{"title":"Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (review)","authors":"Marisa Solomon","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"T environment is an incoherent imaginary. Highly racialized in its moralistic deployment of good and bad (McKee 2015), clean and dirty (Butt 2020, Resnick 2021), worth preserving or wasted (West 2006, Wolfe 2006), its terms produce colonial schemas and maps that demarcate who is and isn’t deserving of global aid. Improbably suggesting shared culpability for the asymmetric effects of late capitalism’s ongoing destruction (Fortun 2001), colonial environmental imaginaries create geographies of charity in the wake of producing what Katherine McKittrick (2013) and others have called uninhabitable geographies. Yet, the incoherence of “the environment” is a resource for racial capitalism, particularly when settler colonial markers of progress require that some people, land, and communities remain stuck in the past in order to facilitate the “modern” march forward (Solomon 2019). Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine works within the incoherence of environmental imaginaries, revealing how their dissonance produces meaning, time, and place in Palestine. Subtended by the toxic materialities of what Rob Nixon (2011) has called environmental slow violence, Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s ethnography of infrastructure offers a different analytic to describe the siege on Palestinian lives: a waste siege. This ethnography asks the reader to see the “disorienting patchwork of military installations” (19) as well as unpredictable yet inevitable encounters with the state (i.e., Israel) and something “state-like” (i.e., the Palestinian Authority) as critical to how waste moves in and through Palestine. From Palestinian domestic waste practices and experiences with disposable","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"493 - 497"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48696094","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":"Militarization: A Reader ed. by Roberto J. Gonzalez et al., and: Militarized Global Apartheid by Catherine Besteman (review)","authors":"L. Zani","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"475 - 482"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48552298","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":"What Else Is There? Vacancy as Development Problem and Solution","authors":"Elizabeth Youngling","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Urban vacant land is often framed as a consequence of political and economic problems that negatively affect land values, tax bases, public safety, and community flourishing. At the same time, vacancy presents governments—and private developers—with opportunities for transformation. This commentary examines a development plan that makes use of vacancy in Chicago, Illinois to shed light on the ways in which vacancy can become a project in itself rather than a side effect of growth, decay, and change. I argue that through processes of erasure, re-inscription, and assemblage, vacancy projects enable redevelopment in ways that further politicians' and developers' agendas for post-industrial urban economic growth. In Chicago, vacant industrial land, such as the former Clybourn Corridor Planned Manufacturing District, is simultaneously positioned as an insurmountable problem and an exceptional development opportunity. I use the Clybourn Corridor case to illuminate the social, political, and economic processes through which vacancy is made productive in urban contexts. The relative opacity of such processes has profound implications for urban futures, shaping who makes plans for and benefits from the transformation of urban space. By delving into a vacancy project ethnographically in Chicago, a city struggling, like many, to define a post-industrial future, this commentary contributes to our understandings of vacancy as a tool to draw resources in and make development happen. It demonstrates the political, economic, and social processes through which urban land is defined and reconfigured as a site for public and private intervention as well as opportunity in the contemporary moment.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"311 - 331"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46887101","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":"Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan by Sima Shakhsari (review)","authors":"D. Alinejad","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0036","url":null,"abstract":"W each popular protest in Iran that makes international headlines, questions about a fissure between Iranian people and the Iranian state reemerge with new force in Western media narratives and policy discussions. Over the past two decades, the role of digital communications platforms in fostering such a fissure has received particular attention. However, claims about the internet’s role have often been informed by bloated techno-utopian hopes, and less grounded in knowledge about Iranians’ digital media practices. Sima Shakhsari’s book, Politics of Rightful Killing, offers a powerful corrective to assumptions about Iran’s web users being a uniform set of political dissidents. Instead, Shakhsari shows us how the Iranian blogosphere constitutes a multifarious communicative space featuring a range of internal political clashes as well as its own dynamics of exclusion, control, and bigotry—often along lines of gender and sexuality. The book draws on ethnographic material elicited through Shakhsari’s participant observation as a long-time blogger in Weblogistan, a term used for the Persian language blogosphere (literally meaning land of weblogs). Alongside the observational material, the analysis foregrounds interviews with key Iranian bloggers the author met in varied diaspora locations. As such, Shakhsari’s discussion is able to seamlessly weave analysis of blog texts and images together with the social dynamics behind their production and the political contexts of their reception. This is the basis on which she makes a convincing case for understanding the thriving Iranian blogosphere of the early 2000s as a significant but vulnerable site of international contestation over the meaning of Iranian","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"755 - 758"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46446164","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":"Gringo Love: Stories of Sex Tourism in Brazil by Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan (review)","authors":"L. Murray","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0044","url":null,"abstract":"W is sex tourism? Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan asks this question in one of the appendices to her graphic novel, noting that the answer is not a simple one and that her book opts to provide possible definitions rather than definitive answers. In fact, throughout the book, she makes clear that Gringo Love is less about what sex tourism is and more about how it is experienced by the book’s protagonists and operated by diverse state and non-state interests in Ponta Negra, Natal, Brazil. With Gringo Love, Carrier-Moison along with William Flynn who adapted the research to the graphic format and Brazilian freelance illustrator Débora Santos have created an engaging, nuanced look at the complexities of sexual economies. The core themes of the book are introduced early and woven throughout: how anti-sex tourism campaigns are heavily raced and classed, the tenuous and blurred lines between romance and money, and the centrality of the women’s relationships with one another for support, guidance, and solidarity. The graphic novel follows Carol, the main character, and her friends Ester, Sofia, Luana, and Amanda as they navigate sexual economies in Natal. Carrier-Moisan’s character “Eva” in the story plays an important role as a narrator, friend, and anthropologist who reflects on the diverse challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in the “Fieldnotes” section breaks. “Part I: Arrivals” opens with a sensationalistic journalistic story and police operations to crack down on “sex tourism.” The decision to start the graphic novel this way foregrounds and locates the women’s stories in the","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"771 - 774"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43916733","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":"Navigating Seas, Markets, and Sovereignties: Fishers and Occupational Slippage in the South China Sea","authors":"Edyta Roszko","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0046","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Oceans have always been arenas of crime, drugs and human trafficking, and poaching. When such violations occur on fishing boats, they fall under the rubric of \"fisheries crime.\" Political scientists and economists have tended to assume that these criminal fishers simply abandon their legal occupation and take up illegal practices, labelled \"transnational organized fisheries crime\" by the United Nations. On the other hand, some scholars have also argued that subsidized and militarized fishers in the South China Sea are simply acting as instruments of their states' geopolitical agendas, responding to regulations, non-enforcement of regulations, and incentives. Such present-centric approaches both obscure the modalities of fishers' embodied skills and knowledge and their motivations, and downplay the inter-ethnic networks that connected different fishers beyond state territories and localized fishing grounds in past and present. Charting the spike in maritime trespass in (and out of) the South China Sea, this article combines ethnography and historiography to show how fishers move in and out of legal and illegal, state and non-state categories of fisher, poacher, trader, smuggler, and militia. I propose the concept of occupational slippage as a way of going beyond the fiction of fishing as mono-occupational and theorizing the realities of fishers as mobile maritime actors who enact and conceal multiple—simultaneous and consecutive—livelihood strategies while navigating not just seas, but also markets and territorial sovereignties. Thus, I argue that the fishers' practices reflect wider interconnections between modern, state-supported, and technology-driven fisheries with older pre-nation-state patterns of mobility and knowledge accumulated through generations, producing new forms of versatility that operate under the states' radars.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"639 - 668"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42838223","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":"Social Memory, Iconicity, and Gendered Spaces in Tuareg Sedentarization and Urbanization","authors":"S. Rasmussen","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0045","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article explores selective memories of nomadic gendered spaces, as expressed in the iconicity of housing built forms and their surrounding motifs and practices in terms of their meanings in relation to changing social contexts among the previously more nomadic Saharan Tuareg in sedentarization and urbanization. The approach here takes the apparently temporal idea of historical change in a formerly nomadic society and connects it to the spatial continuities and transformations in settled and urban organization and practice, analyzing their impact upon gender constructs and relations between the sexes, and exploring ways women and men actively respond to and manipulate these new spaces through evoking selective memories of their rural nomadic milieu. It is shown how local and national social constructions of memory and history sometimes converge, sometimes diverge, and have changed under wider pressures, while Tuareg women's lives and their place as makers of much material culture have been transformed. It is argued that agency in gendered spaces in oases and towns of Niger and Mali alternately obliterates and commemorates important gender constructs central to cultural identity. More broadly, this article argues that spatial and iconic meanings emerge only when animated by practices focused on both remembering and forgetting, practices not always rigidly opposed or mutually exclusive.