Political Anthropology

Social scientists commonly know that time is a social construct and a tool for governing by those holding power. Yet, how exactly is time used for governing? This article examines how timescape (embodiment of approaches to time) works in practice as a tool of power by considering multiple networks of time that manifest in al-Batuf/Beit Netofa Valley planning policy. This valley's agriculture, mostly owned by Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, is considered by ecologists and officials a unique traditional agriculture landscape and wetland habitat that has become scarce in Israel due to its development and wetland drainage. Assembling separate modes of anthropological inquiry that attend to time as a technique, I show that knowledge, ethics, and time management are not separate spheres of governance but rather interwoven as one timescape tool of governing. Thus, the case of al-Batuf/Beit Netofa elucidates the ways in which time is used for governing in the context of an agricultural-environmental development policy and plan.

The book charts the attempts of Islam's largest missionary movement, the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), to build Europe's biggest mosque in London – the so-called Mega Mosque. The book follows TJ from its founding in India in 1926, to its establishment in Britain during the 1940s, to its plans for construction of a controversial mosque in London. The book addresses the issues emerging at the forefront of national debates across liberal democracies: the role of Islam in the west, conceptions of changing citizenship and national identities, and how best to integrate increasingly diverse populations. What happens to illiberal and politically disengaged groups that wish to segregate themselves from what they regard as corrupt and immoral wider societies? How do these groups engage with government policy that seeks to define good citizens as those that are actively engaged in the socio-political life of the community? Zacharias Pieri provides context and insight to answer these and other important questions.

The authors suggest to view the origins of Islam against the background of the 6th century AD Arabian socio-ecological crisis whose model is specified in the paper through the study of climatological, seismological, volcanological and epidemiological history of the period. Most socio-political systems of the Arabs reacted to the socio-ecological crisis by getting rid of the rigid supra- tribal political structures (kingdoms and chiefdoms) which started posing a real threat to their very survival. The decades of fighting which led to the destruction of most of the Arabian kingdoms and chiefdoms (reflected in Ayyãm al- 'Arab tradition) led to the elaboration of some definite "anti- royal" freedom-loving tribal ethos. At the beginning of the 7th century tribes which would recog- nise themselves as subjects of some terrestrial super-tribal political authority, the "king", risked to lose its honour. However, this seems not to be applicable to the authority of another type, the "ce- lestial" one. At the meantime the early 7th century evidences the merging of the Arabian tradition of prophecy and the Arabian Monotheist "Rahmanist" tradition which produced "the Arabian pro- phetic movement". The Monotheist "Rahmanist" prophets appear to have represented a supratribal authority just of the type many Arab tribes were looking for at this very time, which seems to ex- plain to a certain extent those prophets' political success (including the extreme political success of Muhammad).

Mediante las voces y experiencias de campesinos quechuas de las comunidades de Ocros y Huancapi (Ayacucho), Los silencios de la guerra. Memoria y conflicto armado, hurga en los rastros de los años de violencia que enlutaron al Perú a fines del siglo XX. El agudo análisis de la antropóloga Valérie Robin Azevedo es una etnografía sensible de los secretos de las memorias campesinas de la guerra contra Sendero Luminoso, donde se rememora el pasado en fiestas patronales y en carnavales, en la creación musical y en los bailes comunales, en los sueños o en las apariciones de un santo milagroso.
¿Cómo se construyen hoy los recuerdos de la guerra y qué se silencia del pasado? ¿Qué muestran y qué ocultan las narraciones y celebraciones que escenifican lecturas parciales del pasado? Este fascinante libro nos revela las encrucijadas campesinas que siguen buscando rutas de convivencia pacífica hacia el futuro para reconstruir los lazos sociales profundamente dañados por la guerra interna.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Modern Devlet Antropolojisi, bu dönem dört modül halinde işlenecek. Birinci modülde, siyasal antropoloji ve devlet olgusunun genel olarak disiplinde yer edinme serüveni üzerine okumalar yapacağız. İkinci modülde, ilkinde bahsi geçen bazı düşünürler üzerinden devlet fikrinin felsefi kökenlerine ineceğiz. Yaşamın ve sahip olduklarının güvence altına alınması talebindeki "kırılgan" bireyin bu güvenceyi sağlayacak bir devlet arayışı varsayımına ve bu varsayımdan hareket eden "refah devleti" kavramına kafa yoracağız. Üçüncü modül ise, devlet yönetimi ile öz-yönetim tekniklerinin yapısal bütünleşikliği olarak tarif edebileceğimiz "(biyo-politik) yönetimsellik" (Foucault) terimi üzerinden, (geç-)kapitalist çağın egemen yönetim biçimlerini kavratmayı amaçlıyor. Dördüncü modülde, bir öncekinde tanımladığımız modern iktidar yapısı bağlamında-neoliberalleşmeyle vahimleşen-toplumsal güvencesizlik, kırılganlık ve kırılganlaşma meselelerini tartışacağız. Bu tartışma aynı zamanda ikinci modülde ele aldığımız liberal politik kuramı güncel koşullarda eleştirme olanağı sunacak.

