AESonline.org » 31(4)

Abstracts from AE Vol. 31, No. 4

AE INTERVIEW

Doing anthropology in sound
Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis
Special web supplement to this article now online
Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social theorists, historians, literary researchers, folklorists, and scholars in science and technology studies and visual, performative, and cultural studies provide a range of substantively rich accounts and epistemologically provocative models for how researchers can take sound seriously. This conversation explores general outlines of an anthropology of sound. Its main focus, however, is on the issues involved in using sound as a primary medium for ethnographic research. [sound, epistemology, ethnography, documentation, media representation]

LIVING, DYING, AND BEING HEARD

Life of the mind: The interface of psychopharmaceuticals, domestic economies, and social abandonment
João Biehl
In this article, I address the embroilment of medical science in the lifeworlds of the urban poor in Brazil, particularly, the place of psychopharmaceuticals within households. I explore how psychiatric diagnostics and treatments are integrated into a domestic “dramaturgy of the real” and how family members use them to assess human value and to mediate the disposal of persons considered unproductive or unsound. I focus on the life of Catarina, who was deemed mad and left by her family in an asylum in southern Brazil. Disabled and abandoned, Catarina began to compile a “dictionary” of words that have meaning for her. By tracing Catarina’s words back to the people, households, and medical institutions that she had once been a part of, I illuminate the complex network in which her abandonment and pathology took form as well as the edges of human imagination that she keeps expanding. From this examination, one comes to understand how economic globalization, state and medical reform, and the acceleration of claims over human rights and citizenship coincide with and impinge on a local production of social death. One also sees how mental disorders gain form at the juncture between the subject, her biology, and the technical and political coding of her sense of being alive. Hers is not just bare life, though: Thinking through her condition, Catarina anticipates social ties and one more chance. This is also a story of the methodological and ethical challenges I faced as I supported Catarina’s search for consistency and her demands for continuity. [networks of family, medicine, state and economy in Brazil, mental health, social death, biology and environment, ethics]

Accountable democracy: Citizens’ impact on public decision making in postdictatorship Chile
Julia Paley
Using a Santiago, Chile, health group as an ethnographic case study, I propose “accountable democracy” as an alternative normative project to the theory of deliberative democracy outlined by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms. Accountable democracy has at its center the impact of public-sphere opinion formation on decision making by officials in elected governments. [accountability, Chile, democracy, Habermas, Latin America, normative theory, social movements]

“If she's a vegetable, we'll be her garden”: Embodiment, transcendence, and citations of competing cultural metaphors in the case of a dying child
Carolyn Rouse
In this article, I explore a struggle between parents and medical professionals to define the meaning and value of a critically ill child, Jasperlynn. I argue that the parents, who refused to sign a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order, transformed the perceptions of the medical professionals by affiliating themselves with powerful moral signifiers. In particular, I explore the roles of embodiment and transcendence as they relate to the contest over the assignment of cultural metaphors defining Jasperlynn’s life. I use the term embodiment-by-proxy to describe the ways in which the parents and the professionals each attempted to change the others’ dispositions toward Jasperlynn, or to become what Thomas Csordas calls “specialists in cultural objectification.” Ultimately, the only weapon the parents had in their struggle to change the value and meaning of Jasperlynn’s life was their newly acquired religious consciousness. Through the family’s demonstration of their deep commitment to God and family, many professionals came to realize that the value of Jasperlynn’s life lay in her relationship to her parents. In effect, the parents were able to transform medicine’s object to include the family. [medical anthropology, embodiment, race, discourse, inequality, DNR, United States]

FARM LABOR: WHO CONTROLS IT AND HOW?

Open towns and manipulated indebtedness among agricultural workers in the New South
Keith V. Bletzer
Reselling consumable commodities like food, alcohol, and cigarettes to agricultural workers has long been a strategy of control and indebtedness used by North American labor bosses to manage workers in situations of demanding and risky work. Recent inclusion of crack cocaine among advanced commodities has brought new risks for workers, as it has permitted them a precarious means to enter a once-restricted resale domain, and it has altered strategies of control and profit by labor contractors by conferring a veneer of independence on workers. Discussion emphasizes an inside view of crack distribution amidst the shifting agencies and counteragencies between labor and management. [agricultural labor, strategies of worker control, distribution and use of licit and illicit substances, southern United States]

Gender and decision making in Balinese agriculture
Nitish Jha
To be analytically useful, the concept of the division of labor needs to take into account decision making as a gendered activity. Decision making is all-important in the retinue of agricultural activities, but gender dynamics in various social units differentially affect the participation of women in it. In Bali, households and irrigation communities, called subak, each manage different aspects of rice cultivation. Distinct sets of factors account for the dissimilar participation of women and men in decision making in the two domains. [gender division of labor, decision making, household, collective action, irrigated agriculture, development, Indonesia]



A FOCUS ON YOUTH
Fresh contact in Tamatave, Madagascar: Sex, money, and intergenerational transformation
Jennifer Cole
In this article, I explore practices of transactional sex among young women in contemporary Tamatave, Madagascar. As young men remain suspended in part-time jobs, young women have been able to embrace the possibilities offered by the informal sexual economy, which links Tamatave to France, Réunion Island, and beyond as well as creating complex redistributions of resources within Tamatave, shifting the balance of power in gendered and generational relations. Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s concept of “fresh contact,” I argue that a focus on the ways in which youthful practice refigures relations between generations works to complicate and nuance recent discussions of youth culture and youth agency. [youth, transactional sex, generations, gender, agency, Madagascar]

Disappearing youth: Youth as a social shifter in Botswana
Deborah Durham
In this article, I explore the discourses of youth in Botswana, focusing the analysis on 1995 protests over the murder of a student. I argue that youth should be examined as a social shifter: When invoked, youth indexes sets of social relationships that are dynamic and constructed in the invocation. As people argue over who youth are and how they behave, they index shifting relationships of power and authority, responsibility and capability, agency and autonomy, and the moral configurations of society. [youth, protests, age, social shifters, Botswana]

A passion for the nation: Masculinity, modernity, and nationalist struggle
Deborah A. Elliston
In the mid-1990s, young Polynesian men emerged at the frontlines of proindependence sentiment and mobilization in the Society Islands of France’s “overseas territory,” French Polynesia. In this article, I ask why. In pursuing that question, I argue for the theoretical and empirical productivity of shifting the associations between masculinity and nationalist struggle out of the realm of common sense and into that of the sociological; that is, of moving away from the analytics of gender foundationalism and into interrogations of the very social processes through which gender differences, masculinities more specifically, are produced. Through ethnographic analysis of gendered labor practices and their mediation by and through households, I track how young men’s positioning within those most local arenas of social action shaped their engagements with competing local formulations of “tradition” and “modernity” and, through those engagements, their commitments to large-scale nationalist struggle. [gender, modernity, nationalism, households, labor, Society Islands (French Polynesia)]

Filial nationalism among Chinese teenagers with global identities
Vanessa Fong
In this article, I look at the apparent contradiction between Chinese teenagers’ nationalism and their identification with a global imagined community that deemed China inferior. I examine how teenagers I knew in Dalian City, China, attempted to resolve this contradiction through the idiom of filial devotion, which they found more convincing than state-sponsored discourses of nationalism that emphasized China’s admirability. Despite their admiration for wealthier societies, they maintained a strong sense of filial nationalism, which they saw as analogous to their unconditional loyalty to their parents. Such nationalism could not be nullified by their disgust with China’s low status in the capitalist world system. [China, nationalism, transnationalism, identity, youth, globalization, citizenship]