Diasporas and secessionist conflicts: the mobilization of the Armenian,Albanian and Chechen diasporas

Abstract

This article examines the impact of diasporas on secessionist conflicts, focusing on the Albanian, Armenian and Chechen diasporas and the conflicts in Kosovo, Karabakh and Chechnya during the 1990s. How do diasporas radicalize these conflicts? I argue that despite differences in diaspora communal characteristics and the types of the secessionist conflicts, a common pattern of mobilization develops. Large-scale diasporic support for secessionism emerges only after independence is proclaimed by the local elites. From that point onwards diasporas become engaged in a conflict spiral, and transnational coalitions are formed between local secessionist and diaspora groups. Depending on the organizational strength of the local strategic centre and the diasporic institutions, these coalitions endure or dissipate. Diasporas exert radicalization influences on the conflict spiral on two specific junctures – when grave violations of human rights occur in the homeland and when local moderate elites start losing credibility that they can achieve the secessionist goal.     

Wild-ing the Ethnography of Conservation: Writing Nature’s Value and Agency In

When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter, dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis. Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’ of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity conservation. The review is structured through three questions: How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis? Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of world-making encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing – as problems both for anthropology and conservation science.     

Transnational Storytelling: Human Rights, WITNESS, and Video Advocacy

Video is increasingly utilized by human rights groups as a component in their advocacy strategies. This article looks at how video is used for a range of local, national, and transnational human rights audiences—both traditional and alternative. Drawing on a case study from the Philippines, it considers the challenges and issues faced by WITNESS (www.witness.org), its locally based human rights partners, and other similar organizations as they create and use video as visual evidence, testimony, and moral story before local, international, and transnational human rights audiences. These challenges include the contextualization of stories and sight bites, dilemmas of moving testimony between advocacy and media arenas, and the difficulties of establishing an ethical relationship, a community of witness, at a distance. This article is written in a personal capacity, although it draws on my experiences working as Program Manager at WITNESS.     

The contingency of ‘rights’: Locating a global discourse in Aboriginal Central Australia

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2007 and endorsed by the Australian Labor government two years later. This achievement is an essential element in the global politics of Indigenous recognition and includes unique rights, such as the right to a cultural collectivity and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, while reinforcing the right to self‐determination. Yet this new Indigenous rights regime is both underpinned and constrained by the UN human rights system, the implications of which include constraint within a secular neo‐imperialist liberal paradigm. However, this human rights paradigm can also offer generative potential to challenge existing relations of power. According to Kymlicka, the UN's system of human rights has, after all, been ‘one of the great moral achievements of the twentieth century’. How can these tensions between the aspirations to universal secularism and the right to culture, for instance, be accommodated within the Indigenous human rights discourse? And how does this new international legal and norm‐setting instrument speak to the glaring disjunct between declaration of rights and social fact in central Australia, the focus of this research? The move toward an anthropology of human rights looks squarely at this conundrum and attempts to locate spaces of continuity and co‐option or, conversely, subversion and rejection as local cultures of human rights are articulated.     

Conditions of life in the city: medicine and gendered relations in Maputo,Mozambique

How do material conditions, urban life strategies, and postcolonial medical infrastructures shape the practices of care available to patients and families in Maputo? How do global health interventions articulate with urban economies, colonial legacies, and gendered relations? Under what conditions is health made available in Mozambique's capital? This article explores these questions through the experiences of one young woman as she moves through clinical and city spaces and through changing familial and residential situations. Showing how health is shaped by gendered relations and material circumstances (or condições) as they are refracted through urban space, her experiences make clear that care both requires and creates complex material‐relational conditions rooted in clinic practice, urban forms, and gendered social and familial life. In the midst of complex medical regimes and rapidly changing urban spaces, these conditions constitute the ground on which women access medicine but also give rise to exclusions from forms of care produced by both biomedicine and social relations. Arguing for greater attention to the role of gender, urban space, economy, and exchange in theorizing health in situated urban and transnational spaces, this article advocates for accounts that go beyond biomedical and clinical framings of life, health, and well‐being and that centre relational accounts of life in the city.     

