Cultural Anthropology最新文献

In this article I present experiences of Egyptians too young to have taken part in the street protests and movement of the 2011 revolution. Today in their early twenties, they narrate their experiences during the early months of the uprising. None claimed to be revolutionaries then or now, but the revolution seems to animate them in complex and long-lasting ways. The January revolution failed to bring about change at the level of state power. Yet more is at stake than the political endgame. I turn my attention to how people narrate the revolution as a process of ethical reflection and self-formation through everyday relationships and settings that took on new meanings. These accounts challenge notions of what it means to participate in a revolution and where it is located and generate a conversation between the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of revolutions.

Focusing on demonstrations held outside Yangon, Myanmar, in favor of urban development, this article intervenes in the binaries of “truth” versus “falsity” and the “genuine” versus “fake” to advance anthropological theorization on demonstration, speculation, and spectacle. The article traces contrasting claims about “real farmers” and their “genuine desires,” as marshaled by both supporters of a large-scale urban project and those who oppose it. It argues that the notion of “the front” helps illuminate the strategic and pragmatic frames in which spectacles are staged, as well as amid the “economy of appearances” that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argues are generated by transnational investment. Narrating the flattening of social relations and political motivations by project-affected residents, the notion of the front displaces simple binaries by emphasizing a conjuring of self and locality increasingly widespread when residents are, themselves, absorbed into the speculative land markets that large-scale investment creates.

For centuries, Europeans interpreted the biblical curse of Ham to justify the colonization and enslavement of Africans. Yet some Zambians today repeat this story as a demonstration of God's intention for Africans to be servants to whites, thus explaining global inequalities. I approach these apparently anti-Black views not as evidence of false consciousness but as counterhegemonic theorizations of racism, coloniality, and capitalism. Many Zambians use the Ham narrative to challenge the liberal fetishization of equality amid the territorializing border logics of the nation-state. They demonstrate how, in a radically unequal world, these fetishes perpetuate social divisions that contravene God's will. This constitutes a non-egalitarian decolonizing critique that instead demands relations of mutual connection, kinship, and care across continents. Working toward moral repair, I enlist the resources of liberation theology to imagine new ethical and political futures that are both anti-racist and anti-statist.

This article traces how Brazilian mothers raising children with congenital Zika syndrome cultivate their children's bodyminds through habilitative care—care that mobilizes a range of substances, technologies, and techniques to encourage maximum potential development of embodied abilities in young disabled children. Based on fieldwork conducted since 2016 with families impacted by the Zika epidemic in Bahia, Brazil, I argue that Bahian mothers' intensive investments in habilitative care constitute a way of asserting their children's deservingness of ongoing care and of contesting public narratives of their children's lack of futurity, thereby challenging exclusionary ideas about whose bodyminds are worth “potentializing.” In dialogue with critical disability studies, I show how habilitative care is bound to discourses of “overcoming” and “curing” disability that scholars in this field have long criticized. I use my ethnography to unsettle these critiques, asking how to attend to the shaping of developing bodyminds amid the precarities of everyday life in the Global South.

Recent years have witnessed the advancement of several technocratic interventions in the context of the global environmental crisis that aim to calculate and track different objects of environmental concern at various scales. In this article, I focus on how such technocratic interventions are transforming the processes by which tropical timber is technically rendered into calculational abstractions known as “volumes” in Peru's tropical timber supply chains. Drawing on twenty-four months of fieldwork following the activities of loggers, timber industrialists, and state technocrats across Peru's Amazonian region of Loreto, I show how calculational abstractions can never fully circumvent the frictions of power, history, and bodily experience. Rather, technocratic interventions aiming to standardize tropical timber-calculation procedures ultimately transform volumes into fertile ethnographic terrains from which to appreciate how competing forms of political imagination intersect and collide with each other as Amazonia enters the age of climate change and biodiversity loss.

A prefatory note from the editorial collective. When the Society for Cultural Anthropology selected our distributed, international editorial collective to lead Cultural Anthropology, they did so in part to support our commitment to opening channels of this crucial platform of our discipline beyond the scope of privileged, endowed higher educational institutions in the United States. As one step of this process, in this issue we provide space to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma to describe their work since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. As Deanna L. Byrd, the NAGPRA Liaison-Coordinator and Research and Outreach Program Manager of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and Ian Thompson, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, writes, since that time, “Native American communities gained a measure of say in how ancestral burials are treated on federal lands. The law also established a mechanism to help Native American, Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian communities have open dialogue with institutions across the country about the return of their ancestors, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.” Please read the rest of their guest commentary to learn more.

