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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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 : 2024-07-26DOI: 10.1177/0308275x241268401
Rafaël Verbuyst
Sensory ethnography offers hitherto under-explored perspectives on why and how people claim and experience indigeneity by elucidating how the past and the present become entangled through sensory experiences. I illustrate this by drawing on fieldwork that I carried out among newly identifying indigenous people in South Africa between 2014 and 2022. As they grapple with centuries of assimilation and destruction, including the myth of their extinction, ‘Khoisan revivalists’ deliberately target all the senses to make their newfound indigeneity as immersive and corporeal as possible. Among others, this entails cultivating indigenous plants, crafting apparel and accessories with Khoisan motifs, and celebrating indigenous sounds. Drawing on insights from indigenous- and settler-colonial studies, as well as Nadia Seremetakis and Charles Hirschkind, I argue that sensory experiences uniquely allow for ostensibly relatable, unmediated, and authentic ‘sensory gateways’ towards indigeneity.
{"title":"Sensing indigeneity: A sensory ethnography of the presence of the past among newly identifying indigenous people in South Africa","authors":"Rafaël Verbuyst","doi":"10.1177/0308275x241268401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x241268401","url":null,"abstract":"Sensory ethnography offers hitherto under-explored perspectives on why and how people claim and experience indigeneity by elucidating how the past and the present become entangled through sensory experiences. I illustrate this by drawing on fieldwork that I carried out among newly identifying indigenous people in South Africa between 2014 and 2022. As they grapple with centuries of assimilation and destruction, including the myth of their extinction, ‘Khoisan revivalists’ deliberately target all the senses to make their newfound indigeneity as immersive and corporeal as possible. Among others, this entails cultivating indigenous plants, crafting apparel and accessories with Khoisan motifs, and celebrating indigenous sounds. Drawing on insights from indigenous- and settler-colonial studies, as well as Nadia Seremetakis and Charles Hirschkind, I argue that sensory experiences uniquely allow for ostensibly relatable, unmediated, and authentic ‘sensory gateways’ towards indigeneity.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141802234","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 : 2024-05-16DOI: 10.1177/0308275x241254021
Lam Minh Chau
By bestowing honours, states produce subjects. But what kind of subjects are created if those honoured do not seek state honours, because they find the honours not worth the responsibilities they have to shoulder, or because they do not internalise the state's values that the honours embody? Building on ethnographic materials from Vietnam, this article explores how some who receive honours are “grateful coerced subjects” on whom state honours are imposed through social pressure, persistent persuasion, or as a matter of fait accompli they cannot refuse. The bestowal of honours exposes them to pressure from the wider society to comply with state's goals and values to prove themselves worthy of the honours, in ways they find physically burdensome and morally problematic. Yet the coerced subjects do not hold a grudge against the state, and even feel grateful to the state for conferring honours on them.
{"title":"Rule by glorification: The imposition of state honours and ‘grateful coerced subjects’ in contemporary Vietnam","authors":"Lam Minh Chau","doi":"10.1177/0308275x241254021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x241254021","url":null,"abstract":"By bestowing honours, states produce subjects. But what kind of subjects are created if those honoured do not seek state honours, because they find the honours not worth the responsibilities they have to shoulder, or because they do not internalise the state's values that the honours embody? Building on ethnographic materials from Vietnam, this article explores how some who receive honours are “grateful coerced subjects” on whom state honours are imposed through social pressure, persistent persuasion, or as a matter of fait accompli they cannot refuse. The bestowal of honours exposes them to pressure from the wider society to comply with state's goals and values to prove themselves worthy of the honours, in ways they find physically burdensome and morally problematic. Yet the coerced subjects do not hold a grudge against the state, and even feel grateful to the state for conferring honours on them.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140969189","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 : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.1177/0308275x241257750
Ernesto J. Benitez
As young Indigenous Kichwa men begin working as local tour guides in the small city of Tena in the Ecuadorian Amazon, they go through complex processes of transition and adjustment navigating entanglements of tourists’ expectations, familial obligations, and desires for socioeconomic mobility. For many, there is the additional challenge of emphasizing their Indigenous identities, given the pervasive anti-Indigenous racism to which they are subjected within Ecuadorian society. I argue that work in tourism has provided young Kichwa men with opportunities for self-transformation, at once attractive and fraught with contradictions. On one hand, they have come to perceive their Indigeneity as an asset rather than a liability and are increasingly able to contest long-standing racism at the local level. On the other hand, their urban lifestyles, pursuit of intimate relationships with foreign tourists and sometimes dismissive attitudes towards rural Kichwa people have distanced them socially from the broader Kichwa population. By exploring these complex affective processes, their impacts on local dynamics, and the multiple and often conflicting understandings of Indigeneity that are constantly being produced and negotiated in these spaces, I seek to broaden the scope of scholarly debates on the impact of cultural tourism in Indigenous communities. I also engage with recent scholarship on Indigenous masculinities to discuss the possibilities and limitations of masculinity as a tool of decolonization for Indigenous peoples.
