Men of the Sea, Sicily, Italy, 1999. © 2001 Giorgia FIORIO (Contact Press Images)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol. 97, No. 1
ARTICLES
Alejandro I. Paz | Settling History in Silwan: State Emblems and
Public Secrets in Occupied East Jerusalem
Leo Couacaud | Multiculturalism and the Fetishization of Ethnic Difference
in Mauritius
Myriam Lamrani | Transcendent Images: Saintly Devotion, Art, and
Indigenous Sovereignty in Oaxacan Transnational Migration
Elizabeth Challinor | Navigating through the Cracks of the State System:
Shifting Spaces of Hope in the Portuguese Mobility Regime
Florence Durney | The Great Outboard Debate: Negotiating Materiality
and Dispossession in a Southeast Asian Marine Hunting Community
AbdouMaliq Simone | An Urban Political from the “End of the World”:
Dock Nine and its Technical Epistles
BOOK REVIEWS
Jessica R. Greenberg | Damani J. Partridge’s Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin
Vincent Ialenti | Peter C. Little’s Burning Matters: Life, Labor, and
E-Waste Pyropolitics in Ghana
Stephan Palmié | David E. Sutton’s Bigger Fish to Fry:
A Theory of Cooking as Risk with Greek Examples
© 2000 Tomas MUSCIONICO (Contact Press Images)
Buy issue through PROJECT MUSE, JSTOR or our ONLINE STORE.
ABSTRACTS
Settling History in Silwan: State Emblems and Public Secrets in Occupied East Jerusalem
Alejandro I. Paz, University of Toronto Scarborough
This paper brings together two aspects of state formations that are rarely considered in unison, emblems and public secrets, and examines the semiotic processes that relate them. It considers these processes in tours given by a prominent organization, called El-Ad, that works to settle Jewish-Israelis in occupied East Jerusalem, and in particular in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. El-Ad claims that it has returned the Israeli state to Silwan, and seeks to substantiate this through a variety of practices used on tours of the biblical archaeological site known as the City of David. While the City of David site is associated with the biblical narratives of King David and the first Jewish kingdom, I show how El-Ad selectively reveals the secret history of its settlement on tour as well. To do so, I describe the discursive marking of this secret history, and, in particular, I review how the director of El-Ad, David Be’eri, retold to tour guides the organization’s foundational narrative in the genre of an intelligence operation. I end by discussing how El-Ad tours of the City of David archaeological site narrate this secret history of settlement, as a means to normalize the occupation. Drawing on theories of the state, secrets and entextualizing practices, I argue that state emblems are key to understanding the masking effects of statecraft. [Keywords: state, public secrets, entextualization, Biblical history, settlement, Jerusalem]
Multiculturalism and the Fetishization of Ethnic Difference in Mauritius
Leo Couacaud, University of Sydney
Mauritius is often celebrated as a success story in lay and academic discourse. One version of this discourse highlights Mauritius’s success in managing its diversity as a multicultural society. But there are a number of reasons to question this assumption. For instance, some writers have claimed that Mauritius’s policy of multiculturalism encourages the promotion of ethnic difference and marginalizes certain minorities (Couacaud 2016, Eisenlohr 2006, Vaughan 2001). In this paper, however, I propose to go further and argue that Mauritius’s policy of multiculturalism not only promotes ethnic difference and marginalizes certain minorities. It has also led to what one could describe as the “fetishization of ethnic difference.” I propose to demonstrate this by discussing how material religious practices act as signs of ethnic difference in everyday life, using ethnographic observations and visual documentation methods for these purposes. Examples cited in the paper include the material culture of temple architecture, religious street-processions, garden shrines, homes, workplaces, and vehicles.[Keywords: plural societies, Mauritius, multiculturalism, ethnicity, materialism, fetishization
Transcendent Images: Saintly Devotion, Art, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Oaxacan Transnational Migration
Myriam Lamrani, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and Harvard University
On their journey to the United States, Oaxacan migrants often turn to various saints, whom they affectionately refer to as their “images,” to seek protection and safe passage on the other side of the border. In this essay, I consider the interplay between figures of devotion and other images to theorize the multifaceted connections between religious and artistic representations of the saints within the context of migration. Through the analysis of two stories—one involving “illegalized” migration, the other “legalized” migrant devotees—where several saints intervene, I examine these images through the concept of transcendence. Here, transcendence encapsulates the saints’ remarkable ability to extend beyond their physical images through different media as they move across borders while reshaping temporal and geographical timelines beyond colonial narratives. I argue that, as devotees call upon the saints to creatively redraw manifold connections between faith, migration, and sovereignty through the reconfiguration of affective and historical geographies, these transcendent images also help migrants re-imagine their indigenous identities to ultimately reframe the established imperialist cartographies. [Keywords: transcendence, saints, images, migration, Santa Muerte, decoloniality, Indigenous sovereignty, affective geographies, Oaxacalifornia
