Radicle - Reed Anthropology Review
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Thinking the Climate Through Anthropology and the Church
No full textThe present climate crisis presents a myriad of challenges for anthropologists attempting to analyze and critique the ways in which scientists and the public think about the world, our relationship to it, and how we make descriptive and moral claims about it. This paper outlines the epistemological problems that arise from climate change's status as a hyperobject: Specifically, the necessity to think across scales of space and time, the moral weight associated with claims about the climate, and the need for a single, global account. I compare these problems through three contemporary frameworks: The Western liberal consensus, the work of anthropologists Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, and the Catholic Church's integral ecology. I discuss kin relations and the obligations that come with them, the thread uniting the three frameworks, as a principle for authentically (re)thinking the climate and our relationship to the world at large.
Keywords: anthropology of science; climate; morality; epistemology; hyperobjects; integral ecology; kinshi
Conservationist Extractivism
No full textFor thousands of years the axolotl, a salamander native to the Valley of Mexico, has been an important food source for local populations. Axolotls were included in Aztec mythology, where they play a role in the cycle of life becoming food for other life. Since colonization, the axolotl population has been threatened by a shrinking habitat, pollution, and invasive species. Researchers have proposed the use of chinampas, a complex farming practice used by the Aztecs, to restore the environment to its previous state of health so axolotls may survive as a species. Conservationists have also outlawed the consumption of wild-caught axolotls, due to their status as an endangered species. Here, indigenous relationships to the land are adopted in a piecemeal fashion that usesindigenous knowledge and cultivation practices but deprives indigenous peoples of their ability to live off the land, while framing axolotl conservation as vital for the maintenance of captive axolotl populations in laboratories worldwide. The use of local knowledge and rejection of local consumption practices makes room for a conservationist extractivism in which axolotl populations are revived only to be taken for biomedical research.
Keywords: Axolotl, Valley of Mexico, Conservation, Standard Environmental Narrative, Consumptio
Black Narrative in Deep Space
No full textFor Neil Smith, deep space is multiscalular and immediate; for Katherine McKittrick, deep space is a landscape which repositions black geographies, imaginatively and materially; for Carter, deep space is the only landscape which offers the imaginative and material foundations for black liberation. In an auto-ethnographic journeying through a flawed and undiscerning teaching paradigm, and the September 26th protests at Reed College, I challenge the assertion that history is written only by the victors. Introducing Frantz Fanon’s process of self-recognition to Katherine McKittrick’s mapping of black geographies in deep space, this piece offers a peek into the boundless contours afforded by the re-writing and re-telling of historical narratives in deep space.
Keywords: transparent space, black geography, auto-ethnography, narrative, black liberation, agenc
Performing the Salem Witch Trials
No full textThis paper approaches the long-embattled notion of ‘authenticity’ in the study of tourism through a deployment of Peircean semiotic analysis to tourist attractions in Salem, Massachusetts. After presenting a sketch of different approaches to authenticity that have persisted in the anthropological study of tourism, the paper lays out the necessary sociohistorical context for understanding the development of Salem’s bustling tourist industry. It then presents the semiotic tools that will be deployed in analyzing the presentations and performances of the selected Salem tourist sites: namely, the distinction between Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness proposed by C.S. Peirce and the semiotic creation of space and time captured by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. The paper shifts to a close semiotic analysis of three tourist destinations, each of which embodies a different type of signification in its portrayal of the Trials. Ultimately, this diversity in approaches to generating touristic authenticity demands that anthropologists of tourism pay more heed to the creative aspects of constructing authenticity, rather than evaluating attempts at authenticity by how closely a performance resembles an underlying ‘true’ culture.
Keywords: tourism, authenticity, chronotopes, museum studies, Salem Witchcraft Trial
“Hambi Stays!”
