Pub Date : 2024-09-01Epub Date: 2024-09-15DOI: 10.1177/0308275X241269650
Zeynep Oguz, Mark Goodale
The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is being elided by dominant discourses and forms of production, such as alternatives to socio-material understandings of energy and resistance to the inevitability of extractivism as the basis for new ways of living. Even more, the collection takes up and problematizes the concept of 'transition' itself on historical, ethnographic, and epistemological grounds. After describing the themes that emerge from the special issue, and explaining how these themes point toward new configurations of research, theory-building, and critical intervention, the introduction concludes with a broader argument about the indispensable place of a critical anthropology in debates over energy and Anthropocenic harm.
{"title":"Introduction: Contesting the moral worlds, scales, and epistemics of energy transitions.","authors":"Zeynep Oguz, Mark Goodale","doi":"10.1177/0308275X241269650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X241269650","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The introduction to this special issue, <i>Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries</i>, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is being elided by dominant discourses and forms of production, such as alternatives to socio-material understandings of energy and resistance to the inevitability of extractivism as the basis for new ways of living. Even more, the collection takes up and problematizes the concept of 'transition' itself on historical, ethnographic, and epistemological grounds. After describing the themes that emerge from the special issue, and explaining how these themes point toward new configurations of research, theory-building, and critical intervention, the introduction concludes with a broader argument about the indispensable place of a critical anthropology in debates over energy and Anthropocenic harm.</p>","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"44 3","pages":"207-218"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11405140/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142298467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-01Epub Date: 2024-09-15DOI: 10.1177/0308275X241269582
Mark Goodale
This article uses the ethnography of the prelives of lithium industrialization in Bolivia to contribute to wider debates - in anthropology and beyond - about the essentially contested nature of the green energy transition. Based on research conducted between 2019 and 2023, the article examines the topographies of production and sociopolitical mobilization that are entangled with Bolivia's state-controlled lithium project but which resist the various pressures to reorient social and productive worlds around arguably the most important 'critical' mineral for climate policy-making. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding these localized counter-futurities, one in which the image of scale-making takes on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. An anthropology of energy, climate justice, and resource imaginaries that is critically attuned to these inter-scalar frictions is one that must also be able to project itself through the kaleidoscope of competing energy narratives as a form of both demystification and ethnographic truth-telling.
{"title":"Lithium scale-making and extractivist counter-futurities in Bolivia.","authors":"Mark Goodale","doi":"10.1177/0308275X241269582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X241269582","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article uses the ethnography of the <i>prelives</i> of lithium industrialization in Bolivia to contribute to wider debates - in anthropology and beyond - about the essentially contested nature of the green energy transition. Based on research conducted between 2019 and 2023, the article examines the topographies of production and sociopolitical mobilization that are entangled with Bolivia's state-controlled lithium project but which resist the various pressures to reorient social and productive worlds around arguably the most important 'critical' mineral for climate policy-making. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding these localized counter-futurities, one in which the image of scale-making takes on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. An anthropology of energy, climate justice, and resource imaginaries that is critically attuned to these inter-scalar frictions is one that must also be able to project itself through the kaleidoscope of competing energy narratives as a form of both demystification and ethnographic truth-telling.</p>","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"44 3","pages":"381-399"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11408119/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142298468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231216260
E. Alber
Though often overlooked, parental navigations play an important role in the difficult pathways of rural children through changing eduscapes in northern Benin. Arguing that parents are deeply involved in their children’s trajectories towards making a living, I analyse the care and support parents see themselves as responsible for. A neoliberal and increasingly privatized schooling system creating unequal chances in combination with the demand of ‘Education for all’ responsibilizes parents for their children’s success, and a tight labour market makes it additionally difficult for youth to find positions in the urban space. In consequence, parents are more intensively investing in their children’s education and related costs than ever before, without feeling that these investments lead to what parents value as success. Due to the lack of parental experience in the neoliberal eduscapes and the lack of cultural and social capitals – parents describe it as ‘blindness’ – parental actions in the eduscapes could best be described as navigations which are entangled with those of their children. In these navigations, parents give their children what they never received from their own parents, but also expect or hope them to become what they never were. Both parents and children navigate, I argue, towards an unknown and uncertain future in ‘radical openness’.
