Friday, April 7 and Saturday, April 8 2006 |
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papers Salih Can Açıksöz ( University of Texas at Austin Department of Anthropology) What happens when pregnancy is redefined in terms of risk, one of the keywords for the operation of a myriad of governmental technologies under the conditions of late capitalism? Based on the ethnography conducted in Istanbul in 2003 with secular middle-class women and their physicians this paper will delve into the clinical encounter between a biomedical approach to risk and polyphony of “lay” understandings of risk to explore the meanings, feelings, and politics of risk in medicalized childbirth. In so doing, it has a Janus-faced objective. On the one hand, it will portray the lived experiences and affective structures of risk assessment in an age of “tentative pregnancy”. It will illustrate how a certain economy of desire and fear enables/disables the women and their supporters to deal with the uncertainty and ambiguity that the very availability of prenatal diagnosis generates. On the other hand, it will seek to pursue how prenatal diagnosis operates as a technology of self through the idiom of risk (which presupposes choice, calculation, and individual responsibility) and to track the different ways in which biomedical power intersects with the larger issues of nationalism and Turkish modernity. |||top
Nikhil Anand (Stanford University CASA) Formally recognized in India in 1990, Joint Forest Management (JFM) is collaborative form of forest governance wherein in forest resident communities police the forest in return for a share of timber profits and access to non-timber forest products. This paper is a first, tentative review and addition to a diverse set of narratives about social justice and forest control in India. Looking through different articulations of ‘interest’ in JFM among forest residents, NGOs state officials and international development workers, I show how JFM projects were effected through discontinuous overlapping projects that hailed particular histories. Second, taking place in the nineties via the sponsorship of international development agencies, JFM is an overdetermined set of collaborations: partially neoliberal, a revitalization of colonial regimes of flexible management and also an effect of postcolonial social mobilizations for justice and equality. With state agencies jockeying to control the process, I question the neoliberal teleology of state withdrawal and abandonment. Finally, thinking through JFM I ask questions and suggest ways we can think of political practicals in the wake of critique. |||top
Hannah Appel (Stanford University CASA) In July 2004, the U.S. senate permanent subcommittee on investigations released a report entitled, “Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption: Enforcement and Effectiveness of the Patriot Act.” Through an investigation of Riggs Bank (a Washington D.C. financial firm,) and their financial relationships with Augusto Pinochet and the Embassy accounts of Equatorial Guinea , the report renders pale the imagination of Hollywood representations of international corruption and money-laundering. This paper uses the report's discussion of Equatorial Guinea (a central African microstate into which $6 billion in oil-targeted capital investment has poured in the last 6 years) and Riggs Bank to do two things: first, to think through and past what Julia Elyachar refers to as the “folk concept” of the market. Second, the paper explores the ways in which both corruption and ethnography operate around the ideas of "exception," (corruption as the exception to moral action, ethnography as the exception to universalizing claims) and how we might use an analysis of global markets to trouble this commonality. |||top
Elif Babül (Stanford University CASA) On December 19 th 2000, at the break of dawn, Turkish security forces began a coordinated armed operation directed against 20 prisons across the country, intervening in the 61 st day of a nationwide death-fast carried out by leftist political prisoners as a protest against the inauguration of F-type prisons (solitary confinement/small group isolation cells) to the Turkish punitive system. After two days the operation was completely over, leaving 32 prisoners dead and hundreds of others seriously injured. The state, it was claimed, had “re-entered” its prisons, which had been “invaded” for the last ten years by “the terrorists” who had turned them into some kind of “arsenal” or “safe-house” under the control of “terrorist organizations”, defying any kind of state authority over them. Prime Minister called the operation a means of “saving terrorists, and protecting them from their own terrorism.” This paper aims to analyze the significance of Operation Back to Life as a lens into the operation of state power in Turkey. By focusing on the construction of the body and mind of the fasting prisoner through multiple (often contesting) claims and discourses, I aim to understand the conditions of possibility for making intelligible the violence of Operation Back to Life in terms of “saving lives.” |||top
Sandra Barrier-Heinz ( University of Hawaii at Manoa) In Polynesia, obesity and related diseases have been a growing problem during the last few years. At the meantime, Polynesians, who have a long history of placing a high value on corpulence, have had to face a dilemma: trying to reconcile traditional cultural constructions of the self and the body with a growing awareness of obesity as a health problem. This paper reviews body image and the concept of “self” in Polynesia, changes in diet and lifestyles, and recent health transitions. I suggest that current issues of identity and cultural renaissance be taken into account in order to address health concerns. Specifically, I propose that dance, an essential part of Polynesian life, be investigated as a potential key player in improving health while meaningfully addressing biomedical concerns regarding obesity in the region. |||top
Adam Brown (UC Davis Department of Anthropology) In recent years, anthropologists and social theorists have increasingly focused their gaze on the role that regimes of “risk management” have played in enabling global financial flows and in producing neoliberal subjectivities. As a consequence, the concept of “risk” has become recognized as a contingent cultural production in its own right, one that merits its own lines of analytical and ethnographic inquiry. Yet what are the implications of this shift? In particular, what are the ways in which ethnographers can trace the diverse modes of cultural work enabled by risk management practices and their associated processes of abstraction? In this paper, I suggest one possible direction in this regard through an examination of the factors behind the recent emergence of one particular risk management strategy – “securitization” – within India’s financial sector and the significance that these factors hold for anthropologists working in financial and non-financial settings alike. |||top
