59 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
The cultural politics of gesture
Ethnographers enter the field as legible signs of otherness to their interlocutors. In this article, I explore the ramifications of my personal experience of being variously `read' in the course of encounters in Bangkok, Thailand, to show how a gradual process of bodily inculcation can reduce the sense of difference and partially overcome the expectations induced by phenotype in particular, leading to greater access to the protected zones of cultural intimacy (including recognition of the newcomer's linguistic capacities). Such transitions also entail a learned increase of ease with informal modes of embodiment, as opposed to postures signaling varieties of power that are intrusive and palpably foreign to local experience. The processes of mutual recognition thus described are embedded in political relations of international as well as inter-personal significance. They thus have multi-faceted consequences for the outcomes and implications of our research.Anthropolog
Recommended from our members
Engagement, Gentrification, and the Neoliberal Hijacking of History
Drawing primarily on fieldwork in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I examine the use of historic conservation to justify gentrification. This commoditization of history expands into urban design a classification that serves the goals of neoliberal modernity. By thus refocusing the classic anthropological concern with taxonomy on the analysis of the bureaucratic production of everyday experience and knowledge, I explore a new global habitus in which dominant interpretations of history spatially reinforce current ideologies. Historic conservation often provides an excuse for intervention into urban life. In a revision of high modernism’s focus on science, logic, and efficiency, this trend invokes “the past.” But which past? The concept of “heritage” is grounded in culturally specific ideologies of kinship, residence, and property, but the universalization of the nation-state as a collectivity of similar subunits has given those concepts globally hegemonic power. In consequence, phenomena that governments treat as “merely” cultural or symbolic are not taken seriously as sources of poverty and subjection. By juxtaposing historic conservation and gentrification with a critique of the public management of knowledge, I thus sketch a critical trajectory for anthropological engagement in “the politics of mereness” by asking who defines what matters in residents’ lives.Anthropolog
Recommended from our members
Dequalificazione, Semplificazione e Valutazione della Conoscenza nella Competenza Pratica degli Artigiani e degli Accademici. La Risposta di un Etnografo a un Problema Globale
Anthropolog
Recommended from our members
The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
Secrecy, paradoxically, is a social fact; as such, it must be performed in order to be realized. This article is a programmatic attempt to explore the semiotics of secrecy as revealed through the interaction of architectonics, spatiality, and social interaction. Gestural secretiveness reproduces socially sanctioned patterns of concealment also embodied in the built environment; these social dimensions also inform local interpretations of legal devices designed to guarantee privacy. On the international stage, moreover, they are transformed into devices for the concealment of potential national embarrassments. As the author demonstrates using materials from Greece, Italy, and Thailand, the practical effects of secrecy — a more flexible construct than the dichotomy of public and private — are revealingly inscribed, at various concentric levels of social identification, on the material landscape of inhabited space, and represent a necessary dimension of adapting urban structures to a human scale.Anthropolog
- …