© 1979 Jane Evelyn Atwood (Contact Press Images)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol. 98, No. 1
ARTICLES
Andrew Bickford | Imagining the Human Camel: Water, Climate Change, and the (Super)Soldier
David Flood | Good Injuries: Embodiment, Temporality, and Collectivity in US Class Conflict The Challenges of Mourning: Nursing Homes Betwixt and Between during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Myles Lennon | The Energy Equicrat: Neoliberal Subjectivity “After” Neoliberalism Taste Work by Black Fashion Designers for Their Clients in Johannesburg
Amy E. Stambach and Joseph C. Pesambili | “Why Are They Already Digging Our Graves?” Unraveling The Diverse Emotional Responses to COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in South Africa and Tanzania
SOCIAL THOUGHT AND COMMENTARY
Lynn Meskell | “A Series of Vandalisms”: Heritage Violence and Delayed Destruction
FILM REVIEW
Riddhi Bhandari and Sriti Ganguly | Cutting through the Fog: Imagining Change through Women’s Complaints in Kohrra
BOOK REVIEW
Rob Eagle | Lisa Messeri’s In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
Tariq Adely | Héctor Beltrán’s Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderland
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ABSTRACT
Imagining the Human Camel: Water, Climate Change, and the (Super)Soldier
Andrew Bickford, Georgetown University
Water molecules are the building blocks of life, but they’re also the building blocks of war: without water, soldiers cannot fight, and militaries cannot function. The paths and routes of water molecules into the bodies of soldiers can mean success or failure, life or death, on the battlefield. In this article, I’ll examine US military plans to weaponize water in the form of hydration enhancement and the body’s ability to store and process water so that soldiers can fight longer and more effectively with less water and fewer logistical problems. These projects deal with the intersection of military human performance enhancements and logistics, ideas and projects that we normally don’t associate together. I also examine the implications of current plans and projects the US military has underway to circumvent its water/biology/logistics problems and the limitations posed by water and climate change on soldiers, equipment, and operations. [Keywords: water, climate change, logistics, soldiers, biotechnology]
Good Injuries: Embodiment, Temporality, and Collectivity in US Class Conflict
David Flood, University of Virginia
At a festival in the rural southeastern United States devoted to music and off-road vehicles, white working-class people frequently seem to court situations of predictable harm. More precisely, injury and the risk of injury in this context appear as unintentional but acceptable outcomes in the pursuit of proper conditions for good sociality, and in fact often come to index ethical social behavior for participants—a phenomenon I describe as injuries of prosocial care or “good injuries.” This striking set of attitudes points towards a fundamental and often-misunderstood aspect of class and political conflict in the contemporary US: the entanglement of class with deep-seated beliefs about the boundaries and demands of ethical intersubjectivity, or what it means to be a good person with respect to other people. I examine these classed ethical stances with particular attention to ideas about temporality and embodiment, in a situation where the boundary between care and harm is porous and contingent. [Keywords: temporality, class conflict, embodiment, ethics, rural US, care, whiteness]
The Challenges of Mourning: Nursing Homes Betwixt and Between during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Sarah Frieman, Paige Gavin, and Roy Richard Grinker,
The George Washington University
Elderly residents in long-term care facilities were one of the populations in the United States hit hardest by the COVID-19 virus. Their deaths highlighted long-standing systemic problems and unmet expectations of the nursing care industry, and the ways social exclusion exacerbated the suffering of residents and their family members. This article, part of a larger collaborative study of COVID-19 death, draws upon ethnographic interviews on death and dying, including an analysis of a podcast series on grief, to suggest that the predominant focus in the anthropology of death—mainly, funeral rites and memorialization—can mask the importance of social practices and institutional constraints prior to death. We argue that the disjunction between the normative expectation of loved ones to be present with and provide affective care to a dying relative in the nursing home, and the experience of being isolated from them, resulted in a disrupted period of transition from life to death; indeed, the discourses we examine reflect uncertainty about how to periodize that transition in the absence of interpersonal interaction with relatives living in long-term care facilities. Finally, we explore how the absence of a ritual process before death—an absence made more legible by the pandemic—complicates old binaries, such as melancholia/mourning, grief/mourning, and grief/closure in social experience. The pandemic challenges us to rethink such divisions and definitions. [Keywords: COVID-19, death and dying, grief, liminality, long-term care facilities, mourning, nursing homes, pandemic]
The Energy Equicrat: Neoliberal Subjectivity “After” Neoliberalism
Myles Lennon, Brown University
