What is African in the African diaspora? In this article, I return to the problematic question of African origins in the black Americas, arguing that despite the distortions of baseline genealogies and associated myths of tribal purity, West African cultural frameworks--when critically reformulated--illuminate New World dynamics of creolization. Focusing on the Petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, which opposes Creole powers of money and magic to the venerated, if enervated, authority of Ginen (Africa), I address a fairly narrow debate regarding the division of Petwo and Rada deities and their imputed Creole versus African origins. Against the ideology of Haitian Vodou, and its misleading influence on various scholars, a Yoruba-Dahomean cultural hermeneutic reveals the African origins and revisionary principles of the Petwo and Rada opposition, as it emerged before the Haitian revolution and realigned with class relations under Francois Duvalier. [African diaspora, creolization, secrecy, hermeneutics, race and class, Vodou]

Sites and places present analytical problems to ethnographers who acknowledge the reality of global flows but doubt their liberatory potential. In this article, I suggest that ethnographers move beyond the rhetoric and organizing assumptions of globalism not simply by discarding the local-global distinction but also by interrogating the analytical tendency to disconnect culture from place. Such a tendency appears to contribute to the resilience of constructivism in ethnographic analysis. A perspective of emplacement builds on insights into global flows while providing a focus on embodied and situated presence. I develop this perspective with the aid of ethnography on conflicts between migrants and original inhabitants in an impoverished area of Malawi’s capital. The occult powers of a secret society partly account for migrants’ emplacement, challenging migrants’ globalist imagination that draws on the liberal rhetoric of economic and political reform and on spiritual protection afforded by world religions. The perspective of emplacement reaches beyond globalism by showing how all phenomena in global circulations are at once both particular and capable of spreading widely as elements of the globalist imagination. [ethnography, globalism, migration, emplacement, embodiment, the occult, African urbanism]

In analyses of the key changes that have taken place in the international organization of capitalism, it has been argued that the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism has transformed the material realities of peoples’ everyday lives and their forms of subjectivity and collective identity. Universalist forms of identification, especially class, it is argued, have given way to forms of affiliation based on the particularisms of ethnicity, nationalism, regionalism, and other cultural affinities. The theoretical weight accorded to class to explain the complexities of change under late capitalism has declined as analysts have turned increasingly to the study of nationalism, regionalism, and ethnicity in order to apprehend the dynamics of contemporary societies, particularly where ethnic conflict has become salient in regional and national politics. Yet, the extent to which universalistic forms of affiliation have been superseded by particularistic forms of identity in contemporary consciousness is the subject of much debate. By drawing on fieldwork undertaken among the family farmers of rural Languedoc, I argue that class maintains its potency both as a subjective category and an analytical category. Further, I show that class remains indispensable to understanding the nature of change in late capitalism. [Post-Fordism, class, identity, France, regionalism, Occitan]

Family planning has been imported to Greece as a means of encouraging individuals to become modern adults by rationalizing their sexual relations and fertility-control efforts. But family-planning discourse neglects how such factors as emotion and so-called traditional belief--including gender norms--guide people’s reasonable actions. In this article, I examine how the purported gender neutrality of family-planning advocacy and its reliance on risk-management models fails to speak to women’s experiences and undermines family planners’ goals for women’s autonomy. [family planning, abortion, gender, sexuality, modernity, risk, Greece]

Korowai of New Guinea participate in person-reference partnerships in which two people call each other by a term recalling some past event of mutual and mildly transgressive bodily identification. This genre of person reference is hybrid between personal names and kinterms and between joking and avoidance. Details of the genre’s internal organization and links to other person- referring expressions provide evidence that Korowai speakers affirm a dyadcentric model of personhood, and that these same speakers affirm an ideology of language according to which words do not only represent persons but also impinge on them causally. This genre of person reference underscores the methodological importance of recognizing reflexive, metarepresentational dimensions of people’s use of different person-referring forms. [food, transgression, language ideology, personhood, name avoidance, kinship, NewGuinea]

In this article, I analyze how ideas of attachment to place and the experience of political and economic marginality combine to produce a particular moral geography for people of the Manambondro region of southeast Madagascar. Though the elements of this moral geography comprise an archive of sorts of the colonial encounter, they also speak of people’s consciousness of their marginality within the postcolonial present. I argue that moral geography represents a structure of feeling, a form of social consciousness that captures something profound about people’s senses of place and also, regarding their ambivalence toward modernity, their sense of who they are and who they might become. [colonialism, modernity, moral geography, place, postcolonialism, structure of feeling, Madagascar]

"Women’s language" is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part of practical social knowledge in contemporary Japan. In this article, I examine the genealogy of Japanese women’s language by locating its emergence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when state formation, capitalist accumulation, industrialization, and radical class reconfiguration were taking off. I show how particular speech forms were carved out as women’s language in a network of diverse modernization practices. I theorize the historical relationship between Japan’s linguistic modernity--language standardization, the rise of the novel, and print capitalism--and the emergence of Japanese women’s language. [gender and language, modernity, language ideology, metapragmatics, reported speech, Japan, Japanese women, effective history]