History and liability in Aceh, Indonesia: Single bad guys and convergent narratives
ELIZABETH DREXLER
In this article, I explore the complicity of history and violence in Aceh, Indonesia, to consider the role of narrative logics in accountability. Through a careful reading of official and archival documents, I argue that narrative logics have corrupted forensic evidence and limited efforts to hold perpetrators accountable for acknowledged acts of violence. I consider how different narratives about past violence have important implications for accountability and future violence. I situate my examination of the Aceh case in a broader context by considering how anthropology produces knowledge about violence, especially its evidentiary basis, and what effect such expertise may have on conflict situations. I develop the concept of “liability” to explore how the state is legally answerable for what it acknowledges.
[liability, state violence, historical narrative, evidence, trauma, testimony, accountability]
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Conspiracy, history, and therapy at a Berlin Stammtisch
DOMINIC BOYER
In this article, I analyze conspiratorial knowledge in discussions of East German politics and history around a Berlin Stammtisch (regulars’ table). The Stammtisch is a venerable, mostly masculine institution of German political culture that defines an intimate fraternal space within which social knowledge and political judgments are articulated, negotiated, and contested. Here, I am particularly interested in how talk of the “covert agencies” and “hidden relations” operating behind the scenes of political life in East Germany merged with more general and contemporary concerns about the relationship of Germanness to history. Whereas other anthropologists have emphasized the importance of conspiratorial knowledge as a mode of revealing otherwise obscure social and historical forces, I show how, in this context, conspiratorial knowledge operates in a different way to displace, dampen, or interrupt associations of contemporary Germanness with an imagined cultural inheritance of authoritarianism.
[politics of memory, knowledge, conspiracy theories, rumor, therapy]
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Buried alive: Imagining Africa in the Brazilian Northeast
JAN HOFFMAN FRENCH
Many rural black communities in Brazil are currently petitioning for legal recognition as descendant communities of fugitive slaves (quilombos) under a provision in the 1988 Constitution of Brazil. In this article, I analyze the elaboration and transformation of a family story into a narrative about slavery in one such recognized quilombo. I then further analyze the narrative’s transformation into a play performed regularly by the adolescent members of the quilombo. Because quilombo identity took shape in tandem with changes in the story, elements of the narrative have become crucial to the production of new bases for self-identification, solidarity, and conflict. At the same time, those transformations have been guided by, and continue to be associated with, practices, beliefs, and worldviews about race, color, ethnicity, and religion that were salient prior to the invocation of the constitutional provision. In addition to illustrating how law can be instrumental in transforming local cultural practices and self-understandings, the story told in this article adds to reexaminations of community as an invocation of positive associations tied to an assumed communal past.
[Brazil, law, race, identity, narrative, cultural performance]
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UNEXPECTED CONVERGENCES

Talking trash: Performing home and anti-home in Austin’s salsa culture
Deborah Kapchan
Austin, Texas, has long been recognized for its racial and ethnic segregation. Policies created in 1927 officially segregated the city, and the public landscape has remained divided. How does a cosmopolitan community of difference constitute itself against the dominant Anglo culture of this Texan city? Analyzing the speech genre of “trash talk” in salsa-club culture, I demonstrate how affect is created in language and how this speech genre co-occurs with other aesthetic practices to produce a sense of belonging across boundaries of race and class. The tension between “home” and “anti-home” creates affective and discursive engagement, mitigating paradox in spaces of alterity.
[affect, class, home, language, music, salsa]
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The voices of Jacob on the streets of Brooklyn: Black and Jewish Israelites in and around Crown Heights
HENRY GOLDSCHMIDT
In this article, I show how categories of identity formation such as “race,” “religion,” “Blackness,” and “Jewishness” may be used—often in tandem—as historiographic tools, helping communities lay claim to contested pasts. I examine the historiographic discourses of Blacks and Jews in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, focusing on the competing claims of Israelite descent advanced by the Lubavitch Hasidim and the Black Hebrew Israelites. Although I trace the roles of both race and religion in these historical narratives, I argue that such categories cannot fully account for the histories and identities of many Crown Heights residents.