Choctaw people thrived for thousands of years in our homeland, what is now the southeastern United States, spreading from portions of western Alabama, the panhandle of Florida, and Mississippi. Deep cultural ties to the land, knowledge, and lifeways were passed from generation to generation. Through time, Choctaw communities shared this landscape with other Muskogean-language speaking Tribes and developed relationships far beyond the southeast region through trade networks, the negotiation of hunting grounds, and exploration. These relationships remain today in recognition of this long history.

As European expansion encroached on Choctaw homelands, a series of land cessions slowly forced Choctaw people to move to the interior of Mississippi or west into Louisiana. Beginning with the Treaty of Mobile in 1765, in just forty-seven years the Choctaw ceded the vast majority of their land to the United States. Millions of acres were relinquished, ending with the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830 as part of the Indian Removal Act. This treaty set in motion the Removal period for Choctaw people to land west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory, or what is now the state of Oklahoma.

As the first Tribe removed by the federal government, the Choctaw people faced merciless peril through disorganization and mismanagement. Some members stayed in Mississippi and make up one of our sister Tribes, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (MBCI), while others migrated west into Louisiana, joining our second sister Tribe, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians. Beginning in 1831, most Choctaw people, however, left to Indian Territory and endured hardships, dis

Syrian refugees resort to a rich ecosystem of brokers who not only facilitate border crossings but also move remittances, jobs, knowledge, wives, and more. How are refugees' circulations made possible, and by whom? Drawing on fieldwork with Syrian brokers in Turkey and the United Kingdom, I put forward the novel concepts of a Syrian infrastructure of displacement and of refugee brokers as a particular infrastructural component, namely, as human routers. Like routers, brokers manage, direct, and control resource flows. Revisiting Julia Elyachar's concept of communicative channels, I contend that refugee brokers and their clients rely on such pre-existing connections, built on shared experiences of migration, brokerage, and hospitality. Reactivated in exile through brokers' performances of “Syrianness,” these channels facilitate a shared sense of belonging needed for their business transactions. The ways in which refugee brokers slip seamlessly between business, charitable deeds, and exploitation challenge the abstract ideas of disinterested solidarity that underpin mainstream humanitarianism.

The question of how to build trust in health care is one that faces health-care workers and public health actors around the world. This article illustrates how midwives in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, have over time generated a distinctive ethos that characterizes the culture of their practice, and that stands as the object of a substantive generalized trust in midwives. In bringing attention to the multidimensional forms of labor carried out by health-care workers in a resource-poor setting, this article shows how cultures of medicine are generated and embodied by health-care workers in ways that mediate the dynamics of trust in health care. It offers a case study of the successful cultivation of trust in health care, while also reflecting on the problematic implications of the tendency to rely heavily on the labor of health-care workers for the development of trust-based health systems.

In the late-night cafés of Amman, Jordan, Iraqi refugees have adopted a new game, called jaakaaroo, that they say is more “malicious” than familiar favorites like dominoes or backgammon. Meanwhile, they decry the cruelty, greed, and suspicion that have eroded social bonds in their home and host countries. Borrowing concepts from Arabic philosophy, I argue that the formal routines of the game act on the same faculty of estimation (al-wahm) that migrants use to read strangers' intentions while disguising their own. When this sense of suspicion emanates from the ingenious device of the game itself, which I theorize as a form of agent intellect (al-'aql al-faa'il), new and troubling feelings come to be absorbed within the broader aesthetic assemblage of teahouse sociality. In these spaces, the harshness of the present becomes enfolded within nostalgic routines—a creative act of solidarity that exceeds binary tropes of hope and uncertainty.

Amid climate change and produced unevenness in geopolitical development, the question of how sustainability and growth might be brought together is a concern for many scientists of renewable energy in the Global South. This article explores answers offered by scientists in São Paulo, Brazil, who make renewable fuels and materials from sugarcane. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and tracing the “material of growth,” the article analyzes the traffic between sugarcane biological growth, industry growth, and economic growth in the context of the crop's history of colonial expansion and environmental destruction. It argues that some scientific practices lay the molecular foundations for a substitutive “sustainable growth” that replicates petro-extractivist growth. Others allow for further permutations of how sustainability and growth might go together, particularly when scientists use sugarcane renewables as an excuse to develop other research aims. The article contributes to anthropological understandings of science, energy cultures, technical practices, and transition.