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Our other Others: on perpetration, morality, and ethnographic unease
Abstract
This article critically assesses the impact of political and moral positions within contemporary anthropology. Re‐examining ideas of advocacy and the ethical within the discipline, it argues for an alternative political anthropology that focuses on perpetration rather than victimhood, offenders rather than the offended. If anthropology wants to be a discipline that works against social wrongs and suffering, then understanding the positions and perspectives of those causing them is, we contend, a necessary point of departure. Yet how can we approach people ethnographically who transgress bodily, legal, and moral boundaries, and why is this not more commonly done? In answering these questions, we analyse mainstream disciplinary ethics, both current and historical, and highlight some of the reactions that the study of perpetrators evoke in anthropologists. This illuminates an inconsistency within political anthropology. While there is ample theoretical and ethnographic nuance within the subdiscipline, this complexity seems to fade when we focus on perpetration. We suggest that anthropology engages more fully in the study of perpetration and approaches the issue by clarifying how (mis)dynamics are anchored within shared social worlds and historical becomings. This article thus calls upon us to expand our anthropological attention and curiosity beyond what might be morally comfortable.
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Based on fieldwork among pimps and sex workers in Eastern Romania, this article explores the personal skills that pimps deem necessary in order to be successful in the transnational street business of pimping in other EU countries. The article introduces the concepts of “reading desires” and “instillation of love,” which enable the pimps to “access” the desires of others. Through these concepts, I argue that the pimps have increased social capacities in distinct social arenas. These skills are not necessarily useful in other arenas of their lives, but in their preparation for entering the transnational street economy abroad, these skills are crucial.
Using a mixed-method approach, we explored how 85 sex market facilitators used neutralization and subcultural discourse to present themselves in the interview setting. We used non-metric, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) to test discursive themes that resulted in a three-fold model with the themes ‘good,’’bad,’ and ‘badass me’ with externalizing and internalizing approaches. The ‘good me’ subtype focused on fundamentally being a ”nice guy” but blaming acts on oppression. ‘Bad me” focused on being ”innately bad” but blaming outside factors and neutralizing ‘bad me.’ ‘Badass me’ centered on high-status feelings of pimping but also expressing guilt about it. This model may be helpful for researchers or practitioners interviewing or working with sex market facilitators, such as pimps or sex traffickers.
This study analyzes semi-structured interviews with 85 pimps in New York City to explore how pimps discuss their economic pathways-i.e., how their pimping leads to distinct types of work outcomes and how they discuss their associated feelings and attitudes. We compare younger (18-23) to older (24-67) pimps, anticipating that younger participants would be more adaptive and produce discourse less entrenched in outsider thinking. Pimps' movements between licit and illicit work worlds mirror those of drifters (Matza, 1964) and align with Murphy and Robinson's (2008) concept of maximizers (i.e., economically benefiting from both work worlds simultaneously). Younger pimps, despite their at-risk status, boast of several distinct advantages in moving between worlds, such as flexibility and technological savvy. How pimps' experiences in both worlds connect to insider (mainstream orientation) or outsider discourse (oppositional orientation) is also examined. Many older pimps who identify as 'hustlers' express oppositional discourse that aligns with Sandberg's (2009) 'gangster' discourse. Those pimping to survive tend to express 'oppression' discourse. Despite their at-risk statuses, many younger pimps demonstrate a hybrid (insider/outsider) orientation, which is one of versatility where participants describe an ability to master both illicit and licit worlds or at least maximize their opportunities by participating in both worlds.
