 Subjects -> ANTHROPOLOGY (Total: 398 journals)
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- The irony of development: Critique, complicity, cynicism
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Authors: Benedikt Korf
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
Has development critique run out of steam' While a certain impasse can be noted between post-development theorists and development ethnographers, this article suggests to re-start the steam engine of development critique by attending to the “irony of development”, i.e. ironic predicaments that explain the sustenance of the development industry despite its persistent failures to live up to its aspirations. How one reads this “irony of successful failure” amounts to a question of how to practise critique, what position the critic takes and what ironic stances the critic intones. While post-development operates an external critique, development ethnographers practise an internal one. I propose to transform the latter into an immanent critique, which identifies “moral excess” as the constitutive function of the ironic predicaments inside the global development apparatus.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2022-08-02T07:06:42Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996221115225
- Future perfect: From the pandemic to the Paris climate agreement
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Authors: Stuart Kirsch
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
Fifteen years ago, Jane Guyer (2007) argued that the near future had largely disappeared from collective imaginaries, replaced by longer-term horizons associated with evangelical Christianity and free market capitalism. While not seeking to repudiate Guyer, this article argues that recent developments have radically altered relationships to the future. It points to a previously unrecognized connection between two of the most significant challenges facing humanity today: the experience of living through a global pandemic and international efforts to limit the harmful consequences of climate change. Responses to both phenomena invoke the grammatical structure of the future perfect tense. During the pandemic, people began to imagine themselves living at a future moment in time when they have already resumed participating in those activities they have been prevented from undertaking, an example of the future perfect. The Paris Climate Agreement, which encourages states and other parties to take action in the present so that in the future they will already have saved the planet, also relies on the future perfect. In reaction to the pandemic and climate change, the near future has reemerged as a focal point of temporal attention. This article examines how the future appears in the present and the contribution of the future perfect tense to the creation of alternative futures.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2022-06-27T06:40:18Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996221107961
- La critique est aisée, mais l’art est difficile. A critical
anthropology put to the test of decolonization: Lessons from New Caledonia
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Authors: Natacha Gagné, Marie Salaün
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
This article focuses on anthropologists’ analyses of decolonization struggles in relationship to past and present movements for self-determination. We begin by highlighting the relevance of Georges Balandier's model of the “colonial situation” for the understanding of these struggles. Next, we show that, as Pierre Bourdieu, following Balandier, suggested, the analysis of these struggles cannot forego an analysis of the position of the researchers themselves in the situation. This brings to light the difficulty of constructing one's “atopic position” as a researcher in decolonization processes. We aim to show that the theoretical precepts which anthropologists adopt (and the precepts’ moral underpinnings) lead them to minimize or overlook the political aspects of decolonization processes. This involves a certain blindness to the concrete conditions—economic, social, and political—that have led to the situation in question. We explore in detail the example of “critical” analyses of the “Kanak People's School System” (École populaire kanak, EPK)—a nationalist Kanak project, aimed at decolonizing the New Caledonia school system in the mid-1980s. We also briefly look at “critical” interpretations of a recent initiative undertaken by a segment of the Kanak population involving the establishment of a written “customary law” in civil (and potentially criminal) matters, which tends to distance itself from the nationalist strategy.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2022-04-18T09:03:33Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996221086461
- The misperception of the environment: A critical evaluation of the work of
Tim Ingold and an alternative guide to the use of the senses in
anthropological theory-
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Authors: David Howes
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
This article presents a critical evaluation of the work of Tim Ingold from the standpoint of social and sensory anthropology. It acknowledges the novelty of the emphasis on enskillment, movement, process, and growth in Ingold's work. However, it is critical of his abstraction of the senses, which are rendered ‘interchangeable’, and of persons, who are reduced to generic individuals. Ingold's anthropology is shown to be pre-cultural and post-social at once, with the result that it fails to address the sociality of sensation and cultural mediation of perception. Ingold's doctrine of ‘direct perception’ is exposed as particularly problematic. In place of his emphasis on ‘the life of lines’, this article foregrounds the life of the senses, and in lieu of his diminution of the social, it acknowledges the politics of perception that inform most every perceptual act. The article concludes with a series of reflections on how to go about sensualizing anthropological theory and practicing sensory ethnography (i.e. the methodology of participant sensation).
