Estranged Bodies and Vietnamese Identities

In this paper I will explore both the regulation of migrant bodies as well as the lived experience of migrant embodiment in order to develop an analysis of the body as a vortex of meaning in the displacement process. By examining the way in which the bodies of Vietnamese migrants are simultaneously object and agent, I will indicate how the relations between migrants and the wider society are felt and sensed through the bodily experiences of Vietnamese people. The dynamic between how Vietnamese bodies are represented and how they are experienced reveals the body to be a predominant marker of difference from both within and without, the mediator between experience and signification. I will indicate how the dominant media construction of Vietnamese bodies as defiled has sustained forms of exclusion and distancing which have influenced the way that Vietnamese bodies are lived. I thus explore the means through which the body has particular salience when attempting to understand the nature of migrant identities in Australia.     

Connecting neuroscience and law: anticipatory discourse and the role of sociotechnical imaginaries

In recent years, attempts have increasingly been made to connect neuroscience and law. Scientists and lawyers are imagining and actively fostering the realization of futures in which neuroscience will play a prominent role in the activity of courts. In this article I take these debates as my empirical object. I trace the emergence of neurolegal discourse, explore its focus on free will and lie detection, and show how expectations about the potential role neuroscience might play in the law are being embedded in new research programs and funding streams. In so doing, I analyze the role of particular “sociotechnical imaginaries” in stimulating, directing and restricting neurolegal discourse and highlight the ways in which new visions of law, science and scientists are produced in the process. Sociotechnical imaginaries are shown to be salient in structuring anticipatory discourse, and represent a key target for social scientific intervention in such debates.     

'We don't know our descent': how the Gitanos of Jarana manage the past

Although Gypsies have often been described as people 'oriented towards the present', the question of how their approach to the past might illuminate their particular mode of being in the world has been left largely untheorized. In fact, understanding how Gypsies manage the past is essential to understanding the processes through which they survive as a group in the midst of non-Gypsy society. In this article I analyse how the Gitanos of Jarana (Madrid) work upon the past so as to remove certain past events and periods from the communal gaze and to ensure that others receive only limited elaboration. I also explore the links between these Gitanos' downplaying of the past in their accounts of themselves and their particular ways of organizing social relations. Therefore, my focus lies on the relationships between the past and the imagined community, and between the latter and its structural supports.     

What's in a Dedication? On Being a Warlpiri DJ

This article reports on the operation of the Pintupi Anmatyerre Warlpiri radio network, established by the Warlpiri Media Association in the north‐west of Central Australia in late 2001. It traces the history out of which the network emerged and considers the distinctive approach taken to broadcasting by a group of young Warlpiri women. In exploring the on‐air invocation of particular forms of social relations, I argue that radio has come to play an important role in facilitating expressions of Warlpiri sociality across an expanding social field. At once a driver of social transformation and the transcendence of localism, as well as the glue that might bind people to each other in a changing world, the activity occurring around the Warlpiri Media Association provides a window onto the multiple challenges and choices faced by Warlpiri people in the present. This article is most particularly interested in how Warlpiri youth are negotiating these challenges and choices. The final section considers whether this new radio network might be understood in terms of the emergence of a new public sphere.     

Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

In the last decade there has been much interest in the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘essentialism’ and the ways in which these notions have been appropriated by Aboriginal people to demarcate a specifically Aboriginal space (Cowlishaw 1986; Lattas 1993; Langton 1981; Morris 1988; Muecke 1992). Central to these concerns is the issue of black/white relations and the specificities of racial oppression. Following these concerns in this article I explore the nexus between the metaphorical dismemberment of self and the corporeal dismemberment of sickness which is reflected in the high mortality rates and disease patterns of Aboriginal people. I extend Fanon's concept that racism has the power to alienate ‘a man of colour’ from his own self-image to argue that it more than metaphorically breaks the human body (Fanon 1991). I provide a window into a much neglected area of research: how notions of illness and social relatedness are constructed in particular socio-historical circumstances. I explore the meanings of illness as expressed at the level of community and as a form of embodiment associated with unequal colonial relations. I focus on indigenous exegeses which articulate Aboriginal women's experience of illness and their sense of identity. I draw on the work of Leder (1990) to foreground a phenomenological view where selfhood is continually confronted by circumstances that make present the ‘body’ as a ‘sharp and searing presence threatening the self’. I also apply Sansom's (1982) model of illness and the significance of carers in an Aboriginal community to demonstrate a world-view of personhood that is diffused with other persons and things rather than a world-view that entails a highly individuated and bounded self. In this world-view adequate healing requires a reconstitution of social relations and a re-ordering of the racialised status quo.     