Joe Bryan (UC Berkeley Department of Geography) Once a tactic for “scaling up” struggles beyond the local, international human rights standards developed by indigenous peoples since the late 1970s now influence state and multilateral policy. In this paper, I take up the conjuncture of indigenous efforts to reverse colonial patterns of dispossession with the emphasis on property found in neoliberal economic policy reforms. Using the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ ruling in the Awas Tingni land claim as an example, I contend that recognition of land rights risks reterritorializing many of the inequalities of race and class it initially set out to challenge. Through an analysis of how colonial categories continue to constrain efforts for social justice, I argue for a reconsideration of the territorial tactics used by indigenous rights advocates. |||top
Adam Bund (Columbia University Department of Anthropology) The 16th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party made the announcement that would formally open Party membership to the Chinese business elite. I encountered the 16th Congress through a website, an official or officially sanctioned digital archive of speeches, graphs, and profiles in several languages compiled as the Congress progressed. This paper will be an attempt to read the 16 th Party Congress in terms of a certain structure of the event and of the archive, in terms of histories of Chinese Marxism and in terms of the demands of a particular vision of managerial global capitalism all necessarily at the same time. I will argue that this conjuncture of the archive and its supporting infrastructures (inscribed in the archive itself) demands a new politics and temporality of reading. To this end, I will follow Althusser’s suggestion that all temporalities of labor, production, circulation, and distribution (theoretical or material) must, in their concept, co-exist within the single space of a constantly shifting modernity. I will extend Althusser’s point by arguing that this play of differential temporalities and readings of history depends fundamentally on questions of technics: teletechnology and structures of archivization. |||top
Jeremy M. Campbell (UC Santa Cruz Cultural Anthropology) Participation has become the new watchword in Amazonian development. For the past decade, national governments, multilateral organizations, and representatives of social movements have striven to publicly collaborate on the planning and implementation of development projects. In Brazil, both the federal government and the World Bank have responded to the international criticisms of impersonal megadevelopment of the 1970s and 1980s, and have committed instead to "a socially engaged, sustainable, smaller development" guided by input from populations effected by development policies. This paper tracks the emergence of the participatory model in Amazonian development, and asks how the turn towards "participation" conditions the possible relationships between development actors. From an analysis of an NGO-run research campaign, which strove to elicit and inspire marginalized voices from a region awaiting a road project, this paper sets out to explore the politics of participation in the Brazilian Amazon: what relationships get to count, and what futures are want-able? |||top
Jenifer Chertow (Stanford University CASA) The paper considers the construction of Tibetans as ethnic minorities by the Chinese state and as "third and fourth world populations" by transnational health organizations for women. Looking at structures of dependency created through national and transnational health initiatives geared toward Tibetan women, the feminization of Tibetans as ethnic minorities is considered within the context of political economic structuring of Tibetans within national and global orders of aid. Tibetan women receive health advice, technological training, and scientific and biomedical knowledges of the body as part of Chinese national and transnational health initiatives. At times borrowing from public domains of health education while at other times refusing dominant biomedical discourses, these women seek to improve their lives and the lives of their children while working within and against social hegemonies that affect their daily lives. I conclude that women's narratives in the context of health initiatives for childbirth, state reproductive planning campaigns and transnational HIV interventions for sex workers in Lhasa and Shigatse provide critical insight into processes of citizenship. |||top
Caroline S. Conzelman ( University of Colorado at Boulder Department of Anthropology) In Bolivia, coca leaf has myriad quotidian, medicinal, and ritualistic uses, but the United Nations considers it a narcotic together with cocaine. This classification is rooted in the discourse of fear surrounding the drug trade and indigenous tradition, which took shape during the colonial era and continues with neoliberal globalization. The coca plant is legally cultivated in the Andean valleys of the Yungas, though its production there is exploding after decades of militarized drug war policy. My ethnographic research in this region shows that there is a stark divide between those coca growers who want to protect their exclusive right to cultivate the lucrative leaf, and those who want to legalize coca production nationally. Both groups are collaborating with communal and neoliberal democratic institutions, international NGOs, and researchers to articulate and advocate their political economic agendas that directly challenge UN doctrine, US and Bolivian drug laws, and top-down development models. |||top
Nick Copeland ( University of Texas, Austin Department of Anthropology) This paper explores rural Mayans’ abandonment of the Guatemalan political left in the postwar era by examining an agrarian conspiracy surrounding the USDA’s fruit-fly control program: MOSCAMED. In the past 25 years, highland Mayans have almost universally come to believe that international agri-businesses and the Guatemalan government sabotage subsistence agriculture, using MOSCAMED’s programs to introduce new pests, thereby forcing farmers to use expensive chemical pesticides. I read the conspiracy as evidence of a continued deep investment in the revolutionary movement. The conspiracy’s overwhelming pessimism, however, signals a recent shift in revolutionary imaginaries and emotional dispositions that disputes depictions by Guatemalan conservatives of the recent Mayan abandonment of the left as democratic free choice. I argue that although Mayans no longer withhold dissent out of fear, the re-invocation of past violence through persistent attacks on social movements convinces many that meaningful reform remains impossible, and to pursue state-sanctioned alternatives. |||top
