Indexing the great ledger of the community: urban house numbering, city directories, and the production of spatial legibility

Despite the recent focus on the spatial politics of calculation, few studies have explored the historical geography of house numbering, a spatial practice that has arguably been one of the principal strategies for rationalizing the geographic spaces of everyday life over the course of the last two centuries. This paper provides the beginnings of a critical spatial history of street and house numbering in the gridded cities of the United States since the eighteenth century. City directory publishers were among the leading proponents of numbering houses at a time when many local governments had yet to firmly commit to systematic house numbering as an essential responsibility of the local state. I therefore examine the connection between the publishing of city directories and the development of urban house numbering systems, both of which were integral to the production of spatial legibility and the individualization of the urban population. The notion of viewing the city as a ‘text’ is historicized through a critical analysis of the modernist comparison of urban space to a recordkeeping book. The paper concludes by tracing the institutionalization of house numbering as a practice of spatial governmentality.     

Blue governmentality: Elemental activism with conservation technologies on plundered seas

For the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the atmosphere and ocean are channels for movement that are to be used and overcome in direct actions to protect marine environments. To accomplish these missions, they deploy a fleet of ships, helicopters, and drones that intervene to stop violations of conservation laws. In this way, oceanic elements—waves, winds, icebergs, and storms—mediate conservation and conservation technologies. The elements and the technologies that Sea Shepherd exploit both inhibit and make conservation possible.This paper argues that the drone is an exteriorization of the human body whose liberatory potentials are mediated by the atmosphere and ocean. Through ethnographic, textual, and videographic analysis, this article explores blue governmentality—how the azure sky and cyan ocean and the technologies that flow through these elements at once afford and constrain the control of biopower. Understanding blue governmentality means appreciating how the elements mediate movement, communication, and life itself. It requires comprehending how technologies emerge from the body, extend political intentionality, work across the elements, and network with other technologies. This article challenges conservation geography to see governmentality not as a totalizing force but one that is tempered by elemental mediations, technological affordances, and human fallibility.     

Governing relations between people and things: Citizenship, territory, and the political economy of petroleum in Ecuador

Ecuador is the fifth largest producer of petroleum in Latin America. Petroleum has brought prosperity to many Ecuadorians, effectively becoming the nation's most important natural resource. It also has inspired intense political mobilizations. While the best known of these are led by Amazonian indigenous peoples, petroleum has also generated other important but not as well-recognized mobilizations. This paper focuses on the political mobilization of Amazonian agricultural settlers and petroleum workers in relation to petroleum. While these actors do not share common livelihood or cultural struggles, the discourses that frame their mobilizations in relation to petroleum have common elements. Their dissatisfaction with the political economy of petroleum in the 1990s and 2000s, for example, generated high profile protests and civil unrest that centered not on stopping production, but on demanding a more ‘responsible management’ of petroleum by the state. The paper brings together political economy, mechanisms of subject formation, and the material qualities of petroleum to explore how petroleum production in Ecuador has shaped common views on citizenship among these actors that center on petroleum as a site of regulation of social life.     

Hybrid governmentality in practice: Territoriality and biopolitics in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh

This article discusses how the Rohingyas – a forcibly displaced community transformed the everyday lives and the territory of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Since August 2017, Cox's Bazar, a borderland of Bangladesh is hosting more than a million of non-citizens within 32 camps in its two subdistricts. Based on mobile ethnographic research, I argue – a. borderlands are sites where politics of territory intersects politics of identity. The Rohingyas' statelessness and perpetuated marginalization are the outcome of this politics between identity and territory of the nation-states. b. The state prioritizes the security of its citizens from the refugees. Consequentially, the state enacts combined mechanisms of biopolitical and territorial practices that physically demarcate the refugee camps and socially segregate the refugees. I introduce this combination of mechanisms as hybrid governmentality. In Cox's Bazar, the key mechanisms of hybrid governmentality include - labelling refugees based on political rationale and providing them with identification cards, enacting street level surveillance to ensure confinement of the refugees, and maintaining everyday separation between refugees and the citizens.     

Introduction: Anthropology,Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.     

The politics of self-help: The Rockefeller Foundation,philanthropy and the ‘long’ Green Revolution

While scholars of contemporary philanthropy have observed a concerted interest in the promotion of ‘self-help,’ little has been said about the political history of this investment and its significance in determining both domestic and international development priorities. We locate this modern conceptualisation of self-help in early twentieth-century philanthropic practice that sought to ‘gift’ to individuals and communities the precious habit of self-reliance and social autonomy. The Rockefeller Foundation promoted rural development projects that deliberately sought to ‘emancipate’ the tradition-bound peasant, transforming him or her into a productive, enterprising subject. We begin by documenting their early agricultural extension work, which attempted to spark agrarian change in the US South through the inculcation of modern habits and aspirations among farmers and their families. These agrarian schemes illustrate the newfound faith that ‘rural up-lift’ could only be sustained if farming communities were trained to ‘help themselves’ by investing physically and psychologically in the process of modernisation. We then locate subsequent attempts to incentivise and accelerate international agricultural development within the broader geopolitical imperatives of the Green Revolution and the Cold War. While US technical assistance undoubtedly sought to prevent political upheaval in the Third World, we argue that Rockefeller-led modernisation projects, based on insights gleaned from behavioural economics, championed a model of human capital – and the idea of ‘revolution within’ – in order to contain the threat of ‘revolution without’. Approaching agricultural development through this problematisation of the farmer reveals the ‘long history’ of the Green Revolution – unfolding from the domestic to the international and from the late nineteenth century to the present – as well as the continuing role of philanthropy in forging a new global order.