Abstract After the establishment in 1682 of a trading company to monopolize commerce between the colony and the metropolis, the Brazilian state of Maranhao has become one of the main slave ports in Latin America. Abolition in May 1888 nonetheless failed to precipitate the collapse of colonial class hierarchies so that throughout the twentieth century a series of local oligarchs continued to cultivate clientelist political systems. Despite institutionalized socioeconomic inequality, however, maranhenses celebrate on a grand popular scale a colossal repertoire of legends, tales and myths. This amounts to a corpus of shared knowledge on the forces that sustain and transform their social universe. In this article, I will focus on the local festival of Bumba meu Boi as preeminent manifestation of this cosmology. Through the analysis of post-abolition sociality in this annual celebration, I argue that in the Tristes Tropiques of Maranhao an infinitely expanding sense of affective egalitarianism is infused with ...
{"title":"Historicizing Play-Logic in the Making of Relatedness: The Case of Bumba Meu Boi Festival in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil","authors":"M. Shapiro","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.2.131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.2.131","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract After the establishment in 1682 of a trading company to monopolize commerce between the colony and the metropolis, the Brazilian state of Maranhao has become one of the main slave ports in Latin America. Abolition in May 1888 nonetheless failed to precipitate the collapse of colonial class hierarchies so that throughout the twentieth century a series of local oligarchs continued to cultivate clientelist political systems. Despite institutionalized socioeconomic inequality, however, maranhenses celebrate on a grand popular scale a colossal repertoire of legends, tales and myths. This amounts to a corpus of shared knowledge on the forces that sustain and transform their social universe. In this article, I will focus on the local festival of Bumba meu Boi as preeminent manifestation of this cosmology. Through the analysis of post-abolition sociality in this annual celebration, I argue that in the Tristes Tropiques of Maranhao an infinitely expanding sense of affective egalitarianism is infused with ...","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"65 1","pages":"131-152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Zusammenfassung Im Mittelpunkt dieses Artikels steht eine populationsgenetische Stichprobe im sudafrikanischen Simon’s Town, die im Rahmen des globalen Genographic Project erhoben wurde. Simon’s Town war wahrend der Apartheid besonders stark von Zwangsumsiedlungen der nicht-weisen Bevolkerung betroffen. Nach 1994 fanden sich einige der ehemaligen BewohnerInnen zum Project Phoenix zusammen, um an das Leben im Ort und die Gewalterfahrung der Vertreibungen zu erinnern. Der genetische Abstammungstest, der in Zusammenarbeit mit dem lokalen Museum organisiert wurde, schloss rhetorisch an das Narrativ von Herkunft, Zugehorigkeit und Diversitat an, das auch pragend fur die Erinnerungspolitik des Phonix-Projekts war. Daruber hinaus reprasentierten die VeranstalterInnen die Studie (und deren Ergebnisse) als Illustration einer „post-racial society“, im Sinne des Slogans der Einheit in der Vielfalt. In meinem Beitrag zeichne ich die zugrundeliegende Identifikationspraktik nach und zeige auf, wie hier die Klassifikati...
{"title":"Wie Phönix aus der Asche: Klassifikation, Erinnerungspolitik und Populationsgenetik in Südafrika","authors":"Katharina Schramm","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.2.201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.2.201","url":null,"abstract":"Zusammenfassung Im Mittelpunkt dieses Artikels steht eine populationsgenetische Stichprobe im sudafrikanischen Simon’s Town, die im Rahmen des globalen Genographic Project erhoben wurde. Simon’s Town war wahrend der Apartheid besonders stark von Zwangsumsiedlungen der nicht-weisen Bevolkerung betroffen. Nach 1994 fanden sich einige der ehemaligen BewohnerInnen zum Project Phoenix zusammen, um an das Leben im Ort und die Gewalterfahrung der Vertreibungen zu erinnern. Der genetische Abstammungstest, der in Zusammenarbeit mit dem lokalen Museum organisiert wurde, schloss rhetorisch an das Narrativ von Herkunft, Zugehorigkeit und Diversitat an, das auch pragend fur die Erinnerungspolitik des Phonix-Projekts war. Daruber hinaus reprasentierten die VeranstalterInnen die Studie (und deren Ergebnisse) als Illustration einer „post-racial society“, im Sinne des Slogans der Einheit in der Vielfalt. In meinem Beitrag zeichne ich die zugrundeliegende Identifikationspraktik nach und zeige auf, wie hier die Klassifikati...","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"38 1","pages":"201-223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. The incapacity of the Ghanaian state to adequately provide for transport services is at once capitalized on and compensated for by local entrepreneurs. Characterized principally by market-oriented entrepreneurial actions, their practices have not only been never captured by the state, but they form the basis for repelling regulative forays of the state. Manifest in the socially embedded economic behaviours of the transport workers is a form of entrepreneurship that can be conceived as both the source and the product of a ‘vernacular neoliberalism’; that is, a kind of avant la lettre neoliberalism that has not been enforced exogenously, but that emerged from the local grounds of long-established modes of economic practice. Drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic research, this article examines the development of a market imperative as a main structuring force of social organization. In so doing, it suggests a progressive reversal o...
