Front and Back Covers,Volume 29, Number 4. August 2013

Front and back cover caption, volume 29 issue 4 Front cover Khat to be banned in the UK Yemeni man chewing khat. Khat is a herbal stimulant that has been chewed recreationally in the Arabian peninsula and in East Africa for centuries, but khat has recently become an object of concern in the UK after ‘khat pubs’, popular with Somali, Yemeni, and Ethiopian immigrants, have sprung up across the country. Against the advice of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), the UK government is following countries such as the USA, Canada, and Germany by banning khat. Later this year, the UK will treat khat as a class C drug, making it illegal to supply or possess. This July, the UK home secretary said ‘The decision to bring khat under control is finely balanced and takes into account the expert scientific advice and these broader concerns’. But in response to the government's announcement, Professor David Nutt (chair of the ACMD) retorted, saying ‘Banning khat shows contempt for reason and evidence, disregard for the sincere efforts of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs’, specifically citing khat's ‘relatively low harms’ in his remonstration. In this issue, Ian McGonigle looks at the broader socio‐cultural background of khat in Africa and the Middle East, and analyzes the global khat controversy as a complex anthropological problem entangling development economics, public health management, domestic fears of terrorism, and khat‐mediated democratic formations. Back cover Scapegoating in Burma A 2013 calendar widely on sale inside Burma in the wake of Aung San Suu Kyi's landmark meeting with Barrack Obama in Rangoon, November 2012. Although the military retain majority control in parliament, media laws have been relaxed and limited reforms include a parliamentary role for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. Major violence erupted in May 2012 against the Rohingya, which was to spread to Muslims more generally by the time the two leaders met. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi remained mostly silent on the issue. Is this ‘hermit state’, the largest country in mainland Southeast Asia, situated at the intersection between Muslim and Buddhist Asia, and a gateway to India and China, succumbing to irrational fears enflamed by the US‐led war on terror? In this issue, Elliott Prasse‐Freeman argues that the Rohingya have become scapegoats for an ill‐defined sense of national identity. True, the Burmese army has also attacked many of the ethnic minorities wishing to retain autonomy, including major offensives against the Kachin and the Shan. But the kind of violence against Muslims is of a different kind. In anticipation of the last free elections in 1960 the army published Dhamma in danger (dhammantaraya) asserting the communist threat to Buddhism, hoping to win the elections. Today, such dangers are projected as coming from Muslim populations interpreted as not rightfully Burmese (the laws require proof of ancestor residence before wholesale immigration began with British conquest in 1823, yet written reference to ‘Rooinga’ occurred as early as 1799). In a country where fears reign, and with a monastic order not hierarchically controlled, many have fallen for this discourse in a way that the country will come to regret. Whither the saffron revolution and Aung San Suu Kyi's revolution of the spirit?     

The Khat ban in the UK: What about the ‘scientific’ evidence? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Since the 1920s certain psychoactive substances have been controlled by specially created international agencies. More recently, governments have committed themselves to using evidence in policy‐making. Yet, as the ban on khat in the UK and other countries shows, the assessment process is a perfunctory rather than a decisive component. The Home Secretary set aside scientific advice and bases the decision to ban on considerations outside the health risk ratio, including crime control and counter‐terrorism. However, experience shows that prohibiting substances when demand remains strong is inherently criminogenic. Indeed, the khat ban would appear to play into the hands of radical Islamist organizations. In this article, Axel Klein discusses how political calculations overrule evidence and how this is facilitated by international drug control agencies. Using the term ‘social system’ to explain the relentless extension of bureaucratic remit, he argues that control would now appear inevitable for any substance defined as a drug, regardless of evidence and consequence. As this has implications for other culture‐bound peculiar substances or ‘genussmittel’ he suggests ditching the term ‘drug’ altogether.     

Symbolic recognition,multicultural citizens,and acknowledgement: Negotiating the Christmas Wars

In recent times, December has come to mark a new tradition—an annual public debate over the degree to which Christmas should be publicly recognised and celebrated in a multicultural society. Curiously, political theorists of multiculturalism have had little to say on this controversy. In this article, I argue that there is a genuine issue at stake in the so-called ‘December dilemma’, but that the public debate—which construes the matter in terms of offending non-Christians—fails to identify and address it. Differentiating three distinct areas of contention (public holiday, public square, and state schools), I suggest that the core issue is one of ‘acknowledging a “generalised other”’, and sketch what this might mean for each of these public aspects of Christmas celebration.     

