The Politics of Emergency

Military and humanitarian interventions have become commonplace in recent years, provoking some to suggest that the right to intervene in the face of an emergency has become a new global norm. Emergencies and interventions pose unique challenges for political and legal theories of sovereignty, legitimacy, and democracy. Political anthropologists and other social scientists have focused on critiques of sovereign power and military and humanitarian interventions, but more attention to the cultural aspects of how emergencies operate and to the positive and negative effects they might have on political and social life is needed.     

South Africa,the world and AIDS (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

South Africa has been at the centre of world history for over a century and it is now the focus of all eyes for the World Cup. The country has been a by‐word for racial inequality and more recently for crime and violence. But it is also notable for social progress and cultural vitality. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has claimed more victims there than anywhere else, a tragic sequel to apartheid. Successive political leaders highlight the contradictions of this historical moment in poignant, even Shakespearean ways. The author briefly reviews three books by anthropologists on AIDS there and suggests that South Africa is likely to remain a source of innovation for the discipline. But we need to take a broader view of world history than at present.     

20世纪早期美国文化人类学家对麦克尼尔的影响

威廉·哈迪·麦克尼尔是享誉全球的世界史学家。他的《西方的兴起》以文明为单位,把文明之间的交往互动看作社会进步的主要动力,开辟了世界史写作的新视角。麦克尼尔世界史思想的形成受益于20世纪早期美国人类学的研究成果,本文介绍了影响麦克尼尔的人类学家及其思想,探讨麦克尼尔如何将人类学研究成果整合到世界史撰写中,并找到了解释世界史的新方法。     

Death as a Window to Life: Anthropological Approaches to Early Medieval Mortuary Ritual

Identity, personhood, ritual, religion, landscape, and the materiality of social practice have inspired anthropologists to advance exiting new agendas. Many of these issues coalesce in mortuary archaeology. This article reviews the dialogue between anthropological questions and the mortuary record through examining three books on early medieval archaeology. It focuses on theoretical developments rather than methodology, discussing key issues relating both to the study of early medieval mortuary remains and to broader anthropological agendas, such as modern political ideology and cultural identity.     

Modernity and Matrifocality: The Feminization of Kinship?

The extensive analytical focus on how gender relations in working lives, employment, education, political engagement and public life change under modernity needs extension into a consideration of the ways in which kinship and relatedness have also been changing. This article argues that relatedness under modernity tends towards matrifocality. This is explored through looking at broad patterns of social change in kinship practices across a range of societies experiencing transitions towards modernities over the past fifty years, and at how state and NGO development and social protection programmes contribute to this matrifocal turn.     

Immigrant "Illegality" as Neoliberal Governmentality in Leadville, Colorado

Abstract:  In this paper, I frame immigrant "illegality" as a local-scale technique of neoliberal governmentality. Drawing on recent work of anthropologists, I present illegality as a racialized, spatialized social condition which operates as governmentality by marginalizing and criminalizing immigrants, loosening the US border and forcing it into local spaces, and impacting immigrants' everyday lives and mobility. The paper then draws on a case study of Leadville, Colorado, to illustrate the utility of this framework. In Leadville, we see how through illegality neoliberalism seeps through scales. Illegality disciplines immigrant labor in service of the neoliberal order, turns all residents into surveillers of immigrants' subordinate sociospatial position, and masks contradictions within neoliberalism that arise particularly at the local scale. I argue that conceptualizing illegality as a governmentality technique provides a powerful tool for understanding changing state spatiality, especially ways in which neoliberalism is diffused and embedded into local economic, political, and social processes.     

The sin of cain

In this comment, the author reflects on where Europe has gone wrong in terms of becoming more inward looking. What might anthropologists do about it?     

Diapraxis rules OK

Social‐cultural anthropologists' well established tradition of studying conflict resolution has hitherto had only limited application in practical programmes for intercultural ‘mediation’ on a large scale. This guest editorial suggests how the new concept of ‘diapraxis’, a practical replacement for ‘dialogue’, might stimulate a more systematic engagement from anthropologists. Some examples of diapraxis relating to the Islamic world are summarized, as described in a recent issue of Swiss government journal Politorbis.     

