Competing biosecurity and risk rationalities in the Chittagong poultry commodity chain, Bangladesh

This paper anthropologically explores how key actors in the Chittagong live bird trading network perceive biosecurity and risk in relation to avian influenza between production sites, market maker scenes and outlets. They pay attention to the past and the present, rather than the future, downplaying the need for strict risk management, as outbreaks have not been reported frequently for a number of years. This is analysed as ‘temporalities of risk perception regarding biosecurity’, through Black Swan theory, the idea that unexpected events with major effects are often inappropriately rationalized (Taleb in The Black Swan. The impact of the highly improbable, Random House, New York, 2007). This incorporates a sociocultural perspective on risk, emphasizing the contexts in which risk is understood, lived, embodied and experienced. Their risk calculation is explained in terms of social consent, practical intelligibility and convergence of constraints and motivation. The pragmatic and practical orientation towards risk stands in contrast to how risk is calculated in the avian influenza preparedness paradigm. It is argued that disease risk on the ground has become a normalized part of everyday business, as implied in Black Swan theory. Risk which is calculated retrospectively is unlikely to encourage investment in biosecurity and, thereby, points to the danger of unpredictable outlier events

Consumption caught in the cash nexus.

During the last thirty years, ‘consumption’ has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things - the cash nexus - leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, ‘atmosphere’, functionality, biography, interaction and mediation

Collapsing fish stocks, gendered economies, and anxieties of entrapment in coastal Sierra Leone

This article explores the economic negotiations between Sierra Leonean fishermen and the women who compete to buy their fish; tracing how relationships of gendered intimacy and interdependence are being reconfigured in a context of deepening economic precarity. Fish stocks in Sierra Leone are in crisis. Fisherfolk look back with nostalgia to a past in which bountiful harvests had made it possible for transactions of fish to be simple and impersonal. Today, by contrast, it is almost impossible for women to access fish without working to develop strong personal relationships with fishermen: deploying gifts of food, loans of money, and even secret ‘medicines’ to secure the loyalty of potential customers. I analyze how men and women reflect on their growing impoverishment through discourses that emphasize their moral ambivalence at being drawn back into webs of interpersonal dependency and argue that these anxieties need to be understood in the context of Sierra Leone’s history of domestic slavery

Ruled by records: The expropriation of land and the misappropriation of lists in Islamabad

In this article, I investigate the ongoing battle between villagers on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, and the state development agency attempting to expropriate their land. This battle has been waged through the medium of documents, particularly lists, which villagers and colluding officials have used to defraud the Pakistani government of the equivalent of millions of dollars. Through this case study, I develop an approach to contemporary state governance as material practice, showing how government discourse is shaped by the material forms it takes and highlighting the issue of reference and predication (or how words relate to things). [ governance, documents, state, semiotics, technology, materiality, South Asia, Pakistan ]Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75363/1/j.1548-1425.2008.00095.x.pd

Historicising Material Agency: from Relations to Relational Constellations

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis; and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations, but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC – third century AD): the fluid, the categorical, and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories, and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives, and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9244-

Nurture commodified? An investigation into commercial human milk supply chains

The material conditions in which women provide breast milk range widely, on the basis of their class and geographical provenance. The commercialisation of breast milk provision throws up questions related to debates on the transnational reconfiguration of social reproduction as they intersect with discourses on motherhood and healthy child development as well as contemporary processes of commodification of the body and the emergence of new gendered forms of atypical work in the global economy (Bakker 2007; LeBaron 2010; Steans & Tepe 2010). This article presents a study of the first commercial human milk processor in India, NeoLacta Lifesciences that obtained an export license for the Australian market in 2017. These practices may be seen to be part of a wider Reproductive Industrial Complex (Vertommen 2016), in which women’s reproductive bodily capacities are enrolled in wider economic and financial processes, instantiating new relations between gender, race, economies and care. This article employs a feminist political economy framework that places into dialogue analyses of social reproduction and commodification with feminist science/technology studies and medical/political anthropology in order to analyse the social, political, and technical processes that transform breast milk into a commodity that is internationally traded and the implications of this for contemporary understandings of work and gender