Search

Drawn from research conducted with the families of child victims of a terrorist attack (on Army Public School) in Pakistan, this paper examines how these victim families make sense of contingencies of loss, suffering, and victimhood in their struggle for equal compensation and benefits of care and compassion. Compensating lives in warfare has not received attention in the discussion on the social life of militarism in anthropology. Monetary compensation and benefits of care have fueled modern military conflicts and effective preparation for them, mobilized civilian populations, and justified civilian deaths as collateral loss. This paper suggests that attention to differential grievability of life and restitution shows how biopolitical modes of inclusion and exclusion define citizenship. If militarization pervades the social life of modern states, a study of the politics of compassion and compensation and of the psychic violence of the pecuniary value of human life shows how victims of war do not remain passive subjects but challenge disparity in values accorded to their lives. Uneven compensation of lives lost in war and the masking of this unevenness in the language of debt and willing sacrifice also reflect an unequal citizenship in life, however, providing a way to demand care and justice and disrupting the monetization of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with an analysis of Tennie's account of hominin culture: the claims that cumulative culture depends on a distinctive form of social learning; that that form of social learning is absent in the great apes; that its archaeological signature in the hominin lineage is late; and, finally, that the forms of social learning available to apes and probably earlier hominins only accelerated their pathways to skills they could acquire for themselves. This synthesis is bold, and influential, and hence an appropriate target of critical reflection. But the further aim of the paper is to develop an alternative view of cumulative culture and its relation to our lineage. It accepts the view that copying is one aspect of cumulative culture. But the paper argues that cumulative culture depends as well on integrating information from a variety of social and nonsocial sources and through an array of sensory modalities. It is not mostly a matter of copying from models but is socially guided re-creation of the model's skill. On this alternative view of cumulative culture, first, copying plays a less central role, and, second, cultures become cumulative not just through the incremental improvement of existing capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the transformation of a state-regulated, highly militarized contested space, designed to guarantee security and exercise state control, into an arena of spontaneous religious creative practices. We investigate the processes of transformation that a highly militarized borderland surrounding is undergoing owing to the religious influence of two female shrines: Rachel's tomb and Our Lady of the Wall. These two shrines, located on opposing sides of the wall, are affecting the role, physical appearance, mythologies, meaning, and experiences of being in the world of this contested space, reclaiming it for Jewish and Christian rituals. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel's undefined borders and demand for security against terrorist attacks led to practices of territorial appropriation to expand its control over contested zones. We show how these contested spatialities, designed to serve as militarized space, are gradually being converted by grassroots agents into spontaneous spaces of religious revival and creativity. We argue that the transformation of this militarized area into places of spontaneous religious practices can be attributed to the interaction between human and material agency, ritual practices, and temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, the Zimbabwean government announced that street vendors had one week to clear the streets or the national army would be deployed against them. This was part of a long-standing campaign of disavowing and displacing vendors. Yet street vendors are integral to economic life in Zimbabwe. In this paper, I examine vending and its policing. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Zimbabwe to ask what underlies the vitriol and violence targeted at vendors. I propose that vending is more than a constellation of individual traders and that its politics extend beyond the conceptions of (il)legality that often characterize debates around street trade. Rather, vending has weaved itself into an infrastructure of economic life in Zimbabwe, facilitating vital flows and undergirding an economy rocked by economic turmoil. Yet vending operates as an infrastructure of disavowal at the nexus of citizenry and spatial politics, as "unwanted" persons operate in unauthorized spaces. Recognizing vending as infrastructural opens up consideration of a decolonial approach to infrastructure and urban governance in African cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore how we might "see" and interrogate absence and presence in the archaeological record. Our aim is to bring into question the epistemic lens (archaeological), through which absence is made visible, and the epistemic lens (Indigenous knowledge), through which absence is made impossible. To do this, we turn to the contact rock art record from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia, where, despite four centuries of contact with the "other" (Indonesian trepanger gatherers and Europeans), no motifs depicting introduced subject matter resulting from these encounters have been found. Rather than attributing this absence to taphonomic factors, we argue that it can be understood as an Indigenous presence when juxtaposed with the richly narrated lifeworld of the Yanyuwa. For Yanyuwa, creating rock art is a non-human-centered activity; it is through the actions of Ancestral Beings and spiritual entities that all rock art, potentially including introduced subject matter, is made and taken away according to cultural circumstances such as Yanyuwa health and well-being and changing engagements with country during postcontact times. We conclude by advocating for archaeologists to look outside of or suspend Western-oriented frameworks and reasoning and turn to self-determined Indigenous ontological and epistemological habits around how absence appears and operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many archaeologists do not realize that their commonsense assumptions about what constitutes money naturalize orthodox (neoclassical) economic theory. Rather than the orthodox view of money as primarily a medium of exchange, this paper presents the heterodox claim of money as primarily a unit of account imposed by those with political power. This heterodox understanding casts money as the mechanism at the heart of ancient states' political economies. A brief history of heterodox chartalist macroeconomics is followed by eight starting points from which archaeologists can explore the operation of state money using the material remains of past societies. Ancient Mesoamerica provides a case study that developed independently of better-known monetary histories from ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Indus, and Chinese civilizations. Monetized state economies date back to at least AD 600 in Mesoamerica and possibly as early as 300 BC. Cacao beans, standard lengths of cotton cloth, and shell and greenstone beads functioned as the currencies of taxation that underwrote political economies across ancient Mexico and Central America. I conclude that similar organizing principles, by which elites in hierarchical pluralities have extracted and deployed surplus production, resulted in the independent invention of money as an accounting system among unrelated ancient societies the world over. My primary argument is that money—understood as a politically controlled system of accounting—is largely missing from our analysis of ancient complex societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores physicians' responses to the suicide of a female surgeon colleague in order to detail the cultural patterning of the problem of suicide within biomedicine. More broadly, it argues that suicide provides an exemplary case of reckoning with uncertainty. Data sources include 124 hours of person-centered and semistructured interviews with 65 individuals, including 54 physicians, 28 of whom are female surgeons. I argue that the cultural model of suicide articulated by physicians reflects an ultimately ineffective strategy for managing suicide's multisource uncertainty, with the suicide of a colleague exposing the moral and affective entailments of a limit case of prognostication. Examining patterns in physician responses to suicide, I define "bewilderment" as a state of having no means of getting to know, and I detail the ways in which physicians' aversive reaction to bewilderment undermine knowledge acquisition. I describe suicide's distinct challenges to biomedicine's social power, including suicide's contestation of narratives about the future. Finally, I raise questions about the degree to which biomedical framings of suicide may undermine the ability of biomedical actors to develop effective interventions to address it. Exploring responses to suicide as a form of cultural production can illustrate fundamental tensions about uncertainty and causality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]