Critique of Anthropology recent issues

The Wisdom of Way Kot: Art, Rhetoric and Political Economy

Loewe, R. — 2008-11-13

In this article I examine how commerce and the global economy are represented locally through the analysis of a popular Yucatecan tale. Way Kot depicts a veritable fantasy world in which human beings become winged beasts and animals betray their natural instincts; however, unlike the authors of many studies that explore the intersection of different modes of exchange, I do not view these images as projections of a mystified mind. On the contrary, building on Marx's discussion of money, and the aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno's notion of `exact fantasy', I demonstrate the myth's rigorous logic by showing how it unravels the mysteries of the commodity form. In addition, I highlight the critical function of the tale (c. 1935), as rhetorical counterpoint to the commodity aesthetics of the era. While agents of a rapidly modernizing state were eager to make commodities enchant, Way Kot presents commerce as a form of witchcraft, and consumption as a form of cannibalism, in which unsuspecting Maya consume their relatives.

You Pig!: A Regional Approach to Environmental Ethics in the Sertao of Northeast Brazil

Hoefle, S. W. — 2008-11-13

A political ecology approach is used to revisit the 1970s debate between Douglas and Leach on one side, and Harris on the other, in order to highlight methodological issues concerning spatial differentiation expressing cultural complexity as well as to demonstrate how opposing phenomenological and rationalist epistemologies can be mediated. The two sides of the debate concerning pigs as ambiguous and taboo creatures are shown to be related to two different sets of human—animal relationships and to vary spatially in different parts of the Sertão of Northeast Brazil. Consequently, the combination of the two contrasting approaches in one unified theoretical perspective results in a better overview than that produced by each one taken by itself.

Mercenaries, Missionaries and Misfits: Representations of Development Personnel

Stirrat, R.L. — 2008-11-13

The argument of the article centres around three stereotypes of the development worker: mercenary, missionary and misfit. The origins of this tripartite characterization of the aid community are unclear but certainly it has a currency, or at least a resonance, within the industry. The argument is not so much concerned with the truth or otherwise of this characterization. Rather it seeks to use these stereotypes as an entry point for exploring the tensions and contradictions in ways in which people working in the industry view themselves and others. While there are individuals who can be recognized as approximating to each of the three stereotypes, in general people veer between them, at different points in their careers and even at different points on the same day. Finally, although these three characterizations — missionary, mercenary and misfit — appear to be contrasting, this article will argue that they are in fact variations on a common theme and a modern version of what people in the industry tend to see as the new `white man's burden'.

Paired Opposites: Dualism in Development and Anthropology

Yarrow, T. — 2008-11-13

Over the past two decades, anthropological studies have highlighted the ways in which overtly progressive ideas of `development' have been used, paradoxically, to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty on a global scale. Such critiques have fed into a wider `postmodern challenge' which has importantly questioned previously held assumptions about development. However, this prevailing critical approach has led to a number of problems. In particular the deconstruction of development discourse has unwittingly re-inscribed many of the binary oppositions it seeks to overcome, without appreciating the complex ways in which development workers employ these. Moreover, a critical impulse to uncover what development practice `hides' focuses attention away from the ideas and practices that development practitioners actively privilege. In this article I argue that it is necessary to go beyond a critical, deconstructive approach in order to appreciate the socially and discursively complex ways in which development workers employ such oppositions. Through an ethnographic account focusing on how oppositions between `local' and `global' and `policy' and `practice' are used to frame a variety of development interventions in Ghana, I outline the mobile ways in which such oppositions are deployed and highlight the diverse ideas and agendas that they are used to articulate.

A Life In and Out of Anthropology: An Interview with Jack Sargent Harris

Yelvington, K. A. — 2008-11-13

This article presents an interview with Jack Sargent Harris (1912—2008), an anthropologist who earned his PhD at Columbia University in 1940 and was one of the first US anthropologists to do fieldwork in Africa, showing an interest in materialistic theoretical approaches. As a merchant seaman before becoming an anthropologist he traveled the globe, including trips to the Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. During the Second World War, Harris became a clandestine operative engaged in counter-espionage for the United States' Office of Strategic Services in West Africa and in South Africa. Returning to the United States, he was hired by the fledgling United Nations as part of its decolonization efforts. However, Harris fell victim to the McCarthy-era witch hunt and was purged from the United Nations. He moved to Costa Rica in 1954 where he became a successful entrepreneur.

