Category Archives: Articles – Volume 39 Issue 4 (November 2012)

President Obama’s 2008 electoral triumph garnered enormous journalistic and scholarly attention, but analysts have shown very little interest in African American media coverage of the campaign. In this piece, I focus on one major, nearly ignored, black media outlet: a syndicated radio show with a huge audience, commercial success, and progressive politics. I analyze the show’s construction of a powerful mediatized black counterpublic, consider its rise parallel to the neoliberal deregulation of U.S. media, and narrate its coverage of the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. I also consider the political effects of a new cross-media platform synergy among black and progressive outlets.

In a postcolonial economy of volunteer tourism from the Global North to the Global South, mostly British women pay thousands of U.S. dollars to travel to Sarawak, on Malaysian Borneo, to work in a wildlife rehabilitation center. There, in a program operated as a public–private partnership, they provide hard labor to maintain and improve the facility and assist subcontracted indigenous Iban men in caring for displaced orangutans. Through the concept of “custodial labor,” I argue that affect produced at the interface of bodies in the work of orangutan rehabilitation also produces an unequal distribution of risk and vulnerability among those involved, across differences of species, classes, nationalities,and genders. My findings contribute to understandings of how humanity is constituted through multispecies encounters, help demonstrate how animals can be treated as subjects in ethnography, and show how affective encounters produce human and nonhuman subjectivities.

Rheana Parreñas’s examination of orangutan–human encounters suggests how cultural anthropologists might pioneer a bolder approach to the analysis of social interactions of all sorts. All interactions, however closely acquainted the parties involved, require the interpretation of more or less inscrutable sounds and gestures. Engaging with this strangeness incites intensely felt bodily experiences that people only imperfectly translate into passions like love, fear, shock, and relief. Parreñas points the way both to a fuller understanding of the role of this sort of affect in neoliberalism and to richer alliances among the subfields of anthropology and between anthropology and the humanities and natural and physical sciences. These new alliances promise to provide us with new ways of understanding our entanglements with others who are always both familiar and strange.

Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine—a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Starting from a visit to an offshore rig, I explore the idea of “modularity”—mobile personnel, technologies, and legal structures that enable offshore work in Equatorial Guinea to function “just like” offshore work elsewhere. Anthropologists often characterize as naive the simplifications of modular processes, the evacuation of specificity they entail. Yet for the industry in Equatorial Guinea, this evacuation of specificity was neither mistake nor flaw. Tracing the making of modularity shows how corporations can appear removed from local entanglements and also helps to clarify the “how” of capitalism—the work required to frame heterogeneity and contingency into the profit and power found in many global capitalist projects.

Hannah Appel’s notion of “modularity” in her analysis of contemporary transnational oil operations exquisitely captures the work required to create the illusion that petroleum production is removed from and uncompromised by local entanglements. Her study belies the notion (peddled by the industry) that the extraction of crude oil is a technoscientific wonder detached from disruptive inequalities and tumultuous political conditions that too frequently haunt places where oil development occurs. In this commentary, I sketch two directions for further research inspired by Appel’s work that could extend the disentangling calculus of corporate profit, liability, and risk. One centers on the corporate form and the other on the financialization of risk.

With no local outlet to sell their corn harvests as a result of neoliberal policies, residents on the Mexico–Guatemala border pursued an alternative strategy. They mobilized to smuggle corn from Mexico to Guatemala and asserted that this constituted legitimate “free trade.” Residents reinterpreted free trade to imply their right to “freely” sell corn over the border, thereby challenging the implications of official free-trade policies that were anything but free. Yet, as locals participate in this growing trade and negotiate with state officials, they may contribute to the neoliberal economic dynamics, increasing regional inequalities, and patron–client state relations they otherwise protest.

The eviction of residents to make way for a “new urban zone” in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is legitimized by notions of building a beautiful, breathable, and orderly city. Although angry about their unfair treatment in the eviction process, residents ultimately support this discourse of beauty. They challenge eviction through individual squabbles over compensation rates, land measurements, and resettlement sites. In the process, dissent becomes atomized and residents reproduce a mode of valuing land based primarily on monetary value. In this context, notions of beauty, despite having counterhegemonic potential, reproduce rather than challenge core ideals legitimizing the project.

Bosnian Muslims’ understandings of Islam and relationships with the sacred landscape have undergone significant transformations since the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. I explore these transformations as I analyze discourses and debates on what constitutes “correct” Islamic tradition in Bosnia today, when Muslim practice has been exposed to a global Islamic orthodoxy and entangled in new supraregional hierarchies of power, values, and moral imagination. I specifically focus on how intracommunal Muslim politics intertwines with contemporary Bosnian Muslim shrine pilgrimages.

Conceptions of wildness (theuan) and accident pervade the Thai informal economy and infuse certain forms of popular religious practice. I look at the propitiation of wilderness spirits in urban Bangkok at shrines that migrant and marginal workers see as sites of hope and danger. I argue that, by naming the potential for accident and death as a spirit with which they can communicate, informal-economy workers attempt to change the potential for misfortune into its opposite. My study draws on recent work on neoliberal and precarious labor in Europe as well as connections between the occult and the economy.

Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—or what, arguably, can be seen as torture—might seem strange. But for single Mizrahi welfare mothers in Israel, somatization of bureaucratic logic as physical pain precludes the agency of identity politics. This essay elaborates on Don Handelman’s scholarship on bureaucratic logic as divine cosmology and posits that Israel’s bureaucracy is based on a theological essence that amalgamates gender and race. The essay employs a world anthropologies’ theoretical toolkit to represent bureaucratic torture in multiple narrative modes, including anger, irony, and humor, as a counterexample to dominant U.S.–U.K. formulae for writing and theorizing culture.

Psychologists working in Russia’s cities have found it both desirable and profitable to offer “psychological education” to the children of the elite. I examine two characterizations of this work—as a form of neoliberal subjectivation and as a post-Soviet project focused on progressive sociopolitical reform. Exploring the tensions between them illuminates the historical specificity of self-work in Russia, its relation to commerce and biopolitics, and its political ambiguity. I conclude that studies of governmentality that attend to both subjectivation as an ethical practice and social history can effectively render capitalist complicity and ordinary ethics in the same frame.

Exploring the highly competitive bilingual news field in urban India, I illustrate how localization of news content has led to conflictual discourses around who should constitute “the local” and for what end. Mediatized contests over “the local” frame urban politics along linguistic and cultural divides, articulated through populist challenges to neoliberal media discourses of “the global local.” In turning a critical eye to these mediatized contests, I extend the recent emphasis on the need to “ground” globalization studies and explore the concrete ways in which globalization imprints itself on local spaces. I argue that local and global formations are embedded in the dynamics of news fields in ways that elude generalized claims advanced by pessimists of cultural homogeneity as well as by optimists of local resistance.