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2022-03-03T10:13:56Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211067307
- The bewitchment of our intelligence: Scepticism about other minds in
anthropology-
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Authors: Marco Motta
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
This article aims at characterizing how the problem of scepticism about other minds appears in anthropology. To do so, I offer a close reading of Nils Bubandt's book, The Empty Seashell (2014), a study of witchcraft and doubt on the North Maluku Island of Halmahera. Through its deep engagement with issues revolving around scepticism, I take the book to be an example of the tendency to consider the problem of sceptical doubt about others as a problem of access to the inner thoughts and feelings of other people. By looking closely at its attempts to respond to this problem, I endeavour to shed light on the ways in which, in working the problem of scepticism out, we may be doing exactly the reverse: giving into the sceptical impulse. How does a certain way of asking questions about scepticism nourish the drive to it' I am interested in the drift towards scepticism that precisely takes the form of a claim against it. In showing that such a drift is prompted by a certain use of language, I hope to elucidate some ways in which scepticism is lived and is thus not merely an intellectual conundrum, but an ordinary human condition.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2022-02-17T01:25:45Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996221080578
- Charity and grace
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Authors: João Pina-Cabral
First page: 249
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
This essay attempts to reconcile charity with grace, the central concepts of two thinkers whose views may seem irreconcilable to many: Donald Davidson, an analytical philosopher and the most distinguished follower of Quine; and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an Europeanist anthropologist, who wrote at length on Spain and Southern France. The latter's historicist exegesis of gracia points to basic aspects of human experience that are also salient in the reduction to basics that Davidson carried out concerning interpretation and truth. For Davidson, in the face of ultimate indeterminacy, interpretation is made possible due to the rational accommodation that charity sparks off. For Pitt-Rivers, gratuity highlights how processes of personal interaction depend on the drawing of shared trajectories: that is, not only do I have to grant others charity to make sense of them, I also have to frame others as subjects with a future by relation to myself as already in existence. The paper proposes that human interaction involves processes of sensemaking that integrate shared intentionality (i.e. the credit with which we respond to the indeterminacy of meaning) with shared experience (i.e. the debt implicit in the ultimate underdetermination of the world's entities). Thus, it brings both concepts together under the label of charis, their common etymological root, suggesting that the dynamic it represents is a broader feature of life itself.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2022-01-10T12:43:39Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211057844
- Sovereignty as new beginnings: Action beyond the liberal subject, among
undercover police investigators in Europe, for example-
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Authors: Gregory Feldman
First page: 317
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
This article argues that Schmitt's “state of exception” is only one expression of the deeper sovereign phenomenon, specifically the human capacity to inaugurate new beginnings in shared space. Sovereign action thus includes anything from Schmitt's vertically-imposed state of exception, which eliminates political subjecthood, to the thrill of horizontally-arranged movements, which enable it. To make this argument, the article foregoes the idea of the bounded, internally coherent liberal subject in favor of a relational subject, who is both internally divided and inherently tied to others. The subject's instability and relationality make new beginnings possible and renders sovereign action promising, even if risky. An unexpected example of this fuller view of sovereignty appears in an undercover police team in southern Europe that investigates global human smuggling and trafficking rings. Based on extensive ethnographic research, this article shows how they often act on their own ethical judgments, reached by considering the standpoints of people tied to their investigations, rather than through obedience to law, policy, or superior command. Acting outside constitutional order, these investigators, (re)constitute themselves as particular persons through their joint actions and simultaneously constitute modest sovereign spaces, however tentatively.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2022-01-06T04:46:25Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211066367
- Rethinking prevention as a reactive force to contain dangerous classes
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Authors: Angel Aedo, Paulina Faba
First page: 338
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
The pervasiveness of preventive rationality, which is especially evident in populations caught in the prison-neighbourhood circuit, constitutes a challenging field for anthropological theory because it allows us to rethink the problem of hegemony in the context of the crises of capitalism. Drawing on research conducted in Chile amongst practitioners of crime prevention programmes and prisoners’ families targeted by such initiatives, in this paper, we explore crime prevention as a political concept whose effects are inseparable from the maintenance of class and gender disparities. In conceptualising how petty crime prevention has become a predominant technology of classifying, policing and managing low-income populations, we take Foucault's notion of illegalism – as distinct from illegality – and extend it to dispossessed groups affected by dramatic levels of economic inequality and structural violence. We discuss preventive rationality in relation to the contradictions engendered by an authoritarian form of capitalism protected by constitutional constraints inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. By connecting the conceptualisation of petty crime prevention to the ongoing contradictions of the society in which we live, we seek to sharpen attention to the ways in which the neoliberal hegemony attempts to contain its decline.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2022-01-27T01:37:08Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211069757
- Corporate sovereignty: Negotiating permissive power for profit in Southern
Africa-
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Authors: Tessa Diphoorn, Nikkie Wiegink