VITA
Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
With photographs by Torben Eskerod

Updated Blurb (2013)

Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form.

An instant classic, Vita has been widely acclaimed for its bold fieldwork, theoretical innovation, and literary force. Reflecting on how Catarina’s life story continues, this updated edition offers the reader a powerful new afterword and gripping new photographs following Biehl and Eskerod’s return to Vita. Anthropology at its finest, Vita is essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

University of California Press, 2013

Awards
2013 J.I. Staley Prize, School for Advanced Research

2007 Margaret Mead Award, Society for Applied Anthropology and American Anthropological Association.

2006 Anthony Leeds Prize, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology.

2006 Stirling Prize, Society for Psychological Anthropology.

2006 Outstanding Book Award, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change.

2005 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology.

Honorable Mention, 2005 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology.

In the paper, we express some doubts about one of the assumptions
of Robert Carneiro’s model on state (and chiefdom) formation,
namely the role of circumscription. In our opinion, the main flaw of
Carneiro’s original theory of state formation is that it implicitly
assumes that every community dreamt to conquer its neighboring
communities. We test the presence of various types of warfare (such
as conquest warfare, land acquisition warfare, and plunder warfare)
in societies with different degrees of political centralization.
Quantitative cross-cultural tests reveal a rather strong correlation
between political complexity and the presence of conquest warfare
suggesting that conquest warfare was virtually absent among
independent communities. Newer works by Carneiro propose a
model explaining how simple chiefdoms could appear in the absence
of conquest warfare. This model also includes circumscription, but
our analysis suggests that it is unnecessary.

El poder encanta y la antropología no ha sido inmune a sus efectos cautivantes. A lo largo de su historia esta disciplina ha brindado relatos pormenorizados de las múltiples expresiones del poder en diferentes sociedades y culturas. Pero muchas veces ha quedado atrapada en visiones esquemáticas, como si entre los todopoderosos y los desposeídos, entre el Estado –como encarnación de las instituciones políticas modernas y la dominación– y las comunidades –como encarnación de las tradiciones, los valores morales y la lógica alternativa de la resistencia–, no hubiera zonas grises, contradicciones, sorpresas.

El punto de partida de este libro es la convicción de que la antropología puede ayudarnos a repensar la vida política actual de una manera renovada, renunciando a las visiones idealizadas del poder. Para eso, los autores retoman conceptos y aportes centrales de Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari y Pierre Clastres, así como de Jacques Rancière, pero sobre todo se apoyan en su propio trabajo etnográfico en la Asamblea Nacional francesa, en la Organización Mundial del Comercio o en el Ejército argentino. Así demuestran, por ejemplo, que quienes ocupan espacios de poder, como los funcionarios de los organismos internacionales, a veces están inhabilitados para tomar decisiones, restringidos por un sistema férreo de diplomática vigilancia, y, en el otro extremo, quienes presuntamente representan una posición subalterna, como las mujeres dentro del ejército, con frecuencia están muy lejos de identificarse con esas posiciones o de actuar como víctimas pasivas.

