(Re)Collecting Mao: Memory and fetish in contemporary China
JENNIFER HUBBERT
In contemporary China, compulsive collecting has become a method of accumulating both fiscal reward and cultural capital. In this article, I consider how the collecting practices of Mao-badge aficionados provide insight into the debates over value and subjectivity in contemporary, late-socialist China. By viewing Mao badges as fetishes, I accentuate the uneasy tensions between various theories of the fetish and call into question the theoretical divide between the postulated ahistorical, “private” fetish and its “public” commodity counterpart, suggesting that private, psychological drama is intimately linked to public commodity exchange. My analysis reveals how objects mediate the conflicts of meaning between different historical eras and play a central role in negotiating identities and subjectivities.
[fetish, Mao, China, history, collective memory, modernity, commodification]
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The crucible of citizenship: ID paper fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco
GASTON GORDILLO
In this article, I examine how indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past alienation from citizenship rights through the fetishization of those objects long denied to them: identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century, shortly after the Argentinean state’s military conquest of the region, government agents excluded these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality and citizenship because of their alleged savagery but simultaneously expected them to show written proofs of their reliability. In the following decades, this contradictory experience made many indigenous people view ID documents and other written records as objects with a force of their own, with the capacity to deflect state violence and shape major aspects of a group’s collective history. Drawing on the concept of “state fetishism,” I analyze the peculiarities of ID-paper fetishism in the Chaco by focusing on the historical and current experiences of the western Toba and the Wichí. In particular, I explore how Toba and Wichí views of ID papers include ideological forms of reification of social practice but also critical interpretations that capture the power dynamics involved in state documentation.
[citizenship, fetishism, the state, identity papers, indigenous people, Toba, Wichí, Gran Chaco, Argentina]
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Backed by papers: Undoing persons, histories, and return
BARBARA YNGVESSON and SUSAN BIBLER COUTIN
Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Bibler Coutin Deportations of long-term U.S. residents to El Salvador and roots trips that Swedish transnational adoptees make to their countries of birth attempt to reconnect individuals to their origins. As they (re)connect, however, such journeys dismantle, reconfiguring the original departure—emigration or adoption—in ways that can destabilize current, future, and past selves and the national and familial belongings in which these selves are embedded. By examining the paths and disjunctures that journeys “back” entail, we consider the significance of “return” for the production of legal knowledge.
[adoption, deportation, law, return, El Salvador, Sweden, United States]
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Islam and Its Constituencies

Islamico-civil “rights talk”: Women, subjectivity, and law in Iranian family court
ARZOO OSANLOO
Soon after the 1979 Iranian revolution, women’s appeals for equal protection of their rights were deemed by supporters of the new government to be remnants of European–U.S. imperialism. Over two decades later, Iranian women are at the vanguard of reform, calling for their civil rights once again. Now, with republican ideals authenticated by Islam through Iran’s innovative state, an Islamic republic, women push for tangible procedural process in reformulated Islamico-civil family courts that position them as individual rights-bearing citizens.
[rights talk, women, Islam, divorce, subjectivity, law]
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Promises of (im)mediate salvation: Islam, broadcast media, and the remaking of religious experience in Mali
DORTHEA E. SCHULZ
In this article, I take the highly successful Muslim preacher Cherif Haidara in Mali as a starting point to explore the conditions that, throughout the contemporary Muslim world, facilitate the rise to prominence of new types of religious leaders, who, by virtue of their media performances and in their roles as preachers, personal counselors, or legal advisers, attract broad constituencies of believers. I assess recent shifts in the normative, institutional, and economic conditions of religious debate in urban Mali that have changed the parameters of common understandings of the relevance of religion to daily life and politics. I examine how the adoption of new media technologies affects the contents and forms of religious reasoning, the subjective understandings and articulations of Islamic normativity, and thereby contributes to changes in the sources and forms of leadership. Finally, I investigate in what ways processes of commodification and commercialization are conducive to these changes in religious experience, community, and authority.
[Islam, West Africa, media, public, consumption, religious commodities, religious authority]
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As Makkah is sweet and beloved, so is Madina: Islam, devotional genres, and electronic mediation in Mauritius
PATRICK EISENLOHR
Mauritian Muslims profoundly disagree over the legitimacy of the devotional genre na‘t, as audition of audiocassette and audio-CD recordings of the genre has become more popular. In this article, I suggest a close articulation between critiques of textual and spiritual mediation in South Asian Islamic traditions practiced in Mauritius and certain uses of electronic voice mediation, such as the circulation of audiocassette and audio-CD na‘t. The significance of electronically mediated devotional discourse emerges in the ways in which media practices become part of genealogical forms of Islamic authority centered on ensuring authentic textual and performative transmission through long chains of reliable interlocutors.
[media, South Asian diaspora, linguistic anthropology, genre, Islam, Mauritius]
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The poetics of “Sufi” practice: Drumming, dancing, and complex agency at Madho Lal Husain (and beyond)
RICHARD K. WOLF
With a special web suppliment I develop an approach to the “poetics” of music and movement, vis-à-vis language, in the context of popular Sufism in South Asia. Bringing Michael Herzfeld’s notion of “social poetics” into creative dialogue with Katherine Ewing’s notion of the experiencing subject as a “bundle of agencies,” I attempt to cope with the problem of “meaning” in a highly heterogeneous event, the ‘urs in Lahore, Pakistan, commemorating the death of the Sufi saint Shah Husain. My pragmatic approach to navigating through an excess of meanings is to focus on what I call “common terms of understanding.” The analysis illuminates how Islam is popularly grounded in South Asia, more generally, and is suggestive of how music and movement might be construed as forms of religiopolitical “embodiment.”
[poetics, Sufism, music, agency, South Asia, ritual, identity.]
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Rurality and Whiteness

Hydrology of hope: Farm dams, conservation, and whiteness in Zimbabwe
DAVID McDERMOTT HUGHES
n Zimbabwe, many whites have affiliated themselves with the land rather than with surrounding societies. Theories of settler culture—which emphasize ethnic conflict—often overlook this environmentalist form of identity. As conservationists, white, large-scale farmers sought to belong to the landscape, and they modified it in ways that facilitated that sense of belonging. On the semiarid highlands, they manipulated the most manipulable of environmental variables: water. In the 1990s, their new landscape of dams and reservoirs provided habitat for wildlife and irrigation for tobacco. Whites justified their land ownership on grounds of both conservation and development—a considerable rhetorical feat. Engineering, then, fostered an unstable, ephemeral feeling of entitlement and belonging.
[Africa, colonialism, identity, land, postcolonialism, settler society, race.]
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Confederate Lane: Class, race, and ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta
JANE ADAMS and D. GORTON
In the Mississippi Delta of the United States, class developed as a racial relationship. Propertied blacks, immigrants, and old-stock poor whites destabilized an ideological discourse pursued by the planter elite. In this article, we examine shifting class processes through the history of poor white people who have settled in a largely white school district located in Washington County, Mississippi, and we consider how ethnicity, religion, and kinship have inflected those processes and political relations. We also trace the role of the federal government in altering social relations. Today in the Delta, black political elites maintain black racial solidarity as the key to electoral success. White elites, largely shorn of political power, are forming alliances with the emerging blacks. Working-class whites, having lost many privileges accrued during the segregationist period, find themselves adrift.
[Mississippi Delta, poor whites, planters, black, race, class, religion, ethnicity]
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