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

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

Be our guest/worker: reciprocal dependency and expressions of hospitality in Ni-Vanuatu overseas labour migration

Whilst there has been renewed interest in the development potential of temporary migration programmes, such schemes have long been criticized for creating conditions for exploitation and fostering dependence. In this article, which is based on a case study of Ni-Vanuatu seasonal workers employed in New Zealand's horticultural industry, I show how workers and employers alike actively cultivate and maintain relations of reciprocal dependence and often describe their relation in familial terms of kinship and hospitality. Nevertheless, workers often feel estranged both in the Marxian sense of being subordinated to a regime of time-discipline, and in the intersubjective sense of feeling disrespected or treated unkindly. I show how attention to the ‘non-contractual element’ in the work contract, including expressions of hospitality, can contribute to anthropological debates surrounding work, migration, and dependence, and to interdisciplinary understandings of the justice of labour migration.     

Documenting discontent: Struggles for recognition in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea

Within the context of the Purari Delta’s transforming materialities of resource extraction, and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku (‘hand head’) lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit‐beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups’ identities manifest. However, given the ambiguous status of the traditional past among the I’ai, the power of these forms is circumscribed to the village thus making them ineffectual tokens in the bid to secure royalties from resource extraction. Instead, highly coveted documents known as ILG certificates have emerged as efficacious things by which royalties can be secured. Examining these certificates as objects, I investigate how these documents help materialise anew descent groups, communities’ relations to their environment and thus their aspirations for development with its attending materialities. The problem for the I’ai, however, remains how to obtain these documents and, as with eve uku, how to control them.     

Making the Baruya great again: From glorified great men to modern suffering subjects?

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of ‘making great men.’ Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being ‘last place’ (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being ‘the greatest people’ of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to ‘be great’ reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a ‘suffering slot’, the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship.     

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?     

‘Saving our people’: health workers,medical citizenship,and vernacular sovereignties in West Papua

Much anthropology has considered the social embeddedness of medical systems, personnel, and practices and the political subjectivities that may arise among health workers. I explore what medical citizenship looks like under conditions of settler colonialism in West Papua based on an ethnographic study of Dani (Balim) and Lani HIV nurses and NGO volunteers who see themselves and their activities as part of a broader effort to save Papuans from extinction. In particular, HIV work emerges as a biosocial obligation, meaning that workers give their expertise, attention, compassion, and treatment networks to people with HIV in the name of ensuring the vitality of the wider population, but giving care is not altruistic. As HIV workers respond to erasure, constraints, and racism, they put themselves at the centre of HIV care webs. ‘Traditional’ technologies transform healthcare encounters and challenge strategic ignorance about the epidemic. A close navigation of global health and settler power allows for flexible, independent, even surreptitious HIV practices that are deceptively radical and disruptive. Papuan HIV workers’ medical citizenship is encompassed by and expresses vernacular sovereignties.     

Deadwood and paternalism: rationalizing casual labour in an Indian company town

This article is based upon ethnographic research in the Indian company town of Jamshedpur, in the Tata Motors and Telcon companies. I relate the local shift towards casual labour since the 1990s to managerial discourses that rationalize this development. I argue that whilst flexible accumulation may represent a global transformation of employment regimes, the local implementation of this process relies upon a discursive continuity with the past. Referencing a historical language of cultural poverty, predominantly Bengali managers in Jamshedpur continue to claim paternal authority over their mainly Bihari employees, despite no longer fulfilling their traditional ‘parental’ roles vis‐à‐vis the provision of permanent employment. In the latter sections of the article, I discuss the managerial spectre of inefficient permanent workers; ‘deadwood’ whom it is perceived that casualization can prune from the workforce. I argue that whilst permanent employees may exhibit less commitment to the work process than their casual counterparts, their presence on the shop‐floor suggests continuity with the company town ideal and forestalls resistance among casual workers. Far from disembedding labour from social relations, neoliberal employment regimes in Jamshedpur exploit company town paternalism and cultural prejudices.     

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.     

