American Ethnologist最新文献

In 2017 a seemingly small change in Pakistan's questionnaire for the upcoming national census sparked vociferous debates about religious identity and the politics of recognition. The questionnaire added “Scheduled Caste” as a separate religion, whereas previously it had appeared as a Hindu subcategory. Some saw this bureaucratic shift as a cynical attempt to further diminish Pakistan's precarious Hindu minority, reopening old wounds about religious nationalism. Anti-caste progressives, however, saw an opportunity to imagine alternative political horizons for minority citizenship. How do untimely state projects render new political aspirations legible? As shown through ethnographic attention to rumors, enumerative practices, and census campaigns, the tools of bureaucratic documentation can reactivate unsettled histories, helping people imagine new possibilities from the state's margins.

In the last two decades, India's system of agricultural land management has been transitioning from paper to digital records. In effecting this shift, engineers and bureaucrats in the city of Bangalore, India's “Silicon Valley,” have tacitly and invisibly shifted the responsibility for maintaining data from the state to individuals. Moreover, the new digital databases of land records have fragmented offices and dispersed data across new sites and actors. Under these transformed conditions, people can access services only through what I call citizen labor. That is, when digitization is applied to land and property—which are quintessential sites for the making and unmaking of citizenship—people are interpellated into laboring on their own data. This shows that the digitization of government extracts a form of labor, one whose benefits accrue to groups and organizations beyond the laboring individual. As a result, people have an increasingly degraded experience of substantive citizenship.

In the South Carolina Lowcountry, near-annual hurricanes and record-breaking sea levels have led to disastrous flooding, overwhelming the region's historical tidal infrastructures and entrenched racial geographies. In response, Lowcountry governments, institutions, and residents have undertaken efforts at “perimeter protection,” raising dikes and seawalls to safeguard selected urban and rural plantation spaces from tidal flooding. Although perimeter protection is presented as a neutral resilience strategy, its practices and material forms reveal a close relationship between coastal protection and efforts to preserve landscapes of white supremacy. Such logics of perimeter protection contrast with everyday affective encounters with eroding coastlines and with the futures outside of bounded edges imagined by Black Charlestonians. By situating the region's hydrological history within the legacy of slavery and plantation extraction, and by following the effects of current sea level rise, we can see how historical hydrologies—which in this case are also racial hydrologies—are entangled with landscapes of contemporary environmental injustice.

In the Kurdish-majority city of Amed (Diyarbakır), Turkey, the local sex work economy has become increasingly and intimately interwoven with institutions, discourses, and practices of securitization. In this context, queer and trans Kurds adopt, adapt, and use surveillance to negotiate the value of their work and life with one another, the broader community, and the state. These negotiations involve vocabularies, strategies, and affective attachments derived from the long-standing militarized conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Key to this dynamic is the notion of bedel, or the indebtedness and obligation that Kurds feel toward the struggle for Kurdish rights. Through affective debt, queer and trans Kurds police boundaries for their security and livelihoods through surveillance, defining those who can and cannot do sex work. In the process, they shift the meanings and functions of bedel as they endure, embody, and embrace violence and homophobia to gain acceptance of their identities.

Fleming, Mark D., et al., “Managing the ‘Hot Spots’: Health Care, Policing, and the Governance of Poverty in the US,” American Ethnologist 48, no. 4 (2021): 474–88; https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13032.

After the publication of this article, the authors learned that their ethnographic analysis was under development parallel to the geography-based work of Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar. Below, AE offers revisions to the original article, expanding on its argument's influences.