{"title":"Entangled navigations: Intergenerational care relations in neoliberal eduscapes in Benin","authors":"E. Alber","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231216260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231216260","url":null,"abstract":"Though often overlooked, parental navigations play an important role in the difficult pathways of rural children through changing eduscapes in northern Benin. Arguing that parents are deeply involved in their children’s trajectories towards making a living, I analyse the care and support parents see themselves as responsible for. A neoliberal and increasingly privatized schooling system creating unequal chances in combination with the demand of ‘Education for all’ responsibilizes parents for their children’s success, and a tight labour market makes it additionally difficult for youth to find positions in the urban space. In consequence, parents are more intensively investing in their children’s education and related costs than ever before, without feeling that these investments lead to what parents value as success. Due to the lack of parental experience in the neoliberal eduscapes and the lack of cultural and social capitals – parents describe it as ‘blindness’ – parental actions in the eduscapes could best be described as navigations which are entangled with those of their children. In these navigations, parents give their children what they never received from their own parents, but also expect or hope them to become what they never were. Both parents and children navigate, I argue, towards an unknown and uncertain future in ‘radical openness’.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"25 1","pages":"365 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138621924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231216258
M. Stivens
Feminist scholarship has often been profoundly ambivalent about maternalist political mobilisations, seeing them as posing dangers of essentialising motherhood and of colluding with male-centred social orders, conservative politics and top-down state projects. This article looks at the complex and fluid politics of protest groups adopting familial kinship maternalist identities to militate politically for refugees and people seeking asylum, with particular reference to the Australian Grandmothers for Refugees organisation (G4R). A regular purple presence at demonstrations and on social media, the group’s 2000 members’ activities include vigils at ministerial and parliamentary members’ offices and detention centres, webinars, letter campaigns, petitions and parliamentary submissions. The G4R grandmothers’ role in the protests against the Australian asylum regime is part of a wider pattern of female predominance in contemporary organisations involved in such support and activism both locally and globally. The Grandmothers also exemplify the often-overlooked political energy of older women. The discussion explores questions about politicised kinship positionings, maternalist framings and mobilisations, and the cosmopolitan hospitality they offer. I am especially interested in how invocations of kinship-based location operate within these organisations, assuming ‘familial’ responsibility for and care of ‘Others’ within and beyond state and nation. Kinship tropes and imaginaries, while on occasion exclusionary and contradictory, arguably work to achieve a linking of political, ‘enraged’ affect with solidarity with the oppressed, enacting a transformative ethics in the public through effective political mobilisations of fictive kinship, responsibility, kindness, empathy and care.
{"title":"Gender and the politics of maternalisms: Kinship-based imaginaries, responsibility and care in Australian refugee advocacy","authors":"M. Stivens","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231216258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231216258","url":null,"abstract":"Feminist scholarship has often been profoundly ambivalent about maternalist political mobilisations, seeing them as posing dangers of essentialising motherhood and of colluding with male-centred social orders, conservative politics and top-down state projects. This article looks at the complex and fluid politics of protest groups adopting familial kinship maternalist identities to militate politically for refugees and people seeking asylum, with particular reference to the Australian Grandmothers for Refugees organisation (G4R). A regular purple presence at demonstrations and on social media, the group’s 2000 members’ activities include vigils at ministerial and parliamentary members’ offices and detention centres, webinars, letter campaigns, petitions and parliamentary submissions. The G4R grandmothers’ role in the protests against the Australian asylum regime is part of a wider pattern of female predominance in contemporary organisations involved in such support and activism both locally and globally. The Grandmothers also exemplify the often-overlooked political energy of older women. The discussion explores questions about politicised kinship positionings, maternalist framings and mobilisations, and the cosmopolitan hospitality they offer. I am especially interested in how invocations of kinship-based location operate within these organisations, assuming ‘familial’ responsibility for and care of ‘Others’ within and beyond state and nation. Kinship tropes and imaginaries, while on occasion exclusionary and contradictory, arguably work to achieve a linking of political, ‘enraged’ affect with solidarity with the oppressed, enacting a transformative ethics in the public through effective political mobilisations of fictive kinship, responsibility, kindness, empathy and care.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"23 2","pages":"461 - 475"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138624228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231216252
Nina Haberland
Every day, from Monday to Friday, women, men, and children sit on the uncomfortable benches outside the Tanzanian social welfare office and wait patiently for hours to meet with a welfare officer. There are mothers claiming alimony payments, fathers seeking visiting rights, quarrelling spouses, minors with legal problems, and families disputing inheritances. Most are ineligible for benefits, so this article asks why they nonetheless accept state practices of subordination like waiting. Based on case studies from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Department of Health in a northern district of Tanzania, I argue that queuing outside the welfare office signifies a ‘desire for the state’ as proposed by Street. To understand this desire, I explore the relationship between welfare clients and the state using the lens of post-socialism, specifically Verdery’s concept of ‘socialist paternalism’. This article explores kinship, the state, and the negotiation of responsibility in relation to the paternalistic images of the state reproduced by the ruling party, and argues that welfare clients appropriate these in search of care, advice, and guidance to address family and kin-related crises.
