The Empire of Love: review of Elizabeth Povinelli

A review of Povinelli, Elizabeth (2006) The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality, Durham and London: Duke University Press

Archives, promises, values: forensic infrastructures in times of austerity

This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated, or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service delivery promised connectivity, prosperity and wellbeing, in reality it also brought forward new levels of risk and vulnerability, generating new tensions and frictions in the body politic. As genetic science reaches post-archival horizons through new genetic sequencing technologies, forensic science in postarchival times raises questions concerning the differential impact of the fragmentation of analytical and archival infrastructures and increasingly asynchronous bureaucracies whose role is displaced by the relative autonomy of datasets and computational architectures that elude governance oversight and citizens’ scrutiny

Secrecy, subjectivity and sociality: an ethnography of conflict in Peten Guatemala (1999-2000)

The thesis explores the relations between histories of violence and cultures of secrecy in Peten, northern Guatemalan in the aftermath of the Peace Accords signed in 1996 by the Guatemalan government and guerrilla insurgents. Informed by ethnographic research among displaced constituencies with experiences of militancy in the guerrilla organisation Rebel Armed Forces, the thesis traces the contours of dispersed and intermittent guerrilla social relations. It explores histories of governmentality in Peten and their relations to state-sponsored violence, insurgency and repression; the incitement and replication of ambivalence in social relations; the production of socialities and subjectivities marked by secrecy; guerrilla ethics and aesthetics of sociality established through generation and circulation of substance; phenomenologies of guerrilla prosthetic embodiment and subjectivity. Violence and conflict are shown to be deeply implicated in guerrilla secret socialities and subjectivities. In turn, the social and cultural field appears as a site of everincreasing partiality. In an effort to apprehend and represent the shifts in perspective thus engendered, the thesis asks what presuppositions make partial subjectivities and socialities amenable to experience, reflection and representation. Through anthropological knowledge practices, social and cultural realms appear plural, complex and relative. However, when anthropology is located within the history of Western metaphysics, it is clear that traditions of anthropological enquiry have imagined partiality to be the culturally specific manifestation of a universal human condition, cognitive structure or interpretative capacity. Since Nietzsche and Heidegger, progressive weakening of Western metaphysics and erosion of the foundations of thought have made these presuppositions problematic. Further, they have engendered the conditions of possibility for anthropology to move beyond the enumeration of potentially infinite partial perspectives grounded in strong universalist assumptions. Anthropology that accepts the weakening of Western metaphysics imagined as the advancement of nihilism may apprehend and represent constant shifts of partial perspectives in anti-foundational terms, thus also realising its nihilist vocation

Sepur Zarco, Guatemala: ‘bodying forth’ and forensic aesthetics of witnessing in the courtroom and beyond

Drawing on long-term anthropological research in Guatemala, the article examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as ‘Sepur Zarco’. Focusing on the scene of selected court hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, the analysis focuses on ‘bodying forth’ (Das 2007), as a process of witnessing, materialisation and subjectification that emerges in the declarations of the different parties, as they conjure up Dominga Cuc Coc, a local Maya Q’eqchi’ woman, on the riverbank washing army uniforms under duress, or as the body of the forensic exhumation. ‘Bodying forth’ is tied to performative forensic imaginaries and aesthetics in the courtroom, the broader Guatemalan body politic, and beyond; it challenges the epistemologies underpinning law and science to re-centre the necessary differential and differentiated accounts of the witnesses and their appeals to justice

