‘Aceh thanks the world’: The possibilities of the gift in a post‐disaster society (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

While it has often been argued that post‐disaster aid is humiliating for its beneficiaries, based on my ethnographic research in post‐tsunami Aceh, Indonesia, I argue that such aid may also come to mean the opposite. Rather than feeling humiliated by foreign aid, people in Aceh actively glossed post‐tsunami foreign assistance as ‘gifts’ for which they often expressed their gratitude. Building on Marcel Mauss's classic argument, as well as on more recent works on the nature of the gift, I argue that they did so because they felt that the gift of post‐disaster aid brought with it both a long wished‐for recognition of Aceh and the possibility of establishing long‐term relationships between Aceh and ‘the world’. Therefore, rather than something humiliating, the post‐disaster aid became a medium for imagining what James Ferguson has called a ‘place‐in‐the‐world’ for Aceh.     

We Branded Ourselves Long Ago: Intangible Cultural Property and Commodification of Fijian Firewalking

ABSTRACT The Fijian firewalking ceremony (vilavilairevo), traditionally performed only by members of the Sawau people on the island of Beqa, is a prime example of a propitiation ritual that has become commodified to suit the requirements of tourism. The Sawau ‘gift’ of walking on white‐hot stones introduces another dimension of the gift practice. Although gifts and commodities are often treated as ideal‐type opposites, and a tradition of Melanesian scholarship has focused attention on the inalienability of gifts, I argue that the self‐consciously traditional firewalking practice of Beqa Island, Fiji, is an inalienable sui generis commodity that becomes effective by ‘branding’ Fijian concepts of different places' distinct custodianships. Over the last two centuries, the gift of firewalking has transmuted itself into a sociocultural tool that has consistently indigenized the power of the foreign. The gift of firewalking has allowed its custodians to locally sustain their community, to gain a reach and respect across the nation and beyond, and to intensify the group's social sentiment and social capital.     

Totem and Transaction: the Objectification of ‘Tradition’ Among North Mekeo

Most recent treatments of Melanesian post‐contact change have presumed that objectifications of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and the penetration of the nation‐state. Harrison (2000) has recently argued, however, that in pre‐colonial times too Melanesians characteristically objectified their cultural practices and identities as ‘possessions’ that could be readily exchanged or transacted. Supposedly, the key difference between the two eras has accorded with different formulations of ‘property’: ‘private property’ and the logic of ‘possessive individualism’ in the post‐contact era; and ‘trading and gift‐exchange systems’ or ‘prestige economies’ in pre‐contact times. In this article I examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices as ‘possessions’ and the notions of ‘property’ that he sees as key to the cultural objectification in both pre‐ and post‐colonial settings with reference to ethnographic and historical information regarding the North Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea. I argue from the perspective of the New Melanesian Ethnography that Harrison's view of pre‐contact prestige economies and trade and gift exchange systems retains several misleading a priori assumptions about ‘commodity exchange’ and, illustrating the potential of the New Melanesian Ethnography for historical applications, that he overemphasizes the extent to which post‐contact changes in cultural objectification have involved individualised and commodified forms of property. Consequently, in the case of North Mekeo, both the continuities and the changes between pre‐ and post‐contact cultural objectifications may have proceeded differently from the ways Harrison has outlined for Melanesia generally.     

From Head‐hunter to Organ‐thief: Verisimilitude,Doubt, and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond

