The body eating its food politics: reflections on relationalities and embodied ways of knowing

This Viewpoint article builds on feminist geography research methods, scholarship of embodiment, and more-than-human geographies to challenge us to think about how relationalities are reconfigured through attention to the human eater’s body. Drawing on an example from ethnographic research, the author problematizes how an embodied act of eating other non-human bodies raises concerns for how we negotiate the complicated sets of ethical relations that we each confront on a daily basis. In particular, this example is used to describe the ethical dilemmas researchers encounter when the intellect conflicts or collides with the corporeal. Rather than reinstate the mind–body dualism that feminists have long argued against, this article grapples with the complicated and complex negotiations embodied knowledge contributes to academic knowledge production. Embodied knowledge is not straightforward, yet should be acknowledged in our academic scholarship and debated about its potential for epistemological and ontological openings in our areas of research.     

‘Living Liminality’: everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland

Mechanisms to exclude people seen as ‘other’ which were once considered exceptional have now become normal. Global patterns of increased state security lead to people on the move or seeking protection being detained, dispersed and deported, their lives treated as ‘waste’ or ‘reject’. The Irish ‘Direct Provision’ system is part of an increasing network of liminal, or threshold, spaces, situated between and within borders, in which such people are detained or forced to wait in often inhumane conditions and often for years at a time. Based on ethnographic participatory photographic research, this article explores the ways in which imposed liminality plays out in people’s everyday lives in ‘Direct Provision’. The article looks at how liminality is lived in spatial and temporal terms and develops the idea of ‘ontological liminality’, a means of expressing the ways in which a chronic sense of fear, insecurity, invisibility and a highly controlled existence are lived and internalized; it also shows the ways in which people negotiate this imposed liminality through everyday practices, creating various forms of attachment, engagement and belonging. Exploring the concept of liminality in this context holds broader implications not only for understanding experiences of people waiting or held in the increasing number of refugee camps, border zones and detention centres in and beyond Europe, but also provides insight into the architectures of exclusion created by states to contain or exclude the ‘other’.     

The State,the Rebel and the Chief: Public Authority and Land Disputes in Assam,India

Based upon an ethnographic study of two land disputes in the rural Assamese district of Karbi Anglong (India), this article challenges the idea that the entry of new institutional players, with their multiple sets of rules, inevitably leads to open institutional conflict. Although a wide range of political actors are involved in the regulation of land tenure in Karbi Anglong, they cannot be regarded as institutional structures ready to undercut one another. As in other parts of Northeast India, none of the claimants of public power involved —‘the state’, ‘the rebel’ or ‘the chief’— attain full sovereignty, which forces them to exercise authority predominantly through practices of negotiation and accommodation, and only selective contestation. If open institutional conflict does occur, as in the Dhansiri forest and the Singhason plateau cases studied here, this is due to the fact that one of the institutional players has overstretched and attempted to exercise authority beyond its realm of power. This article thus argues for a more agency‐oriented method of analysis in the study of land relations. The focus on everyday interactions between ‘the state’, ‘the rebel’ and ‘the chief’ in Karbi Anglong is a first attempt in that regard.     

Mediating anti-political peace in Abidjan: Radio,place and power

After a decade of conflict (1999–2011), peace-building in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, focused on the local as a primary site of reconciliation. In addition to being local, peace was anti-political, seeking to separate place from politics as autonomous realms of public life. Through the example of local radio peace programmes, this article offers a critical, ethnographic account of anti-political peace as a spatial process. It links local peace and its justifications to the operations of governmental power, emphasising continuities of anti-political mediation and political domination. Such a historicised perspective challenges the framing of anti-political peace as the opposite of politics-as-conflict: they have long been two sides of the same coin in Abidjan and, as a binary “choice,” prevent the search for more democratic alternatives. Simultaneously, I argue that anti-political peace it is best approached as a field of contest. An ethnographic approach acknowledges the widespread rejection of politics in the Ivoirian metropolis, while resisting the collapse of institutional and everyday perspectives into a self-reinforcing consensus. I show that radio producers and Abidjanais residents could not quite pin down the meaning of politics, as that which ought to be shunned. Rather than bypass these hesitations through normative or ontological reasoning, I suggest (following others) that we might treat politics' irreducible polysemy as a source of continued struggle.     