Freedom of information and transparency in Scotland: Disclosing persons as things and vice versa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Contemporary ideals of democratic governance hold that public trust in the workings of public authorities is achieved through measures such as allowing free access to information. Yet 18 months participating in and observing the activities of users of Freedom of Information legislation – introduced in Scotland in 2005 – and civil servants disclosing information under it reveals that public trust and transparency do not always flow from increased access. Treating ‘transparency’, not as a known phenomenon, but as something that emerges in ethnographic observation and analysis, this article moves beyond an idea of transparency as being the simple revelation of an object by a subject, and in doing so challenges the fixed distinction between persons and things on which transparency as it is understood by Freedom of Information legislation appears to rely.     

Ontological politics of hydrosocial territories in the Salween River basin,Myanmar/Burma

In this paper, we question an often-unchallenged assumption that we all talk about the same ‘thing’ when talking about water. Taking the Salween River in Myanmar as a case study, we draw on a growing body of hydrosocial literature to analyze the multiple ontologies of water. Conceptually, we take each ontology to be constituted of – and enacted within – a human-more-than-human assemblage, the spatiotemporal dimensions of which demarcate a ‘hydrosocial territory.’ We present three illustrations, namely: the role of the Union Government's National Water Resources Committee and how it manifests and is situated within an ontology of ‘modern Water’; a Karen indigenous initiative to establish a Salween Peace Park and an associated revealing of an ‘indigenous’ ontology; and plans for the construction of mainstream hydropower dams and electricity export to neighboring Thailand, where different water ontologies and their hydrosocial territories collide. We examine how multiple ontologies of water are contested through ‘ontological politics’, whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. While not downplaying the role violent conflict plays, we argue that in the Salween basin ontological politics are an underappreciated terrain of contestation through which political authority and the power relations that underpin it are (re)produced, with implications for processes of state formation, territorialization and the ongoing peace negotiations.     

‘Get me out of here’: Bail hearings of people indefinitely detained for immigration purposes (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article is based on observation of 66 applications for bail brought by men detained indefinitely for immigration purposes. It argues that although the research is incomplete – the full stories of the applicants could not be known, neither the Home Office Presenting Officers nor the Immigration Judges could be ‘shadowed’ or even interviewed, court records are not public – there is value in doing ‘observation’ without ‘participation’ of institutions which act in the name of the public. This research shows that the outcomes of bail applications are not, as the public might imagine, always fair and unequivocal. All too often, they look like ‘the luck of the draw’, bringing the institution and its presiding officers into disrepute. The article illustrates this point using ‘dialogues’ from two bail hearings where the same applicant appeared before two different judges, with very different outcomes.     

Shades of green: Public opinion on environmental issues in Australia

Data from the 1990 and 1993 Australian Electoral Studies are used to investigate whether public concern about the environment has declined in Australia over recent years. Questions of the ranking and structure of environmental concerns and of levels of support for environmental organisations are addressed. The data show that public concern about the environment remains high on an ‘agenda of long‐term issues’, that environmental concerns form two distinct clusters (termed ‘brown’ and ‘green') and that active support for environmental organisations correlates only with the green cluster. It is argued that these findings give no more than partial support to the ‘organisational’, ‘postmaterialist’ and ‘risk society’ perspectives on environmental issues.     

An Experimental Act: Formations of Wildness and Indigeneity in Far North Queensland

In this article, I focus upon the recent Wild Rivers Act controversy in Queensland, Australia, as an ‘experimental event’ that drew together a diverse cast of actors – including Indigenous traditional owners, state politicians, bureaucrats, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, and waterways – to contest the future of a region historically (over)coded as ‘wild’. In attending to these actors, and the discourses and arguments mobilised, I argue that this controversy reveals emergent trends in the imaginaries of wildness and indigeneity surrounding indigenous lands and waters in contemporary settler colonial nations. Critical insight into such issues, I show, requires reconceptualising the static ‘matters of being’ through which indigenous territory is often captured – such as tradition and development – as contingent and contested ‘matters of becoming’. It is precisely in events such as the Act controversy that the contemporary politics of indigenous territory, and its contingent and contested foundations, becomes visible.     