In the last few years, occult head‐hunters – elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times – appear to have adopted a novel and troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head‐hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims’ organs to sell them on the global market of body parts. Based on a comparison of ethnographic material from North Maluku, a province in the eastern part of Indonesia, and news reports in regional and national papers, I trace how accounts about headhunting have morphed with narratives about organ theft. I argue that this plasticity is not a merely a change in symbolic ideas of the occult that reflects changing political and economic realities. Rather, I propose that their turn to organ theft enrols head‐hunters in a contemporary and global ‘travelling package’ that includes and entangles organ trafficking practices, media accounts, political imaginaries, and social anxieties within the same field of reality and possibility, a field of verisimilitude in which fiction and fact, rumour and reality, are fundamentally blurred. The article proposes a ‘more‐than‐representational’ approach to the organ‐stealing head‐hunter that sees him not just as a representation of particular political and historical circumstances but as a co‐producer of these circumstances, of particular political worlds and their attendant scales of anxiety. This approach, I argue, challenges the epistemological distinction between symbolic representation and political reality that informed (but also incommoded) the analyses of headhunting rumours in the 1980s and 1990s – and that continues to inform anthropological analyses of ‘the occult’ more generally.     

The politics of self-help: The Rockefeller Foundation,philanthropy and the ‘long’ Green Revolution

While scholars of contemporary philanthropy have observed a concerted interest in the promotion of ‘self-help,’ little has been said about the political history of this investment and its significance in determining both domestic and international development priorities. We locate this modern conceptualisation of self-help in early twentieth-century philanthropic practice that sought to ‘gift’ to individuals and communities the precious habit of self-reliance and social autonomy. The Rockefeller Foundation promoted rural development projects that deliberately sought to ‘emancipate’ the tradition-bound peasant, transforming him or her into a productive, enterprising subject. We begin by documenting their early agricultural extension work, which attempted to spark agrarian change in the US South through the inculcation of modern habits and aspirations among farmers and their families. These agrarian schemes illustrate the newfound faith that ‘rural up-lift’ could only be sustained if farming communities were trained to ‘help themselves’ by investing physically and psychologically in the process of modernisation. We then locate subsequent attempts to incentivise and accelerate international agricultural development within the broader geopolitical imperatives of the Green Revolution and the Cold War. While US technical assistance undoubtedly sought to prevent political upheaval in the Third World, we argue that Rockefeller-led modernisation projects, based on insights gleaned from behavioural economics, championed a model of human capital – and the idea of ‘revolution within’ – in order to contain the threat of ‘revolution without’. Approaching agricultural development through this problematisation of the farmer reveals the ‘long history’ of the Green Revolution – unfolding from the domestic to the international and from the late nineteenth century to the present – as well as the continuing role of philanthropy in forging a new global order.     

Arendt in the refugee camp: The political agency of world-building

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.     

‘I don't think it was such an issue back then’: changing experiences of pregnancy across two generations of women in south-east England

Based upon in-depth interviews with recent mothers and their own mothers in London, England, this article uses a cross-generational perspective to examine the changing experiences/perceptions of pregnancy over the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Pregnancy is a biological process, but exists within social, economic, political and cultural realms and is both spatially and temporally located. In this article we argue that advances in gender equality, maternity benefits, technological innovation and mass media have meant that pregnancy is now increasingly experienced in the ‘public’ sphere, whereas, in earlier twentieth century Britain at least, it was often relegated to the realm of private or domestic life. However with these changes have come new types of surveillance in the form of scientific ‘advice’, medical technologies and media dissemination of cultural ‘norms’ regarding appropriate dress, lifestyle and behaviour during pregnancy. Based upon the findings of our research we examine these changes from two different perspectives: firstly a Foucauldian notion of surveillance in relation to ‘medical’ advice on diet/lifestyle during pregnancy, and secondly new expectations regarding body image and clothing in the context of the emergence of ‘pregnancy chic’ and the figure of the ‘celebrity mum’.     

