A growing ethnographic literature attends to maintenance and repair practices in the face of decay and ruination. This article explores the forms of decay that become an integral part of infrastructure maintenance. In Turkey’s Çoruh Basin, hydroelectric dam constructions lead to a concern about the landscape’s erosive character, which requires foresters’ practices of watershed rehabilitation in the uplands to protect the dams against sediment accumulation in the reservoirs. The work of repairing ecologies for the long-term maintenance of dams, I contend, is undergirded by the gradual decay of another maintenance labor—that is, the villagers’ arduous practices of tending landscape through farming and husbandry. Through an ethnographic study of how foresters and villagers experience the landscape under rehabilitation, this article offers a novel anthropological analytical perspective that foregrounds the continuum between maintaining and decaying, tracing the role of labored landscapes in this continuum. I argue that maintenance practices, while intending to counter decay, entail other forms of decay. ÖZET Giderek büyüyen bir etnografik literatür, çöküş, yıkım ve tahribat süreçlerinin karşısında bakım ve onarım pratiklerine odaklanmaktadır. Bu makale, altyapı bakımının bütünleyici bir parçası haline gelen çöküş biçimlerine odaklanmaktadır. Türkiye’nin Çoruh Havzası’ndaki hidroelektrik baraj yapımları sürecinde arazinin erozyona yatkın yapısı bir mesele olarak ortaya çıkmıştır. Bu mesele, barajları rezervuarlardaki sediment birikimine karşı korumak için ormancıların yüksek kesimlerde havza rehabilitasyonu çalışmaları yapmalarını gerektirmiştir. Barajların uzun vadeli bakımı için yapılan ekoloji onarım çalışmalarının, başka bir bakım emeğinin—köylülerin tarım ve hayvancılık yoluyla araziye bakma pratiklerinin—zamanla gerçekleşen çöküşü tarafından desteklendiğini ileri sürüyorum. Ormancıların ve köylülerin rehabilitasyon altındaki coğrafyayı nasıl deneyimlediklerine odaklanan etnografik araştırmam sonucunda bu makale, bakım ve çöküş süreçleri arasındaki devamlılığı ön plana alan ve emekle şekillenen arazilerin bu devamlılıktaki rollerini takip eden yeni bir antropolojik analitik perspektif önermektedir. Bakım pratiklerinin, çöküş ve tahribatı engellemeyi amaçlarken, başka çöküş biçimleri içerdiğini iddia ediyorum.
{"title":"Infrastructural Decay","authors":"Ekin Kurtiç","doi":"10.14506/ca38.1.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca38.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000A growing ethnographic literature attends to maintenance and repair practices in the face of decay and ruination. This article explores the forms of decay that become an integral part of infrastructure maintenance. In Turkey’s Çoruh Basin, hydroelectric dam constructions lead to a concern about the landscape’s erosive character, which requires foresters’ practices of watershed rehabilitation in the uplands to protect the dams against sediment accumulation in the reservoirs. The work of repairing ecologies for the long-term maintenance of dams, I contend, is undergirded by the gradual decay of another maintenance labor—that is, the villagers’ arduous practices of tending landscape through farming and husbandry. Through an ethnographic study of how foresters and villagers experience the landscape under rehabilitation, this article offers a novel anthropological analytical perspective that foregrounds the continuum between maintaining and decaying, tracing the role of labored landscapes in this continuum. I argue that maintenance practices, while intending to counter decay, entail other forms of decay. \u0000\u0000ÖZET\u0000\u0000Giderek büyüyen bir etnografik literatür, çöküş, yıkım ve tahribat süreçlerinin karşısında bakım ve onarım pratiklerine odaklanmaktadır. Bu makale, altyapı bakımının bütünleyici bir parçası haline gelen çöküş biçimlerine odaklanmaktadır. Türkiye’nin Çoruh Havzası’ndaki hidroelektrik baraj yapımları sürecinde arazinin erozyona yatkın yapısı bir mesele olarak ortaya çıkmıştır. Bu mesele, barajları rezervuarlardaki sediment birikimine karşı korumak için ormancıların yüksek kesimlerde havza rehabilitasyonu çalışmaları yapmalarını gerektirmiştir. Barajların uzun vadeli bakımı için yapılan ekoloji onarım çalışmalarının, başka bir bakım emeğinin—köylülerin tarım ve hayvancılık yoluyla araziye bakma pratiklerinin—zamanla gerçekleşen çöküşü tarafından desteklendiğini ileri sürüyorum. Ormancıların ve köylülerin rehabilitasyon altındaki coğrafyayı nasıl deneyimlediklerine odaklanan etnografik araştırmam sonucunda bu makale, bakım ve çöküş süreçleri arasındaki devamlılığı ön plana alan ve emekle şekillenen arazilerin bu devamlılıktaki rollerini takip eden yeni bir antropolojik analitik perspektif önermektedir. Bakım pratiklerinin, çöküş ve tahribatı engellemeyi amaçlarken, başka çöküş biçimleri içerdiğini iddia ediyorum.