Anthropology Publications

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HOW TO KNOW WHEN NOT TO KNOW: Strategic Ignorance When Eliciting for Samoan Migrant Exchanges
(Berghan Books, 2000) Gershon, Ilana
Queer Pilgrimage: The San Francisco Homeland and Identity Tourism
(Wiley, 2001) Howe, Alyssa Cymene
When Culture Is Not A System: Why Samoan Cultural Brokers Can Not Do Their Job
(Taylor & Francis, 2006) Gershon, Ilana
In independent and American Samoa, Samoan representatives have historically been successful at furthering their communities' interests when dealing with various colonial regimes. Yet during my fieldwork in California, I kept witnessing failed encounters between Samoan migrants and government officials. I argue that government officials helped create these problems through the ways they expected Samoan migrants to act as culture-bearers. I conclude by exploring how cultural mediators become the focal point for tensions generated by the contradictory assumptions government system-carriers and Samoan culture-bearers hold about how to relate to social orders.
Sexual borderlands: Lesbian and gay migration, human rights, and the metropolitan community church
(Springer, 2007) Howe, Cymene
This article considers several questions surrounding sexual migration, binational same-sex couples, legal precedent, and the role of religious communities in lesbian and gay migration to the United States. With theoretical aspects of human rights serving as a starting point, the article then moves to a consideration of the legal dynamics of migration, the history of U.S. (im)migration law in relation to lesbian and gay asylum claims, and the Uniting American Families Act (2005). Drawing from the concept of sexual migration, the article proposes that religious or spiritual communities may provide important networks and ideological resources for lesbian and gay migrants who subscribe to religious values, particularly in a context of politically incendiary claims surrounding homosexuality and immigration. The analysis centers on the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), suggesting that with its socially legitimatized status, MCC may provide philosophical foundations necessary for effectively addressing human rights for lesbian and gay migrants.
Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism in Nicaragua
(American Anthropological Association, 2008) Howe, Cymene
This article develops the concept of “televisionary” activism—a mediated form of social justice messaging that attempts to transform culture. Focusing on a locally produced and very popular television show in Nicaragua, I consider how social justice knowledge is produced through television characters' scripting and performance. The ideological underpinnings aspire to a dialogic engagement with the audience, as producers aim to both generate public discourse and benefit from audiences' suggestions and active engagement. Several levels of media advocacy interventions are considered including the production, scripting, and translation of transnational material into local registers. Televisionary activism offers challenges to several conservative social values in Nicaragua by placing topics such as abortion, domestic violence, sexual abuse, homosexuality, and lesbianism very explicitly into the public sphere. At the same time, sexual subjects on the small screen must be framed in particular ways, as, for instance, with the homosexual subjects who are carefully coiffed in normalized human dramas. Finally, many of these televisionary tactics draw from and engage with transnational tropes of identity politics, and “gay” and “lesbian” subjectivity in particular, confounding the relationship between real and idealized sexual subjects in Nicaragua. That is, these televisionary tactics “market” transnational identity politics but derive legitimacy through their very “localness.”
The Legible Lesbian: Crimes of Passion in Nicaragua
(Taylor & Francis, 2009) Howe, Cymene
This article considers a precedent-setting murder case in Nicaragua that rendered a conviction based upon the victim's ‘sexual option’ and status as a ‘lesbian.’ A significant achievement for advocates in Nicaragua, the case was also a victory for sexual and human rights proponents globally. This article queries how the sexualization of culture can be viewed through the spectacle of Aura Rosa's life, death and symbolic resurrection. Analyzing the discourses and practices of Nicaraguan activists, international rights campaigns, the state, and local media, I argue that the post-mortem process of re-figuring the victim as a ‘lesbian’ is imaginable only within a discursive field saturated with human rights paradigms including those of sexual rights. Central to these practices are notions of vulnerable bodies, ascriptions to particular models of modernity and an emerging ‘epistemology of the hate crime.’
