TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol. 98, No. 3
ARTICLES
Jieun Cho | Ordinary Life: Evacuee Mothers and the Politics
of Home in Post-3.11 Japan
Diana Espirito Santo | The Racial Lives of Chilean Aliens: Prospective Genetic Hybridity in Abduction and Contact Narratives
Myfanwy James | Looking for the Local: The Politics of Humanitarian Recruitment in DRC
Amanda Kaminsky | Artisanal Slaughter: The Multicultural Ethics of Goat Meat in Vermont
Peter Sutoris | The Promise of Politics: Place-based Pathways to Agonism among Environmental Activists in India and South Africa
Hadas Weiss | The Meaningfulness of Work: Employment and Agency in Berlin
BOOK REVIEW ESSAY
Kristin Doughty | Prison Towns and Abolitionist Solidarity: A Review of Prison Town, Life beside Bars, and Healing Movements
BOOK REVIEWS
Liya Lin | Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp’s Disability Worlds
Zeynel Gül | Christopher T. Dole’s Living On: Psychiatry and
the Future of Disaster in Turkey
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ABSTRACT
Ordinary Life: Evacuee Mothers and the Politics of Home in Post-3.11 Japan
Jieun Cho, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This article examines the enduring impact of temporary housing on mother-child evacuees from Fukushima following the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan. To manage the uncertainties of the radioactive fallout, many mothers “voluntarily” evacuated with their children from irradiated yet officially “safe” areas. Focusing on six evacuee mothers, this paper highlights how their efforts to rebuild an “ordinary life” are variously challenged by the administration of temporary housing. It analyzes how gender-specific harms are created by both pre-disaster gendering of the family and post-disaster dynamic of return-focused “hometown” recovery. It also highlights homemaking as a political act by demonstrating how the mothers contend with the dissonances of family-home while navigating prolonged displacement. What emerges here is a tension that signifies what I call a politics of “home” in post-3.11 Japan. Ultimately, the study contributes to investigating the intersectional impact of emergency response, gendered precarity, and societal norms, calling for a critical engagement with “home” in disaster recovery, especially when uncertainty is the norm, as with a nuclear disaster. [Keywords: home, ordinary, gender, disaster, displacement, Fukushima]
The Racial Lives of Chilean Aliens: Prospective Genetic Hybridity in Abduction and Contact Narratives
Diana Espirito Santo, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
This article is about two interlacing narratives: one is of race, mestizaje and hybridity in historical Chile, and the other is of the underlying assumptions and futurological racial projections in four Chilean abduction and contact ethnographic case studies. The two are at a contrapuntal stance to each other in that the second manifests a sort of forward-thinking “racecraft” (Palmié 2023) where race is not seen as a natural kind but an epistemologically open system with a prospective twist. On the one hand, I highlight the very importance of the question of race itself which is patently manifest in the case studies described. Questions of the suspicion of underlying kinship between human and alien races, more than substitution, figure strongly in at least three cases. But, on the other, there is what Hacking (1983) might call an “interventionist” approach to race, whereby race is embedded in a constant process of being prospectively made, or done, by experimentation (alien-human, visits, abductions, processes of knowledge divulgation, affect creation). Through an analysis of the last four case studies, which deals with time-travel, multiple dimensions, and alternate histories in relation to miscegenation, we observe an imminently emotive aspect to this racialization, both of human beings and hybrid-aliens, which can be heuristically juxtaposed to the eugenics doctrine of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Chile. This racial hybridizations is an open-ended, cosmological endeavor, an act of world extension into the spatially, temporally, and racially unknown which I have conceptualized as “extreme” (Valentine et al 2012). [Keywords: alien abductions, contactists, extreme horizons, genetic hybridity, prospective racial futures]
Looking for the Local: The Politics of Humanitarian Recruitment in DRC
Myfanwy James, London School of Economics and Political Science
There is renewed energy behind “going local” in the humanitarian sector: transferring power and funding to “local” actors to make aid more equitable and efficient. Yet, this obscures how claims to localness are highly contested. This article examines the tensions generated by humanitarian recruitment of “local staff” in North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hiring “locally” is deeply contentious because who is “local” is up for debate. Humanitarian recruitment of “locals” becomes another arena for political struggles over who has a claim to positions of authority and access to resources, based on disputed claims of “localness,” which continue to shape, and be shaped by, violent conflict. Humanitarian agencies become embroiled in existing conflicts about who belongs, in contexts where slippery notions of local belonging have long been used as a political resource in power contests, and