Christina Croegaert (Northwestern University Department of Anthropology) Among the recent Bosnian diaspora to the United States, migration stories are orienting devices wherein narrators make use of transnational discourses of refugee-ness. Drawing on three years of multi-sited research in Chicago, and a small town in western Massachusetts, I identify two narrative categories: 1) Victimhood and 2) Savvy Survivor. Through a focus on participants and place, I suggest that although these narratives share certain features, they differ in significant ways to authorize various political and gender subjectivities. Public performance venues, homes, and a community center provide contrasts whereby this research illuminates the parts civil institutions may play in soliciting nationalist projects, and contributes to scholarship concerned with the dynamic relations between place-making activities and identity formations. |||top
Nicholas D’Avella (UC Davis, Department of Anthropology) In 2002, the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires passed a city code which recognized same-sex civil unions. In the context of wider efforts to pass a similar bill at the national level in 2005, an Argentine gay rights organization initiated what would become prominent press coverage concerning a particular gay couple, who, having adopted children in Boston and been married in Toronto, were thinking of moving from New York to Buenos Aires. By reading this narrative of transnational urban citizenship in the context of tensions between urban and national legal apparatuses, this paper not only draws attention to the important role played by urban legal codes in a discourse which tends to focus on national and transnational forces, but also highlights the complex relationships between these various levels, and in so doing questions their reification as discrete terrains of analysis. |||top
Micaela Jamaica Díaz-Sánchez (Stanford University Department of Drama) In the performance work of Mexicana actress/writer/director, Jesusa Rodríguez and Xicana/Tepehuan painter/installation/performance artist, Celia Herrera-Rodríguez the body functions as the critical site for the (de)construction of national and indigenous identities; the corporeal operates as the primary signifier in the reclamation of denied histories. Through the self-consciously performative style of cabaret Jesusa Rodríguez monumentalizes Mexico’s indigenous legacy as she employs discourse central to Mexican national identity and cultural citizenship. Celia Herrera-Rodríguez enacts indigeneity as intimate ritual and positions her work as personal historical recovery aimed at creating dialogue among indigenous peoples on a global level. Their aesthetic methodologies are mediated by multifarious contradictions, colonial epistemologies and discursive strategies for survival. And in the critical recognition and negotiation of these refractory mediations, performance functions as an embodied attempt at reclamation of subaltern narratives, in and out of the “nation.” This paper explores how one Xicana/Indígena/Mexicana body traverses historical moments in performance (specifically betwixt/between elements of contemporary Xicana and Mexicana cultural production and indigenous practices)? How are mythologies mapped and weighted onto specific bodies. What if that body is indígena and what marks it as indígena? What if that body is queer? I conclude with an analysis of how nation and citizenship function in the performative monumentalizing. |||top
Ritika Ganguly ( University of Minnesota Department of Anthropology) Within the larger set of concerns that explore the politics of knowledge and identity that underpin modern formulations of Ayurveda, my paper will investigate how a ‘modern’ traditional medical system ‘goes global’. Recent sociological and anthropological interest in the evolution of Global Ayurveda has focused on the development of globalized styles of representation that offer pragmatic explanations of how ‘original’ healing systems are tamed and acculturated at the level of pharmaceuticalization in an effort to be made accessible. My research explores, however, how a context of globality is established within clinical Ayurvedic research itself and how the global is imagined, performed, practiced and produced in communicating the results of medical research in Ayurveda. In investigating the disciplining of Ayurveda as culture situated alongside the disciplining of Ayurveda as medicine, my paper will discuss the gesture to “culture” and “antiquity” in Ayurvedic reports that are otherwise modeled on biomedical research reports. It will theorize how the production of difference is as integral to Global Ayurveda as the production of similarities in order that a ‘pan-humanity’ benefits from it. |||top
Marc Goodwin ( Univ. of California, Berkeley) Today we often hear about protests with global actors, assembled at a thousand miles distance, connected by forms of technology that scarcely existed ten or fifteen years ago. The WTO protest in Seattle in November, 1999, was hailed by its organizers as the “Protest of the Century.” My paper examines discourses of globalization underpinning certain kinds of contemporary protests, like the one witnessed in Seattle. I consider whether social science research focusing on “global civil society,” transnational activist networks (TANs), and New Social Movements (NSMs), is implicated by the very discourses of ‘the global’ that it seeks to interrogate. I argue that by examining protest as a form of social action that performs certain important kinds of symbolic work, we can better understand not only how protest fits into a general set of strategies of radical and transgressive politics, it will allow us another level of analysis that current approaches that stress collective action do not afford. |||top
Zareena Grewal (Phd Candidate Anthropology and History, University of Michigan and Lecturer, Anthropology, Vassar College) Muslim engagements with the classical Islamic tradition in the US are framed by a context of contending cultures and global religious and political debates where multiple and competing claims to authority emerge. In light of the sense of a crisis of religious authority, partly inherited from the post-colonial Muslim world, Muslim American youth have begun traveling to the intellectual centers of the Muslim Middle East in search for a “traditional” education. These Muslim travelers are hoping to reform their US communities and protect the legitimacy and authority of their tradition-in-crisis by becoming literate in legal and theological discourses with deep historical roots. By placing an ethnographic lens on the pedagogical encounters of Muslim American “students of knowledge” in Damascus and Cairo, I will explore the nature of religious authority and the ways it is enacted, reconfigured, and reinforced in these transnational intellectual networks. |||top
