TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol. 97, No. 4
ARTICLES
Farzad Amoozegar | The Radiant-Strange Faces of the Dead
Ashawari Chaudhuri | The Good Seed: Bt Cotton, Braided Time, and Agricultural Biotechnology in India
Elizabeth Durham | On Vitality: Chemical Possibilities and Politics of Life Force, Ease, and Everyday Life
Beth S. Epstein | Expansive Vision: Re-thinking Race and Class Divides in the French Banlieue
Edward James Glayzer and Alex Joseph Nelson | Paying for Gender (In)equality: The Individualization of Commodified Dating Rituals in South Korea
Sarah Leiter | Spanish by Another Name? Racializing Sephardic Identity in Contemporary New Mexico
BOOK REVIEWS
Lindsay A. Bell | Peter Benson’s Stuck Moving: Or How I learned to Love (and Lament) Anthropology
Aisha Khan | Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt
Sharolyn D. Pollard-Durodola | Jessica Chandras’s Mother Tongue Prestige: The Sociolinguistics of Privilege in Urban Middle-class Education in India
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ABSTRACT
The Radiant-Strange Faces of the Dead
Farzad Amoozegar, City University of New York, Hunter College & The Graduate Center
This article examines how for seven Iranian paraplegic veterans of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War, the faces of their friends killed during combat evoke awe-inspiring and sorrowful feelings. For them, the faces of the dead are not simply the physical features, but represent infinite possibilities to be with the deceased. The “face” denotes a moral event, where the living recognize and welcome the inexhaustible dead. Imagining the “face” is no longer just a vision but an encounter with the departed, a site where the living respond to the dead. These veterans speak about the faces of their dead friends using concepts filled with Islamic significance: the “radiant” (nūrani) and the “strange” (‘jeib). This in-between space fathoms death as both blissful and appalling. The Islamic concept of barzakh (“obstacle” or “separation”) is used to examine the radiant-strange feelings the veterans have toward their dead friends. The use of an Islamic perspective contributes to the decolonizing efforts in understanding how these veterans “see,” (re)engage and live with the dead based on their Shi’ā and mystical worldviews. [Keywords: the Face, death, Islam, Barzakh, decolonizing anthropology]
The Good Seed: Bt Cotton, Braided Time, and Agricultural Biotechnology in India
Ashawari Chaudhuri, Cornell University
The introduction of genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton in India in 2002 invoked fierce debates and discussions about the future of agriculture in the country. At the beginning of its cultivation, some farmers received higher yields. However, over the years, concerns over the cost of cultivating GM cotton, pests developing resistance to the technology, environmental impacts, and corporate control over agriculture have taken center stage in discussions around agricultural biotechnology. Although most of these discussions have been centered on GM seeds, the seed itself remains unexplored. Based on ethnographic and archival research among communities that are on opposite ends of the agrarian political economy like farmers and breeders/biotechnologists, I explore the meaning of Bt cotton for these communities. In opening up the GM seed through practice, time emerges as a powerful yet understudied phenomenon. Different registers of time, like breeding time, generational time, seasonal time, and market time, are braided in ways that determine the meaning of the seed for these communities. I use braided time to critique GM seed as a commodity. I also suggest that recognizing the significance of time further enables responsibility towards human, agrarian lives as well as non-human ecological formations [Keywords: Bt cotton, braided time, agricultural biotechnology, farmers, breeders, biotechnologists, India]
Expansive Vision: Re-thinking Race and Class Divides in the French Banlieue
Beth S. Epstein, NYU Paris
Regularly portrayed as sites of breakdown and disorder, the disadvantaged French suburbs lie at the center of charged debates about diversity and integration, feeding deeply felt anxieties about the diminished promise of the French republican ideal and its impending decline. The suburbs are less well known, however, for their dynamic cultural pluralism and engaged civic life, facets which belie the overdetermined portrayals of France and its “others” regularly used to uphold an invested social order. Based on return fieldwork in the city outside of Paris where, 25 years prior, I conducted research, this article considers the significant shifts in race and class dynamics that have shaped perceptions of the disadvantaged suburbs and French public life more broadly during this same 25-year period. The racial question, long anathema to the republican “difference-blind” ideal, has come more prominently into view. Hitched to an