Browsing by Author "Faubion, James"
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Item Embargo A Bog Approach: An Ethnography, Or, An Anthropology Of Climate Emergency(2021-12-03) Storer, Eliot; Faubion, James; Boyer, Dominic; Howe, CymeneThis dissertation investigates contemporary human, social, and cultural responses to climate emergency. My ethnographic field research localizes vanguardist “solutionist” discourses where marginalized environments and aspirational state actors intersect on “The Flow Country” blanket bogs in the far north of Scotland. The Flow Country is the premier site of the UK’s large scale “forest-to-bog” peatland restoration project, one of the few “natural climate solutions” enacted and institutionalized. My fieldwork (2017-2018) approached a boggy, yet “neutral,” “Net Zero” discourse that might confound traditional environmentalist positions. My findings characterize a local Net Zero cultural form with 1) a latent construction of future uncertainty that manages to reproduce the “estate” of land ownership regimes; 2) a rhetorical imaginary of “plausibility” dominated by positive scenario construction over religious or scientific politics; and 3) a lyrical model of ethnography that enjoins a more open strategy of accountability and interlocution. I describe my findings in four chapters approaching: 1) the marginal imaginaries of bogs; 2) the relationship of experts and elites to apocalyptic and climate solution discourses; 3) the “extra-human” sensorial experience and erotic politics of environmental monitoring; and, 4) the parallelism of expositive and narrative strategies in corporate, public, and individual climate accounting.Item Born to Age: The Industrialization of Eldercare and The Making of Aging Subjects in Urban China(2023-04-21) Wang, Yifan; Faubion, JamesIf China’s over three decades of implementation of birth planning policies had sought to contain a crisis of overpopulation, today, as the global productivity epicenter, China is reconceptualizing the crisis as population aging. This sea change has culminated in China’s recent calls to industrialize eldercare in the face of diminishing family-based care provision. This industrialization is reshaping the eldercare landscape and giving rise to new care ethics, subject positions, and a mushrooming field of service and goods for consumption. My dissertation studies how aging has become a dominant way of describing and understanding life and the future in China today. On the one hand, it explores how this state-fostered and market-driven industry operates among the state’s population, welfare, and economic policies, market competitions, and ordinary people. On the other hand, it shows how people come to terms with aging differently through the mediation of the eldercare industry. This dissertation is primarily based on fieldwork at Gardenview, an eldercare company that runs several residential eldercare facilities in Nanjing and neighboring metropolitan cities, including Shanghai and Hangzhou. Between 2017 and 2020, I conducted a total of 14 months of fieldwork with Gardenview and at eldercare-themed exhibitions, summits, and forums. In addition, the dissertation is built on two archival research projects, with one examining how the concept of the population has been called upon in the Chinese Communist Party’s official discourses and the other tracing a series of welfare production exhibitions organized by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1958. Drawing on diverse empirical and archival data, my dissertation elaborates on three overarching arguments. First, the industrialization of eldercare in China has transformed eldercare from a long-established family duty into a socioeconomic enterprise, configuring and reconfiguring the relationship between care ethics and market incentives. Second, the viability of this eldercare industry is further predicated upon a demographic sensibility—a collective and historically rehearsed feeling towards the population that the industry, in turn, actively recalibrates. Finally, the fostering of the eldercare market and the feeling of the population together create new aging subjects that fuel social and economic productivity through consumption.Item Creating Emergency: Hierarchy, Ideology, and Competition in the Humanitarian Network of (Post-)Disaster Port-au-Prince(2015-11-10) Mantel, Rebecca; Georges, Eugenia; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; Duno-Gottberg, LuisI assert that in the months and years following the January 2010 earthquake, the humanitarian ecology in Port-au-Prince was neither a singular apparatus, as it is often called, nor a scattered and uncontained chaos of uncoordinated NGOs (James 2010). I argue that instead of these two extremes, the humanitarian actors collected into groups distinctive in characteristics such as size, funding mechanisms, and interactions with the attempted humanitarian oversight structure. These factions, internal to the aid apparatus, at once shaped aid workers’ perceptions of urgency and their subsequent views on the needs of the urban Haitian population at a given time while they were shaped, themselves, by the internal logics of competition underlying the inflated population of aid agencies and organizations. In the protracted setting of emergency and crisis in Port-au-Prince, need was based on often opposing analyses of in what particular stage of need lay the imagined state of emergency. These temporal analyses defined the form and function of aid offered to different communities, and the aid apparatus was rarely, if ever, in consensus about where on the continuum of need lay the residents of Port-au-Prince. Multiple contradictory analyses led to discordance within the overall aid effort: some were firmly rooted in the relief timeline typical of an immediate post-disaster temporality, while other took actions reflective of a longer-term development mindset. These contradictory analyses were especially evident in medical settings, wherein the efforts that aid workers took in assisting individual patients often reflected their organizations’ overall attitude concerning the temporality of need of Port-au-Prince as a whole. While aid workers constructed their analyses in part through their daily routines, their interactions with and observations of the medical structure as it existed in the post-earthquake months, these attitudes were also fueled by a broader, underlying internal competition that played out in the hyper-saturated ecology of aid in Port-au-Prince. