Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211038607
Matthew Archer, H. Elliott
In 2007, Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, announced plans to source its entire tea supply sustainably, beginning with the certification of its tea producers in East Africa to Rainforest Alliance standards. As a major buyer of Kenyan tea, Unilever’s decision pushed tea producers across Kenya to subscribe to Rainforest Alliance’s sustainable agriculture standard in order to maintain access to the global tea market; according to a 2018 report, over 85% of Kenya’s tea producers were Rainforest Alliance certified. Drawing on ethnographic material among supply chain actors across different sites along the sustainable tea value chain (from those designing and disseminating standards to tea traders to smallholder tea farmers), this article examines how these actors frequently attributed the power to determine the outcomes of certification to a faceless ‘market’. Deferring to ‘the market’, we observe, served primarily to mask the outsized power of lead firms (in particular Unilever) to determine conditions of tea production and trade. At the same time, ‘the market’ was also in some cases qualified by our interlocutors, allowing them implicitly (and at times explicitly) to reveal power and give it a face. Concealing and revealing power in this way, we suggest, can be seen as a mode of engagement among supply chain actors operating in ‘sustainable’ supply chains, like the Rainforest Alliance-certified Kenyan tea supply chain, in which the power of lead firms tends to be consolidated through market-driven sustainability initiatives. Such a mode of engagement mitigates exclusion from sustainable supply chains while maintaining space for critique.
{"title":"‘It’s up to the market to decide’: Revealing and concealing power in the sustainable tea supply chain","authors":"Matthew Archer, H. Elliott","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211038607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211038607","url":null,"abstract":"In 2007, Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, announced plans to source its entire tea supply sustainably, beginning with the certification of its tea producers in East Africa to Rainforest Alliance standards. As a major buyer of Kenyan tea, Unilever’s decision pushed tea producers across Kenya to subscribe to Rainforest Alliance’s sustainable agriculture standard in order to maintain access to the global tea market; according to a 2018 report, over 85% of Kenya’s tea producers were Rainforest Alliance certified. Drawing on ethnographic material among supply chain actors across different sites along the sustainable tea value chain (from those designing and disseminating standards to tea traders to smallholder tea farmers), this article examines how these actors frequently attributed the power to determine the outcomes of certification to a faceless ‘market’. Deferring to ‘the market’, we observe, served primarily to mask the outsized power of lead firms (in particular Unilever) to determine conditions of tea production and trade. At the same time, ‘the market’ was also in some cases qualified by our interlocutors, allowing them implicitly (and at times explicitly) to reveal power and give it a face. Concealing and revealing power in this way, we suggest, can be seen as a mode of engagement among supply chain actors operating in ‘sustainable’ supply chains, like the Rainforest Alliance-certified Kenyan tea supply chain, in which the power of lead firms tends to be consolidated through market-driven sustainability initiatives. Such a mode of engagement mitigates exclusion from sustainable supply chains while maintaining space for critique.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41642257","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211038041
Farhan Samanani
Anthropological accounts of power remain characterized by an enduring tension. Social scientific theories of power allow anthropologists to situate subjects and mediate between contending perspectives. However, in doing so, such theories inevitably also end up displacing the grounded perspective of interlocutors themselves. This tension sustains a contentious debate, which positions attention to power and attention to grounded perspectives in opposition. In this article I draw on ethnography conducted with the UK’s largest community organising body, Citizens UK, to trace an alternative approach to this tension. For Citizens UK organisers this tension becomes a way of driving change by enrolling diverse actors in collective projects and by displacing hegemonic understandings from within. Good theories, for Citizens UK organisers, are characterised by the practical ability to mediate between contending positions and, in doing so, transform them. To make sense of this mode of theorisation I take up queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘low theory’, geographer Cindi Katz’s notion of ‘minor theory’, and I draw on the linguistic anthropology notion of ‘register’. This allows me to unpack how organisers use theory to act, but also to trouble established anthropological understandings of what theory is and what it ought to do.
