For Love,Money, or Normalcy: Meanings of Strategy and Sentiment in the Russian-American Matchmaking Industry

Public debates about international matchmaking highlight the victimization of impoverished women by western men or the self-interested instrumentalism of women who marry for visas. Meanwhile, agencies and many of their clients portray this as a linking of well-intentioned lonely hearts who just want normal family lives. A meaningful anthropological account must incorporate and move beyond both types of narratives, acknowledging that deeply felt sentiment and ‘strategic’ plans to improve one's life overlap in all kinds of social exchange, romantic or otherwise. How the relationship between self-interest and affect is understood depends upon historically specific and gendered experiences of political economy. Participants’ framings of their own and their prospective spouses’ ‘sincerity’ and ‘seriousness’ are diagnostic of structural pressures each group has experienced, which they seek to address through international marriage.     

The racialised and classed constitution of English village life

This article explores ethnographically the ‘village’ as a stage for the enactment and reproduction of a racialised set of white middle-class social and moral values. To do this I draw upon interview material with middle-class whites who live in a suburban ‘village’ on the border of rural Leicestershire and urban Leicester in England. I explore the way in which my co-conversationalists reflexively and imaginatively defend their area's ‘village’ identity through a discourse that ‘others’ its wealthy Asian residents. Although these raced others have achieved economic parity with the more affluent wealthy white middle-class residents, they are imagined to lack the ‘proper’ middle-class values of respectability and decorum, which are associated with the traditional white rhythms of English village life.     

Opting out of the city: lifestyle migrations,alternative education,and the pursuit of happiness among Chinese middle-class families

This article responds to calls among anthropologists to attend to the aspirational qualities of life pursuits by respecting idealized life visions and acknowledging the suggestiveness of living otherwise. It follows a cohort of formerly urban middle-class Chinese families that have chosen to ‘opt out’ of their successful city lives to pursue alternative lifestyles and education for their children in China's rural southwest. Drawing on literatures about voluntary lifestyle migrations and alternative parenting and education, I show how these families construct meaningful social worlds through class histories, family ideals, and presentist temporalities that deviate from Western class formation and neoliberal constructions of self defined by individualistic identity pursuits. Through analysing a configuration of self and sociality that emphasizes the family and routes parental self-aspirations through children, the article deepens our understanding of child-centredness as a key feature of Chinese lifestyle migrations. It shows how quests for ‘the good life’ take shape through diverse sociohistorical and familial contexts with their own temporal orientations and life politics.     

Procreative and performative kinship among residents in Victorian caravan parks

Recent senior anthropologists have heralded a new era where performative social and cultural kinship may eclipse procreational ‘biological kinship’ in contemporary western society. This article takes research on permanent residents in caravan parks as an extreme case that may act as an exemplar for future western contexts. Between 2003 and 2008, interviews with caravan‐park managers, 50 interviews with park residents and short field stays at 17 outer Melbourne and rural Victorian caravan parks, provided multi‐sited ethnographic material for analysis. I argue that contemporary contexts for relatedness give scope for creative development of social performative ties with ‘ex’ spouses and in‐laws, friends and pets. ‘Biological’ kin and family with a material dimension remain central, however, and a response to family need or rupture is often the broadening of the procreative kin links between grandparent and grandchild and between siblings. Childhood institutionalisation and divorce in particular, contributed to pathways towards caravan park housing. Other kin‐based motivations include finding safe accommodation for wives; providing housing for young adult males after injury and family divorce; and arranging for housing succession for children. Ideas of blood and folk biology demonstrate considerable resilience in contemporary kinship arrangements.     

Of love and fur: grandmothers,class, and pre‐mortem inheritance in a southern Polish city

This article analyses the pre‐mortem alternate‐generation inheritance of fur clothing in Kraków: a practice that speaks to the conventions of grandmother‐granddaughter relationships and also to the connection between inheritance and social class. The perception of fur as a symbolically loaded material enhances its suitability for being ‘kept in the family’. Clothing inheritance fosters bourgeois belonging over multiple generations, encouraging the patronage of selected spaces and services (including furriers). In the shorter term, however, generational differences within amicable grandmother‐granddaughter pairs are amplified in part through the way pre‐mortem inheritance practices highlight granddaughters' non‐reciprocable debt to their grandmothers. A focus on fur as a particular kind of object highlights the significance of certain inheritance practices and their links to the affective ties in the reproduction of class in Poland. The article also contributes to a broader understanding of the reproduction of class by analysing the interconnections between taste, the body, and memory.     