{"title":"Desiring the state: Social welfare and kinship in post-socialist Tanzania","authors":"Nina Haberland","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231216252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231216252","url":null,"abstract":"Every day, from Monday to Friday, women, men, and children sit on the uncomfortable benches outside the Tanzanian social welfare office and wait patiently for hours to meet with a welfare officer. There are mothers claiming alimony payments, fathers seeking visiting rights, quarrelling spouses, minors with legal problems, and families disputing inheritances. Most are ineligible for benefits, so this article asks why they nonetheless accept state practices of subordination like waiting. Based on case studies from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Department of Health in a northern district of Tanzania, I argue that queuing outside the welfare office signifies a ‘desire for the state’ as proposed by Street. To understand this desire, I explore the relationship between welfare clients and the state using the lens of post-socialism, specifically Verdery’s concept of ‘socialist paternalism’. This article explores kinship, the state, and the negotiation of responsibility in relation to the paternalistic images of the state reproduced by the ruling party, and argues that welfare clients appropriate these in search of care, advice, and guidance to address family and kin-related crises.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"8 26","pages":"385 - 398"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138623759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231216250
N. Mookherjee
This article seeks to ethnographically highlight the multiple uses of gene/alogy (as explored by Franklin and McKinnon in the 2000s) in the context of the Bangladesh war of 1971, and hence maps out the range of violence and ambivalences at the heart of kinship. It aims to do so by exploring the process through which disrupted kinship futures are seen as a cornerstone for discourses of war and sovereign practices to justify sexual violence during wars. The formation of Bangladesh in 1971 coincided with the rape of 200,000 (contested and official numbers) Bengali women perpetrated by the Pakistani army and its local collaborators. The article explores the occupation of the womb, that is, the connotation of genetic or ethnic fixing through sexual violence by the Pakistani army, which is apparently an attempt to disrupt the kinship futures of East Pakistan (that later became independent Bangladesh). The sovereign logic of disrupting kinship futures of those that one feels the need to attack, weaken and annihilate (in this case East Pakistanis) is, however, based on a process of naturalisation of inequalities drawn from historical and racialised accounts. The article argues that the sovereign belief in being able to genetically and behaviourally ‘fix’ East Pakistanis through wartime sexual violence, and to instil fear, is possible through the sovereign inhabitation of the inhumanity of sexual violence. Therein lies the vulnerability of sovereign power, the paradox of kinship and its processes of inclusions and ruptures in the future. In seeking to develop a wider theoretical contribution about kinship as the cornerstone of statecraft and wars, the article also seeks to show how military rape alters the grounds of the nation itself, the experiences and imaginations over a period of half a century, and instils various forms of ambiguities about the history of wartime sexual violence.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231216256
Veronica Strang
As environmental change and mass extinctions underline an urgent need to establish more humane relationships with non-human beings, there is a creative opportunity to reimagine concepts of kinship to promote the collective well-being of all living kinds. Anthropology draws on culturally diverse interspecies relations: some locate human and other species within distinctive and hierarchical categories, while others have more fluid and egalitarian notions of personhood. Engagements with non-human species therefore range from objectifying and exploiting them, to their acceptance as kin, as persons, and as reciprocal co-creative partners in the composition of shared lifeworlds. Though the concept of kinship is conventionally used to illuminate inter-human relations, this article suggests that it has further potential to raise key questions about how societies engage with non-human beings, and our ethical responsibilities towards them. These questions might usefully inform contemporary debates about non-human rights, and how these might be upheld by state and/or international legislation.