{"title":"Power in a minor key: Rethinking anthropological accounts of power alongside London’s community organisers","authors":"Farhan Samanani","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211038041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211038041","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropological accounts of power remain characterized by an enduring tension. Social scientific theories of power allow anthropologists to situate subjects and mediate between contending perspectives. However, in doing so, such theories inevitably also end up displacing the grounded perspective of interlocutors themselves. This tension sustains a contentious debate, which positions attention to power and attention to grounded perspectives in opposition. In this article I draw on ethnography conducted with the UK’s largest community organising body, Citizens UK, to trace an alternative approach to this tension. For Citizens UK organisers this tension becomes a way of driving change by enrolling diverse actors in collective projects and by displacing hegemonic understandings from within. Good theories, for Citizens UK organisers, are characterised by the practical ability to mediate between contending positions and, in doing so, transform them. To make sense of this mode of theorisation I take up queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘low theory’, geographer Cindi Katz’s notion of ‘minor theory’, and I draw on the linguistic anthropology notion of ‘register’. This allows me to unpack how organisers use theory to act, but also to trouble established anthropological understandings of what theory is and what it ought to do.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48169825","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211038045
D. Souleles
It is now routine for anthropologists to study those who exercise power and control wealth and status in any number of societies. Implicit in anthropology’s long-standing commitment to apprehending societies in their totality, and explicit in the call to study up, paying attention to power is just one of the routine things that anthropologists do in the course of their fieldwork. That said, many theoretical and ethical norms in the discipline are calibrated to allow researchers to both know about and protect those with relatively little power who made up much of anthropology’s original topical area of interests. By contrast, studying people who exercise power entails special ethical and theoretical consideration. This article enumerates some of those considerations, and suggests that anthropologists need to have coherent theories of social action in addition to theories of social meaning. The article also suggests that some canonical disciplinary ethical norms are inappropriate for the study of the powerful for empirical and practical reasons.
{"title":"How to think about people who don’t want to be studied: Further reflections on studying up","authors":"D. Souleles","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211038045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211038045","url":null,"abstract":"It is now routine for anthropologists to study those who exercise power and control wealth and status in any number of societies. Implicit in anthropology’s long-standing commitment to apprehending societies in their totality, and explicit in the call to study up, paying attention to power is just one of the routine things that anthropologists do in the course of their fieldwork. That said, many theoretical and ethical norms in the discipline are calibrated to allow researchers to both know about and protect those with relatively little power who made up much of anthropology’s original topical area of interests. By contrast, studying people who exercise power entails special ethical and theoretical consideration. This article enumerates some of those considerations, and suggests that anthropologists need to have coherent theories of social action in addition to theories of social meaning. The article also suggests that some canonical disciplinary ethical norms are inappropriate for the study of the powerful for empirical and practical reasons.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45870567","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211038605
Matthew Archer, D. Souleles
This introduction suggests that anthropology often assumes that the people anthropologists work with are relatively powerless. Due to this default, anthropologists tend to design their research and theorizing to reflect a relatively powerless other. We suggest that the accumulated scholarship on studying up, that is, studying those who structure the lives of many others, offers more accurate ways to theorize power and its exercise as partial and situated, as well as more plural and productive ways to imagine anthropological practice and ethics. We also suggest that this line of thinking gives us some ground to speak to the larger direction of the discipline.
{"title":"Introduction: Ethnographies of power and the powerful","authors":"Matthew Archer, D. Souleles","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211038605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211038605","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction suggests that anthropology often assumes that the people anthropologists work with are relatively powerless. Due to this default, anthropologists tend to design their research and theorizing to reflect a relatively powerless other. We suggest that the accumulated scholarship on studying up, that is, studying those who structure the lives of many others, offers more accurate ways to theorize power and its exercise as partial and situated, as well as more plural and productive ways to imagine anthropological practice and ethics. We also suggest that this line of thinking gives us some ground to speak to the larger direction of the discipline.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42141248","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211036187
Sayd Randle
California’s sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water agencies, this article explores the sense of nostalgia and diminished power experienced by the workers tasked with overseeing these networks. These emic perspectives are frequently articulated in the form of unfavorable comparisons to an imagined past, when the workers believe that their agencies were better resourced and civil engineers’ technical expertise was more respected by the public that they served. Analyzing these stories of declining influence and capacity, the article shows how understandings of individual and institutional power can be conditioned by past paradigms of regional development and technocratic statecraft.