https://www.jqcjc.org/documents/v7i3.pdf#page=69
In this mixed methods study of 56 entry-level pimps in Harlem, NY, we explore how pimps’ choices to use violence or control differ by where they are selling sex, who their clientele are, and whether these violent and controlling behaviors yield higher returns. First, we qualitatively explore how pimps account for each of these choices, and how each group of choices are related to the other choices. Second, we use bivariate statistical techniques to see whether there are associations in this sample between pimps’ ages and each of those decisions, and between each of those decisions and reported earnings. We find that younger pimps work with clients and sex workers in their social networks because they are easier to hold accountable, which leads younger pimps to bypass the self-reported risks involved with more violent work, but also tends be associated with lower self-reported earnings. Older pimps gravitate toward stranger clients, which involves more risk but higher earnings. Most pimps do not describe regularly using violence either against sex workers or to protect sex workers, but the use of violence is more common among older pimps. The accounts of regularly using violence with workers are not associated with higher earnings. The idea that pimps control most aspects of how sex workers labor and other aspects of their lives such as where they live are not substantiated by the accounts of the pimps themselves, but we do find older pimps describe exerting more control over sex workers than younger pimps. We discuss the implications of our findings, which demonstrate that pimps are a diverse group who see their own violence and control decisions as related to age, location, clientele, and perceived risks and rewards.
As the most comprehensive edited volume to be published on perpetrators and perpetration of mass violence, the volume sets a new agenda for perpetrator research by bringing together contributions from such diverse disciplines as political science, sociology, social psychology, history, anthropology and gender studies, allowing for a truly interdisciplinary discussion of the phenomenon of perpetration. The cross-case nature of the volume allows the reader to see patterns across case studies, bringing findings from inter alia the Holocaust, the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the civil wars in Cambodia and Côte d'Ivoire into conversation with each other. The chapters of this volume are united by a common research interest in understanding what constitutes perpetrators as actors, what motivates them, and how dynamics behind perpetration unfold. Their attention to the interactions between disciplines and cases allows for the insights to be transported into more abstract ideas on perpetration in general. Amongst other aspects, they indicate that instead of being an extraordinary act, perpetration is often ordinary, that it is crucial to studying perpetrators and perpetration not from looking at the perpetrators as actors but by focusing on their deeds, and that there is a utility of ideologies in explaining perpetration, when we differentiate them more carefully and view them in a more nuanced light. This volume will be vital reading for students and scholars of genocide studies, human rights, conflict studies and international relations.
For decades, scholars and journalists have intricately tied presidential elections to the idea of a struggling “white working class.” They explained the 2016 presidential election by investigating the politics of low- or middle-income white conservative voters. This article instead focuses on the way in which white low-wage and unemployed small town residents question, distrust, and embrace conservative populist politics. The paper first explores how conservative populism and the media response are remaking the white working class along cultural and racial lines. Drawing from research conducted in a predominantly white former manufacturing town in central Maine, I then document that some poor and low-wage white workers distrust conservative populist politicians and are angry about being pushed aside by business-first politics. While populist and neoliberal politics have contributed to a remaking of the white working class around a white worker ideal, the concomitant decline in the social safety net and good jobs has been generating a sense of betrayal among those who are struggling the most. The article thus offers an alternative to the white working class caricature and argues that a contradictory consciousness results from workers living within and reacting against economic precarity and conservative populism.
This book is about the ways in which current reconfiguration of the
modes of governing in Europe are playing themselves out at the level
of the subject and the impact they are having on individual experience
of gender difference and sexuality. The topic through which I examine
these transformations is that of ‘sex trafficking’, commonly understood
as a process by means of which people are purposely recruited by use
of force or deception for forced labour or exploitation in the sex sector.
This book is, however, about more than ‘sex trafficking’. My argument
is that experiences such as that of Liudmila described in the Preface
offer insight into broader transformations of state sovereignty, labour
markets and citizenship arising as consequences of globalisation and
European enlargement. It is the aim of this book to explore the conditions
under which ‘sex trafficking’ comes about and is sustained, and to
make visible how these conditions are connected to broader spheres of
social and political life in contemporary Europe.
This paper analyses the reconfiguration of social relations in rural Hungary after the collapse of socialism as well as the cultural idioms in which these changes were interpreted in order to unearth the connection between structural transformation, the re-articulation of ethnic and peasant traditions and the discourse on Roma as a threat to communal harmony. The locality in the focus of our case study is a village that played a major role in the rise of the far-right Jobbik party. By applying an ethnographic approach, we seek to uncover structural forces, discourses and agencies that help explain the success of the anti-Roma mobilization campaign that ended with Jobbik’s electoral victory.
