Search

Scholarly debates over precarity are gaining unprecedented visibility across fields. From labor insecurity forming a growing dangerous class to the existential condition of vulnerability induced by millennial capitalism, precarity has become an object of both empirical study and theoretical reflection. While European social movements have been organizing and writing about precarity from the late 1970s to today, still, from the US perspective, the term precarity might be mistakenly taken as strictly a scholarly invention. "Precarious Writings" offers an important corrective to the ways that precarity has been taken up in anthropology and cognate disciplines, addressing the specific epistemological and political limitations of existing usages and returning the concept to its overlooked grassroots history in social movement struggles in southern Europe. By returning precarity to these activist roots, this paper makes the case for the recognition of social movements as knowledge producers as well as sources of theoretical insight and innovation in their own right. By failing to recognize precarity's development within contentious struggles, scholarly uses miss how the activist notion enables identity reformulations toward a kind of "precarity pride." That is, the politicization of insecurity has become a source for nurturing a fluid space of political creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the global civil unrest following the brutal killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Elijah McClain, and so many others at the hands of police in the United States, #BlackLivesMatter protesters and their allies have critiqued the anti-Black racism imbued in the erection and maintenance of Confederate historical monuments. The legacy of social movements seeking to remove Confederate statues is long-standing. However, unlike in previous moments, what began as the forced removal of Confederate statues during protests has rippled to the removal of colonialist, imperialist, and enslaver monuments all over the world. In this webinar, scholars and artists shared their insights on the power of monumentality and the work they are doing to reconfigure historical markers. In the midst of this most recent turmoil, the Society of Black Archaeologists, in collaboration with the Wenner-Gren Foundation and SAPIENS and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, hosted a panel discussion between scholars, activists, artists, and public historians titled "As the Statues Fall: A Conversation about Monuments and the Power of Memory." This piece provides a look into that conversation and its highlights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Militarism and militarization have inspired opposition for millennia. In the post–World War II era, dozens of social movements challenging the existence and operation of US and other foreign (extraterritorial) military bases have provided a prominent example of antimilitarization activism. Movements from Okinawa, Japan, and Jeju, South Korea, to Vieques, Puerto Rico, and Vicenza, Italy, have struggled to close existing bases, stop the construction of new bases, and reduce or eliminate the harms that bases frequently inflict on local communities. This article reviews the history and effects of antibase movements, including recent efforts to create a global "No Bases" movement. While these movements have achieved varying degrees of success and had complicated impacts at individual, local, national, and global scales, this article shows that antibase movements collectively have been important actors in international geopolitics, with significant global influence. Specifically, movements have disrupted everyday military operations and reshaped the global deployment of US bases abroad. Antibase movements thus provide an example of how antimilitarization movements can check, slow, and in some cases reverse militarization—although militarization can continue after base closures. The article concludes with seven tentative hypotheses explaining why some antibase movements are more successful than others in achieving their stated aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2013, a series of large demonstrations throughout Brazil started to shake its main cities and political landscape. In this article I juxtapose these protests, the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s that brought the poor peripheries of São Paulo to the center of the political scene, and the cultural production coming from these peripheries after the 1990s. This juxtaposition creates a perspective from which to look at the changes that have transformed cities, citizens, and the polity in Brazil during the last decades. One of my main arguments is that in São Paulo, as in many other metropolises shaped by peripheral urbanization, political agency is inseparable from the spatial configuration of the city and from its shifting patterns of spatial segregation and social inequality. I focus on the peripheries and argue that the quality of both poverty, the urban environment, and citizens' engagement have changed a great deal from the 1970s to the present. Poverty has different signifiers in a city of better infrastructure, mass communication, democracy, less violence, and broader access to consumption. Difficulty in moving around the city is one of these signifiers. Moreover, politics has other languages and tools in the context of intensified cultural production and circulation and of a democracy people can take for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the legitimacy of the wave of social protest initiated by middle-class Israeli students in July 2011, a much broader movement developed as thousands of marginalized poor hoping to obtain housing solutions began encamping in public spaces. These Israeli poor, mainly of Mizrahi origin, did not fit the model of "the salt of the earth," the "good citizens" who by virtue of their contribution to the colonization project are supposed to enjoy preferred treatment by the state. Based on a reflexive analysis of my political intervention, in this paper I describe the dynamics of the HaTikva encampment of the poor in south Tel Aviv. Making use of the contradictions between the state's colonialist logic and its neoliberal reforms, a marginalized and poor segment of Mizrahi Jews was able, for a short while, to act as an autonomous political agent