This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2016–2019, examines methane extraction operations in Lake Kivu on the Rwanda/DRC border as a lens into understanding how energy futures in Africa are imagined and enacted within national projects of post-war reconstruction. In 2005, scientists suggested that the lake’s dissolved methane risked oversaturation within the century. This spurred state-backed projects to simultaneously prevent a natural disaster and harness the methane to meet Rwanda’s rising electrification needs. Two companies are currently building and operating methane-fuelled power plants. The article suggests that these energy projects, an integral part of the overall architecture of social repair in Rwanda, reproduce and generate forms of captivity and entrapment that are central to understanding the lived politics of ‘carceral repair’, a generation after genocide.
{"title":"Carceral Repair","authors":"K. Doughty","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380203","url":null,"abstract":"This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2016–2019, examines methane extraction operations in Lake Kivu on the Rwanda/DRC border as a lens into understanding how energy futures in Africa are imagined and enacted within national projects of post-war reconstruction. In 2005, scientists suggested that the lake’s dissolved methane risked oversaturation within the century. This spurred state-backed projects to simultaneously prevent a natural disaster and harness the methane to meet Rwanda’s rising electrification needs. Two companies are currently building and operating methane-fuelled power plants. The article suggests that these energy projects, an integral part of the overall architecture of social repair in Rwanda, reproduce and generate forms of captivity and entrapment that are central to understanding the lived politics of ‘carceral repair’, a generation after genocide.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"1 1","pages":"19-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88776728","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}
Aircrete is a lightweight building material with a number of remarkable qualities, including high compression strength, buoyancy and thermal insulation. Perhaps most strikingly, its lack of sand aggregate makes it energy efficient compared to concrete. While aircrete is regularly sold by various construction companies, DIY enthusiasts and technicians around the world are cultivating more home-brew, open-source methods. This article follows James, an American ex-security contractor and mining engineer, as he attempts to convert his own embodied legacies of imperial extraction into a pro-social business venture by designing aircrete machines and mixes for urban Africa. His adventures in aircrete typify an energy future in which an array of intriguing experiments and technologies intersect with a broader entrepreneurial effort to capture Africa’s growing consumer markets.
{"title":"Air in Unexpected Places","authors":"Michael Degani","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380209","url":null,"abstract":"Aircrete is a lightweight building material with a number of remarkable qualities, including high compression strength, buoyancy and thermal insulation. Perhaps most strikingly, its lack of sand aggregate makes it energy efficient compared to concrete. While aircrete is regularly sold by various construction companies, DIY enthusiasts and technicians around the world are cultivating more home-brew, open-source methods. This article follows James, an American ex-security contractor and mining engineer, as he attempts to convert his own embodied legacies of imperial extraction into a pro-social business venture by designing aircrete machines and mixes for urban Africa. His adventures in aircrete typify an energy future in which an array of intriguing experiments and technologies intersect with a broader entrepreneurial effort to capture Africa’s growing consumer markets.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"1 1","pages":"125-145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84069220","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}
Goudebou refugee camp in northern Burkina Faso has emerged as a testing ground for international efforts to find market-based solutions to the delivery of basic energy services in humanitarian contexts. This article follows energy researchers, humanitarian practitioners and entrepreneurs as they work to capture a market for energy here by mapping consumer demand, generating evidence that can prove the willingness of refugees to pay and securing contracts for the supply of solar powered technologies. Their efforts reveal the moral and material logics of humanitarian interventions in the field of energy, and point to the continued significance of ‘crisis’ for the making of Africa’s energy politics, subjects and futures.