Reproduction in transition: cross-border egg donation,biodesirability and new reproductive subjectivities on the European fertility market

Today, there should be little doubt that new reproductive technologies have ‘diversified, globalized, and denaturalized’ human reproduction (Inhorn and Birenbaum-Carmeli 2008). Not only have assisted reproductive technologies developed and spread throughout the world at a rapid pace, but this significant development has also given rise to a global market of cross-border reproductive care (CBRC). This article seeks to investigate CBRC between Sweden and the Baltic states, in which Swedish infertility patients travel to private fertility clinics as recipients of egg donation. This article argues that the restructuring of the European space (occurring in and through both the so-called ‘transition’ of the former Eastern Bloc and the expansion of the European Union) constitutes crucial conditions of emergence for the trans-European market of infertility care, which not only results in new modalities of reproductive mobility but also articulates a new set of interrelated European gendered reproductive subjectivities. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which such ‘new reproductive subjectivities’ – here exemplified by a sample of cross-border donor egg recipients – are articulated in relation to notions of ‘choice’ and what I call ‘biodesirability’, and how such notions cannot be exempt from its specific post-socialist European context.     

Environmental responsibility and the possibilities of pragmatist-orientated research

Human geographers have explored at some length the discourses and subject positions implicated in the recent rise of ‘environmental responsibility’. Assigning it either as an individual disposition enacted in various spaces, a performative ‘othering’ tool, and/or a form of ecological governmentality, these debates have said little about the role of research and researchers in encouraging environmental responsibility. Utilising arguments from William James’ ‘radical empiricism’, I argue that exploring practices through a pragmatist lens enables a tentative re-envisioning of environmental responsibility. Re-visiting my doctoral research into the household-level adoption of sustainable consumption practices, I claim environmental responsibility as an ethical experience felt at the moments when practices are reconsidered. Here, my presence played a vital role in this social experimentation, which, as pragmatists argue, is the fundamental basis of positive social change.     

Tacit differences,ethnicity and neoliberalism: Polish migrant mothers in German cities

This article presents an inquiry into which tacit differences are relevant for how people make sense of encounters with others in urban settings, and how, if at all, they are translated into ethnic categories understood as ‘basic operators’ in everyday life. Drawing from our interviews with twenty Polish mothers living in Berlin and Munich, we argue that what our research participants distinguish as ‘typically Polish’ or ‘typically German’ is not necessarily connected to some ethnically specific ways of working or mothering, but, rather, significantly structured by locally specific forms of neoliberalism. By asking what kind of difference becomes understood as ethnic difference and how this process of demarcation occurs, this article adds to the strand of intersectional approaches that theorise the notion of difference, recognise heterogeneity of individual categories and render them suspect.     

Keeping to oneself: Hospitality and the magical hoard in the Balga of Jordan

ABSTRACT

Anthropologists have given copious attention to problems of exchange, of giving and receiving. Yet problems of taking, unequal accumulation, secret storage, predation, and refusal to share are no less central to social life. This is certainly the case among Jordanian Bedouin, whose notions of hospitality are a complex blend of reciprocity, protection, and coercive extraction. The families of dominant tribal shaykhs are often known for their ability to take, to store away wealth, and to protect hoards of found and inherited treasure, both magical and mundane. By reading the oral historical traditions of the Balga tribes against familiar Maussian ideas and the models of parasitism suggested by Michel Serres, I argue that hospitality, as Bedouin know it, is constructed in ways that resist the romanticism that besets anthropological portraits of ‘pre-capitalist' and ‘premodern' gift economies.     

Caring for Country: History and Alchemy in the Making and Management of Indigenous Australian Land

This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of A?angu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby A?angu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within A?angu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields.     

Gifts and Rights: Cautionary Notes on Community Self-help in Thailand

ABSTRACT A pervasive assumption in the critical literature and practice of development has been that capitalism and state-building has undermined relatively autonomous village communities in which there were equalizing institutions of mutual help or gift-giving. These assumptions tend to retain the dualisms of modernization theories by reversing them. The author argues that we should instead challenge these dualisms, and look for complexity and contradictions within both the past and the present. He then draws on a study in Thailand to show how the ‘village’ was a product of state-building, and how in the past the idiom of ‘helping’ constituted relations of domination and extraction as well as more egalitarian relations of mutual help. The use of the language of the gift confers power on the giver; since the 1930s, state officials have appropriated and transformed the language of ‘helping’ to coerce villagers into working on ‘development’ projects. Until the 1970s, villagers described ‘development’ as coerced serf labour, but since then, they have struggled with mixed results to redefine development as their right to participate in the national and global product. The author finishes by arguing that, in the context of the current global crisis of accumulation, we should reclaim rural development as a democratic right, opposing neoliberal attempts to redefine it as a gift which government and development agencies can discontinue at their will.     

