Experimenting with Ethics, Experimenting as Science Ethical variability: Drug development and globalizing clinical trials Adriana Petryna The rapid growth of pharmaceutical markets has led to increased demands for human subjects for drug research, particularly in low-income countries. For regulatory, economic, and even biological reasons, new populations are being pursued as human subjects for pharmaceutical trials. In this article I consider the evolution of commercialized clinical trials and ethical and regulatory environments as they contribute to a dramatic growth of human-subjects involvement in research. I focus on the operations of U.S.-based contract research organizations (CROs), which make up a specialized global industry focusing on human-subjects recruitment and research and the on ways in which they expedite drug testing to low-income contexts. Specifically, I analyze how these transstate actors interact with regulatory authorities in the United States and how they recast international ethical guidelines as they organize trials for research subjects abroad. [global pharmaceuticals, bioethics, clinical trials, human subjects, research ethics, governance, biological citizenship] Review essay: Experimental economics in anthropology: A critical assessment Michael Chibnik Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xix + 451 pp., map, appendix, bibliography, index. In recent years, well-funded cross-cultural economic experiments have received considerable publicity in science journals. The anthropologists conducting these experiments have made ambitious claims about the value of their research, saying that their findings “illuminate the nature of human nature” and the “appropriateness of the assumption of self-interest that underpins much of social science.” The publication of a new book, Foundations of Human Sociality, provides an opportunity to assess these claims. The findings reported in the book are consistent with long-accepted ideas in sociocultural anthropology. The book’s contributors are often insufficiently critical of theoretical assumptions in economics, psychology, and biology and pay insufficient attention to relevant theory in economic anthropology. In particular, the evolutionary psychology paradigm accepted by many anthropologists conducting economic experiments does not aid in understanding their findings. [experimental economics, economic anthropology, reciprocal exchange, decision making, anthropological theory] Improvising in and through Music Jazz discourse and black South African modernity, with special reference to “Matshikese” Michael Titlestad In this article, I use a jazz structure (made up of a chorus, solo, and coda) to explore both the versions of black modernity advanced in South African jazz discourse and the particular ways in which these are manifest in the journalism of Todd Matshikiza. I set various global flows of the imaginary alongside their local appropriation and manipulation to show how South African writers made use of the jazz episteme to construct tactical (if evanescent) alternatives to the ponderous singularities and teleology of apartheid ideology. In doing so, I seek to describe ways in which jazz generated a parallel textuality in which local versions of freedom and social hope could be imagined and expressed. [jazz reportage, black South African modernity, Todd Matshikiza, Drum magazine, improvisation] The soul danced into the body: Nation and improvisation in Istanbul Rebecca Bryant In this article, I examine the politics and practices of apprenticeship in the “traditions” of Turkish folk music through playing the baglama, or saz. The saz has become iconically representative of a folk music collected and preserved in the era of nationalism, and I examine the meaning of such a self-conscious and reflexive tradition’s claims to traditionality. I outline the ways in which that tradition is acquired as an aesthetics of self, requiring one to consciously shape the self to become the type of person who can play the saz and, hence, improvise within the sensibility of a tradition. [musical apprenticeship, personhood, habitus, Turkey] Compromising Sovereignty or Modeling It? Imagined geographies: Sovereignty, indigenous space, and American Indian struggle Thomas Biolsi In this article, I seek to complicate scholars’ understanding of the “modular” form of the nation-state by examining four kinds of indigenous political space that figure in contemporary American Indian struggle in the United States: (1) “tribal” or indigenous-nation sovereignty on reservation homelands; (2) comanagement of off-reservation resources and sites shared between tribal, federal, and state governments; (3) national indigenous space in which Indian people exercise portable rights beyond reservations; and (4) hybrid political space in which Indian people exercise dual citizenship and assert rights as tribal citizens under treaty and other federal Indian law, as U.S. citizens under the Constitution, and as social or cultural citizens within a multicultural U.S. society. [indigenous, law, nation-state, Native, race, sovereignty, space] Boys or men? Duped or “made”? Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military Rhoda Kanaaneh Several thousand Palestinian citizens of Israel currently volunteer to serve in various branches of the Israeli “security” apparatus. Members of this small group of mostly men are commonly perceived by other Palestinians as traitors to their people and are socially marginalized. Even soldiers who strain and sometimes break the limits of social acceptance, however, relate to their communities in dominant gendered terms. The critiques, explanations, and, occasionally, defenses of soldiering represent much larger concerns about the relationship of Palestinian citizens to the Israeli state, particularly concerns about Israelization, but are measured in relation to a family-centered provider masculinity. What the state offers or withholds from Arab soldiers plays a powerful role in shaping Palestinian discourses on masculinity and citizenship. [Israel, Palestinians, military, assimilation, masculinity, providers] Through the looking glass: U.S. aid to El Salvador and the politics of national identity Adán Quan From 1980 to 1992, U.S. government aid funded extensive political and social reforms in El Salvador to undermine a revolutionary guerrilla insurgency and consolidate neoliberal governance. On the basis of ethnographic interviews of Salvadoran and U.S. aid managers, I examine the articulation of these U.S.-sponsored reforms with changing relations of domination in El Salvador. The interaction of notions of Salvadoran sovereignty and national identity with U.S.-promoted notions of modernity shaped the U.S. management and Salvadoran adoption of aid. This interaction favored a faction of the Salvadoran elite that defined itself as “progressive” yet not too beholden to the United States. As U.S. aid managers favored a Salvadoran elite compatible with U.S. governance schemes, this emerging local class engaged with development projects by relating them to its own evolving notions of national identity and sovereignty. [development aid, El Salvador, national identity, globalization, elites, U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism] Intervening in Intimacy Gender, power, and the performance of justice: Muslim women’s responses to domestic violence in Kazakhstan Edward Snajdr The grassroots assistance that Muslim women activists provide to victims of domestic abuse in Kazakhstan differs significantly from approaches commonly used by service providers in the United States. Yet the activists’ informal remedies, which are shaped by discourses of religion and ethnicity and which have attracted women who seek something other than safety or formal justice, are implicitly regulated by cultural politics. By examining particular cases, I show how activists prescribe gender ideologies that guide victims’ choices while supporting their own group’s broader political goals. These findings may help in understanding the dynamics of women’s political agency outside the state. [domestic violence, gender, law, power, activism, Islam] The intimacy of state power: Marriage, liberation, and socialist subjects in southeastern China Sara L. Friedman Marriage is a powerful institution in which state regulation and sexual normalization converge to link personal desires with state goals. In socialist China, marital reforms have been part of the regime’s efforts to cultivate liberated socialist subjects. I focus on a coastal region known for its distinctive marriage customs, arguing that the development of socialist state power there was premised on the forging of female subjects committed to new ideals of conjugal intimacy. Although these ideals were introduced in the high socialist Maoist era, they were only realized in the current post-Mao era, with its coupling of market reforms and societal openness with population control policies. This outcome suggests that different configurations of state and economy have had different capacities to define subjectivities at once intimate and political. Even when state actors succeed in shaping their citizens’ intimate desires and relationships, they do not necessarily produce political subjects committed to the state’s original goals.