Everyone Will Be Jealous For That Mutika

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

Learning the ‘Science of Feelings’: Religious Training in Eastern Christian Monasticism

In Eastern Christianity novitiate is a period of learning to experience the presence of God in one's life and the world. Novices follow the hesychast prayer, a mystical tradition that leads them to an experiential knowledge of God. In this paper, I argue that novitiate should be regarded as a complex learning process involving specific assemblages of contextual, cognitive, body-sensory and emotional aspects. By educating their attention and emotion novices learn to see beyond and within reality and thus discover the potentiality of people and things ‘in the likeness of God’. Religious transmission happens not only through embodied practice and the active acquisition of religious knowledge but, more importantly, through the work of the imagination. Novices' orientation towards the transcendent requires an expansion of the imaginative capacities beyond their ‘routine’ functioning. Imagination could be thus seen as a key cognitive capacity through which they learn to experience God.     

A flavour of Alzheimer's

This article describes how today in the United States neurologists diagnose forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia. Taking as a starting‐point the pervasive context of uncertainty in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, it examines how uncertainty is not merely an epistemological obstacle to the making of knowledge. On the contrary, the article analyses how uncertainty positively incites the use of clinicians’ ‘feelings’ in diagnostic work. Drawing on observations of clinical consultations and team meetings, it studies how, alongside contemporary instruments of objectification, clinicians use, share, and discuss their ‘feelings’ to ultimately renew knowledge about brain diseases. In documenting the manner in which medical expertise is bound to a concrete experience of the world, this article further explores how experts’ ‘intuition’ can be grasped as a conscious and effortful process, rather than as something ineffable, resisting analysis, and confined to an unconscious background.     

The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste

In north central Timor‐Leste, multi‐sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross‐temporal more‐than‐human ‘mutualities of being’, kinship networks are attuned to relational flows between ‘bodies’ and things. Rather than concentrating on the disjunctions created by the differences in the natures of beings or their ritual separation, this paper examines how relational flows between such ‘bodies’ and things open up cosmopolitical spaces for the creation and negotiation of intergenerational wellbeing.     

Comic woman,victim woman: Pushing gender and genre boundaries in popular Hindi Cinema

“Women's film” in Hollywood is associated both with the genre of melodrama, the “weepie”, and with female spectatorship. In the Indian context of popular Hindi cinema, first, genre analysis itself is a questionable line of inquiry since several genres, the melodrama, musical, gangster, or mystery, combine in a single film, known locally as the masala (spicy) film; and second, films are scarcely divided by a gendered viewership. Yet I identify “women's films” as a distinct category in Hindi cinema, emerging around the ‘70s. These women's films typically center on female protagonists, dramatize their victimization and vindication; by the ‘80s under a range of influences these films mutated into rape‐revenge narratives.

However, another strain emerged within the ‘70s’ “women's film,” which drew on cinema's rich visual iconographic tradition of the sight gag, promulgating the comedic/tomboy heroine figure. It favored laughing and mocking patriarchal structures rather than surrendering to them in tears. Focusing on Ramesh Sippy's Sita aur Gita [1972] emblematic of this trend I explore theoretical concerns about associating genres with gender. In keeping with recent poststructuralist theories about gender and media ‘consumption I show how the film destabilized clear‐cut gender identification and stood for a promising trend that was sadly undercut. Thus, while genre might still be a useful analytical tool for Hindi cinema, defining women's film as female‐centered narratives is a viable category as long as we appreciate the instability in gendered viewer identification.     

Reading Wacquant as both ‘lumper’ and ‘splitter’

In this short response to Loïc Wacquant's ‘Marginality, Ethnicity and Penality in the Neo-liberal City’, I outline two intellectual conversations that emerge from the author's work. The first develops out of the connections that the author draws between systems of criminal justice and welfare. The second grows out of the disassociation he urges us to see between the logics and trajectories of crime, on the one hand, and criminal justice on the other. I then briefly describe how my own work has been influenced by and contributes to these two ongoing streams of research.     

