Framed as a letter to Sigmund Freud, this text weaves precariously between psychoanalytic interpretations of mourning and laments sung during an epidemic of an unknown disease in the Delta Amacuro rain forest of Venezuela in 2008. This encounter extends reflection on the ways that Freud, Klein, Laplanche, Nasio, and other psychoanalysts have characterized “the work of mourning,” urging att…
The transition of Cultural Anthropology to an open-access publication required that the Society for Cultural Anthropology take on the publishing responsibilities formerly fulfilled by Wiley-Blackwell. This entailed the expanded use of already established infrastructures, the development of relationships with outside production vendors, registries, and archiving agencies, and designing for t…
In the Mexican border city of Tijuana, two publics contend to represent the city as a whole. One styles itself after the classic bourgeois public sphere, showing the continued relevance of this model even in an only ambivalently Western society such as Mexico’s. The other, taking shape through genres of hearsay, significantly expands received conceptions of publicity. Ethnographic examina…
In the 25 years since Writing Culture was published, ethnography has radically expanded its objects and registers. Drawing on a range of examples, this paper considers some of the issues raised by an thnography of stone. [ethnography, materiality,stone]
Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together. As it attunes, spatial and temporal dimensions come into play; writing skids over surfaces, pa…
A prominent animal rights activist in New Delhi, explaining her relentlessness on behalf of animals, said to me the following: “I only wish there were a slaughterhouse next door. To witness that violence, to hear those screams . . . I would never be able to rest.” She was not alone among animal welfare activists in India in linking the witnessing of violence against an animal to the creatio…
In this article, which takes James Clifford and George Marcus’s Writing Culture as its starting point, I make the case for a kinky kind of empiricism that builds on the singular power of anthropological ways of knowing the world. Kinky empiricism takes established forms to an extreme and turns back to reflect on its own conditions of possibility. At the same time, it deploys methods that crea…
In this article I critically engage the view that the enactment of human rights is the enactment of moral and political progress. Drawing on my research of international and local harm reductionists in Russia, I focus on these activists’ arguments for and suggestions of rights-based legislation. I contend that such arguments are not only made according to the logic of security, prosperity, an…
In 2009–2010, a team of officials at Lima’s Office of Formalization worked to formalize (legalize) the hundreds of markets that operate informally in the downtown area of the city. To persuade businesses to apply for an operating license, the Office lowered the threshold of requirements and simplified the procedure. This strategy was akin to the legal reform program promoted by Hernando de …
An experiment in “self-historicizing,” this personal article looks back on Writing Culture after 25 years. It asks how these years can be narrated historically. It locates the book with reference to postwar experiences of decolonization and globalization, and specifically in a transitional moment between the radical 1960s and the neoliberal 1990s. [historicizing, decolonization, globalizati…
Writing culture suggests (1) allowing writing to take up the burden of theory, (2) practice Walter Benjamin’s idea of denkbilden, or thought-images, (3) create culture as well as describe and analyze. Thus, this little sketch I call “Excelente zona social.”
Using a notion of “the digital” as one of its master metaphors, a version of the term reliant on Kara Keeling’s discussion of “digital humanism,” this piece argues that there is something about the nonlinearities defining digitality’s difference that might help us to think about recalibrations in the ethnographic project itself. From a discussion of Marlon Riggs’s filmic depiction…
In this article, I return to my engagements with people in the field not only to address the specific circumstances and trajectories I encountered there, but to make a case for allowing our engagement with Others to determine the course of our thinking about them and to reflect more broadly upon the agonistic and reflexive relations between anthropology and philosophy. I do so in order to sugge…
This essay situates contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media. In the spirit of Writing Culture, it calls for ethnography attuned to its times. It also calls for ethnography that “loops,” using ethnographic techniques to discern the discursive risks and gaps of…
This article approaches the brand from its surfeits, those material forms and immaterial social meanings that exceed its authority and intelligibility. By thinking through “counterfeits” and other unauthorized brand forms, on the one hand, and the novel and often unpredictable social meanings that emerge through moments of brand consumption, on the other hand, I argue that at the heart of t…
The homeless, in post-Communist Bucharest, Romania, are bored. They describe themselves as bored all of the time. Drawing upon nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork that moves between Bucharest’s homeless shelters and squatter camps, day centers and public parks, this article approaches the homeless’s boredom as an everyday affect structured by the politics of consumption in post-com…
Coming out from the shadow of the economic crisis of the 1990s, the neoliberalizing Finnish state identified another emergent threat: “burnout,” a mental disorder characterized by cynicism and loss of productivity affecting nearly all strata of the workforce. Efforts to identify and rehabilitate workers focused on improving “self-awareness,” and having individuals reevaluate their relat…
In this article I discuss the unintended consequences of humanitarian and development assistance provided to “victims of human rights abuses” in Haiti in the years following the restoration of democracy in 1994. Such targeted aid was a component of international political and economic development aid intended to facilitate the nation’s postconflict transition. I argue that in much the sam…
