A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology

Over the last one hundred and plus years, linguistic anthropology has grown to cover almost any aspect of language structure and language use. From a discipline that was at first conceived to provide the tools for the documentation of endangered languages, especially in North America, it has become an intellectual shelter and a cultural amplifier for the richness of human communication in s…

Enterprise as an Instrument of Civilization: An Anthropological Approach to B…

Edisi

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ISBN/ISSN

978-4-431-54916-1

Deskripsi Fisik

xv, 250 hlm.:ill.

Judul Seri

Translational Systems Sciences Volume 4

No. Panggil

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“Xenophobia” In South Africa: Order, Chaos, and the Moral Economy of Witc…

This article explores the violent, anti-immigrant riots that swept through informal settlements in South Africa in 2008, during which more than sixty foreigners were killed and more than one hundred thousand displaced. In the first part of the paper, I draw on research conducted in informal settlements around the city of Durban to argue that many people’s perceptions of foreigners are informe…

Writing The Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time

This article puts a reading of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2 in dialogue with Donna Haraway’s works and methods. Working through the former helps me unpack the process of Haraway’s inquisitive “implosion” method and some of its aims better. I describe this as exploring how the world is interconnected one process and thing at a time, how these connections are vitally and politically import…

Working Mis/Understandings: The Tangled Relationship between Kinship, Franco-…

Marriage migration and family reunification have become one of the few ways for migrants from former French colonies to gain legal entry to France. As a result, love, marriage, and kinship have become central to the politics of contemporary border control. Based on extensive research with Franco-Malagasy families in southwestern France, this article examines how couples negotiate the complexiti…

The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, …

This article explores the relationship between precarity as a labor condition and precarity as an ontological experience in the lives of urban poor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The focus is on a garbage dump on the outskirts of the city where thousands of Rio’s poor, known as catadores, reclaim recyclables for a living. Attending to cyclic moments in which these workers leave the dump for other…

Some Carry On, Some Stay In Bed: (In)convenient Affects and Agency in Neolibe…

What is the significance of feeling unbearably weighed-down by everyday life on the social and economic margins of a Central American city? What are the politics of a mother feeling there is no longer any point in showing up for work given the limited impact it makes for the everyday needs of her family? Relatedly, what is the significance of another woman carrying on with the business of survi…

Socialities Of Indignation: Denouncing Party Politics in Karachi

In May 2007, in the aftermath of city-wide urban unrest mediated by live news television, Karachi residents clamored noisily, using rumors, blogs, and SMS texting to overtly denounce the violence and intimidation ploys of political parties. Their discourse took a particular form: It described the violent tactics of organized politics as repulsive, suggested the moral respectability of avoiding …

Santeri´A Copresence And The Making Of African Diaspora Bodies

In Santerı´a priesthoods, practitioners are “made” into African diaspora bodies in what is called “making santo.” These embodied epistemologies reveal not only the complex historical practices that have emerged through processes of racialization and enslavement but also how a body logic resituates the formations of diasporic feeling and sensing. I argue that practitioners’ everyday …

Reason, Risk, And Reward: Models for Libraries and Other Stakeholders in an E…

Scholarly publishing, and scholarly communication more generally, are based on patterns established over many decades and even centuries. Some of these patterns are clearly valuable and intimately related to core values of the academy, but others were based on the exigencies of the past, and new opportunities have brought into question whether it makes sense to persist in supporting old models.…

Radmilla’s Voice: Music Genre, Blood Quantum, and Belonging on the Navajo N…

In this article, I examine race, sound, and belonging through an analysis of the first Navajo/African American Miss Navajo Nation, Radmilla Cody. Cody, a professional singer and a Navajo citizen, has been a polarizing public figure in Navajo communities since her crowning in 1997. Utilizing a mixed methodology of participant observation, sound recordings, and press releases, I probe how sound a…

Race, Sovereignty, And Civil Rights: Understanding the Cherokee Freedmen Cont…

Despite a treaty in 1866 between the Cherokee Nation and the federal government granting them full tribal citizenship, Cherokee Freedmen—the descendants of African American slaves to the Cherokee, as well as of children born from unions between African Americans and Cherokee tribal members—continue to be one of the most marginalized communities within Indian Country. Any time Freedmen have …

Managing Hate: Political Delinquency and Affective Governance in Germany

The governance of young right-extremists in Germany has spawned a proliferation of therapeutic procedures for their political rectification. This article examines three such efforts in order to expose the excesses and paradoxes that dovetail with, and at times seem to overwhelm, the presumed biopolitical rationality of governance. The penal regimes that bear on young right-extremists call into …

