Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

In the context of transnational migration, many non-migrant men in Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia postulate a ‘transcontinental’ version of polygyny, wishing to have one wife in Europe and another in Africa. Such claims are made among competing notions of love based on romantic intimacy and monogamy. This article explores the ways in which people rationalise polygyny in transnational marriage, based on the notion of hegemonic masculinity. Whereas hegemonic masculinity is an ideal asserted discursively, through persuasion, and relies on common consent, some migrant men resort to the strategy of keeping the African wife secret from the European wife—they are only able to assert a ‘one-sided hegemonic masculinity’ in transnational marriage. Ultimately, global economic inequalities and the demand for labour migration characteristic of contemporary neoliberal globalisation counter the trend towards romantic intimacy, necessitating transnational family forms and favouring polygyny.

This article focuses on the Australian partner visa application process, as experienced by African-Australian couples in intimate heterosexual relationships. In Australia, similar to other Anglo-European countries, the visa application process is an increasingly complex procedure. In order to avoid sham marriages that are entered into for the sole purpose of obtaining residency, it heavily scrutinises couples’ relationships and motives for marriage migration. This article explores marriage migration ‘from below’, by looking at how the Australian Government utilises the idea of ‘genuineness’ in order to establish the sincere character of binational relationships, and in turn, how this bureaucratic focus affects couples and their intimate relationships. I argue that the visa application process is distrusting of binational couples, which produces various outcomes: it obstructs intimacy and romance as experienced by couples; rather than fostering equality as desired by the Government, it generates a dependency among couples whereby female sponsoring spouses are ascribed more power than their foreign partners; and the non-transparent and lengthy procedure, as a form of structural violence against binational couples, affects couples’ ontological security.

Love and intimacy are personal as well as political; they are concepts that are multidimensional, complex, and, sometimes, contradictory; and are meaningful to institutions and states as well as individuals. Dynamic local and global forces generate shifts in perceptions and experiences of intimacy and love, which are mediated by a wide variety of actors, ideals, beliefs and practices. This introduction to the special issue of shifting states of love, intimacy and intimate citizenship explores how these experiences are shaped by political, sociocultural, legal and intimate borders and boundaries, both literal and metaphorical. The article points to intimate relationships that, in various ways, challenge or transgress normative boundaries, but which are simultaneously experienced as empowering and deeply meaningful to those involved. This introduction to the special issue, as a collection of ethnographically rich analyses of loving, proffers new insights into the emergence of various forms of intimacies: from love across state borders, polygamous intimacies, transnational, intercultural and online love and dating, to interspecies intimacies based on mutual love and care.

On Siargao Island, as elsewhere in the Philippines, women who enter into intimate relationships with Western men can attain economic capital, global opportunities and social mobility through their partners. On Siargao Island, local women who surf differentiate themselves from imaginings of ‘other’ Filipinas by emphasising their relationships with Western men as being ‘for love’ not money. Nevertheless, the economic benefits that can accrue to local women in transnational relationships is observable. However, through identification with surf culture, women who surf possess a global social capital and transnational networks that extend beyond their Western partners, and which alter the dynamics of these relationships in the women's favour. Further, local women's social mobility and adherence to the ‘surfer girl’ identity creates a space in which they are implicitly challenging colonial and class-based beauty ideals in the Philippines that privilege fair or light skin over darker skin.

This article applies an anthropological perspective of violence to critique and interrogate the concept of social justice. It analyses Bangladeshi sex workers’ “lived experience” of symbolic and structural violence in different social worlds—the community and family, and brothels—as a new framework for understanding social injustice. We find that violence and injustice exist in a complex web of power, identity, social structures and culture, shaped by power relations, discriminating social structures, and oppressive cultural norms which push the sex workers into the cycles of violence. These forms of violence impede an individual's capabilities, life chances and dignity, the factors that determine one's experience of social justice. From a social policy perspective, our study suggests that social justice to sex workers concerns, first and foremost, with addressing their needs for safety and security, thus, enabling them to experience equity, dignity, protection and human rights.