Based on the experience of researching and writing a book on urban policing in France and its reception by the media and various audiences, this essay discusses the challenges facing a public ethnography—distinguished from public sociology or anthropology. First, I differentiate two tasks (popularizing and politicizing) and multiple publics (imagined or encountered). Second, I plead for the e…
The article explores the forms of punctuated time that characterize evangelical discourse in both Cˆote d’Ivoire and the United States. It compares forms of punctuated time that not only form the basis of End Times theology in both places, but also have served as the basis of important lobbying networks. Although evangelical politics in each place has different roots, both are linked by popu…
In this article, I explore the politics of infrastructure in South Africa by focusing on the “travels” of a small technical device. Since the end of apartheid, prepaid meters have been widely deployed in South Africa’s townships to curb the nonpayment of service charges. Yet many residents have bypassed their meters, enabling them to illicitly access electricity or water. I track the micr…
Inclusive growth is the new popular slogan animating development initiatives across the globe. Embracing the common rhetoric of rights discourses, the Indian government is investing heavily in novel welfare schemes for empowering poor people on the assumption that granting them access to the official market will put them on track for upward mobility and economic progress. In this article I use …
This article considers the treatment of commuter train suicides in Tokyo’s commuter train network in an effort to think critically about the lived experience mediated by theories of emergence materialized through “smart” infrastructures. In so doing, it embarks from the question of how the commuter train network thinks the disorder of the commuter suicide in relation to how the network ha…
This article addresses legacies of national origin within global forms. Focusing on tensions related to human resources, I consider the case of the humanitarian organization M´edecins Sans Fronti`eres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders). Since 1971, MSF has grown into a large, transnational NGO sponsoring a variety of medical projects worldwide. Amid recent efforts to “decolonize” its human …
This essay concerns experience of time in anthropology. It triangulates between theoretical discussions of time, embodiments of temporal experience in a handful of classic and contemporary anthropological works, and the temporal texture of ethnographic fieldwork, reading, and writing. Thinking with philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, as well as with my disciplinary and field i…
In this article, I investigate the biopolitical economy of security as it is operating today in the United States in the context of infectious disease research. Drawing on my work with influenza researchers, I specifically show how experts have been concerned not only with the circulation of biological matter but also with the exchange of scientific information. I argue that it is a specific lo…
This article offers an analysis of a “sympathetic public” cohering around the U.S. welfare state’s wreckage that is tuned to the material dimensions of emplacement. It does this through an exploration of efforts to bring a national public housing museum to Chicago. Museum supporters mobilized the properties of ruined public housing to summon affinities and identifications with the U.S. po…
This article argues that the most lively contemporary legacy of the 1980s Writing Culture critiques now lie outside, or beyond, conventional texts but, rather, in the forms that are integral to fieldwork itself. Fieldwork today requires a kind of collaborative concept work that stimulates studios, archiving, para-sites, which in turn constitute the most innovative expressions of ethnography, di…
Building on recent anthropological discussions on sovereignty and life, I examine the political theologies of Thakur baba, a minor sovereign deity in central India. How might we understand spirits and deities as cohabitants with the living? Following Gilles Deleuze, I set out the idea of “varying thresholds of life.” How do we conceptualize relations of power between these thresholds? Engag…
In the middle of both recessionary financial constraints and new developments in what are often called “neoliberal” global economics, a number of high-profile North American universities are creating new campuses in locations around the world. Conceptually different than an older model of study abroad sites, they are also helping to create a new geography of “area,” that includes shifti…
The lionfish is an enigmatic, beautiful, and invasive marine species in The Bahamas, where the reef ecology is construed as vulnerable while fishermen and invasive fish are seen as primary threats. This article considers fisheries anthropology through recent attempts to incorporate the lionfish into the Bahamian fishery as a commercial fish species, and it explains how the mysterious fish has b…
Because Cuban “race” operates on a flexible black–white continuum, with performance and social markers like class and foreign-ness affecting racial assignment, the very category itself remains unstable. I examine this instability in Cuban touristic practice, focusing on the way in which questions of belonging and origin, as well as perceived differences between “us” and “them,” ma…
The relationship between life, death, and personhood is articulated by the body, without which there would be no such relationship to begin with. How do secular institutions and modes of knowledge understand, produce, and manage this relationship? What can this tell us about the secular and the body in its purview? As part of a larger ethnography of “American Immortalism,” I tackle these is…
This text explores the difficulties faced by faculty of color, particularly women of color, in the academy. Building on existing literature on these issues, the authors deploy their experiences in the academy to argue for transformative work to be done in order to make academia—and anthropology in particular—more inclusive.