Transnationalizing Desire: Sexualizing Culture and Commodifying Sexualities
(Taylor & Francis, 2009) Howe, Cymene; Rigi, Jakob
Sexuality, as a conceptual framework, has become a site for several social, moral, and political controversies, economic strategies, existential anxieties and ontological uncertainties. The transformation of sexuality, semiotically and in practice, particularly since the 1950s, reveals itself to be part of wider social and economic processes that have been variously described under the rubrics of ‘globalization’ (Appadurai 1996; Featherstone 1990; Hannerz 1989; Sassen 1998) and ‘transnationalism’ (Blanc et al. 1994; Glick Schiller et al. 1992), or the kindred categories of ‘post-modernity’ (Jameson 1991), ‘late capitalism’ (Mandel 1975) and a ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey 2005). In this special issue, we are interested in how sexuality as commodity and practice has come to stand for vast categories of meaning and experience in a transnational context. We explore how various forms of sexuality and desire inform national identities, the sexual policies of the state, and concepts surrounding commodification and subjectivity. We understand ‘transnationalizing desire’ to be the locus of several overlapping political and cultural processes regarding the intimacies of sexuality: how desire and subjectivity are understood on ‘local’ levels, and in turn, how these categories of meaning and experience become appropriated and re-articulated in transnational exchanges. Central to the analytical frameworks included here is how individuals and collectivities imagine the horizons of sexuality and desire, whether through legal interventions of sexual rights and responsibilities, interactions in the international marriage ‘market,’ or in modifying local hierarchies of sexual identity. Resonating in each of these discussions is a tension between ‘local’ practices, identities and values and those that are seen to be transnationally ‘imported’ varieties.
Cooperation and Co-optation in Transnational Activism
(2010) Howe, Cymene
Cooperation and co-optation, despite their shared prefixes, seem to suggest very different approaches to establishing coalitions, politics and sociality. Where cooperation suggests prioritizing collective knowledge - shared ways of thinking, being and doing - co-optation is often understood as a kind of political thievery, usurping the politics, ideologies and practices of one collective in order to advance the goals of another. The cooperative impulse to create a synergy of skills, seems to find its reverse when we talk of co-optation; it is instead the appropriation of those synergic skills, or put differently: hitching one’s political wagon to another’s in order to reap the benefits therein. While co-optation is often invoked in the negative as an inappropriate, or at least uninvited, form of borrowing, I would like to recast the notion of co-optation in a more positive register as that “process of placing one’s political goals within a larger rubric of political success.” What I would like to elaborate here, based on my anthropological fieldwork among sexual rights activists in Nicaragua, is what I am calling the “strategic co-optation” of lesbian and homosexual identity. While Nicaragua is a country likely still remembered for the Sandinista Revolution, what is less well known is that following the end of the Sandinista regime in 1990, the country instituted Latin America’s most repressive anti-sodomy law (Article 204), which mandated that “anyone who induces, promotes, propagandizes or practices in scandalous form sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex commits the crime of sodomy and shall incur 1 to 3 years imprisonment.”[1] My research has been an attempt to understand how advocates of sexual rights in Nicaragua, and their cooperantes (often in the form of feminists) have worked—discursively and practically—to overturn their country’s anti-sodomy law. Many activists have indeed wed their struggles to the categories of “homosexual” and “lesbian” subjectivity. However, I will argue that we ought not see this as an example of colonial discursive dispersions where Southern subjects are victims of an assimilationist logic handed down from the North. Rather, I want to suggest that as activists invoke these political terms—ones that certainly have traction in the transnational [2] world of human rights advocacy—they have done so in ways that allow for creative and flexible appropriations of the terms themselves. These categories are, in other words, spacious signs with political teeth that are being strategically co-opted to address locally relevant concerns, both political and cultural. First, let me outline some of the scholarly concerns about transnational gay and lesbian rights and identity before I then turn to the work of Nicaraguan sexual rights advocates.
Gardening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water by Veronica Strang
(Wiley, 2011) Ballestero, Andrea S.