Book Review: Henrika Kuklick (ed.), A New History of Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008

Laister, J. — 2008-11-13

Book Review: Xiang Biao, Global `Body Shopping': An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007

Pal, N. — 2008-11-13

A New Perspective on Later Migration(s): The Possible Recent Origin of Some Native American Haplotypes

Wilson, J. A.P. — 2008-09-16

Productive as the recent collaboration between genetics and anthropology has been, additional insights are within reach. Molecular DNA evidence has been beneficial to the study of the peopling of the Americas, but the interpretation of this very complex dataset has been constrained by longstanding assumptions. The use of DNA evidence to test lesser-known historical hypotheses may reveal a more complicated picture of demography in American antiquity. Scholars debate the details of the initial colonization of America, but few have investigated claims of later historical migrations from Asia to America. This is an effort to address the paradoxical sustained similarity between Native American and East Central Asian cultures and gene pools, in the face of turbulent East—West admixture throughout Eurasian history. Though inconclusive, these data may nonetheless be consistent with the possibility of modest Asian—American ties within historical timeframes.

The Persistence of the `Old' Idea of Culture and the Peace Process in Ireland

Finlay, A. — 2008-09-16

This article is less concerned with the weaknesses of the old anthropological idea of culture than with how and why, despite these weaknesses, it has retained such influence with the liberal state. It approaches these questions using a case study in the management of conflict: the peace process in Ireland and the agreement reached ten years ago on Good Friday 1998. According to some, the model on which the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) is based — usually referred to as consociational — has become the default position of the international community when it comes to the management of conflict. In line with consociational principles, the GFA accords cultural rights to two specific communities — something that is at odds with the traditional liberal idea that rights accrue to individuals. Focusing on several key debates, the article traces the influence of ideas about culture and identity on the peace process. Crucial here is that the `old' idea of culture justifies a conflation of individual and collective, communal identity such that the former is understood as dependent on the latter. The respect that liberalism traditionally accords to the individual is thereby extended to the group of which s/he is a member. Finally, considering the role of anthropologists in the Irish case, the article concludes by querying what it is that is specifically anthropological about the old idea.

Research on the Na and Academic Integrity

Xiaoxing Liu, — 2008-09-16

Through the critique of the theoretical claims and research approaches of Cai Hua, a French-trained Chinese anthropologist, this article discusses issues regarding studies of the Na and academic integrity in China. It questions the legitimacy of Cai's scholarly work, criticizes his plagiarism in a broader context of China's struggle against academic fraud and points out that in order to build a healthy and prosperous academic environment, scholars must subject themselves to the standards of academic integrity.

Writing as a Citizen?: Some Thoughts on the Uses of Dilemmas

Whitaker, R. — 2008-09-16

This article traces a series of frustrations and dilemmas that arose from people's attempts to participate in Northern Ireland's peace process in ways that challenged the reduction of its politics to a single line of conflict. As attempts to expand the possibilities for active citizenship, they were not entirely successful. However, the article argues that dilemmas offer privileged access to contradictions and conflicts at work within both political actors and the scene of their actions. The dilemmas explored here are examined for what they can reveal about the political culture of the peace process and the prospects for democratic life after the Good Friday Agreement. Some of these problems emerged as a result of the author's partisan involvement in the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, one of the parties to the 1996—8 peace talks. As such, this article also asks how participation in the peace process might contribute to the ethnographic record of the peace process.

Book Review: Stuart Kirsch, Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006

Moretti, D. — 2008-09-16

Book Review: Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007

Sansi, R. — 2008-09-16

Recently Published

2008-09-16

Introduction: The Limits of Neoliberalism

Kingfisher, C., Maskovsky, J. — 2008-05-28

Neoliberalism has emerged as one of the key concepts for studies of cultural and political-economic change on a global scale. Yet its enthusiastic adoption and application in recent anthropological work raises some significant theoretical and political problems. At the center of these is the challenge of discerning its limits. This Special Issue argues for the need to move beyond abstract and totalizing approaches that treat neoliberalism as a thing that acts in the world. We argue instead for approaches that stress its instabilities, partialities, and articulations with other cultural and political-economic formations, and that direct attention to the ways that culture, power and governing practices coalesce into concrete governmental regimes with their attendant patterns of inequality. Specific articles probe the limits and boundaries of neoliberalism as it plays out in different cultural and political-economic contexts.

