Edge of Safety” argues for thinking of structural family therapy as a “moral laboratory.” Borrowing a trope from Cheryl Mattingly’s recent book Moral Laboratories, the article reconsiders a therapeutic style that was once controversial by analyzing personal stories of supervision—i.e. professional training—in light of Mattingly’s suggestion that a social space in which people conduct experiments on themselves and their lives may be considered a moral laboratory. Family therapy is especially good to think with, because it is simultaneously a real and a metaphorical laboratory, physically lab-like in its use of visual technologies, yet moral in the way it puts the possibility for situational change in the hands of human actors. The technological apparatus stages evidence for sub-visible, interpersonal dynamics, while the provocative quality of not only therapeutic actions, but also of supervision, points to an ethos of experimentation. Stories of supervision reveal how personal of an experience being supervised can be. Trainees are pushed to become something otherwise, in learning to “expand” their styles. Sometimes the push is just right. Sometimes it goes too far. Whatever the case may be, the stories analyzed speak to anthropological questions concerning the uncertainty of human action and the many ways people can unknowingly injure one another with small hurts.     

Property as sovereignty in micro: the state/property nexus and the Cyprus Problem

This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of ‘community’ offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's ‘communal’ character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypriot constitutional communities of the Republic. Focusing on the moral and political claims that ensue from this premise, I show how refugee Cypriots encounter and rearticulate the state in a variety of institutions as they lay claims to property (periousia) – their own or others’. Consequently, I argue that thinking through ‘community’ contributes to understandings of the linkage between property and statecraft (what I call the state/property nexus). In turn, this allows us to better comprehend statehood in post-conflict domains.     

The failure of global migration governance

The deconstruction of the moral polity around forced migration proposed by Thomas Faist in his article “The moral polity of forced migration” can, in some ways, be interpreted as an analysis of the failure of global migration governance. In this comment, I review the challenges faced by those claiming their human rights, suggesting – in addition to Faist’s explanations – some further causes of and consequences for the current situation. I then explore the type of claim made by refugees in their protests, using the concept of weak agency, which relativizes the statement made by Faist that their claim is not subversive.     

How ‘The Urge to Kill’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">Feels</Emphasis>: Articulations of Emic ‘Appetitive Aggression’ Experiences Among Former Forcefully Recruited Children and Youth in the Acholi Region of Northern Uganda

Based on 10 months of fieldwork in the Acholi region of northern Uganda among youth and adults who were forcefully recruited into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) during the war, this article provides qualitative details to research on ‘appetitive aggression.’ Through two case-stories the article unfolds first person articulations of how ‘appetitive aggression’ is experienced as ‘the urge to kill’ and how it relates to the emic Acholi spiritual concept of ‘cen’; a local Luo expression used to describe places and human beings possessed by evil spirits. The analysis illuminates what the individual and social implications of ‘the urge to kill’ and ‘cen’ entail for two Acholi men; first in a militia and then in a civil post-war context. The analysis then relates these findings to soldier experiences across cultures and time periods. While our analysis supports the findings in ‘appetitive aggression’ studies that appetitive aggression serves as a resilient protective factor against developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this study documents that once the former forcefully recruited return to civilian life, ‘appetitive aggression’ and ‘the urge to kill’ precipitate individual and at times lethal social and moral complications in a fragile post-war community. Thus, the article argues that appetitive aggression and the emic perceptions and experiences of it among the local population are essential to consider in studies, processes and programs targeting demobilization, rehabilitation, reconciliation and re-integration.     

DEEPER PROBLEMS FOR NOONAN'S PROBABILITY ARGUMENT AGAINST ABORTION: ON A CHARITABLE READING OF NOONAN'S CONCEPTION CRITERION OF HUMANITY

In ‘An Almost Absolute Value in History’ John T. Noonan criticizes several attempts to provide a criterion for when an entity deserves rights. These criteria, he argues are either arbitrary or lead to absurd consequence. Noonan proposes human conception as the criterion of rights, and justifies it by appeal to the sharp shift in probability, at conception, of becoming a being possessed of human reason. Conception, then, is when abortion becomes immoral. The article has an historical and a philosophical goal. The historical goal is to carefully present the probability argument in a charitable manner. The philosophical goal is to offer a unique criticism of Noonan's probability argument against abortion. I argue that, even on a very charitable reading of Noonan's argument for the conception criterion, this criterion is also susceptible to charges of arbitrariness and absurdity. Noonan's claim that probability shifts have anything to do with the moral rights of fetuses cannot be made coherent. I also show that there are problems with Noonan's assumptions about moral rights and the potential to become a being possessed of human reason.     