{"title":"Capturing Crisis","authors":"Jamie Cross","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380208","url":null,"abstract":"Goudebou refugee camp in northern Burkina Faso has emerged as a testing ground for international efforts to find market-based solutions to the delivery of basic energy services in humanitarian contexts. This article follows energy researchers, humanitarian practitioners and entrepreneurs as they work to capture a market for energy here by mapping consumer demand, generating evidence that can prove the willingness of refugees to pay and securing contracts for the supply of solar powered technologies. Their efforts reveal the moral and material logics of humanitarian interventions in the field of energy, and point to the continued significance of ‘crisis’ for the making of Africa’s energy politics, subjects and futures.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"73 1","pages":"105-124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84295934","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 considers the entanglements revealed by the recent and rapid influx of solar technology on the archipelago of Zanzibar. Following a technical failure that left the islands without electricity for three months in 2009–10, the Zanzibari government has pursued several avenues to increase energy autonomy, including solar power. However, the future of energy independence promised by solar development is complicated by a legacy of political conflict and new relationships of dependence and inequality. Drawing on interviews with domestic energy users, government officials, state engineers and NGO activists, and situated within the unique post-revolutionary context of Zanzibar, this article explores how solar innovations and investments contribute to the reimagining of social, economic and political entanglements while simultaneously reproducing persistent discourses of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion.
{"title":"Uneasy Entanglements","authors":"E. Dean","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380205","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the entanglements revealed by the recent and rapid influx of solar technology on the archipelago of Zanzibar. Following a technical failure that left the islands without electricity for three months in 2009–10, the Zanzibari government has pursued several avenues to increase energy autonomy, including solar power. However, the future of energy independence promised by solar development is complicated by a legacy of political conflict and new relationships of dependence and inequality. Drawing on interviews with domestic energy users, government officials, state engineers and NGO activists, and situated within the unique post-revolutionary context of Zanzibar, this article explores how solar innovations and investments contribute to the reimagining of social, economic and political entanglements while simultaneously reproducing persistent discourses of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"29 1","pages":"53-70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87242701","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 ethnographic investigation of the rise of the artisanal oil refining industry in the Niger Delta, Nigeria, shows how oil infrastructures have become contested between the state, multinational oil corporations and local youths in what I call a ‘new oil frontier’. I argue that artisanal refineries are indicative of the politics of crude oil governance and reveal complex, integrated and innovative forms of extractive practices by youth groups within many Niger Delta communities. Using the example of the Bodo community in Ogoniland, where local youths operate refineries constructed with local materials and technology, I show that such refineries represent an emergent form of energy capture that transforms the creeks of the Niger Delta into islands of carbon sale and challenges state and corporate power.
{"title":"Crafting Spaces of Value","authors":"Omolade Adunbi","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380204","url":null,"abstract":"This ethnographic investigation of the rise of the artisanal oil refining industry in the Niger Delta, Nigeria, shows how oil infrastructures have become contested between the state, multinational oil corporations and local youths in what I call a ‘new oil frontier’. I argue that artisanal refineries are indicative of the politics of crude oil governance and reveal complex, integrated and innovative forms of extractive practices by youth groups within many Niger Delta communities. Using the example of the Bodo community in Ogoniland, where local youths operate refineries constructed with local materials and technology, I show that such refineries represent an emergent form of energy capture that transforms the creeks of the Niger Delta into islands of carbon sale and challenges state and corporate power.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"8 1","pages":"38-52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85596921","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 afterword, I consider some of the important insights that are generated in this special issue. The thorough and detailed consideration of the ways in which detainees and formerly incarcerated persons survive confinement and the constraints imposed on them illustrates the power of ethnography. Each of the contributions builds on strong empirical material and sometimes decade-long engagement with people in and on the brink of confining institutions. In this way, the contributions form a comprehensive empirical foundation for understanding confinement beyond the carceral institutions, while also allowing us to ask new kinds of questions about confinement beyond site. While firmly rooted in prison ethnography, the special issue thus inspires urban studies and anthropologists more broadly to think concertedly about the role of confinement, not only as the fate of many urban residents but as an ever-present element of the urban imaginary and of urban life.