{"title":"Living kindness: Re-imagining kinship for a more humane future","authors":"Veronica Strang","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231216256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231216256","url":null,"abstract":"As environmental change and mass extinctions underline an urgent need to establish more humane relationships with non-human beings, there is a creative opportunity to reimagine concepts of kinship to promote the collective well-being of all living kinds. Anthropology draws on culturally diverse interspecies relations: some locate human and other species within distinctive and hierarchical categories, while others have more fluid and egalitarian notions of personhood. Engagements with non-human species therefore range from objectifying and exploiting them, to their acceptance as kin, as persons, and as reciprocal co-creative partners in the composition of shared lifeworlds. Though the concept of kinship is conventionally used to illuminate inter-human relations, this article suggests that it has further potential to raise key questions about how societies engage with non-human beings, and our ethical responsibilities towards them. These questions might usefully inform contemporary debates about non-human rights, and how these might be upheld by state and/or international legislation.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":" 16","pages":"476 - 494"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138619920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231216251
Loes Loning
Thousands of women and girls experienced sexual violence during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and many became pregnant as a result of rape. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Rwanda, this article discusses how kinship is (re-)established in the aftermath of sexual violence by focusing on the lived experiences of young people conceived in genocidal rape. The article explores what forms of relationships become possible, impossible, enabled or dismissed, in the aftermath of a period of extreme violence. Through detailing the delicate establishment of affective ties, I hope to show the subtle work that goes into containing genocide memories in the everyday. The article suggests that young people engage in careful and ‘attuned’ kinship practices in an environment that changes throughout their life course. In exploring how young people carefully navigate the mending, protecting, and accepting of ‘family’, the article emphasizes the possibilities and limitations of kinship in the aftermath of collective violence.
{"title":"The aftermath of gendered violence: Kinship and affect in post-genocide Rwanda","authors":"Loes Loning","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231216251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231216251","url":null,"abstract":"Thousands of women and girls experienced sexual violence during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and many became pregnant as a result of rape. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Rwanda, this article discusses how kinship is (re-)established in the aftermath of sexual violence by focusing on the lived experiences of young people conceived in genocidal rape. The article explores what forms of relationships become possible, impossible, enabled or dismissed, in the aftermath of a period of extreme violence. Through detailing the delicate establishment of affective ties, I hope to show the subtle work that goes into containing genocide memories in the everyday. The article suggests that young people engage in careful and ‘attuned’ kinship practices in an environment that changes throughout their life course. In exploring how young people carefully navigate the mending, protecting, and accepting of ‘family’, the article emphasizes the possibilities and limitations of kinship in the aftermath of collective violence.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"29 44","pages":"444 - 460"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138624515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231216255
Henrike Donner
This article addresses the complex ways in which poor urban women’s educational and training needs are embedded in official discourses of capacity creation and are constructed in opposition to their community and kinship networks, an aspect that is very often overlooked when such programmes are designed. It argues that this oversight is not a coincidence, as neoliberal policies and discourses of empowerment construct young women as ‘subjects of capacity’. Where they are addressed directly, young women are framed as the single, autonomous subjects of liberalism who, once enabled, overcome ‘traditional’ kin and community attachments. Based on the ethnographic study of vocational training for beauticians provided by an Indian NGO, the article argues that such interventions are geared towards ‘community development’ and therefore reference broader social landscapes, but that the participants in training see themselves and the process as part of, rather than as opposed to, kin and community obligations. While education and training are more often than not conceived as stand-alone projects offering young women a way into employment and the labour market, the article foregrounds the class-based limits of such workist approaches and the entanglements between body work, caste/class, and histories of feminized poverty. It demonstrates how young women from lower-caste and lower-class backgrounds see opportunities in the beauty industry mainly as supporting their roles as responsible daughters, future wives and daughters-in-law realized within the complex economies of marginal urban communities. They are also acutely aware that while the actual work of the beautician allows some access to the world of ‘professional’ modern and classed notions of femininity and, arguably, a more dignified workplace than in domestic service, the pitfalls of an industry built on gendered, racialized and classist inclusions and hierarchies are noted too. Critiquing the mainstream feminist focus on access to the labour market, the article argues that young women are fully aware of their own precarious relationship with ideals of neoliberal constructs of autonomous subjectivities promoted by the state and its agents.