{"title":"“All great warriors have long hair”: Tourism and shifting Indigenous masculinities in Napo, Ecuador","authors":"Ernesto J. Benitez","doi":"10.1177/0308275x241257750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x241257750","url":null,"abstract":"As young Indigenous Kichwa men begin working as local tour guides in the small city of Tena in the Ecuadorian Amazon, they go through complex processes of transition and adjustment navigating entanglements of tourists’ expectations, familial obligations, and desires for socioeconomic mobility. For many, there is the additional challenge of emphasizing their Indigenous identities, given the pervasive anti-Indigenous racism to which they are subjected within Ecuadorian society. I argue that work in tourism has provided young Kichwa men with opportunities for self-transformation, at once attractive and fraught with contradictions. On one hand, they have come to perceive their Indigeneity as an asset rather than a liability and are increasingly able to contest long-standing racism at the local level. On the other hand, their urban lifestyles, pursuit of intimate relationships with foreign tourists and sometimes dismissive attitudes towards rural Kichwa people have distanced them socially from the broader Kichwa population. By exploring these complex affective processes, their impacts on local dynamics, and the multiple and often conflicting understandings of Indigeneity that are constantly being produced and negotiated in these spaces, I seek to broaden the scope of scholarly debates on the impact of cultural tourism in Indigenous communities. I also engage with recent scholarship on Indigenous masculinities to discuss the possibilities and limitations of masculinity as a tool of decolonization for Indigenous peoples.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140975640","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 : 2024-05-08DOI: 10.1177/0308275x241254027
Macario Garcia
In this article, I explore how mobility, animacy, and ontology intertwine to shape everyday violence in the carceral American Southwest. I draw on ethnographic research that I conducted between 2016 and 2017 at the Desert Echo Facility, a state prison that holds individuals from minimum to high-security levels. Some incarcerated people feel supposedly inanimate objects, such as walls, rocks, paper, and floors moving, while others feel vibrations moving across the compound. For some of the incarcerated, physical movement signifies aliveness – meaning that incarceration forces them to question if they are less alive than the “inanimate” materials that confine them. Others understand these movements as the direct violence of the state that purposefully disrupts how they construct relations. In this context, incarcerated peoples’ alive status is no longer a given and their relations no longer assumed to be inherent and ongoing, but rather, processes to be negotiated within criminal punishment systems. I focus on what these movements mean to incarcerated people, and how they situate these movements within differing ontologies to make visible the often-hidden violence of incarceration in the United States.
