American Ethnologist
Volume 30, issue 3

Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez

Bioprospecting

Trees and seas of information: Alien kinship and the biopolitics of gene transfer in marine biology andbiotechnology
Stefan Helmreich
Examining discussions of “lateral gene transfer” in marine biology and biotechnology, I maintain that “natural” bonds between genealogy and classification in biology may be dissolving. I argue that marine microbial biology is good to think with about the rise of new kinships and biopolitics organized less around practices of “sex” than politics of “transfer.” I draw on fieldwork among academic and industry marine biologists to explore implications of rhizomatic, informatic, watery articulations of “bare life.”
[biopolitics, kinship, gene transfer, anthropology of science, maritime anthropology, biotechnology]

From market to market: bioprospecting’s idioms of inclusion
Cori P. Hayden
In this article I explore how “community” and its foil, the (urban) market, provide competing models for the market-mediated modes of inclusion and exclusion on offer through bioprospecting agreements. Focusing on the collecting strategies of Mexican scientists implementing one such agreement, I show how community and market inform prospecting participants’ ideas not just about (re)distributing benefits but also about managing the political liabilities now haunting corporate resource extraction in the south.
[bioprospecting, anthropology of science, Mexico, Latin America, globalization, intellectual property, indigenous rights]

Tabooed and Empowered

The cognitive machinery of power: Reflections on Valeri’s The Forest of Taboos
J. Stephen Lansing
As Judith Butler has emphasized, for Michel Foucault power is both external to the subject and the very venue of the subject, intrinsic to the formation of the self. Valerio Valeri’s studies of the Huaulu, an egalitarian society of forest dwellers on a remote Indonesian island, help to disentangle these two aspects of power. Foucault often cautioned that his analyis of the history of European systems of thought made no claims to universality, but scholars working in the Foucauldian tradition have seldom ventured outside Europe. Valeri’s analysis of Huaulu taboo clarifies and contextualizes Foucault’s insights into the formative nature of power and offers new insights into the cognitive foundations of consumer capitalism.
[cosmologies of capitalism, repressive regimes, taboo, potlatch, subject formation, consumer society, Frankfurt School, commodity fetishism]

Concealment, confession, and innovation in Kwaio women’s taboos
David Akin
The extensive anthropological literature concerning menstrual taboos has been dominated by symbolic and structural analyses. It tells us little about how people actually engage such taboos in their daily lives or about how taboos change through time. I argue that a more historically conscious, practice-oriented approach is needed and employ the Kwaio case to demonstrate how such an approach can reveal taboos as emergent and dynamic creations that both shape and respond to social change.
[taboo, menstruation, confession, gender relations, religious change, Melanesia]

Official Discourses and Questioning Lives

Nuriye's dilemma: Turkish lessons of democracy and the gendered state
Sam Kaplan
In this article, I explore political consciousness and its relation to language, action, and power relations among schoolchildren and their parents in a small town in southern Turkey. More specifically, I draw on Wittgenstein’s concept of language games to examine the ambiguous and indeterminate links between political discourse and educational practices, especially how these links are refracted in everyday life. Thus, I show that the term democracy, as used in the school system, has become a linguistic “scaffold” on which townspeople can arrange the political and social self-images they use to narrate their own life courses and life strategies. This sociolinguistic analysis of a political signifier, which draws out the relation among officially proscribed canons of representation, performances of hierarchy, and different understandings of polity and society across generations, lays groundwork for new approaches to the ethnography of the state.
[Turkey, state, democracy, political signifier, schooling, language and society]

Malay male migrants: Negotiating contested identities in Malaysia
Eric C. Thompson
Ethnic identity has dominated the political and social landscape of Malaysia throughout most of the 20th century. Recent changes, including government development policies, feminization of the industrial workforce, and rural to urban migration, have transformed the underlying political economy of the country. In relationship to these changes, official discourse has sought to engender a “New Malay” subjectivity, dissociating the Malay–peasant complex of the early 20th century and associating Malayness, instead, with urbanism and entrepreneurship. Malay male migrants figure centrally in this articulation of identity and political economy. Focusing on the articulation of multiple fields of identity, I argue that social and cultural forces are shaping and reshaping the lives of Malay men, although their effects are felt differentially by subjects who must negotiate intersecting fields of ethnicity, gender, migrancy, religion, and class.
[identity, ethnicity, class, migrants, masculinity, Malaysia]