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of ‘corporate sovereignty’ and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. This contrasts with claims made by other (non-state) actors who operate in a permissive space that (regularly) lacks this legally grounded relationship with the state. By unpacking this state-sanctioned permissive space and highlighting the role of the state as the arbiter, our approach to corporate sovereignty offers a new comparative analytical perspective to theorize how sovereignty is performed and opens ethnographic avenues to explore how sovereignty is negotiated and co-produced across diverse localities. To elucidate our argument, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on coal mining companies in Mozambique and private security companies in South Africa. By focusing on cases that differ, we want to show the multitude of ways in which corporate sovereignty is enacted and takes shape.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2021-09-06T10:46:36Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211037124
- Eleven Namibian rains: A phenomenological analysis of experience in time
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Authors: Michael Schnegg
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
The Damara pastoralists (ǂnūkhoen) in Namibia distinguish a diverse range of rains. Some rains kill livestock, others care for insects and still others wash away the footprints of the deceased, allowing the person to exist in the spirit realm. While anthropologists have documented cultural classifications like the Namibian rains for decades, we still lack a convincing theory to explain how they come to exist. To address this, I develop a phenomenological perspective and theorise how experience contributes to what rain becomes. I argue with Husserl that the present in which we experience the rain is not a discrete moment, but a unity across a succession of ‘nows’. In the process, perceptions, images, memories and expectations about past and future events blend. In other words, a web of meaningful relationships connects the rain we experience ‘now’ with multiple past and future entities, including people, plants, spirits and animals. I refer to this as network formation. Combining the analyses of the people's pastoral being-in-the-world and their historical–political context, including post-colonialism, allows an explanation as to why some of those combinations are singled out and become distinct ontological entities. I refer to this as node selection. Combining the two processes – network formation and node selection – allows for an explanation as to why precipitation becomes discernible and meaningful as eleven different Namibian rains.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2021-08-09T01:22:37Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211035365
- Fabulous: Remarks on scenarism, simulations, and scenarios
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Authors: James D Faubion
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
In “Governing the Future,” Limor Samimian-Darash does much to illuminate scenarism and the divergence between the simulations and the scenarios that constitute the chief apparatuses of anticipatory governance. She renders both of them fabulations, drawing the concept as well as the divergence between simulations and scenarios from the epistemological and ontological precedents that Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze have set. Her renderings are compelling, but leave many epistemological and ontological issues unresolved. I address three of these issues. First, it has to do with what sort of concept scenarism might be. Second, it has to do with the poetics of simulations and scenarios. Third, it has to do with the virtuality or actuality of simulations and scenarios, in their planning as in their enactments.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2021-07-26T03:58:56Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211033443
- Governing the future through scenaristic and simulative modalities of
imagination-
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Authors: Limor Samimian-Darash
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel’s annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities can be distinguished from each other in terms of their approaches to future uncertainty, their temporalities and the role of imagination within their enactment. To further conceptually develop the logics of imagination, I draw on Deleuze’s and Bergson’s discussions of the concept of fabulation, and I suggest that scenarios and simulations represent two different logics of future-governing that are based on practices of imagination.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2021-05-21T12:51:25Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211014116
- Value moves in multiple ways: Ethical values, the anthropology of
Christianity, and an example of women and movement-
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Authors: Ingie Hovland
First page: 273
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
How can anthropologists describe ethical values—that is, what emerges as important—in the social, material worlds of Christianity' This article considers the question by working along interfaces. The first part of the article discusses two diverging approaches to values in the anthropology of Christianity (realizing values and producing values) and situates these in relation to three groupings in the anthropology of ethics and morality (deontological ethics, first-person virtue ethics, and poststructuralist virtue ethics). The second part of the article follows one value—the value of movement—in a historical example: the writings of a group of Christian women in 1880s and 1890s Norway. I argue that ethical values move in multiple ways through this social world: people realize values, people produce values and people work on values.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2021-07-21T03:09:21Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211029729
- Ethical infrastructure: Halal and the ecology of askesis in Muslim Russia
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Authors: Matteo (Teo) Benussi
First page: 294
Abstract: Anthropological Theory, Ahead of Print.
This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of ‘ethical infrastructure’: the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists’ striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the ‘profane’, often unassuming or religiously unmarked, yet essential material scaffolding constituting the ‘material conditions of possibility’ for pious life in the lifeworld of late modernity. Halalness is conceptualised not as an inherent quality of a clearly defined set of things, but as a (sometimes complicated) relationship between humans, ethical intentionality, and infrastructurally organised habitats. Pointing beyond the case of halal, this article syncretises theories of self-cultivation, material religion, ethical consumption, and infrastructure to address current lacunas and explore fresh theoretical and methodological ground. This ‘ethical infrastructure’ framework enables us to conceptualise the embeddedness of contemporary ethicists in complex environments and the process by which processes of inner self-fashioning change and are changed by material worlds.
Citation: Anthropological Theory
PubDate: 2021-12-06T10:33:37Z
DOI: 10.1177/14634996211059724
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