In recent debates about climate change, a transmission model of ecological inheritance has apportioned responsibility for ecological damage to generations portrayed as locked in conflict, while depicting Earth as a worldly possession capable of being assigned to a set of heirs. With a focus on North America, this article examines assumptions about ownership, possession, dispositional authority, and succession embedded in the trope of bequeathing an ecologically compromised world to a receiving generation that worries it might be the last. Many of these assumptions create exclusions for those who already apprehend themselves as dispossessed. Indigenous conceptions of responsibility, temporality, and place suggest ways to begin to decolonise the rhetoric of ecological inheritance, allowing humans to inhabit the everyday under signs other than extinction, regardless of how things turn out.
{"title":"Bequeathing a World","authors":"K. Weston","doi":"10.3167/cja.2022.400208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400208","url":null,"abstract":"In recent debates about climate change, a transmission model of ecological inheritance has apportioned responsibility for ecological damage to generations portrayed as locked in conflict, while depicting Earth as a worldly possession capable of being assigned to a set of heirs. With a focus on North America, this article examines assumptions about ownership, possession, dispositional authority, and succession embedded in the trope of bequeathing an ecologically compromised world to a receiving generation that worries it might be the last. Many of these assumptions create exclusions for those who already apprehend themselves as dispossessed. Indigenous conceptions of responsibility, temporality, and place suggest ways to begin to decolonise the rhetoric of ecological inheritance, allowing humans to inhabit the everyday under signs other than extinction, regardless of how things turn out.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41719570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The project of ontological anthropology expounded by Philippe Descola has unexplored merits for a critical and secular anthropology of Christian conversion in indigenous societies. Drawing on Shuar descriptions of their healing practice in a context of medical pluralism in southeast Ecuador, this article argues that for animist peoples, Protestant Evangelicalism constitutes a step toward philosophical materialism or ‘naturalism’. While Shuar healing reserves a central place for hallucinogenic plant-induced visions for personal empowerment and shamanic healing, Shuar Evangelicals express a preference for engaging only the material qualities of medicinal plants. This is not, however, the consequence of adopting a disenchanted material cosmology but of a submissive mode of relating to the immaterial aspects of reality normally engaged in ancestral Shuar ontology. The article thereby extends the ontological turn’s emphasis on what is known to a consideration of modes of relation to ontological content.
{"title":"Christian Modernisation in Amazonia","authors":"Christian Tym","doi":"10.3167/cja.2022.400209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400209","url":null,"abstract":"The project of ontological anthropology expounded by Philippe Descola has unexplored merits for a critical and secular anthropology of Christian conversion in indigenous societies. Drawing on Shuar descriptions of their healing practice in a context of medical pluralism in southeast Ecuador, this article argues that for animist peoples, Protestant Evangelicalism constitutes a step toward philosophical materialism or ‘naturalism’. While Shuar healing reserves a central place for hallucinogenic plant-induced visions for personal empowerment and shamanic healing, Shuar Evangelicals express a preference for engaging only the material qualities of medicinal plants. This is not, however, the consequence of adopting a disenchanted material cosmology but of a submissive mode of relating to the immaterial aspects of reality normally engaged in ancestral Shuar ontology. The article thereby extends the ontological turn’s emphasis on what is known to a consideration of modes of relation to ontological content.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48062760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In July 2017, local leaders interrupted their conversations after a long working day at the sight of a cloud that looked like Fidel Castro. This fleeting vision plunged them into a genuine and lasting joy, far from the hypocrisy and cynicism attributed to revolutionary elites since the crisis of the 1990s. Following the role of affects and emotions in the daily work of bureaucrats and in their interactions with farmers, I argue that affects play a pivotal role in producing what Timothy Mitchell calls the ‘state effect’ by fueling the boundary work that sustains the distinction between state and society in Cuba. I show how affects articulate registers of self-sacrifice and reciprocity which have been mediating relationships with El Estado since the beginning of the revolution.