Everyone Will Be Jealous For That Mutika

In this paper I describe a phenomenon I refer to by its Aboriginal English name — ‘humbugging’ — in a western Arnhem Land Aboriginal settlement. By discussing the focal object in this phenomenon — the ‘mutika’ (car)¹ — I argue that a most interesting process of de-commoditization is occurring in this settlement. I use examples of humbugging to illustrate how the car in this community has tremendous symbolic as well as practical significance. I use. in particular, the work of Douglas and Isherwood (1979) and Appadurai et al. (1986), and argue that their ‘social life of things’ theoretical framework is appropriate for interpreting the importance of the ‘mutika’. I also suggest, however, that this framework needs to be re-thought in order to incorporate the challenge which de-commoditization presents to it.     

The Death of the Big Men: Depreciation of Elites in New Guinea

Recently, Tolai people of Papua New Guinea have adopted the term ‘Big Shot’ to describe an emerging post-colonial political elite. The emergence of the term is a negative moral evaluation of new social possibilities that have arisen as a consequence of the Big Shots’ privileged position within a global political economy. Grassroots Tolai pass judgment on the Big Shots’ through rhetorical contrast with idealised Big Men of the past, in a particular local version of a global trend for the emergence of new words to illustrate changing perceptions of local elites. As such the ‘Big Shot’ acts as an example of a global process in which key lexical categories that contest, trace and shape how global historical change is experienced are constituted through linguistic categories.     

Post-war settlements and the production of new illegalities: the case of Dayton and people trafficking and prostitution in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article charts the rise of people smuggling, trafficking and prostitution in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, and also goes on to point to their transformation in the post-post-war era into ‘cottage’ industries. I argue that the conditions of possibility for their existence are rooted in contradictions inherent in the Dayton Peace Agreement that brought to an end the war of Yugoslav succession. In particular, borrowing Auge’s concept of non-places, I argue that village life has been characterised increasingly by the multiplication of human mobility, the emergence of new forms of inter-ethnic clientship and social relations of estrangement, each of which may enable the industries to thrive. Above all, they are likely to render ineffective the Bosnian state’s attempts at incorporating the public, particularly in rural areas, into the surveillance and detection of people smuggling, trafficking and prostitution.     

Moments of Hierarchy: Constructing Social Stratification by Means of Language, Food, Space, and the Body in Pohnpei, Micronesia

In this paper I examine relationships between multiple semiotic modes used to construct hierarchy, and I show the importance of going beyond our traditional notion of language to look at how social actors employ a range of semiotic resources in organizing and interpreting social relations. Using examples from Pohnpei, Micronesia, I show how notions of superior and inferior are compounded through several sign systems—spatial relations, food sharing, the body, and language. These systems act oppositionally as well as cooperatively to produce situated ideas of social inequality, ideas built out of disequilibrium of bodies in space, of referents in language, and distribution of resources, as well as contradictions in the interactions of these signs. The compounding of signs not only recruits multiple sensory modes and perspectives in the exposition of hierarchical relations, but entails a notion of the contradictory nature of status relations. Using examples from a Pohnpeian feast, I explore the creative interplay of sign systems in the construction of "moments" of hierarchy in a large, public setting and discuss how through the practice of title-giving, which virtually every adult member of the society participates in, a particular idea of social inequality, built out of multiple sign systems, is mapped onto each body, [language, interaction, politics, Oceania, social stratification, hierarchy]     

