In this issue...

Crossings
(Un)Employment and its Compromises
Religious Work and Ethical Labor
Visions and Critiques

Foreword: Crossings—Artistic, Aural, Digital
Virginia R. Dominguez

Into the mainstream: Shifting authenticities in art
SALLY PRICE
When artists who were once dubbed “primitive” find themselves operating in a freshly expanded environment, with an international clientele, new materials to work with, access to urban exhibition spaces, the counsel of culture brokers, and options for travel abroad, their response can include highly creative innovations in both the forms they produce and the interpretations they offer of their work. The new environment can sometimes even lead to adjustments in their vision of the origins and meanings of their artistic heritage. In this article, I trace the recent history of art made by Maroon men in the Guianas, following its mutation from a form of expression for internal consumption, largely as gifts for wives and lovers, to a commodity sold in an external market.
[art, authenticity, culture brokers, symbolism, primitivism, Maroons]

An anthropologist underwater: Immersive soundscapes, submarine cyborgs, and transductive ethnography
STEFAN HELMREICH
In this article, I deliver a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s three-person submersible, Alvin. I examine multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of what I call the “submarine cyborg”—“doing anthropology in sound,” as advocated by Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis—I show how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and I argue that a transductive ethnography can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support this sense of sonic presence.
[anthropology of science, anthropology of sound, soundscapes, immersion, cyborgs]

Women on the market: Marriage, consumption, and the Internet in urban Cameroon
JENNIFER JOHNSON-HANKS
In this article, I show how dramatic social changes in Yaoundé, Cameroon, are the product of women applying long-standing cultural schemas in a changed economic context. Marriage rates are falling precipitously, and growing numbers of relatively elite women are looking beyond the nation’s borders for husbands. Yet, as these women seek foreign husbands, their models of marriage are largely transposed out of older forms of bridewealth: E-mail–mediated marriage draws as much on local history as on global politics.
[Africa, marriage, gender, honor, modernity, consumption]

(UN)EMPLOYMENT AND ITS COMPROMISES

Neoliberal times: Progress, boredom, and shame among young men in urban Ethiopia
DANIEL MAINS
In this article, I examine discourses and practices surrounding employment, the experience of time, and international migration among young men in urban Ethiopia to demonstrate the value and limits of understanding cultural and economic processes in terms of neoliberal capitalism. Young men’s inability to experience progress and take on the normative responsibilities of adults is conditioned by economic policies associated with structural adjustment and local values surrounding occupational status. Young men construct international migration as a solution to their temporal problems. I argue that local values surrounding status and shame highlight the importance of social relationships for conceptualizing time and space.
[youth, progress, neoliberal, Ethiopia, time, migration, unemployment]

Neither here nor there: Mexican immigrant workers and the search for home
STEVE STRIFFLER
In this article, I explore how immigrant workers have understood the shift from seasonal migration between Mexico and California to permanent settlement in the U.S. South. I suggest not only that understandings, memories, and the physicality of places are produced in tension with one another but also that the ongoing experience of migration is itself key for shaping how subjectivities and places are constituted through the contradictions embedded in them. I also argue that even as immigrant settlers become more invested in the United States, the idea and experience of a community rooted in Mexico but spanning multiple places retains its appeal in part because it plays such a powerful role in daily life in the United States.
[Mexican immigration, U.S. South, poultry, place, migration, identity, gender]

RELIGIOUS WORK AND ETHICAL LABOR

The Quaker way: Ethical labor and humanitarian relief
ILANA FELDMAN
This article considers the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) relief project in Gaza (1948–50) to explore ethical dilemmas that are endemic to humanitarianism. Considering humanitarian practice from this distinctive perspective can shed new light on this arena. Exploration of the “ethical labor” of Quaker practice in Gaza illuminates an ethical practice that joined concern for others with care of the self, a practice that was equally attentive to an obligation to be “in the world” and to be true to oneself. The debates and practices of AFSC volunteers in Gaza reveal humanitarianism as a field of compromised action.
[humanitarianism, ethics, refugees, Quakers, Palestine]

