Cultural Anthropology最新文献

Activism in favor of non-human animals is on the rise throughout Mexico despite ongoing and episodic violence. Activists, also known as animalistas, represent themselves as the “voice” of non-human animals as they seek rights and well-being for animals. In Ciudad Juárez, a border city once considered the most dangerous city in the world (2008–2012), animalistas engage in complex ways with non-human bodies as they seek to “speak” for them. This article analyzes the relationship between injured bodies and voice in Ciudad Juárez's animalista movement, with the act of the rescue as the point of inception. Injured animal bodies prove central for activists because anthropogenic violence transforms dogs' bodies. Non-human injured bodies, and their visual representations, allow animalistas to position themselves as the voice of an animal that survived an abuse while also individualizing and depolitizicing—through the discourse of pathology—violence against dogs.

The fraught tectonic history of Anatolia has given oil in Turkey an absent presence. In this article, I examine how oil's absent presence produces a series of speculations in Turkish public life regarding oil's alleged abundance and its obstructed production. In particular, I trace widespread speculations that claim that the Treaty of Lausanne, which founded Turkey in 1923, will expire on its centennial anniversary in July 2023. I argue that speculations about the expiration of Lausanne harken back to both anxieties around territorial partition and neo-imperial desires of expansion in contemporary Turkey. Such speculations are further utilized by the AKP government to reinterpret Turkey's history and to legitimize expansionist and irredentist politics in the present. In this context the ground—what's under it and who exerts political claims over it—becomes a productive zone in which multiple ethno-nationalist and imperialist notions of territorial belonging, loss, and desire are played out. I conclude that by recalibrating anthropological analyses around the generative powers of the geological, we can better understand how the indeterminacy of the underground entwines with the political legacies of post-imperial collapse and nation-state formation that emerged in the aftermath of World War I.

Bakers and soldiers strive to provide subsistence and security to the residents of Amman and Baghdad. Neither set of actors is involved in straightforward administrative work; they do not sit behind desks, they rarely push paper. They are instead enrolled in bureaucratic assemblages colored with an altogether different hue. This article dissects the embodied dexterities deployed by bakers and soldiers as they carry out their jobs at bakeries and checkpoints dotted across the Jordanian and Iraqi capitals. Drawing on ethnographic work, we develop the concept of bureaucraft to analyze the variegated modes of labor without which citizens would lack for some of the most basic of public goods. Taming people and things to make them congenial to the state effect takes a great deal of shrewd maneuvering. We strive to demonstrate that it requires craft.

Across anthropology, political theory, and history, scholars are recentering the role of universalisms in the radical political struggles of the global South. Whereas some argue that these movements realized and even shaped Enlightenment universalisms, other scholars maintain that they promoted alternative universalisms. In this essay, I explore how political actors craft universalist projects by combining and transforming—in short, conjugating—ideational elements across various traditions, European and otherwise, with the resultant “conjugated universalism” more than the sum of its constituent parts. I focus on peasant revolutionaries belonging to Pakistan's Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), the country's historically largest communist party, who conjugated across various traditions—including Marxism, Baloch tribal ethics, and Siraiki nationalism—to substantialize and legitimize the otherwise abstract universalism of “worker-peasant rule” (mazdur kisan raj). This attention to conjugation centers peasants as worldly actors and destabilizes the universal/particular distinction, one that has conventionally framed the study of universalism.

Until 2016, South Baltimoreans debated a proposed incinerator. Those debates were manifestly about local land use, but rumors spread that something else was really going on. Opponents supposed the plant was secretly owned by a power player in the waste-to-energy sector; supporters swore opponents must be bankrolled by Big Landfill. In short: a waste-industry proxy war was brewing in South Baltimore. I follow these rumors and argue that their persuasive power grew as they darted up, down, and back, forging a politics of connection across scales that made skilled use of fragmented information. On both sides of the issue, talk of outside influence worked to vest some voices with more authority than others. Tracking these claims across scales and through allegedly bad relations—in a place where corporations strive to disavow connections of all kinds and consign local knowledge to the realm of mere suspicion—I show how rumors of a proxy war became tools for mapping ambiguous forces long at play in this environment. More, by wielding doubt to do subversive work, rumors managed to draw local power from them.

