Abstracts -- AE 31(2)
Culpability
Toward an anthropology of culpability
Nandini Sundar
Anthropologists concerned with political violence
and justice must engage in a comparative examination of
culpability for past and ongoing crimes. When powerful states
use reparations, truth commissions, or war crime tribunals
to attribute culpability to others, including their past
selves, they often, paradoxically, legitimize ongoing injustices.
As against culturalist explanations for mass violence, which
set up a hierarchy of cultures, we need to look at the institutional
sites through which public morality is constructed. This
approach is illustrated with reference to the killing of
Muslims in Gujarat, India, in 2002 and to the invasion of
Iraq by the United States in 2003. [culpability, comparative
anthropology, reparations, genocide, war, India, United
States]
Theorizing modernity conspiratorially:
Science, scale, and the political economy of public discourse
in explanations of a cholera epidemic
Charles L. Briggs
When some five hundred people in eastern Venezuela
died from cholera in 1992–93, officials responded
by racializing the dead as “indigenous people”
and suggesting that “their culture” was to blame.
Stories that circulated in affected communities talked back
to official accounts, alleging that the state, global capitalism,
and international politics were complicit in a genocidal
plot. It is easy to attribute such conspiracy theories to
differences of culture and epistemology. I argue, rather,
that how political economies position different players
in the processes through which public discourses circulate,
excluding some communities from access to authoritative
sources of information and denying them means of transforming
their narratives into public discourse, provides a more
fruitful line of analysis. In this article I use—and
talk back to—research on science studies, globalization,
and public discourse to think about how conspiracy theories
can open up new ways for anthropologists to critically engage
the contemporary politics of exclusion and help us all find
strategies for survival. [race, conspiracy theories, narrative,
health, globalization, indigenous peoples, Latin America]
Criminal justice, cultural justice:
The limits of liberalism and the pragmatics of difference
in the new South Africa
John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
What are the limits of liberalism in accommodating
the growing demands of difference? Can a Euromodernist nation-state,
founded on One Law, infuse itself with another, with an
African jurisprudence? And how is it to deal with cultural
practices deemed “dangerous” by the canons of
enlightenment reason? These questions are especially urgent
in postcolonies like South Africa, with highly diverse populations
whose traditional ways and means are accorded constitutional
protection. Here we examine how South Africans are dealing
with such “dangerous” practices in an era in
which their nation is becoming ever more policultural; how,
in the process, an Afromodernity is taking organic shape
in the interstices between new democratic institutions and
the kingdom of custom; how the confrontation between Culture,
in the upper case, and a state founded on liberal universalism
is beginning to reconfigure the political landscape of this
postcolony—as it is, we argue, in many places across
the planet. [law, culture, liberalism, postcoloniality,
multiculturalism, policulturalism, Afromodernity]
_________________________
Desire
Modernity without romance?
Masculinity and desire in courtship stories told by young
Papua New Guinean men
David Lipset
Romance has been theoretically associated
with the estrangements created by modern individualism.
As demonstrated in courtship stories told by young men from
the Murik Lakes in Papua New Guinea, the relationship of
Murik culture to modernity has not resulted in narratives
that privilege a construction of courtship in which the
self merges with the beloved. Desire is not defined in terms
of romantic love but is set amid events that are scrupulously
fixed in the foregrounds of specific times and exact locations.
In these tales, representations of personhood are organized
by a Homeric chronotope rather than by a romantic one. Although
masculinity in Murik culture has undergone important transformations
in the 20th century, its sociology has not given way to
the discourse of modern individualism. [modernity, romance,
masculinity, chronotopes, Bakhtin, Papua New Guinea, Sepik
River, Murik]
Incitements to desire:
Sexual cultures and modernizing projects
Florence E. Babb
Review of:
The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS.
Héctor Carrillo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002. xiii + 371 pp., bibliography, index.
Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China.
Judith Farquhar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
xii + 341 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index.
Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai.
James Farrer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
xii + 387 pp., illustrations, map, bibliography, index.
Heterogender Homosexuality in Honduras. Manuel
Fernández-Alemany and Stephen O. Murray. Lincoln,
NE: Writers Club Press, 2002. xi + 208 pp., bibliography.
This review essay considers recent work on sexuality and
modernity, broadly conceived. Examining two studies from
China and two from parts of Latin America, I suggest that
fruitful research and writing is focusing on regions that
are undergoing economic transitions marked by growing private
sectors and market reform as a consequence of globalization.
In these areas one finds both economic and sexual “opening
up” to change, with diverse cultural and political
implications at the local and the national levels. [sexuality,
economy, modernity, globalization, China, Latin America]
_________________________
Discourse
The organization of ideological diversity in discourse:
Modern and neotraditional visions of the Tongan state
Susan U. Philips
In current cultural anthropology, under the influence of
postmodernism, considerable attention is given to the multiplicity
of interpretive perspectives with which people contend in
making sense of their daily experiences. In this article
I examine diverse representations of the nation-state in
Tonga and other Pacific microstates. My focus is on the
configuration of ideological diversity in the Tongan Magistrate’s
Courts compared with configurations of traditional and modern
nationalist ideologies in other Tongan political domains
and in other Pacific nations. Some contemporary anthropological
accounts represent ideological diversity as plural, fluid,
and rapidly changing. Other accounts of ideological diversity
emphasize the oppositional structuring of ideas and the
power struggle for ideological domination. I argue that
it is useful to think of an ecology of ideas, in which multiple
ideas move across discourse domains, becoming implanted
in hospitable discourse environments, much as plants move
into new environments. [ideological diversity, discourse
structure, law, state, representations of the nation, Tonga,
tradition and modernism]
Heteroglossia, “common sense,” and social memory
Andrea L. Smith
In this article I analyze internally contradictory
narratives articulated by former settlers of Algeria. By
adopting a discourse-centered approach to these stories
of colonial assimilation, I show that what are often described
as “commonsense” forms in popular memory can
be viewed as examples of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Passages
from taped conversations illustrate multiple voices in dynamic
interaction. Research in cognitive anthropology and psychology
suggests that it is not unusual for individuals to retain
multiple and conflicting viewpoints simultaneously. Narratives
about the past may be especially multivocal, for reasons
I discuss here. I reflect on implications of these insights
for anthropological models of social memory. [social memory,
common sense, hegemony, French Algeria, settlers, multivocality,
heteroglossia]
Transnational perspectives on sociolinguistic capital among
Luso-Descendants in France and Portugal
Michèle Koven
I argue in this article that language practices
and ideologies are central to French–Portuguese transmigrants’
efforts to obtain recognition of legitimate identities in
both French and Portuguese national contexts. Drawing on
ethnographic work, I describe the encounters of Luso-Descendants,
the adult children of Portuguese migrants, with French and
Portuguese monolingual language ideologies. Although these
actors’ lives are led transnationally, their life
possibilities are structured by sociolinguistic norms centered
within two ideologically monolingual nation-states. This
article thus contributes to scholarship about the sociolinguistics
of migration by advocating a more transnational approach
to the study of migrant populations. Similarly, it contributes
to discussions of transnationalism by looking specifically
at how language becomes an important site for the enactment
of identities within and across multiple national boundaries
in the context of the European Union. [language practices,
immigration, return migration, transnationalism, language
ideologies, Europe, France, Portugal]
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