Navigating through the Cracks of the State System: Shifting Spaces of Hope in the Portuguese Mobility Regime
Elizabeth Challinor, Nova University of Lisbon
Portugal’s tolerance towards irregular migration and its relatively extensive citizenship rights, in comparison with other European countries, have contributed towards its reputation as a migrant friendly state. However, when the state turns a blind eye to the irregular status of migrants and when the outsourcing of refugee reception to civil society fails to deliver according to Weberian expectations of an orderly, rational bureaucracy, who has the right to call whom to account? Through an examination of the blurred accountabilities in different sites of service provision in Portugal, the article examines the complex, shifting and incomplete strategies employed by social workers, civil society hosting staff and migrants in struggles over claims and resources. The challenges are like those of a game of cards in which players, searching for clarification regarding the rules of the game and how to apply or even manipulate them, may be partners in one round and adversaries in the next. These sites of struggle extend beyond two-sided confrontations between bureaucrats and their clients to include the wider structural context with its multiple actors, multiple accountabilities, and complex positionalities at play. A common outcome in these struggles for migrants and service providers alike is a transition from hope in state service delivery to hope in their own ability to navigate the system. There are limits to what service providers can achieve due to the structural conditions beyond their control. When they fail to deliver, relations between migrants and service providers sour. Feeling that clients have acted contrary to their expectations of compliant gratitude, service providers employ strategies which range from cutting relationships altogether to providing minimal formal support and questioning their own reactions. Migrants, believing that they have been let down or even tricked by the state, may even feel legitimatized to trick it in return. [Keywords: anthropology of the state, refugee and migrant reception, Portugal, social welfare, hope, bureaucracy]
The Great Outboard Debate: Negotiating Materiality and Dispossession in a Southeast Asian Marine Hunting Community
Florence Durney, IKOS (Institutt for Kulturstudier og Orientalske Språk), University of Oslo
Lamalera is a small coastal community in the Lesser Sunda region of eastern Indonesia whose cosmology and livelihoods are rooted in hunting large marine prey, including toothed whales and large ocean fishes. In the past decade Lamalera’s hunting practices have become embroiled in an international authenticity debate about technology, traditional belief, and conservation, fixating on the incorporation of outboard motors in hunts. Combining theories of material religion and the dispossession of indigenous peoples, this article makes two arguments. First it argues that the movement to outboards should be understood as an adaptation in the materiality of a sacred practice rather than the unraveling of tradition or decline of authenticity as has been proposed. Second, the article argues that the discourse of authenticity itself impacts the community in harmful ways, both by requiring Lamalerans to defend themselves, which has internal social costs, and by detrimentally reframing the important work that the community has done to keep their sacred practices alive in the midst of challenging circumstances. [Keywords: tradition, dispossession, whaling, authenticity, materiality, Indonesia, marine tenure, sacred practices]
An Urban Political from the “End of the World”: Dock Nine and its Technical Epistles
AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Sheffield
This essay explores some resonances between the measures taken by the intensely subjugated residents of an urban district in Jayapura, West Papua (Indonesia) and notions of the “technical” examined by multiple strands in philosophies of media/computation, as well as Black thought. It explores some of the collective orientations and practices deployed to address a context of intensive subjugation, emphasizing these practices as modes of technicity applied to sustaining ways of acting in concert in a situation that continually undermines social coherence and intimacy. This exploration aims to further an understanding of a Black urban politics; to encompass the orientations and practices of “resistance” as technical operations to mitigate the experiences of capture and foster a sense of indeterminacy in the dispositions of ongoing colonial rule. [Keywords: urban politics, technicity, Blackness, collective life, coloniality, political ontologies]