Of Makerspaces and Hacklabs: Emergence,Experiment and Ontological Theatre at the Edinburgh Hacklab,Scotland

This paper commences a geographical engagement with makerspaces, hacklabs, and other workshop spaces which form part of a broader ‘maker movement’. It examines the arts of inquiry and experimentation found at one such site, drawing on ethnographic field work at the Edinburgh Hacklab, and makes connections with emerging themes of interest to geographers, including creativity, experiment, art, and nonhuman agency. Putting standard innovation-driven narratives of makerspaces into question, attention is instead turned to the events of emergent experimentation and creativity taking place in these spaces. To this end, Andrew Pickering’s concept of ‘ontological theatre’, describing powerful focal instances of agential symmetry between humans and nonhumans, is engaged with, in order to understand the links between Hacklab activities and emergent and complex aspects of nonhuman agency.     

Border historicity and ethnographic rupture: Pirates,Korean Kings and borderlanders in transnational Tsushima Island,Japan

Tsushima’s community festival commemorates Tsushima’s admirable borderland diplomacy in the pre-modern East Asian politics. This indigenous historicization in performance, nevertheless, fails to resonate with ethnographic reality: anthropological fieldwork revealed that local culture differs considerably from postcolonial ritual imaginings and historicity, illuminating a discontinuity between the past performed and the present observed. A rupture exists between borderland imagery as a coherent Japanese state boundary and the ethnographic reality of an uneven liminal frontier between Korea and Japan. In order to make sense of the ethnographic ruptures, this article constructs the border-centric ethnohistory through the lens of and experiences of the border, defying a state-centric past. I de-essentialize border-state relationship, accentuating border spontaneity and contingency between and beyond the power of sovereignty – a paradoxical Janus-faced process of contradiction and negotiation. I argue that it is Tsushima’s historical metamorphosis that stands out in history, not its subjugation to the power of either state.     

Domestic violence,safe space and vicarious abuse: inside a Pennsylvania Exchange and Visitation Center

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the ‘safe space’ of an exchange and visitation center, this article examines center staffs’ experiences of vicarious abuse. Vicarious abuse refers to the emotional effects that occur when someone – other than the victim in the relationship – experiences or witnesses the coercively controlling tactics of a domestic violence abuser. This article examines the limitations of safe space that fails to consider the physical and emotional security needs of all who utilize the space. By tracing the fears of staff who interact with abusers, this article also frames domestic violence as a public safety concern with implications beyond the intimate. With recognition that staff experiences of vicarious abuse differ from the embodied experiences of victims in abusive relationships, this article applies a feminist geographic analytic to examine how the ‘safe space’ of an exchange and visitation center enables fear and normalizes vicarious abuse.     

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.     

Digital heritage in a Melanesian context: authenticity,integrity and ancestrality from the other side of the digital divide

This article examines how digital heritage, in the form of 3D digital objects, fits into particular discourses around identity, ancestrality and cultural transmission in Melanesia. Through an ethnographic analysis of digital heritage use amongst the Nalik community in New Ireland (Papua New Guinea), it demonstrates how digital heritage is understood not in terms of deceit and a loss of authenticity, but instead, towards an understanding of authenticity in terms of completeness and integrity. A notion of completeness and integrity, I argue, has the effect of creating an authentic experience of the past for Nalik communities by bringing back museum objects (‘old’ objects) that have been dispersed amongst museums and heritage institutions worldwide. In tracing out the operations and effects of how a Melanesian community engages with 3D digital objects, this article offers unique ethnographic insights into digital heritage in ways that challenge widely-held assumptions about the heightened value placed on the original object over its digital counterpart.     

Perceptions of Consumption: Constituting Potters,Farmers and Blacksmiths in the Culinary Continuum in Eastern Tigray,Northern Highland Ethiopia

Despite the integrated and co-dependent nature of crafting vessels and tools and the production of cuisine, the entangled identities of artisan, farmer and cook are rarely envisioned as part of a ‘culinary continuum’ in which the production of culinary equipment, food and cuisine constitutes different categories of people. Studies of cuisine tend to focus on the role of cuisine in negotiating social status and power in feasting contexts or in constituting normative social identities of gender, personhood and ethnicity. Presented is a study of potters, blacksmiths and farmers in eastern Tigray, Ethiopia. Similar to marginalized and casted occupational specialists in many societies across Africa, eastern Tigray’s potters and smiths are marginalized, avoided and demeaned in contexts where food, drink or sex is shared. Normative gender identities are constituted in the enculturation of boys as they learn to grow food and in girls as they learn to cook. Men and women perform these gendered tasks in daily life using separate gendered technological practices and spaces. Potters and blacksmiths transgress normative gender expectations by using technological skills and space differently. The embodiment and performance of their respective crafts are perceived to transform them into different ontological categories of men and women who also are attributed with the dangerous capacity to consume fertility, landscape and people.     

