{"title":"Affects After Finitude","authors":"Elizabeth A. Povinelli","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905303","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay approaches current anxieties about climate catastrophe by differentiating between a philosophy of the end and a social theory of settler late liberalism that is situated after the end. In order to suggest such a social theory, I begin with two examples of moods and dispositions cultivated in my birth family and among my Karrabing colleagues. Instead of what moods should be fostered at the end—optimism, hope, panic, anxiety, despair—I ask what moods and dispositions have been cultivated in spaces long living after the end? I outline some resonances and differences between these two worlds, both of which sat within a cascade of violent endings, in order to turn to the question of whether optimism should characterize our approach at the end—or to the end? Across my discussion I differentiate between affects and moods on the one hand and dispositions and dispositifs on other hand. I conclude by asking why affects and dispositions become the question in the shadow of the end. As s social thought and commentary piece, I am taking liberties in terms of the depth with which I'll pursue all and any of this—instead I hope merely to open up some new directions.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"545 - 565"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42471522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention by Tess Lea (review)","authors":"Eduardo Hazera","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905306","url":null,"abstract":"I policies were pigs, would they run “rampant” (11) like a drove of “feral” (12) swine, uprooting the picturesque plantation rows of archival orders? What if policies were “vicious” (12) Tasmanian tigers? Would they bare “fierce” (11) fangs made of file cabinets? Policies could also be botanical. But if that were the case, which plant would they be? A shrub? A tree? A medicinal herb?—it’s doubtful. But perhaps policies would resemble Queensland’s invasive rubber vine—“tangled, verdant” and “overgrown” (12)—choking the life out of “neglected” (11) ecological registries. Or are policies more humanoid? Could we imagine a tribe of pre-contact policies gathering together late at night: they encircle a “primitive” (11) spreadsheet; a witchdoctor pounds a “barbarous” (11) whiteboard; “savage” (11) signatures link arms with dotted lines, all dancing in tandem with the vibratory thump of primordial pen strokes? The whole psychedelic scene ripples with “an ambient saturation that works its way into and out of human and nonhuman lives” (12). These adjective-laden questions—which are derived from Tess Lea’s list of synonyms for the troublesome word “wild”—work with surreal aesthetics to rehash the title of Lea’s book, Wild Policy. Such surreal questions performatively reenact Lea’s introductory claim that the word “wild” describes policymaking far better than it describes Aboriginal lifeways. In this sense, the questions above extend Lea’s critical gestures. They poke fun in a serious tone. They wag their tongues at the stodgy formality of policymaking by asking surreal questions about the prehistoric mythologies of policy beings. The title of Lea’s book, reverberating with this surreal line of playful inquiry, “inverts” (12) the terminological tendencies","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"587 - 592"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48708671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Redefining Boundaries and Opening New Terrains in a Peripheral Anthropological Tradition","authors":"Ognjen Kojanić","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905304","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"567 - 581"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47241501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Timely Matters","authors":"Jeremy F. Walton, P. Eisenlohr, Sasha Newell","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900184","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of \"material temporalities\" with an eye to the collection's impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate \"material temporalities\" in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalities in offering affordances to and constituting forms of recalcitrance for human actors. Following this, we discuss the two orders of time, human and nonhuman, that intersect in the assemblages of material temporalities, as well as a number of key inspirations for our theorization of material temporalities—Walter Benjamin's notion of messianic time and Michel Foucault's concept of heterochrony, specifically. This discussion of human and nonhuman times supports our critique of \"clock time\" and its errant aspiration to an objective material basis for temporality. Following this, we offer an overview of both recent and longstanding anthropological engagements with temporality and historicity, as well as a summary of recent media studies perspectives on time and materiality, which mount a more radical intervention and critique than most anthropological arguments. We then review anthropological debates over affect and materiality in order to argue for the centrality of temporality and historicity to affective matters. Finally, we summarize the collections's three major thematic clusters—virtuality and latency, material extensions of phenomenological time, and material futures—with reference to the specific contributions.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"209 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46029607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life by Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine (review)","authors":"J. Slotta","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900194","url":null,"abstract":"T concept of ideology has gone out of fashion in many quarters. Already in 1991, Terry Eagleton remarked on its disappearance from the writings of social theorists. Since then, turns toward affect, materiality, ontology, and the like have moved cultural anthropology and social theory even further from the discursive, representational, subjective domain of ideology. Coincidently, around the time Eagleton was remarking on the abandonment of the concept, ideology was beginning to find its legs in the field of linguistic anthropology. Since then, the study of language ideologies— people’s conceptions of language and its use—has grown to assume a central place in the field. It has not only provided a fruitful angle for approaching longstanding concerns of linguistic anthropologists, everything from the intricacies of conversational interaction to the historical transformations of languages. It has also opened up vast new terrain for research, serving as an intellectual trading zone where linguistic anthropologists draw on and contribute to scholarship on modernity, (post)coloniality, liberal democracy, neoliberal globalization, new media, religion, education, and a host of other topics. During this time, few scholars have had more of an impact on the study of language ideologies than Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine. Their 2000 essay “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation” is already a classic in the field. Now, with Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life, we have the culmination of their decades-long investigation into the warp and woof of language ideologies. This book will be required reading","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"379 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44942430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Slum Acts (After the Postcolonial) by Veena Das (review)","authors":"Navjit Kaur","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900191","url":null,"abstract":"T exercise, execution, and more often, defense