Aspects of gift giving in Denmark in the sixteenth century and the case of the Rose Flower Cup

The concept of an ancient system of gift exchange gradually being replaced by a market economy during the middle ages and early modern period has been rightly challenged by many recent studies. As it will appear from this essay on gift giving at the Danish court of King Frederik II (1559–88), gifts and favours continued to play an important role in the organisation of power and society. Several examples from sixteenth-century Denmark are discussed, including Frederik II's patronage of the astronomer Tycho Brahe. Special emphasis is put on a gift from the Danish noble couple Hans Skovgaard and Anne Parsberg on the occasion of the baptism in 1577 of their godson, the eldest son of Frederik II. Donations at rites of passage like baptism were a convention at the time, yet the huge gilt silver cup known as the ‘Rose Flower’ was more than that. It was an elegant way of reciprocating an earlier, royal wedding gift. At the same time the cup and its symbolism hinted at the ideal of the generous lord, stressing the hospitality and accessibility expected from the king, an ideal as common to king and nobility at the renaissance court of the sixteenth century as it had been in the previous centuries. The more humble gifts mentioned in private account books of the time point to the fact that people did not necessarily give someone a gift to obtain something in return. Sometimes gifts were simply given to sustain the social order of which the donors were a part.     

Theming Asia: culture,nature and heritage in a transforming environment

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a special issue on Theme Parks in Asia with reflections on how the various theoretical ideas on theming and theme parks that are found in the social science literature can help us to understand the proliferation of theming and theme parks in contemporary Asia. How does theming create a specific spatial and social form that has meaning in a transforming Asia? We trace here the rising importance of theming in places of consumption, education, entertainment and everyday life and argue that further attention is needed to understand the transformation of ideas of culture, nature and heritage within the context of theme park development in Asia. We look at arguments that suggest that theming is part of human cognitive processes, that it creates a frame that gives the content a particular order and meaning; we also consider theming within the context of theories of Disneyization and the ‘experience economy’ in leisure and tourism to explore how ‘new’ experience-based consumerism, and the designing of coherent ‘imagineered’ spaces, plays a role in ordering our social worlds. We also examine how debates over the authenticity or superficiality of theme parks, and more generally in cultural display and preservation, can take on new twists in Asia. We do this by drawing on a review of postmodernist perspectives on themed parks to show how theme parks in Asia can be better understood through nuanced inquiries into the ways cultural, natural and heritage images and icons are cited, referenced and projected, departing from a simple ‘copy’ versus ‘original’ dichotomy. Finally, we position and introduce the papers included in this special issue and suggest further possible research into such a fertile research field.     

Indonesian domestic workers and the (un)making of transnational livelihoods and provisional futures

Doreen Massey (2005. For Space. London: Sage.) argued that space and time should not be reduced to a bounded locality of the ‘here and now’ and instead proposed re-imagining ‘space as simultaneity of stories-so-far’. We build on her argument to suggest that an appreciation of migrant aspirations and future trajectories require us to go beyond simultaneous ‘stories-so-far’ but also consider ‘stories-to-come’ which may build upon, divert from, or even unmake the ‘stories-so-far’. We apply these ideas to our study (based on a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews) of the transnational journeys traced by Indonesian domestic workers employed in Singaporean middle-class homes. We argue that socially and culturally specific notions of risk can work to propel and sustain migration into retrogressive occupations like domestic work, as well as disrupt dominant narratives around migrants as strategic actors, necessarily in control of their trajectories and driven by their migration plans. The calculus of risk-taking and aspiration on which transnational livelihoods are predicated is one that takes into account both situatedness in and connectedness across different places (in short simultaneous ‘stories-so-far’). At the same time, future ‘stories-to-come’ may entail both subtle shifts and constant (re)negotiations that propel individual life stories unto different pathways.     