Designing cultural policy in a postcolonial colony: the case of Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898 with the end of the Spanish-American War. In 1952, the island became a ‘Commonwealth’ through the development and approval of a local constitution. While this political status allows Puerto Rico some degree of autonomy, it nevertheless continues to subject the island to United States federal authority. For the last 60 years, discussions on whether Puerto Rico’s Commonwealth status is a permanent or transitional status has fuelled much of the political debate and public policy of the region, and has been highly influenced by political status ideologies: to become a state of the United States, to maintain the current status, or to become independendent. Budgetary, legal, and commercial dependence on the United States causes constant conflicts in the design and implementation of Puerto Rican public policy in areas such as education, law, and economic development. Likewise, culture has not been exempt from these debates. In fact, cultural differences have caused conflict at all levels – from the theoretical conceptions of culture, to cultural policy and arts management. Moreover, the implementation of cultural policies has also been subject to political ideologies and the concept of culture has variably been seen as an obstacle or strength for specific political purposes. In the midst of a sustained economic crisis, the current Puerto Rican government has proposed the development of a comprehensive cultural policy through a participatory process. The objective of this paper is to present this process as a means of analyzing Puerto Rico’s experience through the challenges in designing and implementing cultural policy within a ‘postcolonial colony’ scenario. This paper will place emphasis on the government’s role, cultural public institutions, and cultural production.     

KHAT EXPANSION AND FOREST DECLINE IN WONDO GENET, ETHIOPIA

This study analyses the expansion of khat production in relation to forest decline in the Wondo Genet area in south-central Ethiopia. By assessing spatial variables and social factors, and using remote sensing and social survey techniques, the extent to which this new cash crop contributes to deforestation is explored.
The results indicate that khat has expanded rapidly in terms of land area used for its production at forest frontiers, in isolated forest patches and within farmland since the mid-1980s. This is mainly due to high economic advantage, high market demand and favourable means of transport as well as the existence of a cohesive trade network. Moreover, the properties of the crop also facilitate expansion. The increased production of khat appears to be a result of conscious choice and rational decisions made by male farmers, regardless of religious, cultural and policy discouragement and despite khat's possible negative impact on livelihood security.
Although it is found that khat expansion does not explain forest decline in the study area per se, it plays an important role in enhancing multifaceted interaction between people and forest. The expansion influences forest decline directly by conversion, and indirectly through increased human activity in proximity to forests. The conversion has resulted in a reduction of forest area, resilience and regeneration. Khat production has changed human settlement patterns, suppressed production of other crops and influenced women's income negatively. These aspects increase the demand for wood and it renders the forest an important source of supplementary incomes. Khat production may create tension, resulting from a conflict in interest between sustaining the native forests, with subsequent environmental benefits for the larger social group, and the economically driven choice land use made by khat farmers.     

‘That Gleaming Sword of Satire’1: Power,Passion and Parliament in the Mid-Victorian City

Political print satire, construed as an articulation of sedition and dissent, is most commonly associated in Britain with its 18th-century ‘Golden Age’. Beyond Victorian fiction, the go-to 19th-century source tends to be the hegemonic, London-centric Punch. It is not widely known that, as Punch mellowed and popularised in the 1860s and 1870s, England's booming urban centres gave rise to a distinct form of citizen journalism which used boisterous satire as an effective vehicle for sociopolitical comment, evidence-based analysis and civic activism. Not only did the provincial satirical periodical filter parliamentary affairs through a critical provincial lens but at a time when politics were largely local, it engaged with the extra-parliamentary power vested in civic and municipal governance. It aspired to much more than diversion through witty posturing. Morally and ideologically inspired, fuelled by righteous indignation, it successfully used the protest of the pen to agitate in the cause of social and political reform, demonstrating the ‘everyday’ resistance and common sense essential to liberal governmentality. Referencing some of the most enduring and respected examples of the genre – the Porcupine in Liverpool, the Town Crier in Birmingham and the Free Lance in Manchester – this article casts light upon this poorly understood journalism of conviction. A cause and effect of both emotional and intellectual release, it serves as an excellent example of citizenship as performed political passion, in an age of public conformity and restraint.     

The condition of ‘Cosmo-housewives’: leisure shopping,the mainstream and its ambiguities

‘Leisure shopping’ is a particular kind of shopping activity that is devoted mainly to fashion clothes and accessories. Women are commonly represented as the main leisure shoppers, and consequently, they tend to be at the centre of shopping centres' mainstream discourses. This article argues that interpretations of representations of ‘leisure shopping’ and the corresponding practice have too often ignored the daily and seemingly ‘banal’ experiences of the social actors involved. The primary purpose of this article is to show how gender roles are performed and reified in high-end factory outlet villages in Italy. It adopts a cross-sectional approach to ‘leisure shopping’ that includes an analysis of the ‘languages’ of two Italian high-end factory outlet villages, the ‘social space’ represented by the same sites and the ‘stories’ about a few ideal-typical female shopping experiences. These aspects are situated in the Italian cultural and political context at the time the research was conducted. Very different demands – such as sensuality, efficiency and motherly care – are put on women in Italy, as well as in the majority of Western societies. The analysis reveals that through their practice of browsing in a high-end factory outlet village, women often reproduce stereotypes while simultaneously trying – though ambiguously – to challenge them.     

