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Against the Run of Play Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Agustin Diz
In Argentina’s Gran Chaco, indigenous Guaraní men play football assiduously. This article explores how the game articulates with their sense of masculinity. Historical engagements in the Chaco’s extractive labor markets have shaped understandings of masculinity that emphasize strength, courage, and provision. However, the decline of the region’s extractive industries has made these forms of masculinity
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Race, Genealogy, and the Genomic Archive in Post-apartheid South Africa Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Katharina Schramm
From the early 2000s onward, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals have presented the South African gene pool as a new archive for the new nation, suggesting a non-racial unity in diversity through common human origins. In this discourse, population genomics and genetic ancestry allude to metaphors of shared kinship to overcome the legacies of race. However, a focus on the underlying practices
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Fatherless Children and Listening Spirits Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Rosalie Stolz
Kinship among Khmu villagers of northern Laos is usually presented in anthropology as patrilineal. However, the ritual of a ‘small marriage’ can confirm a child’s belonging to the mothers’ house. The affirmation of the child’s maternal belonging is simultaneously about separation and exclusion from paternal ties and requires for its success careful measurements of kinship. During the ritual, quantities
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The American Eugenics Record Office Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Susan McKinnon
In the first decades of the twentieth century, American researchers at the Eugenics Record Office utilized a theoretical framework that combined humoral and Mendelian principles of inheritance to measure, trace, and predict the intergenerational transmission of an expansive net of morally charged heritable traits. Their reductive understanding of Mendelian principles—guided by class- and race-based
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Given Names and Lived Closeness Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Ferenc Dávid Markó
Immediately after the independence of South Sudan in 2011, a nationality law was passed that defined citizenship by membership to clearly defined and bounded ethnic groups. To acquire citizenship, the testimony of a ‘next of kin’, taken to be an ‘older blood relative from the father’s line’, was supposed to verify ethnicity and, thus, belonging to the new nation. Citizenship offices were tasked with
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Normalizing Activism and Marginalizing Radical Youth in Spain’s Post-15M Social Movements Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Eduard Ballesté
In this article I compare the different forms of participation of young anti-capitalists in two post-15M Spanish social movements in Lleida: White Tide and Platform of those Affected by Mortgages. The objective of the article is to analyze how biopolitical normalization processes work within social movements themselves. The article explains the normalization processes that adult activists exercise
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Sovereignty, Prefigurative Politics, and Basques’ Joy to Decide Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Julieta Gaztañaga
The literature about Basque politics and the anthropology of sovereignty often define the political within the boundaries of violence, desire, and statehood: a sort of pessimism pervades the general assumptions and the end results. In this article, I shift the focus to a different aspect of the problem of sovereignty, drawing on ethnographic research about a Basque social movement that asserts self-determination
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Violence, Rumor, and Elusive Trust in Mocímboa da Praia, Mozambique Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Ana Margarida Sousa Santos
The riots of 2005 in Mocímboa da Praia and the current violent attacks in Cabo Delgado province have resulted in a range of unsettling rumors. This article revisits the riots and their aftermath to make sense of the rumors that have spread since then, fueling fears of violence and uncertainty. These disconcerting rumors are especially rich in what they tell us about the perception of the political
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Toward a Critical and Comparative Anthropology of Disability Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Joshua Reno,Kaitlyn Hart,Amy Mendelson,Felicia Molzon
This article places anthropology in dialogue with critical disability studies (CDS) in order to reassess historical and emerging ethnographic readings of difference. We argue that one unintended consequence of a lack of attention to disability in anthropology, generally, has been an impoverished conception of personhood and power. Building on insights from CDS and the ethnographic literature, we show
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Suspicious Surfaces and Affective Mistrust in the South Caucasus Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Florian Mühlfried
This article builds on ethnographic vignettes of mistrust, with the material stemming from the South Caucasus. Although mistrust has recently gained attention as a phenomenon sui generis, the impact of objects on the stirring of mistrust has been largely overlooked. The present article intends to fill this lacuna by investigating how certain objects are met with mistrust because their (material or
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Post-Hellenistic Perspectives on Divination, the Individual, and the Cosmos Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Elsa Giovanna Simonetti