Globalization, governmentality and failure through the prism of Petén, Guatemala

In this paper, I consider the analytical purchase of a focus on ‘failure’ for the analysis of globalising processes in Petén, Guatemala. I locate my interest in ‘failure’ at the point of intersection between theoretical reflection and ethnographic experience, and propose to frame my interrogation of the nexus between globalisation and failure specifically in terms of governmentality. The emphasis on governmentality unsettles simplistic assumptions concerning the meanings of ‘globalisation’ to suggest the importance of a link between globalising processes and specific ‘projects of governance’. A consideration of the relation between globalising processes, governmentality and failure through the ‘local prism’ of Petén focuses the analysis on situated understandings of contemporary processes of social transformation, a point which is illustrated with reference to declarations of failure of the large conservation project Maya Biosphere Reserve. In turn, failure through this global/local prism brings into focus the knowledge practices, analytical operations, scalar assumptions and imaginative figurations inherent in thinking through global/local ‘contexts’. The paper concludes that 'failure' constitutes a concept-metaphor linked to a plurality of local/global interpretative strategies through which people make sense of globalising processes and their histories. This suggests a broader point concerning the role of concept-metaphors for ethnography

Life, death, ethnography: epistemologies and methods of the quasi-event

What is the relation between the biopolitical and necropolitical terrain in and through which experience unravels and the conceptual apparatuses which hold the promise of analysis and critique? What analytics, methods and ethics do contemporary life-and-death formations and intersecting precarious modes of existence elicit? What difference, if any, does it make to appeal to the ordinary and the everyday, the situated and always-already-in-relation, the emergent and the quasi-event (Povinelli, 2011), as simultaneously sites, objects and frames? In this article, I approach these questions ethnographically, with reference to debates in social and cultural theory and drawing on long-term anthropological research in Guatemala. The article aims to make an original contribution to debates on biopolitical and necropolitical processes and dynamics, by reflecting on the implications for epistemologies, methods and infrastructures

Postplurality: An Ethnographic Tableau

Book synopsis: Marilyn Strathern’s ethnographic contributions to studies of personhood, kinship, gender relations and reproduction have achieved wide recognition in the field of anthropology. Her analytic devices, including her model of merographic connection, have had profound effects on anthropologists’ responses to the crisis of representation, especially for those who have drawn on the transformative and subversive capacities of her analytic thinking to conjure up the ethnographic present. However, to date there has been no volume that explicitly brings Strathern and queer analytics together over questions of knowledge and ontology. This collection of original essays draws on the significance of Strathern’s work in respect of its potential for queer anthropological analysis. Utilising a range of ontological imaginings and subversions, the book explores how people might relate to queer object categories partially, merographically, or in terms of a sense of dissonance from signifier and self. The chapters examine the ways in which Strathern’s varied analytic devices facilitate the creation of alternative forms of anthropological thinking, as well as a greater understanding of how knowledge practices of queer objects, subjects and relations operate and take effect. Queering Knowledge offers an innovative collection of writings, bringing about queer and anthropological syntheses through Strathern’s oeuvre. The ontological and epistemological questions that the book addresses will make it especially relevant to anthropologists engaged in queer theory, as well as scholars of gender studies, social and cultural anthropology, science and technology studies, social theory and cultural theory, research epistemology and methodology, and ethnography

Counterfeit: Disruption and Creation in the Files of Transnational Adoptions from Guatemala to Europe

The article draws on our respective work on the transnational adoption files that ordered the movement of children from Guatemala to Europe in the latter part of the 20th century and up until 2007, to consider strategies to detect and figure the irregularities that underpinned these transnational adoption flows. We intersect approaches to deciphering the files drawn from anthropological research conducted in Guatemala, and in Europe in the context of work to support adoptees’ individual and collective search for origins. We provide an overview of the historical and political context, and the legal arrangements that underpinned the rise of transnational adoption flows from Guatemala (1977 – 2007). We consider how adoption files operate as entry points into searches for origins and understandings of the adoption process. When read against the grain, adoption files simultaneously reveal and occlude personal histories and bureaucratic practices. They evidence entrenched, varied and sometimes haphazard practices of forgery, omission and creation. Anomaly and incongruity in the files emerge as structing devices that reveal the operations of transnational adoption shadow circuits and counterfeiting as method. For those seeking historical clarification, deciphering forgeries and irregularities entails creating new registers of legibility of the adoption papers, the adoption process and the relationalities generated through their searches