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. The first chapter lays out the background of each of the three major sets of humanitarian actors that will be the focus of this work: the UN and its military arm, MINUSTAH; Cuban medical aid and its relatively recent Venezuelan-Bolivarian influence; and what I call micro-NGOs, the small-scale organizations that did not fall under the radar or command of the UN humanitarian coordination agency, OCHA. Chapter two focuses on a singular geographic space, the Pétionville tent camp, where I conducted my first months of field research in 2010. By focusing on particular projects implemented within the camp by its managing NGO, I use this camp space to describe how NGOs dealt with the often hazy period of transition between emergency relief and development aid. Chapter three takes a step away from Port-au-Prince and back in time to look at the development of the relationships between Venezuela and Cuba, Cuba and Haiti, and Haiti and Venezuela. This chapter discusses the making of the “fragile state” in contemporary development policy research, and explains how the alliance between Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti marks a turning point in both Latin American regionalism and the oft-referenced “South-South aid” collaborations. The fourth chapter discusses two very disparate ways in which revolution and its identities and ideologies played out in the setting of post-earthquake Port-au-Prince. The first section looks at revolutionary ideology in Chávez’s political and economic campaign as it joins Cuba and Haiti into his Bolivarian movement, while the second section looks at the reasons for which MINUSTAH armed forced have failed to connect with the local populous and has, in fact, come to signify a newfound revolutionary enemy by certain political and geographical factions within Port-au-Prince. The fifth and final chapter looks more closely at the relationship between micro-NGOs and the UN oversight structure. Here, I finalize the argument that I began above wherein competition between the “uncoordinated” NGOs proved to be an integral part of the post-earthquake humanitarian structure, the many disparate pieces actually forming an ecology and an economy that supported the continued presence of all levels of foreign interventionist actors.Item Dance Music Events(2021-04-22) Symmes, Thomas Colton; Parsons, William; Faubion, JamesThis dissertation studies dance music events in three movements: in a field survey of writings about dance music events, in field work and interviews with promoters of Twin Cities dance music events, and in conversations between the writings and the interviews. Survey, interviews, and conversations are arranged around six reading themes: events, ineffability, dancing, the materiality of sound, critique, and darkness. The field survey excavates these six themes in histories, sociotheoretical studies, memoirs, musical nonfiction, and zines. The field work searches for the reading themes in interviews with six promoters of dance music event series in the Twin Cities named Warehouse 1, Freak Of The Week, House Proud, Techno Tuesday, Communion, and The Headspace Collective. Writings and interviews discover each other in related and distinct conversations that reverberate with the six reading themes. The dissertation learns that dance music event conversations reflect and engage with multiple relevant themes and topics. It participates in conversations about dance music events that are also, often enough, conversations about things besides dance music events.Item Learning Machines: Pedagogy, Academic-Industrial Collaboration, and Knowledge Work in the Russian Data Sciences(2018-04-19) Lowrie, Ian P; Faubion, JamesThis dissertation focuses on elite efforts to restructure work and education in the Moscow information technology sector. Russia has long had a strong national program in theoretical mathematics, but has been less successful at applying this expertise to the development of modern computational science, infrastructure, and business. As the Russian extractive economy stagnates, however, these elites are looking to data science as a privileged locus for the translation of what they call the “human resources” of excellence in fundamental mathematics into the “human capital” of data-scientific expertise. Their interventions into the science system have brought together industrial and academic actors in locally unprecedented ways, producing hybrid institutions, forms of pedagogy, and work practices that draw upon but differ strikingly from those operative in other knowledge economies. At the level of quotidian experience, this project traces the hybrid educational and work practices emerging within the new ecology of data scientific knowledge centered on a new department of computer science at the Higher School of Economics and Yandex. More broadly, it charts the ongoing institutional reformation of the Russian science system and information technology sector, following postsocialist knowledge workers as they develop sophisticated local forms of algorithmic rationality and pedagogy. In short, this research provides an intimate picture of work and education in the production of a distinctly Russian form of computational modernity.Item Needed Subjects: An Ethnography of the Formation of the Inclusion Complex in Russia(2020-04-24) Borodina, Svetlana; Faubion, JamesThis dissertation tackles the question “What is it that sustains the social inclusion of people with disabilities?” in the context of post-socialist Russia, a country that in the past decade has undertaken a shift from segregationist disability policies toward a cultural and political orientation of inclusivity. Through ratification of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities, Russia committed to adjusting their legislative, political and economic protocols as well as cultural practices according to the principle of inclusion. Despite inclusion’s international acclaim, little regulation exists for making it a functional organizational principle beyond