This article investigates the relation between ancient divinatory theories and ontological assumptions about individuals, the gods, and the cosmos through the writings of Dio Chrysostom, Epictetus, and Maximus of Tyre—three philosophers who belong to the first Roman imperial age. By exploring their works in light of recent anthropological studies, this article will discuss how different divinatory
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Rethinking Religious Festivals in the Era of Digital Ethnography Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Chiara Cocco,Aleida Bertran
AbstractThe Festival of Sant'Efisio has been carried out for centuries in Sardinia, Italy, to honor a vow made to the Saint after a plague in the seventeenth century. As a result of the global health crisis in 2020, the Festival was performed mainly through social media. Studying this event under such conditions accentuated the inherent complexity of interpreting ethnographic data from religious festivals
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Digital Failures in Abolitionist Ethnography Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Jason Bartholomew Scott
AbstractIn an era when grassroots activism is defined by the use of social media, the democratic potentials of the Internet are constantly confronted by a shifting set of practical and political obstacles. Organizations seeking to abolish violent policing, for example, use social media to mobilize widespread support, but can fail to solidify lasting influence within government institutions. Similarly
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Digital Failures in Abolitionist Ethnography Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Jason Bartholomew Scott
In an era when grassroots activism is defined by the use of social media, the democratic potentials of the Internet are constantly confronted by a shifting set of practical and political obstacles. Organizations seeking to abolish violent policing, for example, use social media to mobilize widespread support, but can fail to solidify lasting influence within government institutions. Similarly, twenty-first-century
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The Limits of Knowing Other Minds Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Patrick McKearney
AbstractNew care workers in Britain typically struggle to understand, on their initial encounters, people who communicate atypically due to their intellectual disabilities. But they are required to provide care that is attuned to these individuals’ desires and intentions. Why, then, does a care organization called L'Arche UK make it harder for carers to learn what is going on inside these people's
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Leaving the Field in the Digital Age Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Felix Girke
AbstractAnthropologists’ arrival stories have long served to justify, naturalize, and domesticate—often through humor—the fraught moment of entering unasked into other people's lives. This textual convention has been thoroughly critiqued, but no comparable attention has been paid to the analogous moment of departure from the field. The digital age enables both sides to maintain contact, a shift that
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When Facebook Is the Internet Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo
AbstractMy social media engagement with research interlocutors is shaped by my positionality as a ‘halfie’ anthropologist based abroad who conducts ethnographic research on violence and peacemaking in the Philippines and the diaspora. On the one hand, social media connectivity facilitates certain research processes, networking, activism, and solidarity building. Yet with social media's security issues
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Rethinking Religious Festivals in the Era of Digital Ethnography Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Chiara Cocco,Aleida Bertran
The Festival of Sant’Efisio has been carried out for centuries in Sardinia, Italy, to honor a vow made to the Saint after a plague in the seventeenth century. As a result of the global health crisis in 2020, the Festival was performed mainly through social media. Studying this event under such conditions accentuated the inherent complexity of interpreting ethnographic data from religious festivals
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The Limits of Knowing Other Minds Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Patrick McKearney
New care workers in Britain typically struggle to understand, on their initial encounters, people who communicate atypically due to their intellectual disabilities. But they are required to provide care that is attuned to these individuals’ desires and intentions. Why, then, does a care organization called L’Arche UK make it harder for carers to learn what is going on inside these people’s minds? I
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When Facebook Is the Internet Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo
My social media engagement with research interlocutors is shaped by my positionality as a ‘halfie’ anthropologist based abroad who conducts ethnographic research on violence and peacemaking in the Philippines and the diaspora. On the one hand, social media connectivity facilitates certain research processes, networking, activism, and solidarity building. Yet with social media’s security issues and
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Leaving the Field in the Digital Age Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Felix Girke
Anthropologists’ arrival stories have long served to justify, naturalize, and domesticate—often through humor—the fraught moment of entering unasked into other people’s lives. This textual convention has been thoroughly critiqued, but no comparable attention has been paid to the analogous moment of departure from the field. The digital age enables both sides to maintain contact, a shift that negates