Ironies Of Laboratory Work During Ghana’s Second Age Of Optimism

While Ghana is touted as an African success story, the young employees of a large herbal medicine research center in Ghana make sardonic and cynical remarks about the state of science in contemporary Africa. They decry the improvisation that characterizes doing science on the continent, point out what is lacking from their laboratories, and mock the ways in which their work appears embarrassing…

Humanity/Plan; Or, On The “Stateless” Today (Also Being An Anthropology O…

My fieldwork among HIV vaccine researchers, activists, and funders has led me to suggest that humanity—when it was first conceived of in the late eighteenth century—emerged as a plan, a plan for how to establish a future anticipated in the present. The powerful implication of this fieldwork-based suggestion is that what humanity is—or if it is at all—depends on the available humanity pl…

Homeownership In Israel: The Social Costs of Middle-Class Debt

What motivates people to make home purchases that seem imprudent in narrowly economic terms, and how does the salience of homeownership debt shape political struggles for social justice? To answer these questions I draw on my fieldwork among homebuyers in Israel in the wake of the 2011 housing protests. I find that homebuyers’ reliance on credit compels them to operate as investors despite th…

Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa

After Lemba South Africans participated in genetic tests that aimed to demonstrate their ancient links to contemporary Jewish populations, American Jews began to visit the Lemba to connect with them on the basis of an assumed shared Judaism. Some Lemba people welcomed and endorsed these visits, but they also maintained their own ideas about the meaning of their “genetic Jewishness” and the …

Ethnography And Theory Of The Signature In Physics

Ending the decades-long search for the elusive Higgs particle, physicists at the Conseil Europe´en pour la Recherche Nucle´aire, or CERN, in Switzerland announced the news of its historic discovery on July 4, 2012. In the wake of the recent discovery of the Higgs particle, the article aims to give a critical account of the concept of signature used in contemporary particle physics. Appearing …

Ecologies Of Investment: Crisis Histories and Brick Futures in Argentina

This article describes an ecological approach to investment in Argentina. This approach involves seeing investments as part of an emergent web of relations among constitutive and constituting parts. Such a sensibility is central to Argentine economic life, in which no investment is treated like any other. Care about attributing equivalence and attention to the relationality of investments was a…

Designing Digital Infrastructure: Four Considerations for Scholarly Publishin…

As we move discussions around publishing forward and adopt open-access models, social scientists need to consider how digital infrastructure opens and closes possibilities for scholarly production and engagement. Attention to changes in publishing infrastructure—which, like most infrastructure, is often rendered invisible—is needed, not only because it allows us to make sense of socio-techn…

Dear Dr. Freud

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…

Cultural Anthropology And The Infrastructure Of Publishing

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…

Two Publics In Amexican Border City

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…

Twenty-Five Years Is A Long Time

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]

Precarity’s Forms

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…

Witness: Humans, Animals, And The Politics Of Becoming

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…

Kinky Empiricism

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…

Human Rights Asmoral Progress? A Critique

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…

Formless: A Day At Lima’s Office Of Formalization

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 …

Feeling Historical

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…

Excelente Zona Social

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.”

Ethnography Is, Ethnography Ain’t

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…

Ethnogra Phy In Theway Of Theory

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…

Ethnogra Phy In Late Industrialism

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…

Brands And Their Surfeits

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…

Cast Aside: Boredom, Downward Mobility, and Homelessness in Post-Communist Bu…

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…

Wrapped In Plastic: Transformation and Alienation in the New Finnish Economy

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…

Witchcraft, Bureaucraft, And The Social Life Of (Us) Aid In Haiti

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…

Why Ethnography Matters: On Anthropology and Its Publics

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…

Turning The Clock Back Or Breaking With The Past?: Charismatic Temporality an…

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…

Traveling Technologies: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality …

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…

Tolerated Encroachment: Resettlement Policies and the Negotiation of the Lici…

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 …

Tokyo’s Commuter Train Suicides And The Society Of Emergence

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…

The Unbearable Lightness Of Ex-Pats: Double Binds of Humanitarian Mobility

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 …

The Time Of Anthropology: Notes From A Field Of Contemporary Experience

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…

The Semiotics Of Security: Infectious Disease Research and the Biopolitics of…

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…

The Museum Of Resilience: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Postwelfare Chicago

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…

The Legacies Of Writing Culture And The Near Future Of The Ethnographic Form:…

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…

The Headless Horseman Of Central India: Sovereignty at Varying Thresholds of …

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…

The Closet, Its Conventions, And Anti-Racist Criticism

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…