From connection to contagion

This essay proposes that we ‘think data’ with a complex legacy of work, once disavowed and now resurgent in social theory, on crowd formations. I propose this move because social media platforms’ mobilization of data – the extractions, ever-shifting reaggregations, and micro-targeting, on the one hand, and our engagements, re-tweets, acts of sharing, and production of virality, on the other – has fuelled such anxious concern about the very things that animated much crowd theory in the first place. Key among these concerns are the force of emotional contagion and the threat of social dissolution; the composition of ‘the social’ by elements that well exceed the human; and pressing questions about the media through which energetic forces travel, often with lightning speed. What questions might be enabled by attending to the resonance between crowd theory's ‘anti-liberal’ preoccupations and contemporary concerns over how social media platforms crowd us?     

The Chinese family as instituted fantasy: or,rescuing kinship imaginaries from the ‘symbolic’

This article revisits well‐travelled ethnographic portrayals of traditional Chinese family dynamics to draw attention to desire as a product of family life and to how crucial elements of family organization and ideology can be understood, in turn, as effects of desire – that is, as instituted fantasies. Although my case in point is the Chinese family, the analysis addresses the category ‘family’ cross‐culturally. In any of its variations, the ‘family’ exists at two synergistically implicated levels: first, it comprises an important part of the reality into which individuals are socialized; second, it embodies in instituted form individuals' attempts to realize – to bring into being – social arrangements as they would like them to be. In the Chinese case, at least two ironies are embedded in this synergy. First, women are primary producers and reproducers of the family in the ‘real world’, despite the fact that patriliny as ‘instituted fantasy’ downplays or veils their agency. Second, the normative subordination of the son to a patriarchal father, expressed and mediated through institutions including ancestor worship and valorization of filial piety, veils a valorizing of the son as agent or protagonist of filial action. Although ultimately unrealizable, patrilineal and familial fantasies animate Chinese family life and are thus an important constituent of Chinese realities. To these ends the analysis re‐purposes ‘the symbolic’ and ‘imaginaries’, categories widely employed in contemporary gender studies and social theory, arguing that understanding kinship enjoins incorporating desire's role both in defining institutions and in motivating their creators.     

HIV,Embodied Secrets,and Intimate Labour in Northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article explores how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies. Women conspicuously enhance their beauty in an attempt to defend themselves against the violence of social exclusion. Moreover, they do so in order to forge safe, loving, and prosperous relationships with their boyfriends, husbands, and families. My goal is to understand how intimacy, as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state, characterises these women's corporeal and sartorial acts. Further, I question how these embodied practices become imbricated in exchange relations with family members, health workers, and the larger community. To describe these routinised toils and triumphs as women seek to care for themselves and others, I employ the term ‘intimate labour’. I demonstrate how women gain access to social and economic resources by attending to and capitalising on the sensual and bodily desires and needs of others.     

Gifting as Governance: NGO Service Projects and Disciplinary Power in Rural Migrant Settlements in China

ABSTRACT

In contemporary China, migrant workers have gathered in urban villages and formed communities of their own. The regulative power of the state has not fully penetrated these enclaves, thus creating opportunities for NGOs to shoulder many of the ongoing welfare responsibilities. The primary goal of this study was to explore how NGO service projects can generate a new type of disciplinary power through give-and-take practices. I argue that service projects allow the givers to transform their economic power and social resources into political power, through which social inequality is obscured, legitimised, and translated into the delivery of ‘love’, ‘caring’ and ‘compassion’. Such political power also delivers middle-class values and lifestyles to rural migrants, who feel obligated to transform their subjectivities in order to reciprocate.     

Children of the palms: growing plants and growing people in a Papuan Plantationocene

This article explores how ecological change transforms children and child-rearing among Indigenous Marind in West Papua. Marind children become ‘anim ' (persons) by immersing themselves within the ecology of sago palms and their suckers, or ‘sago children’. Conversely, deforestation and oil palm expansion – the defining traits of the place, period, and production mode I term ‘Papuan Plantationocene’ – subvert the mutual maturation of humans and sago by confining children to the oppressive environment of the village and preventing them from supporting sago's growth through sago transplanting and felling. Meanwhile, oil palm itself is alternately characterized by Marind as a vulnerable child subjected to totalizing human control and as a figure of hope for future Marind generations. The article provides a deeper and broader consideration of ‘childhood’ beyond the human in understanding how monocrop capitalist production reconfigures the form and possibility of multispecies social reproduction for people and plants.     