as a strategy for armed mobilization. While humanitarian agencies look for an imagined “local,” representations of the local are negotiated through encounters with external organizations. Pragmatic attempts by humanitarian agencies to hire “for acceptance” concern a simultaneous rejection and embrace of contested notions of ethno-territorial belonging, in a way that ultimately risks reproducing ideas of “the local” that present ethnicity as a rigid and territorial notion. This contentious politics of recruitment reveals how aid agencies can fuel social tensions when the “local” aid category interacts with existing discourses around belonging, authority, and territory. “Going local” is thus not straightforward, but deeply political. [Keywords: humanitarianism, aid, intervention, conflict, autochthony, DRC, local, localization, ethnicity]
Artisanal Slaughter: The Multicultural Ethics of Goat Meat in Vermont
Amanda Kaminsky, University of Michigan
Against the cruel logic of the industrial slaughterhouse, non-commercial and on-farm slaughtering practices promise more ethical ways to confront animal death. This article examines how such “artisanal slaughter” becomes a valuable service for those pursuing a confluence of diverse ethical requirements such as religious devotion, sustainability, animal welfare, and food sovereignty. Goat meat affords unique insights into artisanal slaughter given its lack of mainstream availability in the United States. Eaten predominantly by African, South Asian, and other ethnic minority and immigrant communities, goats require time, money, and intention to acquire and slaughter in culturally appropriate ways. In Vermont, where alternative agriculture enjoys strong state support and a widespread reputation, sustainability ethics converge with the culinary preferences of a growing immigrant and refugee population to support a small goat meat industry on the margins of the mainstream food system. This article analyzes how artisanal goat slaughter critiques the industrial-capitalist food system, even while remaining embedded within the constraints of its norms. Particularly amid post-COVID slaughterhouse bottlenecks, artisanal slaughter suggests ways to circumvent the industrial meat industry, while offering a glimpse of a more culturally diverse alternative food movement. [Keywords: slaughter, ethics, goats, meat, sustainability, immigration, Vermont]
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
The Promise of Politics: Place-based Pathways to Agonism among Environmental Activists in India and South Africa
Peter Sutoris, University of Leeds
Environmentalism of the poor is increasingly seen to offer effective models of political organization and action to tackle environmental destruction. This study contributes to an anthropological engagement with this phenomenon by illuminating the cultural logics galvanizing environmentalism of the poor in distinct locations, elucidating democratic commitments among marginalized peoples confronting environmental decay, and the ways such commitments fuel activist action. Focusing on anti-dam activism (Pashulok, India) and struggles against industrial pollution (Wentworth, South Africa), I ask: How does the way in which activist groups confront internal difference shape their outward-facing political action? In answering this question, I point to two ways of negotiating political difference: an intergenerational dialogue about the future of development reflected in ritualized re-telling of history among Indian anti-dam activists (vertical pluralism), and a dialogue across historically unthinkable boundaries of race, ethnicity, and ideology palpable among South African activists (horizontal pluralism). I argue that these pluralisms helped activists see the targets of their critique not as enemies to be destroyed but as “adversaries” (Chantal Mouffe), cultivating a space of the political that helps to reimagine democratic practice outside the framework of existing constituted power. By illuminating the vertical and horizontal pluralisms within the two movements, this article outlines differing place-based pathways to agonism, nuancing Mouffe’s theorisation of the concept through ethnographic encounters with political mobilization in “marginal” places. [Keywords: agonistic pluralism, environmentalism of the poor, multisited ethnography, environmental activism, India, South Africa]
The Meaningfulness of Work: Employment and Agency in Berlin
Hadas Weiss, Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA)
Drawing on my fieldwork on the work lives of professionals and job-seekers in Berlin, I identify a tension between a promulgated and widely shared ideal of employment as free, empowering, and meaningful, and an equally widely shared awareness of the circumstances that enable and limit one’s employment possibilities. This apparent contradiction is resolved by a rescaling. Specifically, in a reality circumscribed by the dynamic of accumulation, resources are afforded, primarily in and through employment, which allow those who can procure and mobilize them to experience, on a diminutive scale, what they are denied writ large: a sphere of agency through which to carve out a socially validated meaning. I describe how this state-regulated and supported rescaling shapes the ways in which men and women in Berlin relate to their current and ideal employment.[Keywords: work, agency, meaning, capitalism, Berlin]