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"669 - 698"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47977044","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":"Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean by Jatin Dua (review)","authors":"Adrienne Mannov","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0042","url":null,"abstract":"I Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, anthropologist Jatin Dua has woven an insightful and refreshing monograph about contemporary maritime piracy emanating from Somalia, with specific focus on what he refers to as “an anthropology of protection” (23). For Dua, this means empirically tracking practices of protection that are violent and/or coercive, whether they are meant to protect lifestyles, land, trade routes, financial assets or free trade (19). This move destabilizes the “empirical and analytical divides between piracy and counter-piracy,” (4) and Dua shows us how they are, in many ways, quite similar. The introduction to Captured at Sea is a fabulous piece of scholarship that offers important interventions to how we understand sovereignty, and specifically challenges the taken-for-given conceptual divide between the land and the sea. The first three chapters seek to anchor piracy practices to reciprocal kinship groups (diya) and counter-piracy to marine insurance companies (121). He begins with a thorough historical framing of protection practices in the region, and then shows how these practices continue to be relevant in everyday relations with those who practice Somali piracy. His chapter on the connections between counter-piracy and marine insurance is based on the framework of maritime regulations and law. Thereafter, Dua focuses on ransom-making practices (Chapter 4) and on being captive (Chapter 5). The book is based on research that stretched over approximately four years during which he developed a methodology that is “transregional” (24). In practice, this means that Dua not only links sites perceived as separate—such as places at sea and on land or diya groups and insurance","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"737 - 743"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48389558","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":"Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change by Hannah Knox (review)","authors":"Sydney Giacalone","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0039","url":null,"abstract":"W does it mean to study climate change as a material-discursive entity ethnographically? What can anthropology lend to this topic, and what do we as a discipline need to learn from it? In Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, Hannah Knox proposes a methodological as well as theoretical approach to attending ethnographically to the “scale-sliding, time-destroying, knowledge-undoing,” ecosystemic relationality of climate change (268). Drawing on Eduardo Kohn and Gregory Bateson’s applications of Peircean semiotics, Knox considers climate change as a form of thought, a process that manifests as an “ecology of signs” within social practices of numbering, classifying, modeling, and experimenting with how we might live in a climate-changed world. Understanding climate change as a signifying phenomenon, a form in continual negotiation with our representations of its meanings, points to how we might “extend our description of climate change into practices, minds, and activities that ultimately aim to change the climate from within by acting on and in an ecosystem of sign relations” (23). Knox draws upon her fieldwork from 2011 and 2018 in Manchester, England, an exemplary city seeking to position itself as low-carbon and postindustrial, with city politicians, activists, residents, and business people. Her methods resist what could come off as a traditional STS critique of the city’s technopolicial forms of governance. Instead, she asks what it means to attend empirically to where and how climate change emerges, as urban communities in Manchester attempt to respond to it.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"765 - 769"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46280730","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":"Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters & Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts by Frédéric Keck (review)","authors":"G. Sodikoff","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0034","url":null,"abstract":"P shortly before the COVID-19 outbreak, Frédéric Keck’s multisited, multispecies ethnography offers a wealth of insight into the science of emergent infectious disease and the ways influenza pandemics have transformed human-bird relations. Although Avian Reservoirs concentrates on avian influenza, the study deepens our understanding of investigations into zoonotic threats in general, no matter the species source. The book will hold particular interest for scholars of Science and Technology Studies, One Health, and biosecurity. But anthropologists interested in the history of theory will also appreciate how Keck breathes new life and relevance into the ideas of the discipline’s canonical figures. Keck argues that the rise in emergent zoonotic diseases due to anthropogenic environmental change has yielded a variety of novel techniques of pandemic preparedness, and these techniques, which focus on the “animal level,” have transformed humans’ relations to birds and other species. Like us, birds face threats of mass death by disease, and their recruitment into techniques of pandemic preparedness towards mutual biosecurity works to blur species boundaries. Yet, unlike us, they may participate in these techniques and scenarios as sacrificial animals, revealing the intransigence of our moral hierarchy of species. Keck depicts transformations in human-bird relations with ethnographic data collected over the course of six years in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, territories whose people “found with avian influenza a language to talk about the problems they have with mainland China” (3). The nature of each territory’s political relationship to China has shaped scientists’ research not only with regard to access to virus samples and funding sources, but also in the ways simulations of bird diseases have been carried out.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"745 - 750"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42377731","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}