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.     

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.     

‘Anthropologists Are Talking’ About Anthropology After Globalisation

Laughing and humour are of great importance to most people in their everyday life and these phenomena have attracted attention from many social thinkers. It has been noted that laughter often is provoked by something that is considered to be absurd and paradoxical. This essay focuses specifically on the meaning of laughter among Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon. The paper discusses how absurdity is employed within narrative genres as a structuring principle within the specific ethos that is predominant among this people and how it serves to generate and manifest conviviality.     

The Work of Indebtedness: The Traumatic Present of Late Capitalist Chile

In political and biomedical discourses, "posttraumatic stress disorder" has become a set of organizing concepts for trauma and traumatic memory. These concepts, however, are predicated on an understanding of traumatic memory as a discrete etiological event that, when reexperienced, is productive of symptoms. In this essay, I explore alternative framings of trauma that arise out of historical changes in political economic language and from experiences of monetary, historical, and affective indebtedness in Santiago, Chile. This ethnographic research is based in an historically leftist población (poor urban sector) and follows the interwoven narratives of a formerly exiled communist militant and her adopted daughter. Throughout this essay, I describe the mother's attempts to inhabit an untimely language of socialist politics and the daughter's rejection of both this language and her mother's pain. I elaborate on how these attempts are products of and productive of monetary and intersubjective indebtedness in a neoliberal present. By describing the differing historical languages inhabited by these subjects, I attempt to evoke an understanding of trauma not as an individual possession or etiological event, but rather as a referential dissonance in the neoliberal context. This referential dissonance emerges from the gap between the historical languages that inform subjectivities. I explore how such a gap can create contexts in which the everyday itself both threatens the disarticulation of the subject and produces injurious affective relationships. In this way, I interrogate relationships between trauma, recovery, and the everyday.     

The language of everyday racism and microaggression in the workplace: Palestinian professionals in Israel

Based on interviews with Palestinian professionals in Jewish organizations in Israel, this article discloses a distinctive practice of ‘everyday racism’ and microaggression – a language of everyday racism. This ‘language of everyday racism’ refers to Hebrew words and expressions that are routinely used by Jews in their mundane conversations and that include the word ‘Arab’ when describing a deficiency or defect, some sort of unsightliness, filth, or general negativity (as in the expression ‘You're dressed like an Arab woman’). This article not only describes the language of everyday racism as a specific form of everyday racism and microaggression (national microaggression), it also illustrates how this language activates the Palestinian professionals in a reflexive manner. The discussion section describes how the internal dialectic between structure and agency is critical to understanding the language of everyday racism, which in turn acts as a mechanism of the inequality that underlies face-to-face interactions.     

At the limits of the human: reading Postraciality from Palestine

ABSTRACT

Drawing from David Goldberg’s attentiveness to racism and ‘postraciality’, I read the role of racial violence and terror in the making of Palestine and the Palestinians. The paper shows how Goldberg’s book unsettles racialized convictions of postraciality, and deconstructs the uncompromising global narrative of race. Following Goldberg’s analysis, this paper challenges racialized Zionist ideologies by considering how we might understand the marking of Palestinian homes, bodies, and lives that have become sites of racialized incarceration and brutality through the process of Israeli settler colonialism. I suggest that there is a need to pay close attention to mundane, everyday modes of suffering in order to understand the postraciality of racial suffering in the context of Palestine. I explore how the equation of Palestinians with non-humans requires them either to disappear or submit to racialized exercises of power. These questions allow us to critically analyze postraciality in the context of those living at the limits of humanity.     

Skolt Sami ethnicity and cultural revival

The article is centred on a concern with limitations in our knowledge of youth's life experiences. I pose questions about the nature and implications of accounts of childhood by tracing ideas in early ethnographies and comparing these with my own attempts to frame youth differently. Using ideas of heroism and narrative, I examine the life histories of two young activists in order to comment on methodological approaches to exploring the world of youths, to ask how far we have come in catching their voices and experiences, and to comment on how far we have still to go.     

Rethinking the ‘everyday’ in ‘ethnicity and everyday life’

While ‘ethnicity and everyday life’ is a familiar collocation, sociologists concerned with racism and ethnicity have not engaged very much with the extensive body of social theory that takes the ‘everyday’ as its central problematic. In this essay, I consider some of the ways in which the sociology of the everyday might be of use to those concerned with investigating ethnicity and racism. For its part, however, the sociology of the everyday has tended to be remarkably blind to the role played by racism and racialization in the modern world. It is thus no less crucial to consider how the experiences of racialized groups might help us rethink influential accounts of the everyday. To this end, I provide a discussion of pioneering texts by C. L. R. James and W. E. B. du Bois, both of whom were driven by their reflections on racism and resistance to recognize the everyday not as an unremarked context, but as, precisely, a problematic one.     

