Abu Ghraib, the security apparatus, and the performativity of power:
STEVEN C. CATON
BERNARDO ZACKA
ABSTRACT
The critical discourse on U.S. military detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison has been dominated by Weberian-style arguments (a bureaucracy gone wrong, insufficient or badly applied administrative rules, or individuals acting as cogs in a machine). We argue that Michel Foucault's "security apparatus" provides a more insightful model for understanding the Abu Ghraib phenomenon. According to this model, the prison becomes a nodal point in an information-gathering nexus confronting unforeseen, emergent, and unclear events, a place where power is less disciplinary than improvisational, exercised through practical judgments about uncertain situations. The performance of such power at Abu Ghraib included the use of photography and acts that, we claim, resemble M. M. Bahktin's negative carnivalesque.
Cultivating knowledge: Development, dissemblance, and discursive contradictions among the Diola of Guinea-Bissau:
JOANNA DAVIDSON
ABSTRACT
Development practitioners are eager to "learn from farmers" in their efforts to address Africa's deteriorating agricultural output. But many agrarian groups, such as Diola rice cultivators in Guinea-Bissau, regulate the circulation of knowledge—whether about agriculture, household economy, or day-to-day activities. In this article, I thus problematize the assumptions that knowledge is an extractable resource, that more knowledge is better, and that democratized knowledge leads to progress. I consider how the Diola tendency to circumscribe information both challenges external development objectives and contours the ways Diola themselves confront their declining economic conditions.
Another country is the past: Western cowboys, Lanna nostalgia, and bluegrass aesthetics as performed by professional musicians in Northern Thailand:
JANE M. FERGUSON
ABSTRACT
Within the popular music scene of Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, a handful of restaurants feature live bluegrass bands, with musicians often dressed in U.S. western-style cowboy attire. By intermingling English-language songs with Lanna (Northern Thai) popular songs performed in the style of Appalachian bluegrass music, they use their illusion of the cowboy myth to point to notions of an authentic Lanna past. However, in their borrowing of this international code, they affirm established (Central) Thai boundaries of ethnonational gatekeeping.
"I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat": Engagement and detachment in human–animal relations:
MATEI CANDEA
ABSTRACT
Relationship, connection, and engagement have emerged as key values in recent studies of human–animal relations. In this article, I call for a reexamination of the productive aspects of detachment. I trace ethnographically the management of everyday relations between biologists and the Kalahari meerkats they study, and I follow the animals' transformation as subjects of knowledge and engagement when they become the stars of an internationally popular, televised animal soap opera. I argue that treating detachment and engagement as polar opposites is unhelpful both in this ethnographic case and, more broadly, in anthropological discussions of ethics and knowledge making.
Suffering in a productive world: Chronic illness, visibility, and the space beyond agency:
M. CAMERON HAY
ABSTRACT
Is coping with illness really a matter of agency? Drawing on ethnographic research among people with rheumatological and neurological chronic diseases in the United States, I argue that patients' coping strategies were informed by a cultural expectation of productivity that I call the "John Wayne Model," indexing disease as something to be worked through and controlled. People able to adopt a John Wayne–like approach experienced social approval. Yet some people found this cultural model impossible to utilize and experienced their lack of agency in the face of illness as increasing their suffering, which was made all the worse if their sickness was invisible to others. Unable to follow the culturally legitimated John Wayne model, people fell into what I call the "Cultured Response"—the realm beyond the agency embedded in cultural models, in which people do not resist but embrace as ideal the cultural expectations they cannot meet and that oppress their sense of value in the world.
Imagined lives and modernist chronotopes in Mexican nonmigrant discourse:
HILARY PARSONS DICK
ABSTRACT
The globalization literature spotlights the way that the experiences of transnational actors are refracted through lives inhabitable elsewhere. In this article, I examine this process in spoken discourse about U.S.-bound migration produced by nonmigrants in the Mexican city of Uriangato. This talk is organized around a "modernist chronotope" that pits "progress" against "tradition," producing images of space–time grafted onto images of persons, or social personae. I show that acts of position taking vis-à-vis these social personae are fundamentally expressed through the ways speakers deploy the modernist chronotope and, thus, become emplotted in its imaginative sociology—a practice that constructs speakers as certain gender and class types.
