Category Archives: Articles – Volume 38, Issue 2 (May 2011)

Amidst a “crisis” of clandestine migration in West Africa, tales about the exploits of “missing men” circulated through Dakar, Senegal. In this article, I explore how these myths enabled debate about the changing parameters of male social visibility, nation building, and social success in the city at the same time that they paradoxically recast as spectacularly present men who had failed to achieve by these standards. I argue that both public discourse about and scholarly analysis of the impact of transnational migration on those left behind recenter the activities of some men, rendering invisible other modes of being and belonging.

In Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, during the years immediately preceding and following its inscription in 2008 as a UNESCO World Heritage site—and at a time when “Bedouinness” in much of the Arab world had been or was being elevated to a marketable heritage—Soqotran pastoralists spoke frequently of being Bedouin as a form of categorical abjection. Examining the work of these iterations, I argue that “Bedouin abjection” is a form of dialogic critique of the “global hierarchy of value” and an ironic assessment of the Soqotran pastoral present. I further assert that anthropologists must be attentive to the universal resonances of these abject articulations.

In this article, I analyze the processes by which transnational peace activists opposed to the U.S. military’s largest “forward operating location” (FOL) in Manta, Ecuador, came to be read by some of that city’s residents as more imperialist than the U.S. Air Force itself. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2008, I argue that this “inversion” was the product of disparate “scale-making practices” on the part of both activists and military officers. Whereas the former encouraged city residents to think of the facility as part of a global military network, the latter successfully pushed for more localized topographies and “geographies of blame.” Attention to these scale-making practices complicates social movement theory about “vertical scale shifts.”

On the basis of interviews with participants in the Snowflakes® embryo adoption program, we examine how siblingship is reconfigured in the absence of a genetic tie between parents and children. For many participants, having genetic siblings is of the utmost importance: siblingship trumps descent. At the same time, embryo adoption creates new forms of siblingship: “batch siblings” and “genetic siblings carried by different mothers.” Although potential incest is a concern to all participants, two models of relationship between placing and adopting families emerge in response: Some families keep in contact, acknowledging but redefining kinship relations to make them more distant. Most often, however, genetic siblingship is not activated between children but, along the model of classic adoption, delayed until later in life.

In this article, I analyze children’s and adults’ discourses on friendship to examine how U.S. middle-class children learn culturally appropriate concepts of friendship. Belying the assumption shared by both caregivers and early research on friendship development that children passively internalize adult-desired concepts of friendship, children creatively reinterpret and reconstruct available cultural resources concerning friendship to build their own culture-laden social world. Moreover, children’s creative embellishment of the core concepts of friendship leads to changes in adult socialization practices. My findings articulate the contribution children and their culture make to cultural reproduction and highlight the inherent dynamism of socialization.

In this article, I explore a particular form of exchange in which food-selling farmers and food-buying urban consumers interact beyond simple economic terms at a U.S. urban farmers’ market. By actively distinguishing their “alternative” exchange from the dominant capitalist exchange, participants objectify processes of production and consumption as well as their own “idealized form of being” (“liberal open-mindedness”) while undermining the dominant ideology of the neoliberal economy. By co-constructing this market as a “third place” where basic distinctions between commodity and gift are blurred and transgressed, customers and farmers produce a “conceptual shift” from Marxian alienated exchange to Maussian inalienating exchange by infusing market transactions with new meanings and new spatial fixes.

In this article, I examine how urban missional evangelicals in the United States cultivate a sense of place. Being “missional” refers to the desire to be a missionary in one’s own society, an idea that has spread widely through the Emerging Church movement. Proceeding from an ethnographic analysis of two urban pastors, I argue that being an urban missional evangelical means having an intricate, nuanced, but ultimately mediate sense of place. Grounded in a cultural logic that seeks distance from suburban evangelicalism, the urban missional sense of place exists as a lived critique of modernity, which I explore through Mary Douglas’s classic analysis of purity and danger.

In this article, I ask how state ethnography deploys, demands, and ultimately instantiates the ethnological forms of a particular multicultural order. Extending recent interests in paraethnographics, I take as my “object” the interface of state ethnography itself. Specifically, I examine an ethnographic survey government anthropologists conducted in Darjeeling to determine the eligibility of ten ethnic groups seeking recognition as Scheduled Tribes of India. Refiguring the proverbial encounter of anthropologists and tribes, I interrogate the real-time dynamics through which both sides negotiate, take up, and take on normative ethnological paradigms—thus actualizing the ethno-logics of Indian multiculturalism within and, indeed, beyond the classificatory moment.

In this article, I analyze three episodes of daydreaming and reverie by young Syrian men that were occasioned, in part, by the presence of the anthropologist in ethnographic encounters. Such daydreaming calls forth an “intersubjective third,” which privileges the experience of the interlocutor but is powerfully defined by the relationship of the roles of anthropologist and interlocutor. This construction opens a space in which both unconscious and conscious aspects of experience can be recontextualized, leading to a better understanding of interlocutors’ wishes and anxieties—in this article, for transgression of genealogical and gender orders, the excitement of Internet pornography, and seductions of the modern. I conclude by theorizing the specificity of the ethnographic encounter’s relation to knowledge and the different commitments for the anthropologist in the encounter and for the psychoanalyst in a therapeutic session.

Relationships forged during ethnographic fieldwork are often ambivalent, if only because of the tension between “being there” and departure. Following Freud’s argument that ambivalence in relationships lies at the heart of melancholia, I argue that ethnographic ambivalence can result in disciplinary melancholia, as seen in calls for a more ethical anthropology and in the pleasure of these appeals. I reach this conclusion by continuing a narrative I began in this journal in 2009, in which I describe my “entanglement” in familial relationships in my field site in southern Laos. Here I focus on the central ambivalence of Lao familial relationships (between nurturance and abandonment), especially in terms of how it informs understandings of death, ghostly agency, and Buddhism. I contend that the central ambivalence of anthropology (between being there and departure) likewise informs disciplinary debates about the ethics of fieldwork, collective culpability, and moral positioning.