Visualizing Marriage in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

In this article, I propose using bridal photography and wedding video-recording to gain a better understanding of the meanings of romance and the ideal life among young generations and to consider how relevant images of getting married shed light on the changing social life in Hong Kong. Bridal photography and wedding videorecording not only play the role of documentation but also reflect the social change and values among new married couples in the society. By examining packaged bridal photography and the process of wedding video-shooting, I propose to state how visualization brings subtle influences into the new dynamism of marriage as a ritual and reflects the changing social contexts in today's Hong Kong everyday life.     

What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

A focus on ordinary or everyday ethics has become perhaps the dominant concern in the rapidly developing anthropology of ethics. In this article, I argue that this focus tends to marginalize the study of the ways in which religion contributes to people's moral lives. After defining religion and transcendence in terms that make them less uncongenial to the study of ethics than many proponents of ordinary ethics suggest, I examine values as one sometimes transcendent cultural form that often informs ethical life. I draw on Victor Turner (along with Durkheim) to develop an account of how rituals often both present people with and allow them to perform transcendent versions of values. These encounters, in turn, shape people's ethical sensibilities, including those they bring to bear in everyday life, in ways we cannot understand unless we accord religion a more central role in the anthropology of ethics than it has played to this point. I illustrate my arguments with material drawn both from Turner's Ndembu ethnography and from my own research on Christianity in Papua New Guinea.     

The life and death of a street boy in East Africa: everyday violence in the time of AIDS

This article focuses on the life history of a single street boy in northwestern Tanzania, whom I name Juma. I suggest that Juma's experiences and the life trajectory of himself and of significant individuals around him (particularly his mother) were structured by everyday violence. I describe everyday violence in terms of a conjuncture between macrostructural forces in East Africa (including a history of failed development schemes and the contemporary political economy of neoliberalism) and the lived experience of individuals as they negotiate local, contextual factors (including land-tenure practices, the power dynamics between immediate and extended kin, life on the streets, and constructions of gender and sexuality). I suggest that AIDS and its many impacts on Juma's life course can only be understood in a broader context of everyday violence. From this basis, I draw several general conclusions regarding AIDS prevention and intervention strategies.     

Culture,Conflict, and Translocal Communication: Mobile Technology and Politics in Rural West Bengal,India

As media reports of political movements from various locations have shown, mobile technology can be a powerful political instrument. This paper examines how political activists in West Bengal, India use mobile phones for their daily political work. I seek ways to recognize the disruptive and political potential of mobile technology without ignoring its social and cultural rootedness. I illustrate how riots and protests relate to the increase in translocal communication enabled by phones. I also demonstrate how the political use of mobile technology for extra ordinary events is grounded in the social and political processes of ordinary everyday life and draws from the local understanding of politics by emphasizing certain aspects of it. My article confirms the cultural continuity amidst the increase in translocal relationships but it also pinpoints how cultures harbour conflicts and alternative discourses which translocal communication helps to amplify.     

Materializing the nation in everyday life: on symbols and objects in the Palestinian refugee diaspora

This article considers the nationalizing practices of everyday life among Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Concerned with what some scholars call banal or everyday nationhood, it examines how particular objects within the ordinary lives of Palestinian refugees articulate conceptions of national belonging and difference. Attending to the discursive and the material, this article argues that understanding Palestinian national practice among refugees in Jordan requires specific attention to the material objects consumed and displayed within the homes and institutions of Palestinian life. As icons productive of a national sensorium, these objects are critical for understanding the constitution of nationhood and what I call a national visualscape. Embedded within the routine spaces of ordinary life, this paper argues that national practice is often visible yet unseen, articulated yet unheard. Palestinian nationhood in Jordan is thus an ordinary affair; it is the practical accomplishment of ordinary people engaged in the production of nationhood without a nationalist movement.     

“A Massive Long Way”: Interconnecting Histories, a “Special Child,” ADHD, and Everyday Family Life

Focusing on one family from a study of dual-earner middle-class families carried out in Los Angeles, California, this article draws on interview and video-recorded data of everyday interactions to explore illness and healing as embedded in the microcultural context of the Morris family. For this family, an important aspect of what is at stake for them in their daily lives is best understood by focusing on 9-year-old Mark, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In this article, we grapple with the complexity of conveying some sense of how Mark’s condition is experienced and relationally enacted in everyday contexts. Through illuminating connections between lives as lived and lives as told, we explore the narrative structuring of healing in relation to Mark’s local moral world with the family at its center. We examine how his parents understand the moral consequences of the child’s past for his present and future, and work to encourage others to give due weight to his troubled beginnings before this child joined the Morris family. At the same time, we see how the Morris parents act to structure Mark’s moral experience and orient to a desired future in which Mark’s “success” includes an appreciation of how he is accountable to others for his actions. Through our analyses, we also seek to contribute to discussions on what is at stake in everyday life contexts for children with ADHD and their families, through illuminating aspects of the cultural, moral and relational terrain that U.S. families navigate in contending with a child’s diagnosis of ADHD. Further, given that ADHD is often construed as a “disorder of volition,” we seek to advance anthropological theorizing about the will in situations where volitional control over behavior is seen to be disordered.     