Ambiguous Transparency: Resumé Fetishism in a Slovak Workshop

This article considers how curricula vitae (C. V.s) reflect and contribute to the social and political conditions of their production. Working with observations of a 2001 workshop in Slovakia on how to write a new style of C. V. and with the related style of life chronicles from personnel files in socialist Czechoslovakia, I argue that this genre's social effects in different economic orders might arise from how authors couple or decouple the referent of a text to other actors in time and space. One ideology that I observed in the workshop encouraged shifts in notions of evidence. Such shifts, I argue, might be furthering the ideological work of creating new forms of personhood and inequality that underlie Slovakia's ‘transition’ to capitalism. Post-socialist C.V.s and socialist life chronicles appear to rise out of different graphic ideologies that govern how actors see themselves as social subjects.     

Third‐way neoliberalism and conditional cash transfers: The paradoxes of empowerment,participation and self‐help among poor Uruguayan women

The Latin American literature on Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) welfare programs has typically involved the quantitative evaluation of social and economic impact, with fewer studies addressing the qualitative and gendered impacts of CCTs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in poor squatter settlement communities in Uruguay, this article explores the everyday social realities of poor single mothers who have been disconnected from their kinship networks and must rely on CCT payments for survival. I locate these women's experiences within the third‐way neoliberal discourses of ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’ and ‘self‐help’ espoused by the state, and the various structural conditions, including crime, violence and unequal gender relations, that impact negatively on women's abilities to comply with their social and civic duties. I argue that rather than producing responsible and empowered subjects, Uruguay's recent CCT welfare program has paradoxically limited some women's participation in civic and public life and reproduced their dependent relations with men.     

The datafication of nature: data formations and new scales in natural history

In this essay, I consider the scales and connections lost and gained as natural history adopts digital data infrastructures. On the basis of ongoing work in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, I track the relations between insect specimens and their material and digital informational ecologies. Using Latour's notion of the ‘circulating reference’, I follow the insect specimens as they make their way into taxonomies, databases, and digitization apparatuses. In focusing on human-data mediations in museum practices of ordering, describing, and distributing specimens, I show how the datafication of nature makes present conventionally dissociated contexts, including German colonialism. Proposing the concept of a data formation, I suggest that ethnographers have much to contribute in bringing forward the sociocultural and historical specificities and contingencies within data.     

‘[Not] talking like a Motorola’: mobile phone practices and politics of masking and unmasking in postcolonial Kinshasa

The expression ‘talking like a Motorola’ (koloba lokola Motorola) was long used during the reign of President Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo/Zaïre to indicate the undesired disclosure of information. It manifests the perception of many Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) that the Motorola handset was only deployed by Mobutu's secret service agents in order to detect and report critics of the regime. Today, mobile phones are no longer the preserve of political agents. Nearly everybody can have one. The idiom is thus outdated. Yet other lines between ‘what can be said [over the phone]’ and ‘what cannot be said’ are being drawn in Kinshasa's political society. Indeed, transformations in practices of secrecy, concealment, and, their counterpart, the divulging of information – all three significant axes of the production of power and contestation of authority – are key, both in state actions and in strategies of civil society. In this article, I attempt to locate the mobile phone within Kinshasa's political society, and analyse how relations to the Congolese state are articulated through the politics of cell phone technology and uses of the handset.     

Children's labour in ethnic family businesses: The case of Chinese take‐away businesses in Britain

Reliance upon unpaid and committed family labour is said to make many ethnic businesses competitive. However, most analysts' references to this labour have not taken into account the nature of family members' and, in particular, children's work roles or the ways in which their labour is elicited and maintained. Here, the nature of children's labour participation in ethnic businesses is investigated in the case of families running Chinese take‐away businesses in Britain. This article focuses on how children in these families understand their often double‐edged experiences of ‘helping out’, as part of a ‘family work contract’, and on the ways in which families negotiate children's labour over time. Given these families' experiences of migration and ethnic minority status, I argue that Chinese children's work in take‐away businesses must be examined in relation to the intersections of family obligations and relationships, livelihood strategies and pressures, and issues of cultural identity.