Category Archives: Volume 39, Issue 2 (May 2012)

In an otherwise sympathetic speech to Occupy Wall Street, Slavoj Žižek dismissed protesters’ pursuit of direct democracy as a “dream.” In no small part responding to a perceived crisis of representative politics, however, the popular movements that swept through northern Africa, Europe, and North America during 2011 have been distinguished by their adoption of direct democratic forms. This initial ethnography—collaboratively researched and written by a Slovene activist–theorist and a U.S. anthropologist—considers the significance of the Occupy Movement’s democratic practices in Žižek’s own hometown. We trace the development of decidedly minoritarian forms of decision making—the “democracy of direct action,” as it is known locally—to activists’ experiences of organizing for migrant and minority rights in the face of ethnonationalism. We compare the democracy of direct action to Occupy Wall Street’s consensus-based model. In conclusion, we ask how ethnographic attention to the varieties of emergent political forms within the current global cycle of protest might extend recent theorizing of radical politics and contribute to broader efforts to reimagine democracy.

This article explores the links between social media and public space within the #Occupy Everywhere movements. Whereas listservs and websites helped give rise to a widespread logic of networking within the movements for global justice of the 1990s–2000s, I argue that social media have contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in the more recent #Occupy movements—one that involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. However, the recent shift toward more decentralized forms of organizing and networking may help to ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase.

The two articles in this issue that I consider here raise fascinating questions about the temporalities of capitalism and about the dilemmas of inclusion in the recent Occupy movements. I explore some of these questions by focusing on three features of the movements: their temporal registers, their moral imaginaries, and their implicit and explicit understandings of democracy. I connect these different threads by showing their relationships to one another and also to what activists believe Occupy has emerged in opposition to: the interrelated crises of global capitalism and representative democracy.

In the Perm Region of Russia, recent social and cultural projects sponsored by energy companies prominently reference certain material qualities of oil and gas. The depth associated with the region’s oil deposits is evoked in cultural heritage celebrations funded by Lukoil-Perm, and the connectivity associated with natural gas pipelines figures in PermRegionGaz’s efforts to foster new patterns of sociability. Attending to the larger material and semiotic shifts in which these projects are embedded points to a significant dimension of contemporary hydrocarbon politics and to specific ways in which corporations attempt to transform critiques of their operations.

Outside the formal and intended curriculum in Jordanian schools, the efforts of students and instructors to teach about religion and living piously as Muslim women span a myriad of spaces and approaches. At the al-Khatwa Secondary School for Girls, tensions surrounding religious authority were enmeshed with struggles outside school, specifically with a local piety movement and with a politics of authenticity that has women at its center. Competing interpretations of Islamic orthodoxy, and contests for moral authority, come to the fore in schools in unique ways, and schools provide a space and tools for young women to negotiate these tensions.

In this article, I offer an analysis of Peruvian Aymara speech directed toward sheep and alpacas, children, and marbles (specifically, the use of “animal-oriented interjections”). The use of these forms positions addressees as reduced (quasi) agents and thereby mediates Aymara ideologies about the scaled or graduated character of those enminded beings that regularly act as addressees. Ultimately, the analysis reveals an Aymara human–nonhuman frontier that requires attention to both the interactional encounters sustained across perceived ontological divides (divides understood to turn on species and ethnodevelopmental difference, etc.) and the (scaled) character of the ideologies that renders these divides “ontological.”

Intervening at the nexus of queer anthropology, black resistance, and Latin American and Caribbean culture and politics, I examine sites, modalities, and limits of “erotic subjectivity” during Cuba’s Special Period in Time of Peace (Período Especial en Tiempo de Paz)—the economic crisis of the 1990s. I trace how nonheteronormative black Cubans have been reinventing ways to participate, officially and unofficially, in a number of fraught, uneven exchanges on the ground. I aim to outline a genealogy of the political possibilities for nonheteronormative black Cubans.

In this article, I analyze the “countdown,” a popular rhetorical trope of contemporary discourses of environmental and cultural crisis. Drawing on fieldwork in a Cucapá village in the Colorado River Delta of northern Mexico, I show how, through the counting of people, birds, fish, water quantities, and language speakers, the habitat, culture, and language of the delta’s indigenous residents have consistently been represented by NGO workers, scientists, and state officials as “endangered.” In taking on the form of a “countdown,” this numerical tracking has ideological effects distinct from other kinds of enumerative practices, leading some Cucapá people to express frustration with it. I analyze how certain domains of experience, such as language, people, and water, are locally identified as being uncountable, and I use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” to illustrate how particular domains of experience become enumerable or resist enumeration in the first place.

Drawing on intensive ethnographic work, we explore how privatization has transformed the field of social and sexual relations on a large sugar plantation in northern Tanzania. Privatization has resulted in permanent layoffs, intensified labor discipline, and the displacement of former residents and of informal economic activities from the plantation itself into villages on the plantation perimeter. We show how spatial and temporal changes in the labor economy of the plantation following privatization have had complex consequences for residents and have fueled a new sexual economy.

On the basis of an ethnographic analysis of the state-run Jewish conversion project in Israel, I address the question of how bureaucrats come to know the subjects they serve. By analyzing how state agents construct the bureaucratic encounter with converts as a dramaturgical exchange, I theorize performance as an institutional mechanism through which bureaucratic knowledge is produced. The notion of “dramaturgy” sheds light not only on the everyday practices of state governmental power but also on the fragile, collaborative dynamics that underwrite the bureaucratic encounter. Such an analysis offers to complicate the notion of “power/knowledge” so often associated with bureaucratic institutions.

After the Batu Hijau mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, began operating in 2000, mine managers identified area farmers as a top security risk because they were threatening to shut down the mine unless they were given jobs there. Among various efforts to get local residents “back on the land,” the mine began sponsoring participatory integrated pest management trainings that were supposed to turn residents into productive and self-reliant subjects. Instead, these trainings evoked subjects who claimed—through their resistance to certain aspects of the trainings—that they were dependent on and entitled to conventional forms of development aid from the mine.

In this article, I examine changing meanings of participation for grassroots community leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil, since the 2004 defeat of the Workers Party (PT) municipal government and a subsequent rise in the presence of both the private sector and NGOs in community politics. Through an ethnographic analysis of community politics in one municipal district, based on interviews I carried out in 2008, I argue that the changing relationship between state, private sector, and civil society has contributed to destabilization of the narrative of active citizenship hegemonic in earlier years, implanting a market-oriented, individualistic ethos in its place.

Members of Italian Masonic lodges, esoteric organizations widely perceived as secret societies, prefer to explain their elaborate practices of concealment and disclosure in terms of discretion. Through the aesthetics and epistemology of discretion, Freemasons view the world as a “forest of symbols” hidden in plain sight and awaiting interpretation. Taking “discretion” as both an ethnographic and analytic category, I ask how an anthropological study of discretion may reveal not only forms of cultural practice deemed secret but also the interpretive art of decoding that underlies the process of knowledge formation at the heart of Masonic communities of practice.