Consuming and living the corner shop: belonging,remembering, socialising

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic case study in Germany investigating the relationship between shopkeepers and customers of small grocery stores owned by immigrants. The focus is on social practices within the shops and how those engaged in these activities make sense of them. Shops become meaningful through shared practices that revolve around selling and buying. However, this process is complex and not without conflict. Moving through the themes of belonging, remembering and socialising, I will show how the everyday lifeworlds of customers and shopkeepers, including their aspirations, expectations and uncertainties, intersect and how the shop emerges as a meaningful space through negotiation. Rather than looking at cultural differences alone, it is concluded that there can be significant other ways to understand multicultural places by focusing on the multiple ways that consumers engage with so-called ‘ethnic’ enterprises.     

The Mediation and Remediation of Disaster: Hurricanes Katrina and Felix in/and the New Media Environment

Hurricanes Katrina and Felix made landfall in 2005 and 2007 on the Gulf Coast of the US and the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua respectively. Despite many economic, political and cultural differences between these two sites, they share a number of interesting similarities. Their inhabitants are subject to similar modes of racialized Othering and internal colonialism, and both places have vital links with the transnational cultural consciousness that Gilroy referred to as the Black Atlantic. Katrina and Felix also occurred at a time when centralized forms of media are increasingly perceived to be in crisis. This crisis is creating new spaces for the development of alternative ways of knowing, watching and making media. This paper draws on recent literature on decolonization by Mignolo, Escobar, Quijano and others to explore the prospects for decolonizing energies within the new media environment and a context of devastation wrought by neoliberalism and disaster. This research examines disasters in/and the new media environment, and suggests that activists should understand the distinctions between mainstream (or corporate) and alternative media, between top‐down and grassroots media, and between “old” and “new” media, in relational and non‐categorical rather than absolute terms. These media realms should be engaged from an awareness of how they interact with and impact upon one another. This research also suggests that disasters must be understood as ongoing and open‐ended events embedded within historical, social, cultural, economic and political processes and systems. Media, policymaking and emergency management practices that are informed by an awareness of this complex embedding, and which are therefore able to take a long‐term view of the unfolding of disasters, will be best equipped to engage effectively, and in democratically responsive ways, with disasters and in particular with the needs of those populations most vulnerable to their impacts.     

Futurism from foundation to world war: the art and politics of an avant-garde movement

The cultural influence of the Futurist art movement on the modern era is undisputed. Of course, it is also undisputed that the movement was deeply involved in the politics of both liberal and Fascist Italy. Futurist politics were characterized by a pronounced nationalism and imperialism, but in the early years were also known for advancing ideas more associated with the extreme left, such as republicanism, anti-clericalism, and workers’ advancement through revolution. There is no consensus on how to narrate Futurist politics, or their relationship to Futurist art. Were the politics more of the left or the right? And, more to the point, should the politics be studied in isolation, or as integral to the broad ‘Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’? This article takes the latter approach and offers an interpretation that unifies the art and politics of the Futurist movement from its foundation in 1909 through to Italy’s entry into the Great War. I argue that the Futurists themselves did not differentiate between their cultural initiatives to modernize Italy or their political interventionism. In looking at key moments in the political evolution of the movement, and the corresponding artwork of the period, I show that Futurism offered a confused political message in its first years, mixing elements of the left and right, but after the Libyan War and especially in the interventionist period, the political message became much more stridently nationalistic and bellicose, and such themes became prevalent in the art of that time.     

Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in Neoliberal America

In this paper, I seek to bring “patriarchy” back into focus in ways that make sense to a twenty-first century American audience. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the ways in which “feminism” has fallen, or is being pushed, off the contemporary political agenda, leaving a political vacuum with respect to, among other things, patriarchy as a system of power. In the second part of the paper, I use a number of films as texts to show how patriarchy in this sense persists quite vigorously and often brutally in contemporary society, not only as a thing in itself, but also as a form of power that intersects with, and organizes, major institutions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism: the industrial production site, the military, and the corporation. Finally, I reflect on the films not only as cultural texts, but also as political interventions that at least partially counter the post-feminist tendencies discussed in the first part of the paper.     

Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity

"Cultural imperialism" has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay surveys the ways in which the term "cultural imperialism" has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. The second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term "colonization of consciousness" used by Jean and John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China, showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non–Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of modern cultural globalization.     

Archaeology without gravity: Postmodernism and the past

Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the past and the present have become commonplace: anthropologists now situate cultures in their historical contexts, while historians pursue particularistic ends within politicoeconomic or ideational structures. Archaeologists have cast their nets even more widely, not only toward anthropology and history, but to fields ranging from molecular biology to hermeneutics. Postmodernist approaches maintain that archaeologists should be looking at the past from multiple perspectives and listening to its multivocality. Archaeologists, in fact, not only develop different ways of understanding the past, but actually develop alternative pasts. This paper argues that multiple paths to alternative pasts enhance archaeological understanding and, at the same time, stimulate the development of archaeological theory.     

Reconfiguring the French nation: Public debates on the Left and national identity

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalisation has shaped the fate of local and national cultural productions, from movies to music, from entertainment to food. How did French intellectual and political elites respond to this unprecedented challenge? What were the implications for the politics of nationalism and national identity? Two books respond to these questions, although in very different ways – the first directly and the second indirectly. Vincent Martigny's Dire la France explains how a new way of narrating French national identity emerged in the 1980s within an internationally oriented French Left, attentive of the coming challenges of cultural pluralism. Patrick Boucheron's (ed.) Histoire mondiale de la France advances into a more challenging direction by skilfully unsettling the ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ clichéd narrative. French history is thus redefined by moving away from the Frankish/Gallic myth of descent, thereby reconfiguring national identity along new lines. This article identifies how crucial debates on the cultural nation and cultural identity emerged in the wake of the May 1968 uprising, asking how much they contributed to the current shape and meaning of French national identity. It thus reviews what can be described as a new historiographical turn in French history.     

Anthropology and populism

This guest editorial probes the inflationary use of ‘populism’ and the contribution that anthropologists can make to this field. Although a highly variable phenomenon historically, contemporary populists in locations as diverse as rural Hungary and urban Wales have much in common in their disaffection with the politics of liberal democracy. While the deeper causes must be sought in political economy, emotion and identity are just as important as material interest in populist movements. In describing and explaining populism, anthropologists should heed the populist traditions of their discipline – even at the risk of political incorrectness.     

Knowledge production and border nationalism in northern Mexico

ABSTRACT. This article examines the transformations in the cultural sphere of Tijuana, one of Mexico's largest and fastest growing cities, in order to emphasise the border as a crucial site of nation‐building in northern Mexico. I propose that cultural and intellectual actors, through particular sites, are changing the way the city is positioned in relation to the national political space of Mexico. Two institutions are considered specifically, both of which are integral to the propagation of an array of representations of Tijuana. In looking to articulations of nationhood and practices of knowledge production, this article delineates how urban identities reclaim and reconfigure key aspects of national identity in a region heretofore unrecognised as central to the creation of a national imaginary.     

EXCHANGING BUSINESS CARDS IN JAPAN: Oh! So you are an …

This article uses the simple example of a Japanese business card as a threefold way to explore identity making, essentialist features, and what it is that anthropologists do. In Japan, the transmission of idealized forms of identity has been explained through numerous processes, such as national discourses or education. Yet, how stereotypical ways of being are reproduced and embedded in insignificant little things – like the worlds that collide on the two faces of a business card – is a subject that has received far less attention. Anthropology has much to gain by focusing on how everyday objects simplify, encapsulate or sanitize identities in ways that disregard the lived experiences of many.     

Breastfeeding as custom not culture: Cutting meaning down to size (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Seeing breastfeeding as culturally constructed highlights its overall meaning only to hide the activity's inner dynamic and structural separateness. To study breastfeeding in its own terms, our paper flips culture as meaning on its head, asking how the whole (culture) fits the part (breastfeeding). Addressing that question to cultural, regional and cross‐cultural bodies of evidence, we find that what's viable bioculturally is nowhere near as malleable as what's imagined culturally. In understanding these arrangements, history and function need as much consideration as anthropologists currently give meaning.