Many theorists and pundits contend that neoliberalism is on the “decline,” citing shifts in political opinions and policies. I argue that these analyses overstate this decline by rendering neoliberalism as a circumscribed ideology that subjects knowingly embrace or repudiate. As a corrective, this article argues that we must apprehend neoliberalism not simply in terms of “political will” or the “war of ideas,” but also as a spatialized, habituated, and affective phenomenon that exceeds any conscious ideological agenda. Toward this end, I explore neoliberal efforts to equitably decarbonize energy infrastructure. Drawing from two years of ethnographic research on sustainable energy development in New York City, I contend that subjects who consciously repudiate neoliberal governance often unwittingly reproduce it through their day-to-day practices—even when they posit those practices in opposition to neoliberal governance. I attribute this unwitting work to the spatiality and materiality of solar infrastructure and energy efficiency upgrades. Specifically, I suggest that the decentralized landscape of sustainable energy enfolds both grassroots activists and leftist technocrats into the workings of neoliberal markets in spite of their conscious opposition to market logics. This distributed spatiality also broadens the range of subjects who participate in electricity governance, diluting the normative ideological poles that have traditionally divided these subjects, as the technocrat and the activist, the corporate worker and the anti-capitalist, coalesce through infrastructural transformation. I conceptualize this boundary-blurring subjectivity as the equicrat, short for the equity-minded technocrat, to call attention to the counterintuitive compatibility of equitable, grassroots governance and rule by experts in the neoliberal landscape. In theorizing this compatibility, the equicrat heuristic illuminates the performative terrain through which subjects at once reject and reproduce neoliberalism. [Keywords: neoliberalism, renewable energy, environmental justice, infrastructure, corporations, activists, ideology]
Negotiating Aesthetic and Emotional Labor: Taste Work by Black Fashion Designers for Their Clients in Johannesburg
Tuulikki Pietilä, University of Helsinki
This article studies how style, taste, and “quality” are negotiated during meetings between Black fashion designers and their bespoke mid-market clients in Johannesburg. It views the parties to the negotiation as embedded in a broader socioeconomic context, arguing that the meetings imply and have implications to participants’ status. The Black fashion designer field only appeared at the turn of the twentieth century in the wake of the post-apartheid opening of occupational spaces for previously marginalized peoples. These societal transformations also led to growth in demand for designer services among those who aspire to or are experiencing upward social mobility in the public or the private sectors. The article employs and redefines the concepts of “aesthetic labor,” “emotional labor,” and “taste work” to analyze clients’ and designers’ efforts at creating “fitting” “solutions” for the clients’ desire to “shine” in various social settings. Simultaneously, in shaping styles for their customers and themselves, the designers strengthen their position as experts with the talent and authority to make aesthetic judgments. The article adds to the literature on aesthetic labor and taste work a view from a context in which the social structure is in greater flux than in many of the contexts in the Global North that are the focus of existing research. It argues that the long-term European influence in South African society and dress codes remains observable in the designers’ judgement on appropriate styles for mid-market or middle-stratum people, although their admittance of subtle individualizing or Africanizing references does speak of and enact slight shifts in the codes. Finally, the article aims to shows that rather than an inherent property of an object, “quality” is an interactionally produced valuation entangled with considerations of taste, class, and gender as well as the historicity of aesthetic codes. [Keywords: aesthetic labor, emotional labor, taste work, bespoke clothing market, fashion designers, Black middle-classes, South Africa]
“Why Are They Already Digging Our Graves?” Unraveling the Diverse Emotional Responses to Vaccine Hesitancy in South Africa and Tanzania
Amy E. Stambach, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Joseph C. Pesambili, University of Dar es Salaam
Understanding the emotional responses to public health interventions provides essential insights for building trust between health responders and communities. This study examines COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in South Africa and Tanzania during the Omicron wave (January–October 2022). It analyzes participants’ fear and mistrust of public health vaccination protocols in the context of a long history of Western medical experimentation on African bodies. Ethnographic research reveals that vaccine hesitancy emerges from participants’ suspicions that science and donor agencies unfairly and immorally use their wealth and hidden political connections to compel African governments to accept foreign agencies’ healthcare interventions. Furthermore, participants indicate that religion and rituals serve as “antidotes” to COVID-19. Exploring the public’s suspicion surrounding COVID-19 vaccination contributes to anthropological scholarship seeking to understand the gap between people’s knowledge and actions. Suspicions about the COVID-19 vaccine are part of a global atmosphere of vaccine hesitancy and are not unique to Africa. This study’s focus on citizens’ perspectives directs public health providers’ and analysts’ attention to the role of emotions in connecting regulatory knowledge with prescriptive practice. [Keywords: public health, pandemic, suspicion, mistrust,COVID-19, religion]