Morality in the religious marketplace: Evangelical Christianity, Candomblé, and the struggle for moral distinction in Brazil:
STEPHEN SELKA
ABSTRACT
Most of the research on the growth of evangelical Christianity in Latin America and elsewhere has focused on the distinctive products that evangelicals bring to the "religious marketplace" and on other competitive advantages that evangelical churches have over their religious rivals. Alternatively, on the basis of research among evangelical Christians and practitioners of African-derived Candomblé in northeastern Brazil, I examine the role of discourses about morality in encounters between two religions that, although often openly hostile to one another, draw adherents from similar socioeconomic circumstances. I argue that competing religious discourses play a central role in struggles for moral distinction in communities that are relatively homogeneous in terms of their social compositions.
Ethnographic exposures: Motivations for donations in the south of Laos (and beyond):
HOLLY HIGH
ABSTRACT
In January 2009, I arranged the renovation of a school in my field site in the south of Laos with funds raised from donors in Australia. This project was initiated at the request of village leaders, and, initially, I saw it as a chance to acknowledge the generous assistance that residents had granted me during my fieldwork. However, the execution of the project was tense, particularly when it brought to the surface long-running ambiguities arising from my adoption as a daughter into a particular Lao family. This adoption, like the school project itself, involved a series of donations that could be interpreted as either self-serving or altruistic—or both. Antagonisms, repressed in donations intended to produce solidarity, make frequent return and imbue those donations with an ambiguous character. Thus, although such exchanges are essential to everyday life in the south of Laos (and to fieldwork), they are also precarious and can lead to conflict as easily as to peace. This ambivalence is especially pronounced in the cross-cultural context of fieldwork, in which the ethnographer is invited to seek out relationships of solidarity and shared understanding but also confronts his or her own specificity.
Lineal masculinity: Gendered memory within patriliny:
DIANE E. KING
LINDA STONE
ABSTRACT
In this article, we present a model of gender within patrilineal descent for a broad region covering Asia, Europe, and North Africa. We develop the concept of "lineal masculinity," a perceived ontological essence that flows to and through men over the generations. It is especially expressed through people's notions of the past, present, and future of their patrilineages. We elaborate lineal masculinity in terms of male achievement, lineage founders, lineage segmentation, and male reproduction. Our model offers cross-cultural analysis and so provides an alternative to the position of strong cultural relativism in kinship and gender studies.
Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy: The powers and dangers of flying language:
JANET MCINTOSH
ABSTRACT
In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect relationships. In text messages, then, English and local African tongues are sometimes treated as foils for each other, suggesting that, rather than merely being mimicked, the English medialect is flavored by distinctly local concerns. Indeed, among many Giriama elders, the poetic patterns of text messaging are construed as a special breed of witchery in which hypermobility and linguistic innovation threaten ethnic coherence and even sanity itself. I suggest, however, that the use of Kigiriama in text messaging may point not to the abandonment of ethnicity but to new ways of being Giriama that are simultaneously local and modern.
Mediating "The Voice of the Spirit": Musical and religious transformations in Nigeria's oil boom:
VICKI L. BRENNAN
ABSTRACT
In this article, I examine a musical recording made by a Yoruba Christian church in the context of Nigeria's oil boom in the 1970s. I focus on the recording as a node of mediation: a site at which multiple forms of mediation converge to bring together institutional orders and individual subjectivities. Those responsible for the recording drew on meaningful cultural forms—in this case, religion, music, and electronic media—to make authoritative claims about morality and experience in the context of profound social change. I seek to understand how religious groups use media to create links between political-economic transformations and individual experience.
Religion and the media turn: A review essay:
MATTHEW ENGELKE
ABSTRACT
In this review essay, I consider three recent collections, one edited by anthropologists, one by an art historian, and one by a philosopher, that reflect on what might be called "the media turn" in religious studies. I situate these collections in relation to broader trends and interests within anthropology, religious studies, and media studies, focusing in particular on the idea of religion as mediation, which involves, in part, a turn away from conceptions of belief and toward materiality and practice.