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No One Can Hold It Back Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Carlota McAllister
The slogan “Water is Life” rallies anti-extractive movements across the Americas. Critical theorists, however, decry the circumscription of environmental politics by the vitalist attribution of political agency to liveliness. This article tempers that critique by juxtaposing it to the Catholic Church’s claims to sovereignty over life, deploying the resulting slippages between water and life to explore
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The Colony as the Mystical Body of Christ Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Jennifer Scheper Hughes
In New Spain in the sixteenth century, the colony was imagined as a sacred body, as the mystical body of Christ (corpus mysticum), in which millions of presumed Catholic Indigenous subjects figured as the body’s wounded feet. Beyond the simple secularization of a theological concept and its appropriation toward political ends, the colonial corpus mysticum became living, enfleshed, and incarnate, both
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Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Andrew Sanchez
This article suggests a new conceptual framework for understanding why some types of work are experienced in more satisfying ways than others. The analysis is based on research in an Indian scrap metal yard, where work entails disassembling things that other people no longer want. In spite of the demanding conditions of the labor and the social stigma attached to it, employees express satisfaction
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Civilization as the Undesired World Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Stine Krøijer
Unlike the concept of utopia, an explicit concern with dystopia is almost completely absent from anthropology. This article describes the technologies or uses of dystopia among a group of radical environmental activists in Germany. Dystopia means an undesired or frightening society or place, and, according to the activists, describes our current society and civilization—a consumerist lifestyle and
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Toward an Epidemiology of Ritual Chants Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Pierre Déléage
This article develops an epidemiological approach to the analysis of ritual discourse, comparing three distinct genres of Amazonian ritual chants: Wayana, Sharanahua, and Ingarikó. The aim is not to identify the inherent properties of chants, nor to establish ideal types of ritual context (initiation, shamanism, prophetism), but to analyze the different factors affecting the stabilization of the heterogeneous
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Monumental Suspension Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Isaac Marrero-Guillamón
More than twenty-five years after it was unveiled, Eduardo Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance has neither been built nor abandoned – it is, rather, suspended. The project consists in digging a vast cubic cave inside the mountain of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands). From the outset, it faced the opposition of environmental activists, who argued that it was incompatible with the mountain’s status
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The Worth of the ‘While’ Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-01 Matti Eräsaari
Taxation always involves an element of value quantification, since to tax is also to implement a measuring scale—a process that is usually taken for granted. But when it becomes necessary to determine the taxational value of abstract time or labor, it is also necessary to outline the principles upon which such value is established. This article discusses the conflicting views of the Finnish Tax Administration
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Into and Out of Citizenship, through Personal Tax Payments Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-01 Dora-Olivia Vicol
This article builds on observations of self-employed Romanian migrants and their encounters with UK fiscal obligations to position tax as a distinct node in the worker-citizen nexus. Speaking to anthropological critiques of neoliberalism, I argue that economic activity is not merely the ethical imperative of a political order premised on self-reliance. It is also a practical test of migrants’ abilities
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Introduction Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-01 Nicolette Makovicky, Robin Smith
This special issue decenters tax as an analytic device for understanding the relationship between state and citizen while examin-ing the limits of social contract thinking. Focusing on how citizens inter-pret and react to state efforts to promote fiscal citizenship, it sheds light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the morali-ties, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems. The
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Governing Religious Multiplicity Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-03-01 Hansjörg Dilger
In post-colonial Tanzania, efforts to govern the relations between Christianity and Islam—the country’s largest religions—have been impacted by the growing potential for conflict between and among diverse strands of the two faiths from the mid-1990s onward. They have also been shaped by the highly unequal relations between various Christian and Muslim actors and the Tanzanian government in the context
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On Visual Coherence and Visual Excess Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-12-01 Matei Candea
