Abstracts -- AE 31(3)
AE Forum: Grounding September
11
National subjects: September 11 and
Pearl Harbor
Geoffrey M. White
Despite a long tradition
of writing on collective representations of the past, anthropology
has contributed relatively little to the expanding literature
on national memory. Yet ethnographic approaches have the
facility to delineate practices that create historical narrative
and give it emotive power while keeping in view longer-term
political forces that underwrite dominant imaginaries.... In
this article I inquire into the discursive origins of emotional
involvement in national history by juxtaposing two events
of spectacular violence, September 11 and Pearl Harbor.
Focusing on the representation of these events in public
culture and at memorial sites, I argue that personal narratives
play a central role in formations of national subjectivity,
at times emotionalizing dominant memories and at other times
opening possibilities for alternative visions. [memory,
nation, subjectivity, emotion, war, memorial, ritual]
The aesthetics of absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero
Marita Sturken
In this article, I examine the narratives and meanings
that have been projected onto the space of Ground Zero in
New York City since September 11, 2001, how they have been
deployed for various political agendas, and how they have
informed the ways in which the site will be rebuilt and
memorialized. I investigate the changing meanings attributed
to the dust and the footprints of the World Trade Center
buildings and the debates over architectural designs and
the proposed memorial. [cultural memory, place, mourning,
memorial, architecture, tourism]
The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local
discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site
Setha M. Low
An inherent tension exists between the meanings of the World
Trade Center site created by dominant political and economic
players and the significance of the space for those who
actually live near it. Most of the writing on and analysis
of the site have focused on the construction of a memorial
space for an imagined national and global community of visitors
who identify with its broader, state-produced meanings.
But New Yorkers, in general, downtown residents, in particular,
bring to meaning making their own personal involvement in
and knowledge of a located history that has social, political,
and economic significance for their everyday lives. These
meanings are as much a part of memorialization as the dominant
players’ political machinations and economic competition
for space and status. Uncovering and eliciting these local
memorial discourses is part of an ethnographic project that
focuses on how personalized narratives of loss emerge and
are manipulated within mass-mediated representations of
the World Trade Center space. My contribution to understanding
how the memorial process works has been to analyze what
downtown residents say about their experience of September
11 and its aftermath, to record their feelings about a memorial,
and, in so doing, to contest, expand, and modify the dominant
media and governmental representations of September 11 and
its memorialization. [World Trade Center site, Ground Zero,
memorialization, Battery Park City, cultural diversity,
New York City, sense of place, public space, fear]
Review essay: The military and militarization in the United
States
Eyal Ben-Ari
Army of Hope,
Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American
Army Communities of Cold War Germany. John P. Hawkins.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001; Softcover 2nd edition, Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2005. xix + 332 pp., notes,
appendices, bibliography, index.
Homefront: The Military
City and the American Twentieth Century. Catherine
Lutz. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. 317 pp., notes, index.
Military Power and Popular Protest:
The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Katherine T.
McCaffrey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2002. xvii + 218 pp., notes, bibliography, index.
I examine three ethnographies of the U.S. military and of
militarization in the contemporary United States. These
phenomena have hitherto received little scholarly attention
by anthropologists. After describing the contents of the
three volumes, I suggest that their wider import for anthropology
lies in their demonstration of the usefulness of the discipline’s
theories and analytical tools for analyzing the political
economy of militarization and the unique character of an
organization specializing in violence. [violence, military,
militarization, war, United States]
Visualizing the State
Nuclear technoaesthetics: Sensory
politics from Trinity to the virtual bomb in Los Alamos
Joseph Masco
In this article I investigate
the politics of nuclear weapons production by examining
how weapons scientists have experienced the exploding bomb
at the level of sense perception through three experimental
regimes: underground testing (1945–62), aboveground
testing (1963–92), and stockpile stewardship (1995–2010).
I argue that, for weapons scientists, a diminishing sensory
experience of the exploding bomb has, over time, allowed
nuclear weapon research to be increasingly depoliticized
and normalized within the laboratory. The result is a post–Cold
War nuclear project that assesses the atomic bomb not on
its military potential as a weapon of mass destruction but,
rather, on the aesthetic pleasure afforded by its computer
simulations and material science. [nuclear weapons, technoaesthetics,
science studies, embodiment, virtual reality, U.S. militarism,
New Mexico]
Miniaturizing Atatürk: Privatization of state
imagery and ideology in Turkey
Esra Özyürek
Since the late 1990s Turkish consumers have purchased
pictures of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and
the most potent symbol of the Turkish state, as popular
commodities, displaying them in homes and private businesses.
In this article, I argue that these consumer citizens seek
to reconcile the memory of Atatürk’s state-led
modernity of the 1930s with recent international pressure
to achieve a market-based modernity. As citizens try to
mask the authority of secularist state institutions with
consumer choice, the market carries state symbolism into
new, private spheres, which it previously had not been able
to infiltrate. [state, market, privatization, secularism,
Islam, Atatürk, Turkey]
Time and Its (Ir)relevance
Real time: Unwinding technocratic
and anthropological knowledge
Annelise Riles
“The Bank of Japan is our mother,”
bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan’s central
bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource,
and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind
their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a
real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding
technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge
practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw
attention to special methodological problems—involving
the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in
the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge
practices. [risk, finance, economics, regulation, bureaucracy,
expert knowledge, Japan]
No past, no present: A critical–Nayaka perspective
on cultural remembering
Nurit Bird-David
By means of an ethnographic analysis of Nayaka
life stories and trance invocations, I revisit the common
wisdom that cultures classed as “immediate-return
hunter-gatherers” show little interest in the past.
I argue that Nayaka are not interested in the past in the
common Eurocentric understanding thereof. They are interested,
however, in a past filtered through their own sensibilities.
Their specific case supports a broader critique of studying
ways of remembering the past in terms of a Eurocentric past–present
distinction. [past, time, cultural remembering, history,
spirit possession, Nayaka, hunter-gatherers]
Transgression and Sentiment
From being to becoming: Nüshu
and sentiments in a Chinese rural community
Fei-wen Liu
In this article, I explore the sentiments of kelian
(the miserable) that were accentuated in the Chinese literature
written in a script called nüshu (female writing),
which men could not read. Not known to the outside world
until the 1980s when it was becoming extinct, nüshu
was used for centuries by peasant women in Jiangyong County,
Hunan Province, southern China. By examining the textual,
contextual, and performative meanings of nüshu, I argue
that sentiment is not only part of human phenomenological
experience, but it also partakes in the way lives are defined,
articulated, reflected, and reconfigured. In Jiangyong,
sentiment was not merely a carrier of nüshu women’s
worldview or an embodiment of their existence as isolated
and powerless beings in a Confucian–androcentric agrarian
community. More importantly, it functioned as an energy
flow that prompted inspiration and engagement—which
these women needed to offset and transform their isolation
and powerlessness. This research fills the void in understandings
of peasant women’s expressive traditions in rural
China in the early 20th century. It also lends insights
into the dialectical relations between human existence (perspective
and lived reality, being and becoming, subjectivity and
collectivity) and forms of emotional expression. [sentiment,
women, expression, China, nüshu, song, intersubjectivity]
The Mapuche man who became a woman shaman: Selfhood, gender
transgression, and competing cultural norms
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
Through the life experiences of
Marta, a Mapuche male transgendered shaman in Chile, I analyze
how selfhood is gendered dynamically by individual desire
and competing cultural and religious norms. Marta’s
unique identity as a divine heterosexual woman is based
on a spiritual transformation, her manner of dressing, and
her gender performances. It challenges conventional notions
of transvestism, transgenderism, and homosexuality linked
to sexed bodies. At the same time, Marta’s self is
shaped and constrained by the normative gender ideologies
of the Virgin Mary, shamanic lore, the Mapuche, and dominant
Chilean society. [shaman, transgendered, selfhood, gender,
sexuality, Mapuche, Chile]
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