In this issue...

Genomics and Racialization
Middle-Class Conundrums
Engagement, Participation, and Complicity
Land and Relatedness
Bodies in Public and Private
Debate and Controversy
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Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez

AE FORUM: GENOMICS AND RACIALIZATION
Provocation
Genomics, divination, “racecraft”
STEPHAN PALMIÉ
The new genomics has begun to play an increasing role in the arbitration of social identities. By facilitating the transcription of older notions that heritable substances determine identity and relatedness into a novel biotic idiom supposedly beyond social maneuver, this molecular–biological knowledge stakes out claims in the domain of the historical. Arguing from the highly publicized case of the genomic “resolution” of the question of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of his slave Sally Hemings’s children and from the emergence of commercial personal genomic history services targeting African American consumers, I seek to expose the epistemological and methodological problems inherent in biotechnologically driven “ancestry projects” (however oppositional and empowering they may be in certain cases). I also aim to show how the divinatory logic of applications of genomic technologies of knowledge production to the validation of modes of social identification replicates racial essentialisms such as U.S. ideologies of hypodescent in a manner oddly reminiscent of the “invisible essences” that, according to classic ethnographic descriptions, underlie systems of witchcraft detection.
[race, genomics, kinship, identity, personal genomic histories, divination]

Commentaries
Rethinking genetic genealogy: A response to Stephan Palmié
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ

Toward genetics in an era of anthropology
ALAN H. GOODMAN

Induction, deduction, abduction, and the logics of race and kinship
STEFAN HELMREICH

Grand anthropological themes
JONATHAN MARKS

Telling stories of human connection: Comments on Stephan Palmié’s “Genomics, divination, ‘racecraft’ ”
CAROLYN MARTIN SHAW

Race, racism, and academic complicity
KATYA GIBEL MEVORACH

On babies and bathwater
KENNETH WEISS

Rejoinder
Genomic moonlighting, Jewish cyborgs, and Peircian abduction
STEPHAN PALMIÉ

MIDDLE-CLASS CONUNDRUMS

The “reputation” of neoliberalism
CARLA FREEMAN
“Flexibility” has been described as the cornerstone of the current neoliberal agenda—embodied in mandates for the fluid movements and restructuring of labor, capital, and information and, at the individual level, in a supple capacity for creative self-invention and self-mastery. Flexibility is also a central quality revered within a realm of oppositional cultural practice known in the analytical paradigm of Caribbean anthropology as “reputation.” What is striking about these different logics of flexibility is that one (reputational flexibility) is grounded in a set of cultural values of the Caribbean subaltern in opposition to bureaucratic hierarchy and (neo)colonial domination, and the other (neoliberal flexibility) sits firmly in the center of contemporary global capitalist orthodoxy. On the basis of fieldwork I conducted between 2001 and 2006, I argue that the quest for flexibility among emergent middle-class entrepreneurs in Barbados represents a new path of opportunity and upward mobility as well as a gendered tightrope of respectability. In this quest, I argue, these entrepreneurs are redefining the dialectics of reputation–respectability and class in Barbados and the cultural meanings of neoliberalism itself.
[neoliberalism, flexibility, middle class, entrepreneurship, respectability, Barbados, Caribbean]

“Then I do what I want”: Teachers, state, and empire in 2000
PATRICIAN SILVER
The continuities from U.S. colonialism through “embedded” liberalism to neoliberalism are visible in distinct forms of discipline, freedom, and choice in the lives of Puerto Rican public school teachers. Historically shifting, but momentarily singular, representations of the good teacher use gender and class ideologies to promote ideals of disciplined uniformity, democratic social service, and disciplined individuality. A sweep of Puerto Rican history across the American Century, coupled with the details of daily life in Puerto Rican public schools, offers a view about what choice means when the conditions for choosing emerge from the neoliberal prescriptions of the “new imperialism.”
[education reform, empire, imperialism, neoliberalism, Puerto Rico, teachers]

ENGAGEMENT, PARTICIPATION, AND COMPLICITY

Channeling globality: The 1997–98 El Niño climate event in Peru
KENNETH BROAD and BEN ORLOVE
We examine the unfolding of a planetary climate event, the 1997–98 El Niño, in a single country, Peru. Rather than seeing the worldwide attention to the event as an instance of globalization, we look at the actors who, in our terms, channeled globality by evoking a worldwide scale to build connections between disparate elements in cultural and political projects. We document how participants in Peruvian media and in everyday conversations attended selectively to certain international images and ideas as they related to the El Niño event and reworked them in distinctively Peruvian fashion. We also examine the specific context and tactics that allowed the state to succeed in channeling globality to further its ends.
[globality, state, public, media, attention, climate, Peru]

Indigenous movements and the risks of counterglobalization: Tracking the campaign against Papua New Guinea’s Ok Tedi mine
STUART KIRSCH
Many contemporary indigenous movements deploy strategies of counterglobalization that make innovative use of the architecture of globalization. This article examines an indigenous political movement that took legal action to gain compensation and limit the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Even though the campaign sought to balance the desire for economic benefits with the protection of local subsistence practices, its objectives were frequently misinterpreted. Indigenous movements that deviate from an antidevelopment position run the risk of being seen as greedy rather than green. Instead of reproducing allegories about the successful exercise of veto power over development projects, anthropologists need ethnographic accounts that analyze the complex ambitions of indigenous movements and the risks of particular strategies of counterglobalization.
[corporations, environmentalism, globalization, law, mining, NGOs, Papua New Guinea]

