Cultural Anthropology最新文献

Humanitarianism has recently undergone a so-called innovation turn, utilizing cutting-edge technologies to enhance the reach and efficiency of humanitarian aid. This article focuses on novel advances in the way aid organizations record, measure, and classify household vulnerability among Syrian refugees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon and Jordan, I explore how the datafication of refugees in humanitarian action not only reveals the constitutive limits of quantitative ontologies but also poses transformative implications for the institutional configurations of humanitarianism. In particular, I suggest that the aid sector's growing reliance on data systems entrenches an extractive relationship between humanitarian organizations and refugees that conscripts, entangles, and unsettles data practitioners themselves. I conclude by pointing to vulnerability assessments as one node within a larger apparatus of integrated data systems, one that centralizes power within the humanitarian industry and poses grave risks for refugee rights.

In the area of Kano in western Kenya, Luo rice farmers perform a ritual of “digging” indigenous medicine (chwoyo yath) in the rice fields to “arrest” hailstones. The practice is not only rationalized in the image of regulating the spate of climate–accelerated hailstones but also of forming life, expressed through the state of how that life is secured and propagated. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with rice farmers and an expert on hailstones, as well as on participant observation, this article explores the exegetical agency of rice medicines, which is reflected in the affective act of arresting hailstones. This is conceptualized through a cosmo–juridical agency of life-forming by creating an interconnection between human life and a natural phenomenon. The article underscores the varied domains of natural phenomena (weather conditions, calamities), rice crop, and humans as agencies that co-negotiate toward life-forming through their forces that transform states of life processes.

Eritreans experience what I call the paradox of humanitarian recognition. Beneficiaries of some of the highest refugee-recognition rates in Global North countries, Eritreans nevertheless experience kidnap, ransoming, extortion, and pre-emptive detention in countries of transit like Sudan and Libya. Efforts by the European Union to address these abuses under multilateral anti-trafficking agreements—as well as broader efforts to externalize European borders and asylum—have further contained and criminalized networks of solidarity that extend beyond countries of transit into countries of settlement such as Italy. Based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews with Eritreans in northern Italy, this article analyzes Eritrean migrants' experiences of violence in Libya, a country of transit, and efforts of Eritrean activists to both bring this violence to light and to aid recent refugees. Eritreans' experiences of seeking asylum upend the binaries between legal inclusion and exclusion on which refugee exceptionalism is predicated.

Using the lens of affect, this article argues that understanding the sensibilities and allegiances of postcolonial experts is vital to determining who constitutes the expert's “public” and, thus, who benefits from state interventions and who doesn't. Following environmental sustainability initiatives in the wake of a parasitic infestation of tobacco in Andhra Pradesh, I analyze experts' concern for landowning farmers in contrast to their passive neglect and active resentment of landless laborers. The article draws parallels between the experts' pedagogies and the parasite's deceptively attractive bloom, which hides complex entanglements between parasite and plant beneath the soil surface. I show that a postcolonial emotional regime idealizes landowning farmers and renders invisible the experts' and farmers' common cultural milieu of landownership and collective dependence on caste-based labor. Invoking nostalgia for a lost past, experts' pedagogies are productive, subsidizing monoculture while neo-liberalizing farmers' subjectivities. By their absenting, laborers face climate precarity and the reproduction of resentment against them.

The idea that the character of the Roma is external to the flow of the dynamics of historical processes is an alienating organicism in Mexico and Latin America. Visual regimes have reproduced exclusionary cultural and racial stereotypes of the Roma. This text analyzes how the Gitanos of Mexico City resist the racializing impositions of the state and of dominant society, contradicting hegemonic stereotypes and prejudices through the strategic self-management of identity by presenting themselves to the outside. Empirical data are provided on two key areas of this self-management connected to the visibility/invisibility dialectic: commercial activities and flamenco performance.

Pantawid-gutom literally means “to bridge hunger” and refers to a range of food and non-food products and practices in the Philippines that allow people to survive in between “serious meals.” What does its existence as a liminal category between food/non-food or serious/non-serious meal signify, particularly for millions of Filipino families who regularly experience hunger? Drawing on fieldwork in low-income urban communities on Luzon Island, and from a review of the scholarly and popular literature, we use local conceptions of pantawid-gutom—hitherto overlooked in the scholarship—as a starting point for exploring the lived reality of food insecurity in the country. The efficacy of pantawid-gutom, we argue, is both material and symbolic, providing temporary relief from the feeling of hunger and allowing people to suspend their ideas of what is good to eat while maintaining the hope that their socioeconomic predicament is something bridgeable.

Environmental sustainability initiatives in Bulgaria generate new forms of racialization. Although institutionally framed as progressive in the name of “green” Europeanization, in practice these initiatives rely on undervalued and unrecognized racialized labor. By attending to the materiality of recycling bins in downtown Sofia and their physical openings—designed to keep hands out—I show how people engage with recycling-based sustainability regimes and the environmental systems in which they are embedded. Bridging analyses of progressivist environmentalism and anthropologies of enclosure, this article introduces the idea of containability to understand the relationship between waste and race. Containability marks a realm of humanwaste relations predicated on the aspirational goal of boundedness and the everyday disruptions of it. I examine these relations from the perspectives of waste collectors, recycling executives, Romani neighborhood residents, and international environmental consultants. These insights invite us to rethink the racial and material politics of environmentalism that constitute contemporary urban life.

This article concerns how competing investments in the real motivate political disagreement. The ethnography focuses on face-to-face debate in the wake of spectacular white supremacist violence against Sikhs in the United States. Young activists relate their struggle against racial supremacy to martyrs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, motivating their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. However, for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror first-hand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won respectability, legibility, and safety. This article argues that the in/comparability of evental violence is staked by a global “economy of agonism,” which mobilizes in this case at least two political forms distinctive of the late-twentieth century in each the politics of recognition and ethnonationalism. The article probes the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the “problem of diaspora,” the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. An ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the “extimacy” of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, “collective relation-making,” i.e., in making solidarity, alliance, or coalition amongst seemingly similarly situated others.

This essay shows how the labor of interspecies care at Animal Rescue in Action (ARA), an animal shelter in South Korea, invites two divergent interpretations. On the one hand, this labor embodies gendered exploitation by being vulnerable to the co-optation of the moralizing politics of “interspecies pity.” On the other hand, it becomes a site for intra-and inter-species entanglements, that are irreducible to the logic of exploitation. The activities of ARA become not only sustainable but also bound by the politics of interspecies pity, which translates the labor of care into selfless affection and grace, thus reproducing gendered exploitation. At the same time, however, everyday entanglements in ARA shelters still create affective excesses that are not entirely subsumed by the politics of pity and generate new forms of care and sociality. Overall, I suggest seeing not only the co-constitutiveness of social inequalities and interspecies relations but also the possibility of new, simultaneously open terrains.

This article approaches the idea of eternity ethnographically. Specifically it turns to post-Yugoslav central Serbia and the version of eternity (večnost) evoked by practicing Orthodox Christians in their daily lives. In this context, the eternal does not imply the everlastingness of persons and things in this life, or an inevitable cyclical “return.” Rather, eternity constitutes a dimension outside of time that sits alongside the present, a dimension that can be inhabited by ancestors and departed kin. In evoking eternity, people throw temporal life into relief, find solace in the face of death, and engage in the national community those no longer physically present. Against an essentializing view of the eternal as repetition or stasis, the article speculates about how evoking eternity is socially and politically generative, imbuing life with increased imaginative possibilities.