Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

The Mè’phàà people in Guerrero, Mexico, won a judgment against open-pit mining by which they asserted their sacred and integral conceptions of territory as part of their collective rights. Through the sentence, they avoided the dispossession of their lands and life project. This article analyzes how discourses around indigenous territorial ontologies were brought into play through anthropological expert reports. We are interested in highlighting the challenges and limits of judicial knowledge when disputing different rationalities and epistemologies regarding territory, grievances, and rights within the legal space. We document the production of non-Western legal knowledge in the judicial field, revealing indigenous territory visions that confront the extractive projects. We focus our ethnographic gaze on the cultural and legal translation of the knowledge of the Mè’phàà people to analyze the scope and limits of a dialogue of knowledges and its effects on the judicialization and the politicization of the indigenous struggle.

This article examines how middle-class bureaucrats in Ecuador create and reinforce particular ethical frameworks through their work, their consumption, and their “side hustles.” Having been tasked with growing and strengthening an alternative economy to capitalism, these government functionaries find it important to engage in productive and consumptive practices to help them experience the correct feelings to be able to promote the Popular Solidarity Economy and avoid being disenchanted bureaucrats. Due to the precarious context in which they work, however, these practices are generally reflective of and idealize entrepreneurial logics. I contribute to an expanding literature on the importance of affect to bureaucrats as well as putting that literature in conversation with authors writing about entrepreneurial self-making. In doing so, I demonstrate how entrepreneurial logics spread into alternative economy space by responding to the very real material and affective needs of government workers in circumstances of precarious employment.

Misconceptions about the ethnolinguistic relationship between Haiti and Louisiana persist to the present. Central to this debate is whether Louisiana Creole (LC) is a variety of French, an independent language, or a variant of the better-known and more widely spoken Haitian Creole (HC). In this paper, I present data from residents of Louisiana and the greater Gulf South who invoke Haiti in reference to who and what are Creoles. Haiti surfaces in two primary ways: as a site of origin and authentication or as a site of difference and denaturalization. Haiti's indexical value and authenticating potential vary according to a speaker's ethnolinguistic identity. These complexities are particularly important for understanding the history and trajectory of the current reclamation movement for the Louisiana Creole language (aka “Kouri-Vini”).

This ethnographic examination of a binary linguistic hierarchy in Haiti shares the critical terrain of Viranjini Munasinghe's unpacking of Caribbean creolization theory. It is a grounded inquiry into a problematic of ontology that inheres in techniques of making non-white identities deployed by Caribbean privileged people of color at arm's length from a European colonial heritage that underpins their privileged class positions. Borrowing Munasinghe's analytic concept of theory made schizophrenic by ideology, the investigation reveals Haiti's francophone minority ideologically utilizing Haitian Creole as a black-nationalist symbol in its domination of the monolingual Creole-speaking majority. The ideological move devalues Creole while elevating French in the reproduction of class inequality. The linguistic schizophrenia undermines the theoretical nation-building logic of Creole as national language. Failing practical validation of Creole in all spheres of Haitian life, I conclude, claims on the state and civil society by Haiti's vast monolingual Creole-speaking majority cannot logically be validated.

Increasingly foreclosed possibilities of asylum in the US-Mexico border have been accompanied in Mexico by two seemingly divergent narratives laden with affective assessments targeting Haitians and Central Americans, the largest populations of migrants forced to temporarily resettle in Northern Mexican cities. Ethnographic analysis in Tijuana offers insight into diverging representations of docility and gratefulness of Haitians versus aggressiveness and rudeness of Central Americans—alongside converging state and economic violence these migrants face. Bringing comparative ethnic studies with Caribbeanist and Mexicanist anthropology to bear on contemporary Mexican migration politics, this article elucidates how Tijuanenses’ public perceptions are racially triangulated to a valorized Mexicanidad in directly relationship with the border. This paper sheds light on how organized state and non-state violence, enshrined in border regimes, become routinized in everyday “common sense” discourse tied to affective relations through a process proposed herein as transborder racial affect.

Travesti and transfeminine migrants across urban Amazonian Peru uniquely refashion their sense of social relatedness in the city apart from the kinship ties of their rural home communities because of experiences of violence and banishment in their youth. Coincidence—the timely concurrence of two unexpected or unrelated events—provides a temporal logic through which some recount episodes of kin relatedness throughout their migratory trajectories. However, in contrast to the conventional sequences of normative kinship as well as to the temporal logic of the “chosen families” model, kinship by coincidence enables interlocutors to acknowledge intense personal traumas with their parents and siblings, to survive a constrained social world as they arrive in new cities, and to leave open the possibility of reconstituting ties of consanguinity in the future. This article draws on ethnographic data and interpretative analysis of Christian Bendayán's Fuerza Animal.