ABSTRACT: Vision gets a bad rap, largely because of the ways it has been recruited into western philosophical and cultural projects of objectivity and domination and then repudiated by their critics (Jay 1993). Accordingly, common metaphors of perspective unfold in just this problem-space of subjective location and object-knowledge: what I see from where I am. If such notions of perspective position vision as a self-defining abstraction from the visual signal, then this paper argues for an expanded and realistic approach—one that re-inscribes the moving/seeing body within its ambient environment—yielding a notion of perspective as process and ground for registering the presence of others. This paper draws on ethnographic scenes from hospitality interactions in the Dhofar mountains of Oman to track how the infrastructural reorganizations of the built and social landscape that incorporated Śeḥret speakers into the modern state refigure visibility and participation in everyday gatherings at the home. Through Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson’s theories of vision, this paper explores the role of moving and seeing in practices organizing engagement and participation in hospitality interactions, foregrounding movement as a useful ethnographic horizon for both linguistic anthropologies of interaction and broader inquiries into perception.

ABSTRACT: 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.

ABSTRACT: 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. Ouestions 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).

ABSTRACT: Drawing on my fieldwork on the work lives of professionals and jobseekers 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

ABSTRACT: 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.

ABSTRACT: 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.

Reviewed by: The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti by Erin Durban Darlène Dubuisson Erin Durban. The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023. 265 pp. What's in a term? Terms can have the power to define reality and shape material and immaterial forms of oppression, resistance, and solidary. As such, Erin Durban's The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti (2023) pays careful attention to the terms surrounding "same-sex-desiring and gender-creative Haitians" (1). Through a rigorous interdisciplinary lens, the book attunes to how the post-2010 earthquake circulation of imported concepts such as "LGBT" (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) and "LGBTI" (inclusive of Intersex) by Evangelical Christians, on the one hand, and the global LGBTQI (inclusive of Queer) human rights movement, on the other, corresponded with imperialist logics of intervention. Whereas the Evangelical Christian movement—conceiving of Haiti as "too queer" (8)—forwarded the "modernization" of Haiti through the annunciation and denunciation of homosexuality, members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement—seeing Haiti as "too homophobic" (8)—sought international protections of Haiti's "LGBT community" from the purported homophobia of Haitian culture. These interventions were manifestations of what Durban theorizes as "postcolonial homophobia"—that is, "the compounded effects of historical and contemporary Western imperialist biopolitical interventions to regulate/manage/control/govern/liberate gender and sexuality" (10). Writing with the sensibility of a long-term friend and critical, self-reflective ally, Durban depicts in rich ethnographic detail how same-sex desiring and gender-creative Haitians contend with postcolonial homophobia by mobilizing Kreyòl terms of self-reference, such as masisi (male same-sex desire) and madivin (women who prefer women), and by strategically employing or resisting "the terms [End Page 419] imported from the United States that privilege same-sex desire" (4). This book is, in effect, a treatise of the terms (here, I mean vocabulary as well as periods, relations/tensions, and conditions) of sexual politics in post-colonial Haiti. The book consists of two parts: 1) a transnational history of European colonialism and United States imperialism in Haiti and 2) ethnographic descriptions of the "episodic 'flare-ups' of homophobic violence" occurring in Haiti between 2008 and 2016 (18). Although the book moves chronologically, it is scattered across time and space. The chapter organization, Durban contends, is meant to "impart a sense of displacements, disruptions, continuities, dispersals, and accretions over time" (18). While the book succeeds at conveying this sense, its omission of important (to my mind) historical moments and structural analyses, e.g., the Duvalier dictatorship era and the contours of neoliberalism in Haiti, create unnecessary gaps in the narrative. This critique is different from saying that the book is structurally lacking. On the contrary, the book is well-organized, covering much ground through its partial and episodic approach. The first two chapters of the book provide a queer transnational history of imperialism and colonialism in Haiti, which addresses the question: "'For whom and by whom has sexuality been defined [in colonialist and imperialist contexts]'" (Pérez 2003:125, cited in Durban, 25). In answer to this question, Durban traces Western imperialist perversion of the zonbi—an Afro-Haitian concept of the living dead that served as "a referent to racial capitalism" (27)—to discuss the emergence and circulation of Euro-U.S. discourse of Haiti as "the dark and dangerous premodern land of Voodoo (English)/Vaudoux (French)" (6). As Durban clarifies, the "'voodoo/vaudoux' of this discourse is a white Euro-U.S. imaginary—or really, a nightmarish fantasy of Haitian Vodou" (6)—the popular syncretic religion that merges Roman Catholicism and Afro-Indigenous religious traditions. In the first chapter, Durban maps the perversion of the zonbi through what they delineate as the "five periods of transnational Haitian history that profoundly shape contemporary queer sexual politics: European colonialism (1492-1791), the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the Black republic (1804-1915), the first U.S. occupation (1915-34), and the early years of the AIDS epidemic (1980s-1990s)" (22). Durban first considers how enslaved Africans brought the concept of the zonbi with them through the Middle Passage and how this notion...