Prices and Politics in Andean Water Reforms

Water rights are best understood as politically contested and culturally embedded relationships among different social actors. In the Andean region, existing rights of irrigators’ collectives often embody historical struggles over resources, rules, authorities and identities. This article argues, first, that the neo‐liberal language that is increasingly used in water policies is ill‐suited for recognizing and dealing with these social, cultural and political dimensions of water distribution. Local water rules and rights, their dynamics, and the way they are linked to power relations, local identities and contextualized constructions of legitimacy, remain invisible in neo‐liberal policy discourse. Second, this same discourse actively destroys these local rights systems and presents itself as the only viable cure to the problems it generates. The ways in which local irrigators’ collectives attempt to protect their water security raise questions about the fundaments and effects of neo‐liberal water reforms, but these questions are neglected or poorly understood. This article proposes a more situated, layered and contextualized approach to Andean water questions, not just to improve representational accuracy but also to increase political visibility and legitimacy of peasant and indigenous water claims. What is needed is not just a new ‘typology’ or ‘taxonomy’ of water rights, but an alternative ‘water rights ontology’ that understands locally existing norms and water control practices, and the power relations that inform and surround them, as deeply constitutive of water rights.     

The Problem that Had a Name: French High‐Rise Developments and the Fantasy of a Suburban Homemaker Pathology, 1954–73

Within Western Europe, France had the largest and longest postwar commitment to private social‐market housing inside dense residential suburbs called grands ensembles d'habitation (GEs). Social‐Catholic activists and planners viewed the GEs as facilitating women's maternal mission within egalitarian communities, but others across the political spectrum saw them as pathological spaces, especially for women who supposedly contracted a psychological disease dubbed ‘sarcellite’, after France's flagship GE of Sarcelles. This article analyses how a phantasmatic gendered discourse of housing disaster, first circulated by the media, strategically influenced gendered actors’ residential desires and legitimised policy shifts toward single‐family housing. The discourse of sarcellite reveals how housing realities and imaginaries shaped gendered claims to housing as an evolving aspect of social citizenship. The article considers both suburban women's demands for subsidised childcare and other services and the nuances and contradictions of the evolving discourse of sarcellite.     

‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence,Non‐Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era

This article explores how peaceful protest and armed resistance reflected and shaped certain gender identities in the southern US civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and reveals much about the significance of violence for ‘marginalised masculinities’ within the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Deep South, civil rights organisers found that their non‐violent strategy's connotations of effeminate submissiveness hampered attempts to win over black men to the movement's cause. Conversely, those African Americans who decided to use armed force to protect the movement against racist attacks were proud of their ability to defend themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post‐1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the inter‐relationship between self‐defence and gender. In the southern movement, the affirmation of manhood remained a by‐product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, self‐defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other racist oppression, ultimately became mainly a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement's affirmative message countered stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists, but the gendered discourse it produced also tended to perpetuate black women's subordination.     

Modernity and the Other Woman: Gender and National Identity in the Egyptian Women's Press: 1952–1967

This article looks at depictions of non‐Egyptian women in the Egyptian women's press during the Nasser period, from 1952–1967. A regular and recurring feature of the Egyptian women's press during the 1950s and 1960s, representations of foreign women were products of both global and local struggles. Enabled by a world order increasingly transformed by the political voices of colonial and post‐colonial subjects, such representations were also bound up in Egyptian debates about gender subjectivities, the consequences of state and nation building, and the boundaries of national identity. While they can be read as contributing to the creation of what Chandra Mohanty has called ‘an imagined community of third world oppositional struggles’, they also suggest much about how the liberating, emancipatory possibilities of post‐colonial/anti‐imperialist projects limit their own possibility for realisation.     