This article examines the backgrounds of traffickers in Cambodia: why they became involved in trafficking, how they operate, their earnings, and the criminal justice system's response to their activities. Our research draws from interviews with justice officials, NGOs, and detained alleged traffickers; and from a review of police and prison records. The results challenge alarmist claims about the high prevalence, profitability, or role of organized crime in human trafficking. In Cambodia, 80 percent of incarcerated traffickers are poor uneducated women who lack legitimate opportunities and whose unsophisticated illicit activities earn very little. We argue that the Cambodian government, in return for foreign aid, adopted a repressive law that defines human trafficking ineptly; in the hands of a dysfunctional justice system, the law has turned into an instrument of corruption and injustice against powerless individuals.
Kamala Kempadoo is Acting Head of the Mona Unit of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, while on leave from the Women's Studies Department at the University of Colorado. She is editor of Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition and Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean. She is a long time activist with feminist organizations in the Netherlands, the U.S.A. and the Caribbean.
1. The term "women of color" is used in this article interchangeably with "Brown and Black," "Third World," "African, Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean," or "Thai, Dominican, Nepalese, Ghanaian, Colombian" women, and could easily be replaced by the notion of "postcolonial women." I am acutely aware, however, that these categories, while speaking to the historical and shared experiences of, and struggles against, colonialism, neocolonialism, Western imperialism, masculine domination, and racialized/ethnicized oppression, may collapse differences between women, may not relate to the self-identification or political identity in particular societies, or could make some nationalities invisible. However, I use them to highlight the significance of the racialization of the global sex trade.
2.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this article and for bringing to my attention that the emphasis on "women of color" may lead to an undertheorizing and strategizing around the roles of white Eastern European and Russian women and "non-U.S., non-European and/or nonwhite men's roles as customers" in the sex trade. This is certainly not my intention, although I am aware that any emphasis on the subjectivity and agency of any single category of people (sex workers, white women, Black men, pink-collar workers, poor women, etc) can implicitly lead to the invisibility of larger relations of power and to the elision of other subjectivities and actors. However, it would take another article to do full justice to these other dimensions of the sex trade.
I have also chosen to retain my focus on "sex workers of color" in this article in light of a new trend in the media and international discussions, where concern with white Eastern and Russian women in prostitution has begun to eclipse the centrality of "Third World women" in the global sex trade. Furthermore, I can only hope that readers will grasp that while sex tourism, militarized prostitution, and trafficking are premised for a large part on international, racialized, gendered relations between postindustrial and postcolonial societies, the involvement of Sri Lankan women in the contemporary Middle East, Nepali women in India, Brazilian women in Suriname, or Korean and Chinese women serving men in the Imperial Japanese army in the 1940s also poses questions about the significance of cultural/racial/ethnic difference between client and sex worker in constructions of prostitution.
3. According to Dr. Julio Javier Espinola, former PanAmerican Health Organization (PAHO) consultant to Haiti, during a meeting in April 2000.
4. UN press release reported in the Washington Post 17 March 2000.
5. Transportation and trafficking fees vary but prices of around 50,000 a person from $30,000 a few years ago"—one of the highest fees in the world.
6. See Kempadoo and Doezema 1998, and Doezema 1998 and forthcoming for various critiques of this neo-colonial image of Third World women.
7. While the majority of sex tourists appear to be men, women sex tourists are also becoming more common and have been the subject of recent investigations in Asia and the Caribbean. See, for example, O'Connell Davidson and Sanchez Taylor 1999, Dahles 1998, and Albuquerque 1998.
8. Nevertheless, the global sex trade cannot be simply reduced to economic imperatives. As Lim ṇotes "if absolute poverty was the sole root cause or major context for prostitution then the sex sector should have declined in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The four economies have all recorded substantial economic progress in recent years" (1998, 206).
9. See Ofreneo and Ofreneo 1998...
The dominant understanding in the United States of the relationship between pimps and minors involved in commercial sex is that it is one of “child sex trafficking,” in which pimps lure girls into prostitution, then control, exploit, and brutalize them. Such narratives of oppression typically depend on postarrest testimonials by former prostitutes and pimps in punishment and rescue institutions. In contrast, this article presents data collected from active pimps, underage prostitutes, and young adult sex workers to demonstrate the complexity of pimp-prostitute dyads and interrogate conventional stereotypes about teenage prostitution. A holistic understanding of the factors that push minors into sex work and keep them there is needed to designand implement effective policy and services for this population.