In Nepal ‘development’ (bikas) frames local socio-cultural practices, including gendered and environmental practices, with lasting gendered and ecological outcomes. This tension is at the heart of everyday life in Ludigaun, a Bahun (high caste Hindu) village in West Nepal. Utilising a framework of a local familiar tension between ‘traditional’ ideas/practices and those imagined through ‘modernity’, I draw on ethnographic material describing a year-long family conflict over keeping buffalo, to allow the tension and contradictions inherent in village life – of gender, generations, and caste – and their articulation with national and global relations – to come into focus. For an older generation of women, their work and relationships with buffalo are at stake, presenting an uncertain future and a possible crisis of identity and of place. I argue that the relationship between these women and their buffalo extends beyond material needs and is a crucial emotional attachment; it is an intimate ‘mode of care’ that is integral to village social reproduction. Women's work with buffalo (although it has no positive status of its own) demonstrates the older generation of women are not passive but active players in constituting caste, gendered and social status identities. Keeping buffalo is fundamental to the ways in which and older generation of Bahun women exert their influence. Building on the work of Campbell (Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human–Animal Intimacies, 2005b, pp. 79–100; Living Between Juniper and Palm: Nature, Culture and Power in the Himalayas, 2013), Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015), Harraway (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016) and Govindrajan (Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, 2018), the human–buffalo relationship presented here demonstrates the human–animal relationship as a key relationship of value to Bahun women at a time when the out-migration phenomenon has taken their children away. I argue that in this way, and at a time when human–environment relationships are increasingly disembedded, human–buffalo relationships in West Nepal emphasise a unity between humans and their environment and remind us that intimacy and becoming are multispecies affairs.

In this paper, I explore the privileging of the language of ‘love’ on dating profiles established by Papua New Guineans active on online dating sites. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), recent accessibility to the internet has led to people going online, with the aim of attracting partners and initiating relationships based on affection. I note that companionate ideals and the vocabulary of love are central to online dating, but also reflect a wider re-imagining of intimate relationships across the country. The articulation of the vocabulary of love has a complex history in PNG, however, encompassing engagements with colonial agents, models of Christian intimacies, as well as the potent use of ‘love magic’. In this context, love can signify ambiguity or coercion as much as affection, companionship or romance. At the same time, the vocabulary of love can have a powerful and efficacious effect, generating connections and capacities, particularly associated with being ‘modern’ and Christian.

This paper explores the interplay between global surfing masculinities, the colonial/feminising touristic order and local cultural norms in the Philippines through an analysis of surfing masculinities and the Visayan hierarchical ordering principal sipog (supog/ulaw), or shyness/modesty/shame/embarrassment. The touristic order constructs tropical tourism destinations as effeminate, a process which marginalises, excludes or emasculates local men. However, through adherence to the masculine modes of modern surf culture, Filipino surfers on Siargao Island find a viable pathway through which to assert dominance and resist and reject the touristic order. Yet, while local men who surf on Siargao Island assert dominance and control in surfing spaces, outside these spaces their subjectivities are complicated by overarching social and class hierarchies, global inequalities and local cultural norms (sipog). In tourist spaces, their behaviours tend more towards shyness, modesty and deference.

Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined in recent decades due to falling cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the ‘locking up’ of Cape York land regimes and environments by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research in south-east Cape York conducted in 2018–2019, in this article I describe and analyse how graziers construct their claims to belonging in the region in response to land tenure changes. Drawing on recent scholarship on non-Indigenous forms of belonging in settler states and using the case study of one particular grazing family, I discuss how graziers position themselves as those who ‘know the intimacies of the soil’, as one grazier stated, due to multigenerational work on the land. Their claim to belonging tends to ignore prior Aboriginal occupation and instead emphasises their long-term relationships with local Aboriginal families, while the third main stakeholder in the region, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, is perceived as a kind of dispossessor representing non-local ‘Green’ ideologies and interests.