Mythologising culture

This second part of Mythologising Culture examines the responses of Aboriginal people in western Sydney to the valorizing of Aboriginality by the Australian nation. As Aboriginal culture has become the object of restitution, regret and reconciliation, Aboriginal people are being called upon to represent and produce Culture in iconic forms such as painting, dancing and other performances and representations. These activities, often depicted as remedial, are seldom initiated and controlled by Aboriginal people, but rather disturb cultural adjustments and established social relations. I discuss a range of responses elicited by these post‐colonial activities, from enthusiastic embrace to the rejection of state sponsored culture. Further, I consider the structural implications of suburban Aborigines being offered the chance to distance themselves from the anonymous suburban poor.     

Child social ethology and peer relations: a developmental review of methodology and findings

During the last three decades, developmental research has increasingly emphasized the relevance of peer relations in children’s socialization. However, most studies of child development still focus upon individual differences in social status, tacitly neglecting relational constraints inherent in the ecology of the peer group. In contrast, socioethological approaches have stressed that natural groups provide a variety of distinct social roles that may have a differential impact upon individual growth and development. However, ethological analyses have often been limited to aggressive relations and group dominance structures. Comparable studies of affiliative organization have been hampered by the paucity of models for the study of cohesive social structure, only recently having begun to overcome this obstacle. A potential third dimension of preschool peer group ethology, object use, has been relatively neglected in studies of peer relations. However, recent research suggests that object use is a salient and important component of the social world of the young child. This article reviews methodology and recent findings in the area of peer relations and discusses the developmental implications of this work. Received: 8 December 1998 / Received in revised form: 26 March 1999 / Accepted: 31 March 1999     

On the ethics and practice of contemporary social theory: from crisis talk to multiattentional method

Using an approach derived from the anthropology and sociology of knowledge, this article explores the historical emergence of European social theory and its contemporary place in the human sciences. I direct ethnographic attention to a sense of crisis or impasse in social theory’s capacity to frame and to analyze the complexity of contemporary relations in the world. By reanalyzing this crisis talk as a phenomenological reaction to the growing (sub)specialization of social theory, I offer a new way of thinking about social theory in terms of specialized analytical attentions. I also suggest how we can move from crisis talk to a new ethics of theoretical complementarity, inspired by Dilthey, which I term “multiattentional method.”     

‘Do you have a mobile?’ Mobile phone practices and the refashioning of social relationships in Port Vila Town

Mobile phones have quickly become an important part of young people's social relationships in Port Vila Vanuatu. In particular, young people embrace the new technology's capacity to broaden the breadth of their sociality. They use the mobile phone to facilitate private and secretive communication, engage in unsanctioned relationships, pre‐marital sexual relationships, and also multiple concurrent intimate relationships. Literature on mobile phone use often either takes the approach that mobile phone technology becomes purely incorporated into pre‐existing social practices, or that it dramatically reshapes social ontologies. The present article argues for an alternative view, one that takes into account the nuances between these two analytical poles. This article suggests that young people use the mobile phone in practices informed by previous models of social relationships, yet the specific materiality of the mobile phone technology is influencing the direction in which models of social relationships are changing. In demonstrating this point, I pay particular attention to two material aspects of the mobile phone technology ‐ the mobile phone as a repository of a particular kind of information ‐ ‘evidence’, and the capacity of the mobile phone to ‘disconnect’ people from their relationships by switching off the mobile. This article argues that these practices are influencing the emergence of a radically altered kinship and gender landscape in the urban context.     

Speaking for itself: Art,meaning and power in New Ireland,Papua New Guinea

Taking the example of the tubuan masked figure, an art form of New Ireland, I explore recent theoretical debates on the question of meaning in art. Challenging approaches that privilege the semiotic, I argue that this form of art is more appropriately seen as a revelation of power. The tubuan brings forth the concealed efficacy, capacities and intentionality of the producer, which elicit responses from, or act upon, the audience in various negative or positive ways. This art object is a form of disclosure in itself, and thus speaks for itself. The appreciation of this art is not a matter of cerebral contemplation, the unearthing of ideas and the translation of images into verbal form, but in an embodied form that is experienced directly as affect. I take seriously the embodied nature of social action, of which the production of art is one form.     

