Browsing by Author "Faubion, James D"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Big Ocean: Marine Conservation, Bureaucratic Practice, and the Politics of Vagueness in the Pacific Islands
    (2015-05-21) Durbin, Trevor J.; Faubion, James D; Boyer, Dominic; Howe, A. Cymene; Ward, Kerry R.
    The Cook Islands Marine Park (CIMP) was claimed to be the largest Marine Protected Area in the world when it was declared in August 2012. This event was part of a trend to develop Large-Scale Marine Protected Areas in the Pacific Islands region and beyond. By some estimates only a few LSMPAs account for most marine biodiversity protection globally. This dissertation represents the first ethnographic account of the development of an LSMPA at local, national, regional, and international scales. An analysis of ethnographic and documentary materials shows that the development of the CIMP is not best understood as a process in which clear goals were set and achieved within existing political and administrative institutions but rather occurred within the context of a political ecology of vagueness, where vagueness is characterized by wandering, the same kind of wandering attributed to vagabonds, sailers, and even the ocean itself. A political ecology of vagueness is analyzed in terms of a flexible conceptual network that approach the vague as a political and social resource. This conceptual framework includes Foucault’s heterotopia, Turners’ notions of liminality as a characteristic of communitas, Fischer’s use of deep play and ethical plateau, and Weber’s characterization of appeals to charismatic authority. An approach to vagueness is presented within a political ecology framework in which ecological distribution conflicts are the result of interstitial social and political processes. It is argued that the the CIMP has become a viable political and ecological project because it was not precisely defined conceptually and because it was collectively imagined and worked upon within social, culture, and political “other” spaces that were interstitial to existing structures.
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    Configuring Violence: Governing Family, Marriage and Migration in Australian Social Welfare
    (2020-02-17) Zeweri, Helena; Faubion, James D
    Using qualitative ethnographic methods over the course of 14 months in Melbourne, Australia, this study focuses on the institutional politics, ethical dilemmas, and knowledge practices through which forced marriage was conceived and contested as a new category of culturally specific violence across social welfare, law enforcement, and migrant community spaces. Unlike other forms of gender-based violence that have become objects of national concern in liberal states, forced marriage brings together questions of social welfare and humanitarian reason with questions of migrant mobility, state sovereignty, and citizenship. I argue that this new category of violence was shaped by the demands of the criminal justice, immigration, and social welfare systems which each represented Muslim migrant familial relations—both domestic and transnational—as social problems in competing ways. This study demonstrates how logics of risk, threat, care, and concern work simultaneously to produce neocolonial social policies in settler colonial liberal contexts confronting the human aftermath of global displacement.
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    Ethics of Freedom, Pragmatics of Constraint: Theatre in a Post-Mandela South Africa
    (2017-04-21) Vlachos, Nathanael Martin; Faubion, James D
    This dissertation, an ethnography of South African theatre artists, traces the moral and ethical contours of a “post-Mandela” South Africa. While “post-apartheid” South Africa is marked by ethical nation-building projects like racial reconciliation and the push for a nonracial “rainbow nation,” post-Mandela South Africa is characterized by a growing skepticism of these projects and a sense that many South Africans have yet to enjoy the freedoms promised by Mandela and others. In dialogue with the anthropology of ethics and Foucauldian ethical frameworks in particular, I examine the implications of a post-Mandela South Africa with regard to processes of shaping and forming self and community. What moral and ethical resources are available for imagining and enacting a good life when moral nation-building projects collapse? What new moral exemplars and pedagogues emerge from a context where former icons of struggle are now seen as collaborators with a colonial past and an insidious neoliberal present? How has this moment mutated those things most integral to understandings of self, like race, class, kinship, and politics? What forms do freedom and constraint currently take in this context? These questions and others are answered through an ethnographic study of South African theatre, drawing on fieldwork from Johannesburg, Soweto, and Grahamstown. Rather than undertaking a study of audience reception or conducting close readings of plays, I focus on the artists themselves, contextualizing their aesthetic sensibilities, the ethical journey of becoming and being an artist, and the inescapable historical entanglements with which they grapple. As I explore the freedoms and constraints at the heart of South African ethical life, I engage their implications for classic and contemporary conversations in anthropology, including kinship, political economy, epistemology, pedagogy, and whiteness. At the same time, the dissertation contributes new conversations to the landscape of South African anthropology, charting emergent ethical subjectivities, diverse understandings of freedom, and the shifting significance of race in South Africa and beyond.
