Regulating mobility in the Peruvian Andes: road safety, social hierarchies and governmentality in Cusco's rural provinces

Significant developments in road safety regulation have taken place in Peru during recent years, reflecting international efforts to reduce worldwide fatalities and injuries. A series of measures has sought to bring about transformations in governmentality among passengers on public transport. Seen ethnographically, these have had uneven success on the ground. In rural provinces of Cusco, situated histories and sociologies of mobility have sometimes led to ambivalence, unobtrusive resistance or reinforcement of discriminatory attitudes. This article explores how reception of the regulations has been refracted through class, ethnic and geographical divisions within Peruvian society, and argues for both the applied and theoretical utility of anthropological study of road safety governance

'I once wore an angry bird t-shirt and went to read Qur’an': asymmetrical institutional complexity and emerging consumption practices in Pakistan

This article brings together theories of institutional logics and the exploration of the lives of tweens in Pakistan to understand how emerging consumption practices fit within Pakistani children’s daily lives, and how institutional complexity that includes the dominance of religion under Pakistani Islamization is negotiated to separate and maintain the differences between them. We identify resolutions to asymmetrical institutional complexity in the consumption of character T-shirts: spatial–temporal practices, visual practices, symbolic substitution practices and single logic practices. We contribute to an understanding of how consumption happens in an Eastern Muslim culture, and how multiple institutional logics shape the consumption practices of children, by articulating how halal consumption practices, far from being essentialist, or presented as market segmentation, form from negotiations and reflections at the boundaries where Islam and Market logics meet

From anger to solidarity: the emotional echo-chamber of Gezi Park protests

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd By using the Gezi Park protests that took place in Turkey in 2013 as a case, we explore the significance of emotional echo-chamber involved in protests. The analyses are composed of thirty-seven interviews conducted with activists on how they define and understand their preferences and motivations for protesting. We discuss how participants get influenced by beliefs, motives and opinions and bring forth the changes of emotions during such processes and help create an emotional echo-chamber

Ambivalences of mobility: rival state authorities and mobile strategies in a Saharan conflict

How do ongoing histories of mobility in economic and political life affect rival state authorities’ claims over a disputed territory? In the conflict over Western Sahara, wide-ranging strategies of mobility pose a challenge to familiar tropes of states constraining movement while subjects seek to escape such control. Morocco and its rival, the liberation movement Polisario Front, both curb mobility while their mobile Sahrawi subjects evade the authority of a state; simultaneously, however, each state authority invests in the circulation of persons to support claims over territory while Sahrawis exercise mobility to enhance their position vis-à-vis a state authority. Mobility emerges as an ambivalent means of mediating and transforming power relations, especially between governing authorities and governed constituencies. [mobility, Morocco, Polisario Front, sovereignty, the state, territory, Western Sahara

Beyond spheres of influence: the myth of the state and Russia’s seductive power in Kyrgyzstan

This article questions the analytical value of “spheres of influence” for understanding power and the state in the post-Soviet region and beyond, based on a critical deconstruction of the ontological and epistemological assumptions inherent in the concept. It proposes an alternative reading of power and the state, drawing on the concept of “seductive power” at a distance and Timothy Mitchell’s “state effect.” Rather than the concept of a sphere of influence, a highly politicized concept that conveys an ontology that flattens and divides space, essentializes the state, and relies on an intentionalist account of power, we need an analytical framework that can help us make sense of the multiple, varied spatialities and historical legacies that produce the state and power. I demonstrate this through an extended discussion of Russian power in Kyrgyzstan, a country often described as a Russian client state. Mobilizing recent re-conceptualizations of state and power in anthropology and political geography, I present an analysis of Russia’s seductive power in Kyrgyzstan and the way it contributes to producing Kyrgyz state-ness. I also show how Russia’s Great Power myth is itself evolving and conclude that the differentiated, relational production of space and power in either Kyrgyz or Russian myths of the state is not captured by a the concept of a return to spheres of influence

Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the 'possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it' (Jayal, 2013, 71). Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection