{"title":"FLOWERS OF DECEPTION: The Expert's Nostalgia for a Future's Past and its Occlusion of Agrarian Labor","authors":"AMRITA KURIAN","doi":"10.14506/ca39.3.06","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.3.06","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Using the lens of affect, this article argues that understanding the sensibilities and allegiances of postcolonial experts is vital to determining who constitutes the expert's “public” and, thus, who benefits from state interventions and who doesn't. Following environmental sustainability initiatives in the wake of a parasitic infestation of tobacco in Andhra Pradesh, I analyze experts' concern for landowning farmers in contrast to their passive neglect and active resentment of landless laborers. The article draws parallels between the experts' pedagogies and the parasite's deceptively attractive bloom, which hides complex entanglements between parasite and plant beneath the soil surface. I show that a postcolonial emotional regime idealizes landowning farmers and renders invisible the experts' and farmers' common cultural milieu of landownership and collective dependence on caste-based labor. Invoking nostalgia for a lost past, experts' pedagogies are productive, subsidizing monoculture while neo-liberalizing farmers' subjectivities. By their absenting, laborers face climate precarity and the reproduction of resentment against them.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 3","pages":"455-484"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.3.06","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142152305","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":"Desnacionalización, Regímenes Visuales y Resistencia: Gitanos Americanos en Ciudad de México","authors":"DAVID LAGUNAS","doi":"10.14506/ca39.2.01","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.2.01","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The idea that the character of the Roma is external to the flow of the dynamics of historical processes is an alienating organicism in Mexico and Latin America. Visual regimes have reproduced exclusionary cultural and racial stereotypes of the Roma. This text analyzes how the Gitanos of Mexico City resist the racializing impositions of the state and of dominant society, contradicting hegemonic stereotypes and prejudices through the strategic self-management of identity by presenting themselves to the outside. Empirical data are provided on two key areas of this self-management connected to the visibility/invisibility dialectic: commercial activities and flamenco performance.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 2","pages":"171-193"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.2.01","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141298547","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":"Deciphering a Non-Meal: Pantawid-Gutom and the Everyday Negotiation of Hunger in the Philippines","authors":"GIDEON LASCO, JHAKI MENDOZA","doi":"10.14506/ca39.2.02","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"<p><i>Pantawid-gutom</i> literally means “to bridge hunger” and refers to a range of food and non-food products and practices in the Philippines that allow people to survive in between “serious meals.” What does its existence as a liminal category between food/non-food or serious/non-serious meal signify, particularly for millions of Filipino families who regularly experience hunger? Drawing on fieldwork in low-income urban communities on Luzon Island, and from a review of the scholarly and popular literature, we use local conceptions of <i>pantawid-gutom</i>—hitherto overlooked in the scholarship—as a starting point for exploring the lived reality of food insecurity in the country. The efficacy of <i>pantawid-gutom</i>, we argue, is both material and symbolic, providing temporary relief from the feeling of hunger and allowing people to suspend their ideas of what is good to eat while maintaining the hope that their socioeconomic predicament is something bridgeable.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 2","pages":"194-215"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.2.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141298548","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":"Sustaining Containability: Zero Waste and White Space","authors":"ELANA RESNICK","doi":"10.14506/ca39.2.03","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Environmental sustainability initiatives in Bulgaria generate new forms of racialization. Although institutionally framed as progressive in the name of “green” Europeanization, in practice these initiatives rely on undervalued and unrecognized racialized labor. By attending to the materiality of recycling bins in downtown Sofia and their physical openings—designed to keep hands out—I show how people engage with recycling-based sustainability regimes and the environmental systems in which they are embedded. Bridging analyses of progressivist environmentalism and anthropologies of enclosure, this article introduces the idea of containability to understand the relationship between waste and race. Containability marks a realm of humanwaste relations predicated on the aspirational goal of boundedness and the everyday disruptions of it. I examine these relations from the perspectives of waste collectors, recycling executives, Romani neighborhood residents, and international environmental consultants. These insights invite us to rethink the racial and material politics of environmentalism that constitute contemporary urban life.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 2","pages":"216-245"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.2.03","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141298549","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":"The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek: On the Problem of Diaspora, the Economy of Agonism, and the Extimacy of Relation-Making","authors":"RANDEEP SINGH HOTHI","doi":"10.14506/ca39.2.04","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article concerns how competing investments in the real motivate political disagreement. The ethnography focuses on face-to-face debate in the wake of spectacular white supremacist violence against Sikhs in the United States. Young activists relate their struggle against racial supremacy to martyrs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, motivating their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. However, for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror first-hand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won respectability, legibility, and safety. This article argues that the in/comparability of evental violence is staked by a global “economy of agonism,” which mobilizes in this case at least two political forms distinctive of the late-twentieth century in each the politics of recognition and ethnonationalism. The article probes the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the “problem of diaspora,” the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. An ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the “extimacy” of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, “collective relation-making,” i.e., in making solidarity, alliance, or coalition amongst seemingly similarly situated others.