Just Choices: Representations of Choice and Coercion in Sex Work in Cambodia

In global discourses about sex work, the image of the ‘sex slave’ has been influential in constructing the view of women working in the sex industry in developing countries as ‘victims’. This paper examines the perpetuation of such discourses through powerful lobbying groups and socially conservative governments. It argues that frameworks that situate women working in the Cambodian sex industry through a singular identity of ‘victim’ or ‘agent’ are inadequate in informing our understandings of sex work in the country. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with sex workers in the port city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, this paper questions prevailing stereotypes of ‘trafficking victims' and the image of ‘defiled’ or ‘duped’ women and girls central to such frameworks. It examines the intricate intertwining of elements of individual choice and coercion in women's lives and illuminates how, in the transition to a market economy, women's choices are constrained by hierarchal structures such as gender, class and socio‐cultural obligations and poor employment opportunities.     

Normalizing Off-Label Experiments and the Pharmaceuticalization of Homebirths in Pakistan

Abstract

The off-label use of the drug misoprostol has effectively turned homebirths in ‘resource-poor’ nations into unmarked and un-enunciated zones of experimentation. Misoprostol has become the public health solution in response to medico-humanitarian discourses that construct homebirths as responsible for high maternal mortality. In the absence of proper safety tests, advocating its routine administration against postpartum haemorrhage in homes around Pakistan functions to erase the distinction between service delivery projects and experimentation. Drawing on ethnographic research in Balochistan, I argue that promoting misoprostol in contexts of structural inequality, particularly where excessive artificial labour induction prevails, constitutes the enactment of a kind of ‘medical relativism’. This medical relativism entails an experimental practice that burdens poor women with undue risk as misoprostol becomes a substitute for required structural and economic transformation of Pakistan's healthcare system. Overall, the paper concludes, the contemporary faith in pharmaceuticals perpetuates a colonial governmentality of bodies, medicines, and healthcare.     

Mobility,white bodies and desire: Euro‐American women in Jakarta

This paper illustrates how cultural logics of desire are being transformed in the context of the global economy refashioning intimate lives. Exploring the experiences of Euro‐American female professionals in Jakarta, it suggests that they become uncomfortably visible as ‘white bodies’; their desirability appears compromised, especially given Orientalist discourses which valorise Asian women's bodies. At the same time, women's position as well‐paid employees generates a contradictory logic of desire: the ‘ego‐boost’ they experience at work may intensify their demands on the masculinity and enlightened views of potential partners, thus rendering Indonesian men, with their perceived bodily effeminacy and ‘traditional values’ unattractive. As one response to the lack of desirability, some women engage in a moral discourse that casts Indonesian women whom they consider ‘bargirls’, as well as the Euro‐American men they attract, as morally deficient. The paper thus provides an alternative perspective on reconfigurations of desire in the context of global gendered mobility.     

‘After the break’: re-conceptualizing ethnicity,national identity and ‘Malaysian-Chinese’ identities

Focusing on ethnic Chinese as cultural citizens of the nation, this paper examines national identity in the context of generational change. In so doing, it connects to colonialist conceptions of identity the dominant framework of ethnicity that operates in Malaysia. It argues that this framework allows for the nationalist imagining of ‘Malaysian-Chinese’ as ‘outsiders’. In probing the complex conceptual relationship between ethnicity, national identity and cultural citizenship, this article asks: How does ‘ethnicity’ enter into negotiations over the ‘national’ in the cultural realm? What are the notions of cultural difference and national otherness that operate in the negative dualisms by which nation and ethnicity are defined? How are these dualisms tied to notions of authenticity and cultural citizenship? Using the novel The Harmony Silk Factory by Malaysian author Tash Aw to address these questions, this paper argues the need to rethink current policies and narratives of ethnic and national identity in Malaysia.     

Embodied narratives of disaster: the expression of bodily experience in Aceh,Indonesia

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused massive destruction to coastal Aceh, Indonesia, and left countless numbers of people dead or wounded. This article focuses on the embodied narratives of three Acehnese women who survived the disaster and, like many others in Aceh, told their stories ‘through’ their bodies. A detailed ethnographic account of their narratives reveals how the body stretches temporally between the ‘narrated event’ and the ‘narrative event’, both through the representation of the body in narratives and through the embodied performance of narratives. Moving beyond meaning‐centred analyses of narratives, I argue that the central accomplishment of these narratives is that they convey poignant bodily experiences to others and thereby create a shared, post‐disaster, world. Ultimately, through these embodied narratives of disaster people remake their world, with others, in the wake of its ‘unmaking’.     