On Adaptive Optics: The Historical Constitution of Architectures for Expert Perception in Astronomy
(2012) Lowrie, Ian; The University of Toronto
This article charts the development of the modern astronomical observational system. I am interested most acutely in the digitization of this system in general, and in the introduction of adaptive optics in particular. I argue that these features have been critical in establishing the modern observatory as a factory for scientific data, rather than as a center of calculation in its own right. Throughout, the theoretical focus is on the nature of technological evolution in the observational system, understood as inextricably bound up with both the system-internal drive to surpass the limits imposed upon the distributed cognition of the researcher and the boundary at which empirical objects resolve themselves into technical objects. In short, this article explores the historically constituted character of expert astronomical perception, arguing that it is impossible to understand without constant reference to its material substrate.
The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America
(SAR Press, 2012) Ballestero, Andrea; Tucker, Catherine M.
It's Getting Better All the Time: Comparative Perspectives from Oceania and West Africa on Genetic Analysis and Archaeology
(Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2012) McIntosh, Susan Keech; Scheinfeldt, Laura B.
Technological advances are making genetic data collection and analysis feasible on a scale unimaginable only a few years ago. Early genetic research using mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome provided important insights for macroscale modeling of regional and continent-wide population movements, but the capacity to study the entire genome now opens an era of finer-grained,mesoscale studies of regional and local population histories that are more compatible with the scale of archaeological analysis. The utility of integrating both types of data is illustrated by a case study from Oceania, where genetic studies were used to evaluate two models for the geographic origins of the populations that colonized Polynesia beginning ca. 3000 BP, bringing with them the distinctive Lapita cultural assemblage. A second case study considers the application of genetic studies to an understanding of Fulbe history, especially that of the pastoral Fulbe. Both archaeological and genetic data are underdeveloped for the key Fulbe homeland regions of Mauritania and Senegal, but recent research in the Middle Senegal Valley permits some conjectures on the history of Fulbe nomadic pastoralism. The article concludes with suggestions for a multidisciplinary research agenda to expand and upgrade the quality of relevant archaeological data, incorporate biodistance studies of human skeletal material, and improve and expand genetic sampling using more historically sensitive collection protocols.
Transparency in Triads
(Wiley, 2012) Ballestero, Andrea S.
Transparency Short-Circuited: Laughter and Numbers in Costa Rican Water Politics
(Wiley, 2012) Ballestero, Andrea S.
Between 2006 and 2009, a group of Costa Rican NGOs, a Spanish aid agency, and local residents were entangled in the pursuit of transparency as a means to allocate funding for their “human right to water” project initiatives. Designed as a series of pedagogical activities to “build” local knowledge about water management, the aid agency conditioned their funding to the honest and correct implementation of the project as revealed by a system of indicators. Against orthodoxy, project leaders were put in charge of designing and implementing the auditing system, an arrangement that short-circuited the foundational separation between observers and observed that is customary in transparency-creation projects and gave the whole initiative an experimental quality. This article examines the building of that indicator system, my informants’ own fascination with producing “speaking numbers,” and the punctuated but constitutive role that laughter played in the process. I suggest that numeric indicators and laughter make the audit speak about intensity and emphasis rather than about the exclusive and discrete categories on which transparency is usually predicated. Here, the audit allowed political actors to rework the potential of water governance technologies, rather than limiting them to their explicit possibilities, in order to constitute what project participants imagine as an integral form of political agency. I argue that paying attention to the in-between process of creating the audit, before its final results are disclosed, highlights the self-referential, short-circuited, and productive uses of transparency as a political device.
Coins in Context: Local Economy, Value and Practice on the East African Swahili Coast
(Cambridge University Press, 2012-02) Wynne-Jones, Stephanie; Fleisher, Jeffrey; Social Sciences Research Institute; the Archaeological Field School
Coinage occupies an unusual position in archaeological research. Thriving scholarship on numismatics and monetary history ensures that the objects themselves are well-studied, often seen as an indication of chronology and of stylistic and commercial links. Yet coins might also be analysed as artefacts, and explored as part of the symbolic world of material culture through which archaeologists understand meaning and value in past societies. Using a recently-excavated assemblage of medieval Kilwa-type coins from Songo Mnara on the East African Swahili coast, this article explores the multiple ways that value was ascribed and created through use, rejecting a simple dichotomy between substantive and formal value. Attention is given to the contexts of the coins, which enables a discussion of the relationship between power and the constitution of value, the circulation and use of coins among townspeople, and their use within ritual and commemorative activity.