Review essay: Grunt lit: The participant observers of empire
KETITH BROWN and CATHERINE LUTZ
In this review of firsthand accounts by U.S. military personnel of the Iraq occupation and insurgency, we argue for their importance as informed sources on the multiple, militarized transnational processes that help drive contemporary globalization. Their reflections, we suggest, are shaped by concerns familiar to sociocultural anthropology, including cross-cultural (mis)communication, technology and the media, the performance of gender roles, and the traumatic effects of violence, and as such challenge the discipline to take such military voices seriously, as it does other subaltern, marginalized, disruptive ways of knowing.
[Iraq War, subjugated knowledge, personal memoirs, violence]

LAND AND RELATEDNESS

Grounding displacement: Uncivil urban spaces in postreform South China
HELEN F. SIU
This historical–ethnographic study of village enclaves in Guangzhou explores the intensified entrenchment of villagers in a Maoist past when they faced market fluidities of a postreform present. It underscores a rural–urban spatiality and a cultural divide between villagers, migrants, and urbanites that are simultaneously transgressed and reinforced. It highlights discursive categories and institutional practices that incarcerate the residents, who juggle lingering socialist parameters with compelling market forces and state development priorities. Connectivity and exclusion, agency and victimization, groundedness and dislocation as lived experience are captured by the historically thick social ethos in the enclaves. This article rethinks issues of emplacement and displacement, dichotomy, and process.
[village enclaves, rural–urban divide, spatiality and migrancy, displacement, historical anthropology, postreform South China]

Constructing a shared Bible Land: Jewish Israeli guiding performances for Protestant pilgrims
JACKIE FELDMAN
During biblical tours, Jewish Israeli guides and Protestant pastors become coproducers of a mutually satisfying performance that transforms the often-contested terrain of Israel–Palestine into Bible Land. Guides’ emplaced performances of the Bible grant a significance to visitors’ movement that constitutes the visitors as pilgrims. The professional authority of the guide is increased by his or her position as “reluctant witness” to scriptural truth and facilitated by historically transmitted practices of viewing, classifying history, and orientalizing shared by Protestants and Zionists. By examining guiding performances of orientation to biblical sites, I demonstrate how Zionist and Protestant understandings become naturalized while marginalizing Palestinian Arabs.
[pilgrimage, performance, habitus, Bible, Jewish–Christian relations, tour guide, Holy Land]

BODIES IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

The “I” in the gene: Divided property, fragmented personhood, and the making of a genetic privacy law
MARGARET EVERETT
In this article, I explore the making and remaking of Oregon’s Genetic Privacy Act, one of the first genetic privacy laws passed in the United States. New genetic technologies have provoked debates about medical privacy and property rights to the body and products derived from the body, and a majority of states have passed legislation regarding the use and disclosure of genetic information. Research in medical anthropology has increasingly focused on the politicized and fragmented body in modern science. As genetic privacy debates demonstrate, however, not only is the body increasingly subject to fragmentation but the property and privacy interests in bodies, body parts, and products derived from bodies are also increasingly subject to division. This article is based on my role as a member of two statewide advisory commissions from 1999 to 2005, the recordings and minutes of their meetings, legislation, testimony from legislative hearings, media coverage of the debate in Oregon, and letters to the editors of local newspapers.
[genetics, property, the body, medical privacy, legislation]

Mourning becomes eclectic: Death of communal practice in a Greek cemetery
DIANE O'ROURKE
Using a case of disagreement over disinterment in one Greek cemetery, I consider how the intersection of public and personal processes gives form and meanings to death practices and, thus, contributes to understandings of identity, community, and death itself. The dominant factor in shaping mourning has been tension between two potential uses of its powerful symbolism to represent identity and relationships: enactment of community or of family. I argue that by giving too much explanatory power to death and belief systems built on the existential fact of death, scholars miss the mutability of death as people experience it and the ways that experience is constructed through everyday contests over secular interests.
[death ritual, grief, community, family, identity, Greece]

DEBATE AND CONTROVERSY
Rebuttal
SUSAN McKINNON

BOOK REVIEWS
The following book reviews are available on AnthroSource:

Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives (Abusharaf, ed.)
Ellen Gruenbaum

The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World (Bashkow)
Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi

Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Biehl)
Thomas J. Csordas

Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Ferguson)
Sandra T. Barnes

From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier (Hughes)
Lisa Cliggett

Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology and Ethics (Inda)
Dorothee Schneider

Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People–Wildlife Relations (Knight)
Jane Desmond

Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (Maurer)
Robert W. Hefner

Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (Miller)
Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni

Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village (Mines)
Steven M. Parish

African Anthropologies: History, Critique, and Practice (Ntarangwi, Mills, and Babiker, eds.)
Nanette Barkey

Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide (Richardson and Lockridge)
Peter Wogan

Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Stein and Swedenburg, eds.)
Ayala Emmett

Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society (Wardlow)
Aletta Biersack