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.     

The impact of moving to a novel environment on social networks, activity and wellbeing in two new world primates

Among the stressors that can affect animal welfare in zoos, the immediate effect of relocation to a novel environment is one that has received little attention in the literature. Here, we compare the social network, daily activity and the expression of stress-related behavior in capuchins (Cebus apella) and squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) before and just after they were relocated to a new enriched enclosure. Results showed similar immediate responses to the move in the two species. Both showed a substantial increase in the time spent resting and spent more time in the highest and "safest" part of their enclosure after relocation. Both capuchins and squirrel monkeys spent significantly more time in close proximity to other group members after relocation, compared to before. In squirrel monkeys, the structure of the social network, which was initially correlated to affiliation, was no longer so after the move. In capuchins, the network analysis showed that individuals regrouped by age, with the youngsters who were potentially more affected by stress being in the center of the network. Social network analysis helped to achieve a more complete picture of how individuals were affected by relocation. We suggest that this type of analysis should be used alongside traditional methods of observation and analysis to encompass the most complex aspects of animal behavior in times of stress and to improve welfare.     

Founders,ancestors, and enemies: memory,family, time,and space in the Pernambuco sertão

This article concerns the use of narrative and genealogical frameworks among sertanejos, the inhabitants of the hinterlands (sertão) of Pernambuco in the Northeast of Brazil, in the process of grouping and differentiating families. It explores how accounts produced by different people are linked by shared memories of past conflicts – such as cangaço and questões de família (lit. ‘family issues’). Through conceived and lived relationships among relatives and the correlated concepts of ‘blood’ and ‘race’ current in this social formation, I look to identify the different meanings attributed to time and space, inscribed in the collective memory, and implicated in the moving configurations of ‘family’ in a cognatic universe.     

Counterpolitics of Liberation in Contemporary China: Corruption,Law, and Popular Religion

This article explores the hidden transfers between law and religion by focussing on the conditions of existence of ‘liberated’ peasant subjects in contemporary China. The post-Maoist era sought to create new citizens from the collectivised Maoist masses who are subject to market reforms and a new politics of ‘governing through law’ (fazhi). At the same time, new religiousities have blossomed in the Chinese countryside. Representing ‘feudal superstition’, their collective practices remain illegal until today. I argue that, beyond the issue of belief, contemporary ‘feudal superstition’ does not represent a form of anti-secular resistance, but rather confirms the central tenets of Chinese secularism from the perspective of ‘failed’ peasant subjects. Where the realities of market liberalisation and governing through law are experienced as corruption, feudal superstition recreates the conditions to realise liberated peasant subjects: a participatory local public sphere, political visibility, investments in the public good, and a new collective property.     

Transnational policy migration,interdisciplinary policy transfer and decolonization: Tracing the patterns of research ethics regulation in Taiwan

Research ethics regulation in parts of the Global North has sometimes been initiated in the face of biomedical scandal. More recently, developing and recently developed countries have had additional reasons to regulate, doing so to attract international clinical trials and American research funding, publish in international journals, or to respond to broader social changes. In Taiwan, biomedical research ethics policy based on ‘principlism’ and committee‐based review were imported from the United States. Professionalisation of research ethics displaced other longer‐standing ways of conceiving ethics connected with Taiwanese cultural traditions. Subsequently, the model and its discursive practices were extended to other disciplines. Regulation was also shaped by decolonizing discourses associated with asserting Indigenous peoples’ rights. Locating research ethics regulation within the language and practices of public policy formation and transfer as well as decolonization, allows analysis to move beyond the self‐referential and attend to the social, economic and political context within which regulation operates.     

