Keeping the bureaucratic peace

'Audit culture and the politics of accountability, new managerialism, and neoliberal governance', American Anthropological Association Invited Roundtable Session, Chicago, 21 November 2003     

Service as a Subversive Activity: On the centrality of service to an academic career

In the normative view of academic life, service is presented as an unfortunate inconvenience, a dull distraction from the real work of the academy, which is taken to be teaching and research. Service is also presented to the novice academic as an activity that is completely unconnected with the real work of teaching and research. Jan Monk has made service central to her academic career. A brief overview of her service activities shows how closely intertwined they have been with her scholarship and teaching. Moreover, I believe that Jan's service work demonstrates not only how service is central to a vibrant, meaningful, and rich academic life; it is also an essential vehicle for creating change within, as well as outside of, the academy.     

‘Who is Lhakpa Sherpa?’ circulating subjectivities within the global/local terrain of Himalayan mountaineering

This paper traces different formations of subjectivities negotiated within the transnational circuits of mountaineering media and cultural production. Drawing from ethnographic research in Nepal and Canada in 2000, I examine various representations of the second Nepali woman to climb Everest in order to demonstrate the linkages between scales and geographies of media narratives and subjectivities. Appearing in newspapers, a research interview with myself (a foreign researcher) and on the Internet, these differently scaled narratives render Lhakpa Sherpa in terms of local and global subjectivities, which shift after her successful climb, and are complex and dynamic. I engage with feminist critiques of globalization to encourage a view of globalization as enacted rather than merely resisted and to analyse ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ as inseparable and contingent and productive of particular gendered subjectivities. The disjuncture between her popularity in Nepal and the lack of knowledge about her in Canada reveals the uneven processes of globalization wherein Lhakpa Sherpa struggles against gender and racial politics in mountaineering at the same time that she is privileged to climb as a sponsored mountaineer, a new subjectivity for a Nepali mountaineer.     

Annie Moore and the archives of displacement: towards an immigrant history of the present

Annie Moore, the first immigrant to enter the USA through the Ellis Island immigrant processing station, stands as an originary figure of the so‐called golden age of European immigration to the USA in the late nineteenth century. The contemporary archivization of the Irish immigrant Annie Moore in the Ellis Island Museum, New York and the Cobh Harbour Heritage Centre in County Cork, Ireland repeats the democratic rhetoric of immigration which underpins the foundation of the USA, as well as the national imaginary of Ireland. Yet in so doing, this archivization effaces the hierarchies of race and class that have historically underpinned the democratic rhetoric of immigration. With reference to Jacques Derrida's work on the archive and hospitality, this article expands on a performance‐based critical art intervention into the archivization of Annie Moore entitled ‘Calling Up Annie Moore’. Focusing on the blindspots, ellipses and discontinuities which the archive represses, the article traces the different histories and experiences of immigration which the art intervention disclosed.     

The State of Research on Gender and Political Participation

Woodrow Wilson declared the early Gilded Age to be a time of Congressional Government, when the legislature “reigned supreme” and was the federal polity's “motivating force.” Yet that same Congress, and era, have been immortalized pejoratively as bastions of corruption; of politicos, spoils–and, most especially, of omnipotently evil lobbyists. This essay argues that both lobbying and the notoriety it aroused in the Grant years were essentially by-products of systemic change. Corruption did exist, but much of what contemporaries saw as illicit was merely new; neither Washington nor the polity as a whole had yet devised mechanisms, or even language, appropriate to emerging conditions. In fact, lobbying was a necessary and even beneficial force in post-Civil War America, one that actually helped officials and citizens to function as the scope, procedures, and agenda of governance underwent dramatic transformation.     

A case history in the transformation of rural Europe: Fuenterrabía

Davydd J. Greenwood. Unrewarding Wealth: The Commercialization and Collapse of Agriculture in a Spanish Basque Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. x + 223 pp. Tables, figures, epilogue, notes, references, appendix, and index. $16.95.     

The municipal elections of March 2001

This article analyses Algeria's ongoing 'civil war' through the lens of contemporary Algerian theatre. Specifically, it examines the relationship between Algeria's unsuccessful transition to democratic, religious pluralism and Alek Baylee Toumi's 1996 play, Madah-Sartre . Among the prominent themes covered are the issues of gender equality as represented in the efforts of Khalida Messaoudi (Toumi's sister) to resist the 1984 Algerian Family Code; the rise of Islamic radicalism; the legacy of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir within contemporary Algerian intellectual and political communities; the problem of Islamic and state-sponsored terrorism; and the effects of the Islamic radicals' policies of assassinating Algerian intellectuals on the Algerian community in the diaspora.