Risky subjects: narrative,literary <Emphasis Type="Italic">testimonio</Emphasis> and legal testimony

This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s exposé of Rigoberta Menchú’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchú should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchú testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchú. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.     

"Interracial" Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil: Twin Concepts?

Racial democracy is maintained in Brazil through both scholarly and popular discourses that consider "interracial" sex as proof of Brazil's lack of a racial problem. In this article, I scrutinize the discourse that asks, "How can we be racist when so many of us are mixed?" I argue that racial discourses are embedded in everyday interactions, but are often codified or masked. "Race" is especially pertinent to sexuality, yet the two have hardly been analyzed together. In fact, it is not the belief in a racial democracy that is at the heart of Brazilian racial hegemony, but rather the belief that Brazil is a color-blind erotic democracy. Using my ethnographic data, I illustrate that "race" is embodied in everyday valuations of sexual attractiveness that are gendered, racialized, and class-oriented in ways that commodity black female bodies and white male economic, racial, and class privilege. [Brazil, race, sexuality, poverty]     

Displayed Objects, Indigenous Identities, and Public Pedagogy

In this article, I describe how one group of student examines indigenous identity formation as dynamic and open to reinterpretation. Drawing on field observations and interviews with students in a 16-month ethnographic study, I examine how one group of students worked toward understanding how indigenous identity was determined by curatorial authority and historically defined museum practices. I argue that students can question the traditional pedagogical conceptions of indigenous culture that ought to be reconsidered within the public museum, and that working to historicize such conceptions makes more explicit student knowledge production of identity.     

Rethinking Indigenous Place: Igorot Identity and Locality in the Philippines

Spanish and American colonisers ascribed the identity ‘Igorot’ to the peoples of the northern Philippine mountains, positioning them in the ‘tribal slot’, somewhere between ordinary peasants and ‘backward’ primitives. From this marginal position, contemporary Igorot communities have been comparatively successful in formalising their entitlements to land and resources in their dealings with the Philippine State. This success depends on a discourse tying indigenous or ‘tribal’ culture to particular places. Colonial and, now, local anthropology has been recruited to this process through the mapping of community boundaries. This has allowed groups to secure official status as ‘cultural communities' and gain legal recognition of their ancestral domains. Ironically, even as ancestral domains are recognised, the municipalities that hold such domains have ceased to be bounded containers for Igorot localities, if they ever were. Participation in global indigenous networks, circular migration, and ongoing relations with emigrants overseas blur the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of Igorot communities. Transnational flows of people, information, and value are recruited to support the essentialised versions of indigenous identity necessary for negotiations with the state. Here, I show how the specific history of the Igorot ‘tribal slot’ enables communities to perform essentialised indigeneity and simultaneously enact highly translocal modes of cultural reproduction.     

Do "Language Rights" Serve Indigenous Interests? Some Hopi and Other Queries

While valuable, the discourse of language rights neglects language use in cultural, social, and historical contexts. This article examines some implications of that neglect, especially vis-a-vis small-scale, indigenous, "oral" societies. Drawing principally on Hopi examples, I argue that language rights discourse rests on a reflexivization of language and culture enhanced by globalism. Now reified, language becomes an allegory of ethnic identity. Preexisting sociolinguistic sensibilities get repositioned, for example, in Native Americancommunities in which language has hitherto been deployed as a technique of privacy and sovereignty, language rights ideology islogocentric and presumes a democratic, secular space of language use, conflicting with both privacy and performativity in Native linguisticvalues. And some linguistic usage reinforces social inequality, both transnationally and group-internally: Here, language rights contradict other human rights. Language rights discourse also requires anthropology to rethink its recent antipathy to the culture concept and to treat language and culture objectively. [Keywords: language rights, sociolinguistic values, sovereignty, logocentrism, globalism]     

"Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good for Him": Infant Mortality, Medicine, and Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines

Feminist scholars have begun to consider the ways indigenous practices of child rearing were and are challenged in (post)colonial discourse and practice, and how these practices have become a terrain on which definitions of nation, state, and economy are contested. In this article, I adopt a historical anthropological approach to consider how Filipino child-rearing strategies were described and stigmatized in educational, public health, and public welfare discourses in the U.S.-occupied Philippines in the early 20th century. I demonstrate how public health practices and discourses that were generated as part of a "benevolent" campaign against high rates of infant mortality were strategically used as a weapon against Filipino arguments for independence. I also consider how discourses constructing Filipino caregivers as overly indulgent were linked to metropolitan concerns about production of the "new industrial man" and were used to develop a racialized critique of the cultural practices of Filipinos.     