an ideological commitment. Based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork, my dissertation examines attempts to produce and promote a sustainable culture of inclusivity among disabled and nondisabled individuals in Russia. It critically interrogates inclusion’s universalized moral value and documents the social effects produced by different, sometimes contradictory, interpretations of inclusion, which populate the contemporary Russian landscape of governmental and civic initiatives of social betterment. The study is situated at the intersection of cultural and medical anthropology, critical disability studies, and political anthropology, as it scrutinizes the emergence of a new citizenship regime that mandates responsible and collective participation by both the disabled and the abled in the building of the world of inclusion. My interlocutors, the largest part of whom are blind, pose a post-socialist inflection of inclusion that challenges liberal ideals of independence, liberty, and obligation to the self, others, and the state. This inflection of inclusion offers insight into the strategies and tactics of coalition building between the post-socialist state, businesses, and civic initiatives, aiming at social reformation and redress. Finally, my scholarship constitutes an unprecedented account of how blind citizens articulate social critique and reformation.Item Push the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan(2015-04-27) Rodwell, Elizabeth Ann; Boyer, Dominic; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; Ostherr, Kirsten; Allison, AnneAs viewing habits have been transformed globally by on-demand services, and viewership has lagged due to competition from social and interactive technologies, television professionals have struggled to articulate a vision for their medium’s future. In Japan, a strong decline in ratings among critical under-40 demographics had already created tension within the dominant broadcast model when the Fukushima disasters ushered in a crisis of confidence in the nation's journalism. While some Japanese media professionals used the incident as an occasion to engage in self-critique, others largely circumvented the delicate questions of self-censorship, reporters’ clubs (kisha kurabu), and sponsor coercion– and focused instead on restoring audience engagement through the development and testing of pioneering interactive television technology. Meanwhile, the technological rather than ethical focus of post-Fukushima changes inspired a new journalistic movement to create alternative digital spaces for informational exchange and political expression, with the intent of harnessing interactive digital technology in a way that bypasses the government controls and self-censorship characteristic of mainstream Japanese media. Despite a common idealism and intellectual curiosity, the two groups are hindered by divergent structural limitations; television industry insiders are fighting a conservative and imitative corporate climate whose content decisions are governed by the interventions of two monolithic advertising firms, while the independent media are profoundly alienated from this system. Engaging contemporary anthropological conversations concerning the evolving nature of mass media and media professionalism in the digital era, my work tracks the Japanese independent media's epistemic project to reform public culture in Japan and dismantle longstanding barriers to freedom of the press, as well as the mass media's more subtle application of interactive technology to TV content. Thus, I argue that analysis of these Japanese media innovations prompts new theoretical consideration of the divide between expert and amateur production, the use of media to constitute social change, and the nature of television itself.Item Recognizing Purity: Space, Non-change, Luminosity, and Effort in Longchen Rabjam’s Presentation of the Great Completeness (rdzogs chen)(2022-04-13) Kelley, Justin James; Klein, Anne C; Clements, Niki K; Faubion, JamesThis dissertation studies the role purity (dag pa) plays in 14th-century Longchen Rabjam’s (klong chen rab ‘byams) presentation of the Great Completeness (rdzogs chen). In service of this aim, I rigorously consider the semantic field of purity and its impact on our contemporary understanding of the Great Completeness. I specifically consider four major themes related to purity: space, non-change, luminosity, and effort. In doing so, my analysis builds on existent scholarship on the Great Completeness, highlighting how understanding Longchen Rabjam’s usage of purity elucidates often misunderstood elements of this contemplative system. Taken comprehensively, the semantic field of purity consists of a broad and remarkably diverse spectrum of attributes, each of which are employed by Longchenpa in service of describing the Great Completeness. In this way, I contend that purity is a vital lens for understanding Longchenpa’s presentation of the Great Completeness and its critical shift in emphasis from the ethical to the epistemological.Item Sound + Vision: Experimenting with the Anthropological Research Article of the Future(American Anthropological Association, 2016) Boyer, Dominic; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; LaFlamme, MarcelItem The social relations of a basic life science laboratory and its heterotopic milieu(2015-12-03) Chryssikos, Timothy James; Faubion, James; Georges, Eugenia; Harter, DeborahThe social relations of a “basic” life science laboratory, its relations to the other life sciences, to the physical sciences, to clinical medicine, and to the economic imperatives of the present era are examined. This work attends to some of the "day to day" activities of this group as it transitioned to a state-of-the-art, architecturally “open” and strategically situated research facility designed to enhance "unplanned" interactions among its variously trained occupants. These activities are situated within a broader discussion of this laboratory's primary disciplinary influences and the specific epistemic contests in which it was primarily invested. A theorization of these relations is carefully distinguished from prior approaches in "science studies" and elsewhere, thereby providing a new framework for analyzing inter-scientific relations.