{"title":"‘You feel it in your bones’: Mobility, animacy, and the everyday violence of incarceration in the American southwest","authors":"Macario Garcia","doi":"10.1177/0308275x241254027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x241254027","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I explore how mobility, animacy, and ontology intertwine to shape everyday violence in the carceral American Southwest. I draw on ethnographic research that I conducted between 2016 and 2017 at the Desert Echo Facility, a state prison that holds individuals from minimum to high-security levels. Some incarcerated people feel supposedly inanimate objects, such as walls, rocks, paper, and floors moving, while others feel vibrations moving across the compound. For some of the incarcerated, physical movement signifies aliveness – meaning that incarceration forces them to question if they are less alive than the “inanimate” materials that confine them. Others understand these movements as the direct violence of the state that purposefully disrupts how they construct relations. In this context, incarcerated peoples’ alive status is no longer a given and their relations no longer assumed to be inherent and ongoing, but rather, processes to be negotiated within criminal punishment systems. I focus on what these movements mean to incarcerated people, and how they situate these movements within differing ontologies to make visible the often-hidden violence of incarceration in the United States.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140999813","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 : 2024-04-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275x241249646
Elisa Lanari
This article captures a shift occurring at the peripheries of the Italian asylum system where, as reception infrastructures are progressively gutted, dismantled, and transformed into security apparatuses, local organizations refocus their efforts on helping refugees and asylum seekers carve out spaces of agency and autonomy in the time-space after institutional reception. I introduce the concept of “makeshift activism” to describe this relentless, creative patching together of solutions to support migrant emplacement beyond and – sometimes – against the confines of official programs. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in one of the world’s first Covid-19 hotspots – Italy’s Veneto region, I take the pandemic as a magnifying glass to expose the precarious nature of this activism but also its potential for prefiguring alternatives to the state’s (non-existent) paths towards long-term inclusion. More broadly, I shift the anthropological gaze towards charting the afterlives and aftermaths of refugee “welcome” in less spectacular locales, such as mid-size cities and small municipalities in peripheral mountain regions.
{"title":"Makeshift activism and the afterlives of refugee welcome in Covid-19 Italy","authors":"Elisa Lanari","doi":"10.1177/0308275x241249646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x241249646","url":null,"abstract":"This article captures a shift occurring at the peripheries of the Italian asylum system where, as reception infrastructures are progressively gutted, dismantled, and transformed into security apparatuses, local organizations refocus their efforts on helping refugees and asylum seekers carve out spaces of agency and autonomy in the time-space after institutional reception. I introduce the concept of “makeshift activism” to describe this relentless, creative patching together of solutions to support migrant emplacement beyond and – sometimes – against the confines of official programs. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in one of the world’s first Covid-19 hotspots – Italy’s Veneto region, I take the pandemic as a magnifying glass to expose the precarious nature of this activism but also its potential for prefiguring alternatives to the state’s (non-existent) paths towards long-term inclusion. More broadly, I shift the anthropological gaze towards charting the afterlives and aftermaths of refugee “welcome” in less spectacular locales, such as mid-size cities and small municipalities in peripheral mountain regions.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140668320","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 : 2024-01-19DOI: 10.1177/0308275x241228727
Sébastien Roux, Paul Macalli
How do individuals, after having discovered they were lied to about the conditions of their births and their childhoods, seek out their own identities and re/establish the “truths” about themselves? Based on two ethnographic studies conducted in sites where lives and kinships were disrupted by political violence, this article aims to examine the urge for narrative coherence in contexts defined by public deceit and betrayal. In Argentina, [Author 1] lived with the nietos who, decades after the dictatorship, discovered they had been stolen and educated by those responsible for their parents’ death. In Ethiopia, [Author 2] met with adopted children who were searching for their life “of before”. In these two contexts, the interviewees explained how their lives had been shattered when they discovered the lies they had been told. Their testimony equally revealed how they felt an existential and urgent need to re-establish the “truth”. Drawing on their experiences and their feelings, this article examines the link between two truths, truth regarding the past and truth about oneself, and explores the need to be certain of facts in the making of identities.
{"title":"True selves, suspicious lives: Public deceits, hopes of restoration, and existential troubles in misdocumented pasts","authors":"Sébastien Roux, Paul Macalli","doi":"10.1177/0308275x241228727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x241228727","url":null,"abstract":"How do individuals, after having discovered they were lied to about the conditions of their births and their childhoods, seek out their own identities and re/establish the “truths” about themselves? Based on two ethnographic studies conducted in sites where lives and kinships were disrupted by political violence, this article aims to examine the urge for narrative coherence in contexts defined by public deceit and betrayal. In Argentina, [Author 1] lived with the nietos who, decades after the dictatorship, discovered they had been stolen and educated by those responsible for their parents’ death. In Ethiopia, [Author 2] met with adopted children who were searching for their life “of before”. In these two contexts, the interviewees explained how their lives had been shattered when they discovered the lies they had been told. Their testimony equally revealed how they felt an existential and urgent need to re-establish the “truth”. Drawing on their experiences and their feelings, this article examines the link between two truths, truth regarding the past and truth about oneself, and explores the need to be certain of facts in the making of identities.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139613619","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: 10.1177/0308275X231216260
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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号