Critical urban collaborative ethnographies: articulating community with Sappho for Equality in Kolkata,India

This article reflects on the notion of community through a collaborative ethnographic study with women loving women in Kolkata. Performing critical urban ethnographies in the global south and writing about sexualities that defy easy spatial categorizations are vital for those who seek to extend the scholarship of sexualities beyond the ‘gayborhood paradigm’ in the global north. This article focuses on how women loving women understand community and activism in Kolkata, a city that exists within tireless attempts at economic rejuvenation and vibrant modes of living. The question of community is moot in political activism around decriminalization of same-sex relationships and social legitimacy of the same. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic work with Sappho for Equality, an activist collective working with sexually marginalized women in eastern India, we engage with community as a space through which women loving women articulate marginalization and strategically connect with normative social institutions. I begin my discussion by introducing the notion of critical collaborative ethnography as a way to practice accountability in social research. Following that through select ethnographic vignettes, I demonstrate how a ‘queer community’ is not a predetermined end but is always in the making: a process that forms and dissipates within specific material contexts, activist practices, and social encounters.     

Anxiety geopolitics: Hybrid warfare,civilisational geopolitics,and the Janus-faced politics of anxiety

Working at the intersection of political geography and international relations, this article does two things. First, it theorises the relationship between geopolitics and anxiety. Second, it uses this conceptual lens to analyse and critique the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’. The conceptual part draws on Lacanian political theory and contributes to critical geopolitics, ontological security studies, and the literature on politics of anxiety. It is built around the notion of anxiety geopolitics, which denotes a discourse that promises to deal with social anxiety by providing geopolitical fixes to it, yet also ultimately fails in doing so. We then move to argue that ‘hybrid warfare’ is a prime case of such discourse. Using examples from the Czech Republic, we show how the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’ successfully connects different sorts of anxieties together and creates a sense of ontological security by linking them to familiar East/West civilisational geopolitics that points to Russia as the ultimate culprit. Yet, at the same time, the discourse simultaneously subverts itself by portraying ‘hybrid threats’ as too insidious, invisible and constantly shifting to be ever possibly durably resolved. We conclude that this makes ‘hybrid warfare’ self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical.     

Education for Social Change: Girls’ Secondary Schooling in Eritrea

One central pillar of the Eritrean revolution is the modernization of gender roles within Eritrean society, through education. This article, based on ethnographic style research, looks at the personal experiences of young women in Eritrean secondary schools. These girls’ journeys are discussed in terms of gender resistance, exemplifying modernity, and gender accommodation, exemplifying tradition. It is argued that these categories are not as dichotomous as claimed by the education policy agenda: in contrast, many young women strive to find a balance between the two. Ultimately, the success of the Eritrean model of the modernization of gender roles should be measured in terms of having created an environment in which women are able to strive to fulfil their aspirations.     

ROUTINE MAGIC,MUNDANE RITUAL: TOWARDS A UNIFIED NOTION OF DEPOSITIONAL PRACTICE

This article seeks to advance ongoing discussions within archaeology concerning the relationship between ritual and depositional practices. Previous researchers have argued that ‘structured’ or ‘placed’ deposits are the result of ritual activities, but also that in many societies the disposal of refuse is governed by social ‘rules’. Distinguishing ‘technical’ actions such as rubbish disposal from deliberately ‘placed’ deposits is extremely difficult, however, and reinforces modern dualistic thought. Instead, this article argues that there was a continuum of practices from formal and ritualized events through to small‐scale, informal acts undertaken on a routine basis, including everyday refuse discard. It also questions purely utilitarian interpretations of storage structures. Drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistorical examples, it explores case studies from the later prehistoric and Romano‐British periods of north central England, and concludes by proposing methodologies through which these practices can be explored more fully in the future.     

Rights,participatory spaces and the daily fabric of children and young people’s voices in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

The past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in public policies aimed at hearing children and young people’s voices, which typically entail creating supportive participatory spaces. While this political project is usually presented as a radical move towards a more inclusive society, it raises critical questions about whose voices are being represented, how, why, by whom and for whom. Drawing upon recent ethnographic research on childhood and youth policies in Switzerland, this article explores how children and young people’s voices are produced in concrete situations. It studies how the institutional and material characteristics of participatory spaces and situated interactions shape which voices will actually be heard. The research highlights that, despite their inclusive ambitions, participatory spaces paradoxically exclude young persons who fail to articulate, orally or in written, linguistically, morally or politically legitimate voices.     

