American Ethnologist
Volume 30, issue 2

Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez

Unplanned Persons and Gendered Children

Planned births, unplanned persons: "Population" in the making of Chinese modernity
Susan Greenhalgh
In this article I suggest that "population" operates as a capacious domain of modern power, with its own imaginaries, discourses, bureaucratic apparatuses, and social effects. Taking China, home to the world's largest population, as my ethnographic case, I examine the role of "birth planning," China's distinctive Marxist-Leninist-Maoist approach to population control, in the construction of "Chinese socialist modernity." I trace the historical, political, and bureaucratic process by which the state's planned birth project, designed to create a modern, planned population, produced not only a large group of planned persons but also a huge outcast group of unplanned, "black" persons who, as legal nonpersons, exist on the margins of society, lacking citizenship rights and state benefits. With its gargantuan population and fearsome birth planning program, China offers striking evidence of the social power of governmental projects on population control--to create new classifications of social life, new types of personhood, and new forms of social and political exclusion.
[population, modernity, personhood, China]

Children and the gendered politics of globalization: In remembrance of Sharon Stevens
Liisa Malkki and Emily Martin
Written to honour the memory of Sharon Stephens as an exceptional anthropologist, this article focusses on her groundbreaking work of critically theorizing children and childhoods in relation to the politics of late capitalism and structures of modernity. Stephens' research into the contested category of childhood is here linked specifically to the location and uses of the figure of "the child" in the gendered politics of globalization.
[children, childhood, globalization, gender, late capitalism, modernity, Cold War", national security" discourses]

Imagining Enemies, Imagining Subjectivities

Dubbing Culture: Indonesian Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities and Ethnography in an Already Globalized World
Tom Boellstorff
In this article I explore how Indonesians come to see themselves as lesbi or gay through fragmentary encounters with mainstream mass media (rather than lesbian and gay Westerners or Western lesbian and gay media). By placing this ethnographic material alongside a recent debate on the dubbing of foreign television programs into the Indonesian language, I develop a theoretical framework of “dubbing culture” to critically analyze globalizing processes.
[globalization, homosexuality, identity, Indonesia, mass media, nationalism, postcolonial]

AIDS rumors, imaginary enemies, and the body politic in Indonesia
Karen A. Kroeger
Rumors about disease and illness draw on the rich symbolism of the body and are a way for social groups to express concerns about their relationships to the community and state. The Indonesian “AIDS Club” rumors are part of a corpus of contemporary legends about AIDS that have circulated globally. In their local form, however, they speak to particular concerns that urban Indonesians have about modernity and the power of the Indonesian state.
[AIDS, rumors, Indonesia, New Order, disease and illness, violence, body politic, somatization]

Resources and Their Ambiguities

Ambiguous numbers: trading technologies and interpretation in financial markets
Caitlin Zaloom
Financial markets and information technologies are key issues for contemporary social theory and the anthropology of globalization. Drawing on fieldwork in Chicago and London, I examine the interplay between processes of technological rationalization and the situated actions of traders in two financial futures markets, one that operates on open-outcry, or pit, technology and the other online. Both technologies represent the market in numbers. Traders use these symbols to read and interpret the market. Yet each technology configures numbers differently. The technologies influence traders’ practices by shaping this basic unit of financial knowledge.
[finance, globalization, knowledge, numbers, technology, United States, England]

“This is Ghanaian territory!”: Land conflicts on a West African border
Carola Lentz
Most African borders have remained permeable, not least because the colonial and postcolonial states have lacked the necessary resources to enforce them more rigidly, “top-down.” In this article I analyze the ways in which an African border has been dealt with “from below,” partly ignored or subverted and partly appropriated. The border between Ghana and Burkina Faso, drawn up in 1898, was soon adopted by the borderlanders as a political resource, capable of shielding them from colonial tax and forced-labor requirements. Local networks of kinship and strategies of land use, on the other hand, usually ignored the border. Although the border cut through many earth-shrine areas, the indigenous institution on which land rights are traditionally based in the region, the shrine custodians continued to exercise their ritual control on both sides of the border. In recent conflicts over land, however, lineal boundaries separating sovereign national territories have been used to usurp traditional land rights. I discuss one such conflict, in which rights to use a fishpond are contested, to explore local perceptions of space and boundaries and how these change in relation to international borders.
[international borders, concepts of space, earth shrines, land rights, authochthony, West Africa, Dagara, Sisala]

“Hot Money” and Daring Consumption in a Northern Malagasy Sapphire Mining Town
Andrew Walsh
In Ambondromifehy, a sapphire-mining town in northern Madagascar, young men earn and spend a great deal of what some call “hot money.” Rather than invest their earnings with long-term intentions in the responsible ways that some around them consider proper, they consume “daringly” by spending money to fulfill immediate desires. I argue that such “daring consumption” might be understood as the active response of young men who refuse the passive roles allotted them by both the sapphire trade and traditional systems of social organization.
[Madagascar, consumption, money, risk, sapphire mining, masculinity]