[race, religion, history, genealogy, Blackness, Jewishness, Bible, Brooklyn]
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Out of the shadows of history and memory: Personal family narratives in ethnographies of rediscovery
ALISSE WATERSON and BARBARA RYLKO-BAUER
Shadows are often places of hiding, ephemeral or blurred, and they also soften that which appears stark or unbearable in the light. This article is grounded in dialogues that revolve around shadows: between the two author–anthropologists, each reconstructing a parent’s story, situating it in history and political economy; and between each daughter and her parent. Both parents have witnessed some of the 20th century’s major upheavals and social processes—war, fascism, the Holocaust, revolution, migration, and exile. This article focuses on epistemological, emotional, methodological, and ethical issues in doing “intimate ethnography,” a term coined by the authors. Through the process of examining similarities and differences in their respective ethnographies, the authors bring into sharper focus the roles of emotion, subjectivity, truthfulness, and positionality in ethnographic work.
[intimate ethnography, methodology, emotion, memory, structural violence, Holocaust, life history]
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RESEARCH, SECRECY, AND CONTROL

Best practices: Research, finance, and NGOs in Cairo
JULIA ELYACHAR
In this article, I examine how artifacts of social-science research were incorporated into survival strategies of poor residents of the global South in the 1990s under neoliberalism. I draw on ethnographic research in Cairo among bankers, borrowers, and nongovernmental-organization (NGO) members to engage recent debates in anthropology about finance and knowledge practices. I argue that the incorporation of “best practices” and microenterprise lending into banking in Egypt helped create a new kind of “multiplier effect” related to the one made famous by John Maynard Keynes in economics and to the conviction among some Egyptians that research artifacts held the key to improvement of their life chances.
[anthropology of finance, development, NGOs, best practices, Egypt, research, knowledge practices]
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The skewing of history in Mexico
TREVOR STACK
In this article, I consider the attempt by a group of activists in west Mexico to uncover the history of their town. Attention focuses on how group members understood the genre of history and why they believed that mastering the genre would help to revitalize their community. I also look at the difficulties faced by the group in living up to its own understandings of that genre and particularly in obtaining the right kinds of evidence to substantiate history. I show that the genre of history in this instance was skewed such that the town’s history could only be known by persons in more central places, and I conclude by arguing that this linking of knowledge, place, and authority is typical of modern society.
[history, genre, knowledge, place, authority, Mexico, modernity]
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Visualizing the sacred: Video technology, “televisual” style, and the religious imagination in Bahian candomblé
MATTIJS VAN DE PORT
Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession cult, whose splendid performance of “African tradition” and “secrecy” has long prohibited the reproduction of religious activity by modern media technology. Authoritative voices within candomblé have explicitly stated that modern media technology is incongruous with authentic traditional religion, claiming that the body in ritual action is (and should remain) the only medium through which an understanding of the sacred can be reached. Nonetheless, more and more cult adepts seek to portray their religious life through video technology, challenging priestly as well as anthropological discourses on the cult. A discussion of some of the very first video productions made by and for the candomblé community reveals that community members are modern media consumers, taught by TV what is aesthetically desirable and stylistically correct and keen to upgrade the importance of a religious event by “making it look like TV.” My analysis reveals just how much TV has become an authenticating and authorizing agent in the religious field: Endowed with the power to make spirit worship part of the contemporary media society that is Brazil (rather than locate that worship in an imagined “Africa”) and allowing the significance of embodied “deep knowledge” to be articulated in a style that is universally understood and appreciated by media consumers, TV is nothing less than constitutive of the very values people attribute to their religious experiences.
[Bahia, candomblé, media, video, authenticity, style, religion]
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Silences in history and nation-state: Reluctant accounts of the Cold War in Sarawak
KEE HOWE YONG
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of rural Chinese Hakkas in Sarawak, Malaysia, just like millions of others throughout the Third World during the Cold War, were targeted as communists or communist sympathizers and were detained at correction centers or relocated into barbed wire–controlled villages. However, given such a past, most of these Hakkas remained extremely reluctant to give their representations of this history. As an anthropologist, I wanted to do something with this history that is contrary to the wishes of most of these Chinese Hakkas, and it is within the struggle with this evidential paradox that I attempt to engage social issues of memory intersubjectively, historically, and politically.
[Cold War, communism, memory, silence, forgetting, Sarawak Chinese Hakkas]
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