(Mis)Recognition: Seeing, Not Seeing, and Mis-Seeing
Stigma, liminality, and chronic pain: Mind–body borderlands
Jean E. Jackson
In this article, I employ the concept of “liminality” to answer the question, why is pain, something invisible and experienced by everyone, so often stigmatizing in its chronic form? Various authors’ work on liminality argues that “betwixt and between,” ambiguous beings are seen by those around them to threaten prevailing definitions of the social order. I show that certain features of chronic pain result in the perception of sufferers as transgressing the categorical divisions between mind and body and as confounding the codes of morality surrounding sickness and health, turning them into liminal creatures whose uncertain ontological status provokes stigmatizing reactions in others.
[chronic pain, liminality, mind–body dualism, stigma, medical anthropology]
Disorderly development: Globalization and the idea of “culture” in the Kalahari
Renée Sylvain
The San (Bushmen) of southern Africa are currently engaged in global activism and local struggles for rights as indigenous people. As their identity becomes globalized, the San are encouraged to promote a stereotypical image of themselves as isolated, pristine primitives. In this article, I argue that primordial expressions of San identity reflect the globalization of an essentialist idea of culture. I examine how this idea of culture is instrumentalized in local contexts of disorder and corruption. Finally, I outline how disorder and primordialism combine to sustain systems of inequality for an underclass of farm San in the Omaheke Region of Namibia.
[globalization, indigenous identity, Bushmen, San, development, ethnotourism]
The birth of the “salon”: Poverty, “modernization,” and dealing with witchcraft in southern Tanzania
Maia Green and Simeon Mesaki
In this article, we explore the social process of modernization through an examination of the transformation in the delivery of antiwitchcraft services that has occurred in southern Tanzania under the pervasive influence of transnational ideoscapes of market liberalization and public-sector reform. We argue that the anthropological association of witchcraft with the modern in Africa overlooks witchcraft’s explicitly unmodern associations in popular discourse and state policy. These latter associations contrast with the practice of antiwitchcraft specialists who seek to enable the realization of modernity both through dealing with witchcraft and through the self-conscious adoption of specifically modernizing practices.
[witchcraft suppression, public-sector reform, modernization, poverty, development, Tanzania]
States of Exception
Humanitarian exception as the rule: The political theology of the 1999 Tragedia in Venezuela
Didier Fassin and Paula Vasquez
In recent years, Walter Benjamin’s illumination that “the state of exception has become the rule” has been reactivated by several authors who have seen in contemporary politics a trivialization of situations of emergency. Instead of accepting prima facie the banality of the exception, we submit it to an empirical analysis to show its complexity and ambiguity. Our case study is the political management of the worst natural catastrophe in modern Venezuelan history: the 1999 Tragedia caused by massive landslides triggered by heavy rains on the same day that the country’s new constitution was voted. A state of emergency was proclaimed and militarization of the disaster area followed, but instead of being feared or denounced, this governmental response appeared to be desired by the majority of the population. The army, under the leadership of President–Colonel Hugo Chávez, embodied the regeneration of the nation, redeemed from the corruption of the preceding regime and united through communion in solidarity with the victims. Arbitrary violence and ordinary looting eventually occurred, but the dominant moral sentiment expressed at the time was deep compassion. The 1999 Venezuelan scene is, thus, exemplary of a more general phenomenon, described by Claude Lefort as “the permanence of the theological-political in modern democracies,” for which the humanitarian state of exception can be seen as a paradigm.
[political theology, state of exception, politics of compassion, humanitarianism, militarization, disaster, Venezuela]
Review essay: U.S. colonial law and the creation of marginalized political entities
Susan U. Philips
Savage Acts: Wars, Fairs, and Empire. Pennee Bender, Joshua Brown, and Andrea Ades Vasquez, dirs. 30 min. New York: American Social History Productions, 1995.
The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico. Efren Rivera Ramos. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001. xv + 275 pp., notes, references, table of authority, index.
Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002. x + 310 pp., notes, glossary, bibliography, index.
Hawaiian Kingdom Law. David Keanu Sai, presenter. 300 min. Na’alehu, Hawai‘i: Na Maka o ka ‘Aina, 1995.
Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. ix + 326 pp., notes, references, index.
In this review essay, I offer a comparative perspective on books and films about the history of U.S. colonial law in Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, and North American Indian reservation contexts. The authors and filmmakers analyze the creation of marginalized political entities such as reservations and unincorporated territories with properties of sovereignty that make them different from U.S. states in their relation to the federal government. All view sovereignty as key to the maintenance of cultural identity. U.S. colonies participate in a common colonial legal discourse concerning the nature of political entities legally constituted as internal to the United States as a nation-state.
[sovereignty, U.S. colonial law, legal discourse, identity, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, Indian reservations]
Precious Matter
Geologies of power: Value transformations of mineral specimens from Guanajuato, Mexico
Elizabeth Emma Ferry
In this article, I examine the extraction, circulation, and use of mineral specimens from Guanajuato, Mexico. I focus on the actions through which people in Guanajuato transform minerals into social objects and people in gem fairs, museums, and mineral clubs in the United States transform them into “natural” objects. Drawing on the work of Sidney Mintz, Nancy Munn, and others, I study how people use value transformations across global commodity systems to negotiate forms of autonomy within political and economic constraints. In the social relations through which minerals come to the United States and in refashioning stones as “pristine” objects, dealers and collectors also naturalize prevailing relations of power between Latin America and the United States.
[Mexico, political economy, power, naturalization, value transformation]
Copyright in context: Carvings, carvers, and commodities in Vanuatu
Haidy Geismar
Much of the anthropology of indigenous copyright and other forms of intellectual property focuses on the ways in which indigenous understandings of reproductive entitlement diverge from the Euro-American or Western property values perceived to be enshrined within national and international legislation. I argue that in Vanuatu, local chiefs and carvers have successfully merged international and indigenous reckonings of entitlement within their understanding of copyright, simultaneously capitalizing on and blurring commonly understood conceptual, economic, and sociopolitical divides. When the people of Vanuatu are asked what copyright is, they invariably refer to the carvings and carvers involved in the ritual hierarchies of entitlement of the region of North Ambrym. I take this locally drawn analogy as my starting point to argue that concepts of “copyright,” and, indeed, copyright legislation and enforcement, may be mutually constituted between spheres of exchange and understandings of entitlement, as much from the bottom up as from the top down.
[copyright, indigenous intellectual property rights, materiality, Vanuatu, Ambrym]
Values, Markets, and Social Transformations
Disparate markets: Language, nation, and education in North India
Chaise LaDousa
Much of the anthropology of indigenous copyright and other forms of intellectual property focuses on the ways in which indigenous understandings of reproductive entitlement diverge from the Euro-American or Western property values perceived to be enshrined within national and international legislation. I argue that in Vanuatu, local chiefs and carvers have successfully merged international and indigenous reckonings of entitlement within their understanding of copyright, simultaneously capitalizing on and blurring commonly understood conceptual, economic, and sociopolitical divides. When the people of Vanuatu are asked what copyright is, they invariably refer to the carvings and carvers involved in the ritual hierarchies of entitlement of the region of North Ambrym. I take this locally drawn analogy as my starting point to argue that concepts of “copyright,” and, indeed, copyright legislation and enforcement, may be mutually constituted between spheres of exchange and understandings of entitlement, as much from the bottom up as from the top down.
[copyright, indigenous intellectual property rights, materiality, Vanuatu, Ambrym]
To be happy in a Mercedes: Tropes of value and ambivalent visions of marketization
Jennifer Patico
The disintegration of Soviet social contracts has provoked, for many Russians, a continuing deliberation over the tense interrelation between material embodiments of value (wealth and commodities) and moral ones (respectability, education, and kindness). By contrast with previous anthropological tendencies to locate value production primarily within exchange transactions, in this article I identify two historically specific tropes of value (“culturedness” and “civilization”) and show how their articulation illuminates positioned experiences of large-scale change and social displacement. From the particular vantage point of St. Petersburg schoolteachers, I consider everyday deliberations about value and social difference as they take form within both local and global frames of reference, examining how these two contexts frequently produce divergent—but only seemingly contradictory—visions of marketization, its desirability, and its sociomoral significance.