This article reflects on the power and dangers of diagrams as a mode of anthropological exposition, comparing this particular form of non-text to the brief dalliance of mid-century anthropology with algebraic and logical formulae. It has been claimed that diagrams, like formulae, are clearer, simpler, or less deceptive than textual argument. By contrast, this article argues that diagrams are just as
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Revisiting Sigmund Freud's Diagrams of the Mind Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-12-01 Ro Spankie
An architect by background, my research centres on the role of the drawing in the design process, in particular in relation to the creation of interior space. The word interior comes from the Latin interior meaning inner, or inter meaning within and one of its original uses was to describe that which is ‘belonging to or existing in the mind or soul; mental or spiritual, as distinguished from that which
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Moral Topology and the Making of Cosmological Boundaries Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Matan Shapiro
Seeking to uproot evil from people’s life, neo-Pentecostal exorcists in Brazil separate between internal and external bodily surfaces and then ‘close’ the victim’s entire body to protect against further malignant intrusion. Based on fieldwork in Brazil and the analysis of expulsion videos online, I demonstrate that exorcists self-consciously use topological imaginaries of connectedness and disjunction
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Speculating (on the Digital and the Monetary) Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Yang Liu,Thomas Malaby,Daniel Miller
Scholarship has frequently struggled with several pairs of dichotomies as it has sought to understand the digital: real vs. virtual, authentic vs. mediated, openness (freedom) vs. closure (control), and community vs. network. In order to make conceptual headway without falling into these traps, we turn in this article to the concept of indexicality. We urge an account of the digital that sees it as
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The Politics of Ritual Form(ation) in Contemporary Mongolia Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Elizabeth Turk
Engaging Humphrey and Laidlaw’s ‘archetypal actions of ritual’, this article explores the thing-like and seemingly externally derived quality of ritualized action in ‘alternative’ medical settings in Mongolia. The cultural rupture of the Soviet era presents a case study in which the continuity of ritualized action cannot be assumed in ritual making during the post-1990 (re)construction of national
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Capitalism, Kinship, and Fraud Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Sherry B. Ortner
Author(s): Ortner, Sherry B | Abstract: Investment broker Bernie Madoff ran what is still considered the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors over a 20-year period of more than $20 billion. He worked his game almost entirely through kinship connections—relatives, friends of relatives, and relatives of friends. The relationship between kinship and capitalism has drawn renewed
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The Ontological Implications of Spirit Encounters Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Jamie Barnes
This article offers a reflexive and phenomenological response to some of the challenges of the recent ontological turn. It argues, first, that a focus on embodiment is crucial in understanding the formation of ontological assumptions, and, second, that researchers have an ethical responsibility to practice an ‘ontological reflexivity’ that goes beyond the conceptual reflexivity of much recent ontological
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The Name of the Relation Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Marina Vanzolini
Taking as a starting point an apparently minor event during my fieldwork—the fact that I received an indigenous name from the Aweti, a Tupi-speaking people who inhabit the upper reaches of the Xingu River—this article explores how personal qualities are elicited through names. A presentation of the Aweti onomastic system will highlight its analytical potential to interpret not only the case in question
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Sorcery, Revenge, and Anti-Revenge Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Florencia Tola
This article focuses on sorcery, revenge, and anti-revenge among the Qom people in Argentina. For them, death is the result of sorcery or a shamanic attack. When a relative dies, the family may decide to avenge him through practices performed on his body. Nonetheless, under specific circumstances relatives decide not to take revenge, performing what I refer to as ‘anti-revenge’. Ethnographic analysis
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Learning to See in Western Amazonia Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Els Lagrou
Through the study of form, we explore how relations constitutepersons for the Huni Kuin of Western Amazonia. Shamanistic song, andthe role in it of patterned design, reveals a specific aesthetics that emphasizes processes of becoming, transformation, and figure/ground reversal. Since bodily substances and actions of others affect the ‘thinking body’, well-being depends on making visible the relational
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Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Marcelo González Gálvez,Piergiorgio Di Giminiani,Giovanna Bacchiddu
Once conceptualized as self-evident connections between discretesocial units systematized through ethnographic fieldwork, relationsare being increasingly treated as instantiations of local ontologicaltheories. The ethnography of indigenous South America has provided asource of inspiration for this analytical shift. As manifested in the contributionsto this special issue, at the core of indigenous practices
