{"title":"Introduction: Beyond Revolution: Reshaping Nationhood through Senses and Affects","authors":"M. Lamrani","doi":"10.3167/CJA.2021.390202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/CJA.2021.390202","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"37 1","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75101217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword: The Sensory Revolution Comes of Age","authors":"D. Howes","doi":"10.3167/CJA.2021.390209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/CJA.2021.390209","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"24 1","pages":"128-137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79064903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article shows that human rights NGOs sustain their relevance not by producing testimony texts and witness subject positions, but rather through the social and performative dimensions of events in which witnessing is transformed into testimony. The interactional dimensions between witness and documenter are usually omitted from textual representations due to NGOs’ rigid bureaucratic writing, and are also largely overlooked by scholars. Witnessing and testimony are analysed as spatiotemporal sites and occasions of contending with violence and colonialism. Through the peculiar case of Palestinian witnesses and Israeli NGOs’ sustained commitment to witnessing and testimony, despite shared acknowledgement of the failures of human rights, the event is theorized as malleable enough to be reshaped by its participants. These additional interactional layers may undermine the very logics of human rights witnessing and testimony.
{"title":"Witnessing and Testimony as Event","authors":"O. Grinberg","doi":"10.3167/CJA.2021.390107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/CJA.2021.390107","url":null,"abstract":"This article shows that human rights NGOs sustain their relevance not by producing testimony texts and witness subject positions, but rather through the social and performative dimensions of events in which witnessing is transformed into testimony. The interactional dimensions between witness and documenter are usually omitted from textual representations due to NGOs’ rigid bureaucratic writing, and are also largely overlooked by scholars. Witnessing and testimony are analysed as spatiotemporal sites and occasions of contending with violence and colonialism. Through the peculiar case of Palestinian witnesses and Israeli NGOs’ sustained commitment to witnessing and testimony, despite shared acknowledgement of the failures of human rights, the event is theorized as malleable enough to be reshaped by its participants. These additional interactional layers may undermine the very logics of human rights witnessing and testimony.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"59 1","pages":"93-110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82921196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I explore how Sudanese communities have attempted to visually document, witness and communicate a silenced history of forced displacement. Thousands of peasants in rural Northern Sudan were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003–2009 Merowe Dam construction project. My aim is to examine both the complex local interactions with and appropriations of the anthropologist’s video camera, which, in the relational process of witnessing, turned into a stage to provide audio-visual evidence against hegemonic discourses of Sudan’s successful hydroelectric future. I show how my video camera’s affordances of capturing and mediating ‘truth’ evoked specific performative genres of representation in moments of crisis and illustrate how these usages differ from everyday interactions with a video camera. These performative genres of ‘crisis witnessing’, I contend, resonate with globally distributed media realities and thereby reproduce certain practices of communication that are stereotyped in the mass media.
{"title":"The Anthropologist’s Video Camera as Stage","authors":"Valerie Hänsch","doi":"10.3167/CJA.2021.390104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/CJA.2021.390104","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I explore how Sudanese communities have attempted to visually document, witness and communicate a silenced history of forced displacement. Thousands of peasants in rural Northern Sudan were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003–2009 Merowe Dam construction project. My aim is to examine both the complex local interactions with and appropriations of the anthropologist’s video camera, which, in the relational process of witnessing, turned into a stage to provide audio-visual evidence against hegemonic discourses of Sudan’s successful hydroelectric future. I show how my video camera’s affordances of capturing and mediating ‘truth’ evoked specific performative genres of representation in moments of crisis and illustrate how these usages differ from everyday interactions with a video camera. These performative genres of ‘crisis witnessing’, I contend, resonate with globally distributed media realities and thereby reproduce certain practices of communication that are stereotyped in the mass media.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"1 1","pages":"37-54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91539383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This special feature presents curated excerpts from two virtual conversations that the editors (Liana Chua and Omri Grinberg) held with anthropologist and author Asale Angel-Ajani, historian Carolyn J. Dean and anthropologist and filmmaker Meg McLagan on the theme of witnessing. Beginning with the participants’ reflexive discussions of how they came to work on witnessing, the conversations delve into several intertwined questions and debates. These include the politics and impacts of witnessing; the performativity of witnessing and the subjectivities involved; the evolving place and practice of witnessing in the contemporary post-truth, digitally saturated milieu; the ‘dark side’ and other problematics of witnessing; how different disciplines witness and represent witnessing; and the question of what scholars can do to witness or bear witness in the present.
本专题精选了两位编辑(Liana Chua和Omri Grinberg)与人类学家兼作家Asale Angel-Ajani、历史学家Carolyn J. Dean和人类学家兼电影制作人Meg McLagan就见证的主题进行的两次虚拟对话。从参与者的反思性讨论开始，讨论他们是如何开始做见证的，对话深入到几个相互交织的问题和辩论中。其中包括政治和目击的影响;观照的表演性及其主体性在当代后真相、数字化饱和的环境中，见证的场所和实践的演变;目击的“阴暗面”和其他问题;不同学科如何见证和代表见证;以及学者在当下能做些什么来见证或充当见证的问题。
{"title":"Witnessing: Virtual Conversations","authors":"Asale Angel-Ajani, C. Dean, Meg McLagan","doi":"10.3167/CJA.2021.390109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/CJA.2021.390109","url":null,"abstract":"This special feature presents curated excerpts from two virtual conversations that the editors (Liana Chua and Omri Grinberg) held with anthropologist and author Asale Angel-Ajani, historian Carolyn J. Dean and anthropologist and filmmaker Meg McLagan on the theme of witnessing. Beginning with the participants’ reflexive discussions of how they came to work on witnessing, the conversations delve into several intertwined questions and debates. These include the politics and impacts of witnessing; the performativity of witnessing and the subjectivities involved; the evolving place and practice of witnessing in the contemporary post-truth, digitally saturated milieu; the ‘dark side’ and other problematics of witnessing; how different disciplines witness and represent witnessing; and the question of what scholars can do to witness or bear witness in the present.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"81 1","pages":"130-142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81703869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the ethics review committee as a contemporary witness to the conduct of biomedical research. Ethics committee work is an internationally growing form of deliberation and decision making, a technology of anticipation that grants researchers access to experimental spaces, research funds and publication venues. Drawing on ethnographic work with a range of ethics committees across the Asia-Pacific region, I explore the metaphorical extension of logics of seeing into bureaucratic forms of ethics review. My analysis untethers the witnessing voice from an individual ‘point of view’, focusing on the attestive assemblage and its documentation. By exploring the committee as a form of collective attestation, I aim to show witnessing as a form of ethical work, for ethical ends.
{"title":"Committee as Witness","authors":"R. Douglas-Jones","doi":"10.3167/CJA.2021.390105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/CJA.2021.390105","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the ethics review committee as a contemporary witness to the conduct of biomedical research. Ethics committee work is an internationally growing form of deliberation and decision making, a technology of anticipation that grants researchers access to experimental spaces, research funds and publication venues. Drawing on ethnographic work with a range of ethics committees across the Asia-Pacific region, I explore the metaphorical extension of logics of seeing into bureaucratic forms of ethics review. My analysis untethers the witnessing voice from an individual ‘point of view’, focusing on the attestive assemblage and its documentation. By exploring the committee as a form of collective attestation, I aim to show witnessing as a form of ethical work, for ethical ends.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"14 1","pages":"55-71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80039522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Physical environments and their images feature increasingly prominently today in efforts to contend publicly with political violence, making aesthetics ever-significant to discourses and practices of testimony. Critics have shown that the publicness of the platforms and practices used in these efforts is marked by disparate levels and types of participation and agency. Relatively underexplored, however, is how those disadvantaged by this disparity navigate it and what role aesthetics may play therein. I explore these questions through fieldwork on architectural memorializations of the 1993 Solingen arson attack where a family with Turkish background were targeted at home in their sleep. I argue that the arson attack has featured in these memorializations not simply as the subject of testimony but also as a force structuring its aesthetics.
{"title":"The Aesthetics and Publics of Testimony","authors":"E. Çaylı","doi":"10.3167/CJA.2021.390106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/CJA.2021.390106","url":null,"abstract":"Physical environments and their images feature increasingly prominently today in efforts to contend publicly with political violence, making aesthetics ever-significant to discourses and practices of testimony. Critics have shown that the publicness of the platforms and practices used in these efforts is marked by disparate levels and types of participation and agency. Relatively underexplored, however, is how those disadvantaged by this disparity navigate it and what role aesthetics may play therein. I explore these questions through fieldwork on architectural memorializations of the 1993 Solingen arson attack where a family with Turkish background were targeted at home in their sleep. I argue that the arson attack has featured in these memorializations not simply as the subject of testimony but also as a force structuring its aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"32 1","pages":"72-92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87924880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article draws on two research projects – one on orangutan conservation, and the other on religious change among indigenous Bidayuh communities – to reflect on the relations, technologies and processes involved in producing witnesses and witness-able truths. I compare two forms of witnessing: visualizations of environmental crisis and orangutan extinction, and modes of encountering invisible entities among Bidayuhs. Both involve the challenge of making the unseen visible or apprehensible and thus addressable. But whereas the first entails a crisis-laden visual imaginary that turns witnessing into a form of human stewardship over the environment, the second involves a more relational encounter involving mutual adjustment and responsivity to obligations and commitments. I suggest that this latter mode of witnessing invites us to reimagine both the crisis logic of environmental visualizations and ideals and practices of anthropological witnessing.