and shed the control and patronage of political bosses. The very same marginality that allowed them to develop significant agency and even to experiment with alliances with Arab Palestinian protesters in opposition to both hegemony and dominant sociopolitical structures explains the rapid decline of their protest and its failure to obtain housing solutions and policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines campaigns in two US social movements, an African American unionization struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, and a recent environmental justice campaign in a Latina/o community. These and the larger movements of which they are a part have been movements of the most economically precarious sectors of the population and have also been historically reliable sources of hope and inclusive regimes of economic and civic value. These regimes manifest in everyday ways that participants in these campaigns construct economic value and in how they link that economic value to their claims for full civic membership. I develop the concept of economic citizenship-namely, that clashes over economic values and social worth are double stranded and mutually constituting. That is, economic regimes of value (capitalist and otherwise) are key to constituting social worth and civic belonging, and notions of civic worthiness in turn constitute economic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article opens up the category of the shareholder, who conventionally sits as a stick figure at the heart of popular explanations for why corporations ruthlessly seek to maximize profits. Following the logic that a gift may be seen as an extension of the giver's self, we take up the possibility that investment portfolios might be viewed as reflections or extensions of shareholder personhood. We examine how three shareholder activist movements in the United States—socially responsible investment, shareholder value, and responsible investment—address the relationship between shareholder personhood, values, and investments. The divergent ways in which these shareholder movements have grappled with the contradictory entailments of share ownership illuminate the contestation at the heart of corporate ownership over the nature of the capitalist person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a set of explanatory notions, "resistance" and "messianism" have been important in anthropology, not least when applied to popular mobilization in colonial and postcolonial settings. The "resistance" perspective has been subjected to critique from within the field; "messianism" has remained curiously unchallenged. The notion of "messianism" evokes a certain understanding of actors' motivations and perceptions and pretends to identify cultural crucibles at the heart of the conjuncture between cosmology and agency. For this reason, categorizing people, cultures, movements, or other phenomena as "messianic" has significant interpretive implications. In their reading of historical records and narratives, anthropologists have attributed a messianic proclivity to the Asháninka and other native populations in the Peruvian Amazon. Taking off from interpretations of the figure of Juan Santos Atahuallpa in the 1742 rebellion against the Franciscan mission, many anthropologists have depicted these Arawakans as highly receptive to messiah figures; more recent Asháninka movements have been seen as similarly motivated. It is argued here that the notion of Asháninka messianism derives its veracity more from its scholarly repetition than from grounded analysis; it has created a "black hole" in place of ethnography that an approach that takes heed of practices, narrative and structural, may begin to fill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the rapid proliferation and growth of local, national, and transnational environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), national bureaucracies concerned with environmental management, and transnational institutions charged with implementing various forms of global environmental governance. This proliferation and recent theoretical trends within the discipline have contributed to a dramatic upsurge in interest among anthropologists in analyzing this phenomenon. The present discussion is an attempt to take stock of this current research trend within anthropology and to contextualize it within a larger set of topical and theoretical concerns. I examine some of the theoretical and practical sources of our interest in environmentalism and review a series of recent trends in the anthropological analysis of environmental movements, rhetorics, and representations. I also identify a set of other issues that I believe a critically informed anthropology might address in the production of future ethnographic accounts of environmental discourses, movements, and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological constructs guided by ethnographic and ethnohistorical information are tested against archaeological data from Neolithic Shandong. The study of Neolithic burials shows that intensive pug production was important not only for human diet and ritual hut also for the display of individual wealth and in equality in the rise of political elites. In addition, pigs served as funds of power for controlling exotic sumptuary items in order to achieve chiefly political hegemony. The data suggest that, in the long term, the fluctuation of pig skulls in mortuary symbolism coincides with that of prestige goods from long-distance exchange. in short, pigs most likely functioned in ancient China as both means of subsistence and objects of social production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on the evolution of Anthropology in Mexico. Anthropology originated in Mexico after the political independence of Mexico in the 19th century. There was a considerable increase in the materials related to anthropology, because foreign and national travelers came to the country along with their observations in the form of letters, sketches, and collections of antiquities. In the 1960's, two anthropological museums were established in Mexico City, which had the country's most important anthropological library. Presently, the anthropological works done in Mexico include a broad range of topics, including religious phenomena, the situation of women, formal education, and social and political movements.