{"title":"Afterword","authors":"Steffen Jensen","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380110","url":null,"abstract":"In this afterword, I consider some of the important insights that are generated in this special issue. The thorough and detailed consideration of the ways in which detainees and formerly incarcerated persons survive confinement and the constraints imposed on them illustrates the power of ethnography. Each of the contributions builds on strong empirical material and sometimes decade-long engagement with people in and on the brink of confining institutions. In this way, the contributions form a comprehensive empirical foundation for understanding confinement beyond the carceral institutions, while also allowing us to ask new kinds of questions about confinement beyond site. While firmly rooted in prison ethnography, the special issue thus inspires urban studies and anthropologists more broadly to think concertedly about the role of confinement, not only as the fate of many urban residents but as an ever-present element of the urban imaginary and of urban life.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81292442","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}
Drawing on extensive prisons research and sustained contact with (former) prisoners in Nicaragua, this article explores three former prisoners’ post-release trajectories. In the face of a hybrid state that manifests as both a legal penal state and an extralegal system of powers, colloquially referred to as el Sistema (the System), and to the backdrop of a (d)evolving political context, I argue for an understanding of the ‘tightness’ of post-release life by conceptualizing the Sistema's transcarceral grip. Former prisoners deal with this grip in different ways, ranging from self-censorship to the taking of ‘delinquent freedoms’. A detailed understanding of this grip can help pinpoint how carceral logics are mobilized outside prison in Nicaragua and how its carceral state expands through not only legal but also extralegal means.
{"title":"Freedom in the Face of Nicaragua's Hybrid Carceral System","authors":"Julienne Weegels","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380105","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on extensive prisons research and sustained contact with (former) prisoners in Nicaragua, this article explores three former prisoners’ post-release trajectories. In the face of a hybrid state that manifests as both a legal penal state and an extralegal system of powers, colloquially referred to as el Sistema (the System), and to the backdrop of a (d)evolving political context, I argue for an understanding of the ‘tightness’ of post-release life by conceptualizing the Sistema's transcarceral grip. Former prisoners deal with this grip in different ways, ranging from self-censorship to the taking of ‘delinquent freedoms’. A detailed understanding of this grip can help pinpoint how carceral logics are mobilized outside prison in Nicaragua and how its carceral state expands through not only legal but also extralegal means.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"71 1","pages":"52-69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83911011","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}
Never have so many foreign nationals been confined and deported from Europe and the USA as within the past decades. Yet a minority succeeds in remaining undeported for years and sometimes decades, in spite of being targets of enforcement practices related to the wars on drugs, on terror and on immigration. As they are brought into forced circulations between prisons, detention centres and the public spaces of penalized neigborhoods, they join a ‘floating population’ of exiles, transforming spaces of confinement into sites of passage. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and biographical interviews at different moments of the trajectories of ‘the undeported’, this article examines how their ability to avoid deportation develops and increases. The notion of mètis is mobilized to analyse how individuals adapt tactically or strategically to shifting, uncertain situations, and to understand the changes that they can sometimes bring to bear on the larger social forces that constrain them.
{"title":"Institutions of Confinement as Sites of Passage","authors":"C. Boe","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380106","url":null,"abstract":"Never have so many foreign nationals been confined and deported from Europe and the USA as within the past decades. Yet a minority succeeds in remaining undeported for years and sometimes decades, in spite of being targets of enforcement practices related to the wars on drugs, on terror and on immigration. As they are brought into forced circulations between prisons, detention centres and the public spaces of penalized neigborhoods, they join a ‘floating population’ of exiles, transforming spaces of confinement into sites of passage. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and biographical interviews at different moments of the trajectories of ‘the undeported’, this article examines how their ability to avoid deportation develops and increases. The notion of mètis is mobilized to analyse how individuals adapt tactically or strategically to shifting, uncertain situations, and to understand the changes that they can sometimes bring to bear on the larger social forces that constrain them.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"298 1","pages":"70-87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73291853","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 focuses on three overlapping layers. First, it illustrates multiple and incoherent expressions of the prison/street nexus in India through fieldwork in prison and a para (urban neighbourhood). Second, it argues that existing categories of understanding prison/street porousness – such as a ‘deadly symbiosis’, a continuum, liminality and a carceral state – are inadequate for explaining these expressions of the prison/street nexus in India, which is framed within chaotic environments. Consequently, I argue, there is a poverty of concepts in narrating the prison/street nexus in the global south more generally, and it stems from methodological concerns. Third, the article unravels the methodological lessons from the study of imprisoned populations to examine how these may be used to narrate urban marginality. I take recourse to Lorna Rhodes’ illustration of ‘blind fields’ and ‘punctums’, to show how these may be used to disrupt conventional and hegemonic narratives of urban marginality.