{"title":"Seeing Fidel in the Sky","authors":"Marie Aureille","doi":"10.3167/cja.2022.400207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400207","url":null,"abstract":"In July 2017, local leaders interrupted their conversations after a long working day at the sight of a cloud that looked like Fidel Castro. This fleeting vision plunged them into a genuine and lasting joy, far from the hypocrisy and cynicism attributed to revolutionary elites since the crisis of the 1990s. Following the role of affects and emotions in the daily work of bureaucrats and in their interactions with farmers, I argue that affects play a pivotal role in producing what Timothy Mitchell calls the ‘state effect’ by fueling the boundary work that sustains the distinction between state and society in Cuba. I show how affects articulate registers of self-sacrifice and reciprocity which have been mediating relationships with El Estado since the beginning of the revolution.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46500903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article focuses on the reception of revolutionary oratory in what was once known as The People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. Sékou Touré, Guinea’s first president, captivated the nation with fiery, unscripted speeches lasting four, five, or six hours. Guinean audiences were enthralled by his sublime revolutionary rhetoric. In a 2008 coup, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara declared himself president, attempting to recreate the fervour of Guinea’s revolutionary days. Guinean citizens initially provided a willing revolutionary audience, though Camara’s oratory fell far short of Touré’s example. The article explores how the effects of shock and boredom that Ngai describes as ‘stuplimity’ (2005) emerged in reaction to Camara’s performances. Stuplimity was a halfway point between Guineans’ initial ‘revolutionary’ suspension of disbelief regarding the junta’s intentions and their subsequent rejection and anger, which led to the junta’s collapse less than a year after it took power.
{"title":"‘I Did Not Wash My Hand for Days’","authors":"M. Mcgovern","doi":"10.3167/cja.2021.390206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2021.390206","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the reception of revolutionary oratory in what was once known as The People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. Sékou Touré, Guinea’s first president, captivated the nation with fiery, unscripted speeches lasting four, five, or six hours. Guinean audiences were enthralled by his sublime revolutionary rhetoric. In a 2008 coup, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara declared himself president, attempting to recreate the fervour of Guinea’s revolutionary days. Guinean citizens initially provided a willing revolutionary audience, though Camara’s oratory fell far short of Touré’s example. The article explores how the effects of shock and boredom that Ngai describes as ‘stuplimity’ (2005) emerged in reaction to Camara’s performances. Stuplimity was a halfway point between Guineans’ initial ‘revolutionary’ suspension of disbelief regarding the junta’s intentions and their subsequent rejection and anger, which led to the junta’s collapse less than a year after it took power.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43004521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The 2018 anti-government protests in Nicaragua generated a vast amount of photographic imagery, video documentation, and visual graphics. On the street and via social media, everyday citizens engaged with this material, activating a multisensory environment. The production of visual content was nonetheless accompanied by iconoclastic gestures; vandalism became a means of reclaiming Nicaragua’s revolutionary past and its symbols, while deploying them towards the making of a yet to be imagined political future. Drawing on examples from Chile and Mexico, the article argues that acts of vandalism may be understood as symbolically reparative. The materiality of the protests, manifested through image, trace, gesture, and sound (slogans, chants, noise) becomes a means towards analysing, ethnographically, revolutionary imaginaries caught within the flux of an unsettled present.
{"title":"Vandalism as Symbolic Reparation","authors":"Ileana L. Selejan","doi":"10.3167/cja.2021.390203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2021.390203","url":null,"abstract":"The 2018 anti-government protests in Nicaragua generated a vast amount of photographic imagery, video documentation, and visual graphics. On the street and via social media, everyday citizens engaged with this material, activating a multisensory environment. The production of visual content was nonetheless accompanied by iconoclastic gestures; vandalism became a means of reclaiming Nicaragua’s revolutionary past and its symbols, while deploying them towards the making of a yet to be imagined political future. Drawing on examples from Chile and Mexico, the article argues that acts of vandalism may be understood as symbolically reparative. The materiality of the protests, manifested through image, trace, gesture, and sound (slogans, chants, noise) becomes a means towards analysing, ethnographically, revolutionary imaginaries caught within the flux of an unsettled present.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46126034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With reference to one man’s remarkable struggle to rebuild his home in Havana following its partial collapse, this article contributes to the emerging anthropological literature on care by thematising the role of the state as carer-in-chief. Experiences such as that of Lázaro, the protagonist of the article, demonstrate the central paradox of care as a state project—one that receives its most extreme expression in the totalising project of revolutionary state socialism—namely, the contradiction between the particularistic, affective, and aesthetic character of care and the generalising and neutralising rational order of the state mechanisms charged with delivering it. Drawing on the ritual and cosmological template of Afro-Cuban espiritismo, Lázaro effectively solves this paradox by supplementing his relationship with state structures with an intricate, ever-evolving, and deeply personal relationship with spirits. The upshot is Lázaro’s remarkable sense of inner conviction in the efficacy of state bureaucracy, underpinned by the aesthetics of care that spiritsit practice provides.