Publicity, privacy, and “happy deaths” in Fiji
MATT TOMLINSON
This article investigates death as a nexus around which public–private distinctions are made. An examination of Methodist missionary efforts at entextualizing “happy deaths” in 19th-century Fiji shows how the missionaries both attempted to create a Christian reading public “back home” but also unintentionally helped create a new private zone of the demonic. The private demonic zone is analyzed through the constricted circulation of particular narratives heard after the death of a high chief in 2003.
[Christianity, missions, publicity, privacy, circulation, death, Fiji]

Transnational Yoruba revivalism and the diasporic politics of heritage
KAMARI MAXINE CLARKE
In this article, I explore the making of social membership in U.S.-based deterritorialized contexts and interrogate the ways that black Atlantic diasporic imaginaries are intertwined to produce transnational notions of linkage. In charting a genealogy of a transnational orisa movement that came of age in a moment of black-nationalist protest, I pose questions about how such a study should be understood in relation to ethnographies of global networks. I argue that, despite their seemingly thin representations of broad forms of linkage, transnational orisa networks produce culturally portable practices that articulate important transformations: They shape institutions through which new forms of religious knowledge are producing significant breaks with older forms.
[ethnographies of global networks, African diasporic movements, black Atlantic, racial politics, Yoruba orisa practices]

Visions and Critiques

Review essay: The tenacity of enchanted things
RUDI COLLOREDO-MANSFELD

Review essay: Violence, language, and everyday life
EMILY MARTIN

Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Veena Das. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 296 pp., maps, tables, notes, acknowledgments, index.

Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life. Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta. London: Routledge, 2007. 204 pp., bibliography, index.

In this essay, I review two books about the social and cultural context of violence in India and Pakistan. Veena Das’s Life and Words provides a remarkable theorization of the anthropological significance of the everyday, and Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta’s Living with Violence provides a rich ethnographic treatment of violence and the everyday. Together, these books produce new insights into how social and cultural life can be re-created in the aftermath of violent events. By focusing on mundane, ordinary events over the long duration in contexts filled with conflict and uncertainty, the authors argue convincingly that violent acts are not necessarily only witnessed and remembered but also rewoven in the process of ordinary life into newly imagined cultural worlds. These findings have crucial implications for how anthropologists devise ethnographic studies of large-scale violence. Both books make plain the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later thought for an ethically responsible ethnography.
[violence, language, nation-states, kinship, gender, memory]

Review essay: “The truest belief is compulsion”: Othering, the unconscious, and ethnographic inquiry
ANDREW WILLFORD

The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Elizabeth Povinelli. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. xi + 338 pp., illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index.

The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. Vicente Rafael. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. xviii + 231 pp., photographs, notes, references, index.

The Puerto Rican Syndrome. Patricia Gherovici. New York: Other Press, 2003. xviii + 296 pp., bibliography, index.
Naming the Witch. James Siegel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. xiii + 253 pp., photographs, illustrations, notes.

Through an examination of recent works by two anthropologists, a psychoanalyst, and a historian, I argue in this review essay that scholars gain analytic purchase into the workings of power, signification, and, ultimately, identity, when we are aided by an ethnographic attentiveness to unconscious compulsions. Although psychoanalysis has been critiqued for its ahistorical and transcultural subject produced within authoritative institutional discourses, I suggest that, these critiques notwithstanding, renewed ethnographic reckoning with the unconscious proves valuable when examining cases of excessive identification.
[psychoanalysis, power, identity, signification]

Review essay: Anthropology and the materiality of architecture
MARCEL VELLINGA

The House in Southeast Asia: A Changing Social, Economic and Political Domain. Stephen Sparkes and Signe Howell, eds. Hardcover, London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. xiv + 271 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

[bio]The Material Culture Reader. Victor Buchli, ed. Oxford: Berg, 2002. xi + 274 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

[bio]Materiality. Daniel Miller, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 294 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Recent anthropological writings on the Southeast Asian house have illuminated its prominent position as a work of architecture and social category. Although these studies provide new perspectives on the cultural significance of architecture and the nature of kinship systems in the region, they have not yet answered the repeated calls for an anthropological approach to architecture that focuses on the dynamic interrelationship of its material, social, and symbolic aspects. Reviewing some of the recent additions to the discourses on Southeast Asian architecture and the study of material culture, this review essay argues that such an approach can only come about if the agency and materiality of architecture are taken into account.