{"title":"Vernacular Neoliberalism: How Private Entrepreneurship Runs Public Transport in Ghana","authors":"M. Stasik","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.2.177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.2.177","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. The incapacity of the Ghanaian state to adequately provide for transport services is at once capitalized on and compensated for by local entrepreneurs. Characterized principally by market-oriented entrepreneurial actions, their practices have not only been never captured by the state, but they form the basis for repelling regulative forays of the state. Manifest in the socially embedded economic behaviours of the transport workers is a form of entrepreneurship that can be conceived as both the source and the product of a ‘vernacular neoliberalism’; that is, a kind of avant la lettre neoliberalism that has not been enforced exogenously, but that emerged from the local grounds of long-established modes of economic practice. Drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic research, this article examines the development of a market imperative as a main structuring force of social organization. In so doing, it suggests a progressive reversal o...","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"65 1","pages":"177-200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract What does the marital union do to individuals and their bodies? Addressing this question from the vantage point of Switzerland, my contribution shows that the romantic symbolism of the spouses becoming one through marital union echoes imaginaries of bodies, whose inside (one’s ‘heart and head’) and outside (the visible manifestations of love) must match. Insofar, becoming spouses has effects on allied bodies, which are shaped by a relation that they also contribute to produce. Through the marital union, the state manufacture of a couple gives birth to a new entity where both formerly unrelated individuals become one – a symbolic figure that becomes materialized in the possibility for bodies of foreign spouses to be integrated into the Swiss national body. The present article proposes that the socio-administrative negotiations surrounding the legal regulation of unions may shed light on the nature of the marital bond. It thus reverses the usual gaze on the continuum between family and nation: inst...
{"title":"‘The Wedding Ceremony Binds the Spouses in Marital Union.’ Material and Immaterial Flows in the Production of Spouses’ Relatedness","authors":"A. Lavanchy","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.1.55","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.1.55","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What does the marital union do to individuals and their bodies? Addressing this question from the vantage point of Switzerland, my contribution shows that the romantic symbolism of the spouses becoming one through marital union echoes imaginaries of bodies, whose inside (one’s ‘heart and head’) and outside (the visible manifestations of love) must match. Insofar, becoming spouses has effects on allied bodies, which are shaped by a relation that they also contribute to produce. Through the marital union, the state manufacture of a couple gives birth to a new entity where both formerly unrelated individuals become one – a symbolic figure that becomes materialized in the possibility for bodies of foreign spouses to be integrated into the Swiss national body. The present article proposes that the socio-administrative negotiations surrounding the legal regulation of unions may shed light on the nature of the marital bond. It thus reverses the usual gaze on the continuum between family and nation: inst...","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"65 1","pages":"55-77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The restrictive legal and political regulations of queer families in Switzerland provide the basis of this article. Within this context, Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgender and Queers (LGBTQ) aim to have their families recognized through the public mediation of affects such as happiness. Consequently, the author attends to the affective politics of imagining and living families by LGBTQ. The author draws upon ethnographic data to explore how happiness structures modes of relatedness in terms of family. With an affect theory stance, the article turns to two case studies which allow to apply and eventually extend Sara Ahmed’s concept of the family as a ‘promise of happiness’ (Ahmed 2010a). By means of the case studies, the author elaborates on how queer families are linked to a normalized, heteronormative figure of ‘the family,’ as well as to dissident modes of relatedness. An affect theory-based analysis leads the author finally to challenge the contrasting juxtaposition of normalized and dissi...