{"title":"The House of Spirits","authors":"M. Holbraad","doi":"10.3167/cja.2021.390208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2021.390208","url":null,"abstract":"With reference to one man’s remarkable struggle to rebuild his home in Havana following its partial collapse, this article contributes to the emerging anthropological literature on care by thematising the role of the state as carer-in-chief. Experiences such as that of Lázaro, the protagonist of the article, demonstrate the central paradox of care as a state project—one that receives its most extreme expression in the totalising project of revolutionary state socialism—namely, the contradiction between the particularistic, affective, and aesthetic character of care and the generalising and neutralising rational order of the state mechanisms charged with delivering it. Drawing on the ritual and cosmological template of Afro-Cuban espiritismo, Lázaro effectively solves this paradox by supplementing his relationship with state structures with an intricate, ever-evolving, and deeply personal relationship with spirits. The upshot is Lázaro’s remarkable sense of inner conviction in the efficacy of state bureaucracy, underpinned by the aesthetics of care that spiritsit practice provides.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42420581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How do we understand the presence of the grotesque in negotiations of democratic life after a revolution? At the peak of procedural democratic consolidation, carnivalesque revelries in Tunisia became the object of public aporia and repugnance. The dissimilar interpretations of these revelries across generations evince an agonistic process of prizing open both the parameters of nationhood and democratic ideals within existing social relations. The concept of the ‘democratic grotesque’ captures the sensorial and affective ways Tunisian citizens negotiate the affordances and limitations of democracy in the post-revolutionary nation. The democratic grotesque has the double potential to revise intellectual and public understandings of democratic dispositions that emanate from liberal democracy and to blur the boundaries between revolution and democracy.
{"title":"The Democratic Grotesque","authors":"Charis Boutieri","doi":"10.3167/cja.2021.390205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2021.390205","url":null,"abstract":"How do we understand the presence of the grotesque in negotiations of democratic life after a revolution? At the peak of procedural democratic consolidation, carnivalesque revelries in Tunisia became the object of public aporia and repugnance. The dissimilar interpretations of these revelries across generations evince an agonistic process of prizing open both the parameters of nationhood and democratic ideals within existing social relations. The concept of the ‘democratic grotesque’ captures the sensorial and affective ways Tunisian citizens negotiate the affordances and limitations of democracy in the post-revolutionary nation. The democratic grotesque has the double potential to revise intellectual and public understandings of democratic dispositions that emanate from liberal democracy and to blur the boundaries between revolution and democracy.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48355763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article tells a story of the aftermath of the ‘failed revolution’ in Egypt through the prism of sound and gendered political prisoner bodies. It created embodied reactions among Cairene men—years after their lived prison experiences—in which depression, sorrow, stress, paranoia, rage, or painful body memories are prevalent. Affect theory shows how sonic vibrations—important stimuli within everyday experience, with a unique power to induce strong affective states—mediate consciousness, including heightened states of attention and anxiety. Sound, or the lack thereof, stimulates, disorients, transforms, and controls. The sound of life is transformed into the sound of death; the desire to disappear in order not to disappear again produces ‘ghost bodies’ alienated from the ‘new Egypt’, but from the family and the self too.