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 2","pages":"246-271"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.2.04","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141298550","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":"Grinding the Souls: Politics of Interspecies Pity and the Labor of Care in a South Korean Animal Shelter","authors":"EUYRYUNG JUN","doi":"10.14506/ca39.2.06","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.2.06","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay shows how the labor of interspecies care at Animal Rescue in Action (ARA), an animal shelter in South Korea, invites two divergent interpretations. On the one hand, this labor embodies gendered exploitation by being vulnerable to the co-optation of the moralizing politics of “interspecies pity.” On the other hand, it becomes a site for intra-and inter-species entanglements, that are irreducible to the logic of exploitation. The activities of ARA become not only sustainable but also bound by the politics of interspecies pity, which translates the labor of care into selfless affection and grace, thus reproducing gendered exploitation. At the same time, however, everyday entanglements in ARA shelters still create affective excesses that are not entirely subsumed by the politics of pity and generate new forms of care and sociality. Overall, I suggest seeing not only the co-constitutiveness of social inequalities and interspecies relations but also the possibility of new, simultaneously open terrains.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 2","pages":"298-321"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.2.06","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141298546","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":"Evoking Eternity: Orthodox Co-Presence in Post-Yugoslav Central Serbia","authors":"NICHOLAS LACKENBY","doi":"10.14506/ca39.2.05","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article approaches the idea of eternity ethnographically. Specifically it turns to post-Yugoslav central Serbia and the version of eternity <i>(večnost)</i> evoked by practicing Orthodox Christians in their daily lives. In this context, the eternal does not imply the everlastingness of persons and things in this life, or an inevitable cyclical “return.” Rather, eternity constitutes a dimension outside of time that sits alongside the present, a dimension that can be inhabited by ancestors and departed kin. In evoking eternity, people throw temporal life into relief, find solace in the face of death, and engage in the national community those no longer physically present. Against an essentializing view of the eternal as repetition or stasis, the article speculates about how evoking eternity is socially and politically generative, imbuing life with increased imaginative possibilities.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 2","pages":"272-297"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.2.05","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141298551","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":"ON AND IN THEIR BODIES: Masculinist Violence, Criminalization, and Black Womanhood in Trinidad","authors":"LENIQUECA A. WELCOME","doi":"10.14506/ca39.1.03","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article, I place in conversation multiple forms of violence against those who occupy the category of poor black woman in Trinidad: the abuse and premature death of these women at the hands of their partners or strangers, the physical and discursive violence against black women by the state, the theft of their children due to inter/intra-community and police violence, and the grief black women are often forced to carry. I show how these different forms of violence converge on and in black women's bodies and, rather than being distinct in causation and effect, constitute multiple iterations of the ongoing colonialist extraction of black women's lives for the creation of different forms of masculinist state and economic power. Ultimately, I show how masculine and feminine subjectivities are produced in tandem with racialized positionings through violence and comprehensively document what is gendered violence and how it is embodied.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 1","pages":"37-63"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.1.03","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140164249","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":"THE ORDINARINESS OF ETHICS AND THE EXTRAORDINARINESS OF REVOLUTION: Ethical Selves and the Egyptian January Revolution at Home and School","authors":"RAMY ALY","doi":"10.14506/ca39.1.07","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article I present experiences of Egyptians too young to have taken part in the street protests and movement of the 2011 revolution. Today in their early twenties, they narrate their experiences during the early months of the uprising. None claimed to be revolutionaries then or now, but the revolution seems to animate them in complex and long-lasting ways. The January revolution failed to bring about change at the level of state power. Yet more is at stake than the political endgame. I turn my attention to how people narrate the revolution as a process of ethical reflection and self-formation through everyday relationships and settings that took on new meanings. These accounts challenge notions of what it means to participate in a revolution and where it is located and generate a conversation between the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of revolutions.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 1","pages":"146-169"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.1.07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140164291","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":"HABILITATING BODYMINDS, CARING FOR POTENTIAL: Disability Therapeutics after Zika in Bahia, Brazil","authors":"K. ELIZA WILLIAMSON","doi":"10.14506/ca39.1.02","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca39.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article traces how Brazilian mothers raising children with congenital Zika syndrome cultivate their children's bodyminds through habilitative care—care that mobilizes a range of substances, technologies, and techniques to encourage maximum potential development of embodied abilities in young disabled children. Based on fieldwork conducted since 2016 with families impacted by the Zika epidemic in Bahia, Brazil, I argue that Bahian mothers' intensive investments in habilitative care constitute a way of asserting their children's deservingness of ongoing care and of contesting public narratives of their children's lack of futurity, thereby challenging exclusionary ideas about whose bodyminds are worth “potentializing.” In dialogue with critical disability studies, I show how habilitative care is bound to discourses of “overcoming” and “curing” disability that scholars in this field have long criticized. I use my ethnography to unsettle these critiques, asking how to attend to the shaping of developing bodyminds amid the precarities of everyday life in the Global South.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 1","pages":"9-36"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.1.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139958018","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}