The political sponsorship of the Orisha religion by Trinidad’s first Indian Prime Minister, Basdeo Panday (1995–2001), reveals the dynamics and tensions between black cultural citizenship and multicultural citizenship. How do multiple cultural citizenships intersect? Specifically, in Trinidad what is the role of black cultural citizenship within a national multicultural frame where African …
This essay sketches two international, pharmaceutical company–sponsored drug donation programs and assesses this novel integration of corporations into global health. Based on ethnographic interviews with retired and current pharmaceutical executives and scientists, international humanitarian workers, and volunteers and drug recipients in the Morogoro region of Tanzania, this essay develops a…
This article analyzes stories of ghosts and criminals told by residents and workers in urban high-rise buildings and suburban gated communities in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. For many in Chiang Mai’s “communities of exclusion,” the fantasy of progressive, orderly neighborhoods and intellectual, prosperous communities coexisted with stories of empty streets haunted by violent gh…
This article explores the engineering of affect in socialist urban design and subsequent changes in the affective register of a rapidly growing city in late socialist Vietnam. The setting is the north central city of Vinh, destroyed by aerial bombing during the American War and rebuilt with assistance from East Germany. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung public housing that…
Understanding current neoliberalism in Brazil requires an analysis of the piracy that has been going on there since at least the 1970s. Early phases of neoliberalism shrank the state, liberalized markets, and privatized resources. Current forms of neoliberal practice are characterized by large informal economies, intellectual property (IP), circulatory “legitimacy,” individualized consumpt…
Sovereignty and governance in contemporary Africa are hotly contested issues with important—even dire—consequences for all those interested in the continent’s markets, resources, people, and welfare. This article focuses not on questions of how authority is assigned or removed but on how it is shaped, worn, and performed for diverse audiences, particularly in the arena of “traditional …
Pentecostals put intensive study into bodies, texts, practices, and their interrelationships so as to effectively cultivate a sensory culture—sensorium—and invite authoritative religious experience. This ethnographic study follows a Pentecostal sensorium from its crucial institutionalization in early Assemblies of God practice to more contemporary manifestations at Bethany University and am…
The classical immunological paradigm is predicated on the body’s ability to recognize and eliminate “nonself.” However, the “self–nonself” model has yet to facilitate any resolution of the field’s major concerns, and may thus prove to be of limited use. Merely discarding it is no solution, as the juxtaposition of “self” and “nonself” persists in research, in clinical setti…
Pain, despite being an elemental bodily experience and the most common reason for seeking medical care, occupies a place of profound ontological and moral uncertainty in U.S. biomedicine. Taking seriously the highly charged emotions—frustration, anger, even disgust—frequently expressed by clinicians regarding their patients with pain, this article draws on thnographic research to explore b…
This article explores religious practice among Buryats, a Siberian people, through scholarship on sovereignty and the body. Under conditions of rapid social transformation such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, certain religious bodies became key sites through which Buryats have negotiated their relationship with the Russian…
This article confronts the cultural limitation of critical race work in the United States by examining genomic practices at two national institutes in Mexico—one focused on people and aimed at sampling “the Mexican genome,” the other focused on plant biodiversity and “razas de ma´ız” or races of corn. The human genome project emphasizes admixture in ways that seem to confound claims…
In the global neoliberal economy, material and immaterial production increasingly happen on opposite ends of the world where they are assigned different social and economic value and serve to perpetuate stark inequality between increasingly large, transnational corporations and small, local manufacturers. Not everyone, however,accepts the terms of this rangement. This article chronicles the eff…
This article examines the performance practices of U.S. gospel magicians, evangelical Christians who convey religious messages with conjuring tricks. Emphatically denying that they possess supernatural powers and scrupulously avoiding effects that resemble biblical miracles, they take pains to present their tricks as unambiguously skillful performances intended to entertain, uplift, and instruc…
In North Carolina, a faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization facilitates a child sponsorship program that connects North American evangelical Christians with at-risk children in one of postwar Guatemala City’s most violent eighborhoods: La Paloma. Pitched in the name of gang prevention, child sponsors help create a context in which these Guatemalan kids might choose God over gangs. Base…
This article presents an embedded analysis of how scientists and federal officials scrambled to get a handle on the deepwater blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Taking the environment as a compelling ethnographic question, it shows how the oil spill and the environment are not given objects that then collide during a disaster, as is commonly assumed in “disaster studies.” Rather, crude oil and …
Although the trend of bringing the “natural” world indoors took off in many parts of the world with the end of the Cold War, this article focuses on the case of Hungary, where the shift to and then away from state-socialist versions of modernist design was particularly politicized. From the 1960s to the present, Hungary witnessed a shift from the dreams of modernist utopia imbedded in “m…