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel (UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology) "Throughout history, imagery has proven to be a universal language that transcends political and social boundaries to communicate the shared human condition," declared the CEO of Getty Images, during his keynote address commemorating World Press Photo's 50th year anniversary. What such lofty discourse obscures are the very particular linkages of specific corporations, "image-brokers" and labor practices behind the managing of daily news images. Digital photography came with hopes of increased democratization of vision and promised worldwide access to diverse ways of seeing. Yet,today giant image banks dominate the "visual content" industry and, much like the populations they depict, all images do not have equal freedom of circulation. This paper draws on two years of fieldwork at key nodal points of production, distribution, and circulation of the international photojournalism industry at its centers of power in New York and Paris. It analyzes one particular example of inequality in this industry of "visual worldmaking" : a differentiation between local photographers who document specific news events and cosmopolitan photojournalists praised for their "personal vision." |||top
Daniel Hammer ( University of Pittsburg Department of Anthropology) By what rationale can a country be labeled un-democratic, even though it has repeatedly held unambiguously free and fair elections? Under what conditions can the circumvention of popular will be claimed to be more democratic than honoring the voice of the people as expressed in their votes? These questions are daily raised in the lives of citizens in the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Here I analyze the ways in which international officials engaged in Bosnian politics have utilized discourses about democracy and Europe to prompt political reform. As often as they have been successful, these discourses have also revealed contradictions in the misleading democratic ideal of ‘rule by the people’ while also complicating the very notion of ‘the people.’ The rhetorics of EU representatives in Bosnia will be used to demonstrate changing global ideals of internationally-led state-building and democratization that rarely look to ‘the people’ for guidance. |||top
Adam Henne ( University of Georgia Department of Anthropology) Timber companies, international environmental NGOs, trade unions, and indigenous advocates are all part of the social ecology that shapes the world's forests. The regulatory regimes in which these actors collaborate, struggle, or miscommunicate are productive of ideas as well as timber. International bodies like the Forest Stewardship Council promote a form of voluntary environmental regulation or 'soft law' through third-party certification of sustainable forestry. In this paper, I consider how these emerging forms of neoliberal environmental regulation work as sites for the production of new environmental knowledge; that is, new definitions of key concepts like 'sustainability,' 'scientific credibility,' and even 'forest.' |||top
Heather A. Horst (Postdoctoral Researcher, Annenberg Center for Communication University of Southern California) Although the importance of ICTs in facilitating global connectedness is widely noted, we still know relatively little about how these technologies impact everyday communications between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds. This paper focuses upon the dynamics of communication and power in Jamaican transnational social fields. Equipped with a cell phone, rural Jamaicans no longer rely upon collect phone calls and expensive calling cards to initiate the connections between their friends and relatives living abroad. For many low-income Jamaicans without access to regular or reliable phone service prior to 2001, the cell phone is viewed as an unadulterated blessing, transforming the role of communication from an intermittent event to a part of daily life. For others, however, the cell phone remains an object of ambivalence, bringing unforeseen burdens and obligations. I conclude by reflecting critically upon the way the concept of the transnational social field engages with discourses of world-ordering. |||top
Cari Costanzo Kapur (Stanford University CASA) Based on Preliminary fieldwork conducted last summer at two call centers in Hyderabad, this paper explores the ways in which call center employees in India, some 75 percent of whom are young women, negotiate their sense of identity as income-earning professionals within the growing global communications sector. Focusing on stories female call center employees shared with me regarding the new social terrain they navigate both inside and outside of work, this paper asks how call center employment influences women’s options and opportunities for courtship, marriage, and divorce. In the paper, I resist the treatment of globalization as a cohesive layer which interfaces with all call center employees in a symmetrical manner. Instead, I suggest that gender, socioeconomic class, cultural capital, and extended family predicaments shape emerging ideas about romantic unions, marriage, and independence among employees of “global” communication centers located in India. |||top
Joanne Kelly ( University of San Francisco) This paper explores what Douglas (2000) calls the “public drama” of charitable giving, through an examination of the corporate sponsors of the Trick or Treat for UNICEF school-based fundraising campaign. This child-centered humanitarian effort has two key elements- the building of UNICEF brand awareness (The Cartoon Network) and explicitly marketing the opportunity to give (Proctor & Gamble). The paper concludes with insights into the use of the “public drama” of corporate philanthropy to reproduce and maintain the status quo. |||top
Alice Kim (UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric) My paper examines how the political-economic and aesthetic production of three recent international ‘airport-cities’ – Incheon, Kansai and Chek Lap Kok airports – document distinct yet interconnected trajectories of capitalist modernity in the Pacific Rim. Through a critical engagement with theories of globalization with a sustained focus on the historical geography of the site of each airport, my project challenges the concept of the ‘global’ as a scale constituted by an unhindered ‘space of flows’ and the location of global interactions, like airports, as merely “non-places” bereft of identity and history by departing from the regnant view of airports as paradigmatic ‘postmodern spaces.’ Rethinking the ‘space’ of these airports, I explore the ways in which the modernity of these new ‘airport-cities’ function as prominent cultural signifiers by which the nations of this region mark both the political-economic prominence of each respective nation-state as well as the ascendance of the ‘Asia Pacific’ region, itself, as a newly emerging geopolitical unit. |||top
Dong Kim (Seoul National University Department of Anthropology) This essay examines the emerging World Anthropologies Network (WAN) as a global, plural, and open-ended project whose objective is to critique and reconsider the hegemonizing tendencies of mainstream Anthropology in a broader theoretical perspective. Specifically, the WAN collective is dedicated towards the inclusion of lesser-known but equally important local anthropological traditions in the anthropological discipline as a whole. It is my intention to look at the main theoretical debates surrounding the constructed dialogues within this network and how these discourses eventually permeate outwards, reaching the sphere of anthropology at large. The politics of anthropology as a whole is of crucial importance in this discussion, for the WAN project seeks to redimension anthropology and anthropological scholarship as a multi-faceted, pluralistic practice open to other non-conventionalized forms of knowledge and knowledge-production. This vision of less exclusivity and greater inclusiveness argues for a self-conscious re-evaluation of anthropology on a global scale, emphasizing the need to reconcile the divergences in power and authority that certain dominant mainstream anthropologies have over more peripheral, marginalized ones. |||top
