Cultural Anthropology最新文献

This essay makes an argument about the relationship between political life and the familiarity and repetitiveness of exile in postcolonial Rwanda and Burundi. I argue, first, that the memory, recurrence, and anticipation of displacement constitute central aspects of postcolonial nationhood and life in both countries. With each cycle of forced expulsion, the boundaries of the nation are unmade and remade. Second, this rhythm of repeated collective exile makes for specific forms of political subjectivity and activism that though tethered to the geography of the nation also always exceed it, making exile a constitutive aspect of postcolonial nationhood.

The Mao-era development of hybrid rice—known as China's Green Revolution—is one of China's best-known scientific achievements. For young rice scientists in contemporary China, however, this heroic past contrasts sharply with their struggles to keep pace in increasingly competitive scientific professions. Engaging with the anthropology of time, we argue against treating their experience as an inevitable response to the global acceleration of academic work. Instead, young rice scientists struggle to synchronize the divergent tempos of the contemporary scientific career with experiments set to the rhythms of the rice plant. Drawing on a current Chinese buzzword, we argue that young scientists are experiencing neijuan (involution), a pattern of growing intensity and complexity of work that yields diminishing returns. Philosophers have issued manifestos for “slow science,” but anthropological inquiry illuminates the locally specific patterns of temporal mediation that are pulling scientists out of sync.

In Istanbul, shopkeepers frequently dispose of their paper and plastic waste by giving it to select migrant waste pickers. This article examines these waste donations as a novel form of hospitable giving in Turkey, a country that has hosted millions of irregular migrants and asylum seekers since 2011. By analyzing the mutual obligations these donations create and the diverse ways that shopkeepers justify helping migrants, the article argues that waste donations occur primarily when they enable shopkeepers to reproduce their moral authority over migrant waste pickers. In doing so, it explores two related issues: the consequences of the state's retreat from providing universal welfare opportunities to irregular migrants; and the embedding of migrant hospitality within service relations in a precarious urban economy. The article concludes by rethinking informal waste labor and host-guest dynamics through the lens of dependent relations.

U.S. police reform advocates often press police departments to replace “fear-based” survival trainings with scenario or “reality-based” trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as effecting an arrest. Temporality is a key facet of these exercises: by decelerating and replaying stressful situations, scenarios promise to allay the impulsive fear presumed to drive racialized police violence. Drawing on ethnography with officers in Maryland, I argue that scenarios instead translate fear through what I call “officer safety time.” This hegemonic temporal regime encourages police to “think threat first,” read danger in the subjunctive mood, and inhabit a hetero-masculine habitus of state power. While presumptively color-blind, officer safety time seals anti-Black violence into a single decision point evacuated of alternate futurities. I argue that scenarios deploy temporality to hail police as simultaneously threatened and threatening, and more broadly, cultivate the temporal orders of state violence in police—while immunizing them against substantive reform.

This article shows how acts of refusal mediated different experiences of uncertainty among the artisanal fishermen who lived and worked in Ennore's (Chennai, India) polluted landscape. In uncovering how some of these uncertainties were experienced as a result of histories of urban segregation that rendered peripheral locations like Ennore seemingly appropriate to house polluting industries, and thereafter sustained through the bodily demands of thozhil (the profession of artisanal fishing) in a contaminated river, the article posits acts of partial, processual, and contradictory forms of refusal as ways in which different fishermen reconciled some of their experiences of living with Ennore's petrochemical pollution. In critically engaging emic terms like area and thozhil that the fishermen used to flag their stances of refusal, and also showing how collective assemblies became instrumental in challenging Ennore's polluting industries, the article argues that refusal not only helped the fishermen forge lives and make claims in places that were becoming more industrial and toxic but also mediated their relationship to a place they knew as, and desired to continue calling, their home.

This article explores the role of readily available credit in shaping new masculine ideals among underground mineworkers in Soma, a lignite-coal basin in Turkey's North Aegean region. The availability of easy credit forges a new approach to self and intimate others in this coal basin, allowing miners to navigate intimate relationships through consumer loans and financial obligations. By concomitantly examining the intergenerational aspiration of “taking control of life” that long accompanied insecure coal mining in the Soma basin and the evolving of national credit access, I show the emergence of a new masculine imperative via indebtedness, “moral immunity,” serving as a means to measure one's masculinity and morality. Through the coupling of easy access to credit and increased investments in nuclear-family intimacy in today's Turkey, moral immunity endows indebtedness with a moral transactional potential in intimate relations and enables extracting financial value from empathic, moral dispositions among miners.

In Mexico City, earthquakes are so frightening that they make residents sick. Sometimes referred to as being tocado (touched), the illness might be considered part of the “culture-bound syndrome” known as susto throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, where acute experiences of shock—such as being trapped in a shaking building—induce chronic physiological outcomes. Instead of explaining the illness as an idiom of social distress or a cultural interpretation of a biomedical affliction, I suggest we might better understand tocado's symptomology by following the fright itself. People who are tocado fearfully attune their senses to the signs of seismic risk—puckering potholes, sidewalk fissures, building subsidence, cracks in apartment walls—and develop an embodied apprehension of the ongoing geophysicality of their worlds. We might thus understand being tocado as being sick with the everyday presence of deep time.

Within anthropology, care operates as contested theoretical territory, with much debate residing in the space between what we think care ought to look like in health service delivery settings juxtaposed with what care looks like in the ethnographic encounter. In Bangladesh, public health service providers are often represented as not caring in health encounters. Based on ethnographic data generated in maternal health settings in Kushtia District, this article nuances conceptualizations of care in government health settings, centering the concepts of sheba (service), which is rooted in clinical care, and jotno (care), intimate, hands-on care that constitutes kinship. Through the enactment of embodied performances, government health service providers and staff enact boundary work around sheba and jotno, which serves to constitute the state during and beyond health service encounters, crystallizing within a broader constellation of imaginaries of the state and one's relationship to it.

As social and environmental crises multiply and compound each other in the urban Global South, I ethnographically illustrate the micro-scale, obscured, but constitutive modes of governance that shape megacities. Through an account of property record-keeping, registration, and regularization in the emerging global real estate hub of Hyderabad, India, I show how macro-scale urban transformations form an aggregate outcome of micro-political bureaucratic processes that enlist the participation of bureaucrats, city-dwellers, and intermediary brokers. I argue that in lieu of regulatory processes that direct actions toward future goals, governance takes the form of reactive regulation, wherein the objectives are to render the city as property and re-assert the state's authority. On the one hand, these constitute deeply political processes, ones that incrementally transform urban environments. On the other hand, these processes exclusively frame urban space, time, social relations, and ecology in reductive terms of property, forestalling transformations toward sustainability or social justice.

What does militarism in the timespace of war-preparedness look like in the majority world? Drawing on ongoing research on soldiering in postcolonial India, focused on the Border Security Force, I examine everyday life and labor within security institutions: soldiers' routines in barracks, prohibited friendships, hardships, and longings. Bringing feminist thought and the political anthropology of security regimes into conversation with a materialist approach to space, this article argues that borderland barracks prove key to the expansionist logic and durability of what I term “constructive security.” The ethnographic study of barracks reveals this logic, i.e., the spatial and social inscriptions by which disparate locales across the country come to be reconstituted as places of work and dwelling for soldiers, privileging and provisioning their social reproduction through violence and care, and stitching together a national security geography. Such a view shows that postcolonial militarism cannot be understood as a coercive project alone; it is simultaneously a constructive one, particularly a reproductive one.