Call center labor and the injured precariat: shame, stigma, and downward social mobility in contemporary Portugal

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a call center belonging to a private telecommunications company in Lisbon, in this article I examine the particular history and contemporary feelings of shame, resentment, and failure which afflict young people currently working in call centers in Portugal as a result of their inability to fulfill the generational social hopes of middle-class distinction which were cast upon them and the specificities attached to the call center regime of labor. It is argued that fixed theoretical typologies associated with neoliberal changes should be critically reviewed in light of empirical grounded analysis of contingent and national histories of neoliberalization processes. Thus, I suggest a reading of the phenomenon of the precariat which stresses its simultaneous contingent and structural role in historical processes of neoliberalization—as in the Portuguese context—rather than its novel (or primordial) character or revolutionary and emancipatory potential role.     

Remittances and Relationships: Exchange in Cape Verdean Transnational Families

This article examines migrant remittances through the lens of anthropological theories of gift relationships. I explore remittance transactions as perceived and practised by people in Cape Verde, a country in which many households receive money from abroad. The article highlights three key dimensions. The first dimension is the transactors' (senders and receivers of remittances) relations and obligations to each other, the second is the degree to which remittances are seen as voluntary gifts or, alternatively, as elements in an obligatory reciprocal exchange, and the third is the relation between the transactors and money as an object of exchange. I argue that these dimensions together open up for a holistic understanding of the dynamic interplay between remittances and relationships. In contrast to mainstream remittance studies, with their conventional focus on economic rationality, this is an approach that illuminates what remittances mean, as social practice, to those involved.     

Medical internship as moral education: An essay on the system of training physicians

This essay is an attempt to describe and interpret my experience as an intern in internal medicine at a major urban teaching hospital which shall be called simply the Hospital. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, I place that experience within a broader conceptual framework. By focusing upon the official ideology of the medical service and the unofficial language of interns and residents, upon the hospital's institutions for voicing dissent and its rituals for marking status elevation, I investigate the connections among the structural conditions of work, the construction of a community of house officers, the relation of that community to the medical profession at large, and the stability and perpetuation of internship as the institutional form of training for medicine.     

Race Research and the Ethics of Belief

On most accounts, beliefs are supposed to fit the world rather than change it. But believing can have social consequences, since the beliefs we form underwrite our actions and impact our character. Because our beliefs affect how we live our lives and how we treat other people, it is surprising how little attention is usually given to the moral status of believing apart from its epistemic justification. In what follows, I develop a version of the harm principle that applies to beliefs as well as actions. In doing so, I challenge the often exaggerated distinction between forming beliefs and acting on them.¹ After developing this view, I consider what it might imply about controversial research the goal of which is to yield true beliefs but the outcome of which might include negative social consequences. In particular, I focus on the implications of research into biological differences between racial groups.     

How an Egalitarian Polity Structures Tourism and Restructures Itself Around It

ABSTRACT

Korowai of Papua, Indonesia, are famous in tourism and mass media circles for their ‘tree houses’, and for other ways they match globally circulating stereotypes of primitive humanity. This article examines how tourism intersects with Korowai egalitarian politics. Korowai spatial dispersion and concern with equality mean that tourists' visits to the land of certain people and not others is politically sensitive. I describe new forms of differentiation arising around tourism, such as emergence of clans specializing in hosting tour groups, and of individual Korowai specializing as tourism mediators. Across these and other areas, what is most striking is how Korowai people's egalitarian political sensibilities have fostered complex forms of interlocal cooperation around tourist visits, innovated and agreed upon in a decentralized manner. This case illustrates a broader pattern that intersocietal articulations are often mediated by the social organization of difference and heterogeneity in people's home locations.