Shamans versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest

This article explores how the recent rise of shamans as political representatives in Brazil addresses tensions and contradictions associated with the internationalization of indigenous rights movements. Identity politics and transnational organizational alliances concerning issues of environmentalism and human rights have greatly expanded the political leverage and influence of indigenous activism. However, some transnational environmentalist discourses collide with Brazilian discourses of national sovereignty, and the 1990s witnessed a nationalist backlash against Indians, whom politicians, military leaders, and media commentators have frequently portrayed as pawns of foreign imperialists. Opponents of indigenous rights also seized on apparent contradictions between rhetoric and action to discredit indigenous claims to environmental resources. The analysis examines how the shift to redefine knowledge as the core of indigenous identity circumvents some of these liabilities by shifting the basis for indigenous rights claims from environmental practices to environmental knowledge. As shamans mobilize and speak out against the threat of biopiracy, they blunt the nationalist backlash, repositioning indigenous peoples as defenders of the national patrimony and solid citizens of the Brazilian nationstate. [Keywords: Brazil, indigenous peoples, identity politics, shamans, biopiracy]     

"Writing in the Margins": Brazilian Hip-Hop as an Educational Project

Hip-hop culture's force as part of globalization in the fields of economics, popular aesthetics, and identity politics has been well documented. However, its articulation to educational practices has received less attention. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in 1999 and 2002 in a youth correctional facility to analyze how state institutional practices mediate hip-hop's educational project in São Paulo, Brazil. This analysis historicizes culture and education as they pertain to popular culture and the state in urban Brazil, and evaluates hip-hop's pedagogical force in the local workshop setting.     

Ready or Not …? Teen Sexuality and the Troubling Discourse of Readiness

In this article, I explore how talk about being "ready" or "not ready" for sex shapes teen and adult understandings of sexuality. I argue that this "discourse of readiness" poses serious threats to teens' identity development, sexual decision making, and educators efforts to help them through these processes. To illustrate, I draw from my nine-month ethnography, examining how participants used readiness discourses to make sense of their sexualities. I suggest implications for educators, policy makers, and researchers in anthropology and education.     

Fear and Intimacy: Citizenship in a Recife Slum,Brazil

In Brazil, citizenship rights and the institutionalisation of citizen participation have advanced significantly under the democratic regime. However, many of the urban poor are still alienated from the state and its legal system. This article argues that, to understand the citizenship of these ‘half-citizens’, it is necessary to take account of an unofficial realm of practices. I show how residents of a slum in Recife interpret and deal with the state project of registered citizenship, which finds its material expression in the compulsory carrying of identity cards. Carrying these cards is surrounded by fear of violent police control. However, obtaining identity cards through informal procedures is associated with a longing for personalised relationships with the police and other state representatives. The relationship of these residents with their identity cards is thus both fearful and affectionate, which allows us to understand their citizenship as a confluence of fear and intimacy.     

Teaching reading,writing, speaking and risk: dialoguing with Eades,French and Lecuna

This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s exposé of Rigoberta Menchú’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchú should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchú testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchú. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.     

The Positional Quality of Life and Death: A Theory of Human–Animal Relations in Animism

ABSTRACT

This article examines human–animal relations in animism. Ethnographies of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, and Africa are compared in order to provide a basic sketch of the remarkable consistency of animism across the world. A central feature that recurs time and again is the positional quality of life and death. That is, life and death are not conceived of as inherent properties but as changeable positions. This is why indigenous hunters, shamans, and diviners temporarily “die” when they participate in the specific rites or cults associated with their respective endeavors. Such metamorphoses of the living into the dead are crucial to understand how hunters engage with their prey, shamans mobilize their animal-helpers, and honey collectors approach their bees. At the same time, these different activities involve the transformation of humans into animals. Chachi bird stalkers and Uduk antelope hunters identify themselves with their quarry, Navajo medicine men and Ainu shamans shape-change into their animallike adversaries, while Batek mourners may adopt a tiger-form. At first sight, such simultaneous metamorphoses (from the living into the dead and from humans into animals) may seem contradictory. Yet, this apparent inconsistency disappears if one realizes that the modern notion of wildlife cannot be applied to animism. I show that the monkeys, deer, whales, tigers, and elephants that indigenous hunters and shamans deal with must be understood as “wild-dead” rather than as wildlife. These various animals are palpable representatives of an expanded realm of death which—I suggest—is characteristic of all forms of animism. In this context, being animate is not sufficient to be considered “alive.”     

Respect of law or respect through law?

What is the role of law and legality in social resilience? This review essay highlights how a sociology of law, culture, and institutions underwrites many of the findings of Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil &; Israel. The book provides a trenchant analysis of group boundaries, stigma, and destigmatization across three cities worldwide. I suggest that in addition to the role of formal law and legal constraints that the book identifies, we can attend to how legality offers a repertoire for resilience on which people draw when faced with stigma, discrimination, or contentious situations, even when formal law falls short. In this way, combining a sociology of law with a sociology of culture can provide us with an understanding of how societies offer social resilience, and how this resource varies across social, national, and legal contexts.     

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross‐cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and ‘translated’ into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of ‘translation’ raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation‐state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.     