Discusión teórica y hallazgos empíricos se conjugan en un libro original, que apuesta al potencial del trabajo etnográfico para revisitar las nociones de Estado, dominación, legitimidad, subordinación y agencia. Y para sentar bases sólidas que permitan comprender cómo circula el poder, cómo se gestiona y se pone en escena, cómo se escurre o se afirma en las sociedades actuales.

Highlighting the events of Egyptian Revolution 2011, various mass­media tried to explain what had caused the riots. Most explanations followed the same pattern, blaming economic stagnation, poverty, inequality, corruption and unemployment. A typical explanation is that " Egyptians have the same complaints that drove Tunisians onto the streets: surging food prices, poverty, unemployment and authoritarian rule that smothers public protests quickly and often brutally ". Such unanimity incited us to investigate to what extent those accusations reflected the Egyptian reality. So we decided to take each of the above mentioned " revolution causes " and to look into the actual dynamics of the relevant socioeconomic indicators in the years preceding the Egyptian revolution. Resumen En los titulares de los eventos de la Revolución egipcia de 2011, varios medios de masas intentaron explicar qué había causado los disturbios. La mayoría de las explicaciones seguían el mismo patrón, protestas por el estancamiento económico, pobreza, desigualdad, corrupción y desempleo. Una explicación típica es que " Los egipcios tienen las mismas quejas que llevaron a los tunecinos a las calles: precios galopantes de los alimentos, pobreza, desempleo y reglas autoritarias que silenciaron las protestas públicas rápida y a menudo brutalmente ". Esa unanimidad nos incitó a investigar hasta qué punto esas actuaciones reflejaban la realidad Egipcia. Así que decidimos tomar cada una de las mencionadas " causas de la revolución " y mirar en la actual dinámica de los indicadores relevantes de la socio­economía, en los días previos a la revolución egipcia. Palabras clave: Egipto, revolución, demografía.

Following the neoliberal restructuration of the Turkish welfare and banking systems in the 2000s, many veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war faced debt enforcement due to failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Veterans responded to debt collection by turning their own bodies into spectacles of debt and sacrifice by publicly removing and showcasing their debt-ridden prostheses. The media interest in these prosthetic spectacles further amplified the visceral threat of dismemberment evoked by veterans’ embodied performances. The public debates surrounding “prosthesis repossession” cases extended well beyond veteran welfare issues, inscribing all sorts of social and political anxieties on the amputee veteran body, such as anxieties around the incommensurability between the value regimes of nationalism and neoliberalism or around the Syrian refugees. Providing a window into larger questions about the interconnections between disability, gender, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, prosthesis repossession cases show us how debt and disability coproduce each other at the nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare in Turkey. By homing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies in a rapidly changing health milieu, we see how the political economy of violence and the violence of political economy become complicit in the production of debt, dismemberment, and prosthetic rehabilitation.

Powerful historical artefacts vitalize their potential agencies in specific historical moments and cause fractures in our perspectives. In this thesis, I argue that objects' power can be examined by looking at their supernatural, political, cultural, practical, and economic agencies. The thesis is based on a case study of looting in Turkey and archival research on nineteenth-century travelogues of Asia Minor. Rituals of looting attest to the supernatural agency. Rituals challenge the common perception of time and space. The contradictions between European travelers' approach to and the Ottoman locals' interpretations of historical artefacts signify objects' cultural agency. Locals' multitemporal framing of antiquities and travelers' perception of time as linear has resulted in an epistemic antinomy that defined the Ottoman experience of modernity from below. Such encounters in the Mediterranean conjuncture often necessitated the Ottoman state to fill in the power gap. I argue that this involvement sutured the antiquities' political agency in designing the Ottoman's modern statecraft and perception of cultural heritage. Besides these three agencies, antiquities have a practical agency that locals attached to their everyday lives. The economic agency of antiquities is relevant in the global market of the illicit antiquities trade. In the sphere of the antiquities market, the exchange value subsumes the antiquities' other agencies. Through in-depth case studies from Laodicea in Turkey to Heraklion in Crete, the thesis demonstrates how artefacts' times have undergone singularization. As their historical and social context unfolded, the shared sense of space within eclectic temporality has come to a halt. I contend that attempts to singularize the past narrow the culturally effective possibilities of conviviality between diverse social groups. The thesis argues that archaeologists, heritage scholars, and policymakers can contribute to the culturally viable and socially equitable ways to organize cultural heritage, should a holistic analysis, involving all the five types of agencies, be applied to the cases of looting of antiquities.