At the Margins of Moral Personhood

In this article I examine the proposition that severe cognitive disability is an impediment to moral personhood. Moral personhood, as I understand it here, is articulated in the work of Jeff McMahan as that which confers a special moral status on a person. I rehearse the metaphysical arguments about the nature of personhood that ground McMahan’s claims regarding the moral status of the “congenitally severely mentally retarded” (CSMR for short). These claims, I argue, rest on the view that only intrinsic psychological capacities are relevant to moral personhood: that is, that relational properties are generally not relevant. In addition, McMahan depends on an argument that species membership is irrelevant for moral consideration and a contention that privileging species membership is equivalent to a virulent nationalism (these will be discussed below). In consequence, the CSMR are excluded from moral personhood and their deaths are less significant as their killing is less wrong than that of persons. To throw doubt on McMahan’s conclusions about the moral status and wrongness of killing the CSMR I question the exclusive use of intrinsic properties in the metaphysics of personhood, the dismissal of the moral importance of species membership, and the example of virulent nationalism as an apt analogy. I also have a lot to say about McMahan’s empirical assumptions about the CSMR.     

Precarious legality: regularizing Central American migrants in Mexico

Regularization programmes for undocumented migrants are generally viewed as a form of transition from “illegality” to a secure legal status. Yet, as we argue in this article, in many countries, such as Mexico, this transition is often incomplete and reversible. This article discusses regularization programmes for undocumented migrants in Mexico before and after the introduction of the 2011 Migration Law and illustrates that the status migrants obtain is precarious, that is insecure and conditional upon their ability to meet requirements for status renewal. Focusing on Central Americans in Mexico, we suggest that many migrants have been unable to obtain or renew their status after new procedures were put in place in 2011. Coining the legality granted through Mexico’s regularization process “precarious legality”, we attribute it to the contradiction between Mexico’s stated respect for migrants’ human rights and the de facto commitment to immigration control.     

Fear and fainting in Luanda: paranoid politics and the problem of interpretative authority in Angola

This article unpacks the events and reactions surrounding a mysterious ‘fainting wave’ that swept through Angolan middle and high schools from early 2011 on. By attending to the historicity and materiality of the fainting wave, the article investigates why the strong conviction took root of a dark political intentionality behind this inexplicable phenomenon, and why this conspiratorial interpretation prevailed over alternative explanations of a more psychological or spiritual bent. Through this, the article contributes to disaggregating the seemingly monolithic, neo-authoritarian Angolan state. More importantly, it points to the limitations of analyses pivoting on an idea of opposing rationalities, while at the same time demonstrating how historically attuned, deep ethnography can help us overcome the limits of more ‘scientistic’ psychological explanations.     

Moralizing regulation: the implications of policing “good” versus “bad” immigrants

Recently, the US has dramatically expanded immigration enforcement. At the same time, some advocates have sought to support “good” immigrants. This paper considers how the resulting good/bad binaries affect undocumented immigrants. I examine a case study in Los Angeles, where policing intertwined with protection. Based on participant observation and interviews, I show that respondents believed state agents classified them either as “bad” criminals or “good”, immigrants. To the extent immigrants identified as “good”, they credited the US with offering them “freedom” and hoped for political inclusion. At the same time, in what I call moralizing regulation, they also performed “good” behaviour and distinguished themselves from those seen as “bad”. Some also tied “good” behaviour to femininity and “acting white”. At the extreme, they blamed other migrants for inviting state mistreatment. The effects were ambivalent: while immigrants appreciated US support, they also adopted and adapted to the state’s moral norms.     

The Viable Violinist

In the aftermath of the Kermit Gosnell trial and Giubilini and Minerva's article ‘After‐birth abortion’, abortion‐rights advocates have been pressured to provide an account of the moral difference between abortion, particularly late‐term abortion, and infanticide. In response, some scholars have defended a moral distinction by appealing to an argument developed by Judith Jarvis Thomson in A defense of abortion. However, once Thomson's analogy is refined to account for the morally relevant features of late‐term pregnancy, rather than distinguishing between late‐term abortion and infanticide, it reinforces their moral similarity. This is because late‐term abortion requires more than detachment – it requires an act of feticide to ensure the death of the viable fetus. As such, a Thomsonian account cannot be deployed successfully as a response to Giubilini and Minerva. Those wishing to defend late‐term abortion while rejecting the permissibility of infanticide will need to provide an alternative account of the difference, or else accept Giubilini and Minerva's conclusion.     

Volunteering,Dana, and the Cultivation of ‘Good People’ in Thailand

The article explores a popular volunteer movement in Thailand and its connection to Buddhist morality and contemporary Thai politics. The article argues that volunteering in Thailand is often conceived of as a gift in various ways: as a form of dana or selfless giving; a gift from ‘good people’ to those defined as ‘in need’ in society and a gift to the Thai nation as a whole. Indeed, when volunteering is said to be a gift to the Thai nation, it is not necessarily because of its ability to redistribute resources, but because of its perceived ability to cultivate moral values and ‘good people’ for the Thai nation. The paper explores the implications that stem from presenting volunteering as a gift, with a strong emphasis on morality and ‘good people’, and how this popular discourse on volunteering may contribute to the maintenance of political status quo in Thailand, particularly in the context of the ongoing political struggles in recent years.     