Of wildmen and white men: cryptozoology and inappropriate/d monsters at the cusp of the Anthropocene

People on the Indonesian island of Halmahera claim that the hairy and barely human giants that are said to roam the jungle are seventeenth-century Portuguese colonizers. Employing the feminist concept of ‘inappropriate/d’, I show how the appropriation of the Portuguese wildman into village narratives, regional political history, and national development plans as well as into global discourses of science and media in each case inappropriately collapses the boundaries that the white wildman is implicated in maintaining: those between human and animal, the colonial sovereign and ‘the primitive native’, cryptozoology and the politics of the real. The wild-yet-Western figure, I argue, is inappropriate/d – is ‘on the loose’ – across local, regional, and global registers of reality in ways that trouble linear histories of the wildman as fading from reality into allegory. Like so many other monsters of the Anthropocene, the truthlikeness, or verisimilitude, of the white wildman is enhanced rather than attenuated by recent turns in politics and media.     

Introduction

There has of late been much debate about the relation of women, nationalism and ethnicity. This collection contributes to that debate in several ways. Firstly, it considers the ways in which gender and ethnicity are complicit, or more precisely how identities as women and as national/ethnic subjects are mutually created. Secondly, it ponders the relation between the colonial and the postcolonial in such discourses of gendered ethnicity. And finally it poses the tough question about the problematic relation beteen women as objects and subjects of both colonial and postcolonial discourses.     

Colonial Constructions and African Initiatives: The History of Ethnicity in Northwestern Ghana

The article discusses the colonial construction of ethnic categories, their linkage with precolonial models of identity and the multiple meanings which ethnicity has assumed for different groups over the past decades, using the example of northwestern Ghana – a region which, in the precolonial period, was neither politically centralized nor knew distinct ‘tribes’. The article analyses how ethnic categories, boundaries and institutions were created and continually redefined by colonial officials, anthropologists, chiefs, labour migrants and educated elites, and how the different ethnic discourses fed into each other. It also draws on some of the older literature on ethnicity in Africa because it can still contribute to our understanding of the making of ethnic identities when framed in a deeply historical approach.     

Are Bush Fires and Drought ‘Natural Disasters’? The Naturalisation of Politics and Politicisation of Nature in New Caledonia

ABSTRACT

Based on long-term doctoral fieldwork on bush fires in New Caledonia, this paper aims to explore the double assumption that bush fires were shaped as a public issue through specific categorisations of human and natural elements, and that this work resulted in negative outcomes as far as the environment is concerned. This paper will address the question of mediation between human agency (colonial history, population distribution and development choices) and the production of ‘bush fires’ as an event category and as a ‘public problem’ calling for a policy solution. More specifically it will address the validity of the definition of bush fires as a ‘disaster’. While this phenomenon is both a discursive creation rooted in colonial imagination and a consciously forgotten strategy used by administrators and settlers to control land and dominate indigenous people, its growing importance today is related to the emergence of environmental concerns. However, one must not forget other issues obscured by the smoke of bush fires, namely a declining cattle farming sector and its lasting environmental impacts on drought (also considered a ‘natural disaster’ in New Caledonia by inhabitants, local administrations and scientists) and biodiversity loss. Addressing this issue leads to more general questions about the manner in which policy-makers, naturalists and environmentalists conceptualise and morally address environmental (natural and man-made) phenomena through time in a colonial/postcolonial setting.     

Tunnel Vision: Part One – Resisting post‐colonialism in Australian anthropology

This essay is based on my conviction that Australian ethnography's narrow purview and anthropology's theoretical limitations need exploring and explaining. While internationally the discipline developed new sites, new theoretical fields and new political ideas in the post‐colonial era from around 1970, classicism continued to dominate research in Australia. New forms of Aboriginal social life and politics created by changing ‘post‐colonial’ conditions largely escaped ethnographic attention, but anthropology was rescued from irrelevance with the emergence of opportunities to assist the courts and Aborigines with land retrievals. By examining selected ethnographies and exceptions to the discipline's main trajectory, I hope to encourage reflection and expansion so that the discipline might realise its potential as the most radical and critical of the social sciences.     

