Authors:Latif Tas Pages: 9 - 16 Abstract: This article examines how a “normal” day passes under a conflicted and authoritarian governmentality in an ethnically diverse city in Turkey. When there is no space or tolerance for different ethnic and religious practices, where oppression against Kurds and other minority groups has become almost normal, pluralism is pushed underground. In this article, the examination of the state and understanding everyday life is mainly derived from ethnographic field research among regular people in the city of Mardin. The perspectives of the oppressor and oppressed in people’s voiced accounts are not just a reflection of the political climate and lives being lived, but also offer a historical account of how future generations will see the politics of our current times. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719165 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Rosa Burç Pages: 17 - 26 Abstract: This article discusses the transformative potential of Turkey’s pro-democracy movement which has emerged out of a long history of Kurdish political struggle. It looks at the development of a two-fold strategy that understands internal transformation as a precondition for democratic transition in Turkey. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has been the most recent iteration of this strategic and ideological reconfiguration. Built on in-depth interviews with key movement actors, this article examines (1) the historical context out of which the HDP materialized, (2) the politics introduced as democratic autonomy, (3) the transformative potential of the party’s women’s politics, (4) the limits of debates on “Türkiyelileşme,” and (5) the role of the non-Kurdish opposition. Assessing the opportunities and impasses, I argue that, despite the recent state-orchestrated clampdown on Kurdish politics and its sites of articulation, Kurdish transformative politics remain a key asset for democratic transition in Turkey, though facing internal and external challenges. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719163 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Mehmet Kurt Pages: 27 - 32 Abstract: In this article, I explore the role of religious discourses and practices in the diasporic Kurdish-Turkish conflict and investigate the ways in which presentations of the political conflict has been disseminated and reproduced via Turkish mosques located in Europe and the United States. Through extended ethnographic research, I examine the imagination of Turkish political theology and the exclusion of the Kurds from the imagined transnational Muslim ummah for which Turkish Islamist discourse promotes the Turkish state as the flag-bearer. I demonstrate that the existence of the Kurds, by virtue of their exclusion from this imaginary worldview, unravels the limitations of Turkish pan-Islamist discourse. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719164 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Mucahit Bilici Pages: 33 - 38 Abstract: In this article I discuss the ways in which the Turkish state uses Islam as a weapon to delegitimize and render unnecessary Kurdish distinctiveness and associated rights claims. Drawing on the particular discourse employed by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a series of political rallies in Diyarbakır, the symbolic capital of Turkish Kurdistan, I highlight key patterns in the instrumentalization of religion to maintain Turkish dominance. The Kurdish question as it is experienced by Kurds of Turkey, contrary to expectations, is not at all a matter of “discrimination” and “otherization.” Rather, the Kurdish problem arises from a lack of recognition of the Kurds as a separate self. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/718932 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Ruken Isik Pages: 39 - 45 Abstract: The Turkish state strictly bans funerals and other forms of public mourning for Kurdish guerrillas, considering them to be a threat to the sovereign state. Victims of honor crimes are also denied proper burials, as they are accused of “ruining” their family’s reputation. Since the 2000s, Kurdish women activists in Turkey have gone against the grain by holding funerals for both groups of women, as well as public protests against the necropolitics of the state and patriarchal powers which establish exceptions to control life and death. This paper analyzes the ways in which women activists take action by claiming these bodies and reimagining grief and mourning as affects of social justice. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/718557 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Yancey Orr, Raymond Orr Pages: 46 - 62 Abstract: The emerging movement to decolonize the sciences, social sciences, and humanities has emphasized the differences between Indigenous and Western scientific ways of knowing. Paradoxically, emphasizing the difference between these systems has also been the principle undergirding modern science’s claim to being a uniquely valid means of knowledge creation. Yet as each approach focused solely on contrasting Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing, potential similarities between these knowledge systems may have been ignored. One such oversight is the use of deception by each system, which is central to experimental research designs in the social and psychological sciences, and in American Indian trickster stories. In narratives recounted throughout American Indian societies, tricksters act from malevolence, greed, or generosity and are often catalysts in knowledge production. Similarly, it is the “experimental process” found in Western scientific systems that deceives subjects in order to elicit insights into causality, and such have been the results, that it has become a preeminent empirical method in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719574 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Óscar Muñoz Morán Pages: 63 - 76 Abstract: In the Quechua community of Coipasi (Bolivia) relations between the living and the dead (almas—souls) swing between excess and containment, remembrance and distancing. The aim of this article is to show that the emotivity of the spirits plays a fundamental role in these relations. Like all matters pertaining to the nature of spirits, this emotivity is excessive but also, and most importantly, it appears to the extent that the souls of the dead feel alienated from family and community social practices. This is reflected in the local notion of “nonremembrance” (mana yuyacunchu). I therefore suggest that an ethnography of the emotivity of spirits offers a better understanding of such common concepts in the anthropology of the Andes as commensality, excess, and the very notion of the soul. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719236 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Koen de Munter Pages: 77 - 92 Abstract: This article revolves around the theoretical and ethnographic experiences of an ongoing anthropological study with contemporary Aymara families about how “education by attention” is produced throughout their cosmopraxis. At the same time, it explores how an anthropology of life and in particular Tim Ingold’s fight for a recalibration of anthropology in a biosocially integrated sense are of intrinsically political-ethical interest, considering the messy and misaligned times we humans have worked ourselves into. Beyond romantic interpretations and essentialist representations, a committed inquiry into indigenous practices that habilitate people for ecological-cultural “correspondence” and affective reciprocity—uywasiña—enables the exploration of important educational attitudes and habits that can lead to necessary realignments of human relations with the world/earth. I discuss these enskilling practices through a conversation with theorizations of attentionality, agencement (the “doing-undergoing” of habit, in Ingold’s terms), and affectionality. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719382 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Christian Tym Pages: 93 - 108 Abstract: The critique of belief as an analytical tool in anthropology has overshadowed belief as an ethnographic reality. This article short-circuits these debates over the politics of belief by elaborating ethnographically the indigenous use of the concept—literally the Spanish “creer” and “creencia”—in Shuar territory in post-conversion Amazonia. It shows that contemporary Shuar “belief” supersedes assumptions about belief as an epistemic commitment. The Shuar concept combines the Christian emphasis on conversion with a relatively stable ancestral notion about the meaning and social significance of knowledge, one that emphasizes its instrumentality, as opposed to the ideology of the truth-seeking cogito striving to make accurate representations of the world. These arguments are advanced by presenting ethnographic material from two distinct sites in Shuar territory in southeastern Ecuador: one in which most people claim to “believe” in shamanic healing and ancestral visionary practices, and one in which they do not. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/718962 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Bo Chen Pages: 109 - 125 Abstract: Vdra-ba society in western Sichuan, China, has been represented by evolutionist Chinese scholars as a primitive matrilineal society that was in transition to a patrilineal system, and it has been likened to that of the Na/Moso. This is a misleading characterization. Vdra-ba society has no tribal organizations and was critically shaped by the overarching Tú-sī system for many centuries. The kinship system is centered on the “house,” and is better described as undifferentiated. The gá-yì (visiting) relationship, with marriage in rare occasions, and conventions of adoption, allows their ideal of a female line to be practiced and transformed in the house into an undifferentiated form of inheritance and accession. There is no descent group. The Vdra-ba kindred, however, is individual-centered rather than ancestor-centered, with its bilateral character. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/718687 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Malvika Sharma Pages: 126 - 140 Abstract: This article, through various ethnographic encounters, highlights the advantages and explores the challenges of fieldwork for a female researcher studying what might be taken to be her own community. Doing a native anthropology in a marginal borderland that has not been explored anthropologically before turns out to be an interesting experience. On the one hand, the identity of being a native of the region carves out ways in the field that help her overcome barriers; on the other hand, the same identity, through her common ethnic and cultural belonging, kinship relations, and local familiarity restricts her in many ways. Through explorations of her identity in the field along gender, caste, class, and ethnic lines, the work highlights how sometimes she is an insider, sometimes an outsider, and sometimes a partial-insider-outsider, thereby collapsing the strict division of a researcher into categories of an outsider and an insider. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719413 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Muhammad Ali Nasir, Muhammad Ahmed Bin Pages: 141 - 153 Abstract: As youngsters in a Pakistani megacity participate in a reading group to discuss the end of time by looking at the eschatological prophecies in Islamic religious sources, they come to relate apparently trivial political actions such as wall-painting, placard-holding, and pamphlet-distributing to the question of justice. We suggest in this article that this complex phenomenon can be best understood through the concept of enaction, as ethical actions are seen to enact a context suffused with political and cosmological considerations. Accordingly, our discussion positions itself against those works in the anthropology of ethics that primarily view such ethical actions in terms of self-cultivation. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719412 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Zachary M. Howlett Pages: 154 - 169 Abstract: This article argues that China’s National College Entrance Exam, the Gaokao, provides routinized charismatic ratification of elite merit and state authority. In his writings, Max Weber differentiates between original and routinized charisma. Whereas original charisma disrupts social orders, routinized charisma legitimizes them by preserving a spark of the extraordinary and the divine. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Chinese high schools, this article examines a mode of charisma preservation that Weber ignored: routinized fateful rites of passage like the Gaokao. Despite being routinized, such events are chancy, their outcomes contingent and undetermined. This indeterminacy is indexed by magical concepts like fate and luck, which lend charismatic authority a divine imprimatur. This analysis illuminates the importance of indeterminacy in understanding the compulsion of charisma, contributes to understanding the dialectical interplay between original and routinized charisma, and explains the Gaokao’s magical-charismatic role in preserving the moral authority of China’s ruling elite. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719267 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Zdeněk Konopásek Pages: 170 - 183 Abstract: According to Latour, religion and science have nothing in common. The two are successful (or failing) in quite different ways. Religiousness is not aimed at fact-making, but at presence-making, he says. To critically reconsider these ideas, I discuss the case study of Marian apparitions in Litmanová, Slovakia. The study suggests a more complicated picture by not focusing on pure and ready-made religion, but rather on religion in the making, a kind of “almost-religion.” It shows how the reality of apparitions, initially of quite unclear status, was becoming more and more religious. Fact-making and fact-checking clearly belonged to this trajectory and have never stopped being relevant. Nonetheless, together with how the apparition was progressively becoming truly religious (or religiously true), Latourian presence-making was gaining in importance. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/718933 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:John Hutnyk Pages: 184 - 197 Abstract: Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives that have particular importance for port city heritage redevelopment, while asking how ethical ethnographic research can still be done. It evaluates ongoing research on two recent maritime restoration projects by considering comparative urban and heritage studies within the framework of collaborative ethnography with informal workers, the unemployed, and other local residents. It asks how to engage “new” researchers in the community to study that community—in this case, those impacted by heritage redevelopment at two sites: in South East London and West Bengal. The paper is conceived as a contribution to ethnographic methodologies in urban anthropology, arguing in support of inclusive and responsive approaches to knowledge creation in the social sciences. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/718528 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:David Dupuis Pages: 198 - 216 Abstract: Although so-called “psychedelic” substances have recently experienced a revival of interest in their therapeutic properties, the underpinnings of their effectiveness remain poorly understood. Based on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in a Peruvian Amazon clinic, this article proposes an anthropological approach to their therapeutic efficacy in the treatment of addiction. Using an analytical framework rooted in interactionism, narrative approaches, and cultural phenomenology, I argue that psychedelic rituals are best conceptualized as transformative techniques of the self leading the participants to reinterpret their identity, their biography, and their daily behaviors in the light of a new cultural model. I claim that the “dissociative” states induced by psychedelics, usually considered as side effects or adverse reactions, are in fact a driving force in therapy. Beyond neuropharmacological and psychodynamic models, my analysis points out the importance of relational, narrative, and “spiritual” processes as key therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719792 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Lars Rodseth Pages: 217 - 234 Abstract: Most ethnographers have little use for models and other formal abstractions, yet even a staunch empiricist such as Franz Boas could appreciate the “aesthetic” advantages of idealization and simplification. These advantages have been largely ignored in recent decades, as anthropologists have come to favor ever more intricate and encompassing accounts. The resulting “ethnographic involution,” I suggest, has steadily diminished anthropology as a source of usable, socially shared knowledge. Much the same problem, interestingly, was confronted long ago by Max Weber, who developed the method of “ideal types” precisely as a way to grasp, represent, and investigate the complexity of historical reality. Weber converged in this regard with his contemporary at Halle, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933). Since the late twentieth century, Vaihinger’s “fictionalism” has attracted renewed interest within philosophy and beyond. Yet his notion of “as-if” reasoning—a via media, I would argue, between particularism and positivism—remains virtually unknown within anthropology. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719660 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Philip Swift Pages: 235 - 255 Abstract: Translation—both multi- and intra-lingual—is vital to anthropological method. Drawing a distinction between two opposing modes of translation (“domesticating” versus “foreignizing”), this paper considers the ontological and ethical consequences of these two interpretative strategies, in particular by critically engaging with the doctrine of Donald Davidson, the theoretical inspiration for João Pina-Cabral’s work, World. I argue, instead, in favor of a “pagan” or pluralizing conceptual method, inspired by Feyerabend, Lyotard, and Hans Peter Duerr, and I suggest that their approaches demonstrate that even the polymodal ontology of Latour is lacking in plurality. In conclusion, I consider how the notion of foreignizing translation relates to the method associated with the ontological turn in anthropology. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719521 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:João Pina-Cabral Pages: 256 - 264 Abstract: This piece is a response to Philip Swift’s article in this issue, where he critiques issues concerning ethnographic theory raised in my book World: An anthropological examination. Inspired by the work of Donald Davidson, I argue that indeterminacy and underdetermination are conditions for all communication and that, in light of that, a position of metaphysical pluralism provides us with a better account of the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture than the kind of ontological pluralism that Swift espouses. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719534 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Fatima Mojaddedi Pages: 265 - 276 Abstract: This article considers the problem of translation and radical interpretation from a post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspective, and challenges the notion of concept, language, and difference being mobilized by Philip Swift. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719702 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Milad Odabaei Pages: 277 - 284 Abstract: This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as “burning translations” responds to the abolitionist call for “letting anthropology burn” by developing the urgency of translation amid histories of racialization. In contrast to foreignizing translation as the self-reflexive hermeneutics of the other, burning translations are speculative approximations of exigent situations that precede and exceed anthropological debates and liberal modes of public reason more generally. Burning translations are risky not because they invent new classificatory concepts and therefore confront the discipline’s intellectual and institutional resistance, but because they redirect anthropological terms and categories outside anthropological debates without attempting to add to these debates, offer a corrective, and thereby expiating what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified as the guilty conscience of postcolonial anthropology. Burning translations test the limit of our concepts as “concepts,” and not as “ours.” PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.1086/719659 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 1 (2022)
Open Access journal