"Aux frontières de l’achevé, de l’établi, de l’ordonné, du centre et du dominant, se trouvent le précaire, l’instable, le désordre, la périphérie et le dominé : une relation dynamique voire conflictuelle existe entre ces deux réalités, qui est celle du faire-ville."

Table des matières:

Avant-propos
Introduction. De l’ethnographie des marges à l’anthropologie de la ville

Première partie. La ville des anthropologues
Chapitre 1. La ville comme hologramme
Chapitre 2. Les savoirs urbains de l’anthropologie
Chapitre 3. Les situations élémentaires de la vie urbaine

Deuxième partie. La ville à l’œuvre
Chapitre 4. Ce qui rend la ville familière
Chapitre 5. Lieux, non-lieux, hors-lieux
Chapitre 6. Brouillons de ville

Troisième partie. La ville en mouvements
Chapitre 7. La culture des villes, ou l’habit d’Arlequin
Chapitre 8. Imaginaire et politique des marges
Chapitre 9. Occupations, invasions, installations : l’agir urbain

Conclusion. Du « droit à la ville » au « faire-ville »

Given the prominence of Muslim veils—in particular the hijab and full-face veil—in public discourse concerning the place of Muslims in Western society, we examined their impact on non-Muslims’ responses at both explicit and implicit levels. Results revealed that responses were more negative toward any veil compared with no veil, and more negative toward the full-face veil relative to the hijab: for emotions felt toward veiled women (Study 1), for non-affective attitudinal responses (Study 2), and for implicit negative attitudes revealed through response latency measures (Studies 3a and 3b). Finally, we manipulated the perceived reasons for wearing a veil, finding that exposure to positive reasons for wearing a veil led to better predicted and imagined contact (Study 4). Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Under Turkey’s neoconservative government, the Directorate of Religious Affairs deploys state-employed religious functionaries to provide Sunni Muslim citizens with advice and guidance on family life. By inculcating government-sanctioned sensibilities and dispositions related to kinship, these Islamic authorities have become instrumental to extending state power into the domestic lives of the religious majority. This particular entwinement of religion with state power is no aberration. Indeed, the Turkish case reveals a contradiction that lies at the heart of secular governance: the continuing involvement of religion in the politics of the family despite the assumed separation of religion and politics. Secular states may appropriate religious discourses and authority in regulating intimacy and the family while aligning these with biopolitical rationalities, as well as with secular laws and expertise. [secularism, kinship, family, intimacy, governmentality, the state, expertise, Islam, Turkey].

The chapter focuses on the rhetoric and logic of this ‘wall-building’ accross the Western world over year 2015-2016, in an effort to understand the emergence of these walls and its relation to the contemporary epochal crisis. It explores the related public media and seeks to uncover the imaginary structure underlying these narratives.

Several recent wall-building cases in Western politics are discussed: Brexit, understood as putting up a political wall between Britain and the European Union, and Donald Trump’s electoral campaign, supported by a very explicit image of a US–Mexico wall-to-be-built. Yet it is also critical to recognise walling within Eastern Europe: the pro-Western Ukraine and its defensive wall project against Russian aggression as well as Hungary, which built a wall dividing it from Serbia in anticipation of the Syrian refugee influx.

