Building community through hospitality : indirect obligations to reciprocate in a transnational speech community

Funded by the University of Manchester and the Manchester Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence.Anthropologists largely draw on the theoretical assumption that the interactional practices underlying hospitality are akin to those of gifting. Yet, by focussing on the giving and receiving of hospitality, such scholarship has failed to address these exchanges’ third element: reciprocating. Faced with this, this article reflects on travelling among Esperanto speakers in France, aiming to grasp how hospitality gains prominence in turning people into fully fledged Esperanto speakers through promoting intercultural, multilingual and cross-border exchanges. Asking what Mauss, Pitt-Rivers and Sahlins would have written about reciprocity had they come across backpackers, couchsurfers and Esperanto speakers, I explore why reciprocity and hospitality are vital for the existence of the Esperanto speech community and, more broadly, what is the place of reciprocity in hospitality. From the ethnography presented, I argue that hospitality can also emerge as a community-building mechanism, stemming from indirect obligations to reciprocate that may paradoxically constitute both short-lived dyadic relationships and long-standing communities.PostprintPeer reviewe

Neutralizing the political : language ideology as censorship in Esperanto youth media during the Cold War

Leverhulme Trust - RPG-2021-215This article takes a magazine for Esperanto youth as an entryway to explore the links between language ideologies and censorial practices. During the Cold War, Esperanto print media sought a connection with the Third World to present Esperanto as an alternative to US-led English and USSR-led Russian. With anti-imperialism gaining ground in these magazines, their editors struggled to adhere to the ideology that posits Esperanto as a neutral and international language. Analyzing the editorial work behind the magazine Kontakto, I explore how partly silencing anti-colonial perspectives worked to safeguard Esperanto's neutrality, ultimately asking: how can language ideologies act as mechanisms of censorship?Peer reviewe

Prefigurative politics

‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to how activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for broader society. Inspired by anarchist principles, the core practices characterising prefiguration include participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Gaining visibility with the social movements that blossomed after 1968, and again with the post-1999 movements opposing neoliberal globalisation, prefigurative politics involve deploying political practices that are in line with the activists’ envisaged goals. These, in turn, tend to encompass the construction of a democratic and horizontal society, which must be enacted through egalitarian relationships between activists who refrain from resorting to authoritarian, sexist, and exclusionary means to reach political goals. Yet, what are the origins of this concept? What kind of politics are referred to as prefigurative? Since the concept’s consolidation, anthropologists have been at the forefront of answering these questions, as both researchers and activists. They look at how prefigurative politics intersect with themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, social change, community-building, and everyday ways of inhabiting the world. This entry explores how prefigurative politics as a concept and as a series of practices have become relevant among those who build horizontal political and social relations, oppose representative democracy, and embody alternative lifestyles. Exploring prefigurative politics leads scholars to question the seemingly straightforward divide between the New Left and ‘old lefts’. Additionally, asking whether right-wing movements can also engage in prefigurative politics helps us better understand the pervasive practices that transform non-institutionalised activism into laboratories from where people foster change and experiment with new socialities.Publisher PD

Por uma antropologia de varanda reversa: Etnografando um encontro entre índios e crianças em uma escola no Rio de Janeiro

This work is based on the ethnography of an encounter between chil-dren in a school in Rio de Janeiro and two former residents of Aldeia Maracanã.One of the key points of this school’s pedagogical proposal is the “valorisationof the Brazilian culture”, taking into consideration its diverse manifestations andespecially invoking elements of indigenous cultures. As part of this project, oneof the school’s initiative was to invite two defenders of the indigenous cause to“present their people and their culture” to the children from the second grade ofelementary school. This article aims to explore the approximations, distances andquestionings provoked in this contact – in which, as in verandah anthropology,the indigenous peoples come to the whites to explain their culture.Este trabalho se baseia na etnografia de um encontro entre criançasem uma escola no Rio de Janeiro e dois ex-moradores da Aldeia Maracanã. Umdos pontos centrais da proposta pedagógica dessa escola em questão é a “valorização da cultura brasileira”, levando em consideração suas diversas manifestações e invocando principalmente elementos de culturas indígenas. Como parte desse projeto, uma das iniciativas tomadas pela escola foi convidar dois defensores da causa indígena para “apresentarem seu povo e sua cultura” para as crianças do segundo ano do ensino fundamental. Minha intenção neste artigo é explorar as aproximações, os afastamentos e os questionamentos gerados durante esse contato – no qual, tal como em uma antropologia de varanda, os índios vêm até o meio dos brancos para explicar sua cultura

The death of Elizabeth II on Wikipedia:Fleshing out freedom through technoliberal participation online

While journalists performed a long-rehearsed move to announce the death of Elizabeth II on the BBC, several volunteer editors rushed to break the news in the queen’s Wikipedia article. Aside from updating verb tenses from is to was, such edits also entailed a revisionist approach, with Wikipedians seeking to shape how the British royals would be portrayed online. Tracing the negotiations and edit wars on the English-language Wikipedia surrounding this event, this article asks: to what extent does collaborative textual production subvert individual authorship in favour of knowledge co-production and collective authorship? Drawing on an online ethnography on Wikipedia’s metapages, I propose technoliberal participation as a framework to flesh out how internet users frequently perceive whatever is available online as property of the collective. Online projects such as this self-styled ‘free encyclopedia’ maximize their participants’ freedom to express themselves while setting them free from a sense of long-lasting commitment to the project. Considering the place of technoliberal participation in several online settings, I argue that the perception of digital technologies as neoliberal tools to address neoliberal problems sets out freedom as a watchword around which content authorship is not erased, but reframed, via responsibility-free, do-it-yourself media ideology