Gratuitousness: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Interiority

Interiority—an individual's inner consciousness, the continual conversation one has with oneself–remains an anthropological terra incognita. Literature has been less circumspect in this regard; fiction might be said to be ‘truer’ than social science in its efforts and intent to deal with how individual consciousness feels in the everyday and is immanent in social life. In this article I argue for recognising interiority as a crucial focus of anthropological endeavour, and I outline a possible way in which interiority might be evidenced as irrupting onto the social scene. Interiority makes its paradoxical appearance in social settings in the form of a strangeness, an individual purity and integrity, for which the term ‘gratuitousness’ is apposite. The language of individuals' interior conversation is routinely contained within the language of public exchange; on occasion it bursts these bounds. In both cases, I contend, interior conversation is an existential norm, which holds a key to understanding social life. The course of the article is to review, briefly but critically, disciplinary tendencies which have rendered individual interiority an impossible or irrelevant anthropological theme. A method of interiority is then outlined by way of an anthropological reading of two literary texts. The article ends by reconsidering the potential of an anthropology project that has a concern for interiority. The modern discovery of inner experience, of a realm of purely personal events that are always at the individual's command, and that are his exclusively as well as inexpensively for refuge, consolation and thrill is also a great and liberating discovery. It implies a new worth and sense of dignity in human individuality.     

Human Emotion Experiences Can Be Predicted on Theoretical Grounds: Evidence from Verbal Labeling

In an effort to demonstrate that the verbal labeling of emotional experiences obeys lawful principles, we tested the feasibility of using an expert system called the Geneva Emotion Analyst (GEA), which generates predictions based on an appraisal theory of emotion. Several thousand respondents participated in an Internet survey that applied GEA to self-reported emotion experiences. Users recalled appraisals of emotion-eliciting events and labeled the experienced emotion with one or two words, generating a massive data set on realistic, intense emotions in everyday life. For a final sample of 5969 respondents we show that GEA achieves a high degree of predictive accuracy by matching a user’s appraisal input to one of 13 theoretically predefined emotion prototypes. The first prediction was correct in 51% of the cases and the overall diagnosis was considered as at least partially correct or appropriate in more than 90% of all cases. These results support a component process model that encourages focused, hypothesis-guided research on elicitation and differentiation, memory storage and retrieval, and categorization and labeling of emotion episodes. We discuss the implications of these results for the study of emotion terms in natural language semantics.     

The discursive detachment of race from gentrification in Cartagena de Indias,Colombia

In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality.     

Negotiating Values: Narrative and Exposition

In this paper I focus on the limits of narrative by asking what kinds of things narratives do, and what kinds of texts do related things in other ways. In particular I focus on how narrative genres organise time in relation to value, drawing on functional linguistic models of temporality and evaluation. From a linguistic perspective, the various narrative genres negotiate different kinds of solidarity with listeners, and so the limits of narrative materialise various possibilities for communing in a culture, alongside the potentialities for construing community through related and other genres of discourse—since in general, the limits/possibilities of our language (and attendant modalities of communication) are the limits/possibilities of our social world.

Life on the hoof: gender,youth, and the environment in the Indian Himalayas

This article examines how young people in the Indian Himalayas understand, appreciate, and discuss their environment. Building on intensive ethnographic field research in Bemni, Uttarakhand, I point to the changing ways in which young people use the everyday practice of herding to acquire knowledge and engage in playful activity. I emphasize that age and gender shape the capacity for young people to interact creatively with their local environments. I will argue that studies of human/environment relations might usefully combine a focus on the movement of individuals through environments with a focus on the gendered ways in which they move through the life‐course.     

Multiple chemical sensitivities: stigma and social experiences

Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), an intolerance to everyday chemical and biological substances in amounts that do not bother other people, is a medically contested condition. In addition to symptoms and the ongoing difficulties of living with this condition, this hidden and stigmatized disability strongly impacts social relationships and daily life. Based on an ethnographic study, this article introduces the context of MCS in terms of cultural themes, the media, and the economic power of industries that manufacture the products that make people with MCS sick. Participants' experiences with family members and friends, in work and school settings, and with physicians exemplify the difficulties of living with MCS. I dedicate this article to Joan Ablon, my professor and mentor, whose work has always inspired my thinking and research topics.