190 research outputs found
Moderno de otro modo. Lecciones caribeñas desde el lugar del salvaje
«Modernidad» es un término turbio perteneciente a la familia de palabras que podemos etiquetar como «universales noratlánticos». Los universales noratlánticos son particulares que han adquirido un grado de universalidad, son pedazos de la historia de la humanidad convertidos en estándares históricos. En este artículo argumenta que en su más común despliegue como un universal noratlántico, la modernidad disfraza y desconoce a los muchos Otros que crea. Se examina entonces cómo desde el Caribe la modernidad nunca fue, y nunca podría ser, lo que dice ser
Returning home: heritage work among the Stl'atl'imx of the Lower Lillooet River Valley
This article focusses on heritage practices in the tensioned landscape of the Stl’atl’imx (pronounced Stat-lee-um) people of the Lower Lillooet River Valley, British Columbia, Canada. Displaced from their traditional territories and cultural traditions through the colonial encounter, they are enacting, challenging and remaking their heritage as part of their long term goal to reclaim their land and return ‘home’. I draw on three examples of their heritage work: graveyard cleaning, the shifting ‘official’/‘unofficial’ heritage of a wagon road, and marshalling of the mountain named Nsvq’ts (pronounced In-SHUCK-ch) in order to illustrate how the past is strategically mobilised in order to substantiate positions in the present. While this paper focusses on heritage in an Indigenous and postcolonial context, I contend that the dynamics of heritage practices outlined here are applicable to all heritage practices
Stitching time: artisanal collaboration and slow fashion in post-disaster Haiti
The promotion of the textile and garment industries as a development strategy following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and a US-backed return to garment assembly lines has prompted an interrogation of some of the local impacts of transnational manufacturing practices in this context. This essay seeks to evaluate alternative fashion practices and social enterprises in Haiti that are currently challenging and disassembling the contemporary forms of slavery predominant in offshore low-wage garment manufacturing. These slower “ethical fashion” cooperatives integrate traditional Haitian skills and cultural konesans (knowledge) with international design languages and market savoir-faire to produce unique handcrafted pieces for the global fashion market. Yet, as this paper argues, these collaborations reveal ongoing neo-colonial inequalities that side-line Haitian agency. Their uneven modes of production and marketing strategies often involve short-term interventions by Western fashion designers that undermine Haitian expertise. This examination of artisan “development” therefore seeks to situate these enterprises in a longer history of sustainability in Haiti, and considers how stitching cloth in response to disaster can retrace the stories of loss and survival of communities and mediate cultural knowledge
Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance
Anthropologists engaged inpost-colonial studies are increasingly adoptingan historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain morean extractive than an ethnographic one.Documents are thus still invokedpiecemeal to confirm the colonial invention ofcertain practices or to underscore culturalclaims, silent. Yet such mining of the content of government commissions,reports, and other archival sources rarely paysattention to their peculiar placement and form .Scholars need to move fromarchive-as-source to archive-as-subject. Thisarticle, using document production in the DutchEast Indies as an illustration, argues thatscholars should view archives not as sites ofknowledge retrieval, but of knowledgeproduction, as monuments of states as well assites of state ethnography. This requires asustained engagement with archives as culturalagents of ``fact'' production, of taxonomies inthe making, and of state authority. What constitutes thearchive, what form it takes, and what systemsof classification and epistemology signal atspecific times are (and reflect) critical featuresof colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of thelate nineteenth-century imperial state, arepository of codified beliefs that clustered(and bore witness to) connections betweensecrecy, the law, and power.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/41825/1/10502_2004_Article_5096461.pd
Shades of empire: police photography in German South-West Africa
This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.International Bibliography of Social Science
Biolegitimacy, rights and social policies: New biopolitical regimes in mental healthcare in Brazil
From West Indies to East Indies: Archipelagic Interchanges
In this paper, I work to rethink notions of comparison and area studies by viewing my ethnographic work in Indonesia through the lens of theories developed by anthropologists working in the Caribbean region. In bringing 'East Indies' and 'West Indies' together in this way, I explore the possibility of reconfigured networks of citation, collaboration and interchange that might help anthropology respond in new ways to contemporary dynamics of globalisation. © 2006 Copyright Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia
Uneven and combined confusion: on the geopolitical origins of capitalism and the rise of the west
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