{"title":"Beyond retributive and restorative justice: In search of mercy with Jordan's Bedouin","authors":"G. Hughes","doi":"10.1111/plar.12559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12559","url":null,"abstract":"Popular debates about criminal justice reform often pose restorative justice as a humane (if utopian) alternative to retributive justice. Drawing on fieldwork with Jordan's Bedouin, I offer an unvarnished account of a longstanding and still‐vibrant tradition of restorative justice that also includes violent and punitive elements. While acknowledging how Bedouin justice can fail women, the poor and the poorly connected, I highlight how Bedouin justice also cultivates mercy as a social good, transforming enmity into forgiveness (if not friendship) and encouraging perpetrators to materially compensate victims. I conclude by considering how contemporary Jordanian practices of mercy might inform efforts to escape from the seeming inevitability of mass incarceration in modern society.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"52 32","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141010216","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":"Writing opacity: Going beyond pseudonyms with spirit portraiture","authors":"Vita Peacock","doi":"10.1111/plar.12560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12560","url":null,"abstract":"What does it mean to go beyond pseudonyms? Building on fieldwork with privacy and data protection advocates in Germany, this article incorporates ethical imperatives coming from within and beyond the field, to develop a different mode of writing it calls spirit portraiture. This entails characterizing natural persons, without including any personal data through which they could be re‐identified, with or without the use of computing. Drawing on three ethnographies that already go beyond pseudonyms, it repositions the axis of representation away from revelation and concealment—that pivots around a monist notion of empirical truth—towards opacity and legibility—that pivots instead around its own point of intervention.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"43 S11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141007899","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":"The good thief: A note on revisits in long‐running ethnography","authors":"Kim Hopper","doi":"10.1111/plar.12556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12556","url":null,"abstract":"This commentary revisits Nancy Scheper‐Hughes’ Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics ([1979] 2001) and opens up its contentious history as resented exposé, unflinching portrait of a demoralized and anomic landscape, and ethnographic test‐case of the terms of engagement. I suggest that the controversy may betoken what long‐haul ethnography in the present era might hold in store, not for individual researchers alone but for our discipline as well. Wholesale rewrites or retractions may not be in the cards, but reparation comes in many shades. At times what it creates is the necessary clearance to build out what was missed—with what may look like deliberate provocation—the first time around. The trick is not to confuse contrition with renunciation … or the space of a landing with the finality of an ending.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"72 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140675337","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":"Beyond pseudonyms: Ethics and politics of ethnographic representation","authors":"Deniz Yonucu, C. M. Parker","doi":"10.1111/plar.12557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12557","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"79 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140675155","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":"(Non)governing machine: Seized activism and NGOization as forms of governance in Indonesia","authors":"Yuda Rasyadian","doi":"10.1111/plar.12555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12555","url":null,"abstract":"NGOization is argued as a key process to the expansion of neoliberalized development, feminist movement, and authentic democratization. Anthropologists have challenged neoliberal assumptions behind NGOization. This article extends the debate by investigating how a nongovernmental organization (NGO) project that initially claimed to buttress egalitarian grassroots activism has undergone NGOization with its public discourse and practice integrated into state work, encapsulating what I theorize as “(non)governing machine”—the apparent nongovernment entity that possesses a systematic power and authority to regulate knowledge and population. Drawing from an ethnographic study of an NGO and local politics in Mollo, Indonesia, my argument is threefold. First, I argue that NGOization enables a specific form of governmentality that has allowed the state to increase its surveillance of, and power over, the population. Second, this article proposes that local politics can be a strong impetus to the establishment of NGOization. Finally, by coining the (non)governing machine, I theorize NGOization as a form of governance, pointing at the productivity and vulnerability of NGO form as a “hybrid formation” that grapples between local politics and transnational networks of power and capital.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"61 s1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140747702","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":"Looking for trouble: (Infra‐)law enforcement, penal populism, and professional habitus against squatting in Italy","authors":"Giacomo Pozzi","doi":"10.1111/plar.12554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12554","url":null,"abstract":"This paper reflects ethnographically on law enforcement against squatting in Milan. To this end, it examines labor practices, moral economies, and everyday narratives of those who work with the institutional mandate of tackling squatting in public housing. I propose to grasp these processes considering two specific political and legal configurations that traverse the arena under investigation: the entrenched presence, in the Italian context, of what has been defined as penal populism; additionally, the increasingly pronounced prominence of an infra‐legal dimension of law. Squatting—and the way in which it is publicly managed and punished—represents a privileged lens for examining the specific forms of normative and political governance in contemporary cities.","PeriodicalId":512457,"journal":{"name":"PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review","volume":"50 16","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139448002","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}