Chris Kortright (UC Davis Department of Anthropology) By weaving together fragments of ethnography and textual analysis, I explore the authoritarian discourse of care. Situated in a general science hepatitis laboratory and the blitzkrieg “Hep C Fight” campaign by the biotechnology company Roche Laboratories Inc., this paper looks at the linguistic creation of truth claims that eliminate dialectical thinking and establishes a specific authoritarian discourse centered and rotating around declarations of care. My informants’ conceptions of the “pure science” of public research produces and reinforces the truth claims of pharmaceutical companies and their relationship to production and distribution. Drawing on both Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin, this paper looks to dialectical thinking as an antagonist to the specific discursive regime that separates knowledge into “scientific” and “social” realms through conceptions of “pure reflection.” |||top
Omar Kutty ( University of Chicago Department of Anthropology) Among the many cultural consequences of globalization, the development of a “global gaze” remains relatively unexplored. Using the politics of sanitation in Delhi as a case study, I shall demonstrate that the “double consciousness” of middle class Indians is no longer constituted through the eyes of the Western other but through a generalized, global gaze, dislocated from any particular country or region. The holders of this gaze are imagined to be executives, tourists, and diasporic Indians who judge the conditions of cities against universal standards of cleanliness and efficiency. I will show that the gaze of the generalized other penetrates practices as quotidian as sanitation by examining the efforts of neighborhood citizens’ groups to re-structure the sanitation systems of the city and, simultaneously, create a new bourgeois regime of discipline which abolishes customary labor rights and creates a strict division between private and public space worthy of a global city. |||top
Amanda Lashaw (UC Berkeley, Social and Cultural Studies in Education) Increasingly, NGOs are central sites in the production of progressive knowledge and culture. Participants in NGO-led projects of social change are primary producers of political-cultural identities that lend persuasion and coherence to the social change projects prevalent in various sites of so-called neoliberal restructuring across the globe. This paper examines the forging of a progressive imaginary through a movement for ‘equitable, small-schools of choice’ in Oakland, California. Grounded in political-economic circuits that position the Gates Foundation as a global purveyor of social ‘solutions,’ the movement is led by an alliance of NGO-based education reformers, school district personnel and reform-oriented teachers and parents. A highly regulated process of ‘new school design’ is the center of gravity around which reform participants generate a collective sense of optimism about Oakland’s future. The paper considers the sway of reformist identities of optimism over the contested meanings of ‘progress’ among education activists in Oakland. |||top
Doris Madrigal ( Stanford University, Department of Spanish and Portuguese) “Language, after all, is power” Emma Perez reminds us in the course of her theoretical development of the concept of “sitio y lengua”(Perez 1991,1998). This concept prompts the critical reflection of our own tongues, languages, and discourses and their historical,geographical, and philosophical effects on our identities. Chicana feminists have adopted “sitio y lengua” in order to explore its practical application within various disciplines (Torres 2003, Hurtado 2003). This paper adds to this existing body of work by exploring the use of “sitio y lengua” in a Spanish for Heritage Speakers Language classroom context. Analysis of student work resulting from a course-long project focusing on the relationship between identity and language is supported by sociolinguistic theory, which views language production as inextricable from it’s societal context (Holmes 1992, Spolsky 1998). Perez’s concept of “sitio y lengua” is revealed as exemplary of personal and communal identity within this classroom setting. The self-reflection on this relationship leads students to not only recognize and accept their linguistic experience, but to validate it as a formative aspect and reflection of their identity. |||top
Sylvia Martin (UC Irvine Department of Anthropology) Anthropological reception studies demonstrate that mass media industries create products that influence how people assign meaning to the worlds in which they live. This paper examines mass media production processes to comprehend the cultural contexts in which those power-laden images are created. I focus on the practices of commercial film industry personnel in Hollywood and the “ Hollywood of the East” – Hong Kong. Based on multi-sited fieldwork, I explore how industry personnel engage in production rituals such as ghost worship and gambling to ward off financial and social risks. I propose reading these rituals as metaphors for the dangers found in capitalist production, representing and reproducing the chaos, the crises, and the games of chance in the “global” market. Drawing from the Comaroffs and Susan Strange, I argue that for all the “rational” economics and routinization that mass media industries have undergone, capitalist cultural production remains characterized by magic and mayhem. |||top
Elise McCarthy (Rice University Department of Anthropology) What is public relations and how is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) related to it? These questions foreground my investigation of concepts of responsibility in 21st-century Ireland: typically studied for its ‘rural’ values, the recently-labeled ‘Celtic tiger’ economy is implicated in the rhetoric of ‘the globe’ as a metaphorical and geographical gateway in international commerce, communication and migration. In this landscape, I focus on public relations and associated practices such as CSR. Usually dismissed as unidirectional propaganda and radically under-theorized in anthropology, I reconceptualize public relations using Bruno Latour’s view of rhetoric in Science in Action (1987). This sees public relations as part of an unceasing, socially-engaged contest towards ‘strongholds’. It also suggests a way to engage with CSR - as a social logic of ‘preparedness’ amid traditional ‘giving', corporate and community identities and concepts of responsibility in a globally-produced Ireland. |||top
