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True selves, suspicious lives: Public deceits, hopes of restoration, and existential troubles in misdocumented pasts Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Sébastien Roux, Paul Macalli
How do individuals, after having discovered they were lied to about the conditions of their births and their childhoods, seek out their own identities and re/establish the “truths” about themselves? Based on two ethnographic studies conducted in sites where lives and kinships were disrupted by political violence, this article aims to examine the urge for narrative coherence in contexts defined by public
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Global tourism and local ethnicity: Reconfiguring racial and ethnic relations in central Laos Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-05-14 Sangmi Lee
Based on ethnographic research in a multi-ethnic village in Laos, this article examines how global tourism reconfigured racial and ethnic relations between foreign tourists and locals, as well as a...
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“The economy of trust”? Competing grassroots economics and the mobilization of (mis-)trust in a Catalonian cooperative Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-05-13 Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar
Rather than theorizing trust and mistrust in the abstract, recent anthropological scholarship has shown how trust and mistrust emerge in particular social settings. In this article, I build on this...
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The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Guilherme Fians
Since Malinowski, taking the natives seriously has been a core issue for ethnographers, as this principle encloses two terms nurturing much theoretical debate in sociocultural anthropology: ‘native...
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Does being Indigenous imply being religious? Anthropology, heritage, and historiography in Mexico Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-05-09 Casper Jacobsen
For decades, indigenist anthropology has been considered indefensible in Mexico. Its conception of Indigeneity persists, however, as a resource for national heritage and identity construction. This...
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‘of evident invisibles’: Ethnography as intermediation Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 João Pina-Cabral
Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter which change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the worl...
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A feral science? Dangers and disruptions between DIYbio and the FBI Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Michael Scroggins
Building on theory within anthropology and associated fields, I develop feralness as a lens for understanding the complexity of technological afterlives. Conceptual development proceeds through a c...
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Bridging anthropological theory: Accumulating and containing wealth in World of Warcraft landscapes Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Rachael Root
Human ingenuity responds to changing environments and resources with technological sophistication and variations in accumulative behaviors. While anthropologists look to the past and to processes o...
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‘We work for the Devil’: Oil extraction, kinship and the fantasy of time on the offshore frontier Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Pauline Destrée
In the offshore oil industry of Takoradi, Ghana, white expatriate workers describe oil extraction as both ‘the work of the Devil’ and a ‘labour of love’. While companies strive to produce the offsh...
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Migrants as subject-citizens: Identity affirmation and domestic concealment among Venezuelans living in Santiago, Chile Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Miguel Pérez, Cristóbal Palma
Over the past decade, Chile has become an important destination for Latin American and Caribbean migrants. In 2022, more than 8% of the population residing in the country were of foreign origin. Si...
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Engineering the middle classes: State institutions and the aspirations of citizenship Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Maxim Bolt, Jon Schubert
The ‘middle class’ has become the subject of euphoric narratives of growth and improving standards of living around the globe, and the object of government interventions and social engineering. Gov...
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Engineering gender, engineering the Jordanian State: Beyond the salvage ethnography of middle-class housewifery in the Middle East Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Geoffrey F Hughes
The figure of the middle-class housewife or ‘rabbat bayt’ emerged in the late 19th-century Arabic-language public sphere amidst the colonial encounter. This gendering of middle-classness responded ...
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‘New’ but ‘Squeezed’: Middle Class and Mortgaged Homeownership in Croatia Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Marek Mikuš
Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing ‘squeezed’ middle classes...
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From ‘beasts of burden’ to ‘backbone of society’: The fiscal forging of a new Bolivian middle class Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Miranda Sheild Johansson
The recently re-branded and highly digitalised Bolivian Tax Office, Servicio de Impuestos Nacionales (SIN), works to consolidate various socio-economic groups, such as the Aymara bourgeoisie (wealt...
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‘A vision for the future’: Professional ethos as boundary work in Mozambique’s public sector Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Jon Schubert
Global imaginaries of middle-classness, although resonating in very different ways in specific national contexts, more often than not conform to broadly capitalist-liberal aspirations, through glob...