Gypsies,Celts and tinkers: Colonial antecedents of anti‐traveller racism in Ireland

Post‐colonial nationalist ideologies and practices construct an Irish Republic free of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘racism’. The ethnicization of the Irish Travelling People ('itinerants’, ‘tinkers') and the existence of anti‐traveller racism, however, reveal the limitations of this construction. This article focuses upon the antecedents of anti‐traveller ideologies by concentrating on the period that preceded Irish independence in 1922. The history of Irish itinerancy from the middle ages to the mid‐nineteenth century is first described and located within the context of British colonialism. This is followed by a consideration of scholarly, literary and popular representations of ‘tinkers’ during the late nineteenth century. Three interelated discourses, those of the British Gypsylorists, the Anglo‐Irish Celtic Literary Revivalists, and the folklore of the Irish peasantry, are described and linked to British imperialism, Irish cultural nationalism, and agrarian class relations respectively. It is argued that an analysis of these discourses, grounded in political economy, provides a useful historical context for analyses of more recent constructions of Travellers that have arisen in the course of struggles over a state settlement programme initiated in the 1960s. Through documentation and analysis of historical constructions of Travelling People, especially constructions of their origins, this article aims to challenge contemporary essentialist constructions of both ethnic identity and racism by redirecting attention instead towards the economic and political processes and relations of power that produce difference and inequality within the Irish context. Such analysis can also raise broader issues regarding the existence and specificity of racism in the Irish Republic.     

Revisiting Furnivall's ‘plural society’: Colonial Java as a mestizo society?

J. S. Furnivall's characterization of Java in the last half‐century of colonial rule as a ‘plural society’ has largely been taken for granted by most scholars who have supported or opposed the applicability of the concept in a Caribbean or African context. In the ‘plural society’ of colonial Java, according to Furnivall, Europeans, Chinese and natives each held by their own religion, their own culture and language, meeting as individuals only in the market place. This article re‐examines the case of colonial Java, which first prompted Furnivall to use the concept, paying particular attention to the Chinese. It argues that at the time he invented the term, he exaggerated the ‘pluralistic’ features of colonial society, and that, when applied to the situation at the turn of the century, the concept was quite misleading. Rather, it is suggested, colonial society in the urban centres of Java at that time might in many respects just as well be characterized as a ‘mestizo society’.     

Retrieving the Red Continent: settler colonialism and the history of American Indians in the US

While present in the contemporary academy, American Indian history remains marginalized by being associated with regional and national histories of the United States. Recently, postcolonial scholarship has provided a pathway out of that marginalization. The postcolonial critique of traditional anthropological and historical writing about indigenous peoples suggests a new way to imagine the relationship between American Indian history and other areas of scholarship. The most promising aspect of this critique is the formulation of ‘settler colonialism’. That framework first emerged among geographers and has recently been embraced by historians and anthropologists. The settler colonial framework offers a way to conceive of the Native past in a transnational context as well as to understand indigenous encounters with modernity as an ongoing struggle with colonial rule rather than as a campaign to accommodate Native people to ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ or to ‘assimilate’ them into a nation state.     

Civil society and healing: Theorizing women's social activism in post-soviet Ukraine

This article suggests a new tack on ‘NGO-graphy’ by setting up a dialogue between medical anthropological theories and the existing literature on postsocialist civil societies. Using data from Ukraine, I integrate recent critiques of ‘civil society’ discourses with an ethnographic investigation of the ambiguous personal transformations that social activism has generated for some women NGO leaders. The article asserts that, by applying the insights of critical-interpretive medical anthropology to the study of postsocialism, we can better track the dynamics of political, social, and personal change through which institutions are created, meaning-making surrounding self and society is negotiated, and powerful discourses are wielded to assert and contest the social worth of persons and groups.     

