American Ethnologist最新文献

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.

British Muslim volunteers in Syria have been variously cast as humanitarians, activists, and—under the suspicious gaze of the war on terror—disguised militants. Yet many volunteers frame their efforts as attempts at iṣlāḥ (reform, repair, rectification). What is the ethicopolitical life of iṣlāḥ, a multivalent concept in the Islamic tradition, in a landscape marked by war and international relief efforts? Considered ethnographically, iṣlāḥ organizes heterogeneous practices, including charitable giving, political defiance, and ethical contestation. It is thus irreducible to either (religious) charity or to its oft-purported opposite, (political) solidarity. Further, it reveals the embedded secularity of such oppositions, which shapes the reasoning of both the British security state and social scientific commentary.