{"title":"‘The Girls are Alright’: Beauty work and neoliberal regimes of responsibility among young women in Urban India","authors":"Henrike Donner","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231216255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231216255","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the complex ways in which poor urban women’s educational and training needs are embedded in official discourses of capacity creation and are constructed in opposition to their community and kinship networks, an aspect that is very often overlooked when such programmes are designed. It argues that this oversight is not a coincidence, as neoliberal policies and discourses of empowerment construct young women as ‘subjects of capacity’. Where they are addressed directly, young women are framed as the single, autonomous subjects of liberalism who, once enabled, overcome ‘traditional’ kin and community attachments. Based on the ethnographic study of vocational training for beauticians provided by an Indian NGO, the article argues that such interventions are geared towards ‘community development’ and therefore reference broader social landscapes, but that the participants in training see themselves and the process as part of, rather than as opposed to, kin and community obligations. While education and training are more often than not conceived as stand-alone projects offering young women a way into employment and the labour market, the article foregrounds the class-based limits of such workist approaches and the entanglements between body work, caste/class, and histories of feminized poverty. It demonstrates how young women from lower-caste and lower-class backgrounds see opportunities in the beauty industry mainly as supporting their roles as responsible daughters, future wives and daughters-in-law realized within the complex economies of marginal urban communities. They are also acutely aware that while the actual work of the beautician allows some access to the world of ‘professional’ modern and classed notions of femininity and, arguably, a more dignified workplace than in domestic service, the pitfalls of an industry built on gendered, racialized and classist inclusions and hierarchies are noted too. Critiquing the mainstream feminist focus on access to the labour market, the article argues that young women are fully aware of their own precarious relationship with ideals of neoliberal constructs of autonomous subjectivities promoted by the state and its agents.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":" 46","pages":"399 - 421"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138616801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231217928
Henrike Donner, Victoria Goddard
This special issue presents a range of case studies that exemplify the potential of kinship for thinking about and acting in relation to various kin and non-kin others in ways that invite us to reconsider the boundaries of politics and the political. The introduction examines ethnographic research that informs the articles in the special issue and shows the ways in which tensions and continuities across relations of intimacy, family and kinship, play out in response to contemporary capitalism. The articles in the special issue demonstrate the usefulness of exploring the interface and overlaps between the political and other fields that are all too often positioned – within scholarship and public discourses – as the antithesis of the political, variously understood in terms of the private, the familial, the domestic and the sphere of kinship.
{"title":"Kinship and the politics of responsibility: An introduction","authors":"Henrike Donner, Victoria Goddard","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231217928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231217928","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue presents a range of case studies that exemplify the potential of kinship for thinking about and acting in relation to various kin and non-kin others in ways that invite us to reconsider the boundaries of politics and the political. The introduction examines ethnographic research that informs the articles in the special issue and shows the ways in which tensions and continuities across relations of intimacy, family and kinship, play out in response to contemporary capitalism. The articles in the special issue demonstrate the usefulness of exploring the interface and overlaps between the political and other fields that are all too often positioned – within scholarship and public discourses – as the antithesis of the political, variously understood in terms of the private, the familial, the domestic and the sphere of kinship.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":" 8","pages":"331 - 364"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138619022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}