Between Religion and Desire: Being Muslim and Gay in Indonesia

Thousands of Indonesian men now identify as both "gay" and "Muslim." How do these men understand the relationship between religion and sexuality? How do these understandings reflect the fact that they live in the nation that is home to more Muslims than any other? In this article, I address questions such as these through an ethnographic study of gay Muslims. I argue that dominant social norms render being gay and being Muslim "ungrammatical" with each other in the public sphere that is crucial to Muslim life in Indonesia. Through examining doctrine, interpretation, and community, I explore how gay Muslim subjectivity takes form in this incommensurability between religion and desire.     

The human dynamics of migrant transnationalism

Abstract

How is migrant transnationalism shaped by the human dynamics of relationships between migrants and non-migrants? This question is addressed through an analysis of asymmetries between migrants and non-migrants in three spheres of transnational life: the moralities of transnationalism, information and imagination in transnational relations, and transnational resource inequalities. Understanding transnational practices such as sending remittances and facilitating migration, it is argued, requires attention to the dynamics of the relationships between individuals. Fieldwork material from Cape Verde and the Netherlands is combined with secondary literature from other parts of the world in order to develop an analytical framework for comparative research.     

Reconciliation and Revenge in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Rethinking Legal Pluralism and Human Rights

Human rights are a central element in the new governmental project in the new South Africa, and this article traces some of the specific forms of connection and disconnection between notions of justice found in townships of the Vaal and rights discourses as articulated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The introduction of human rights in post-apartheid South Africa has had varied social effects. Religious values and human rights discourse have converged on the notion of reconciliation on the basis of shared value orientations and institutional structures. There are clear divergences, however, between human rights ideas and the notions of justice expressed in local lekgotla, or township courts, which emphasize punishment and retribution. The article concludes that the plurality of legal orders in South Africa results not from systemic relations between law and society but from multiple forms of social action seeking to alter the direction of social change in the area of justice within the context of the nation-building project of the post-apartheid state.     

Human genome and philosophy: what ethical challenge will human genome studies bring to the medical practices in the 21st century?

A human being or person cannot be reduced to a set of human genes, or human genome. Genetic essentialism is wrong, because as a person the entity should have self-conscious and social interaction capacity which is grown in an interpersonal relationship. Genetic determinism is wrong too, the relationship between a gene and a trait is not a linear model of causation, but rather a non-linear one. Human genome is a complexity system and functions in a complexity system of human body and a complexity of systems of natural/social environment. Genetic determinism also caused the issue of how much responsibility an agent should take for her/his action, and how much degrees of freedom will a human being have. Human genome research caused several conceptual issues. Can we call a gene 'good' or 'bad', 'superior' of 'inferior'? Is a boy who is detected to have the gene of Huntington's chorea or Alzheimer disease a patient? What should the term 'eugenics' mean? What do the terms such as 'gene therapy', 'treatment' and 'enhancement' and 'human cloning' mean etc.? The research of human genome and its application caused and will cause ethical issues. Can human genome research and its application be used for eugenics, or only for the treatment and prevention of diseases? Must the principle of informed consent/choice be insisted in human genome research and its application? How to protecting gene privacy and combating the discrimination on the basis of genes? How to promote the quality between persons, harmony between ethnic groups and peace between countries? How to establish a fair, just, equal and equitable relationship between developing and developed countries in regarding to human genome research and its application?     