A "Consumer's Right" to Choose a Midwife: Shifting Meanings for Reproductive Rights under Neoliberalism

The "right to choose" has long served as the ideological rallying cry for reproductive rights activists. Yet critical attention to the social, political, and economic conditions under which individuals make such choices has been central to anthropological research on reproduction. In the context of neoliberal public policy shifts that favor trust in the market to remedy all social and economic inequality, I explore how women's reproductive rights are becoming characterized by one's ability to consume uneven reproductive "choices." Based on my ethnographic fieldwork with midwifery supporters in Virginia, I examine how organizers have begun to utilize "consumer rights" rhetoric in their struggle for legal access to midwives. One often-unintended result has been intensified divisions within this movement, particularly as low-income "homebirthers" feel unable to claim the identity of "consumer." I use Virginia as a case study to raise broader questions about women's shifting strategies toward securing reproductive rights under neoliberalism.     

The Politics and Regulation of Anger in Urban China

Negative emotions such as anger, and community responses to their expression are culturally and politically conditioned, including by dominant medical discourse on anger’s somatic and psychic effects. In this article I examine local genres of anger expression in Beijing, China, particularly among marginalized workers, and address culturally specific responses to them. Through majie (rant), xiangpi ren (silenced rage), and nande hutu (muddledness as a more difficult kind of smartness), workers strategically employ anger to seek redress for injustices and legitimate their moral indignation while challenging official psychotherapeutic interventions. Those who seek to regulate anger, mostly psychosocial workers acting as arm’s-length agents of the state, use mixed methods that draw on Western psychotherapy and indigenous psychological resources to frame, medicalize or appease workers’ anger in the name of health and social stability. I demonstrate how the two processes—anger expression and responses to it—create tensions and result in an ambiguous and multivalent social terrain which Chinese subjects must negotiate and which the state attempts to govern. I argue that the ambivalence and multi-valence of anger expressions and state-sponsored reactions to them render this emotion both subversive vis-à-vis power and subject to manipulations that maintain social order.     

From "Rights" to "Ritual": AIDS Activism in South Africa

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the "near death" experiences of full-blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and "social death" associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to "new life" and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV-positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen–activist and member of a social movement.     

Indigenous Media Gone Global: Strengthening Indigenous Identity On- and Offscreen at the First Nations/First Features Film Showcase

For 12 days in May 2005, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), as well as several other screening venues in Washington, D.C., hosted a group of renowned indigenous filmmakers from around the globe for the groundbreaking film showcase, "First Nations/First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film and Media." This film showcase highlighted the innovative ways in which indigenous filmmakers draw on indigenous storytelling practices to create cinematic visions that honor their long-standing indigenous cultural worlds while reaching local and world audiences. In this essay, I highlight the onscreen impact through an analysis of several films featured in First Nations/First Features, as well as the offscreen impact emphasizing how the indigenous directors used this opportunity to strengthen social networks and share experience in this industry, which may develop into future collaborative film projects.     

The good Arab: conditional inclusion and settler colonial citizenship among Palestinian citizens of Israel in Jewish Tel Aviv

Dominant majorities often use idealized categories to validate the ‘goodness’ and deservingness of minority citizens. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, this category is the ‘good Arab’. Since its origins in early Jewish settlement of Palestine, it has become a powerful and controversial metaphor in Israeli public discourse. As an experienced condition of limited inclusion, the ‘good Arab’ exemplifies the Palestinian dilemma of accessing socioeconomic opportunities in Jewish Israeli spaces that stigmatize and fend off their ethnonational identity. Combining a historical genealogy of the ‘good Arab’ with ethnographic research among Palestinians in Tel Aviv, this article shows how a historically evolved logic of settler colonial control and indigenous erasure continues to define liberal frameworks of conditional citizenship and inclusion. Theorized through the emerging concept of conditional inclusion, these insights open up new avenues for analysis and comparison in anthropological debates surrounding indigenous struggles, settler colonialism, urban inclusion, and citizenship.     

Understanding Power in Indigenous Protected Areas: the Case of the Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Parks

This article draws on concepts of power from political ecology and political sociology to describe the ways that the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation (a Canadian indigenous people) have attempted to realize their goals under the broad rubric of their Tribal Parks initiative. Like some other Indigenous peoples’ and Community Conserved territories and Areas (ICCAs), the Tribal Parks example features de facto legal pluralism, lack of clear tenure and/or legal recognition, oppositional and/or cooperative relationships with other actors, and situations where local actors are influenced by intersecting global discourses on conservation and indigenous rights and culture. Globally, ICCAs are a form of protected area and are potentially critical in terms of meeting ambitious global protected area targets as well in addressing issues related to the rights and well-being of indigenous peoples. As such, understanding the ‘customary law or other effective means’, or the dynamics of power through which indigenous groups are able (or not) to realize their protected area goals is of global significance. This article illuminates the contours of power through two specific Tribal Parks case studies: the first involves contestations over industrial logging, while the second focuses on the establishment and implementation of what came to be called an ‘ecosystem services fee’ paid by ecotourism outfitters operating within a Tribal Park. Results highlight that the Tla-o-qui-aht have drawn power from different sources and exercised it by different means including turning to the Courts in a context of legal uncertainty, protest and direct action coupled with appeals to public opinion, developing and drawing on relationships with both local and non-local interests, and by strategically ‘tapping into’ prominent discourses.