Le registre de la « dignité » fait aujourd’hui partie des revendications des mouvements sociaux contemporains à travers le monde, à côté des revendications liées à des questions matérielles ou des questions de droits, qu’il s’agisse du terme de « dignité », ou plus largement des termes d’ « indignation », de « logement digne » ou encore de « travail décent ». Comment comprendre ces revendications en dehors d’une approche essentialisant la dignité et la réduisant à un attribut naturel de l’homme, ou encore sans partir d’une définition a priori de ce qu’est la dignité ?
Afin de répondre à ces questions en s’appuyant sur deux années de recherches de terrain réalisées au Brésil auprès d’un de ces mouvement sociaux – le Mouvement des Sans Terre du Brésil –, Alexis Martig se propose de contribuer à la compréhension des revendications contemporaines de dignité, en pensant une anthropologie de la dignité en contexte de lutte sociale.
Pour cela, il revient sur ces expériences de participation et d’observation au sein du Mouvement des Sans Terre, et analyse les pratiques spécialement développées pour reconquérir la dignité des travailleurs ruraux brésiliens à partir des théories de la reconnaissance sociale (Taylor, Honneth, Fraser, Renault, Margalit). Ce faisant, l’auteur cherche ainsi à comprendre l’aspect moral de la lutte du mouvement des Sans Terre, ainsi que plus largement la part et le rôle des sentiments dans la construction et la négociation des hiérarchies sociales au Brésil.

Highlights:
- Quelles sont les dynamiques de pouvoir dans une institution supposée posséder le monopole de la violence légitime ? Quelles relations et perceptions entretiennent les militaires vis-à-vis du pouvoir politique ?
- S’il est d’usage d’associer militaires et violence (politique) dans le cas de la Guinée, peu d’analyses ont été proposées sur les conceptions du pouvoir internes à l’armée.
- Il s’agit ici d’interroger ce qu’est une institution d’État, qui échappe à cet État à certains moments, s’y confond à d’autres et qui repose sur des modes de gouvernement ambigus et complexes.
- L’armée possède ses propres logiques organisationnelles d’abord au niveau du camp, considéré comme un espace-ressource en soi.
- Il existe aussi des opportunités de gain pour les militaires hors des camps, en particulier la participation aux opérations dans le cadre de la MINUSMA et la sécurisation des terrains miniers industriels. Dans ces deux cas, il s’agit donc d’activités financées de l’extérieur, par une institution internationale d’abord (les Nations unies), puis par des compagnies privées (les industries minières).
- À partir de l’analyse de ces différents canaux d’enrichissement, j’interrogerai les rapports que les militaires entretiennent avec le pouvoir politique et surtout, comment ils le perçoivent.
- Sans prétendre être représentatif de la situation de l’armée guinéenne en général, cet article montre en quoi le pouvoir dans l’armée se structure autour de la gestion et du contrôle des ressources, entraînant des fragmentations internes, souvent compétitives.

The theme of politics and religion, its relationship and consequences, is perhaps one of the most popular topics in both public and scholarly discourse today. The factors that led to this state of affairs are not the subject o f my research, although they serve as a necessary context. Based on an analysis of official documents, interviews with leaders of the Ukrainian Ummah and their public statements and publications in the media, this article traces the evolving forms o f political activism among Muslims in Ukraine.

Where does art stand in the context of contemporary democracy, how does it "speak out" and shape democracy? How do pro-democratic manifestations arise in the sphere of art, how is democracy used and what games are played with the recipient? The article touches on the issues of public space and art, financing and management, political commitment, new media, etc. All this serves to point out the issue of the democratic space in which art functions and which it produces at the same time. The article takes the form of reflections on the above issues, illustrated with specific examples of works and artistic endeavours along with the disputes surrounding them. It shows how an internal space for disputes over democracy emerges within the realm of art itself.
[key words:  democracy; democratic art space; public art; political anthropology; anthropology of art;]

