TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol. 98, No. 2
ARTICLES
Christina Davis | The Language Politics of Aragalaya: A Multilingual Protest Movement in Postwar Sri Lanka
Megan Douglas | Hustling for the Good Life: An Ethnographic Study of Informality and Legality in a Congolese Hair Salon in Nairobi, Kenyai
Kelly McKowen | Coming of Age in Utopia: Youth Unemployment, Social Democracy, and Reciprocal Becoming in Norway
Cecilia Salinas | Digital Visibility and Active Ignoring: Insights from Minoritized Norwegians of Asian Descent
Katie Ulrich | Flexibility as Theory of Change in the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry
REVIEW ESSAY
David Henig | For the Love of Rats: A Homage to Companion Species in the Landscapes of War
BOOK REVIEWS
Scott Ross | Rachel Marie Niehuus’s An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo
Amy Alterman | Risa Cromer’s Conceiving Christian America Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics
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ABSTRACT
The Language Politics of Aragalaya: A Multilingual Protest Movement in Postwar Sri Lanka
Christina P. Davis, Western Illinois University
In the midst of the worst economic crisis since independence, in April 2022 Sri Lankan youth started a protest movement called Aragalaya (struggle), which called for the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The country was nearly out of foreign currency and had defaulted on massive local and foreign loans as a result of poor political decisions, reckless spending, and President Rajapaksa’s criminal financial mismanagement. A dynamic and ideologically diverse movement devoted to fighting corruption and bringing about system change through nonviolent protest, Aragalaya was physically based at Gota Go Gama (GGG), a protest village in an oceanside park at the heart of Colombo from April to July 2022. While initially most of the participants were from the Sinhala majority community, over time, Tamil-speaking ethnic minorities also joined. This article takes a language-focused approach to the study of global protest movements by examining participants’ efforts to promote unity and inclusivity by making Aragalaya (the movement) and GGG (the protest site) trilingual in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. I incorporate participant observation and interviews conducted in 2022 and 2023. The first part of the article examines how participants transformed GGG into a trilingual performative space through multimodal media including signboards, slogans, speeches, hashtags, and social media posts. I then analyze Sinhala participants’ views on the trilingual effort and discuss how Tamils and Muslims understood that effort in relation to other interactional practices at GGG with the Sinhala majority. I argue that, while Aragalaya participants creatively played with language, script, and images to counter Sinhala-only ideology and practices, interactional dynamics nevertheless reproduced linguistic inequalities. [Keywords: protest movements, youth activism, language, media, ethnic minorities, Sri Lanka]
Hustling for the Good Life: An Ethnographic Study of Informality and Legality in a Congolese Hair Salon in Nairobi, Kenya
Megan Douglas, African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS)
For many Congolese refugees living in Nairobi, Kenya, economic self-sufficiency is challenged by legal barriers to mobility and employment. In an effort to circumvent restrictive labor laws and achieve “the good life,” many engage in the informal economy and petty bribery. Based on ethnographic research spanning nine months within a Congolese kinyozi (hair salon) in Nairobi during 2019 and 2020, this article examines the intricate connection between “hustle” culture and the pursuit of the good life among Congolese in the city. I argue that hustling stands as a vital and empowering force, enabling Congolese to navigate economic uncertainty while actively shaping a more promising present and ambitious future for themselves. [Keywords: refugees, informality, hustling, bribery, agency, neoliberalism]
Coming of Age in Utopia: Youth Unemployment, Social Democracy, and Reciprocal Becoming in Norway
Kelly McKowen, Southern Methodist University
In Norway, youth unemployment is not only a policy issue but a subject of popular concern. One sometimes hears that the country’s young people, who have grown up in an exceedingly wealthy petro-state, lack the ethics, habits, and dispositions toward labor of their parents and grandparents. While these complaints hardly constitute an accurate representation of the youth, they do capture something important about the challenges of “coming of age” within the context of the twenty-first-century Nordic Model. In this article, based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, I argue that social democracy, as a political-economic and moral order, propagates, but also requires, a productivist ethics of “reciprocal becoming”—that is, of building lives and livelihoods that involves reciprocating the security provided by the welfare system through taxes and the moderate use of benefits. Unemployment thus signals not only a young person’s inability to make ends meet but their apparent refusal to build a life in which they would meet their obligations to this model society. Through examining the stories of various young people, however, I show that deviations from reciprocal becoming can largely be explained by examining the Nordic Model’s own fraught becoming through neoliberal and social investment reform. Looking beyond Norway, this article advocates for future anthropological research that centers comparative political economy, bringing the heterogeneous becomings of both young people and contemporary capitalism into a shared frame. [Keywords: youth,
unemployment, becoming, capitalism, Norway]
Digital Visibility and Active Ignoring: Insights from Minoritized Norwegians of Asian Descent
Cecilia G. Salinas, University of Oslo
This study examines the entanglements of digital and analog sociality, focusing on the processes of inclusion and exclusion among minoritized Norwegians of East and Southeast Asian descent. It does so by delving into mediated visibility and its cultural contextual complexities, exploring the risks and potentials of becoming visible in Norway. While these platforms magnify brutal online harassment, they also facilitate the formation of supportive networks and resilience. Through its ethnographic, non-digital-centric methodology, the study offers nuanced insights into the complexities of digitally embedded sociality. It argues that the risk of mediated visibility for minoritized Norwegians does not only lie in the digital infrastructures themselves, such as monopolized corporate algorithms, surveillance, and datafication, but also in cultural patterns of sociality. These patterns are apparent by the reactions towards the denunciation of racism such as ignoring, denial, trivialization, silence, and blame-shifting. Combining the analytical framework of Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad with Ann Stoler’s concept of “imperial dispositions of disregard,” and Jacques Rancière’s concept of noise, the study reaffirms the significance of pre-digital social theories in the digital age regarding dynamics of othering. [Keywords: racism, social media, disregard, Norway, mediated visibility, yellow face]
Flexibility as Theory of Change in the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry
Katie Ulrich, Harvard University
Sugarcane in Brazil has been used for centuries to make refined sugar and, more recently, ethanol-based biofuels. The flexibility to switch between sugar and biofuel production at the mill, depending on market prices, is often explicitly presented as key to the viability of the sector amid chronic production crises. In Brazil, sugarcane is not only for sugar anymore. While many take this flexibility as a self-evident, inherent property, this article instead argues that Brazilian sugarcane flexibility is only achieved through technical and infrastructural practices. In the practice and achievement of flexibility, something more is made too: flexibility becomes a story-telling device that generates meaning beyond the notion of flexibility itself. This further meaning is around ideas of change. Specifically, flexibility constitutes an articulation of a theory of change that involves a certain warrant for change—industry crisis—and a certain mechanism of change: making the industry plastic and agile rather than asking why it is in crisis in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sugarcane actors in São Paulo, this article examines flexibility’s social lives not reducible to neoliberalism and post-Fordism, and demonstrates the analytical necessity to not take properties of products or production systems for granted. At stake most broadly is that flexibility’s theory of change maintains the status quo, locating change in the properties of materials rather than the operation of broader systems that utilize those materials, like extractive capitalism, even when those broader systems are the cause of the problems that flexibility is intended to respond to. [Keywords: flexibility, change, sugarcane, renewable fuels, agriculture, energy transition, Brazil