No full textThis photo essay explores the activist occupation of Hambach Forest (Hambi) in western Germany, a forest threatened by the expansion of a massive lignite mine. The extractive relationship to the Hambach landscape of RWE (Rheinisch-Westälisches Elektriziätswerk AG), the utility company responsible for the mine, has drawn strong opposition, most prominently in the form of a community of local and international activists who have occupied the forest and squatted abandoned houses in several of the ghost villages since 2012. An ethic of mutual solidarity holds the Hambi activists together and distinguishes them from what they perceive as a destructive and uncaring outside system. This ever-shifting collective of punks, squatters, tree-climbers, and saboteurs structures everything with the goal of continual obstruction to RWE's plans. Their oppositional yet communal collective activity reveals the political potential of a movement rooted in the imperiled forest landscape. Activists turn "trash" into building materials, use found food for creative cooking, and sustain one another through mutual dependency in their commitment to living with and for Hambach Forest. This photo essay uses ethnographic description, interviews, and photography to offer a window into the world of Hambi.
Keywords: Activism, Forest, Extraction, Capitalism, Anthropocene, Anarchism, Materialit
Forgetting War
No full textReflecting on the far-reaching changes the coronavirus has brought about in all spheres of life, this article takes an anthropological and phenomenological perspective on the new ‘normals’ of the pandemic, specifically with regards to bodily and linguistic practices. By placing phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in conversation with anthropologists like Mauss, the article illuminates the ways in which the disruption posed by the pandemic has fundamentally altered our relation to others, our bodies, and ourselves. The article then moves to destabilize the dichotomy of ‘ordinary’ and ‘exception’ by analyzing the militarization of language; in showing its limitations in grappling with a world in pandemic, the article concludes with a call for novel forms of language that de-emphasize adversariality and instead promote the empathy and memory that the pandemic demands.
Keywords: phenomenology, bodies, bodily techniques, space, language, Coronavirus, pandemi
Epistemological Environments
Full text linkBy advocating for multimodal approaches to the disciplines, this piece contributes to the forma- tion of alternative, resilient epistemological spaces in anthropology and ecology. Reflecting ethno- graphically on interdisciplinarity, Calderbank critiques the rigid disciplinary bounds, teleological spatiotemporality, and the gendered, capitalist, and colonial schemas which inhere in the structure of Western academe. In theoretical conversation with broader post-colonial, queer, and feminist environmental studies, the piece advocates for the revitalization of imagination, as opposed to innovation — making use of the poetic form to explore the entanglements in the “oftentimes paradoxical paths to knowing,” and rejecting the primacy of science over story
Sidetracked
Full text linkIn Rajasthan, India, the Guijjar often employ the tactic of blocking trains by sitting on the railways. Termed here as "train jamming," this piece discusses the ontological, spatio-temporal, and political positioning of this practice. The building of railways themselves ruptured lived spaces, implementing a state device to further distance economic classes and previously marginalized people. This article analyzes not only why the Guijjar sit on the train tracks, but how this interacts with the state and other cultural portrayals of train space-time. Utilizing this state-created space, the Guijjar in turn recreate its meaning and subvert the assumed purpose
Forging Collective Politics
No full textThis photo essay attempts to untangle and explore the complex relationships between electoral politics, economic development, multiculturalism, gender and race in Sumpango, Guatemala. Drawing on several months of fieldwork from 2017-2019, George analyses the dynamics of shifting invocations of gender and indigeneity through their manifestations in the everyday, and reflects on the texturizing and reflexive potential of visual mediums in anthropology
The Enlightenment Movement
Full text linkInitially proposed as a tool to unify different groups, electricity was used to silence and further marginalize the Hazara, a Shia minority in Afghanistan. This piece tracks and analyzes this ongoing problem, centering on the "Enlightenment Movement," Hazara protestation of the state in response to rerouting electricity. Discussing the governmental, ethnic, and geographic features at play in the issue of electricity, this paper argues that the Enlightenment Movement is not just fueled by a desire for electricity, but a demand for a wider discussion of Hazara civil rights