This article presents the authors' reply to comments on their study on the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong. Some commentaries either requests more detail about other players in the movement or suggest slightly different ways of aligning them. The authors emphasize that the players, namely, the media, other indigenous women in New Territories, and the Heung Yee Kuk, are a deconstruction of the female inheritance movement, and not an exhaustive list of everyone involved in the debate.

This article comments on the study by Sally Engle Merry and Rachel E. Stern of the female inheritance in Hong Kong. The study is considered as an important empirical grounded contribution to the debate on globalization and human rights. It points out the two fundamental problems entailed in the translating process that the study discussed: the problem of alienation and the tension between individual and structural approaches.

This article comments on the analysis by Sally Engle Merry and Rachel E. Stern of the female inheritance in Hong Kong. The article points out that Merry and Stern offer an eloquent and perceptive theorizing of local translation of global rights. Essentially, they examine how gender equality and human rights could be used to deal with discrimination against women by traditional cultures.

This article presents an author's commentary on the article by Sally Engle Merry and Rachel E. Stern analyzing the female inheritance rights movement in Hong Kong, China. The author asserts that Merry and Stern have demonstrated effectively how the indigenous women gradually adopted the international language of rights and how changes in the social environment in Hong Kong contributed to a political ecology that favored the passage of the ordinance amendment.

This article presents the author's views on several issues related to a study on indigenous rights and contemporary anthropological thinking conducted by Adam Kuper, a British anthropologist. The author holds that Kuper's discussion is a critique of the essential tendencies of the discourses inspired by indigenous peoples movements. The discussion raises various questions. The author views that Kuper's caricature of indigenous rights activists as misguided romantics is not a just one.

This article presents the author's views on several issues related to a study on indigenous rights and contemporary anthropological thinking conducted by Adam Kuper, a British anthropologist. The author appreciates Kuper's discussion saying that it is a significant contribution to debate on the issue of indigenousness and special rights. The author holds that indigenousness is no more a justification for claiming special rights.

A summary is presented of the article "Good-bye kitty, hello war: The tactics of spectacle and new youth movements in urban Japan," by Sharon Hayashi and Anne McKnight, in "Positions." "Demos" are youth demonstrations that use public space as performance space and work under the assumption that political protest is more effective if it is aesthetically engaging. Subjects of protest have included Japan's neoliberal economic politics and support for the Iraq War. Information about the event spreads virally, playing on the participants desires to be a part of the scene.

This article presents an author's commentary on the article by Sally Engle Merry and Rachel E. Stern exploring contemporary social movements, local identity, and globalization in Hong Kong, China. The author relates Merry and Stern's work implies that anthropologists are an integral part of layers of various political and social struggles in the world. It also reinforces the idea that anthropologists can potentially function as cultural translators who make a difference by fully exploring the experiences of local subjects.

The author reflects on the history of the Ghost Dance panel in Kanab Creek canyon. The author has criticized about the significant supporting data missed by Richard Stoffle and his company concerning the study of the historicity of the Ghost Dance. She has also stressed that Stoffle and his colleagues have failed to refer directly to her publications describing in detail the survival of Jack Wilson's Ghost Dance religion in Saksatchewan at Sioux Wahpeton reserve into the 1960s.