Gendered Visibilities and the Dream of Transparency: The Chinese‐Indonesian Rape Debate in Post‐Suharto Indonesia

How does the seen produce the unseen? And what happens when the unseen makes a bid to emerge from its occlusion? This paper examines the gendered visuality of the Reformasi crisis in Indonesia in 1998, juxtaposing the visibility of male‐on‐male violence at student demonstrations with the invisibility of violence against (feminised) Chinese‐Indonesians and, in particular, raped Chinese‐Indonesian women. The discussion focuses on activists’ attempts to establish ‘proof’ that these rapes did occur, government attempts to discredit their evidence, and the circulation of false photographs of the rapes on the internet. (An unremarked irony of this falsification of evidence was that it was made possible by the pre‐existence of an archive of sexually violent images on pornographic sites depicting ‘Asian schoolgirls’.) The paper argues that this particular debate over credibility, witnessing and proof needs to be seen within a wider popular Indonesian discourse on the status of evidence, the privileged place of the photograph within it, and the archive of images of (male) students and heroic male‐on‐male violence that helped shape what people could ‘see’ as meaningful political action and recognisable state violence. It also comments on the evidentiary status of witnessing and embodied experience in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction.     

The death of the right‐to‐die campaigners (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The ‘right‐to‐die’ or assisted suicide debate in the UK has recently been dominated by high‐profile litigation which has brought to public attention stories of individual suffering. The most recent case is that of Tony Nicklinson who, as a result of his permanent and total paralysis which he said made his life ‘intolerable’, wanted the courts to allow a doctor to end his life. Only six days after a Judicial Review refused his request, Tony died of ‘natural’ causes. This article compares the presentation by the media of Tony's requested death with his actual death and discusses what this reveals more generally about the way in which the right‐to‐die debate is presented to the public. It argues that in a politicised debate in which the personal stories of the disabled‐dying are given airtime because of their didactic or symbolic potential, actual death becomes less important than the rights‐rhetoric surrounding death.     

‘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.     

NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives,Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.     

Public anthropology and the financial crisis (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When anthropologists write about finance and the economy, their publications seldom reach audiences as wide as those of economists or journalists. Is there a space for anthropologists in public debates about our era's acute economic dilemmas? The short answer should be yes, partly because anthropologists are trained to probe social silences and make the invisible visible, and because we reject the pitfalls of Econ 101, oversimplifications that pervade public discourse. Academic anthropologists can draw lessons from what we might term ‘public economics’, as well as from the writings of Gillian Tett, an award‐winning financial columnist trained in anthropology. Perhaps we can also learn a little from tricksters – or from satirical activists who deploy irony, caricature, and paradox as sharp instruments in this age of austerity and billionaires. As we analyze finance and the economy in the aftermath of a financial meltdown whose causes and policy implications are intensely debated, our challenge still is to satisfy journalists' appetite for sound‐bite narratives without sacrificing nuance, historical contingency, and complexity.     

Alternative Trajectories: A comment on Miguel Vale de Almeida in this issue (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This is a comment on the narrative by Miguel Vale de Almeida in this issue. It points at difficulties of escaping from the dominant Anglo‐Saxon narrative on gay and lesbian experiences faced by those who undertake the issue of gay rights in countries outside the Anglo‐vernacular world. It also indicates the entanglement of the ‘gay rights’ discourse in spatial representations underpinned by the tendency to exercise the ‘othering’ and based on the secularist approach.     

Empire‐nation: national and imperial discourses in England

When the states of England and Scotland combined in 1707, conditions were created whereby English nationalism could merge into British nationalism. With the expansion of empire, English nationalism was expressed through imperial‐national discourses allowing English nationalists to claim non‐English space when articulating what might be best understood as an Anglo‐British nationalism. Accordingly, such discourses largely ‘hid’ what one might now understand as ‘English nationalism’ within a ‘British’ discourse of empire. The case of England illustrates that imperial discourses can become intimately bound up with the ‘national’ discourse of the nations at the core of the imperial structures. Accordingly, it is here argued that imperial and national discourse are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are able to feed into each other, affecting the manner in which ideas of the nation and empire are conceived and articulated.     

Täuschend ähnlich – Bemerkungen zur Geschichte des Modellexperiments

Deceptively Similar. Remarks on the History of Model Experiments. The article argues for a reconsideration of what has been called ‘model experiments’ or ‘mimetic experiments’. After providing a short overview of the historical developments and the occurences of such types of experiments, three aspects pertaining to their practical functions are discussed. First, the aspect of control: Model experiments are often employed to get a grasp on phenomena that are otherwise beyond the control of human actors. Second, their aesthetic dimension: Model experiments often employ aesthetic strategies that, far from being epistemic obstacles, establish their function as models and may generate new areas of research. Third, meta‐theories: The practice of experimenting on models is often accompanied by discussions about their representativeness. Albeit triggered by problems in local contexts, this self‐reflective discourse did acquire a more general relevance with the formulation of scaling laws in the 19th century.     