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‘Creature of statute’: Legal bureaucracy and the performance of professionalism in Johannesburg Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Maxim Bolt
South Africa’s Master of the High Court administers property inheritance. Described as a ‘creature of statute’, and staffed by legally trained officials, the law takes centre-stage. Focusing on Joh...
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Liminal states: Propertied citizenship and gendered kin work in middle-class Kolkata families Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-11-05 Henrike Donner
This article traces the way the intersection between gender, class and family values is reorganised in relation to state policies that enable propertied citizenship through home-ownership. Focusing...
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Scales of disaster: Intimate social contracts on the margins of the postcolonial state Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Ayesha Siddiqi, Sophie Blackburn
Geographical scholarship highlights social contracts as a valuable lens on the dynamic and contested balance of rights and responsibilities between risk governance players. We apply this lens to po...
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An anthropology of the social contract: The political power of an idea Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Gwen Burnyeat, Miranda Sheild Johansson
The idea of the social contract resonates in many societies as a framework to conceptualise state–society relations, and as a normative ideal which strives to improve them. Policy-makers, developme...
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In search of a caring state: Migrations of Afghans from Iran to Germany Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Sara Lenehan
When Afghans began fleeing war in the 1980s, the Iranian state welcomed them on an ethical premise of care towards fellow Muslims. However, since the 1990s, Iran has pursued exclusionary policies t...
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Breaking the Contract: Digital Nomads and the State Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Dave Cook
This article explores ethnographically how digital nomads reconcile their commitment to ‘freedom’ with their relationships to state institutions. It analyses the ways these ‘global citizens’ attemp...
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Shifting terms: Development discourses and moral imaginaries in Indian state service provision Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Meredith McLaughlin
How are multiple visions of state–society relations accommodated within the daily practices of the post-liberalization Indian state? How does state service provision relate to these shifting normat...
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Resilience, infrastructure and the anti-social contract in neoliberal Britain Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-08-27 Benjamin OL Bowles
‘Resilience’, a quintessentially neoliberal concept, has never been a politically neutral discourse, its intellectual roots situated in the work of Friedrich Hayek and the birth of neoliberal econo...
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‘We were not emotional enough’: Cultural liberalism and social contract imaginaries in the Colombian peace process Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-08-10 Gwen Burnyeat
The 2016 Peace Accord signed between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla was narrowly rejected by the public in a polarising referendum. This article focusses on government officials...
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Defying national homogeneity: Hidden acts of Zainichi Korean resistance in Japan Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Christopher Laurent, Xavier Robillard-Martel
This article draws attention to the shifting dialectical relationship that exists between everyday acts of resistance and the forms of domination they seek to subvert. Using ethnographic data collected in Osaka’s Koreatown, we analyze some of the ways in which young Zainichi Koreans, the descendants of colonial subjects who migrated to Japan, use daily acts of self-preservation to chip away at hegemonic
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Current demands in the Nepali electricity sector: For a social reproduction theory of infrastructure Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-02-10 Mikkel Vindegg
This article uses work and state relations at a Nepali electricity office as a staging ground for bringing the labour of repair squarely into focus in the ethnography of infrastructure. A trio of electricians at the office had a torrid time trying to address an ever-increasing number of complaints. Customers were under the impression that the electricians were both lazy and slow, despite even compromising
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The politics of dispossession and compensation in the eastern Indian coal belt Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-02-07 Itay Noy
Ethnographic studies in sites of land dispossession for large capital projects have revealed the diversity of local political responses to this process, from fierce resistance to compliance. The theoretical challenge, in this context, is to trace the particular factors that affect this politics, and the conditions under which different reactions to dispossession unfold. Drawing on fieldwork in an Adivasi
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Audit as confession: The instrumentalisation of ethics for management control Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2022-02-07 Caitlin Scott
Techniques of audit are a prominent feature of contemporary publicly funded institutions. While such accountability systems are often understood as broadly ethical, critical perspectives note their coercive nature, seeing audit regimes as instruments of governmentality for disciplining and creating self-regulating subjects, diminishing autonomy and premised on an absence of trust. In this article,