Family assemblages

Abstract

In this paper, we develop and extend the emerging concept of ‘family assemblages’ to theorise the bodies, objects, habits, spaces, technologies, discourses and affects that participate in family life. We argue that existing conceptualisations of the family tend towards anthropocentrism, a sundering of the world into active human subjects and passive non-human objects. Assemblage theory offers a means of overcoming this anthropocentrism in order to generate richer accounts of the more-than-human dynamics of family life. From this perspective, anything that participates in the action of family life can be considered a member of the family assemblage, establishing the ontological ground for a non-anthropocentric and relational view of the family. We elaborate these arguments with reference to ethnographic research on fathers’ mental health conducted in Melbourne, Australia. Our ethnographic material provides a rich empirical context for the development of the notion of family assemblages. We conclude by suggesting that the concept of the family assemblage is not simply a provocation to the human-centric assumptions that guide most studies of family life, but may also prove useful for human and health geographers already attuned to the materiality of family life.     

From ethnographic knowledge to anthropological intelligence: An anthropologist in the office of strategic services in Second World War Africa

This article explores the overlapping modalities and practical purposes of anthropological ethnographic knowledge and political–military intelligence gathering – the commonalities as well as the boundaries between them – through an analysis of the career of the anthropologist Jack Sargent Harris (1912–2008), a secret operative for the United States’ Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War in Nigeria and South Africa. Calling upon archival and oral historical sources, the article relates Harris’s training in Boasian cultural anthropology and as a professional ethnographer of African societies and cultures to the ways he recruited informants, conducted surveillance, related to foreign Allied officials, utilized documentary evidence, and worked to establish authority and credibility in his wartime intelligence reporting. The article argues that political purpose is a central artefact of anthropological ethnography as it is in other ethnographic modalities even if the justifications for these endeavours remain distinct.     

Body Shopping: Reconfiguring geographies of fitness

This article critically interrogates the representational politics implicated in the metaphorical and material production of geographies of embodied fitness. It is intended as a contribution to the growing critical appreciation of the ways in which humans and non-humans are worked together in the production and reproduction of cyborg or hybrid geographies. It therefore mobilises the word fitness in the literal sense of a bodily state, but also in the metaphorical sense of how diverse 'things' come to fit together, how collections of bodies and machines come to be intelligible as inhabitable worlds. But, importantly, this article also argues that this sort of analysis is inadequate if it fails to engage with the ways that the production of human-machinic hybrids is also bound up in the enactment of geographies of ontological purity, a purity that is diffracted, at least in part, through categories such as gender and race. To illustrate this, the paper briefly outlines the ways in which the fitness equipment manufacturer NordicTrack attempts to produce geographies of fitness. Specifically, it suggests that while these geographies muddy the clarity of the boundaries between categories such as male/female, human/non-human, nature/culture, at the same time they work as forces of purification, subtly and not so subtly reinforcing these very same dualisms.     

The ‘drive and talk’ as ethnographic method

Anthropologists have long embraced the value of the ‘walk and talk’ ethnographic method, which is an interactive means of generating research insights in situ – on site. In this article, we propose that there is room for an expanded appreciation of the ‘drive and talk’ method. While driving and talking with their interlocutors, researchers can elicit information prompted by features in the landscape and the environment that might be otherwise forgotten or overlooked if the interview context was set in a fixed location. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, this article explains the empirical and phenomenological (sensorial and experiential) insights yielded by driving and talking with interlocutors in a South Australian wine-growing region. Automobility has the advantage over ambulation when it comes to accessing landscapes at the scale of the farm, which is where environmental management decisions are on heightened display.     

Scale, causality, complexity and emergence: rethinking scale's ontological significance

Scale remains a pivotal yet highly contentious concept in geography. I survey the lively discussions engaged in recently by many critical/radical geographers regarding the theoretical status of scale. While these discussions have been intellectually fruitful, I argue that much more needs to be said. Drawing from complex systems theory, I argue that scale should be understood as an ontological category essential to understanding causality. Revalorising Aristotle's four categories of cause – formal, final, material and efficient – from two centuries of positivist thinking facilitates this endeavour. Research on the relationship between university-based poultry scientists and the poultry industry illustrates the explanatory potential of poly-scalar analysis.