American Anthropologist最新文献

The turn of the 21st century has witnessed a rising trend of migration from the African continent to cities across India. Accompanying such flows have been racial tensions and policing spectacles, including incidents of violence, vandalism, and evictions against African migrants and their pathologization as “illegal.” These subtle yet pervasive forms of migrant policing by state and citizen actors constitute what I call the social life of “illegality” that is characterized by distinctive modes of suspicion and surveillance. Based upon ethnography conducted in an “unplanned” settlement of Delhi cohabitated by both African and Indian residents, I illuminate how caste-race-religion informed indexes of difference contribute to the multi-sensorial racialization of African migrants as suspicious. In emplacing such dynamics within changing spatial economies and the moral anxieties accompanying such transitions, I further demonstrate quotidian practice of microsurveillance against African migrants as sustaining their position as rent-paying clients who are nonetheless maintained in their racial alterity. The social life of “illegality” thus refocuses attention on the sensorial and emplaced registers that illegalize migrants, above and beyond documentation, thereby furthering a discussion on migrant “illegality” as enmeshed within racialized imaginaries, urban transformations, and alternate modes of governmentality.

As a pandemic-era collaborative writing project undertaken amid rising geopolitical tensions, this article demonstrates understanding humor in contemporary China as an ethnographic project leading toward deep, empathetic knowledge at a time when in-person fieldwork became difficult. Through deciphering and translating layered meanings “encrypted” in and intentions signaled by humor in a new comedy program launched in 2021, we dive deep into the lively social life in contemporary China. Humor, via “thick description,” offers valuable insights into life in “fieldsites” that were hard to access during the pandemic time, amid political tensions. It provides a unique lens to examine the unspoken but shared sentiments in societies where humor has become a fundamental mode of public expression. It alerts us to existential anxieties in social life, the subtle voices of social critique, and the yearning for empathy. Humor is not only a valuable object for anthropological inquiry but also a vantage point to reflect on ethnographic methodology and epistemology. We examine humor, with its sentimental and ethical potentialities, and through spontaneous collaboration of mutual support, envision new possibilities in anthropological knowledge production.

This article focuses on female bodies co-laboring across the racial lines and academic-activist divides to explore both the potentials and constraints of feminist solidarity in the hyper-masculine and ultra-nationalist normative order of the global war on terror. Anthropological studies have deconstructed phantasmatic narratives of the global war on terror by disclosing its racialized and classed structure. However, what remains understudied is how racialized female bodies are subjected to the biopower and necropower of this war. This ethnography concentrates on the feminist solidarity between Özlem Yasak and Serra Hakyemez, the coauthors of this article, which stretches over 13 years and moves between the colony and the metropole and the Global South and Global North. It examines how a Turkish academic and a Kurdish activist (both lower middle-class women) forge, cultivate, and repair their comradeship as they move from an immigration office to their family house to neoliberal universities. Based on what we call the Other-graphy as a new feminist method, this article argues that the global war on terror expands its reach as the humanitarian and neoliberal regimes of power recruit activists and academics to the fantasy of autonomous subjectivity posited against their possible political solidarity.

Anthropologists need to grapple politically with the ways in which security, war and militarization shape our fields of study. This special section of American Anthropologist, “Forever War: Anthropology and the Global War on Terror,” brings together scholars studying, writing and enacting their politics amidst the immense socio-political impacts of the Global War on Terror. In this introductory article, I offer the concept of “the security encounter” to describe the complex and inherently political conditions of doing anthropology within the current conjuncture, as well as a provocation for anthropologists to adopt an abolitionist approach to security, militarization, and permanent war which increasingly structure our lives and work.

When nine Ghanaian banks collapsed during the country's 2017–2019 financial crisis, a Charismatic Pentecostal pastor was at the center of public accusations as the board chairman of one of the failed banks. His role put a spotlight on the growing influence of Charismatic Pentecostal institutions and elites in Ghana's financial market. Shifting the perspective between diverse actors who reckoned with the bank's collapse, from ordinary Christians to artist-activists, this article explores how Ghanaians evaluated the culpability of the pastor and in so doing problematized who Christian elites involved in banking and business are accountable to: God, their congregants, or the public at large? We argue that global financial liberalization has generated new types of financial elites, Pentecostal pastors among them, who become subject to new lines of accountability. Holding someone accountable comes with stakes expressed through vernacular registers that demonstrate how financial markets are engulfed in broader social relations and regimes of ethical evaluation.