{"title":"DELIVERING THE STATE: State-Making through Maternal Health “Care” in Bangladeshi Public Maternal Health Spaces","authors":"JANET E. PERKINS","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.2.06","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Within anthropology, care operates as contested theoretical territory, with much debate residing in the space between what we think care ought to look like in health service delivery settings juxtaposed with what care looks like in the ethnographic encounter. In Bangladesh, public health service providers are often represented as not caring in health encounters. Based on ethnographic data generated in maternal health settings in Kushtia District, this article nuances conceptualizations of care in government health settings, centering the concepts of <i>sheba</i> (service), which is rooted in clinical care, and <i>jotno</i> (care), intimate, hands-on care that constitutes kinship. Through the enactment of embodied performances, government health service providers and staff enact boundary work around <i>sheba</i> and <i>jotno</i>, which serves to constitute the state during and beyond health service encounters, crystallizing within a broader constellation of imaginaries of the state and one's relationship to it.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"328-353"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.06","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"REACTIVE REGULATION: Rethinking Urban Growth and Governance through Property Relations","authors":"INDIVAR JONNALAGADDA","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.2.01","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As social and environmental crises multiply and compound each other in the urban Global South, I ethnographically illustrate the micro-scale, obscured, but constitutive modes of governance that shape megacities. Through an account of property record-keeping, registration, and regularization in the emerging global real estate hub of Hyderabad, India, I show how macro-scale urban transformations form an aggregate outcome of micro-political bureaucratic processes that enlist the participation of bureaucrats, city-dwellers, and intermediary brokers. I argue that in lieu of regulatory processes that direct actions toward future goals, governance takes the form of reactive regulation, wherein the objectives are to render the city as property and re-assert the state's authority. On the one hand, these constitute deeply political processes, ones that incrementally transform urban environments. On the other hand, these processes exclusively frame urban space, time, social relations, and ecology in reductive terms of property, forestalling transformations toward sustainability or social justice.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"192-220"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.01","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BORDERLANDS AS BARRACKS: Constructing a National Geography of Security in India","authors":"SAHANA GHOSH","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What does militarism in the timespace of war-preparedness look like in the majority world? Drawing on ongoing research on soldiering in postcolonial India, focused on the Border Security Force, I examine everyday life and labor within security institutions: soldiers' routines in barracks, prohibited friendships, hardships, and longings. Bringing feminist thought and the political anthropology of security regimes into conversation with a materialist approach to space, this article argues that borderland barracks prove key to the expansionist logic and durability of what I term “constructive security.” The ethnographic study of barracks reveals this logic, i.e., the spatial and social inscriptions by which disparate locales across the country come to be reconstituted as places of work and dwelling for soldiers, privileging and provisioning their social reproduction through violence and care, and stitching together a national security geography. Such a view shows that postcolonial militarism cannot be understood as a coercive project alone; it is simultaneously a constructive one, particularly a reproductive one.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"221-248"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DISCARDED CANDIDATES: Waste as Metaphor in Local Government Elections in Australia (and Elsewhere)","authors":"TANYA JAKIMOW","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Elections produce legitimacy, relations between representative and represented, and consent to rule. They are also systems of discarding. Representative democracies require a surplus of candidates who engage in practices and rituals of elections, the majority of which are discarded at the ballot box. Candidates (over)invest in their campaigns, resulting in wasted time, money, and materials. Unsuccessful candidates offer a particular vantage point to view the processes of valuing and devaluing in elections, as they transition from the elevated position of candidate to the abject condition of discarded representative. Through orienting lenses of discard studies and the anthropology of waste, I re-examine campaign practices in 2021 local government elections in New South Wales, Australia, and shed light on the experience of being made surplus to representative democracy. Anthropological approaches to care, repair, (Martínez 2017) and “discarding well” (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022) provide alternative ways to re-value so-viewed surplus candidates after election day.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"276-300"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.04","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FRACKING AND HISTORICIZING: On Deepened Time in West Texas","authors":"CAMERON HU","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.2.07","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article draws on ethnographic research in the oil fields of West Texas to reflect on the imperial-modern compulsion to historicize—to explicate more and more of the world in terms of contingent, indeterminate historical process. A century ago, petroleum drilling turned West Texas into a vast extractive zone and simultaneously historicized the desert plain as a former reef. Today, I show, fracking moves to shape and accelerate the region's geological processes on the logic that the Earth, now burdened with historicity, is somehow too slow. This confluence of events highlights a common moral-political undertow shared across the “deep” historiography of the Earth and the “shallow” historiography of the human. Conceptually and concretely, both historiographic operations reorder their objects as open-ended processes that modern powers may adjust and modulate. From West Texas, the question arises: Does modernity wreck the planet by historicizing it?