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Authors:A.J. Faas Pages: 3 - 23 Abstract: Critique of Anthropology, Volume 43, Issue 1, Page 3-23, March 2023. I examine the aesthetic (re)production of the state in disaster museums and memorials in a comparative analysis of the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial in Beichuan, China, and the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. I explore how particular national imaginaries and narratives of the past were projected to produce narratives that cloak the chaos of catastrophe and channel powerful public emotions into a robust state imaginary operating heroically on an Other-Nature-Disaster without history. In China, the state is embodied by conventional faces of the state apparatus. By contrast, in New York, such leaders are notably absent. Instead, the focus is on “heroic” first responders that I argue constitute devolved encounters with the state—neither faceless nor portrayed by official leaders, but instead embodied by neighbors, friends, and everyday heroes. In both contexts, I find similar techniques of producing aesthetic assemblages within which, whether the proximal agent of suffering be human or no, any purportedly external perturbation creates a crisis of state integrity that is discursively cloaked in the language of the Nature of the Other and this is partially accomplished by enframing emergencies in carefully delimited timeframes. Citation: Critique of Anthropology PubDate: 2023-02-24T04:38:58Z DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156709 Issue No:Vol. 43, No. 1 (2023)
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Authors:Pauline Destrée Pages: 24 - 43 Abstract: Critique of Anthropology, Volume 43, Issue 1, Page 24-43, March 2023. In the offshore oil industry of Takoradi, Ghana, white expatriate workers describe oil extraction as both ‘the work of the Devil’ and a ‘labour of love’. While companies strive to produce the offshore as a timeless and spaceless fantasy of ‘frictionless profit’, workers emphasize oil work as a sacrificial economy where risk, loss and distance are traded in the pursuit of an ideal of family life. In this article, I argue that the operational structures and labour regime of the offshore (characterized by a rotation pattern, continuous production, distant locations, a segregated workforce, and mobile installations) create not only a model of capital accumulation, but a mode of being and making kin. I describe oil workers’ aspirations to a ‘good family life’ and parental care, pitting time against distance, and the interpersonal ruins that remain when they fray. In probing how oil workers make petro-capitalism affectively workable, by exploring the entangled processes of extractive and reproductive labour, this article contributes to recent scholarship on the role of kinship in sustaining global capitalism. Citation: Critique of Anthropology PubDate: 2023-02-24T04:38:55Z DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156713 Issue No:Vol. 43, No. 1 (2023)
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Authors:Miguel Pérez, Cristóbal Palma Pages: 44 - 65 Abstract: Critique of Anthropology, Volume 43, Issue 1, Page 44-65, March 2023. Over the past decade, Chile has become an important destination for Latin American and Caribbean migrants. In 2022, more than 8% of the population residing in the country were of foreign origin. Since 2018, Venezuelans have been the largest immigrant group, making up 30% of all international migrants living in Chile. This article explores how Venezuelan migrants become citizen-subjects through their residential practices, that is, through actions that symbolically construct their inhabited spaces (neighborhood and housing). Understanding citizenship as a process that implies the ethical formation of the self as a construction of new forms of belonging and political membership, we show how the daily life of these migrants is traversed by tensions surrounding their identity: while in public space they openly affirm their identity as diasporic Venezuelans, in the domestic sphere they hide said identity to accommodate an ideal of citizenship inspired by notions of civility, compliance, and moderation. Citation: Critique of Anthropology PubDate: 2023-02-24T04:38:55Z DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157552 Issue No:Vol. 43, No. 1 (2023)
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Authors:Rachael Root Pages: 66 - 83 Abstract: Critique of Anthropology, Volume 43, Issue 1, Page 66-83, March 2023. Human ingenuity responds to changing environments and resources with technological sophistication and variations in accumulative behaviors. While anthropologists look to the past and to processes of globalization to sketch these shifts in the natural world, there is a growing awareness that these transformations also occur in digital online worlds. I argue that archaeology’s attention to materiality provides useful analysis and directions for ethnographic video game analysis. I use research from the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, where players marshal social and economic resources in both the natural and digital worlds. In constructing reputations and accumulating prestige, players integrate online and offline resources, traversing the tangible/digital divide in their pursuit of achievement. Archaeological perspectives and theories of aggrandizement, containment, systems, landscapes, and ontological materiality provide opportunities to expand ethnographic video game research and debates into new directions. Citation: Critique of Anthropology PubDate: 2023-02-24T04:38:56Z DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156718 Issue No:Vol. 43, No. 1 (2023)
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Authors:Michael Scroggins Pages: 84 - 105 Abstract: Critique of Anthropology, Volume 43, Issue 1, Page 84-105, March 2023. Building on theory within anthropology and associated fields, I develop feralness as a lens for understanding the complexity of technological afterlives. Conceptual development proceeds through a case study of the relationship between Do-it-Yourself Biology (DIYbio), nonprofessional scientists experimenting with the established technology of recombinant DNA in new contexts such as garages and kitchens, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Absent the institutional controls of academia or industry, DIYbio has been perceived by the FBI as a potential threat to national security and is policed by the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Though the FBI has tried to contain the spread and reach of DIYbio, it has, ironically, came to be one of the main instruments of DIYbio’s global spread. In closing, I argue that feral technologies, those technologies with unexpected and potentially dangerous afterlives, are emblematic of the 21st century. Citation: Critique of Anthropology PubDate: 2023-02-24T04:38:57Z DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157559 Issue No:Vol. 43, No. 1 (2023)
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Authors:João Pina-Cabral Pages: 106 - 129 Abstract: Critique of Anthropology, Volume 43, Issue 1, Page 106-129, March 2023. Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter which change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the world in between’ that makes their fieldwork possible – this article takes the argument a step further, proposing that all ethnographic encounters are fundamentally ‘amidst’. Thus, it calls for a shift from translation to intermediation as the guiding trope of ethnography. Although the practice of ethnography requires the objectification of a ‘field’, metaphysical pluralism remains the fundamental condition of ethnographic intermediation. In light of that, the article critiques (a) the practice of describing our main methodological disposition as ‘participant observation’, arguing instead for the older term ‘intensive ethnographic research’; and (b) the implicit use of the trope of ethnography-as-translation. Ethnographic examples are taken from the author’s own fieldwork in the coastal mangroves of southern Bahia (northeast Brazil) in the late 2000s. Citation: Critique of Anthropology PubDate: 2023-02-24T04:38:57Z DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157544 Issue No:Vol. 43, No. 1 (2023)
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