{"title":"Witnessing the Unseen","authors":"Liana Chua","doi":"10.3167/CJA.2021.390108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/CJA.2021.390108","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article draws on two research projects – one on orangutan conservation, and the other on religious change among indigenous Bidayuh communities – to reflect on the relations, technologies and processes involved in producing witnesses and witness-able truths. I compare two forms of witnessing: visualizations of environmental crisis and orangutan extinction, and modes of encountering invisible entities among Bidayuhs. Both involve the challenge of making the unseen visible or apprehensible and thus addressable. But whereas the first entails a crisis-laden visual imaginary that turns witnessing into a form of human stewardship over the environment, the second involves a more relational encounter involving mutual adjustment and responsivity to obligations and commitments. I suggest that this latter mode of witnessing invites us to reimagine both the crisis logic of environmental visualizations and ideals and practices of anthropological witnessing.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"41 1","pages":"111-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89144284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
People in the Singida region of Tanzania have long utilized diverse energy sources for subsistence. The wind separates grain from chaff. The sun ripens the millet and dries it for storage. More recently, solar panels charge phones and rural electricity investments extend the national grid. Yet as an electric frontier, Singida remains only peripherally and selectively served by energy infrastructures and fossil fuels. This article sketches Singidans’ prospect from this space and time of energy transition. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2004 and 2019, it asks: how do rural Singidans eke energy from their natural and social environment? How can ideas of the sun and of labour in Nyaturu cosmology inform understandings of energy? And how are new energy technologies reshaping Singida’s social and economic landscape? I theorize energy as a deeply relational and gendered configuration of people, nature, labour and sociality that makes and sustains human and natural life.
{"title":"Prelude to a Grid","authors":"Kristin D. Phillips","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380206","url":null,"abstract":"People in the Singida region of Tanzania have long utilized diverse energy sources for subsistence. The wind separates grain from chaff. The sun ripens the millet and dries it for storage. More recently, solar panels charge phones and rural electricity investments extend the national grid. Yet as an electric frontier, Singida remains only peripherally and selectively served by energy infrastructures and fossil fuels. This article sketches Singidans’ prospect from this space and time of energy transition. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2004 and 2019, it asks: how do rural Singidans eke energy from their natural and social environment? How can ideas of the sun and of labour in Nyaturu cosmology inform understandings of energy? And how are new energy technologies reshaping Singida’s social and economic landscape? I theorize energy as a deeply relational and gendered configuration of people, nature, labour and sociality that makes and sustains human and natural life.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"2 1","pages":"71-87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87532755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the quest for alternatives to energy extraversion and carbon-heavy extraction, transformation of waste to energy is growing worldwide. In Ghana’s working-class city of Ashaiman, an international NGO converts faecal waste into electricity through a massive biodigester. Fed by public toilets, the power is sold back to residents. Touted as an exemplar of sustainable development, Ashaiman’s case demonstrates that when power comes from human waste, the entanglement of energopolitics and biopolitics, but also energopower and necropower – the political uses of death and decay – is undeniable. Premised on such ‘bio-necro collaborations’ and enabled by sustainability science, these interventions activate state monopolies of waste while assimilating bodily excesses of urban dwellers. Marking the intimate exploitations of internal energy frontiers, an ever-tightening circuitry of energy production and political-economic incorporation results.
{"title":"Experiments in Excreta to Energy","authors":"Brenda Chalfin","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380207","url":null,"abstract":"In the quest for alternatives to energy extraversion and carbon-heavy extraction, transformation of waste to energy is growing worldwide. In Ghana’s working-class city of Ashaiman, an international NGO converts faecal waste into electricity through a massive biodigester. Fed by public toilets, the power is sold back to residents. Touted as an exemplar of sustainable development, Ashaiman’s case demonstrates that when power comes from human waste, the entanglement of energopolitics and biopolitics, but also energopower and necropower – the political uses of death and decay – is undeniable. Premised on such ‘bio-necro collaborations’ and enabled by sustainability science, these interventions activate state monopolies of waste while assimilating bodily excesses of urban dwellers. Marking the intimate exploitations of internal energy frontiers, an ever-tightening circuitry of energy production and political-economic incorporation results.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"96 1","pages":"88-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90532067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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