The value of work and ‘common discourse’ in the joint management of Kakadu National Park

Joint management at Kakadu National Park has been marked by conflict and discontent among the major actors, its Traditional Aboriginal Owners and the White rangers (and other staff) of the state. Despite such conflict, and structured differences between these groups of actors, the park continues to function. In this article I argue that the structures and actions perpetuating difference and conflict are usually more or less balanced by opposing structures and actions that draw the two groups of actors together. I further argue that the most important of such cohering structures and actions, what I call ‘common discourse’, derives from the work that both Aboriginal and White rangers perform in the field. This form of under‐recognised discourse acts against the corrosive discourses of the separate groups that tend to perpetuate separateness.     

Risk, medicine and women: a case study on prenatal genetic counselling in Brazil

Genetic counselling is an important aspect of prenatal care in many developed countries. This tendency has also begun to emerge in Brazil, although few medical centres offer this service. Genetic counselling provides prenatal risk control through a process of individual decision-making based on medical information, in a context where diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities overlap. Detection of severe foetal anomalies can lead to a decision involving possible termination of pregnancy. This paper focuses on medical and legal consequences of the detection of severe foetal anomalies, mainly anencephaly and Down syndrome, and in light of the fact that abortion is illegal in Brazil. The discussion is based on the literature and empirical research at a high-complexity public hospital in Rio de Janeiro.     

Pariah capitalism and the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia: Problems in the definition of the problem

This paper explores how current shifts in racial discourse and demographics are reflected within the negotiation of paid domestic work. Various scholars have pointed out that racism in the United States has become increasingly covert and institutionalized, void of racial terminology and invisible to most whites. This shift has been institutionalized in the negotiation of domestic work, as alternative racial markers such as language and citizenship replace explicit racial terminology. Through an analysis of thirty interviews with white women who employ domestic workers this research examines contemporary negotiations of racial privilege and subordination in domestic work. Overall, white employers insisted that race did not matter when making hiring decisions; however other cultural markers such as language mattered greatly, at times even resulting in firing. In addition, complex and contradictory narratives about immigration were used to simultaneously both vilify immigrant workers and romanticize their work experiences.     

White folks: race and identity in rural America

Abstract

Since the breakdown of the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David in 2000 and the start of the second Palestinian Intifada there has been a voluminous literature that asserts that hostility to Israel and Zionism is a new form of anti-Semitism. This essay critiques the ‘new anti-Semitism’ view. Reversing the method that Plato uses in the Republic, the analysis moves from microcosm (an imaginary ride on a London bus) to macrocosm (the Middle East). In the process, the author argues that anti-Semitism is best defined not by an attitude to Jews but by the figure of ‘the Jew’. In the light of the analysis, and bearing in mind the variety of possible reasons for hostility to Israel or Zionism, it is difficult to see how the ‘new anti-Semitism’ view can be sustained.     

Negotiating the discourse of race within the United States welfare system

The incendiary dynamic between race and welfare in the United States is well-known. An under explored aspect of this dynamic is how recipients of colour navigate the racial undercurrents that permeate welfare and which may result in differential treatment. Drawing from qualitative interviews with twenty-four recipients of colour, this study seeks to understand the ways in which they negotiate their relationships with workers. The study finds that to deflect racial stereotypes, participants monitor their behaviour for traces of anger that could be construed as ‘street’ rather than ‘decent’, and divorce themselves from those that don't. Participants also rejected the discourse of citizenship, seeking to sooth and placate workers rather than asserting a right to benefits. This discourse replicates historical patterns of powerlessness in the United States, where the need to beseech rather than insist and avoid appearing too angry resonates loudly for people of colour. This serves to reinforce the dominant discourse of undeservingness and racial stereotyping within the welfare system.     

Racism and the politics of signification: Israeli public discourse on racism towards Palestinian citizens

This paper explores the phenomenology of racism using the Israeli situation as a case study to examine if, when and how the concept of ‘racism’ is employed in local media discourse on policy towards Palestinian citizens.

Our central argument is that racism, as a signifier of policy, can be located in the dialectic between denial and affirmation of the category of race, while we link the scope and meanings of practices marked by the media as ‘racism’ to contingent cultural, social and historical conditions. The article proposes the periodization of the relevant discourse into three primary phases: from 1949 to the late 1970s, when the category of racism was ‘prohibited’ in Israeli discourse in the aftermath of the Holocaust; the mid-1980s, when this taboo was broken and the phenomena included in the category of racism expanded accordingly; and the 1990s to 2000, during which racism became an institutionalized, all-encompassing discursive term.     

Assembling a visa requirement against the Mexican ‘wave’: migrant illegalization,policy and affective ‘crises’ in Canada

Using the example of a 2009 visa requirement imposed onto Mexican nationals travelling to Canada, this paper frames migrant illegalization as an assemblage that brings together transnational connections, discursive and affective productions, modes of racialization and migrant negotiations. More specifically, the paper maps the events leading to the crafting of the visa requirement and the ensemble of stakeholders – Canadian immigration officials, politicians and business representatives, the Mexican and American governments and Mexican migrants –who responded to it. Through that analysis, the paper argues that migrant illegalization is not always a consistent or predictable set of practices, processes and actors, but instead an often contradictory assemblage of actions and reactions dependent on the social and political context.     

Disciplined to diversity: learning the language of multiculturalism

This study shows that contemporary multiculturalism is a cultural referent used in the construction of modern and socially-acceptable selves. By analysing the practices of diversity training, I consider one of the ways in which multiculturalism moves from abstract philosophical idea and fodder for policy formation to adoption as a cultural and moral framework that individuals use in establishing their identities, discerning meaning and engaging others. Demonstrating that people must acquire competence in the use of a particular multicultural vocabulary and rules of interaction, I challenge the perspective that both bigotry and acceptance are organic to individuals. Properly multicultural selves are not merely the natural extension of interior individual qualities. Instead, people produce modern identities vis-à-vis diversity through the use of language and the negotiation of its meaning.     

Madness, fear, and control in Bangladesh: clashing bodies of power/knowledge

This article presents an understanding of how Bangladeshis cope with madness in relation to two assumptions: that systems of knowledge and of power are coterminous, and that actors in medical encounters draw on incompatible and unequal bodies of knowledge-power I first offer a perspective on psychiatry, emotion, and discourse in Bangladesh as a society increasingly caught up in globalizing modernity. Then I present two types of data to illumine tensions between various attempts to control the fears associated with schizophrenia. The first is a set of exchanges in the advice column of a new popular psychiatry magazine in Bangladesh that inculcate new perspectives on self Those who write to the editors signal their fears of what might, in the end, be impossible to control. Answers from the psychiatrists who edit the magazine reflect discourses circulating on the web, at international conferences, and at the institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States where one of them received his training. The second data set consists of video recordings of persons diagnosed with schizophrenia interacting with families and/or psychiatrists. In part because of knowledge-power asymmetries, attempts at controlling fears surrounding schizophrenia in these four cases fail to address the depths, tacitness, embodiment, and narrative embedding of anxieties experienced by all parties. I close with an argument about the implications for theories of culture and of medical pluralism that arise from cases in which the local Self is experienced from the perspective of powerful Others.