</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"354-382"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"GETTING YOUR DUCKS IN A ROW: Marriage, Protection, and Love without Regret in Virginia","authors":"SIOBHAN MAGEE","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Marriage, as a topic of ethnographic and historical exploration, ties together kinship, politics, economics, and faith in complex and significant ways. In the United States, federal and state governments have used legal marriage to create insiders and outsiders along lines of “race,” sexuality, and religion. Those who have not been allowed to marry a consenting partner of their choice have been cast as dangerous, and as threats to the nation. Drawing on fieldwork in the Virginia city of Charlottesville, I argue that protection is a key idiom through which to understand marriage and kinship in the United States. The research took place at the time of the 2017 white nationalist attack on Charlottesville, and discussions of marriage and kinship resonated with wider political questions about what it means to be safe, and how kinship often means loving against and caring against—protecting against—dangers that threaten those closest to us.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"301-327"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.05","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"SPECTACLE: The Semiotics of Albinism in Tanzania","authors":"JANE L. SAFFITZ","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the past fifteen years, scores of high-profile murders of Africans with albinism have sparked a robust global movement for albinism rights. In Tanzania, disparate albinism stakeholders <i>(wadau)</i> attribute violence to an illicit market for albino body parts run by traditional healers and their patrons, who are said to believe in the extraordinary powers of these parts to access an unseen realm. This article tacks between stakeholders with albinism and composite sketches of a healer and her artisanal miner patient, to offer a theory of violence rooted in spectacle rather than belief. Focusing on albinism interventions as sites of spectacle, I employ a semiotics of quality to show how albinism becomes central to broader processes of illumination <i>(kuongeza nuru)</i>. A semiotic approach to social movements moves beyond the sedimented categories and narrative tropes that compel activism to reveal a postactivist politics and ethics grounded in relationality.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"249-275"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.03","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"LOVE AS ENJOYMENT: Hopelessness, Play, and Desirable Futures in Ghaziabad, India","authors":"AKANKSHA AWAL","doi":"10.14506/ca40.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Some young middle-class women in Ghaziabad have little hope that love will lead to a desirable future. Therefore, they kindle desire in casual encounters that they describe as “enjoyment” and cultivate a sensibility of living in the moment. Enjoyment departs from love <i>(pyaar)</i> as depicted in mass media like Bollywood that leads to marriage. Instead, through enjoyment, college-attending women move through fantasies of love <i>(pyaar)</i> leading to marriage under conditions of urbanization, the rise of women's education, and pervasive unemployment. In the process, they uncouple flirting and erotic play from its progression to love <i>(pyaar)</i> or marriage. In so doing, women ironically and unintentionally create an alternate form of love (enjoyment). This version of love is playful, creative, and fun. It allows women to access pleasure and to enact a version of love not latched to marriage. By paying attention to these alternate forms of love, this essay shows how women work past the “cruel optimism” of love, reconstituting it as a site for self-affirmation, pleasure, and play.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 1","pages":"131-161"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.1.06","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143717206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ISHA'S WAIT: Money, Love, and Kinship in the Wake of Domestic Violence in India","authors":"GARIMA JAJU","doi":"10.14506/ca40.1.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.1.04","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Isha waits in her low-income parents' home for her estranged husband, charged for dowry and domestic violence, to pay her the legally mandated maintenance money. I listen to her as she talks about <i>pyaar</i>, or love, and domestic violence as arising from the absence of its <i>ehsaas</i>, or feeling/realization, by the abusive husband. The awaited money is infused with the hopeful imagination that it will generate both <i>pyaar</i> and its <i>ehsaas</i>. I argue that money becomes a substance of kinship assigned an agentive role in engendering the ethical transformation of a “bad” husband to create “good” kinship. Exploring the ways in which the tenuous legal promise of money sustains imaginations of reformed kinship futures, I outline how centrally money shapes the experience of domestic violence and its aftermath.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 1","pages":"82-104"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.1.04","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143717210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION: On the Ethics of Forgetting","authors":"PAOLO HEYWOOD","doi":"10.14506/ca40.1.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay explores the ethics of forgetting as a technology of the self. Forgetfulness is a feature of a range of contexts of political conflict and “difficult” heritage. Such forgetfulness is often imagined as an imposition (as when states deny the freedom to remember) or a weakness (as when people are thought to repress uncomfortable or difficult memories). Here, by contrast, I examine a context of difficult heritage and political conflict in which people forget some things by remembering others, and I highlight the ways in which it is often hard to disentangle the primary process. Rather than ask whether the point is what you remember or what you forget, alternative and more interesting questions are revealed, I suggest, by asking what kind of subject constitutes the ideal end result.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 1","pages":"105-130"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.1.05","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143717186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}