Small acts and personal politics: On helping to save the orangutan via social media

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest among political and media analysts in the value and utility of online activism. This article seeks to shed new light on this debate by thinking through popular responses to orangutan causes on social media. Rather than focusing on the (in)efficacy of such responses, the author describes a pervasive, public ethos of small acts – one built around the interactive affordances of social media – that frames self‐consciously ordinary, non‐professional supporters’ efforts to help save the orangutan. She suggests that taking these activities seriously as projects of ‘helping’ and doing ‘good’ can also push the anthropology of social media beyond its current focus on ‘activism’ towards a more nuanced appreciation of the different shades and scales of ‘acting’ online.     

The new face of development: The ‘bottom of the pyramid’ entrepreneurs (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In recent years, ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives – from Grameen Phone Ladies and Solar Sister, to Women First and Living Goods – have captured increasing attention, not only in corporate boardrooms where the desire for untapped revenue streams looms large, but also in the arenas of development policy and practice, where entrepreneurship is celebrated as a way to repurpose ‘informal’ and/or ‘subsistence’ workers through new forms of private sector engagement. Based on fieldwork with BoP schemes in Bangladesh and South Africa, and cases drawn from other regions, this paper explores how development is outsourced through the figure of the BoP entrepreneur, the ‘poor’ woman who travels door‐to‐door delivering a range of branded manufactured goods across the ‘retail black spots’ of developing countries. These women are actively converted into entrepreneurial subjects through a set of ideological and material practices that aim to produce and hone the requisite traits of industry, market discipline and entrepreneurial distinction to succeed in global business; subject positions that can bring tangible rewards to those who successfully assume them. However, the process of outsourcing development to a reservoir of ‘informal labour’ unsettles BoP claims of ‘inclusive capitalism’, as an ethos of meritocracy and individual responsibility not only deflects the responsibility for development onto the poor themselves, but remakes their subjectivities in service to global brands.     

A game of risk: Boat migration and the business of bordering Europe (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Largely in response to irregular migration flows, a Euro‐African border is under construction at the southern edges of Europe. The latest phase in this ‘borderwork’ is a system known as Eurosur, underpinned by a vision of a streamlined surveillance cover of Europe's southern maritime border and the African ‘pre‐frontier’ beyond it. Eurosur and other policing initiatives pull in a range of sectors – from border guards to aid workers – that make the statistically small figure of the irregular border crosser their joint target. To highlight the economic and productive aspects of controlling migratory flows, I call this varied group of interests an ‘illegality industry’. Casting an eye on the Spanish section of the external EU border, this article investigates how the illegality industry conceptualizes migrants as a source of risk to be managed, visualized and controlled. The end result, it is argued, is a ‘double securitization’ of migrant flows, rendering these as both a security threat and a growing source of profits.     

On the question of historical injuries: Transitional justice,anthropology and the vicissitudes of listening (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In this paper I am concerned with how certain kinds of violence and injuries, located simultaneously in multiple spaces and temporalities, question the prospect of what I call an ‘imagined new future’. I take the proceedings of a recent workshop on transitional justice, held in a university situated in the global North, as an avenue to unpack this idea. Here, I distinguish two instances when testimonies of violence embodied by survivors, may challenge broader assumptions about transitional justice. Firstly, when the prospect of historical injuries emerge, when difference and inequality – despite the promise of new post‐violence nations – are in fact woven together into a longue durée, a longer temporality, that remains beyond the theoretical contours and technical mandates defined by experts in the field. From this perspective, transitions may be experienced by specific communities not as fractures but as relative continuities, for example, of historically rooted political and economic hegemonies. Secondly, when the voice of survivors fracture the theoretical space created by larger discourses of reconciliation. In this case, they may incarnate an unforgiving victim, displaced outside the moral economy of reconciliation that stresses forgiveness and unity over resentment and fragmentation. In the end, the question I would like to pose is how certain forms of violence are rendered unintelligible by mainstream transitional justice discourses.     

