American Ethnologist最新文献

In much anthropological reflection on value creation through objects, value is conceptualized as created in circulation. Yet objects’ social lives are punctuated by periods of waiting as much as they are by movement. Waiting can thus be theorized and examined as a critical pause in the circulation of objects, one that enables their value transformation and creation via social actors, institutions, and valuation processes. Demonstrating this can be accomplished ethnographically by following the consignment, exhibition, and sale of a group of objects—in this case by the artist Maqbool Fida Husain via a Mumbai art gallery. As objects wait, the art world turns around them, setting valuation and other value-making processes in motion. This moment of waiting is precisely when our methodological and analytical gaze should turn to the object's social relations and to the collective activities of the art world.

In South Africa's urban hubs, young women are increasingly participating in the global fertility market by donating their eggs. Egg providers, who supply oocytes for others’ use in fertility treatment, are a key resource in the fertility market, and they are emblematic of new forms of biolabor. Egg markets have tapped into a precariously middle-class population of young Black women in Johannesburg, where the neoliberal state has largely retreated from fostering social mobility. What role does egg donation play in the social world of young South African women? I approach this question by extending Cohen's concept of “operability,” which can illuminate how egg donation becomes a means for young women to enact modernity, or relationality beyond the postapartheid state and the horizons of their social worlds, structured as they are by the entanglements of race, class, and gender.

Political risk forecasting is an industry that provides specialized analysis to a range of clients, including insurance companies, extractive industries, governments, defense ministries, and NGOs. Risk forecasters aim to help their clients mitigate risks by anticipating political developments that could threaten their investments and assets, especially in the “emerging markets” of the Global South. What can ethnographic analysis reveal about this industry's knowledge practices and how it transforms open-source intelligence into commercially relevant risk forecasts? Based on five years of work experience as Senior Africa Analyst at a commercial intelligence firm, I examine how forecasters select and process risk-relevant events, narrate them as qualitative risk briefs, and finally assign them quantitative risk scores. Through a close reading of a risk firm's internal guidelines and its daily practices, I show how analysts construct risk in African countries in line with entrenched sociopolitical imaginaries, reproducing the coloniality of finance.

On November 13, 2020, the Sahrawi movement for national liberation, known as the Polisario Front, resumed its armed struggle against Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara. With this decision, the movement put an end to a 29-year-long peace process throughout which the implementation of international law had been indefinitely deferred. During this cease-fire, the Polisario used humanitarian aid to strengthen its nation-state building in exile. This practice formed part of a larger historical narration that was inserted into the cease-fire's temporal parenthesis, or what I call an imperial meantime. As a result, a disjuncture arose between the movement's political forms and its goal of achieving state sovereignty over Western Sahara. During this imperial meantime, a generation of refugees came of age. Describing the contradictions experienced by young politicized refugees, and highlighting the role that the control over time plays in humanitarian governance, I show how the invisible violence of a humanitarian peace anticipated the return to armed struggle.

How can people talk about the past in a deeply fractured society, wounded by two centuries of colonial and postcolonial violence? In Oran—Algeria's second-largest city—people find creative ways to speak without speaking about unspeakable pasts. They do this by creating poetic parallelism between urban forms—from skeletons of buildings to martyr images—in everyday speech and image-events. In poetics, parallelism deploys similar linguistic forms to suggest equivalence of meaning for certain effects. In everyday life, parallelism is emergent social action that brings new publics to life through its performance. This parallelism enables ordinary people to talk to each other across entrenched sociopolitical divides, especially in contexts of authoritarian censorship. Through poetic parallelism, Oranis revivify the martyrs of independence as agentive witnesses to their decaying city's housing crisis. In doing so, they reconfigure the relationship between the colonial past and postcolonial present.