Alternative Male Spawning Tactics and Acoustic Signals in the Plainfin Midshipman Fish Porichthys notatus Girard (Teleostei,Batrachoididae)

The plainfin midshipman Porichthys notatus has two male reproductive morphs, ‘Type I’ and ‘Type II’, which are distinguishable by their physical traits alone. Type I males are eight times larger in body mass than Type II males and have a six-fold larger relative sonic (vocal) muscle mass than Type II males. In contrast, the testicles of Type II males are seven times larger than those of Type I males. This study demonstrates morph-specific patterns of reproduction, including acoustic signals, for Type I and II males. Field censuses of nests showed that only Type 1 males maintained nests. Type II males and females transiently appeared in these nests in association with each other. Infra-red video and hydrophone recordings in aquaria showed that Type I males maintained nests and readily vocalized. Long-duration ‘hums’ and sequences of short-duration ‘grunts’ were produced during advertisement and agonistic contexts, respectively. Humming Type I males attracted females to their nests, pair-spawned, and then guarded egg clutches alone. By contrast, Type II males neither acoustically courted females nor maintained available nest sites, but rather ‘sneak-’ or ‘satellite-spawned’ at the nests of Type I males. Type II males infrequently produced low amplitude, short duration grunts that were similar in spectral, temporal and amplitude characteristics to the grunts of females. Type II males appear to be obligate sexual parasites of the nest-building, mate-calling, and egg-guarding Type I males. The dimorphic body and vocal muscle traits of the two male morphs in the plainfin midshipman are thus paralleled by a divergence in their reproductive tactics and the properties of their acoustic signals.     

Beyond blasphemy or devotion: art,the secular,and Catholicism in Paris

In this article I explore the relationship between the secular and ‘cultural’ Catholicism in France through the lens of a contemporary art exhibit displayed at a new project of the French Catholic Church. Visitors’ varied responses to the exhibit, I argue, ultimately reinforced the organizers’ claim that the activities that occur within this ‘non‐religious’ space of the French church are self‐evident aspects of a broadly recognizable and ‘secular’ French or European culture.     

‘All daughters and sons of the Republic’? Producing difference in French education

Anthropological focus on public sphere debates can have the unintended consequence of reaffirming ideological oppositions (‘secularism versus Islam’) while ignoring other processes of difference production. In this article, I examine how French school employees build a logic of cultural otherness in an arena of uncertain social reproduction. Contrary to analyses of the French public sphere that emphasize the ideology of secular universalism, I argue that this dominant ideology has little purchase in the thick of social relations in a peripheral school. Faced with neoliberal transformations and diminishing resources, teachers draw instead on diverse discourses that have the effect of producing cultural difference. Through this process, immigrant‐origin students are presented as incommensurable with Frenchness, and Frenchness becomes rooted in family structure and territory. This case illustrates how state actors confront the contradictions that inhabit universal citizenship and reconfigure the project of Republican schooling.     

‘Hip to be Irish’: ethnicity and Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’

A ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity surfaced in the 1980s – according to a number of scholars and journalists – and is comprised of what some consider to be more ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ Irish cultural attributes. Defining authentic and traditional Irishness is complicated, however, by the recent influx and highly visible forms of economic capital and media attention stemming from the Celtic Tiger – the surge of economic prosperity that began in Ireland in the 1990s – and the commercializing of Irish music and dance – such as Riverdance. In this paper, I propose, through my study involving Irish language enthusiasts, that this ‘new’ form of Irish ethnicity is more the result of rather than the reason for this surge in popularity. I use Pierre Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’ in questioning the ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity, arguing instead that a deeply seated, less-visible reservoir of cultural and social capital form the basis for this perceived contemporary ethnicity.     

Asocial memories, ‘poisonous knowledge’, and haunting in Mongolia

This article argues that memories that come from contexts that are adversarial, and that are not always based on communication and sociality, should be better integrated within the existing theories of social memory. Shamans in postsocialist Mongolia claim that previously suppressed origin spirits demand that their descendants become initiated as shamans in exchange for ceasing to harass them for forgetting and abandonment. Some clients refuse to become initiated as shamans and thus choose to sever their relationship with their past. In this article I explore one such refusal, which led to a disintegration of existing social ties, while also yielding unexpected memories. These memories are different from the shared memories that emerge in the context of organized shamanic rituals. Circulated through rumour and supposition instead of positive sociality and sharing, these ‘asocial’ memories also act as a particular kind of ‘poisonous knowledge’, prompting each individual to withdraw from the network as a way of avoiding the alleged harm from unattended spirits. Owing to divergent subject positioning, where one person's remembering is another's forgetting, the haunting by unwanted memories continues, as resolution through unifying communal ritual is not possible.