American Ethnologist
Volume 30, Issue 1

Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez

On Fear and State Violence

Darker than midnight: Fear, vulnerability, and terror making in urban Burma (Myanmar)
Monique Skidmore
The Burmese military State constructs fear and vulnerability among its citizenry through the strategic use of political violence. Fear is inherently temporal and, unlike despair, requires that one have the ability to envisage alternatives to a future of complete domination. Burmese people strive not to express fear, and the anthropologist’s articulation of fear contrasts with the silence that fear engenders among them. In this article I reflect on strategies for the ethical collection of experiences of fear in situations where suppressing or denying fear is the most common survival strategy.
[Burma, Myanmar, violence, fear, state construction of affect, vulnerability, time]

“In our own hands”: Lynching, justice, and the law in Bolivia
Daniel M. Goldstein
Vigilantes in the marginal communities of a Bolivian city take the law into their own hands both to police their communities against crime and as a way of expressing their dissatisfaction with the state and its official policing and justice systems. In this article, I examine an incident of vigilante violence (lynching) in one such Bolivian barrio to explore the ways in which vigilantism acts as amoral complaint against state inadequacy, challenging state legitimacy and redefining ideas about justice, citizenship, and law in the process. I also analyze the range of discourses that surrounds lynching in contemporary Bolivian society, exploring the interpretive conflict that results as barrio residents attempt to counter official representations of the meaning of vigilantism in their community.
[violence, vigilantism, legal anthropology, citizenship, Bolivia, the Andes]

When Narratives of the Past Differ

Kapi‘olani at the brink: Dilemmas of historical ethnography in 19th-century Hawai‘i
Sally Engle Merry
Shifting accounts of the confrontation in 1824 between a Christianized Hawaiian chiefess and the priestess of Pele, the deity of the volcano, illustrate the way the same story changes over time. A comparison of these different versions and of the circumstances of their production provides a way of thinking about how historical ethnographers can use such plural and competing accounts as the basis for writing histories of colonial encounters. It shows how the choice of one or another version of a story has significant implications for the histories we tell and for the way groups understand their pasts.
[colonialism, historical anthropology, ethnography, Hawai‘i, missionaries]

Nongovernmental organizations and the work of memory in northern Thailand
Henry D. Delcore
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide an ideal context in which to examine the production and reproduction of identities and modernities in the contemporary world because they tend to concentrate within themselves ideas, people, and resources drawn from various sites in the world system. In this article, I examine the practice of memory among NGO activists, village leaders, and farmers in Nan Province, northern Thailand. Asessing the impact of NGOs on the cultural constitution of Thai modernity, I trace contending representations of the rural past to different social concerns with identity and interests that have emerged in the era of planned development and increasing global interconnectedness.
[Thailand, NGOs, development, globalization, memory, modernity]

Debating the Relevance of Religious Beliefs

Pentecostalism in translation: Religion and the production of community in the Haitian diaspora
Paul Brodwin
I examine the growth of Pentecostalism in the Haitian diaspora through both a neo-Weberian framework and the argument, derived from Walter Benjamin, that the cultural translation of religious doctrine should resonate with the original and not merely substitute scholarly categories for sacred meanings. Haitian migrants to Guadeloupe, French West Indies, appropriate Pentecostalism to produce a transnational enclave in the face of marginality and displacement. Using Christian idioms, they defend themselves against denigrating stereotypes and articulate sentiments of loss and remembrance of the Haitian homeland. Their theology of sin, salvation, and the spirit therefore overlaps with anthropological frameworks about the production of community. These two languages complement each other, and each provides a partial theory to explain the need for moral separationism as well as its likely effects. Examining this complementary relationship suggests both the specificity of Haitian Pentecostalism and the limits of Benjamin’s literary model for ethnographic interpretation.
[Pentecostalism, Haiti, transnationalism, religion, morality, translation, Benjamin]

Religious practice and cultural politics in Jewish Copenhagen
Andrew Buckser
The small Jewish community of Copenhagen is one of the most liberal and assimilated in Europe. In its liturgy, its leadership, and its ritual practice, however, it maintains strictly orthodox forms. In this article, I examine how this orthodox dominance has persisted, despite the often vigorously expressed dissatisfaction of the liberal majority. I argue that the confluence of Jewish religious forms with the cultural setting of contemporary Denmark tends to confer control over ritual practice on the orthodox. The interaction of Jewish institutional structures with Danish social patterns leads to orthodox social control, whereas the interaction of Jewish religious ideas with the Danish cultural setting promotes cultural control. These outcomes have implications for social scientific approaches to contemporary conservative religious movements, which have often been characterized primarily as forms of opposition to modern social change. The political dynamics of such movements are not simple reflections of a broad opposition between tradition and modernity; they emerge out of the intricate and often unpredictable interplay of religious structures with the social and cultural worlds within which those structures are embedded.
[cultural politics, Denmark, Jews, liberalism, religion]

Discriminating Change in Everyday Life

Places, practices, and things: The articulation of Arrernte kinship with welfare and work
Diane Austin-Broos
In this article, I discuss problems of articulation that occur between kin-based and market-based societies. In particular, I address Western Arrernte (Aranda) people in central Australia and their struggles to articulate bilateral kinship networks with a welfare economy and state. I also consider the transitions involved as Arrernte people come to objectify kin relations more in terms of commodities and cash and less in detailed knowledge and experience of country. My discussion aims to underline the tensions and struggles in an Arrernte circumstance sometimes overlooked in recent anthropology, which has focused either on ritual descent groups or on issues of welfare and economics without relating them to kinship. I identify differing contexts of ethnography, along with their import both for analysis and a politics of difference.
[Aborigines, Aranda, articulation, bilateral kinship, commodities, welfare, demand sharing, central Australia]

In a cup of tea: Commodities and history among Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya
Jon D. Holtzman
In this article, I explore the 20th-century history of Samburu pastoralists through the lens of a particular beverage, tea. In classic anthropological analyses, “drug foods” such as tea have been taken as emblematic of the spread of global capitalism. Tea, however, is a rare example of a commodity that Samburu have adopted as a central component of a self-defined “traditional” culture specifically counterposed to change. Tracing historical transformations in practices and meanings associated with tea use, I consider both the processes underlying its acceptance and their import in explicating broader processes through which Samburu agents have negotiated contexts of change.
[Kenya, consumption pastoralism, food, tea, history]

Review essay

My aim is true: Postnostalgic reflections on the future of anthropological science
Karen Sykes