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Making others (un)equal: The social ethics of Scandinavian enclaving in Maputo, Mozambique Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Flora Botelho
This article explores practices and ideologies of equality as the central mechanisms through which cosmopolitan Scandinavians in the capital of Mozambique simultaneously build themselves as a community and sever relationships with locals, thereby constructing a socioeconomic, cultural and moral enclave within the city. Scandinavian sociality is predicated upon the absence of overt signs of social differentiation
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‘You’ll be very far from this place’: Temporal and spatial aspirations at Bridge International Academies in Kenya Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Manya Kagan, Yonatan N Gez
The association between aspirations and education across the African continent is widely recognized. However, it is only in recent years that scholars began observing this connection in the context of the booming low-fee private schools (LFPS) sector. In this article, we consider the case of one of Kenya’s most prominent LFPS actors, a chain of primary schools called Bridge International Academies
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Frontiers of cosmopolitanism: Educational enclaves and the extractive roots of international schools Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-11-11 Matthieu Bolay, Jeanne Rey
This article situates international expatriate schools in their cultural and political economy by drawing attention to the tensions between a cosmopolitan educational ethos and processes of social, economic and legal enclavement. Based on extensive multi-sited ethnographic research in the international school sector, we show how cosmopolitan claims of openness mirror a relative closure and ‘offshore-like’
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Looking for the authentic other: Cosmopolitan ethos and orientalism in French migrants’ experiences in Abu Dhabi Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-11-06 Claire Cosquer
French migrants in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates – UAE) are often portrayed as money-driven and greedy, notably by their compatriots. Common representations of the Gulf area as extraordinarily affluent reinforce these suspicions and prompt migrants to justify their expatriation. This moral effort takes on the form of a cosmopolitan ethos. French residents in Abu Dhabi generally express a strong desire
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Cosmopolitan enclaves: An introduction Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-11-06 Jeanne Rey, Matthieu Bolay, Yonatan N Gez
Cosmopolitan enclaves emerge at the intersection of global dynamics and local contexts as spaces where the cultivation of a cosmopolitan ethos encounters processes of socio-spatial boundary work and segregation. In the introduction to this special issue, we discuss under which circumstances the intention to cultivate open-mindedness goes hand in hand with keeping the local environment at bay. We argue
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When diversity becomes a resource: Managing alterity and everyday cosmopolitanisms in Carlo Pisacane, a primary school in Rome Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-11-05 Chiara Cacciotti
The paper addresses the ways in which the negative social connotation associated with a majority of foreigners in an Italian primary school (Carlo Pisacane, Rome) was first ‘ethnicized’ in numerical terms, and subsequently politically transformed into an issue of national identity. The purpose of this paper is then to show Pisacane’s attempts to transform itself from a school of immigrants into a cosmopolitan
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Power in a minor key: Rethinking anthropological accounts of power alongside London’s community organisers Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-08-27 Farhan Samanani
Anthropological accounts of power remain characterized by an enduring tension. Social scientific theories of power allow anthropologists to situate subjects and mediate between contending perspectives. However, in doing so, such theories inevitably also end up displacing the grounded perspective of interlocutors themselves. This tension sustains a contentious debate, which positions attention to power
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How to think about people who don’t want to be studied: Further reflections on studying up Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-08-27 Daniel Souleles
It is now routine for anthropologists to study those who exercise power and control wealth and status in any number of societies. Implicit in anthropology’s long-standing commitment to apprehending societies in their totality, and explicit in the call to study up, paying attention to power is just one of the routine things that anthropologists do in the course of their fieldwork. That said, many theoretical
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Introduction: Ethnographies of power and the powerful Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-08-27 Matthew Archer, Daniel Souleles
This introduction suggests that anthropology often assumes that the people anthropologists work with are relatively powerless. Due to this default, anthropologists tend to design their research and theorizing to reflect a relatively powerless other. We suggest that the accumulated scholarship on studying up, that is, studying those who structure the lives of many others, offers more accurate ways to
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Dynastic aura: Proximity to the powerful and its promise in corporate South Korea Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-08-27 Michael M. Prentice
This article discusses the experiences of high-level managers at a South Korean conglomerate named ‘Sangdo’ who worked within the corporate group’s head office under the owner-executive family. These highly credentialled professionals were attracted to the idea of working directly under or alongside an elite, wealthy corporate dynasty who both owned the conglomerate and were its top executives. Rather