of torture in liberal democracies by the judicial apparatus of the state has garnered much anthropological ink in contemporary writings. In engagement with this vein of thinking, Veena Das’s new book, Slum Acts, asks the reader to confront different questions. Firstly, displacing the site through which torture could be seen and “made thinkable in academic writing,” Slum Acts moves away from the bureaucratic chambers of courts, prisons, official documents, media narratives, to the more humble and marginal spaces of minor documents, vernacular writings of false convicts, and slum areas to ask in what ways margins become connected to the imaginations of global terrorism? Is it the question of adding different parts to a singular whole, a “statist logic” fueled by conspiracy theories in which Das also finds much contemporary academic writing complicit, or can an anthropological imagination delve into various scales that don’t add up to a singular whole? Das pursues these multiple tentacles spread across what she calls minor documents, the dispersed body of police in the neighborhoods of slums, and vernacular literature .Thus, the ethnographic endeavour uncovers a thick sociality of language that confronts the question of violence not as an event, which is outside the everyday life but an excessive knowledge that pervades everyday life. In a fieldwork fidelity of patient listening, Das’s ethnographic ink examines what it means to acknowledge, live, and endure this “inordinate knowledge.” Inordinate knowledge, as she rightly argues, isn’t a form of counter knowledge to “suggest contestation, resistance, or struggle,” or an ability to tell “counter stories,” a path in which Michel Foucault’s","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"365 - 369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49578953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Developmental Speculation: Materializing the Future in China's Urban Planning Museums","authors":"Leksa Lee","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900187","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Local governments in China are building thousands of urban planning exhibition centers across the country. These museums and their gigantic scale models depict cities years in the future, after local infrastructure and industrial development projects have been completed. Yet exhibition industry insiders say the futures they depict are unlikely to be realized, raising the question of why local governments would invest so much in producing them. I argue that the exhibition centers and their city models are a material form of financial speculation aimed at inspiring high-level officials to fund local officials' municipal development projects. The emerging ethnography of speculation identifies it as an engagement of the future in the present that is meant to compel and inspire. Through ethnographic work on China's museum industry, I show that China's new urban planning exhibition centers are a tool of \"developmental speculation:\" a postsocialist, intra-governmental, political, and financial form of risk-taking that stakes claims on future economic development and that works through inspirational narrative. In the museum industry, local officials and museum production companies use material acts of modeling and design to link local initiatives to state policies, and to meld the present city with the future city in the scale models. The scale models embody past, present, and future together in one heterochronic material object. Thus, if speculation works through fantastical narratives, China's new urban planning exhibition centers are narratives modeled in material, meant to inspire higher-level officials. They are speculation materialized.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"279 - 306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45942176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest by Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno (review)","authors":"B. Kobak","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900193","url":null,"abstract":"I Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest, anthropologists Britt Halvorson and Joshua Reno undertake the difficult work of historicizing popular perceptions of the American Midwest in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. This presents a difficult task because, as the authors argue, there may be no swath of the country considered more ordinary and banal. And yet, despite this seeming innocence, various tropes of the region have perpetuated ideals of whiteness for centuries. Framed principally as a critical study of region, Imagining the Heartland consists of five chapters that address how the Midwest has operated as a “screen” or “stage” through which ideologies of whiteness have been reinforced at various periods of United States history (4). They consistently argue that region, like territory, is not so much a natural property of a place as it is a normative claim about who belongs (50, 152). Beyond the current caricature of the forgotten, working-class, white voter of the Trump era, they ask why this, along with other popular perceptions of the Heartland have heightened significance at the historical moment they do (23-24). The answer they offer lies in the qualities so often associated with the Midwest as banal, average, a sort of national middle. Yet, to counteract claims that the Trump era is unprecedented in its conflation of whiteness and the Midwest, Halvorson and Reno’s analyze a vast set of materials that span over a century and a half. Historical junctures that feature prominently throughout the text include native dispossession in the 19th","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"375 - 378"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49409106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani (review)","authors":"Hafsa Arain","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900190","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"361 - 364"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43299304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Projecting a Body Politic: Photographs, Time, and Immortality in the Kurdish Movement","authors":"Marlene Schäfers","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900188","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Many followers of the socialist Kurdish liberation movement surround themselves with photographs of fallen militants who they respect and celebrate as martyrs. These images hold considerable power: they are able to direct speech, shape bodily comportment, and command the everyday lives of their spectators. This paper asks where this potency stems from and what effects it has. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish communities in Turkey and Europe, it argues that displays of martyrs' photographs project a Kurdish body politic in the making, enrolling both those whom they depict and those who handle them into an alternative project of sovereignty that remains under acute assault. Key to this effect is how the photographs make the dead latent in the present. On the one hand, this makes the images immensely powerful media of political mobilization. Embodying the sacrifice of lifetime made by the fallen, the images become powerful vectors for feelings of indebtedness, commitment, and dedication that make distinct demands on the disposable time of those who contemplate them. On the other hand, photography's capacity to make the absent present and thereby upset linear emplotments of time also makes it a potentially unsettling medium. As a result, photographs of martyrs become crucial sites where political belonging and commitment are fashioned, consolidated, and potentially rebelled against.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"307 - 333"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47079285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}