Aims and contradictions of cultural diversity policies in the arts: a case study of the Rich Mix Centre in East London

In recent years, the concept of diversity has become prominent in cultural policy, echoing community arts philosophies of the 1960s and 1970s that questioned the notion of universal artistic value and argued for greater recognition of the relationship between cultural identity and inequality. Cultural diversity policies today implicitly challenge the liberal‐humanist discourse of ‘the best’, and emphasise what is ‘relevant’ to particular communities. Official policy rhetoric can often hide contradictions that are only apparent in practice. How does ‘diversity’ shape the way organisations engage with audiences and does this contradict the still present discourse of ‘universalism’, with its emphasis on value judgements? This paper explores this tension through the study of Rich Mix, a multi‐functional arts centre in London's multi‐ethnic East End. It argues that Rich Mix is caught between discourses of universalism and diversity, leading to confusion over the project's rationale and ambivalence amongst artists about how their art is judged.     

‘Mr Neville did all in [his] power to assist me’: A. P. Elkin,A. O. Neville and Anthropological Research in Northwest Western Australia, 1927–1928

From the commencement of his field research A. P. Elkin sought to bring a practical application to his work on Aborigines. He positioned anthropology as an enabling science which had the capacity to reduce conflict, violence and misunderstanding on the frontier. He stated that the ‘object of his mission [field work]’ was both ‘academic and practical’. He declared that the knowledge gained through anthropological field research would serve not only narrow academic aims but would also be put at the service of government. Anthropology's purpose was to inform and influence the formulation of government Aboriginal policy. This paper examines Elkin's first encounter and interaction with government through his relationship with A. O. Neville, chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia. It illustrates the beginnings of what Gillian Cowlishaw has called a discourse of helping, that is Australian anthropologists in the 1930s constructed a discourse about their usefulness to government. It was a discourse which seemingly lacked critical distance from the policies of government. I argue that this discourse of helping government was heavily influenced by Elkin once he became professor of anthropology but it can be discovered in this earlier period. I conclude by discussing how the implications of this discourse were played out in the decade of the 1930s. The focus of this paper is on Elkin and his relationship with Neville and the consequences of this relationship for Elkin's later actions.     

Citizenship at war: Passports and nationality in the 2008 Russian‐Georgian conflict (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

By analyzing the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, this paper stretches the limits of the anthropology of war and citizenship. Trying to overcome anthropologists' usual unease about commenting on ‘big topics’, I examine citizenship policies ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ that potentially lead to conflict and war. Special attention is paid to the role of nationality as a crucial feature of post‐Soviet citizenship, and to citizenship as an effective means of neo‐imperial expansion. In my conclusion, I contextualize my findings within anthropological debates about citizenship and argue that the recent stress on rights and entitlements needs to be balanced by an analysis of the repressive dimensions of citizenship regimes.     

The ‘Global’ versus the ‘Local’: Cognitive Processes of Kin Determination in Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT Morgan and his informants' interpretation of Australian social categories as ‘marriage classes’ has survived in Dumont's (and Viveiros de Castro's) distinction of a ‘local’ (Dravidian systems) and a ‘global’ (Australian systems) formula. This paper explains that the ‘global formula’ is neither a necessary nor an applied device in Australian kin category determination, even when genealogical memory is short and when there is a non‐limitation of range in the extension of categories. Instead, a heuristic model, which is called the relational triangle, is proposed. This model depicts the procedure through which Australian people pragmatically determine and extend kin categories. Moreover, it also offers a visualisation of the cognitive schema and processes framing discourse and behaviour in relation to kinship and draws some parallels with Greenberg's hypotheses on markedness in kinship classes.     