Mooring subjects of heritage: proprioceptive emplacement at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

This article examines how visitors to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (HSIBJ) in Fort Macleod, Alberta, are physically and affectively situated within an immersive heritage landscape. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, HSIBJ is inextricably tied to regional Blackfoot and settler-colonial histories, as well as the tensions that emerge between the two. HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre is organised to plunge audiences inside the ‘live’ archaeological scene and an evocative heritage landscape. It does so through technologies, including motion-triggered projections, which locate and secure visitors within official national – and universal – heritage narratives. The central argument of this article is that HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre beckons subjects of heritage through proprioception, the awareness of the body’s position in and movement through space. Extending beyond the physiological sensation of one’s own body, proprioception also works alongside the two other substantiating buttresses of archaeology and heritage to provide a gravitational ground upon which the visitor is located and their subjectivity confirmed. Proprioceptive grounding emplaces a body within an expanded and ‘ancient’ narratology of nation, and in this way, also becomes the mechanism through which exogenous settlers assuage anxieties about their latecoming status.     

Online petitioning and politics: the development of Change.org in Australia

Online petitions are an important feature of contemporary political engagement in advanced democracies. In this paper we report on a unique data set – covering a five year period and over 17,000 petitions – documenting the development of the Change.org platform in Australia. Australia presents an interesting case as, until very recently, there was no national government hosted online petition site. Our analysis results in three findings that advance scholarship on online petitions. First, we find the majority of petitions are in fact targeted at government, and that their issue area is of a political nature. Second, we find that most signers of petitions sign a single petition – they are not serial participants. Finally, we show that ‘super users’ of the online petition system engage broadly as well as often. Together these findings demonstrate that online petition creation and signing – even on commercial platforms – is a distinct and important part of citizen engagement in politics.     

Inappropriate object: Warsaw and the Stalin‐era Palace of Culture after the Smolensk disaster (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article is about the shifting relationship between the city of Warsaw and the Palace of Culture and Science – a gigantic Stalinist skyscraper which dominates the city centre – in the aftermath of the 10 April 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 95 others (mostly very senior military and political figures) in the woods outside Smolensk in western Russia. The crash's victims had been on their way to a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of a massacre in the Katyń forest, near Smolensk, during which thousands of Polish army officers were shot on the orders of Stalin. Despite its status as Warsaw's most obvious material relic of Russia's historical domination over Poland, the Palace of Culture has in the last two decades been gradually reappropriated into the city's own landscape and everyday life. In fact, since the fall of communism, the Palace has eclipsed the city's traditional emblems and monuments to become regarded as the most identifiable marker, or ‘symbol’, of the contemporary city. Further, the Palace has consolidated the tangible and powerful impact it exerts on the city's architecture and urban layout, on its political, bureaucratic, ‘cultural’, commercial and educational life, and on the bodies and minds of its citizens. The very word ‘palace’ is normally understood in Warsaw to refer to the Palace of Culture. For a time after Smolensk, however, the word acquired a new association with the Presidential Palace, where crowds gathered to lay flowers, light candles and stand vigil. The markedly muted presence in Warsaw of the Palace of Culture during the mourning period after Smolensk demonstrated that the happy interaction between post‐socialist Warsaw and the rehabilitated Palace does not extend into every domain. The topography of mourning in Warsaw in the days after 10 April seemed to highlight the abject dimension of the Palace's uncanny presence in the city. This article explores why, how and for how long the Palace withdrew and was withdrawn from the life of the Warsaw after Smolensk.     

Strange powers: Conservation,science, and transparency in an indigenous political project (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador are important players within global movements for indigenous rights and biodiversity conservation. Scholars, non‐governmental organizations, and donor agencies laud their efforts to protect more than 430,000 hectares of forestland from an expanding colonization front, the transnational petroleum industry, and the spillover of violence from the Colombian civil war and drug trade. In this article, I examine how a set of discourses surrounding indigenous politics enable and constrain Cofán projects. In the context of an ethnographic account of Cofán political practice, I differentiate between the ‘expressive’, ‘instrumental’, and ‘obstructive’ nature of ‘conservation’, ‘science’, and ‘transparency’, respectively. More specifically, I develop three arguments: first, that the discourse of conservation serves to express deeply held conceptions of the ties between Cofán culture, Cofán territory, and Cofán politics; second, that the discourse of science functions as an instrument that Cofán activists use to ground a political‐economic exchange with outside powers; and third, that the discourse of transparency stymies Cofán collective action and is neither locally meaningful nor politically useful. By analyzing the social life of these terms and concepts in Cofán activism, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of discursive power, which always exists in tension with the cultural sensibilities and political perspectives that it supposedly transforms.