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On People, Sensorial Perception, and Potential Affinity in Southern Chile Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Cristóbal Bonelli
Through an ethnographic exploration of Pehuenche conceptualizations of doubles and of greeting and funerary practices in Southern Chile, this article considers the ontological relevance of sensorial perception as a main operator for stabilizing the tension between autonomy and dependence on otherness. The article aims to establish how relations between ‘real people’ or che, in Pehuenche daily life
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"You’re a Trickster” Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-03-01 Megan Laws
The trickster has held a prominent place in the study of folklore, as much as it has been central to anthropological understandings of egalitarianism. In both, the trickster embodies an insoluble tension between the repressed, amoral desires of the individual and the moral demands of social life. This tension, so it goes, is visible in the ambiguity of the figure—a protean indeterminate being, neither
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The Alimentary Forms of Religious Life Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Diego Malara
Focusing on the practice of fasting, this article traces the ethical efforts and conundrums of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians who take their religion seriously, but do not necessarily see themselves as disciplined believers. I argue that the flexibility and lenience of the Orthodox system allow for morally ambivalent disciplinary projects that, in order to preserve their efficacy, must be sustained
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Assemblage Making, Materiality, and Self in Cuban Palo Monte Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-09-01 Diana Espírito Santo
In this article I use my ethnographic data on an Afro-Cubanreligion called Palo Monte to argue that ontologically discrepant ‘bits’ ofthe cosmos can become stuck together for particular purposes, at timesproducing ‘synchronicities’. I argue that the practitioners of this religion,Paleros, can be trained into producing synchronicities in the form ofwitchcraft. This coheres with a concept of self that
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Inside and Outside the Law Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-09-01 Ghassan Hage
In this article I begin by noting a certain jouissance in Beirutiurban culture that co-exists with an ongoing history of intercommunalconflict and the failure of centralized planning. I then examine the irreverentcelebration of this ‘outside-the-law’ culture by a group of middle-classimmigrants who have returned to Beirut to enjoy its free spaces. I arguethat these outside-the-law spaces are characterized
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Discipline (and Lenience) Beyond the Self Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-09-01 Bruno Reinhardt
Lighthouse Chapel International (LCI) is a Ghanaian Pentecostal-charismatic organization with a transnational reach. In this article,I analyze the pedagogical system whereby this denomination hasintroduced converts into its ‘church planting’ mission. LCI leaders arekeenly aware of both the necessity and the perils of discipline to theChristian life, exemplifying two stances of Pentecostal-charismatic
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Introduction Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-09-01 Maya Mayblin, Diego Malara
Questions of discipline are, today, no less ubiquitous than when under Foucault’s renowned scrutiny, but what does ‘discipline’ in diverse religious systems actually entail? In this article, we take ‘lenience’ rather than discipline as a starting point and compare its potential, both structural and ideological, in religious contexts where disciplinary flexibility shores up greater encompassing projects
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Grounding Rights Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-09-01 David Cooper
Since the Sandinistas returned to power in Nicaragua in 2007, ideas about rights have been central to the governing party’s populist project. The rights in question are understood to require the production of ‘organized’ citizens who become integrated into the mechanisms of popular governance. But for rural Sandinistas who participated in the revolutionary agrarian reform of the 1980s, rights are about
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The Hut-Hospital as Project and as Practice Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-06-01 Cristiana Bastos
This article analyzes one kind of colonial equipment designedin the early twentieth century for the purpose of providing medical assistanceto the indigenous populations of Angola and Mozambique. I willrefer to it as a ‘hut-hospital’, although it had several forms and designations.The layout of hut-hospitals consisted of a main building and anumber of hut-like units that were supposedly more attractive
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The Colonial State and Carnival Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-06-01 Christoph Kohl
Carnival performances and their political implications underwent significant transformations in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. By focusing on two periods of colonization, this article examines carnival as an event that involves a multitude of meanings and forms of imitation that could imply resistance to colonialism, but were by no means limited to critique and upheaval
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Perspectives of (and on) a Comedic Self Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Marianna Keisalo
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Delta Ontologies: Infrastructural Transformations in the Chao Phraya Delta, Thailand Social Analysis (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Atsuro Morita,Casper Bruun Jensen