{"title":"Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers","authors":"Sayd Randle","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211036187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211036187","url":null,"abstract":"California’s sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water agencies, this article explores the sense of nostalgia and diminished power experienced by the workers tasked with overseeing these networks. These emic perspectives are frequently articulated in the form of unfavorable comparisons to an imagined past, when the workers believe that their agencies were better resourced and civil engineers’ technical expertise was more respected by the public that they served. Analyzing these stories of declining influence and capacity, the article shows how understandings of individual and institutional power can be conditioned by past paradigms of regional development and technocratic statecraft.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41578129","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211038606
Michael M. Prentice
This article discusses the experiences of high-level managers at a South Korean conglomerate named ‘Sangdo’ who worked within the corporate group’s head office under the owner-executive family. These highly credentialled professionals were attracted to the idea of working directly under or alongside an elite, wealthy corporate dynasty who both owned the conglomerate and were its top executives. Rather than seeing this as a site of inherent conflict between the familial and the professional, I describe how the idea of working alongside and for such elites was enhanced by a ‘dynastic aura’. Through the concept of dynastic aura, I highlight how, in South Korea, families that own business groups are objects of public fascination, particularly as indicators of the future of the economy. In the context of Sangdo, I describe how managers were drawn to the potential of working with a new generation of Sangdo ownership, who sought to centralize and systematize expertise within a holding company. I show how this aura figuratively wore off for managers as they came to understand that ownership was just as entangled in the corporate form – not necessarily above or outside of it – as they were. The article highlights how certain aspects of kinship (such as dynasties and generational succession) still animate capitalist labour, even for non-family members. Additionally, the article calls attention to the way that actors engage with and understand powerful actors in their own right, going beyond accounts of anthropologists’ own direct encounters with the powerful.
{"title":"Dynastic aura: Proximity to the powerful and its promise in corporate South Korea","authors":"Michael M. Prentice","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211038606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211038606","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the experiences of high-level managers at a South Korean conglomerate named ‘Sangdo’ who worked within the corporate group’s head office under the owner-executive family. These highly credentialled professionals were attracted to the idea of working directly under or alongside an elite, wealthy corporate dynasty who both owned the conglomerate and were its top executives. Rather than seeing this as a site of inherent conflict between the familial and the professional, I describe how the idea of working alongside and for such elites was enhanced by a ‘dynastic aura’. Through the concept of dynastic aura, I highlight how, in South Korea, families that own business groups are objects of public fascination, particularly as indicators of the future of the economy. In the context of Sangdo, I describe how managers were drawn to the potential of working with a new generation of Sangdo ownership, who sought to centralize and systematize expertise within a holding company. I show how this aura figuratively wore off for managers as they came to understand that ownership was just as entangled in the corporate form – not necessarily above or outside of it – as they were. The article highlights how certain aspects of kinship (such as dynasties and generational succession) still animate capitalist labour, even for non-family members. Additionally, the article calls attention to the way that actors engage with and understand powerful actors in their own right, going beyond accounts of anthropologists’ own direct encounters with the powerful.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49401464","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211040154
E. Hertz
The author reviews the fine ethnographic analyses in this special issue and argues that they become more coherent if power is understood as a sociotechnological network. This further implies that anthropologists' conclusions about how power is exercised must be modest, both historically situated and politically targeted, if the discipline wishes to contribute meaningfully to holding the powerful to account.
{"title":"Rich man, poor man, middleman, thing: Distributing power","authors":"E. Hertz","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211040154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211040154","url":null,"abstract":"The author reviews the fine ethnographic analyses in this special issue and argues that they become more coherent if power is understood as a sociotechnological network. This further implies that anthropologists' conclusions about how power is exercised must be modest, both historically situated and politically targeted, if the discipline wishes to contribute meaningfully to holding the powerful to account.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45875254","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211038608
S. Field
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidified by industry associations can buffer this precariousness by opening new employment opportunities and allowing them to maintain their connection to elite industry circles through periods of unemployment and uncertainty. For many working in the industry, precariousness defines the US hydrocarbon sector as much as the wealth that it is known to generate. Precariousness, I argue, is not just experienced by specific groups of people but rather is a general characteristic of capitalism that touches all but a select few.