Based on ethnographic research in Berlin, this paper examines two paradigmatic cases in which real incest is brought into the penumbra of law and subsumed into an imaginary complex superimposed on sexual abuse. It uses them to theorize at a higher level of abstraction about the deployment of myth by the unconscious, the relation between taboo and law, male and female attachments to the child, gender conflict, and changes in the position of the father in the symbolic order of the West. One case focuses on how a child victim translates what had happened into the therapeutic and legal languages of sexual abuse, the other on the father’s evolving apprehension of his deed in the course of therapy. I argue that (1) the incest taboo increasingly regulates lineal rather than lateral relations between kin; (2) the imaginary complex construes male sexuality as a security threat to children, resulting in a negative identification with and of male difference, with serious consequences for the family, the heterosexual couple, and the mother-child bond; and (3) the erosion of the incest taboo, and of the authority of the father who was its guarantor, opens up alternative modalities to regulate relations between generations and genders.
Purpose. The ideologically based view of intimate partner violence has traditionally influenced policy and practice in modern western nations and dominated cross-national research and practice. This review considers the validity of the position statement of a British organization responsible for accrediting many male perpetrator programmes in the statutory, voluntary, and private sector as an example of this ideological influence.
Method. The position statement, informed by the patriarchal view of partner violence, is evaluated using empirical evidence from various branches of the social sciences, including psychology, that have not been guided by the patriarchal view.
Results. Overwhelming empirical evidence is presented, which refutes ideologically driven assumptions that have been put forward to guide current practice and evaluation of it.
Conclusions. This review highlights the need to investigate intimate partner violence from a scientific and gender-inclusive perspective. The implications for psychological practice are discussed.
Cet article expose la tendance actuelle, en anthropologie, a travers le developpement d'une discipline morale avec des modeles mondiaux qui contiennent implicitement des jugements moraux. Le modele moral actuel est profile avec ses emphases sur l'oppression, la demystification et la denonciation. Des attaques variables de la science et de l'objectivite, une part du modele moral actuel donc, sont evoquees et une defense de l'objectivite et de la science est presentee
This paper addresses the differences between cultural/feminist and psychological perspectives on domestic violence, with specific reference to the roles of anger and alcohol. Feminist perspectives assume patriarchal control to be at the root of domestic violence, and see anger and alcohol as excuses for abusive behaviour. Psychological approaches identify anger and alcohol as risk factors for violence in some subgroups of offenders. A risk–needs model is presented, in which a distinction is drawn between acute and stable dynamic risk factors. Both may be targets of intervention, but addressing stable dynamic risk factors is more likely to effect enduring change. A theoretical understanding is required to identify stable dynamic risk factors, and here we suggest an affective defence approach to anger-related domestic violence and a social problem solving approach to alcohol-related domestic violence. Further developments in risk assessment and treatment matching are recommended.
Through the concept of "social navigation," this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of possibility in a world of conflict, turmoil and diminishing resources.
Settler-native conflicts in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and South Africa serve as excellent comparative cases as three areas linked to Britain where insurgencies occurred during roughly the same period. Important factors considered are settler parties, settler mythology, the role of native fighters, settler terror, the role of liberal parties, and the conduct of the war by security forces. Settlers and natives in each area share similar attitudes, liberal parties operate in similar fashions, and there are common explanations for the formation of splinter liberation groups. However, according to Mitchell, the key difference between the cases lies in the behavior of British security forces in comparison to South African and Israeli forces.
Mitchell's chapter on liberal parties includes an independent account of the Progressive Federal Party of South Africa, the official parliamentary opposition from 1977 to 1987, along with the first major published account of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland. His study of splinter group formation contains the first major account since 1964 of the Pan-Africanist Party of Azania, including its insurgency campaign in the 1980s and 1990s. Mitchell also contrasts behavior among the Inkatha Party and Labour Party in South Africa with the Social Democrat and Labour Party in Northern Ireland.