Refusing to Sing: Gender,Kinship and Patriliny in Macedonia

The issue of whether formal kinship structures and sentiments reflect the reality of social relations was of particular concern to specialists at the height of the kinship debates in the 1960s and 1970s, as it continues to be in some contemporary studies. So too, the classifications ‘patrilineal’ or ‘matrilineal’ have clearly been shown to be problematic given that there are multiple levels of discourse and relational and ideational realities in any given society. For many contemporary kinship specialists in fact no simple correlation can be made between type of descent system and actual social relations, especially relations between men and women. However, some anthropologists continue to argue that patrilineal kinship systems are somehow indicative of control or domination by men or, put inversely, of women's lack of power and authority. It is argued in this paper that even where the formal kinship structures and ideological discourses are dominated by agnation as appears to be the case in south Slav societies generally, and Macedonian in particular, this is not automatically mirrored in gender relations between men and women. In short, there is a long leap from patriliny to patriarchy.     

Postcoloniality,National Identity,Globalisation and the Simulacra of the Real

The focus of this paper is a famous boys' boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross section of post-colonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern’ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that contemporary social analysis needs to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their dissolution as an ‘inevitable’ by-product of ‘globalisation’; this seems to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so-called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘post-coloniality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation-state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ in order to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition where analyses of the relationship between nation-states and of the asymmetries within them continue to be important political tasks.     

Discourse in crisis: situating slavery,jihad and military intervention in northern Mali

French discourses narrowly represented the occupation of Timbuktu, Mali as a product of the proliferation of global Jihadi-Salafist networks and, consequently, as a threat to European security. However, revealing perceptions of their ongoing and systematic political economic marginalization, internally displaced persons and refugees from Timbuktu tended to racialize the occupation, distinguishing it as an attempt to (re-)enslave certain northern Malian populations. Both interpretations creatively highlighted certain themes while silencing others. Nonetheless, by selectively characterizing the occupation of the north, the French press reproduced hegemonic global discourses that largely overlooked the roles of (post)colonial domination in regional politics and justified neocolonial intervention. In so doing, these discourses have reinforced continued misconceptions of global geopolitics, and have therefore sustained imperialist knowledge-practices.     

The Social Life of Rights: ‘Gender Antagonism’, Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.     

Discourses of Deception: Cheating in Professional Running1

Cheating, it is claimed, is anathema to sport. But is this the case? In this paper it is argued that cheating is integral to modern sport, that the model of sport as ‘fair play’ is simply an ideological guise of amateurism. The paper focuses on the sport of professional running which, since its origins in the eighteenth century, has been a gambling sport. Strategies involving cheating to manipulate wins, or losses, have featured in this sport as ways of increasing the probability of striking successful wagers. Such strategies are an accepted part of professional running: participants anticipate and expect others to be playing it in this way. However, a distinction is made between what is referred to in the paper as ‘clean’ cheating and ‘dirty’ cheating. The former is an accepted way of the sport, the latter occurs but is deprecated. The paper explores these different forms of cheating and the athletes' responses to them. Through a focus on the discourses of success in capitalist society, a model of cheating is developed to interpret such practices. Within the context of professional running, a working class sport, it is argued that, given the habitus of its practitioners, ‘success’ may be measured in terms of monetary gains and the ‘kick‐on’ in life that these might provide. Cheating practices may serve to enhance the probability of success and social mobility. Given the relatively short career spans of sports people and the costs involved in developing the requisite skills, cheating may promote success and establish a financial base for post‐sport careers. The paper concludes that cheating in sport can be anticipated as a feature of an acquisitive capitalist society.     

Radicalization and counter-radicalization at British universities: Muslim encounters and alternatives

Abstract

This paper explores the ‘spaces’ left over for Muslims to be ‘radical’ and the management of minority identities in light of their securitization in the UK. The paper considers a key site of this management of ‘radical’ identities: the university. The university works as prototypical case because of the ways in student activism and identity are a priori drawn together but also because of the prevalence of higher education among terrorists in the UK and USA. As a result, universities have been specifically targeted in counterterrorism and counter-radicalization measures. The paper reveals through student narratives how security discourses of ‘radicalization’ constrain their activism, university experience and identities. Yet, alternative identity constructions emerge that work against the moderate/radical binary. These narratives show how incomplete the process is of incorporating Muslims into the nation.