{"title":"Power and precariousness in the expert hierarchies of the US hydrocarbon industry","authors":"S. Field","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211038608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211038608","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidified by industry associations can buffer this precariousness by opening new employment opportunities and allowing them to maintain their connection to elite industry circles through periods of unemployment and uncertainty. For many working in the industry, precariousness defines the US hydrocarbon sector as much as the wealth that it is known to generate. Precariousness, I argue, is not just experienced by specific groups of people but rather is a general characteristic of capitalism that touches all but a select few.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44400886","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 : 2021-06-16DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211021658
James Wintrup
This article offers a critique of Christian humanitarianism in Zambia. But it does so by engaging with the arguments of anthropologists who have begun to question the status of political critique within the discipline. These anthropologists argue that critique often undermines ethnographic understanding because it problematically positions the anthropologist as an actor who is able to ‘uncover’ political realities that remain invisible to others. In this article, I take these concerns seriously and attempt to reconsider the practice of critique by drawing on an ethnographic description of the work of Christian medical missionaries in Zambia. Focusing on how these missionaries encouraged one another to ‘see’ their Zambian patients as ‘Christ-like’ and ‘faithful’ in moments of suffering, I argue that these practices of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’ resemble certain forms of political critique. Rather than an exercise in ‘uncovering’ hidden realities, critique can also be understood as an act of ‘aspect-showing’ – the aim of which is to encourage others to ‘see’ the same things in a different light. The critique of Christian humanitarianism I offer here is therefore itself an act of aspect-showing that partially resembles that which missionaries themselves engaged in.
{"title":"Who alone can ‘see’? Christian humanitarianism, aspect-perception and political critique","authors":"James Wintrup","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211021658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211021658","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a critique of Christian humanitarianism in Zambia. But it does so by engaging with the arguments of anthropologists who have begun to question the status of political critique within the discipline. These anthropologists argue that critique often undermines ethnographic understanding because it problematically positions the anthropologist as an actor who is able to ‘uncover’ political realities that remain invisible to others. In this article, I take these concerns seriously and attempt to reconsider the practice of critique by drawing on an ethnographic description of the work of Christian medical missionaries in Zambia. Focusing on how these missionaries encouraged one another to ‘see’ their Zambian patients as ‘Christ-like’ and ‘faithful’ in moments of suffering, I argue that these practices of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’ resemble certain forms of political critique. Rather than an exercise in ‘uncovering’ hidden realities, critique can also be understood as an act of ‘aspect-showing’ – the aim of which is to encourage others to ‘see’ the same things in a different light. The critique of Christian humanitarianism I offer here is therefore itself an act of aspect-showing that partially resembles that which missionaries themselves engaged in.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X211021658","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48547857","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 : 2021-04-08DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211004713
Angela Torresan
By the late 1990s, when I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork research in Lisbon, the ‘dentists’ case’ had become a familiar trope for the presence of Brazilian immigrants in Portugal. Although it involved a small group of Brazilian and Portuguese professionals, it gained visibility in the media of both countries, escalating into a political and diplomatic quarrel, and culminating in the amendment of the 1966 Cultural Accord. I use Victor Turner’s concept of social drama to address the case as a chapter in the cyclical pattern of connection and disconnection of postcolonial Luso-Brazilian relationships. Drawing from a recent discussion on the concept of cosmopolitanism in migration studies, I employ the idea of postcolonial sociabilities to help explore the seemingly inherent ambiguities in the relationship between Brazilians and Portuguese.
{"title":"Postcolonial social drama: The case of Brazilian dentists in Portugal","authors":"Angela Torresan","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211004713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211004713","url":null,"abstract":"By the late 1990s, when I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork research in Lisbon, the ‘dentists’ case’ had become a familiar trope for the presence of Brazilian immigrants in Portugal. Although it involved a small group of Brazilian and Portuguese professionals, it gained visibility in the media of both countries, escalating into a political and diplomatic quarrel, and culminating in the amendment of the 1966 Cultural Accord. I use Victor Turner’s concept of social drama to address the case as a chapter in the cyclical pattern of connection and disconnection of postcolonial Luso-Brazilian relationships. Drawing from a recent discussion on the concept of cosmopolitanism in migration studies, I employ the idea of postcolonial sociabilities to help explore the seemingly inherent ambiguities in the relationship between Brazilians and Portuguese.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X211004713","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47852732","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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