The evolution of strong reciprocity: cooperation in heterogeneous populations

How do human groups maintain a high level of cooperation despite a low level of genetic relatedness among group members? We suggest that many humans have a predisposition to punish those who violate group-beneficial norms, even when this imposes a fitness cost on the punisher. Such altruistic punishment is widely observed to sustain high levels of cooperation in behavioral experiments and in natural settings. We offer a model of cooperation and punishment that we call STRONG RECIPROCITY: where members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, strong reciprocators obey the norm and punish its violators, even though as a result they receive lower payoffs than other group members, such as selfish agents who violate the norm and do not punish, and pure cooperators who adhere to the norm but free-ride by never punishing. Our agent-based simulations show that, under assumptions approximating likely human environments over the 100000 years prior to the domestication of animals and plants, the proliferation of strong reciprocators when initially rare is highly likely, and that substantial frequencies of all three behavioral types can be sustained in a population. As a result, high levels of cooperation are sustained. Our results do not require that group members be related or that group extinctions occur.     

Mind and Spirit: a comparative theory about representation of mind and the experience of spirit

This special issue reports the findings of the Mind and Spirit project. We ask whether different understandings of ‘mind’, broadly construed, might shape the ways that people attend to and interpret thoughts and other mental events – and whether their judgements affect their experience of (what they take to be) gods and spirits. We argue in this collection that there are indeed cultural differences in local theories of minds, in the way social worlds draws the line between interior and exterior, and that these differences do affect the way people sense invisible others. This introduction lays out the ideas that inspired the project and the methods that we used. This is the first report on our work.     

Normal and pathological oscillatory communication in the brain

The huge number of neurons in the human brain are connected to form functionally specialized assemblies. The brain's amazing processing capabilities rest on local communication within and long-range communication between these assemblies. Even simple sensory, motor and cognitive tasks depend on the precise coordination of many brain areas. Recent improvements in the methods of studying long-range communication have allowed us to address several important questions. What are the common mechanisms that govern local and long-range communication and how do they relate to the structure of the brain? How does oscillatory synchronization subserve neural communication? And what are the consequences of abnormal synchronization?     

The Effect of Perceived Regional Accents on Individual Economic Behavior: A Lab Experiment on Linguistic Performance,Cognitive Ratings and Economic Decisions

Does it matter if you speak with a regional accent? Speaking immediately reveals something of one’s own social and cultural identity, be it consciously or unconsciously. Perceiving accents involves not only reconstructing such imprints but also augmenting them with particular attitudes and stereotypes. Even though we know much about attitudes and stereotypes that are transmitted by, e.g. skin color, names or physical attractiveness, we do not yet have satisfactory answers how accent perception affects human behavior. How do people act in economically relevant contexts when they are confronted with regional accents? This paper reports a laboratory experiment where we address this question. Participants in our experiment conduct cognitive tests where they can choose to either cooperate or compete with a randomly matched male opponent identified only via his rendering of a standardized text in either a regional accent or standard accent. We find a strong connection between the linguistic performance and the cognitive rating of the opponent. When matched with an opponent who speaks the accent of the participant’s home region—the in-group opponent –, individuals tend to cooperate significantly more often. By contrast, they are more likely to compete when matched with an accent speaker from outside their home region, the out-group opponent. Our findings demonstrate, firstly, that the perception of an out-group accent leads not only to social discrimination but also influences economic decisions. Secondly, they suggest that this economic behavior is not necessarily attributable to the perception of a regional accent per se, but rather to the social rating of linguistic distance and the in-group/out-group perception it evokes.     

Women social justice scholars: risks and rewards of committing to anti-racism

This article draws from the experiences of women, located in different countries, whose scholarship expresses a commitment to anti-racism and social justice. What are the challenges they face? How do they negotiate multiple commitments? Anti-racism scholars are border crossers and ethical leaders with a deep sense of care. Their experiences suggest that one does not necessarily have to engage in activism ‘out there’. The very commitment to anti-racism, as a scholar, becomes a form of social justice work. The ability to have a transformative impact both inside and outside of the academe enriches their sense of fulfilment as scholars.     

How do RNA folding algorithms work?

Programs such as MFOLD and ViennaRNA are widely used to predict RNA secondary structures. How do these algorithms work? Why can't they predict RNA pseudoknots? How accurate are they, and will they get better?     

