Journal for the anthropology of North America最新文献

This article investigates the operations of United States immigration courts ethnographically, examining how law, politics, and bureaucracy converge in the everyday production of immigration adjudication. Based on over 500 h of observation in 36 courtrooms across 11 immigration courts, we document how life-altering deportation decisions—often in absentia and lasting only minutes—are rendered through routinized procedures that obscure judicial ambivalence, the politicization of immigration, and bureaucratic pressures. While legal scholarship has emphasized patterns in judicial outcomes, and anthropology has traced how law shapes immigrants' lives beyond the courtroom, few studies ethnographically analyze the affective arrangements inside immigration court. We develop a novel, multi-sited methodology by mobilizing a national network of undergraduate students trained and supervised by faculty to conduct ethnographic court-watching. This approach produces rich qualitative data on tone, demeanor, and “off-the-record” exchanges, while also democratizing research through pedagogical innovation. We argue that immigration courts are best understood not only as legal institutions but as affective arrangements: spaces where judges, attorneys, clerks, interpreters, federal agents, and respondents are entangled in performances of authority, credibility, and fairness under conditions of bureaucratic and political constraint. We conclude by reflecting on the risks of conducting ethnography under escalating authoritarianism. Surveillance, suppression of dissent, and the targeting of students and scholars render research itself precarious. What does it mean to observe and analyze courts when the very act of knowledge production is marked with vulnerability and threat?

Boxing styles typify interrelated sets of fighting techniques and combative characters. Because boxers acquire a style through bodily practice and styles in the United States are often tied to racialized social groups, an ethnography of the acquisition of boxing styles presents an opportunity to examine how youth, in conjunction with other social actors in the boxing world, reorient their bodies within racial imaginaries. Bridging experiential and psychoanalytic approaches, this framework sheds light on the intersectional nature of race, gender, nationality, class, and other embodied social differences. Theorizing bodily reorientations within racial imaginaries invites us to reconsider the relationship between embodied difference, culture, and race. More than a social construct, racial experience can be a meaningful source for people to reimagine themselves in constructive ways against societies where racialized bodies are stigmatized and devalued.

In the coalfields of Appalachia, coal production and employment have steadily decreased over the last two decades, yet political discussions in every recent election cycle continue to focus on coal or fossil fuels as the answer to the region's economic woes. Based on 18 months of fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013, I investigate the ways that coalfield residents experienced the intersections of political discourse with everyday material realities. Following David Ruccio's concept of everyday economic representations, I explore the ways residents directly and indirectly contest the dominant narratives in electoral politics that suggest coal is the only means to fix the depressed coalfield economy. I further argue that votes cast in each election cycle do not provide an adequate picture of the region or the reasons people go, or do not go, to the polls at all. I finally offer some insights into more recent election cycles and the economic futures of the coalfields as residents creatively work toward a just transition.

This article examines the symbol placed on a US spy satellite, National Reconnaissance Office Launch–39 (NROL-39). In 2013, NROL-39 was launched into space, the payload vehicle and mission patch emblazoned with a gigantic octopus, its tentacles surrounding the globe, and the words “Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach” written below the globe. Spy satellites are not new, but what is new here is the explicit use of a known symbol of threat and domination by a United States intelligence agency and the stories it crafts around fear and domination. NROL-39 is an insight into how a US intelligence organization pictures itself, its role, and its targets. NROL-39 gives us a glimpse behind the mask of the security state and what this tells us about the worldview and political imaginaries of the people behind it. The use of a symbol traditionally associated with political repression and threat gives us insight into how security officials think about satellites, intelligence collection, security, domination, and enemies. It is an opening into the militarized imaginary of satellite intelligence, technological capabilities, propaganda and psychological operations, and the further militarization and politicization of space.

This project is a rehearsal in language and its capacity to refuse comprehensibility. In this experimental process, we will be exploring the boundaries of legibility through a tracing of the shards and fragments embodied in the minor detail. With our sight fixed toward Palestine, we will explore how detail holds radical potential, be it in classical texts in the canon of Palestinian literature, or in the oral testimonies that have emerged from Gaza over the past 6 months. The focus on illegibility and language that defies comprehension exists in the shadow of genocide, where language fails to capture the immensity of the moment. Broken and sharp, it turns inward into a sense closer to emotion than to logic. In that sense, this project is also a rehearsal in utilizing language as matter, as material, as tangible touch.