Neoliberalism, Indigeneity and Social Engineering in Ecuador's Amazon

Wilson, P. C. — 2008-05-28

This article examines a state-sponsored hacienda invasion by indigenous people in Amazonian Ecuador in the context of neoliberal state restructuring and decentralization. Studies have demonstrated how neoliberal reforms limit the delivery of social services by the state, but in the case examined, the municipal government offered increased access to basic infrastructural and social services to residents of the new community and encouraged the land invasion. This may indicate shifts in neoliberal policy in parts of Ecuador, where decentralization is accompanied by promises of enhanced state services. I argue, however, that Ecuador's changing neoliberal agenda may provide new mechanisms for state control in Amazonia while reinforcing enduring racist ideologies of modernizing nationalism.

Is China Becoming Neoliberal?

Nonini, D. M. — 2008-05-28

Contemporary China has recently been seen as in the throes of `neoliberal restructuring'. This claim is contested on theoretical and methodological grounds. During the period of economic liberalization since the death of Mao, China has shown a hybrid governance that has combined earlier Maoist socialist, nationalist and developmentalist practices and discourses of the Communist Party with the more recent market logic of `market socialism'. A new cadre-capitalist class has emerged during liberalization, while large numbers of farmers, urban workers and a `floating population' of urban migrants have been dispossessed of land, employment and political rights. Reactions by many higher-level Party cadres against dispossession show a residual commitment to socialist values. Guanxi personalist ties within the new cadre-capitalist class simultaneously blur the `state'/`market' boundary, lead to dispossession and create conditions for accelerated capitalist growth. The conclusion is that contemporary China is not becoming `neoliberal' in either a strong or weak sense, nor undergoing a process of neoliberalization, but instead shows the emergence of an oligarchic corporate state and Party whose legitimacy is being challenged by disenfranchised classes, but is still in control through its efforts at modernization.

Neoliberalism, the Special Period and Solidarity in Cuba

Powell, K. — 2008-05-28

While the Cuban state's resistance to neoliberalism and to US dominance in particular has been vigorous, it is nonetheless subject to the constraints of neoliberal hegemony, and has entailed a degree of accommodation: the partial introduction of a market economy within a socialist political framework has given rise to some strong contradictions, most notably a sharp increase in inequality. This article considers to what extent the contradictions arising from these reforms have effects within everyday practices of struggle which threaten to problematize dispositions to solidarity — dispositions which are central to continued resistance, and an important social and political resource in confronting and shaping the future.

The Homeland Archipelago: Neoliberal Urban Governance after September 11

Ruben, M., Maskovsky, J. — 2008-05-28

In the post-9/11 period, the power of the concept of neoliberalism to describe US social and political dynamics has been questioned, particularly in light of discourses emphasizing the disaggregation of state power. Relying primarily on ethnographic data collected in Philadelphia between 2000 and 2005, this article examines the melding of neoliberal governance and Homeland Security ideology in the figure of `home', as a social construct more collective than the individual and more private than the community. Examining the arenas of community-based policing through Town Watch, and urban redevelopment through eminent domain, the article argues that the protection of `home' has become a mechanism through which the sometimes contradictory imperatives of capitalism and state governance may be promoted by municipalities and contested by urban residents, particularly those in minority and working-class communities.

The Neoliberal American Dream as Daydream: Counter-hegemonic Perspectives on Welfare Restructuring in the United States

Morgen, S., Gonzales, L. — 2008-05-28

Despite the efforts of its supporters to cast welfare `reform' in the United States as a successful achievement of neoliberal public policy, we argue that among low-income people who have received public assistance, counter-hegemonic interpretations and `possibilities' coexist with, texture and sometimes, challenge hegemonic assumptions about poverty, the state, motherhood and relations of power. Paying attention to these counter-hegemonic perspectives reveals ideological and political possibilities that are foreclosed when neoliberal hegemony is theorized as seamless and complete, rather than partial and vulnerable to disruption. That neoliberalism must be actively produced helps to explain the powerful processes that subject poor women and men, more intensely than many others, to practices and discourses designed to shape compliance with neoliberalism.

Public Health, Patronage and National Culture: The Resuscitation and Commodification of Community Origins in Neoliberal Brazil

Collins, J. F. — 2008-05-28

This article examines state and citizens' reliance on patron—client relations during neoliberal restructuring. It contends that neoliberalism is not an objectively apparent set of processes but an ideology. Building on this insight that emphasizes contradictory power relations, I focus on residents of a historical center, the Pelourinho, and their interpretations of the packaging of their practices as patrimony. As a result of their experience with institutions and patronage networks, these people have cobbled together surprising approaches to their state and its production of value from their habits and themselves. Thus, even as the state structures its attempt to commodify habits around a mix of techniques and patronage, residents employ related idioms to make demands on that state. I develop this argument in relation to an earlier period that was influential in putting together the lineaments of the national culture that is commodified today to argue that a double-bound debunking takes place in the Pelourinho, due to the workings of patronage and an ostensibly objective social science. Such a relational engagement with state attempts to sanitize vernacular habits suggests ways of understanding state institutions and NGOs that are so much a part of ideologies and their contestations under neoliberalism.

