My body imprisoned, my soul relieved: Youth, gangs and prison in Cape Verde

Urban street gangs flourish in the urban centres of the Cape Verdean archipelago. Most of their members belong to the male, young and economically disadvantaged strata of society. While in public discourse youth gangs are often peremptorily blamed for most of the violence and criminality that take place in the country, the internal dynamics of gang life often go unnoticed. Based on fieldwork in the cities of Praia and Mindelo, the article discusses the mechanisms that make Cape Verdean adolescents and youths join urban gangs and stick to them, despite the state’s politics of securitization and repression. Within this context, the experience of imprisonment is related to gang members’ pre-prison biographies and the conceptualization of prison itself, reinforced during individual ‘careers’ of marginality.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The (il)legal Indian: the Tupinambá and the juridification of indigenous rights and lives in North-Eastern Brazi

This article traces different aspects of the present-day juridification and judicialization of indigenous lives using the example of the Tupinambá Indians of north-eastern Brazil. The Tupinambá’s identity is being increasingly bureaucratized by public administration and is constantly being questioned by public and private agents to deny the Tupinambá’s constitutional land rights. In the course of the still ongoing process of the demarcation of the Indigenous Territory Tupinambá de Olivença, indigenous inhabitants are facing a plethora of civil actions, and Tupinambá leaders are being persecuted and criminalized by the police and the judiciary. This article exposes the legal intricacies of possessory actions against indigenous people in Brazil and discusses the different acts and attitudes of the actors of the Brazilian ‘juridical field’ as regards the indigenous rights. It suggests a view of law, law enforcement and law suits as means of social sense making, that is, a public staging, interpretation, imagining and ‘mapping’ of Brazil’s ‘indigenous question’, which has, ultimately, to be legitimized by society at large.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

To kill and to die: On the joys and sorrows of juvenile drug dealers in Bahia, Brazil

This article discusses the life and death of juvenile drug dealers in the state of Bahia, Brazil, where the drug business has become omnipresent and a growing number of youths from the urban periphery are taking up a career with one of the country’s many drug gangs. The price most of them pay for their economic success as traffickers is high: they are repeatedly imprisoned under harsh conditions, suffer severe physical violence and, at times, die at young age. Drawing on the narratives of juveniles from Bahia and the writings of Bataille and Baudrillard, the youths’ approach to life is discussed as a knowingly illusory attempt to regain their sovereignty within the boundaries of consumer capitalism. It is argued that their death is not a blow of fate, but rather the premeditated consequence of their acquisition of consumer-citizenship ‘on credit’ and, ultimately, their refusal to constitute Brazil’s modern precariat.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Morabeza, cash or body: prison, violence and the state in Praia, Cape Verde

In the past decade, Cape Verde has been facing severe and growing problems of youth delinquency and gang-related violence. The state has reacted to this challenge mainly with a securitization politics, expanding and modernizing its security forces. As a result, the Cape Verdean prison population has more than doubled over the same period. In the capital city of Praia, more and more youths from the disadvantaged periphery find themselves behind bars, serving long sentences for mostly drug- and gang-related crimes, in what seems to be a replication of the experience of many Cape Verdean immigrants in Portugal and elsewhere. In a personal fieldwork account, the article sketches out parallels between the experiences of immigrant youth in Portugal and marginalized youth in Cape Verde, and discusses the way the Cape Verdean state is presently dealing with the phenomenon of ‘youth delinquency’. Essentialist notions of the country’s supposed culture of ‘morabeza’ (gentleness) are confronted with actual patterns of symbolic and physical violence, revealing a persistent unwillingness of Cape Verdean public discourse to face up to the country’s growing structural socioeconomic disequilibrium.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Images of culture: participatory video, identity and empowerment

WOS:000317748300007 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science)Drawing on recent fieldwork in Brazil and Portugal, ‘participatory video’ is critically evaluated as a tool for anthropological research and empowerment. While questions of ‘image’ and ‘identity’ stand out as a major concern of the video workshops discussed, it is suggested that awareness-raising is the ultimate objective of audiovisual methods within a ‘shared anthropology’ that seeks not only to produce scientific knowledge, but also to acquire political relevance

Sehen und Sehen und gesehen werden. Die Macht des Blickes und der Blick zurück

Beobachtungen während einer partizipativ-audiovisuellen Feldforschung in der Lissabonner Peripherie bilden den Hintergrund für visuell-anthropologische Überlegungen zur „Macht des Blickes“. Der Blick staatlicher Institutionen und der Agenten staatlicher wie gesellschaftlicher Gewalt (wie z. B. der Medien) spiegelt Machtverhältnisse wider und schreibt diese fest. Die Bewohner der unterprivilegierten Stadtteile der portugiesischen Großstädte sind das Objekt eines Blickes, der sie in ihrer Alterität konstituiert und mittels dessen sie der portugiesischen Gesellschaft in ihrer bildhaften Marginalität „vorgeführt“ werden

Phase separation and coexistence of hydrodynamically interacting microswimmers

A striking feature of the collective behavior of spherical microswimmers is that for sufficiently strong self-propulsion they phase-separate into a dense cluster coexisting with a low-density disordered surrounding. Extending our previous work, we use the squirmer as a model swimmer and the particle-based simulation method of multi-particle collision dynamics to explore the influence of hydrodynamics on their phase behavior in a quasi-two-dimensional geometry. The coarsening dynamics towards the phase-separated state is diffusive in an intermediate time regime followed by a final ballistic compactification of the dense cluster. We determine the binodal lines in a phase diagram of Péclet number versus density. Interestingly, the gas binodals are shifted to smaller densities for increasing mean density or dense-cluster size, which we explain using a recently introduced pressure balance [S. C. Takatori, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 2014, 113, 028103] extended by a hydrodynamic contribution. Furthermore, we find that for pushers and pullers the binodal line is shifted to larger Péclet numbers compared to neutral squirmers. Finally, when lowering the Péclet number, the dense phase transforms from a hexagonal “solid” to a disordered “fluid” state

Atmospheric dust and aerosol as sources of nutrients in a mediterranean ecosystem of Israel Final report

SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: F93B699 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technologie (BMFT), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman