Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

The resale of Brazilian fuel on the Venezuela–Brazil border is an emerging event that facilitates a renewed sociopolitical understanding of local survival strategies beyond notions of societal resilience and informality in times of crisis. This economic activity rather belongs to a mercurial way of life that occurs in these cross-border spaces where gold is the locus of a commercial chain that links various underground economies. Based on collaborative ethnographic research, in this article we show that the resale of fuel occurs with even greater virulence in times of multiple crises and closed borders, which has exacerbated by the current Covid-19 pandemic turning prevailing underground economies into “flammable economies.” By this, we refer to an informal economy in times of crisis that is extremely volatile and contagious, whose effects proliferate fueled by the legal ambivalence that is becoming more extensive everyday.

Turupukllay is a popular form of bullfighting in Peru that unfolds over several days. Social analysis of turupukllay has largely focused on the symbolic dimension of its most sensational form, Yawar Fiesta, in which a condor is affixed to the back of the bull. But regarding these animals merely as symbols results in a limited sense of “play,” particularly given how turupukllay encompasses the bull as a life-form. Based on fieldwork in Andagua, Peru, we argue that playing with the bull is more extensive: turupukllay can be seen as playing with tauromaquia broadly—the art, life, and regulation of Spanish-style bullfighting. In Andagua, turupukllay plays with the bull through local breeding practices that physically transform it while also engaging in an ongoing burlesque of the formal features in tauromaquia. This version of turupukllay highlights an ongoing historical dynamic at play in the wide popularity of corrida de toros in Peru.

Fernando Ortiz's proposal to replace the word acculturation with transculturation in Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) has become an iconic statement affirming the distinctiveness of Latin American anthropology. This narrative includes a deeper thread that involves Bronisław Malinowski, who praised the neologism for its counterhegemonic implications in his introduction to Contrapunteo. According to this thread of the narrative, though, Malinowski sought to suppress Ortiz's theorization by subsuming it into his school of functionalism. This article approaches the genesis of transculturation as a more complex and reciprocal process of negotiations that also included Melville Herskovits and acculturation studies. The theoretical positions of each of these anthropologists—Ortiz, Malinowski, and Herskovits—stemmed from geopolitical circumstances linked to the different colonial and postcolonial contexts in which they worked. I argue that despite their different agendas and mutual misrepresentations, transculturation became more counterhegemonic through their interactions, and suggest that this has implications for how we might think about the development of anthropological theory as arising from reflexive anthropological collaborations.

While Cuba was in a COVID-19-induced lockdown, coleras, women who wait in hours-long colas (lines) to purchase scarce goods to resell, emerged in online state media as “folk devils” responsible for the acute shortages of basic goods. Using an intersection lens, we combine fieldwork in lines and content analysis of online media to examine the creation and policing of the colera threat during the summer of 2020. Coleras were framed as immoral subjects, gendered and racialized, and often depicted as a virus that threatened the nation's health. The colera moral panic attempted to obscure class, race, and gender inequalities and structures that have made certain citizens vulnerable in the aftermath of successive waves of Cuban economic reforms. Understanding this moral panic allows us to appreciate the material scarcities and indignities to which poor Black women have been subjected, and widespread concerns about the state's failure to protect society's most vulnerable.