Julie Minich ( Stanford University, Department of Spanish and Portuguese) In her groundbreaking 1993 essay “Queer Aztlán”, Cherríe Moraga calls for a new revolutionary space with “no freaks, no ‘others’to point one’s finger at” (164). This paper takes a new look at “Queer Aztlán” to examine how Moraga’s work might point to important link between Chicana/o Studies and Disability Studies, both of which seek to understand the social salience of the body. Via an analysis of the short story “Big Jesse, Little Jesse”, from Oscar Casares’s remarkable 2003 collection Brownsville, it reveals how Moraga’s insistence on theorizing Aztlán from a queer subject position can be productively applied to Chicana/o cultural texts that deal with disability. The analysis centers upon the story’s conclusion, in which the protagonist (Big Jesse) is inadvertently forced to “perform” the disability of son (Little Jesse). Following the work of disability theorist Tobin Siebers, who examines disability as a performative identity or “masquerade”, this paper argues that such instances of “disability masquerade” in cultural representations can have both liberatory and repressive effects for people with disabilities. I conclude by demonstrating that Casares points to the pedagogical potential of Big Jesse’s masquerade but leaves the ending to his short story ambiguous. The performance that concludes the story points to disability as an essential category of analysis in the “broader and wiser revolution” (150) that Moraga seeks but also foreshadows devastating consequences if important lessons are not learned through the protagonist’s moment of masquerade. |||top
Alfred Montoya (UC Berkeley, Department of Anthropology) My paper examines the effects of zoning as a technology of governance in Vietnam at two scales; first in a Saigon quarter newly designated a “free tourists zone” and subject to a regime of surveillance, policing and control different from the city at large; second, in a network of re-education/rehabilitation camps where bodies “contaminated” by HIV/AIDS and various forms of “vice” are contained, refashioned, or ‘allowed to die.’ My analysis explores how in both sites spaces of exception are created and deployed to manage different types of risk, spaces within which what it means to be an individual, a citizen with particular responsibilities and rights and a particular relationship to the state and other citizens, and a subject with a particular relationship to and understanding of themselves, is at stake, and made the target of reflection and intervention by diverse technological, political, and ethical regimes. |||top
Amelia Moore (UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology) In 1998 the National Science Foundation (NSF) ushered in new ways of conceiving of and enacting global environmental research and conservation efforts under the heading “Biocomplexity Research.” Biocomplexity, as concept and catch phrase, subsumes the popular notion of “biodiversity” in scope and potential influence in that it is an explicit attempt to represent the earth as one complex, unified global system, and to unite the living and the non-living under on rubric: the language of statistical models. It is also a research protocol in that NSF Biocomplexity Projects require the deployment of multidisciplinary research teams comprised of experts, including anthropologists, who conduct their own research as just one component of larger Projects. All this implies that “the world” is one cohesive and functioning unit, and its potential future involves the reliance on predictive statistical data and quantifying technology. This paper explores the assumptions and pitfalls involved in building Biocomplexity. |||top
Timothy E. Murphy (UC Davis Department of Anthropology) Notions of a gay global culture are predicated on perceived behaviors, styles and other forms of expression that can be located cross-culturally, connoting for some a sense of cosmopolitanism and modernity. Looking at the life of 27 year-old Henrique from a rural town and working-class family, this paper will consider possible social ramifications of assuming a gay identity in the metropolis of Teresina, Brazil, where a public gay culture emerges in the upper-class suburban zone of the city. Unlike Henrique, some men who have sex with men, and women who have sex with women in Teresina do not identify with this highly visible gay culture, which gets most of its public exposure in the high-end shopping malls. The story of Henrique will serve to consider global, consumptive, and moral influences on gay identity formation in Teresina. |||top
Traci Potterf (UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology) On a day-to-day basis, Cubans must struggle to find inventive solutions to their health concerns. Recent international events, such as ongoing U.S. sanctions, the fall of the Soviet Union and troubled ties with Venezuela, have resulted in scarcity and increased government control. These conditions ultimately compromise sanitation, diet, health care and emotional stability. In response, Cubans have turned to a black market economy, stop-gap solutions and medical pluralism. Adaptive strategies in both state and popular sectors not only allow Cubans to cope with scarcity, but also permit them to meet a wider range of health needs, from nutritional concerns, environmental contaminants and contagious disease to nervios, witchcraft and other forms of psychological and spiritual unrest. Based on a twelve months of fieldwork in Baracoa, Cuba, this paper explores how the interplay of micro and macro-level factors produce illnesses as well as shape creative strategies to overcome them. |||top
Rebecca Prentice ( University of Sussex Social Anthropology) In discourses of ‘the global,’ garment factories are depicted as sites of commodity production for the mass market, as a promising source of national capital accumulation, and as an apparatus of economic development in the global ‘South.’ Within such discourses, women have taken center stage, where as workers they are imagined to be both the engines and unwitting victims of the global neoliberal project. How do we disrupt global representations of garment workers – at once imagined as ‘hope of the nation’ and symbol of the singular dangers of modernity? In this paper, I suggest that to meet the challenge posed by the discursive centrality of women’s bodies (e.g., efficient, dexterous, patient, reactive) in debates over global garment production, we must attend to the phenomenological and deeply physical experience of garment workers in localized factory sites, methodologically foregrounding workers’ embodied subjectivity as a counterpoint to global discourses about them. This paper is based on 15 months’ fieldwork in three Caribbean garment factories. |||top