Constitutional change in Fiji: The apparatus of justification

The discriminatory racial and other non‐democratic provisions which feature in the new constitution of the ‘Sovereign Democratic Republic of Fiji’ have been justified by the regime, at least superficially, on the grounds that they are essential for the protection and enhancement of indigenous Fijian rights and interests. This justification is underscored by two further related, claims which serve to promote the view that western democratic principles and practices are unsuitable to Fiji's political environment. First, the nature of Fiji's plural society is said to constitute a prima facie barrier to the peaceful conduct of western‐style democratic politics. Secondly, it is claimed that the 1970 Constitution of Fiji represented the imposition of essentially alien values on a pre‐existing ‘traditional’, and more legitimate, political framework. The purpose of this article is to evaluate these claims and to demonstrate that the new constitution is, in most respects, an instrument of Fijian chiefly domination.     

Whose crisis counts? Intersectionality,austerity and the politics of survival

Foregrounding the voices of minority women in England, Scotland and France, Minority Women and Austerity provides a rich and compelling account of austerity’s lived effects. Through its intersectional analyses and historically attendant frame, the book locates minority women’s experiences of austerity not as fundamentally “new” but rather as an extension and sharpening of conditions of “routinized crisis” and inequality. In doing so it compels its readers to ask: whose crisis counts? In this review paper, I summarize the book’s key contributions. In particular, I discuss the book’s theorizations of “political racelessness” to critique the erasure of minority women’s experiences and activism. I reflect on what this means for those researching austerity and its deleterious effects, and for those participating in anti-austerity activism. I end by discussing the analytical tools that the book offers for interrogating the Left’s response to on-going austerity within a post-Brexit Britain.     

“A Massive Long Way”: Interconnecting Histories, a “Special Child,” ADHD, and Everyday Family Life

Focusing on one family from a study of dual-earner middle-class families carried out in Los Angeles, California, this article draws on interview and video-recorded data of everyday interactions to explore illness and healing as embedded in the microcultural context of the Morris family. For this family, an important aspect of what is at stake for them in their daily lives is best understood by focusing on 9-year-old Mark, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In this article, we grapple with the complexity of conveying some sense of how Mark’s condition is experienced and relationally enacted in everyday contexts. Through illuminating connections between lives as lived and lives as told, we explore the narrative structuring of healing in relation to Mark’s local moral world with the family at its center. We examine how his parents understand the moral consequences of the child’s past for his present and future, and work to encourage others to give due weight to his troubled beginnings before this child joined the Morris family. At the same time, we see how the Morris parents act to structure Mark’s moral experience and orient to a desired future in which Mark’s “success” includes an appreciation of how he is accountable to others for his actions. Through our analyses, we also seek to contribute to discussions on what is at stake in everyday life contexts for children with ADHD and their families, through illuminating aspects of the cultural, moral and relational terrain that U.S. families navigate in contending with a child’s diagnosis of ADHD. Further, given that ADHD is often construed as a “disorder of volition,” we seek to advance anthropological theorizing about the will in situations where volitional control over behavior is seen to be disordered.     

Uneasy translations: vernacularizing demography for post-Soviet statecraft

The article explores a series of professional development seminars for state bureaucrats in the context of the moral panic over Russia's ‘demographic crisis’. It follows the vernacularization of social knowledge for state bureaucrats – a central practice that marks these pedagogical engagements. The article explores this practice's potentialities and limitations for effectively communicating social knowledge to administrative audiences. It grounds itself in the theoretical discussions of expertise and demonstrates how vernacularizing social knowledge for post-Soviet statecraft shapes the social and political meanings of Russia's demographic crisis, investing state policies and discourses with authority.     

From ‘Norwegian citizens’ via ‘citizens plus’ to ‘dual political membership’? Status,aspirations, and challenges ahead

The Norwegian citizenship regime has gradually changed to accommodate some of the demands voiced by or on behalf of the Sami. This article describes and analyses these changes in terms of changing citizenship status for the Sami as a gradual move from ‘Norwegian citizens’ via ‘citizens plus’ to ‘dual citizens’. Sami who are registered in the electoral roster for elections to the Sami Parliament possess political rights connected to two different political systems in Norway: one with membership based on territoriality, the other with membership based on descent. The author argues that the ‘people-to-people’ approach that currently seems to guide Sami aspirations for the political future ignores the condition of dual political membership and is thus ill-suited as a point of departure for discussions of the desirable scope of the future constitutional space of the Sami Parliament in Norway.     

Doctors on Status and Respect: A Qualitative Study

While doctors generally enjoy considerable status, some believe that this is increasingly threatened by consumerism, managerialism, and competition from other health professions. Research into doctors’ perceptions of the changes occurring in medicine has provided some insights into how they perceive and respond to these changes but has generally failed to distinguish clearly between concerns about “status,” related to the entitlements associated with one’s position in a social hierarchy, and concerns about “respect,” related to being held in high regard for one’s moral qualities. In this article we explore doctors’ perceptions of the degree to which they are respected and their explanations for, and responses to, instances of perceived lack of respect. We conclude that doctors’ concerns about loss of respect need to be clearly distinguished from concerns about loss of status and that medical students need to be prepared for a changing social field in which others’ respect cannot be taken for granted.