Rehoboth Baster,Namibian or Namibian Baster? An analysis of national discourses in Rehoboth,Namibia*

Abstract. The point of departure of this article is a conception of nations as discursive constructions of ‘us’/‘here’ in relation to ‘them’/‘there’. The empirical analysis examines three national discourses in Rehoboth, Namibia: (1) a discourse on the ethnic Baster nation; (2) a discourse on the Namibian nation‐state and (3) a discourse on the nation‐state containing a variety of ethnic nations (‘the rainbow nation’). The first discourse is characterised by a primordial belief about Rehoboth Basters, their homeland and their ties to this homeland. This conception is challenged by the discourse on the Namibian nation‐state. Here, it is argued that ‘ethnic nations’ are the creation of colonialism; with Namibia's new independence, it is seen as necessary to tear down previous ‘ethnic nations’ and build up a new, united nation‐state. The rainbow discourse attempts to integrate the other two discourses through ideas about overlapping nations, where the boundaries that separate ‘us’/‘here’ from ‘them’/‘there’ overlap and are inclusive rather than exclusive.     

Challenges in ‘Translating’ Human Rights: Perceptions and Practices of Civil Society Actors in Western India

Rights‐based approaches have become prevalent in development rhetoric and programmes in countries such as India, yet little is known about their impact on development practice on the ground. There is limited understanding of how rights work is carried out in India, a country that has a long history of indigenous rights discourse and a strong tradition of civil society activism on rights issues. In this article, we examine the multiple ways in which members of civil society organizations (CSOs) working on rights issues in the state of Rajasthan understand and operationalize rights in their development programmes. As a result of diverse ‘translations’ of rights, local development actors are required to bridge the gaps between the rhetoric of policy and the reality of access to healthcare on the ground. This article illustrates that drawing on community‐near traditions of activism and mobilization, such ‘translation work’ is most effective when it responds to local exigencies and needs in ways that the universal language of human rights and state development discourse leave unmet and unacknowledged. In the process, civil society actors use rights‐based development frameworks instrumentally as well as normatively to deepen community awareness and participation on the one hand, and to fix the state in its role as duty bearer of health rights, on the other hand. In their engagement with rights, CSO members work to reinforce but also challenge neoliberal modes of health governance.     

The Politics of Disciplining Water Rights

This article examines how the legal systems of Andean countries have dealt with the region's huge plurality of local water rights, and how official policies to ‘recognize’ local rights and identities harbour increasingly subtle politics of codification, confinement and disciplining. The autonomy and diversity of local water rights are a major hindrance for water companies, elites and formal rule‐enforcers, since State and market institutions require a predictable, uniform playing field. Complex local rights orders are seen as irrational, ill‐defined and disordered. Officialdom cannot simply ignore or oppress the ‘unruliness and disobedience’ of local rights systems: rather it ‘incorporates’ local normative orders that have the capacity to adequately respond to context‐based needs. This article examines a number of evolving, overlapping legal domination strategies, such as the ‘marrying’ of local and official legal systems in ways that do not challenge the legal and power hierarchy; and reviews the ways in which official regulation and legal strategies deny or take into consideration local water rights repertoires, and the politics of recognition that these entail. Post‐colonial recognition policies are not simply responses to demands by subjugated groups for greater autonomy. Rather, they facilitate the water bureaucracy's political control and help neoliberal sectors to incorporate local water users’ rights and organizations into the market system — even though many communities refuse to accept these policies of recognition and politics of containment.     

Human Rights and the Pink Tide in Latin America: Which Rights Matter?

Latin America witnessed the election of ‘new Left’ governments in the early 21^st century that, in different ways, sought to open a debate about alternatives to paradigms of neoliberal development. What has this meant for the way that human rights are understood and for patterns of human rights compliance? Using qualitative and quantitative evidence, this article discusses how human rights are imagined and the compliance records of new Left governments through the lens of the three ‘generations’ of human rights — political and civil, social and economic, and cultural and environmental rights. The authors draw in particular on evidence from Andean countries and the Southern Cone. While basic civil and individual liberties are still far from guaranteed, especially in the Andean region, new Left countries show better overall performances in relation to socio‐economic rights compared to the past and to other Latin American countries. All new Left governments also demonstrate an increasing interest in ‘third generation’ (cultural and environmental) rights, though this is especially marked in the Andean Left. The authors discuss the tensions around interpretations and categories of human rights, reflect on the stagnation of first generation rights and note the difficulties associated with translating second and third generation rights into policy.