The rediscovery of ‘the national’ in the 1990s – contexts,new cultural forms and practices in reunified Germany

This article examines how and in which societal and political contexts nationhood is expressed and symbolised in reunified Germany. This ‘rediscovery’ of nationhood since the 1990s mixes new and old motifs of the cultural repertoire of ‘the national’ for different purposes. Three main contexts triggered a rediscovery of ‘the national’ after 1989: reunification, immigration and the retrenchment of the social state. I argue, by analysing ethnographic material and political discourses, that these contexts, on the one hand, rearticulate old forms of ethnic and cultural nationalism and, on the other hand, create new images and symbols of an open civic society and immigration country. There are ‘playful’ forms, such as campaigns of nation branding, that symbolically include the ‘productive’ and ‘useful’ immigrant into the national project. Moreover, such campaigns serve to legitimatise the downsizing of the national state that – according to a neoliberal attitude – relies on a new community spirit of entrepreneurial, ‘activated’ citizens who ‘help themselves’. Thus, focusing on these pluralised renationalisation processes makes evident how polyvalent ‘the national’ still is. It can be employed by those who attempt to ‘reunite’ the East and West Germans, by businesses to sell their goods and ideas and by almost any political orientation, be it right‐wing or left‐wing.     

‘Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes’: Managing Aboriginal Health within an Ontology of Life‐as‐Contingent

ABSTRACT The authors have worked in Australian Aboriginal communities within the Wiradjuri area of central‐western New South Wales. Examining what appear to be distinctive Aboriginal approaches to time, we argue that these stem not from a different notion of time as such but, rather, from the relationship between the social and the self which places a distinctive value on the use and management of time. One way to access the dynamic between time and self is to realise that life is understood as fluid and contingent rather than predictable. This continually subverts the idea that time is measurable and controllable; that life is lived within domesticated sedentary space; and that planning ahead and self‐discipline are virtues. Yet these are notions central to practices associated with contemporary health care. A majority of health care providers, whether Aboriginal or not, are trained in the Australian mainstream health system and may consequently underestimate the implications of different ways in which a person acts on the temporal/spatial dimensions of her life, and how this influences ways in which she manages time in relation to her health and well‐being. Temporal concepts, such as ‘planning’, ‘discipline’, ‘future’, ‘boredom’, or ‘patience’, as well as that of the ‘long‐term’ with regard to managing illness or money, interact with the ways in which Aboriginal people experience themselves as ill or in need of health care, influencing how they act on medical advice. We argue that the key to understanding the use of time lies not in the concept of time per se but in what is involved in developing a responsive social self when the time/space dimensions of the day to day are informed by a fluid and thus contingent ontology of that day to day.     

Truth or Lies? Selective Memories,Imagings, and Representations of Chief Albert John Luthuli In Recent Political Discourses

Individuals, organizations, and institutions adopt prominent people as political symbols for a variety of reasons. They then produce conflicting memories and images of their chosen symbols. In this article we argue that multiple representations of celebrated public figures should not only beviewed in terms of a choice between ‘truths’ and ‘lies.’ Using the case of Chief Albert Luthuli, the president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967, we show that secrets and silences about aspects of his political life would make it difficult for anyone to establish the veracity of competing memories which have been produced around his name since his death in 1967. We argue that many ‘Luthulis’ were produced for different purposes and at different times during this period. We therefore suggest that tounderstand the motives for the making of the various images of Luthuli we need to explore in some depth the contexts in which they were made.