{"title":"The Desire to Disappear in Order Not to Disappear","authors":"M. Malmström","doi":"10.3167/cja.2021.390207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2021.390207","url":null,"abstract":"This article tells a story of the aftermath of the ‘failed revolution’ in Egypt through the prism of sound and gendered political prisoner bodies. It created embodied reactions among Cairene men—years after their lived prison experiences—in which depression, sorrow, stress, paranoia, rage, or painful body memories are prevalent. Affect theory shows how sonic vibrations—important stimuli within everyday experience, with a unique power to induce strong affective states—mediate consciousness, including heightened states of attention and anxiety. Sound, or the lack thereof, stimulates, disorients, transforms, and controls. The sound of life is transformed into the sound of death; the desire to disappear in order not to disappear again produces ‘ghost bodies’ alienated from the ‘new Egypt’, but from the family and the self too.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48674840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The autumn of 2019 was characterised by an eruption of global protests, including Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador, Chile, and Egypt. The velocity with which these protests emerged nurtured a sense that the Global South ‘was on the march’. At the same time as these events were rapidly unfolding, the world’s premier mass art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, was in its final weeks. Harnessing discourse analysis, participant observation, and collaborative auto-ethnography, the authors draw together a comparative study of the Chilean and Egyptian pavilions and assess the impact of ongoing and suspended revolutionary histories of both nations. Approaching art as a form of ‘practical aesthetics’ (Bennett 2012) and focusing on humour as an aesthetic quality enmeshed in complex political temporalities, this article analyses the relationship between humour, contemporary art, and revolution, demonstrating how the laughter facilitated by these two pavilions negotiates understandings of national pasts, and uprisings in the present.
{"title":"Laughing with, Laughing at","authors":"C. Lionis, Alkisti Efthymiou","doi":"10.3167/cja.2021.390204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2021.390204","url":null,"abstract":"The autumn of 2019 was characterised by an eruption of global protests, including Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador, Chile, and Egypt. The velocity with which these protests emerged nurtured a sense that the Global South ‘was on the march’. At the same time as these events were rapidly unfolding, the world’s premier mass art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, was in its final weeks. Harnessing discourse analysis, participant observation, and collaborative auto-ethnography, the authors draw together a comparative study of the Chilean and Egyptian pavilions and assess the impact of ongoing and suspended revolutionary histories of both nations. Approaching art as a form of ‘practical aesthetics’ (Bennett 2012) and focusing on humour as an aesthetic quality enmeshed in complex political temporalities, this article analyses the relationship between humour, contemporary art, and revolution, demonstrating how the laughter facilitated by these two pavilions negotiates understandings of national pasts, and uprisings in the present.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49305423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, we explore the ways in which a man with motor neurone disease, Gareth, and his wife and carer, Maggie, enact different temporal orientations, when the expected future, an early death, does not arrive. We attend to the tensions between everyday priorities and uncertain futures to discuss the ways Gareth and Maggie negotiate action to deal with problems that are yet to come, but, despite this, already matter. We argue that prognosis thrusts people towards multiple presents and futures; while the future is fixed in time through prognosis and repaired through present action, it is also unfixed as lived experience unfolds over time. What emerges is a dialogue between multiple futures, pre-determined and uncertain, and practices that aim to repair the future, even if they cannot do so.
{"title":"The Lived Temporalities of Prognosis","authors":"D. Sakellariou, N. Nissen, Narelle Warren","doi":"10.3167/cja.2021.390210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2021.390210","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we explore the ways in which a man with motor neurone disease, Gareth, and his wife and carer, Maggie, enact different temporal orientations, when the expected future, an early death, does not arrive. We attend to the tensions between everyday priorities and uncertain futures to discuss the ways Gareth and Maggie negotiate action to deal with problems that are yet to come, but, despite this, already matter. We argue that prognosis thrusts people towards multiple presents and futures; while the future is fixed in time through prognosis and repaired through present action, it is also unfixed as lived experience unfolds over time. What emerges is a dialogue between multiple futures, pre-determined and uncertain, and practices that aim to repair the future, even if they cannot do so.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49534649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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