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    Lesbicas Negras' Ethics and The Scales of Racialized Sexual Recognitions in Gynecology and Public Discourses in Salvador-Bahia
    (2015-04-20) Falu, Nessette; Faubion, James D; Howe, A. Cymene; Bongmba, Elias; Georges, Eugenia; Hennessy, Rosemary
    This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of the bio-cultural ethics of gynecological care among Afro-Brazilian lesbians, or lesbicas negras, in Salvador-Bahia. I argue that many lesbicas negras’ pursuit of what they believe is their human right to reveal their sexuality and integrate it into accessing quality gynecological care and health education from their physicians is informed by their ethical obligation to confront the wide social issue of “preconceito.” Preconceito, which literally translates to “prejudice,” represents a social phenomenon that signals how preconceived ideas can materialize micro-social inequities and the barriers to effective and affirming medical-patient interactions for these women. This project is an interpretation of the motivations and strategies to achieve social well-being in a context entrenched with preconceito toward skin color, homosexuality, poverty, and more. I contextualize particular strategies that help these women conceive themselves as agents of their well-being as black women, homosexuals, and as bodies historicized and continually marginalized as a population afflicted with economic, political, and health disparities. Theoretically, I demonstrate the ethical as a domain of relationships that my key interlocutors have toward themselves (also with others), and as a result, I pay attention to how such relationships inform a particular set of ethical practices for the acquisition of well-being and human rights as openly black gay women. I interpret such relationships to the self to be composed of the understandings my interlocutors have about the impact that the freedom to speak about their sexuality, particularly as consumers of healthcare system, has upon their well-being. Analytically, I scale the social complexities of pursuing recognition of sexual liberty across public discourses, micro-social quotidian experiences, and social interactions. Thus, I argue that lesbicas negras become ethical subjects everyday as they strive toward well-being and such strivings can demonstrate the complicated relationships across sexual health, sexuality, racial formations, social well-being, citizenship, public discourses, and freedom (libertade).
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    "Poor Religious Understanding": Peacebuilding, Secular Islam, and Approaches to Countering VIolent Extremism in Kyrgyzstan
    (2020-08-28) Wilensky-Lanford, Ethan; Faubion, James D
    This dissertation considers the intersections of Islam and secularism in the post-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, as well as how international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have worked to promote peace and counter violent extremism in the country. By introducing two intertwined concepts – Islamic secularism and secular Islam – the author describes the spaces where state policy, development goals, individual freedoms, and religious practice meet. Through analysis of interviews with friends and associates of some Kyrgyzstani nationals who became foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, the dissertation also identifies certain contextual push factors for violence. Ultimately, using Saba Mahmood's critique, this dissertation rejects the liberal motive of promoting secularism within Islam for civilizing purposes, in favor of six concrete considerations for practically countering violent extremism in the Kyrgyzstani context.
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    The Ethics of Whiteness: Race, Religion, and Social Transformation in South Africa
    (2017-04-21) Schneider, Rachel Christianna; Bongmba, Elias K; Faubion, James D
    The Ethics of Whiteness is an ethnographic study of progressive white Christians living in Johannesburg who sought to engage with histories of racism, contemporary racial inequality, and calls for racial redress. After apartheid, many whites attempted to preserve their privileged way of life through strategies of withdrawal, isolation, and emigration. In this context, Christian churches became key sites for maintaining elite white cultural norms. The individuals and groups I studied chose an alternate path: one which sought to embrace, rather than resist, sociopolitical and racial change. My interlocutors intentionally lived and worked in poor, black spaces and were involved in experimental social and spiritual communities aimed at bridging race and class divides. Seeking to challenge dominant white norms, they strove to cultivate lives of simplicity, service, and “downward mobility.” Such actions, while not unproblematic, were legitimated through a plurality of secular and religious ideals that framed authentic South Africanness, authentic humanness, and authentic Christianity as bound up with lived sacrifice and struggle. At the heart of this study is what I call the ethics of whiteness—the beliefs, practices, and values that motivated those I studied to engage in efforts to think and act otherwise in relation to their conservative white peers. I develop the concept of the ethics of whiteness in dialogue with concerns and methodological approaches found in the anthropology of ethic, which focuses on the empirical and qualitative study of ethical life. While wary of traditional religious institutions, my interlocutors drew from a number of religious sources and histories to develop their socially engaged form of Christian spirituality, including 1) Black Theology and South Africa’s history of multiracial religious activism against apartheid; 2) liberal Protestantism and its focus on social development and civic engagement; and 3) the Emerging Church Movement, an Anglo-American reform movement that begin in the late 1990s in opposition to conservative white evangelicalism. The confluence of these movements, I suggest, ultimately allowed my interlocutors to understand themselves simultaneously as political activists, development workers, and Christian revolutionaries engaged in the work of building a “new” non-racial, democratic South Africa where white and black alike could find a dwelling place.
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    Twilight of the God-Idols: Race, Religion, and the Life and Death of Whiteness in Contemporary America
    (2014-11-17) Driscoll, Christopher M; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias; Faubion, James D
    White people die. Such a brash statement not only refers to an obvious physical death faced by humans across race, but is metaphoric commentary on literal shifting racial demographics in an increasingly diverse 21st Century U.S. society. This project suggests that certain concepts, such as whiteness or the category of god, what I refer to as “god-idols,” make acceptance of this real or imagined “death” difficult, as it is their function to ignore, deny or fight directly against recognition of human limit and uncertainty experienced through a confrontation with physical and social expressions of death. Though not limited to white Christians, historically, many white U.S. Christians have been unable and unwilling to accept a loss of social control and certainty—a loss that appears on the horizon. Responding to the fears of some and the hopes of others that such a “death” becomes reality, I make use of the trope of death as theme and ontological grounding so as to theorize a death-dealing system of adherence to these “god-idols,” followed by suggestions about how to respond to such a social arrangement. I offer the start of a program of response, calling for white Christians and white people more generally to fully exercise their limited human freedom through a radical embrace of their responsibility to learn to live in an uncertain social world where interdependence and equitable relationships are required in ever-complicated ways.