Jak w kontekście współczesnej demokracji sytuuje się sztuka, jak „zabiera głos" i kształtuje demokrację? Jak w polu sztuki dochodzi do prodemokratycznych manifestacji, jak demokracja jest wykorzystywana i jakie są podejmowane gry z odbiorcą? W artykule zostają przywołane zagadnienia: przestrzeni i sztuki publicznej, finansowania i zarządzania, zaangażowania politycznego, nowych mediów itp. Wszystko po to, by wskazać na problematykę demokratycznej przestrzeni, w której sztuka funkcjonuje, i którą jednocześnie wytwarza. Artykuł przybiera formę rozważań dotyczących powyższych kwestii, ilustrowanych konkretnymi przykładami dzieł i działań artystycznych oraz toczących się wokół nich sporów. Pokazuje, jak w obrębie samej sztuki wytwarza się wewnętrzna przestrzeń sporu o demokrację.
[słowa kluczowe: demokracja; sztuka publiczna; demokratyczna przestrzeń sztuki; antropologia polityki; antropologia sztuki]

Abstract: This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.
Keywords: Atlantic Return, economies of virtues, incarnation, Pauline event, Pope Francis, sovereignty, theopolitics, touch-event

Ponencia en  Seminario Memoria, conflicto y coexistencia: Interculturalidad y descolonization en América Latina y el mundo, Santiago, Chile, 16 diciembre, 2015.

Aunque la Guerra del Pacifico terminó en 1883, Bolivianos, Peruanos, y Chilenos siguen disputando las fronteras trazadas en su final. Mientras retos se disputan en el Corte Internacional de Justicia en La Haya, los comentarios del publico y los discursos sobre estas fronteras y su significado suceden en diversas esferas públicas. Estas esferas públicas y media han cambiado radicalmente en los 132 años desde cuando se establecieron las fronteras, y hoy en día las redes sociales es un sitio clave donde Bolivianos y Chilenos de la región norte expresan las memorias (colectivamente imaginado) de formaciones políticas del pasado y sus sentimientos personales sobre el disputo en el contexto de la política actual. Esta presentación analiza texto y los memes que combinan imagines con texto posteados en Facebook por Chilenos del norte y Bolivianos, junto con los comentarios de sus amigos y conocidos. Mientras Bolivianos apelan a un sentimiento de soberanía histórica, y los Chilenos se burlan de la falta de mar de Bolivia como indicador de subdesarrollo, ambos grupos usan el humor para abordar el tema, a menudo en formas despolitizado. Considerando las redes sociales como un sitio clave donde se expresa la memoria, a pesar del reciente desarrollo de este medio, también la presentación abre conversaciones sobre como perdura la memoria mientras los portajes en donde está expresada siempre cambian, y el uso de humor en memorias de conflictos como una manera para despolitizar los temas profundamente divisivas.

... a typical naive set of assumptions about "group oriented" cultures it that the participants within them are basically altruistic, self-effacing, self-sacrificing and sociable. A society of such individuals should exhibit the very best of human civilization working in equitable, democratic communities. By contrast, those from individualistic cultures should be cold, grasping, selfish, egotistical and almost incapable of the cooperation demanded by a civil society. Indeed, a society of individualists, by this stereotype would be a dog eat dog affair, dedicated to conflict, riven with disloyalty and betrayal, forever failing to build a stable and humanistic community.

This article concerns public health policies for the Indigenous peoples of Brazil, focusing on relations of violence observed by the authors during their research. We draw attention to different types of violence through an analysis that articulates fieldwork on primary health care in Indigenous Areas with observations of political negotiations concerning health issues involving Indigenous leaders and government workers. There is, on the one hand, the habitual symbolic violence that can be observed in daily interactions between health workers and Indigenous patients, and, on the other, the contradictions of an official political rhetoric that assents to Indigenous authority and then systematically dismisses it when decisions that involve public health are put into practice. The research combines different methodological strategies (intensive fieldwork, research on public policy documents, participant observation of political meetings, interview with indigenes and managers, etc.) to ...