{"title":"Carceral Entrapments","authors":"M. Bandyopadhyay","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380103","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on three overlapping layers. First, it illustrates multiple and incoherent expressions of the prison/street nexus in India through fieldwork in prison and a para (urban neighbourhood). Second, it argues that existing categories of understanding prison/street porousness – such as a ‘deadly symbiosis’, a continuum, liminality and a carceral state – are inadequate for explaining these expressions of the prison/street nexus in India, which is framed within chaotic environments. Consequently, I argue, there is a poverty of concepts in narrating the prison/street nexus in the global south more generally, and it stems from methodological concerns. Third, the article unravels the methodological lessons from the study of imprisoned populations to examine how these may be used to narrate urban marginality. I take recourse to Lorna Rhodes’ illustration of ‘blind fields’ and ‘punctums’, to show how these may be used to disrupt conventional and hegemonic narratives of urban marginality.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"8 1","pages":"15-32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77980259","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 deconstructs a binary that has arisen between prisons as, on the one hand, ‘total institutions’ of exclusion and, on the other, ‘carceral continuums’ that incorporate marginalized urban livelihoods. The experiences of four inmates at Pademba Road, Freetown’s male prison – which accommodates inmates with sentences from one year to life – illustrate that prisons belong in neither camp. Instead, inmates’ unique responses to their imprisonment show that both a prison’s continuity and its exclusionary mechanism are situational and gendered as crime, social standing, capital and agency coalesce. Following Michel de Certeau’s examination of people’s reappropriations of culture in everyday life, this article analyses how inmates’ tactics to reinforce and bend prison walls work to either strengthen or undermine the carceral system’s strategies and influence the prison’s permeability. Inmates’ embodied experiences allow for a nuanced understanding of the inside/outside relationship of imprisonment and of the space between mobility and stasis, subjugation, embrace and resistance.
本文解构了出现在监狱之间的二元对立，一方面是排斥的“整体机构”，另一方面是包含边缘化城市生计的“监狱连续体”。弗里敦男子监狱Pademba Road的四名囚犯的经历表明，监狱不属于任何一个营地。该监狱关押的囚犯从一年到终身监禁不等。相反，囚犯对监禁的独特反应表明，监狱的连续性和排他性机制都是情境性和性别性的，如犯罪、社会地位、资本和机构的结合。继米歇尔·德·塞托(Michel de Certeau)对人们在日常生活中对文化的重新利用的研究之后，本文分析了囚犯加固和弯曲监狱墙壁的策略是如何加强或破坏监狱系统的策略并影响监狱的渗透性的。囚犯的具体经历使我们能够细致入微地理解监禁的内外关系，以及流动与停滞、征服、拥抱与抵抗之间的空间。
{"title":"Degrees of Permeability","authors":"L. Schneider","doi":"10.3167/cja.2020.380107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380107","url":null,"abstract":"This article deconstructs a binary that has arisen between prisons as, on the one hand, ‘total institutions’ of exclusion and, on the other, ‘carceral continuums’ that incorporate marginalized urban livelihoods. The experiences of four inmates at Pademba Road, Freetown’s male prison – which accommodates inmates with sentences from one year to life – illustrate that prisons belong in neither camp. Instead, inmates’ unique responses to their imprisonment show that both a prison’s continuity and its exclusionary mechanism are situational and gendered as crime, social standing, capital and agency coalesce. Following Michel de Certeau’s examination of people’s reappropriations of culture in everyday life, this article analyses how inmates’ tactics to reinforce and bend prison walls work to either strengthen or undermine the carceral system’s strategies and influence the prison’s permeability. Inmates’ embodied experiences allow for a nuanced understanding of the inside/outside relationship of imprisonment and of the space between mobility and stasis, subjugation, embrace and resistance.","PeriodicalId":84387,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge anthropology : a journal of the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University","volume":"94 1","pages":"88-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75970147","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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