acrimonious debate about the relative merits of the republican ideal, these shifts have engaged only obliquely with the radical potential of the everyday cultural mix of the disparaged suburban neighborhoods. As these polemics take center stage, they mask other singularly important elements of the suburbs’ history, from the structural transformations that have undercut opportunities for social mobility for the most vulnerable residents of these neighborhoods, to the extreme social segregation that endures within the elite institutions of the well-to-do. Most important, these polemics sideline the significance of the plurality that has come of age in these districts, minimizing its possibilities for new forms of social and political engagement, and normalizing in the process the dispirited image that defines the suburbs in the public eye. [Key words: France, race, class, diversity, suburb, separatism, solidarity]
Paying for Gender (In)equality: The Individualization of Commodified Dating Rituals in South Korea
Edward James Glayzer, University of Dayton, and Alex Joseph Nelson, University of Indianapolis
In contemporary South Korea, the expectation that men should pay all, or the vast majority, of the costs of dating and courtship is shifting. Young women are increasingly achieving parity in educational achievement and employment with men, causing singles to see a more equal and individualized division of dating expenses align with their aspirations for an egalitarian and companionate romantic relationship. However, this seemingly equitable division belies the less obvious costs of dating, such as investments in cultivating body capital for women and men’s often greater earning potential, reflected in South Korea’s large gender wage gap, the highest among OECD countries. In this paper we draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and survey data to examine emergent ideologies and practices for sharing the costs of dating in South Korea and the implications for gender equality more broadly. We interpret these shifting practices and ideologies as part of a process of individualization in which the hegemony of certain patriarchal gender norms is wholly or partially rejected and new norms are negotiated by couples themselves. Ultimately, we argue that South Korean couples continue to struggle to establish gender equality in their romantic relationships despite the individualization of relationship norms. By further contextualizing decisions about the division of dating costs, we draw attention to the need for broader awareness of inequalities that continue to trouble the romantic pursuits of Seoul’s youth. Our findings challenge more positive theorizations of the individualization of intimacy (e.g., Giddens 1992) and highlight how this process can just as easily reinforce, rather than challenge, existing patriarchal gender norms. [Keywords: gender, intimacy, romantic relationships, masculinity, South Korea, socioeconomics]
Spanish by Another Name? Racializing Sephardic Identity in Contemporary New Mexico
Sarah Leiter, University of New Mexico College of Arts and Sciences
Racialization, the process of creating and populating racial categories, most often is a divisive and disparaging practice that artificially bounds and hierarchizes groups of people. But can racialization also be a socially productive practice? This article explores this question in the context of contemporary New Mexico, where some Hispanic residents recently discovered their Sephardic, or Iberian Jewish, ancestry and, as a result, are beginning to conceptualize their ethnic or racial selves in new ways. This article argues that they are using racial discourses to cast themselves as Sephardic by appealing to DNA test results and genealogical reports, framing their physical appearances as distinctively Spanish-Jewish, and likening themselves to Indigenous groups. Further, this article suggests that as Sephardic New Mexicans appeal to ideas about biology to embody their Sephardic lineages, racialization can be socially productive for them in several ways. First, it can blur borders between entrenched racial categories as Sephardic New Mexicans inhabit multiple categories at once. Second, it may help them cope with anti-Hispanic racism by establishing them as deeply rooted in the United States. Third, it can lend them a sense of autobiographical coherence at a time when they might be shifting their identification practices. Fourth, it can entitle them to a special form of conversion to Judaism that recognizes the ancestors with whom they have come to associate. Finally, it can facilitate a sense of belonging and connection with others. Each of these potential social effects is accomplished in part by establishing and relating to Sephardicness as genetically inherited, bodily apparent, and shared among a physically identifiable group of people. [Keywords: race, racialization, DNA, American southwest identity, religious conversion, historical consciousness]