For those at the high end of the trafficking chain, the sex trade is an alluring and lucrative business: the supply of girls is constant, the costs of operations are low, and interference from law enforcement is weak to non-existent. Anti-trafficking organizations and governments commonly appropriate such market metaphors of supply and demand as they struggle with the moral?political dimensions of a business involving trade, labor, prostitution, migration, and national borders. But is the sex trade really the perfect business? This book examines the social worlds and interrelationships of traffickers, victims, and trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao border. It explores local efforts to reconcile international legal concepts, the bureaucratic prescriptions of aid organizations, and global development ideologies with on-the-ground realities of sexual commerce. The book provides an insider's view of recruitment and sex commerce gleaned from countless conversations and interviews in bars and brothels, and shows a much more varied picture of friends recruiting friends, and families helping relatives. Sex work in the Mekong region follows patron–client cultural scripts about mutual help and obligation, which makes distinguishing the victims from the traffickers difficult. The book goes beyond the usual focus on migrants and sex commerce to explore the institutional context of anti-trafficking, and raises crucial questions about how an increasingly globalized development aid sector responds to what might more accurately be described as an extraterritorial development challenge of human mobility.
This collection of essays brings together historians and political scientists from Britain, France and the United States, who, from widely differing perspectives and traditions, have been involved in the process of rethinking African politics. They present here the outline of a new approach, grounded in universal political theory rather than on theories of Third World political development. This seeks to integrate the history of Africa (from pre- to post-colonial) with concepts of political theory as they have been applied historically to the analysis of Europe and America. The book addresses a wide audience: students of African history and politics, of Third World development and of political theory.
en In recent years, Canada has witnessed an increase in visibility of far‐right groups and activities. This phenomenon is particularly interesting as it contrasts with the broader Canadian context of acceptance of immigrants and support for multiculturalism. How do far‐right groups represent themselves and their claims to the public considering the dominant discursive environment in which they operate? Moreover, are far‐right groups’ discourse and rhetoric marked by contextual differences? This paper analyzes the way the distinct Canadian and Quebec chapters of the vigilante group Soldiers of Odin (SOO) use their public Facebook pages, comparatively. This research demonstrates that both SOO chapters negotiate their self‐representation by employing cultural elements that are salient and meaningful in their respective sociopolitical contexts and that can be exploited to infer motivations.
Résumé
fr Ces dernières années, le Canada a connu une augmentation en visibilité des groupes d'extrême droite et de leurs activités. Ce phénomène est particulièrement intéressant, car il contraste avec le contexte général canadien d'acceptation des immigrants et du soutien au multiculturalisme. Considérant l'environnement discursif dominant dans lequel les groupes d'extrême droite opèrent, comment ceux‐ci se présentent‐ils ainsi que leurs revendications au public? De plus, les discours et les rhétoriques des groupes d'extrême droite sont‐ils marqués par des différences contextuelles? Cet article analyse la façon dont les distincts chapitres du groupe de vigilantes les Soldats d'Odin (SO) au Canada et au Québec utilisent leur page Facebook publique, comparativement. Cette recherche démontre que les deux chapitres des SO négocient leurs représentations d'eux‐mêmes en employant des éléments culturels qui sont saillants et significatifs dans leurs contextes sociopolitiques respectifs et qui peuvent être exploités à des fins de motivation.
This essay focuses on the voters of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro in Morro da Cruz, a low-income community in Porto Alegre. The transition from Lulism (2002–16) to Bolsonarism (2018–) was marked by the rise and fall of the economy and the collapse of the political system. Based on a ten-year longitudinal ethnography, we look at the effects of such major shifts at the national level on people’s individual self- and political subjectivity. We investigate how and why “new consumers”—those who accessed the finance system during the Workers’ Party (PT) Administration—came to support a far-right candidate. We argue that the inclusion of the poor into the market economy brought about individual empowerment and a sense of self-worth in the PT era—a process that was threatened by economic recession and unleashed an existential crisis, especially among men. Bolsonaro, as a male figure, and his campaign gave order to a changing world, resulting in a reconciliation of personhood and political belonging. © 2020 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.