Book Review: Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006

Stepputat, F. — 2008-05-28

Recently Published

2008-05-28

Dispossession and the Anthropology of Labor

Kasmir, S., Carbonella, A. — 2008-02-19

This article develops an approach to the anthropology of labor that seeks to transcend the North/South and working class/poor oppositions that have long framed our understanding of social inequality. Drawing upon David Harvey's understanding of the ways in which capitalism always creates its own Other through dispossession, as well as historical case studies of struggles against dispossession, we emphasize the mutability of class relations in both the global North and South, and point to the complex interconnections of the social movements of waged and unwaged laborers across the globe. This focus on the connections between peoples who are differently marked by processes of dispossession, we argue, simultaneously enriches our understanding of social inequality and furthers the project of decolonizing anthropology.

The Making of Space, Race and Place: New York City's War on Graffiti, 1970--the Present

Dickinson, M. — 2008-02-19

This article examines New York City's war on graffiti from 1970 until the present and the ways in which the city's reaction to the popular youth practice was largely shaped by the neoliberal restructuring process occurring throughout the same period. It explores the racialization and criminalization of the youth who practiced graffiti, and the ways in which this process manifested itself as a contestation over the use of urban space. Finally, it explores the practice of graffiti and the role of cultural practices more generally in relation to an anti-racist discourse.

Assessing Phenomenology in Anthropology: Lessons from the Study of Religion and Experience

Knibbe, K., Versteeg, P. — 2008-02-19

How did phenomenology inspire anthropology to re-evaluate its principal method: participant observation? This question is answered by exploring how phenomenology has contributed to the anthropological study of religion. The focus in this field is not only on the way people perceive but also how they experience the world. This allows for a view that does not treat experience of the world separately from cognition of the world. Religion can thus be studied as it is lived and acted in concrete situations. By seeing the scholar as part of the life-world of the people in whose lives she participates, phenomenology in anthropology goes against the tendency to privilege `scientific' knowledge over other kinds of knowledge. This has some important theoretical ramifications, most notably the refusal to transcend lived experience through theory. This discussion will be illustrated from authors' fieldwork. The influence of phenomenology in anthropology also raises some important doubts. At the end of this article, these doubts will be addressed.

Cultivating Autonomy: Power, Resistance and the French Alterglobalization Movement

Williams, G. — 2008-02-19

This article explores the resistance of alterglobalization activists on the Larzac plateau in southern France to various forms of power. As part of a technique of resistance activists cultivate themselves as `autonomous' political subjects and organize a movement considered to be an `autonomous' counterpower. In addition to being a political goal, autonomy is problematically tangled up in many aspects of their lives and is of frequent concern in their efforts to resist. Autonomy also constitutes a theoretical problem in anthropological discussions of power and resistance. An autonomous space of resistance is often assumed by social movement theorists or denied by those who argue that power and resistance are inseparable. I argue in this article that autonomy, understood as something socially relative rather than absolute, is produced in the process of resisting via particular practices through which power and resistance come to oppose one another.

Turning Marx on his Head: Missionaries, `Extremists' and Archaic Secularists in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

McBrien, J., Pelkmans, M. — 2008-02-19

Christian and Muslim religious movements have made significant inroads into post-Soviet Kyrgyzstani society, and have been seen as a threat by the secular establishment. In this article we discuss the defence mechanisms that are locally employed to ward off the danger that these `new' religious movements represent. Our focus on secular responses not only fills a gap in the available research (which has focused on religious renewal but largely ignored the `secular' majority), but also provides new perspectives on how to view the postsocialist religious landscape. By scrutinizing secular responses we show that what is at stake is not so much atheist ideology but secular understandings of religion that were (inadvertently) promoted by Soviet rule. As such this article shows the curious effect of Soviet legacies on contemporary notions of religion and culture.

Book Review: Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg, 2005

Mills, D. — 2008-02-19

Book Review: Jaro Stacul, Christina Moutsou and Helen Kopnina (eds), Crossing European Boundaries: Beyond Conventional Geographical Categories. Oxford: Berghahn, 2005

Goode, S. — 2008-02-19

Book Review: Jacqueline Solway (ed.), The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Berghahn, 2006

Lewis, J. — 2008-02-19

Recently Published

2008-02-19