\u0000","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41597160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article foregrounds the returns of migration by following young migrant workers to Lebanon and back to subsistence farming communities in western Sudan during a time of revolution and economic crisis in both countries. Their labor and the returns of it connect these two seemingly distinct zones of labor and production in a transregional economy, linking East Africa to the Middle East. In this cross-border economy, the search for work through mobility has become a point of value extraction by brokers and border guards, and at the same time a practice of gendered self-validation for male migrants. In Sudan, migrants and brokers both refer to this practice as a gamble, mughamara. Proposing mughamara as an ethnographic concept of mobility, I show how young migrants use this term to validate themselves through migration. Comparing their experiences to Sudanese migrants who worked in Lebanon decades before them, I show how the youth’s presentation of mobility as a necessary gamble with life reveals an underlying generational experience of crisis and the foreclosure of class mobility. In a political and socioeconomic context where migrant workers often feel devalued in and by labor, mobility is presented as their only way forward—as well as their ticket home.
{"title":"“Life is a Gamble”","authors":"Anna Reumert","doi":"10.14506/ca38.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca38.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"This article foregrounds the returns of migration by following young migrant workers to Lebanon and back to subsistence farming communities in western Sudan during a time of revolution and economic crisis in both countries. Their labor and the returns of it connect these two seemingly distinct zones of labor and production in a transregional economy, linking East Africa to the Middle East. In this cross-border economy, the search for work through mobility has become a point of value extraction by brokers and border guards, and at the same time a practice of gendered self-validation for male migrants. In Sudan, migrants and brokers both refer to this practice as a gamble, mughamara. Proposing mughamara as an ethnographic concept of mobility, I show how young migrants use this term to validate themselves through migration. Comparing their experiences to Sudanese migrants who worked in Lebanon decades before them, I show how the youth’s presentation of mobility as a necessary gamble with life reveals an underlying generational experience of crisis and the foreclosure of class mobility. In a political and socioeconomic context where migrant workers often feel devalued in and by labor, mobility is presented as their only way forward—as well as their ticket home.","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41662338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Language and social relations","authors":"J. Eller","doi":"10.4324/9780429197710-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429197710-4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49309529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawing on fieldwork between 2007–2013 in Amdo Tibetan regions in northwestern China, this article considers the unprecedented spate of self-immolation-by-fire protests among Tibetans in light of the military crackdown on Tibetan unrest beginning in 2008. The author takes a performative approach to Tibetan self-immolation protest as a new and deeply contested genre of mass media in the context of severe state repression. The author argues that such an approach accounts for the always unresolved yet socially and politically constitutive meaning and efficacy of dead bodies in a necropolitics particular to modern Sino-Tibetan relations.