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Power and precariousness in the expert hierarchies of the US hydrocarbon industry Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-08-27 Sean Field
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on
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Rich man, poor man, middleman, thing: Distributing power Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-08-27 Ellen Hertz
The author reviews the fine ethnographic analyses in this special issue and argues that they become more coherent if power is understood as a sociotechnological network. This further implies that anthropologists' conclusions about how power is exercised must be modest, both historically situated and politically targeted, if the discipline wishes to contribute meaningfully to holding the powerful to
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‘It’s up to the market to decide’: Revealing and concealing power in the sustainable tea supply chain Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-08-09 Matthew Archer, Hannah Elliott
In 2007, Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, announced plans to source its entire tea supply sustainably, beginning with the certification of its tea producers in East Africa to Rainforest Alliance standards. As a major buyer of Kenyan tea, Unilever’s decision pushed tea producers across Kenya to subscribe to Rainforest Alliance’s sustainable agriculture standard in order to maintain access
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Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-08-03 Sayd Randle
California’s sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water
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Who alone can ‘see’? Christian humanitarianism, aspect-perception and political critique Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 James Wintrup
This article offers a critique of Christian humanitarianism in Zambia. But it does so by engaging with the arguments of anthropologists who have begun to question the status of political critique within the discipline. These anthropologists argue that critique often undermines ethnographic understanding because it problematically positions the anthropologist as an actor who is able to ‘uncover’ political
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Postcolonial social drama: The case of Brazilian dentists in Portugal Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-04-08 Angela Torresan
By the late 1990s, when I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork research in Lisbon, the ‘dentists’ case’ had become a familiar trope for the presence of Brazilian immigrants in Portugal. Although it involved a small group of Brazilian and Portuguese professionals, it gained visibility in the media of both countries, escalating into a political and diplomatic quarrel, and culminating in the amendment
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Elusive adulthood and surplus life-time in Spain Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-03-20 Hadas Weiss
Drawing on fieldwork in Madrid, I argue that the growing redundancy of living labour power in the capitalist production process has translated, since the last decades of the 20th century, into surplus portions of the individual life-cycle. Capitalism’s promise of productivity, associated with adulthood, has shrunk to become a window of opportunity. Besides sheer luck, it takes protracted preparation
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Staging joyful spectacles: Exploring the temporalities of positive affect in child-focused NGO programs Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-03-20 Annie McCarthy
The child has long been a powerfully affective figure in development work – whether as an abject victim or a joyful symbol of brighter futures. While the power of children to produce emotions in donors has been well studied, far less attention has been given to children’s own affective relationships with development organisations. This article explores the role of affect in children’s participation
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‘I volunteer at home too!’ Gendering affective citizenship Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2021-01-28 Milena Marchesi
This article argues for gendering affective citizenship and humanitarianism. Both of these ‘regimes of care’ are understood to work through benevolent affect, to mobilize citizens in the wake of the retrenchment of the welfare state. Ethnography with Italian-origin women volunteers at a Milanese association shows that the affect and motivations of affective citizens can starkly deviate from benevolence
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Back to the industrial age: Work in the new economy today and tomorrow Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-12-09
A number of recent monographs have been focused on how work is organized and experienced today in the new economy, enabled through digital communication via apps and smartphones. Work by Ravenelle, Rosenblat and Gershon portrays both blue collar and white-collar labour, often as part of the so-called gig economy. With their ethnographic focus, the volumes complement the widespread media critique of
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Archives, promises, values: Forensic infrastructures in times of austerity Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-12-07 EJ Gonzalez-Polledo, Silvia Posocco
This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated, or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service
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The politics of hopeful citizenship: Women, counterinsurgency and the state in eastern India Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-11-26 Lipika Kamra
Anthropologists have posited that citizenship takes on multiple meanings and forms based on citizens’ everyday engagements with state and non-state actors. This article examines forms of citizenshi...