At first glance, there seems to be a shared mission between social media's promise of increased dissemination of information and truth commissions' commitment to truth, granting victims a voice, and safeguarding people's right to information—which would suggest that the rise of the former could only empower the latter. This study suggests otherwise. I argue that social media can impede truth commissions' liberal vision that celebrates “speaking” as synonymous with “healing” and hails publicizing victims' testimonies as key to facilitating national reconciliation. Through a study of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission's Facebook-mediated public hearings, I analyze these platforms' algorithmic mode of content circulation and argue that one of its less analyzed features is its “war on silence.” While “voice” has been celebrated and silence decried in human rights discourse, I analyze silence as a “gap in knowledge” and argue for its role in forging empathetic publics and mediating reconciliation.

This article addresses the psycho-spiritual intersection of geopolitics and medicine in the borderlands between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, at the margins of war. Set in a Saudi Arabian Hospital in Jeddah, it examines patients’ demand for and physicians’ attempt to secure ‘afiya (psychic, physical, and spiritual well-being) amid regional upheaval and the limits of Islamicized biomedical care. I reflect on the case of a Yemeni migrant/refugee hospitalized in Saudi Arabia for a persistent jaundice, Omar, who speaks of his looming fear that his self/soul would “break” if his request for biomedical care were to be rejected, and who longs to be in the care of a Yemeni indigenous healer. Strangely, then, his fright at the break of the soul/self exceeds the fear he felt crossing a desert military border on foot. Drawing on theories of the soul/self and the psyche, I explore how soul-fracture becomes a figure of postcolonial and wartime affliction, congealing in its evocation the end of neighborly hospitality, the fraying of community, and the breaking of a shared lineage: the abject Yemeni, exiled from their own region and the broader Muslim community.

Executives at APIX, Senegal's state investment-promotion agency, cast their office as the vanguard of a new kind of state formation, one remade through decades of austerity and resolutely focused on the nation's future. They imagined PowerPoint as especially critical to this mission, as it had the potential to move the state beyond the confines of paper form and parochial bureaucratic routine and into the wider world. In this article, I explore the complex relationship between this state agency and this presentation software package. More specifically, I examine how preoccupations with weight shape state work and technological practice. By attending to everyday aspirations for weightlessness and resultant shifts in material forms, I argue, we might better understand the complex and consequential relationship between state and media in Senegal and elsewhere.

Anthropological engagement with moralities and ethics assumes that people evaluate themselves and others according to their notions of good and bad; yet little is known about how people evaluate the quality of their deliberations. Such evaluations of the seriousness of ethical deliberations prevail in Japan's genetic counseling for pregnant couples considering NIPT, a maternal blood test early in pregnancy that does not endanger the pregnancy but might lead to termination dilemmas. These deliberations are based on the idea that the ambivalence over whether to provide or undergo a potentially selective test is virtuous. This article examines how Japanese policymakers, medical professionals, genetic counselors, and pregnant couples make decisions within social settings that valorize indecisiveness. Ambivalence emerges as the cognitive skill of seeing complexity clearly. How people and their ethnographers evaluate the quality of ethical deliberations is essential to contemplate if we are to understand how people seek to lead a moral life.

This article centers on an NGO-induced fog-capture project in Lima, Peru. While presented by the NGO as an alternative water-supply system for residents lacking state infrastructure, the fog catchers ultimately failed to live up to promises about potable water. Yet as fog turned into a material impossibility, the project's failure yielded a series of new possibilities and expectations, for instance about the potential acquisition of a piece of land. The fog catchers creatively informed other, ongoing processes of improvised urbanization, meaning that the failure became not an end point but a site of emergence whereby the temporality of the fog-capture project folded into parallel rhythms of socio-material transformation. In conclusion, I suggest that the failure be understood not as simply dictated by a larger politico-economic order but as a generative moment through which certain urban configurations became momentarily exposed and could be productively acted on.