Cambridge Core - Human Rights - Child Perpetrators on Trial - by Jastine C. Barrett
This article examines the politics of American “doomsday” prepping during Barack Obama's presidency. It challenges claims that growing interest in prepping post-2008 arose exclusively from extreme apocalyptic, white supremacist, and anti-government reactions to Obama's electoral successes – claims that suggest prepping to be politically congruent with previous waves of extreme right-wing American “survivalism.” Drawing on ethnography, this paper argues that, while fears of Obama have been central to many preppers’ activities, much of their prepping under his presidency centred on fears that sit outside survivalist politics. Building on this, the article illuminates connections between prepping and America's twenty-first-century electoral mainstream. Engaging with discussions about the “remaking” of American conservatism during Obama's presidency, it particularly frames prepping's growth as being engaged with, and shaped by, currents of mainstream anti-Obama fear that similarly undergirded the Tea Party's rise within popular Republicanism at this time.
The election of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and rise of conservative populism in countries around the world has led to an abundance of scholarship on populism and the white working class. Much of this work seeks to explain the underlying cause of this conservative populist politics, focusing on globalization and economic precarity, racism and anti‐immigrant sentiment, or failures of political leadership. Survey data and polling analyses, in particular, explain relationships between demographics, political opinions, and voting results. Though quantitative data on the social groups or activists most involved in populist politics are important, missing from this research are ethnographies of populism that explore how local, state, and national actors influence the meaning of “the people.” In this article, I will argue that ethnography is particularly well‐suited for exploring the coming together of local and national politics and the subtle ways that economic insecurity, racism, sexism, and Islamophobia intersect in the making of “hard working taxpayers” or “ordinary folks.” I draw from research in a predominantly white, former manufacturing town in central Maine to illustrate the significance of this ethnographic approach to populism.
This article investigates the moral content and epistemological utility of scholar-informant solidarity in ethnography. It supports efforts to highlight the potential for immoral outcomes when ethnographers prioritize the interests of those they study during the conception, execution, and dissemination of their work. However, this article advocates reinforcing the imperative of scholar-informant solidarity, recognizing the practice as morally compromised but epistemologically indispensable. I illustrate these claims by referencing my experiences as an ethnographer of white nationalist groups in the Nordic countries. In three case studies, I show how solidarity—and with it collaboration, reciprocity, and advocacy—led to troubling contributions to political causes while offering ethnographic knowledge unlikely to be gained through other forms of research. The article argues further that, while the moral and epistemic consequences of solidarity are exposed in the study of oppressive and violent groups, the potential for power asymmetries and political conflict among scholars and informants is ubiquitous. Therefore, the article addresses the need to embrace solidarity and the immorality that comes with it to ethnographers at large. © 2019 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
This article extends prior research on right-wing ideology broadly and the ideology of the Tea Party specifically. Using data from 45 interviews with Tea Party activists and participant observation at Tea Party meetings, I map five distinct ideologies, used by subsets of the Tea Party Patriots membership: Christian Conservatism, Constitutionalism, Reformed Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Conspiracism.
This volume is a compilation of new original qualitative and ethnographic research on pimps and other third party facilitators of commercial sex from the developed and developing world. From African-American pimps in the United States and Eastern European migrants in Germany to Brazilian cafetãos and cafetinas this volume features the lives and voices of the men and women who enable diverse and culturally distinct sex markets around the world. In scholarly, popular, and policy-making discourses, such individuals are typically viewed as larger-than-life hustlers, violent predators, and brutal exploiters. However, there is actually very little empirical research-based knowledge about how pimps and third party facilitators actually live, labor, and make meaning in their everyday lives. Nearly all previous knowledge derives from hearsay and post-hoc reporting from ex-sex-workers, customers, police and government agents, neighbors, and self-aggrandizing fictionalized memoirs.
This volume is the first published compilation of empirically researched data and analysis about pimps and third parties working in the sex trade across the globe. Situated in an age of highly punitive and ubiquitous global anti-trafficking law, it challenges highly charged public policy stereotypes that conflate pimping and sex trafficking, in order to understand the lived experience of pimps and the men and women whose work they facilitate.