{"title":"The Sociopolitical Lives of Dead Bodies: Tibetan Self-Immolation Protest as Mass Media","authors":"Charlene E. Makley","doi":"10.14506/CA30.3.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/CA30.3.05","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on fieldwork between 2007–2013 in Amdo Tibetan regions in northwestern China, this article considers the unprecedented spate of self-immolation-by-fire protests among Tibetans in light of the military crackdown on Tibetan unrest beginning in 2008. The author takes a performative approach to Tibetan self-immolation protest as a new and deeply contested genre of mass media in the context of severe state repression. The author argues that such an approach accounts for the always unresolved yet socially and politically constitutive meaning and efficacy of dead bodies in a necropolitics particular to modern Sino-Tibetan relations.","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"448-476"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2015-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66759968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Focusing on a story of former firefighters who used a counterfeit rescue vehicle to perform a false emergency as a cover-up for drug trafficking in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, this article engages the concept of camouflage to intervene in anthropological discussions on statecraft. The article explores how drug traffickers—but also gendarmes, prefects, and customs officers, who help smugglers by accepting bribes—use the camouflage of legitimate political authority to enable illicit transactions. In the tri-border area, the notion of camouflage helps explain how the contraband and corruption that pervade border relationships are inseparable from formal enactments of political authority. Camouflage, thus, helps illuminate the aesthetic, pragmatic, and moral connections between statecraft and criminality, further enhancing our analytical purchase on how the law and its violation are symbiotically intertwined. I argue that this study of corruption on the border reveals that state effects are created by endless refractions, which do more than blur the distinction between law and crime, between the deceived and the deceiving, between the original and the counterfeit. Camouflage does not merely blend the predictable dichotomous categories by which we approach and analyze the performance of the state, but by obfuscating any clear distinction between the legal, the political, and the criminal, it actually enables states to happen.
{"title":"STATES OF CAMOUFLAGE","authors":"Ieva Jusionyte","doi":"10.14506/CA30.1.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/CA30.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on a story of former firefighters who used a counterfeit rescue vehicle to perform a false emergency as a cover-up for drug trafficking in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, this article engages the concept of camouflage to intervene in anthropological discussions on statecraft. The article explores how drug traffickers—but also gendarmes, prefects, and customs officers, who help smugglers by accepting bribes—use the camouflage of legitimate political authority to enable illicit transactions. In the tri-border area, the notion of camouflage helps explain how the contraband and corruption that pervade border relationships are inseparable from formal enactments of political authority. Camouflage, thus, helps illuminate the aesthetic, pragmatic, and moral connections between statecraft and criminality, further enhancing our analytical purchase on how the law and its violation are symbiotically intertwined. I argue that this study of corruption on the border reveals that state effects are created by endless refractions, which do more than blur the distinction between law and crime, between the deceived and the deceiving, between the original and the counterfeit. Camouflage does not merely blend the predictable dichotomous categories by which we approach and analyze the performance of the state, but by obfuscating any clear distinction between the legal, the political, and the criminal, it actually enables states to happen.","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"113-138"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2015-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.14506/CA30.1.07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66759582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay draws on ethnographic research with Aboriginal Australians living in the parks and bush spaces of a Northern Australian city to analyze some new governmental measures by which remoteness comes to irrupt within urban space and to adhere to particular categories of people who live in and move through this space. To address this question in contemporary Northern Australia is also to address the changing character of the Australian government of Aboriginal people as it moves away from issues of redress and justice toward a state of emergency ostensibly built on settler Australian compassion and humanitarian concern. It also means engaging with the mediatization of politics and its relation to the broader, discursive shaping of such spatial categories as remote and urban. I suggest that remoteness forms part of the armory of recent political efforts to reshape Aboriginal policy in Northern Australia. These efforts leverage remoteness to diagnose the ills of contemporary Aboriginal society, while producing remoteness itself as a constitutive feature of urban space.
{"title":"AN URBAN FRONTIER: Respatializing Government in Remote Northern Australia","authors":"Daniel Fisher","doi":"10.14506/CA30.1.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/CA30.1.08","url":null,"abstract":"This essay draws on ethnographic research with Aboriginal Australians living in the parks and bush spaces of a Northern Australian city to analyze some new governmental measures by which remoteness comes to irrupt within urban space and to adhere to particular categories of people who live in and move through this space. To address this question in contemporary Northern Australia is also to address the changing character of the Australian government of Aboriginal people as it moves away from issues of redress and justice toward a state of emergency ostensibly built on settler Australian compassion and humanitarian concern. It also means engaging with the mediatization of politics and its relation to the broader, discursive shaping of such spatial categories as remote and urban. I suggest that remoteness forms part of the armory of recent political efforts to reshape Aboriginal policy in Northern Australia. These efforts leverage remoteness to diagnose the ills of contemporary Aboriginal society, while producing remoteness itself as a constitutive feature of urban space.","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"139-166"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2015-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.14506/CA30.1.08","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66759631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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