Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute最新文献

Liberal public reason seeks to provide a neutral platform for political engagement. Yet, its conditions, notably the rules of engagement and the demand for consensus, effectively exclude many populations with non-liberal subjectivities from public participation. In Israel-Palestine, the majority of both Jewish and Palestinian populations hold non-liberal subjectivities, and neither side can claim the position of an unmarked public speaking for a generalized, common public good. Yet, the price of non-engagement in the context of acute civic crisis and violent, intractable conflict, is exceedingly high. This article considers the attempts of two local initiatives to create alternative methods for the radical inclusion of divergent cosmologies and ontological claims. The Citizens’ Accord Forum uses relatively mainstream communication techne to engage ultra-Orthodox Jews and Muslims, but the interactions ‘spill over’ beyond the constraints of liberal reason. Siach Shalom upends the rules of communicative ethics of the liberal public sphere, relying on the Hasidic concept of the ‘unity of opposites’, a paradoxical logic that contains contrasts, as well as a vertical model of social change.

Brazilian favelas (shantytowns) are often considered as marginalized urban territories that must be better integrated into the nation-state to obtain legitimacy under the Rule of Law. Based on years of fieldwork in one of the largest shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro (Rocinha), this article suggests that the absence of a (normative) liberal apparatus in favelas is not necessarily a political deficiency, but evidence of post-liberalism. Can favela dwellers speak outside (or despite) the current nation-state framework of rationality and liberalism? Can they speak of their own freedoms? Some frameworks insist on representing favela dwellers exclusively as victims of structural violence. In these, the possibility that freedoms and liberties can exist beyond a (normative) liberal framework is often ignored. I consider the genealogy of Brazilian favelas beyond the established tropes of poverty and suffering, indicating that the history of favelas is enmeshed in political experiments with liberation. Ethnographic evidence demonstrates that public reason, justice, and freedom can take unexpected forms in the favela. The ‘dangers of romanticizing poverty’ and the political effects of representing favela dwellers as political agents entitled to freedom are also considered. I conclude that more than satisfying (normative) liberal sensibilities, we could foster a more ‘indexical’ mode of representation as a collaborative strategy for liberation.

Through the synagogue-cum-community space of St-X in Marseille's infamous peripheral northern districts, local urban-invested intercommunal communication and solidarity are generated via self-help initiatives that particularize humanitarianism. Because of their traditionalist Jewish and Muslim religious anchorings and the stranglehold of laïcité over the state and organized religion, post migrant North African life and shared experience in these districts are either co-opted into the liberal realm of interfaith by the centre or pushed out as illiberal and dangerous because they live by other grammars of public reason. To analyse the reason of peripheral traditionalism and its attendant self-help, I draw on the writings of Maimonides originating from the field, i.e. present in the discourse of interlocutors, and in particular ‘aql as a Judeoislamic philosophical and praxical touchstone.

The theoretical association of an inclusive public sphere with liberal democratic governing begs a closer examination. This article pursues forms of disqualification implicit in the idea of political community as a national project, ultimately finding that the exclusion of foreigners does not begin on the far side of the US border, but well within it as an extension of other forms of alienation under the law. My ethnographic starting point is a 2020 US Supreme Court case involving the cross-border killing of a Mexican teenager by a US border agent. The victim's parents sued on civil rights grounds, but the court's majority voted to dismiss the case, ruling that the Constitution was not available in the circumstances of their son's death. The case shows that theorizing the public sphere as an integrative flow of discourse through public institutions is partial at best. The flow of discourse in this case goes the other way, instantiating ideas of difference – racial, cultural, political, and territorial – that by design preclude inclusion. The precedents cited in the text of the court's opinion show the court selectively racializing extraterritoriality and – even within US territory – restricting full constitutional rights to what it calls ‘members’ of a ‘national political community’. Though specific to the United States, the case informs broader questions arising from the idea of the liberal public sphere as both the means and ends of inclusion. Quoted and paraphrased text include offensive material.

In the widely demonized municipality of Ettadhamun, the heavy hand of Zin al Abidine Ben Ali's police state was partly lifted in 2011 and replaced by the softer touch of aid promoting international democracy. This aid architecture supported the burgeoning civil society to train Ettadhamun residents in the skill of ‘interpersonal communication’ (tawasul bayna al-afrad) for the purpose of managing social conflict. Yet the members of the only non-religious association in the neighbourhood of Nogra reject the liberal recommendations of their trainers and carve out a tense neighbourhood co-presence without dialogue with their Salafist neighbours. Counter-intuitively to deliberative theories of democracy, I suggest that in this non-dialogical co-presence inheres a public sphere with social and political possibilities. Neighbourhood residents trade liberal argumentation for dwelling together beyond words, which does not attempt to reform one another and engenders solidarity. The suspension of dialogue reflects a minoritarian articulation of the aftermath of the 2011 revolution as ‘the reconstitutive phase of the political’. This articulation refuses the curated narrative of the postcolonial Tunisian nation and pries open the teleology of liberal democratic transition.

Ethics and ontology have become prominent concepts in recent anthropology, informing a variety of research endeavours. Despite their different approaches, agendas, and concerns, they share a central focus on alterity and the relationship between self and other: Who is the other? How should I relate to the other? In relating these concerns, ontological questions would appear to have logical primacy over ethical ones: after all, one must understand the other as a particular kind of being before entering into a relationship with them. But there are many situations in which we cannot be certain how to understand the other we are facing. Especially in the context of colonial or postcolonial encounters, when social and cosmological orders have become unstable, our expectations of who the other is may clash with our experience of them. This paper discusses the narrative of an Aché elder in which he reflects upon such a situation during the violent period when the nomadic Aché came into contact with Paraguayan settlers. The narrative tells the story of the death of a white logger at the narrator's hands. While morally justifying the killing with reference to deforestation and cruelties perpetrated by settlers, he also questions it, reframing it as an ethical dilemma. The dilemma stems from his loss of ontological certainty over what kind of being his victim was after looking into his face. This paper brings this dilemma into conversation with Levinas's argument that the ethical being-for-the-other has primacy over the ontological being-in-the-world, which comes to the fore in the experience of the face of the other.