Shaila Seshia (Yale University Department of Anthropology & School of Forestry and Environmental Studies) Once characterised as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’, agriculture in the newly established mountain state of Uttaranchal, India, has been re-cast as ‘organic by default’. This paper explores the recent turn to organic agriculture through the promotion of Organic Uttaranchal as a key component of the state government’s rural development strategy. While the Organic Uttaranchal image emphasizes the persistence of indigenous traditions and seed varieties, the strategy is not based on a glorified form of traditional and subsistence agriculture that seeks a return to nature. Instead, it emphasizes the production of high-value low-volume agricultural commodities and taps a growing domestic and international market in organic food, now estimated to total $37 billion USD globally. Working through the paradoxes harboured within the claim to be ‘organic by default’, the paper analyses their complex entanglements with international development projects, neoliberal economic reform, processes of place-making, and the production and commodification of regional identity. |||top
Pam Stello (UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education) I compare the respective British and American political-economic origins and consequences of scientific genius in the examples of Darwin and Einstein in the progressive era. I show that the representations were the expression of nationally-structured divisions of labor in natural knowledge production that grew up with the development of the institutions of the professionalization of science and the media. Through which, the collective production of natural knowledge commodities was distributed publicly as the product of the disembodied mind of the ideal scientist. The public consumption of natural knowledge commodities reified the disembodied mind as a source of value and objectivity in science and integrated consumers into social relations of production that were represented as natural hierarchies of individual minds and national mentalities. I trace this change from Darwin, the tinkerer, and the criterion for truth as qualitative experience, to Einstein, the professional scientist, and the reliance on expert knowledge. |||top
Michelle Stewart (UC Davis, Dep’t of Anthropology) From “Problem-Oriented Policing” models to “Criminal Profiling,” policing techniques are becoming an increasingly international (and exportable) enterprise of control. Implied in these “exportable technologies” of policing practices is the assumption that the public and the police are both homogenous groups for which the technologies are assumed to be compatible. What sits at the center of universal policing practices is the messy particulars of criminal acts/motivations and crime investigation that occur on the local level—a space in which the individual application of the technology can fall apart through acts of interpretation, incompatibility or resistance. Through a specific investigation of the implementation of Problem-Oriented Policing—a “community-based” approach—in an urban area, this paper calls forward the conflicts and complications that arise when policing and policing practices are changed. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a Science and Technologies Studies approach, this paper will discuss the unexpected conflicts when international policing models go local. |||top
Noelle M. Stout (Harvard, Department of Anthropology) Drawing on a year of ethnographic field research in Havana, Cuba, my paper analyzes how participants in the world of same-sex hustling, or jineterismo, transform international concepts of sexuality and desire into local socialist logics. More specifically, I explore how the performances and practices of gays and hustlers localize seemingly universal categories of sexual identity, commodity desire, and sex tourism to reflect their experiences of transition under late-socialism. In doing so, I aim to complicate anthropological epistemologies of globalization that tend to posit the inevitable conquest of “local” places by “global” capitalist flows by drawing attention to the hybrid discursive forms that bring to life sexual subjects in contemporary Cuba. My paper questions the inevitability of capitalist expansion and attempts to take seriously Cuban paradigms that argue that the developments and desires inspired by capitalism can be contained within socialist value systems. In doing so, I hope to show how performances at the heart of Cuban economic and social transition can speak back to and against teleological visions of the triumph of global capitalism often taken for granted in contemporary anthropological frameworks. |||top
Fouzieyha Towgi (UCSF and UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine) Women’s Honour, “Tribal” Values, and National Politics over Natural Resources The corporeal body of the local midwife and the social body of “tribes” in Balochistan province rupture the conception that the Pakistani state holds about itself as a “modern” nation. The transnational development aid policies influence socio-economic policies in Pakistan. Then, the development goals in Pakistan directly shape nation’s reproductive health and medical care policies. I focus on gendered effects of these macro-level processes on the local level. Focusing on how development policies transform rural life in Balochistan & the lives of midwives and childbearing women, in this paper I delineate the connection between the racialization of Balochs as “tribal” and its men ungovernable with the desire of the state to manage reproduction via modern technologies. Specifically, I address how the naturalization of Baloch “tribalism” in human rights and development discourses defending women’s rights are re-produced- discursively, politically, and militarily- by the Pakistani government and national policy makers in the name of “developing” Balochistan. |||top
Marion Traub-Werner ( University of Minnesota Department of Geography) ‘Free trade,’ a heterogeneous and shifting mix of policy and practices, seeks to frame inter-national exchanges as equivalent interactions between territorialized national economies based on naturally acquired differences. In this paper, with a focus on the Caribbean, I analyze the recent liberalization of the export apparel industry after a ten-year reprieve from World Trade Organization rules. Trade, labor and industry analysts have predicted the consequences of this new trade regime through an ‘impact’ discourse of winners and losers. Mobilizing critical literatures in geography and anthropology, I examine strategies to disable ‘impact’ discourses of free trade through an analysis of governmental practices to territorialize commodity and labor flows and the multiple excesses created through this process. |||top
