{"title":"Linguistic dimensions of the crimmigration regime: Language ideological working conditions in US Immigration Court","authors":"Sonya Rao","doi":"10.1111/plar.12574","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12574","url":null,"abstract":"This essay uses an examination of communication in Los Angeles Immigration Court (2014–2017) to demonstrate how legal professionals’ beliefs about language foster and entrench underexplored linguistic dimensions of the US crimmigration regime. Scholars have shown that within courtroom interactions, legal ideas about language hold back the administration of justice in asylum proceedings, and language interpretation itself can perpetuate the administrative violence of these proceedings. I combine ethnographic courtroom observations and critical examination of internal agency policy to show how ideas about language, inherited from legal professional culture and training, aggregate into adverse working conditions, allowing for only a performance of procedure, and amplifying the US crimmigration system. Of particular interest are ideologies of a monoglot standard and national language imaginaries, referentialism and referential transparency, and decontextualization. Abolitionist logics and reform of legal education offer possible strategies for structural intervention.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":" 17","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141678231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, UkraineGreta LynnUehling (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2023)","authors":"Jessica R. Storey-Nagy","doi":"10.1111/plar.12562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12562","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":" 19","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140988144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing EuropeApostolosAndrikopoulos (The University of Chicago Press, 2023)","authors":"Elsemieke van Osch","doi":"10.1111/plar.12561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12561","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":" 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140989029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in IndiaYaminiNarayanan (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023)","authors":"Muhammed Ek","doi":"10.1111/plar.12565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12565","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"2 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140990403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Knowing Women: Same‐Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial GhanaSerena OwusuaDankwa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)","authors":"Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola","doi":"10.1111/plar.12564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12564","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"115 33","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140987991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian IndiaMukulikaBanerjee (Oxford University Press, 2022)","authors":"Bart Klem","doi":"10.1111/plar.12563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12563","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":" 824","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140989112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mobilizing at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post‐Dictatorial ChileSimónEscoffier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)","authors":"Emmanuelle Barozet","doi":"10.1111/plar.12566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12566","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"3 20","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140988348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Copresent jurisdictions: Spirits, theopolitics, and the rise of Akan spirituality in the United States","authors":"Lauren Coyle Rosen","doi":"10.1111/plar.12568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12568","url":null,"abstract":"Akan spirituality, originally from Ghana, has risen in popularity in the United States since the 1960s and recently has expanded, as shrine houses grow. Akan spiritualists promote reconnecting to ancestors and spiritualists in Ghana, and they offer spiritual avenues for pursuing healing and justice, particularly for African Americans and other diasporic Africans. This article draws on extensive collaborative ethnographic research with a prominent shrine house in Maryland and its ties to a key shrine in Larteh, Ghana. It foregrounds two elder priestesses, focusing on their spiritual governance and work in the realms of healing, adjudication, policing, and protection. They serve in these ways within their spiritual communities and sometimes alongside or with state institutions, or as an antidote to them. This article advances a new concept called copresent jurisdictions—here, defined as Akan spiritual assemblages of Abosom (exalted spirits), ancestors, priestesses, priests, and spiritualists who operate with their own spiritual laws and authorities within their sacred communities and in relation to state institutions. It argues that these copresent jurisdictions offer alternative pathways of law, politics, spirituality, and justice within the contexts of imperiled democratic orders. Copresent jurisdictions expand current theoretical debates over theopolitics, postjuristocratic transitions, cosmopolitical assemblages, and transnational copresences.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":" 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141001586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Everything I Have Seen There, That I Know …”: Witnessing the Colombian armed conflict through refugees’ narratives of implication","authors":"Alana Ackerman","doi":"10.1111/plar.12567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12567","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I engage with the predicament of witnessing as a condition for persecution and displacement. I argue that observing violence during war is a critical form of implication. In the context of the Colombian armed conflict, members of armed groups often threaten the lives of those who observe their acts of violence, producing a chain of terror that extends outward from the original moment of witnessing. This chain of violence collapses a supposed distinction between the witness‐as‐observer (testis) and the witness‐as‐survivor (superstes). In a global context of exclusionary asylum and immigration systems, this article provides an expansive understanding of why some people face persecution and are forced to flee their homes and cross international borders. Through an ethnography of refugees’ experiences witnessing and subsequently surviving persecution in Colombia, this article contributes to anthropological scholarship on displacement, refuge, asylum, and witnessing.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"52 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141010235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Signing documents: Accountability politics and racialized suspicion in Africa's development audits","authors":"Miriam Hird-Younger, Sarah O'Sullivan","doi":"10.1111/plar.12558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12558","url":null,"abstract":"Good governance policies in international development require nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to translate their programs into documents that render NGOs knowable and accountable to their donors. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana and Uganda, we examine the signatures on these documents and the labor of NGO staff to obtain the signatures of aid recipients. We argue that signatures serve as mechanisms that NGO staff use to make their good governance practices traceable and to deter donor suspicion of funding misuse. Staff dedicate significant energy to imagining how signatures may or may not trigger donor suspicion. We posit that despite NGO staff's anxiety over getting signatures right—present, matching, and signed by the correct person—signatures can only ever defer donor suspicion. Such suspicion cannot be eliminated because it is deeply entrenched in racialized logics that position Global North donors as holding expertise and African NGOs as susceptible to corruption. Because NGO staff worry about donor suspicion rather than what aid recipients communicate with their (lack of) signatures, even fake signatures can circulate just as well as authentic ones. Tracing the social dynamics of collecting signatures sheds light on the racialized injustices inherent in Africa's development systems.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"53 30","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141010067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}