{"title":"‘Happy as in Queer’ – The Affective Paradoxes of Queer Families","authors":"Yv E. Nay","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.1.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.1.35","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The restrictive legal and political regulations of queer families in Switzerland provide the basis of this article. Within this context, Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgender and Queers (LGBTQ) aim to have their families recognized through the public mediation of affects such as happiness. Consequently, the author attends to the affective politics of imagining and living families by LGBTQ. The author draws upon ethnographic data to explore how happiness structures modes of relatedness in terms of family. With an affect theory stance, the article turns to two case studies which allow to apply and eventually extend Sara Ahmed’s concept of the family as a ‘promise of happiness’ (Ahmed 2010a). By means of the case studies, the author elaborates on how queer families are linked to a normalized, heteronormative figure of ‘the family,’ as well as to dissident modes of relatedness. An affect theory-based analysis leads the author finally to challenge the contrasting juxtaposition of normalized and dissi...","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"62 1","pages":"35-53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract As many aspects of assisted conception become familiar, others emerge not only as unfamiliar, but also unpredicted. This article focuses on a newly emergent kin figure – the donor sibling. It suggests that the anthropology of friendship might have as much to tell us about the significance of the donor sibling in Euro-American kinship thinking as the anthropology of kinship. The article locates the donor-sibling in changes in UK legislation and policy that have increasingly promoted more transparency and ‘openness’ in donor conception.
{"title":"Donor Conception and (Dis)closure in the UK: Siblingship, Friendship and Kinship","authors":"J. Edwards","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.1.101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.1.101","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As many aspects of assisted conception become familiar, others emerge not only as unfamiliar, but also unpredicted. This article focuses on a newly emergent kin figure – the donor sibling. It suggests that the anthropology of friendship might have as much to tell us about the significance of the donor sibling in Euro-American kinship thinking as the anthropology of kinship. The article locates the donor-sibling in changes in UK legislation and policy that have increasingly promoted more transparency and ‘openness’ in donor conception.","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"5 1","pages":"101-122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This special issue deals with the making of kinship through medical, political, affective, and legal technologies. While this primarily refers to the creation of kinship through medically assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization or gamete donation, it also includes further techniques of making kinship such as marriages, the establishment of so-called ‘donor siblingship’, and more general ways of creating belonging and an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991 [1983]). We understand technology as a device which assists the making of kinship that is situated in political, legal, and affective spheres and which therefore should be understood in a much broader way than just referring to the biotechnological manipulation of body substances. The term assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) refers to the technological means of manipulating gametes in order to conceive a child. Probably the best known of these techniques is the so-called ‘in vitro’ (Latin: ‘in glass’) fertilization or IVF. By isolating reproductive substance from the human body and enabling its cultivation in a petri dish, ‘IVF has changed scientific understandings of what life is’ (Franklin 2013 referring to Maienschein 2003) but also of what kinship is. In contemporary Euro-American thinking 1 , kinship is considered as the domain that is based on the ‘natural facts of life’ (Strathern 1992) – such as sex difference, generational succession, pregnancy and birth. Therefore, by intervening at the core of the making of a new life by dividing reproduction from sexual intercourse and taking it out of the human
{"title":"Making Kinship in Switzerland and Beyond: Imaginations and Substances","authors":"Nolwenn Bühler, Anika König","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.1.1","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue deals with the making of kinship through medical, political, affective, and legal technologies. While this primarily refers to the creation of kinship through medically assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization or gamete donation, it also includes further techniques of making kinship such as marriages, the establishment of so-called ‘donor siblingship’, and more general ways of creating belonging and an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991 [1983]). We understand technology as a device which assists the making of kinship that is situated in political, legal, and affective spheres and which therefore should be understood in a much broader way than just referring to the biotechnological manipulation of body substances. The term assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) refers to the technological means of manipulating gametes in order to conceive a child. Probably the best known of these techniques is the so-called ‘in vitro’ (Latin: ‘in glass’) fertilization or IVF. By isolating reproductive substance from the human body and enabling its cultivation in a petri dish, ‘IVF has changed scientific understandings of what life is’ (Franklin 2013 referring to Maienschein 2003) but also of what kinship is. In contemporary Euro-American thinking 1 , kinship is considered as the domain that is based on the ‘natural facts of life’ (Strathern 1992) – such as sex difference, generational succession, pregnancy and birth. Therefore, by intervening at the core of the making of a new life by dividing reproduction from sexual intercourse and taking it out of the human","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"65 1","pages":"1-10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article addresses how experts imagine family-making with IVF in Switzerland, and how their imaginations reveal the kinship rationale and the political tensions behind it. In 2008 prominent institutional representatives of reproductive medicine, reproductive health, politics and ethics took part in a public panel discussion on ‘modern reproductive medicine’ organised by the Medical Faculty at the 175 th anniversary of the University of Zurich. That discussion shows in an exemplary way, how professionals in Switzerland imagine ‘the IVF act’ through bodily substances and biomedical technologies, and how they imagine ‘social technologies’ of family-making and citizenship that are closely related to these notions of conception. It is argued in this article that the debate can be read as the staging of different and contested narratives, in particular of secular and sacred origin stories, that include a concerned conception or embryo tale and that pivot around the good ‘child as gift’ versus the bad ‘child as project’. These globally informed narratives have a strong cultural, political and economic stance, and they are driven by hopes and particularly anxieties about human reproduction, kinship and gender in Switzerland at the beginning of the 21st century.
{"title":"The ‘Child as Project’ Versus the ‘Child as Gift’: Expert Imaginations of IVF and Kinship in Switzerland","authors":"W. D. Jong","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses how experts imagine family-making with IVF in Switzerland, and how their imaginations reveal the kinship rationale and the political tensions behind it. In 2008 prominent institutional representatives of reproductive medicine, reproductive health, politics and ethics took part in a public panel discussion on ‘modern reproductive medicine’ organised by the Medical Faculty at the 175 th anniversary of the University of Zurich. That discussion shows in an exemplary way, how professionals in Switzerland imagine ‘the IVF act’ through bodily substances and biomedical technologies, and how they imagine ‘social technologies’ of family-making and citizenship that are closely related to these notions of conception. It is argued in this article that the debate can be read as the staging of different and contested narratives, in particular of secular and sacred origin stories, that include a concerned conception or embryo tale and that pivot around the good ‘child as gift’ versus the bad ‘child as project’. These globally informed narratives have a strong cultural, political and economic stance, and they are driven by hopes and particularly anxieties about human reproduction, kinship and gender in Switzerland at the beginning of the 21st century.","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"65 1","pages":"11-33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article examines the ways in which the genealogical model is mobilized, challenged and / or reinforced in imaginaries related to the possibility of medically assisting the extension of female fertility and the making of older mothers. By focusing on public discourses on egg donation and egg freezing procedures, it shows firstly how oocytes may become active and visible elements in the production of genetic continuity in the female line, in contrast with genealogical thinking based on the importance of the male line. Secondly, it identifies two ambivalent figures, ‘the grandmother mother’ and the ‘radiant forties mother’, revealing the anxieties and hope associated with the extension of female fertility. It results from the analysis that gender and age are two crucial components of the genealogical model that need to be studied together when it comes to the extension of fertility time.
{"title":"Imagining the Future of Motherhood: the Medically Assisted Extension of Fertility and the Production of Genealogical Continuity","authors":"Nolwenn Bühler","doi":"10.3790/SOC.65.1.79","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3790/SOC.65.1.79","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the ways in which the genealogical model is mobilized, challenged and / or reinforced in imaginaries related to the possibility of medically assisting the extension of female fertility and the making of older mothers. By focusing on public discourses on egg donation and egg freezing procedures, it shows firstly how oocytes may become active and visible elements in the production of genetic continuity in the female line, in contrast with genealogical thinking based on the importance of the male line. Secondly, it identifies two ambivalent figures, ‘the grandmother mother’ and the ‘radiant forties mother’, revealing the anxieties and hope associated with the extension of female fertility. It results from the analysis that gender and age are two crucial components of the genealogical model that need to be studied together when it comes to the extension of fertility time.","PeriodicalId":42778,"journal":{"name":"Sociologus","volume":"65 1","pages":"79-100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70193407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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