Social Standards as Stabilizing Factors of the "Social Mind"

In our everyday lives we constantly encounter phenomena that, through facts of the behavior of particular individuals, cannot be understood merely by a psychological analysis of an isolated human being. We read that "the collective was seized by the enthusiasm of labor," or "the stadium began to hoot indignantly," or "the spectators jumped up from their seats as a man," etc. A psychological analysis of such phenomena immediately raises a number of complex problems. What is the nature of these common psychological manifestations? How do they embrace many people? How do they affect the mind of each discrete individual?     

Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood

This article reviews the development of the laws and treaties regulating the use of child soldiers and the political, social, and cultural context in which these developments are grounded. Humanitarian and human rights groups have undertaken a major initiative to end the use of young combatants. These efforts are part of a larger children's human rights project designed to create a universal definition of "childhood." Casting the proposed ban on child soldiers in the language of human rights deflects attention from the enormity of the social and cultural changes involved in the proposed transnational restructuring of age categories. Treaty-making efforts reflect an emerging "politics of age" that shapes the concept of "childhood" in international law, and in which different international, regional, and local actors make use of age categories to advance particular political and ideological positions.     

Eyes are windows to the Chinese soul: evidence from the detection of real and fake smiles

How do people interpret the meaning of a smile? Previous studies with Westerners have found that both the eyes and the mouth are crucial in identifying and interpreting smiles, yet less is known about Easterners. Here we reported that when asking the Chinese to judge the Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles as either real or fake, their accuracy and sensitivity were negatively correlated with their individualism scores but positively correlated with their collectivism scores. However, such correlations were found only for participants who stated the eyes to be the most useful references, but not for those who favored the mouth. Moreover, participants who favored the eyes were more accurate and sensitive than those who favored the mouth. Our results thus indicate that Chinese who follow the typical Eastern decoding process of using the eyes as diagnostic cues to identify and interpret others'' facial expressions and social intentions, are particularly accurate and sensitive, the more they self-report greater collectivistic and lower individualistic values.     

WHAT IS IT TO BE A DAUGHTER? IDENTITIES UNDER PRESSURE IN DEMENTIA CARE

This article concentrates on the care for people who suffer from progressive dementia. Dementia has a great impact on a person’s well‐being as well as on his or her social environment. Dealing with dementia raises moral issues and challenges for participants, especially for family members. One of the moral issues in the care for people with dementia is centred on responsibilities; how do people conceive and determine their responsibilities towards one another? To investigate this issue we use the theoretical perspective of Margaret Walker. She states that ideas about identity play a crucial role in patterns of normative expectations with regard to the distribution of responsibilities in daily practices of care. The results of this study show how the identity of a family‐member is put under pressure and changes during her loved one’s illness that leads to difficulties and misunderstandings concerning the issue of responsibility. These results offer an insight into the complexities of actual practices of responsibility and highlight the importance for those caring for people with dementia of attending carefully to how they see themselves and how they see other people involved (Who am I? Who do I want to be for the other?). Answers to such questions show what people expect from themselves and from one another, and how they, at any rate, are distributing responsibilities in a given situation. Professional caregivers should take into account that family members might have different ideas about who they are and consequently about what their responsibilities are.     

Export agriculture,transnational farmworkers,and labor resistance in the Mexico–US borderlands

This article discusses the system of export agriculture in northern Mexico and its impact on transnational farmworkers employed in both sides of the US–Mexico border. Since the late 1990s, a transnational industry producing fresh produce for consumer markers in the USA has taken hold in the San Quintin Valley in Baja California, transforming the economic and social fabric of this border region. This industry has generated a new labor regime predicated upon the employment of a flexible and cheap source of indigenous workers from the poorest states in southern Mexico. I examine the contours of this regime, the forms of labor resistance it has elicited, and the new types of labor migration it has generated by Mexican workers to the USA. As I show, indigenous farm laborers engage in novel forms of labor and political protests to claim for their rights. These developments, I argue, speak of the class formation of transnational farmworkers who, mobilizing local and transnationally, combine traditional labor demands with wider claims for their civil and political rights.