AESonline.org » 31(3)

Abstracts -- AE 31(3)

AE Forum: Grounding September 11

National subjects: September 11 and Pearl Harbor
Geoffrey M. White
Despite a long tradition of writing on collective representations of the past, anthropology has contributed relatively little to the expanding literature on national memory. Yet ethnographic approaches have the facility to delineate practices that create historical narrative and give it emotive power while keeping in view longer-term political forces that underwrite dominant imaginaries.... In this article I inquire into the discursive origins of emotional involvement in national history by juxtaposing two events of spectacular violence, September 11 and Pearl Harbor. Focusing on the representation of these events in public culture and at memorial sites, I argue that personal narratives play a central role in formations of national subjectivity, at times emotionalizing dominant memories and at other times opening possibilities for alternative visions. [memory, nation, subjectivity, emotion, war, memorial, ritual]

The aesthetics of absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero
Marita Sturken
In this article, I examine the narratives and meanings that have been projected onto the space of Ground Zero in New York City since September 11, 2001, how they have been deployed for various political agendas, and how they have informed the ways in which the site will be rebuilt and memorialized. I investigate the changing meanings attributed to the dust and the footprints of the World Trade Center buildings and the debates over architectural designs and the proposed memorial. [cultural memory, place, mourning, memorial, architecture, tourism]

The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site
Setha M. Low
An inherent tension exists between the meanings of the World Trade Center site created by dominant political and economic players and the significance of the space for those who actually live near it. Most of the writing on and analysis of the site have focused on the construction of a memorial space for an imagined national and global community of visitors who identify with its broader, state-produced meanings. But New Yorkers, in general, downtown residents, in particular, bring to meaning making their own personal involvement in and knowledge of a located history that has social, political, and economic significance for their everyday lives. These meanings are as much a part of memorialization as the dominant players’ political machinations and economic competition for space and status. Uncovering and eliciting these local memorial discourses is part of an ethnographic project that focuses on how personalized narratives of loss emerge and are manipulated within mass-mediated representations of the World Trade Center space. My contribution to understanding how the memorial process works has been to analyze what downtown residents say about their experience of September 11 and its aftermath, to record their feelings about a memorial, and, in so doing, to contest, expand, and modify the dominant media and governmental representations of September 11 and its memorialization. [World Trade Center site, Ground Zero, memorialization, Battery Park City, cultural diversity, New York City, sense of place, public space, fear]

Review essay: The military and militarization in the United States
Eyal Ben-Ari
     Army of Hope, Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany. John P. Hawkins. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001; Softcover 2nd edition, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. xix + 332 pp., notes, appendices, bibliography, index.
     Homefront: The Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Catherine Lutz. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. 317 pp., notes, index.
    Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Katherine T. McCaffrey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. xvii + 218 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

I examine three ethnographies of the U.S. military and of militarization in the contemporary United States. These phenomena have hitherto received little scholarly attention by anthropologists. After describing the contents of the three volumes, I suggest that their wider import for anthropology lies in their demonstration of the usefulness of the discipline’s theories and analytical tools for analyzing the political economy of militarization and the unique character of an organization specializing in violence. [violence, military, militarization, war, United States]

Visualizing the State

Nuclear technoaesthetics: Sensory politics from Trinity to the virtual bomb in Los Alamos
Joseph Masco
In this article I investigate the politics of nuclear weapons production by examining how weapons scientists have experienced the exploding bomb at the level of sense perception through three experimental regimes: underground testing (1945–62), aboveground testing (1963–92), and stockpile stewardship (1995–2010). I argue that, for weapons scientists, a diminishing sensory experience of the exploding bomb has, over time, allowed nuclear weapon research to be increasingly depoliticized and normalized within the laboratory. The result is a post–Cold War nuclear project that assesses the atomic bomb not on its military potential as a weapon of mass destruction but, rather, on the aesthetic pleasure afforded by its computer simulations and material science. [nuclear weapons, technoaesthetics, science studies, embodiment, virtual reality, U.S. militarism, New Mexico]

Miniaturizing Atatürk: Privatization of state imagery and ideology in Turkey
Esra Özyürek
Since the late 1990s Turkish consumers have purchased pictures of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and the most potent symbol of the Turkish state, as popular commodities, displaying them in homes and private businesses. In this article, I argue that these consumer citizens seek to reconcile the memory of Atatürk’s state-led modernity of the 1930s with recent international pressure to achieve a market-based modernity. As citizens try to mask the authority of secularist state institutions with consumer choice, the market carries state symbolism into new, private spheres, which it previously had not been able to infiltrate. [state, market, privatization, secularism, Islam, Atatürk, Turkey]

Time and Its (Ir)relevance

Real time: Unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge
Annelise Riles
“The Bank of Japan is our mother,” bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan’s central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems—involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices. [risk, finance, economics, regulation, bureaucracy, expert knowledge, Japan]

No past, no present: A critical–Nayaka perspective on cultural remembering
Nurit Bird-David
By means of an ethnographic analysis of Nayaka life stories and trance invocations, I revisit the common wisdom that cultures classed as “immediate-return hunter-gatherers” show little interest in the past. I argue that Nayaka are not interested in the past in the common Eurocentric understanding thereof. They are interested, however, in a past filtered through their own sensibilities. Their specific case supports a broader critique of studying ways of remembering the past in terms of a Eurocentric past–present distinction. [past, time, cultural remembering, history, spirit possession, Nayaka, hunter-gatherers]

Transgression and Sentiment

From being to becoming: Nüshu and sentiments in a Chinese rural community
Fei-wen Liu
In this article, I explore the sentiments of kelian (the miserable) that were accentuated in the Chinese literature written in a script called nüshu (female writing), which men could not read. Not known to the outside world until the 1980s when it was becoming extinct, nüshu was used for centuries by peasant women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, southern China. By examining the textual, contextual, and performative meanings of nüshu, I argue that sentiment is not only part of human phenomenological experience, but it also partakes in the way lives are defined, articulated, reflected, and reconfigured. In Jiangyong, sentiment was not merely a carrier of nüshu women’s worldview or an embodiment of their existence as isolated and powerless beings in a Confucian–androcentric agrarian community. More importantly, it functioned as an energy flow that prompted inspiration and engagement—which these women needed to offset and transform their isolation and powerlessness. This research fills the void in understandings of peasant women’s expressive traditions in rural China in the early 20th century. It also lends insights into the dialectical relations between human existence (perspective and lived reality, being and becoming, subjectivity and collectivity) and forms of emotional expression. [sentiment, women, expression, China, nüshu, song, intersubjectivity]

The Mapuche man who became a woman shaman: Selfhood, gender transgression, and competing cultural norms
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
Through the life experiences of Marta, a Mapuche male transgendered shaman in Chile, I analyze how selfhood is gendered dynamically by individual desire and competing cultural and religious norms. Marta’s unique identity as a divine heterosexual woman is based on a spiritual transformation, her manner of dressing, and her gender performances. It challenges conventional notions of transvestism, transgenderism, and homosexuality linked to sexed bodies. At the same time, Marta’s self is shaped and constrained by the normative gender ideologies of the Virgin Mary, shamanic lore, the Mapuche, and dominant Chilean society. [shaman, transgendered, selfhood, gender, sexuality, Mapuche, Chile]