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":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":"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: 10.1177/0308275X231216256
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":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":"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":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":"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: 10.1177/0308275X231216250
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.
{"title":"‘Occupying’ the womb: Disrupted kinship futures and sovereign logics in sexual violence during wars","authors":"N. Mookherjee","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231216250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231216250","url":null,"abstract":"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.","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":"138610207","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":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":"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":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":"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}
Pub Date : 2023-10-26DOI: 10.1177/0308275x231207732
Patrícia Alves de Matos
Austerity policies in Portugal unleashed a violent crisis of well-being and social reproduction which intensified the ‘triple burden’ placed upon women, making them the primary ‘shock absorbers’ of the crisis. This article addresses the critical role of working-class women’s various forms of paid and unpaid care work in responding to the material and immaterial needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households. It is shown that women’s care-based responses and distributive struggles sought to minimise the risks that the agency of those they cared for could be compromised in the present and the future. Expanding feminist approaches and broader contributions decentring agency from the ends of individual choice and freedom, the article argues that agency is a distributed capacity and potentiality produced by, and productive of, embedded interdependent caring practices, relationships and investments across space and time to define, fulfil and negotiate the inescapable existence of fundamental needs.
{"title":"Distributed agency: Care, human needs, and distributive struggles in Portugal","authors":"Patrícia Alves de Matos","doi":"10.1177/0308275x231207732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231207732","url":null,"abstract":"Austerity policies in Portugal unleashed a violent crisis of well-being and social reproduction which intensified the ‘triple burden’ placed upon women, making them the primary ‘shock absorbers’ of the crisis. This article addresses the critical role of working-class women’s various forms of paid and unpaid care work in responding to the material and immaterial needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households. It is shown that women’s care-based responses and distributive struggles sought to minimise the risks that the agency of those they cared for could be compromised in the present and the future. Expanding feminist approaches and broader contributions decentring agency from the ends of individual choice and freedom, the article argues that agency is a distributed capacity and potentiality produced by, and productive of, embedded interdependent caring practices, relationships and investments across space and time to define, fulfil and negotiate the inescapable existence of fundamental needs.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136377147","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 : 2023-10-04DOI: 10.1177/0308275x231205961
Daniel Sosna, Barbora Stehlíková, Pavel Mašek
Quantification has become a privileged form of knowing and vehicle of governance. Anthropological critique has demonstrated that a view of numbers as independent carriers of meaning is untenable; instead, numbers should be conceptualized as being part of relations and temporalities, opening space for shifts in understanding. Proposing the perspective of ‘ecologies of quantification’, we acknowledge the wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming. We put waste management at the centre of our interest to explore the ways quantification attempts to conquer arguably one of the unruliest domains of contemporary social life. Based on our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices, and junked cars in Czechia, we point to problems emerging when numbers become stripped of their relations. Our research sheds light on experience in the process of quantification and demonstrates that there are multiple ways to know quantity.
{"title":"Ecologies of quantification in waste management: Landfilling, e-waste recycling, and car breaking","authors":"Daniel Sosna, Barbora Stehlíková, Pavel Mašek","doi":"10.1177/0308275x231205961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231205961","url":null,"abstract":"Quantification has become a privileged form of knowing and vehicle of governance. Anthropological critique has demonstrated that a view of numbers as independent carriers of meaning is untenable; instead, numbers should be conceptualized as being part of relations and temporalities, opening space for shifts in understanding. Proposing the perspective of ‘ecologies of quantification’, we acknowledge the wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming. We put waste management at the centre of our interest to explore the ways quantification attempts to conquer arguably one of the unruliest domains of contemporary social life. Based on our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices, and junked cars in Czechia, we point to problems emerging when numbers become stripped of their relations. Our research sheds light on experience in the process of quantification and demonstrates that there are multiple ways to know quantity.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135592190","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 : 2023-09-11DOI: 10.1177/0308275x231202083
Leo Hopkinson
Anthropologists have often conceptualized competition by contrasting it with cooperation, even when collective ends are sought and achieved by competing. This approach tells us little about the qualities of the relationships and subjectivities that competition sustains. I explore the qualities of competitive relationships and subjectivities among Accra boxers, many of whom feel a constant, simmering sense of competition with one another. Boxers describe these competitive relationships using kinship idioms, and distinguish keenly between these kinship metaphors and non-metaphoric kin relations. A sustained comparison between competitive relations and kin relations in Accra reveals how competition intertwines subjectivities and futures, rather than producing hyper-individualistic and self-interested ‘neoliberal subjects’. I thus argue that boxers use kinship as a metaphoric resource to help them navigate the fraught intimacies that competition fosters. Their rendering of competition as kinship suggests how anthropologists might theorize the contradictory nature of competitive relationships with more nuance.
{"title":"Boxing family: Theorising competition with boxers in Accra, Ghana","authors":"Leo Hopkinson","doi":"10.1177/0308275x231202083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231202083","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropologists have often conceptualized competition by contrasting it with cooperation, even when collective ends are sought and achieved by competing. This approach tells us little about the qualities of the relationships and subjectivities that competition sustains. I explore the qualities of competitive relationships and subjectivities among Accra boxers, many of whom feel a constant, simmering sense of competition with one another. Boxers describe these competitive relationships using kinship idioms, and distinguish keenly between these kinship metaphors and non-metaphoric kin relations. A sustained comparison between competitive relations and kin relations in Accra reveals how competition intertwines subjectivities and futures, rather than producing hyper-individualistic and self-interested ‘neoliberal subjects’. I thus argue that boxers use kinship as a metaphoric resource to help them navigate the fraught intimacies that competition fosters. Their rendering of competition as kinship suggests how anthropologists might theorize the contradictory nature of competitive relationships with more nuance.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135982223","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 : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231194245
Yi Wu, Xiaofeng Cheng
Using the rotating credit association created by a Lisu village, called the “village bank,” this study explores the social forces that have shaped, limited, or activated the ethnic community’s local environmental agency in southwest China. We argue that while the inherited elements of the Lisu indigenous beliefs could help local communities meet the ecological needs of our time, offering different ethics and perspectives to challenge the pursuit of material abundance based on extractive economic modes, the Lisu’s social and economic behavior is not solely determined by their religious beliefs. In the post-Mao economic reform era, village banks have become a fresh way through which Lisu villages activated their environmental agency, trying to achieve a balance between environmental protection and poverty reduction. Lisu’s “ambivalent” stance on environmental protection reflects the interactions between state-orchestrated development, NGOs, and the tension between maintaining tradition and reducing poverty.
{"title":"The village bank of a Lisu community: Indigenous belief, economic practices, and environmental conservation in Southwest China","authors":"Yi Wu, Xiaofeng Cheng","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231194245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231194245","url":null,"abstract":"Using the rotating credit association created by a Lisu village, called the “village bank,” this study explores the social forces that have shaped, limited, or activated the ethnic community’s local environmental agency in southwest China. We argue that while the inherited elements of the Lisu indigenous beliefs could help local communities meet the ecological needs of our time, offering different ethics and perspectives to challenge the pursuit of material abundance based on extractive economic modes, the Lisu’s social and economic behavior is not solely determined by their religious beliefs. In the post-Mao economic reform era, village banks have become a fresh way through which Lisu villages activated their environmental agency, trying to achieve a balance between environmental protection and poverty reduction. Lisu’s “ambivalent” stance on environmental protection reflects the interactions between state-orchestrated development, NGOs, and the tension between maintaining tradition and reducing poverty.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46433719","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}
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