Epistemic Engineering and the Lucha for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua
(Wiley, 2013) Howe, Cymene
From 1992 to 2007, Nicaragua had the dubious distinction of maintaining the most repressive antisodomy law in the Americas. Based upon several years of field research with activists involved in what they have called the lucha for sexual rights, this article considers the “epistemological engineering” of Nicaragua's sexual rights struggle. It discusses two distinct frameworks that have informed the work of advocacy: “Orgullo Lésbico-gay” (Lesbian and Gay Pride) and “Una Sexualidad Libre de Prejuicios” (Sexuality Free from Prejudice)—both of which have different ideological origins and epistemological purposes. As managers of political logics and strategists of social struggle, activists have utilized political performances and publicly disseminated discourses in order to craft the way in which the struggle will “come out,” and ultimately how sexual rights will be understood by the larger Nicaraguan body politic. Through this process, activists have developed the epistemic dimensions of sexual rights in multiple registers, including those of universal liberation and minority rights, as well as earlier iterations of a communitarian ethos, including Sandinismo.
The subject that is not one: On the ethics of mysticism
(Sage, 2013) Faubion, James D.
Any anthropological approach to ethics that gives a central place to subjects and the positions they might occupy is obliged sooner or later to address an apparent paradox, instances of which are widespread. They occur in those many ethical systems that valorize a condition that can hardly be characterized without equivocation: the subject that is not one.We commonly think of such a (non-)subject as a mystic. A useful starting point in coming to terms with the mystic rests in the distinctive place in which he or she typically stands in relation to any given ethical domain – a place decidedly not at the center, at the axial conjunction that the ethical Everyperson occupies. Victor Turner’s treatment of liminality provides a useful analytical precedent, but it does not of itself adequately clarify either the specific ethical difference or the specific ethical function of mysticism as such. Crucial to both is the mystic’s generation in practice of what turns out to be a very real paradox of self-reference, the thinking and acting out of the proposition that ‘this ethics is not an ethics’. The upshot is that the mystic as (non-) subject confronts the ethical system in which or by which he or she resides with its logical and its social incompleteness. No wonder, then, that mystics are rarely beloved of ethical absolutists, whose absolutism – by their very being, and whether or not wittingly – they call into question. No wonder, on the other hand, that moral-ethical liberals so often find them beyond the pale. The ethical paradox of the mystic is insuperable – but all the more socioculturally significant in being so.
Regulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields
(Indiana University Press, 2014) Türem, Ziya Umut; Ballestero, Andrea
Sexual adjudications and queer transpositions
(John Benjamins, 2014) Howe, Cymene
Each of the articles included in this special issue of the Journal of Language and Sexuality asks us to imagine queer im/migration, asylum and sexual citizenship in multiple dimensions and to probe the discursive operations that establish the parameters of sexual subjectivity. This review article argues that these processes are illustrative of “sexual adjudication:” the discursive coordinates, legal logics and linguistic sensibilities that produce the category of the sexual migrant, the sexual refugee and the sexual asylum seeker. The discussions featured here engage questions of how sexual epistemics work in both sending and receiving countries, as well as the role of borders in constituting narratives of sexual subjectivity. In addition to analyzing the theoretical overlaps and reciprocal conversations between the articles included in the special issue, this essay provides a historical, comparative context by situating these discussions within larger theoretical and terminological questions regarding queer im/migration, asylum and subjectivity.
Anthropologies of ethics: Where we've been, where we are, where we might go
(University of Edinburgh, 2014) Faubion, James D.
Comment on Laidlaw, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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