The Trouble with Morals Philosophical Affinities Opening Territories Conclusion Acknowledgments References
This article argues for the necessity of recovering the original sense of the word 'culture' as denoting modes of practical activity in the man-made environment: cultivating the land rather than cultivating the mind. This entails a critique of intellectualistic tendencies to assimilate bodily experience to conceptual and verbal formulations and to regard practices as 'symbolic' of something outside themselves. Working with Merleau-Ponty's concept of the 'lived body' and Bourdieu's notion of habitus, I endeavour to move away from the unduly abstract semiotic models which have dominated anthropological research in recent years by developing a grounded and common-sense mode of analysis which lays emphasis on patterns of bodily praxis in the immediate social field and material world. I examine the interplay between forms of comportment and forms of cognition through a restudy of gender construction and initiation rites among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone. Consideration is given to gender inversions and imitations, and the relation of bodily habits to social convention and custom.
This article analyzes the relationship between conflict, social invisibility, and negative potentiality. Taking its empirical point of departure in fieldwork conducted in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the manner in which people orient themselves
toward precarious prospects and potentialities. Little attention has been paid to the orientational effects generated by long-term conflict—that is, the way that violence, as an underlying possibility, an imagined oncoming event, influences social life. Moving from the empirical to the
theoretical, and from the specific to the general, the article compares two areas of conflict and orientation toward negative potentiality before moving on to a more general discussion of invisibility and potentiality in social life and theory.
In bracketing certain ''Western'' Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be ''suspending the ethical'' in our dealings with the ''other.'' Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imagine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged anthropology might take.
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.
This article addresses some of the ethical, ethnographic and political dilemmas of an idiosyncratic multi-sited research project exploring the illegal and covert activities surrounding the traffic in humans and their body parts by outlaw surgeons, kidney hunters and transplant tourists engaged in ‘back-door’ transplants in the global economy. In its odd juxtapositions of ethnography, documentation, surveillance and human rights work, the project blends genres and transgresses longstanding distinctions between anthropology, political journalism, scientific reporting, political engagement, public interest anthropology and human rights work. How does one investigate covert and criminal behavior anthropologically? When, if ever (and on what grounds), is it permissible to conduct research ‘under cover’? When crimes are being committed, to whom does one owe one’s divided loyalties? Following a discussion of politically engaged research I pluck a few ‘backstage’ scenes from this Goffmanesque study of the organs trade to illustrate the very different forms, practices and emotions it encompasses. I want to recapture the ‘basic strangeness’ of a routine medical procedure – kidney transplant – that has become increasingly dependent on medically supported claims and rights to the healthy bodies of marginalized ‘others’. I close with an argument against bioethics and its capitulations to medical markets in bodies.
Anthropological interest in Romany and Gypsy populations is now intense; but for the first seven or so decades of Anthropology, the field was left entirely to amateur folklorists. Roma and Gypsies may often "not want in" (Gmelch 1986), but they also seem not to fit into existing academic models. Examining various ways in which Romany sociality challenges existing anthropological models, this article assesses the contribution of three explanations of Romany persistence: historical, sociostructural and culturalist. Roma always live immersed within and dispersed among dominant majority populations, and yet their adaptation remains surprisingly successful in the long historical view. The enormous diversity of Romany social forms, as well as Roma evasion of the trap of nation-state/ethnic figurations, continues to provide a potent source for anthropological reflection and theorization.
Politics and political collectives are not merely symbolic phenomena. They are anchored physically in space and of ten supported by particular architectural representations. This article analyzes a specific example of this, namely the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath, and demonstrates how architectural designs were integral to establishing an assembly for the post-revolutionary collective. The article focuses on the Fête de la Fédération of July 14, 1790, celebrated on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The author argues that the architectural staging of this spectacle served to generate an embodiment of the nation, enhanced by affective and acoustic measures. While the article is mainly concerned with the architectural technologies of politics related to the French Revolution, it also points beyond this specific historical case and briefly indicates how 20th-century fascisms used techniques that were prefigured by 18th-century French inventions.