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Communities of care: Public donations, development assistance, and independent philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-11-26 Andrew Ong, Hans Steinmüller
If there are any charitable, philanthropic, or welfare-state activities in the de-facto states of insurgent armies, they are generally interpreted in terms of utilitarian motives and the self-legitimation of military elites and their business associates. However, development and philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar have more extensive purposes. We argue that a framing of care rather than of governance
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Blinded by the slide: Ignorance and the commodification of expertise Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-10-12 Felix Stein
This article investigates how commodification operates with reference to expertise, rather than material objects. By drawing on the work of German management consultants, it highlights three forms of ignorance that arise as part of commodifying expertise. These are here described as ignorance due to profit, ignorance due to rhetoric and ignorance due to strong assumptions. These forms of ignorance
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Waiting for a deus ex machina: ‘Sustainable extractives’ in a 2°C world Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-10-12 Dinah Rajak
In recent years the oil industry has shifted from climate change denialism to advocacy of the Paris Agreement, championing sustainability in an apparent assertion (rather than rejection) of corporate responsibility. Meanwhile growth forecasts continue unabated to finance the industry’s enthusiasm for upstream ventures in uncharted territories. How do extractive companies, and those who work in them
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Between the devil and the deep blue sea: Objectivity and political responsibility in the litigation of the Exxon Valdez oil spill Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-10-12 Stuart Kirsch
Objectivity is widely recognized as a fundamental value in the sciences. Yet objectivity may be deployed as a filter or screen that discourages scientists from reflecting on the political consequences of their work. This article examines the relationship between scientific commitment to objectivity and recent critiques of the influence of corporations on research. It does so by analysing legal documents
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On the banality of wilful blindness: Ignorance and affect in extractive encounters Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-10-12 Judith Bovensiepen
Research on strategic ignorance tends to focus on the deliberate manufacture of non-knowledge as a tool of governance. In contrast, this article highlights the ‘banal’ workings of wilful blindness, how it can become a normalised part of corporate routine. It examines the diverse dynamics of wilful blindness that became visible in the planning and implementation of a mega oil development project in
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Dynamics of wilful blindness: An introduction Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-10-12 Judith Bovensiepen, Mathijs Pelkmans
What are the politics of ignorance in an age of misinformation? How can the concept of ‘wilful blindness’ help us to understand the logics involved? We start the introduction to this special issue by arguing that the intrinsic instability of wilful blindness draws valuable attention to the graded nature of intentionality and perception, and the tensions between them. These features are an essential
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Invisible children? Non-recognition, humanitarian blindness and other forms of ignorance in Sabah, Malaysia Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-10-12 Catherine Allerton
In the Malaysian state of Sabah, public antipathy towards the presence of large numbers of migrant workers influences a widespread ignorance of the educational and other exclusions of their children. Children of migrants are rendered invisible in Sabahan cultural discourse because they are not recognized as proper subjects, or even as ‘normal’ children. Cultural denial of such children’s circumstances
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Concrete violence, indifference and future-making in Mozambique Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-07-23 Julie Soleil Archambault
In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of the momentous transformation under way in a place where building is now described as being ‘in fashio...
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Corrigendum to “Transcending enclosures by bus: Public transit protests, frame mobility, and the many facets of colonial occupation” Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-07-13
Griffin MS (2020) Transcending enclosures by bus: Public transit protests, frame mobility, and the many facets of colonial occupation. Critique of Anthropology Epub ahead of print 16 June 2020. doi: 10.1177/0308275X20929405
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Occupations in context – The cultural logics of occupation, settler violence, and resistance Critique of Anthropology (IF 1.788) Pub Date : 2020-06-15 Mona Bhan,Haley Duschinski