In this article, I attend to two forms of hearings (or nonhearings) in two distinctive courtsof law, both involving the persecution of Iranian dissidents in the 1980s. Drawing on myethnographic and archival research, inside and outside of Iran, I ponder the conditionsof possibility of confessions/testimonies and their affects and after-lives. The first caseinvolves the Islamic Republic’s televised trials of a group of leftist prisoners. The secondone is a symbolic court in The Hague, known as the Iran Tribunal, organized by somedissidents in diaspora, where witnesses testified against the Iranian regime. I meditate onthe relationship between these two different spaces of the “law” in their differing milieus,and the divergent modes of speaking and hearing they render possible or impossible. Icontemplate the kinds of ethical subjectivities they produce or shatter and reflect on theconditions and modes of speaking and hearing in relation to these topographies of coerciveand sympathetic courts.[Iran, revolution, people’s tribunals, witnessing, testimony]

https://www.cairn.info/revue-monde-commun-2019-1-page-28.htm

Toute l’anthropologie, aussi ouverte, large et interdisciplinaire soit-elle, partage un commun : l’enquête de terrain la plus minutieuse, l’implication personnelle la plus poussée, la saisie subjective des subjectivités, et la formation inductive des concepts (du terrain vers la théorie). Mais l’importance grandissante et l’hétérogénéité de la demande de connaissances issues du terrain questionnent cette charte. Elles m’obligent à aller au-delà de l’affirmation convenue de la « vérité du terrain » (qui serait en quelque sorte la vitrine publique des chercheurs) pour m’interroger sur l’enquête elle-même et sur le rapport entre ce que j’observe dans le temps de la rencontre ethnographique d’une part, la compréhension que je peux établir de ce qui s’est passé sur le moment de cette observation d’autre part, et enfin ce que je pourrai dire publiquement de ce que j’ai appris.

The purpose of the article is to browse selected artistic works and activities that fit within the logic of contemporary critical and engaged art, and to indicate the implications resulting from the established critical and engaged position. Presented cases come mainly from the Polish context or already have a well-established reception in the country, often they were also present in discussions going beyond the narrow group of art critics, sometimes becoming the object of media and more widespread discourse. The analysis of artistic activities enables capturing their political context in the sense of formulating a political message by the creators themselves, as well as its functioning in the sphere of socio-cultural reception and political transformation of these messages. The collected examples serve a reflection that casts doubt on some of the assumptions of engaged art, especially in terms of its non-obviousness and politicalness. The author argues that it is not about the fact that phenomena from the field of art or other socio-cultural practices do not have a political aspect, in fact, the point is that the dominant beliefs of the ubiquity of politics make it difficult to study the real presence of politics and simplify potential cognitive possibilities in this regard, funding simple and obvious interpretation keys.
[key words: critical art, engaged art, humanities,  politics, engaged humanities, political anthropology, anthropology of art]

Celem artykułu jest prześledzenie wybranych dzieł i działań artystycznych mieszczących się w logice współczesnej sztuki krytycznej i zaangażowanej oraz wskazanie na implikacje płynące z przyjętego stanowiska krytycznego i zaangażowanego. Przedstawione przypadki pochodzą głównie z polskiego kontekstu lub mają w kraju już utrwaloną recepcję, nierzadko też były obecne w dyskusjach wychodzących poza wąski obręb krytyków sztuki, stając się niekiedy obiektem dyskursu medialnego i bardziej powszechnego. Analiza działań artystycznych pozwala na uchwycenie ich kontekstu politycznego w sensie formułowania komunikatu politycznego przez samych twórców, jak i jego funkcjonowania w sferze społeczno-kulturowego odbioru i politycznego przekształcania owych komunikatów. Zgromadzone przykłady służą refleksji poddającej w wątpliwość niektóre z założeń sztuki zaangażowanej, szczególnie w zakresie jej nieoczywistości i polityczności. Autor przekonuje, iż nie chodzi o to, że zjawiska z zakresu sztuki czy innych praktyk społeczno-kulturowych nie mają aspektu politycznego, w gruncie rzeczy chodzi o to, że dominujące przekonania wszechobecności polityki utrudniają badanie realnej obecności polityki i upraszczają potencjalne możliwości poznawcze w tym zakresie, fundując proste i oczywiste klucze interpretacyjne.
[słowa kluczowe: sztuka krytyczna, sztuka zaangażowana, polityka, humanistyka, antropologia sztuki, antropologia polityki]