Neil Turner ( California State University, Los Angeles) The point of this essay is not to argue that biomedicine has become a mechanism for establishing political and cultural identity for refugees entering the U.S. Nor does it claim that modern biomedicine alone influences and defines the character and needs of immigrants. Rather, it seeks to establish that biomedicine and the relations of power within the context of theoretical perspectives presented by scholars such as Anderson, Foucault, Comaroff, Ong and others, verifies each other and seeks to present biomedicine as a mediator of physical realities that gives nation-states justification for definition, exclusion, recognition, domination and control of immigrants and refugees. It first traces the emergence of the medical “gaze” in a historical context to its formation as a classificatory concept and agent of power relations. Then, it discusses the central role of cultural citizenship and its impact on the processes of immigration and assimilation. |||top
Teresa A. Velasquez ( University of Texas at Austin Department of Anthropology) This paper focuses on the outcome of a 2002 World Bank sponsored indigenous rights legislation. For the first time in Ecuadorian history, indigenous peoples are granted the right to be consulted and to participate in the benefits of oil drilling. Recent application of the legislation has provoked divisions among Kichwa indigenous organizations over whether Occidental Oil & Gas Company will drill in the Central Amazonian province of Napo. I examine the divisions as a way to discuss the unpredictable outcomes of a World Bank sponsored governance project. I analyze the legislation in relation to World Bank efforts to resolve indigenous-state conflict that has thus far impeded the expansion of Ecuador’s oil frontier. Through ethnographic research conducted in the Spring of 2003 and August of 2005, I show how indigenous rights legislation, when sponsored by the World Bank, has implications for the future of identity-based social movements. |||top
Matthew Wolf-Meyer ( University of Minnesota Department of Anthropology) In the 1970s and 1980s, predictions of the way in which capitalism would “colonize” night were prolific, both in popular culture and academic discourse. What happened in the course of the 1990s is an inching away from this colonizing of night: Rather than American businesses staying open later, service industry jobs were sent overseas, thereby preserving a diurnal sleeping scheme for Americans (and for those who serve them elsewhere). It may be argued that this creeping away from night, this retreat into diurnal practices, is the point where the biology of the human body resists the efforts of capitalism. Rather, I argue that the resistance to the penetration of night is an effort to promote specific cultural norms; in other words, it is about the globalization of the Protestant ethic, properly disguised as a particularly modern form of relating to one’s body through the normalization of appropriate times of activity. |||top
Summer Wood (New York University Department of Anthropology) This paper examines two widely acclaimed films-Mira Nair's ?ethnofiction? feature film Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Zana Briski's documentary Born Into Brothels (2004)-which seek to depict the experiences of street children and sex workers in urban India using vastly different representational strategies. Films about marginalized peoples made by diaspora or Western directors may serve to globalize racialized and gendered images of alterity; such films thus demand particular consideration of whether the ways in which the subjects are represented serves to re-inscribe their subaltern status. Spivak's conception of the subaltern informs this paper's analysis of the ethics and aesthetics of filmic technologies of representation and self- representation, with emphasis on the truth claims made by both films. The films are also considered in terms of Appadurai's global ?mediascape,? in which images by and of marginalized peoples become a deterritorialized commodity in the ?financescape? of international art film production and distribution. Ultimately, both films suffer the same shortcoming: the drive to craft a narrative easily consumed by Western audiences foregrounds the subjectivity of male participants, while re-inscribing the doubly subaltern status of girls and women. |||top
Deniz Yonucu ( University of Chicago Master of Arts Program in Social Sciences) In the paper I would like to present in this conference, I want to discuss the recent emergence of the discourses on crime and criminality in the “Turkish” media and try to analyze how the emerging representation of crime and criminals contributes to the constitution of new kinds of technologies of governance as well as entailing redefinition of the citizenry in Turkey. The paper to be presented in the conference will focus on the constitution of the “dangerous criminals” and “innocent citizens” through the media and discuss how the representation of the criminals as “abjected” bodies and the animalistic imagination of the criminals in the “Turkish” mainstream media legitimize the violence against the criminals and detach the crime issue from its social and material context. Moreover, I will argue that by the association of crime with the urban poor, the urban poor who had always been regarded as the marginal population become increasingly deprived of any subject position and social channels which would enable them to speak as “political subjects”. |||top
Austin Zeiderman (Stanford University CASA) In this paper, I comment on a form of urban tourism in Brazil: the favela tour of Rio de Janeiro. By interpreting the favela tour as a site in which images of Rio de Janeiro are made for export, processes by which localities are produced for global circulation and consumption are revealed. With international travelers as clients, the tour aims at no less than a transformation of the figure of Rio de Janeiro in the global imagination. Drawing on brief experience as a favela tourist, I suggest that attempts to re-signify the symptomatic image (the favela) of Rio de Janeiro are characterized by a persistent schizophrenia. The tour’s paradoxical representations subvert its own desire to prescribe and fix meanings associated with the favela. In seeking to determine how the world sees the city, the tour reflects the contradictory ambivalence that marks culturally-dominant views of marginalized urban spaces. |||top
Jianfeng Zhu ( University of Minnesota Department of Anthropology) Internet penetrates China rapidly in the past couple of years. Online population in mainland China has reached 94 million by the end of 2004, according to the"15th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China" by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in January 2005. In this paper, I focus on the pregnant women’s online community and explore how messages posed on bulletin board as well as in the form of blogs, facilitate the formation of a collective identity of Chinese modern mother, the “pretty mommy.” Drawing on my fieldwork in China and Latour’s actors networks theory, I argue that internet, as a new form of reality, becomes an important tool for Chinese women to participate in the process of knowledge production. This paper will also examine how local/global are experienced as well as performed within this network. This paper further engages in the discussion concerning how cyberculture can be studied ethnographically. |||top |
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