Reflecting on Loss in Papua New Guinea

This article takes up the conundrum of conducting anthropological fieldwork with people who claim that they have ‘lost their culture,’ as is the case with Suau people in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea. But rather than claiming culture loss as a process of dispossession, Suau claim it as a consequence of their own attempts to engage with colonial interests. Suau appear to have responded to missionization and their close proximity to the colonial-era capital by jettisoning many of the practices characteristic of Massim societies, now identified as ‘kastom.’ The rejection of kastom in order to facilitate their relations with Europeans during colonialism, followed by the mourning for kastom after independence, both invite consideration of a kind of reflexivity that requires action based on the presumed perspective of another.     

The Politics of Mediation: Local–Global Interactions in the Central Amazon of Brazil

The proliferation of a nongovernmental sector held the promise of linking local actors with national and international ones, thereby contributing to a highly participatory, Habermasian ideal in which the formerly marginalized would find greater participation and expression. Yet the role of international agents in community-based resource management projects has recently come under scrutiny. In addressing these issues in this article, I consider the roles of different interlocutors in two contrastive phases in an Amazonian community's movement to preserve its endangered fisheries. The comparative exercise demonstrates how institutional agents, by establishing a discourse that structures the criteria through which collective demands may be problematized, may inadvertently shift from mediation to domination, and from local partnering to local production.     

IS IT ETHICAL TO STUDY WHAT OUGHT NOT TO HAPPEN?1

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, only an estimated 2% of all AIDS patients have access to treatment. As AIDS treatment access is scaled-up in the coming years, difficult rationing decisions will have to be made concerning who will come to gain access to this scarce medical resource. This article focuses on the position, expressed by representatives of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), that the practice of AIDS treatment access rationing is fundamentally unethical because it conflicts with the ideal of universal treatment access and the human right to health. The conclusion is that MSF's position lacks coherence, has negative practical implications, and is unfair to governments struggling to increase patient's access to AIDS treatment in unfavorable circumstances.     

The Political Economy of the Ecological Native

In Chimalapas, Mexico, nongovernmental actors attempted to integrate campesinos into the discourse and practices of the Western environmental movement. The political economy school of anthropology assumes that cultural identity and practice flow from historical experiences grounded in relevant national and institutional contexts. In this article, I argue that although the movement in Chimalapas drew from the well-developed symbolic toolkit of the environmental movement, it was not able to create a space for local concerns within a transnational agenda that was already fairly well established and inflexible. Political ecology was the hinge of this movement: a political-economic analysis that validated traditional agrarian concerns in Chimalapas but included an environmentalist discourse legible to international funders. In this way, environmentalists in Chimalapas attempted both to create new practices and to link old practices to new expressions of culture and identity.     

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.     

Unsettling Power: Domestic Violence,Gender Politics,and Struggles over Sovereignty in Ghana

This article provides a new lens for analyzing power formations in human rights practices by examining Ghanaian struggles over a Domestic Violence Bill. While the hegemonic character of human rights advocacy is well-established, we know less about exercises of power in discourses and practices that oppose rights. I analyze how the Ghanaian government constructed the discourse of cultural sovereignty and deployed it against women's rights. The government legitimated this discourse by appropriating the voice of ‘the people’ and superimposing notions of ‘foreignness’ onto both the Bill and Ghanaian women's rights activists. Drawing on the historiography of colonialism and ethnography of political performance, I argue that this case illustrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty is mobilized in a struggle over shifting configurations of gender, political activism, and state sovereignty.     

Disciplinary citizenship in South Korean NGOs' narratives of resettlement for North Korean refugees

This article explores how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in South Korea articulate and implement disciplinary citizenship in the resettlement of North Korean refugees. Fieldwork based on in-depth interviews reveals that NGOs play a pivotal role in carrying out the state-led resettlement project at the local level. As disciplinary agents, NGOs mirror the state's policy in their emphasis on self-sufficiency and workfare as they encourage North Koreans to become economically productive citizens. Concomitantly, they emphasize civic contributions and volunteerism as a remedy for improving the social reputation of North Koreans as welfare recipients to that of contributing citizens. This focus on active, responsible citizenship aims at disciplining North Koreans to become docile subjects at the bottom of the social ladder, despite persistent economic difficulties and social marginalization in South Korea. Thus, refugees are pressured not only to achieve economic self-sufficiency, but to contribute to society in order to claim their sociocultural citizenship.     

Biological vs. social, economic and political priority-setting in conservation

The most influential conservation priority‐setting approaches emphasize biodiversity and threats when deciding where to focus investment. However, socio‐economic and political attributes of nations influence the effectiveness of conservation actions. A combination of biological and sociological variables in the context of a ‘return on investment’ framework for establishing conservation priorities was explored. While there was some overlap between megadiversity nations and return on investment priorities, only a few countries emerged as high priorities irrespective of which factors were included in the analysis. Conversely, some countries that ranked highly as priorities for conservation when focusing solely on biological metrics, did not rank highly when governance, population pressure, economic costs and conservation needs were considered (e.g. Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia and Venezuela). No priority‐setting scheme is a priori superior to alternative approaches. However, the analyses suggest that attention to governance and return on investment may alter biocentric assessments of ideal conservation investments.     

Trouble with the Gray Literature

In much of the tropics, the gray literature—published by nongovernmental organizations, governments, intergovernmental organizations, consultancies, private companies, and individuals—has a greater volume than the peer‐reviewed scientific literature in ecology and conservation. I discuss why this is a problem in terms of quality, discovery, access, and archiving. Unpublished dissertations and theses are another vast untapped source of information in tropical biology. Internet search engines can potentially integrate access to all information sources, but only if the producers of gray literature and theses greatly improve electronic access. Digital repositories can provide both this accessibility and permanent archiving.