Ethnoscripts
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Syncretic debris: from shared Bosnian saints to the ICTY courtroom
Full text linkThis article is an anthropological postscript to the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), brought to a conclusion in 2017. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Bosnia, I trace in the Tribunal’s archives the strange afterlives of two shared and syncretic saints, George and Elijah, their feasts and the religiously plural landscapes they encapsulated. Surfacing as debris after violent impact – displaced and disarticulated – they offer here a possibility of reading both along and against the grain of the archival expectations. I analyse the chartings of ethno-religious distinctions and the discourse of ‘historical enmities’ between Bosnian communities, with particular attention to the iterations of these arguments in the reports of ICTY’s expert witnesses. This sustained invention of the absence of shared tradition, although productive of debris, is, I argue, continually countered by the emplacement of remnants into rekindled wholes
The Krampus in Austria: A Case of Booming Identity Politics
Full text linkIn Austria, the Krampus has recently witnessed an unprecedented boom. Since the early 2000s, the number of troupes and organized events has skyrocketed. Most of these can be termed ‘invented traditions’ in Hobsbawm’s sense, as there are only a handful of places with a history of the practice from before the mid-twentieth century. Despite the vast differences between regions, young men in all of them dress up in masks that invoke associations with the devil or demons, wear long fur suits and roam the streets scaring and attacking onlookers with the switches they carry. Investigating contemporary Krampus practices in rural Austria, we argue that they serve as important sources of identity making, at the centre of which are relations between men and women, as well as between ethnic Austrians and immigrants. Through an engagement with anthropological discussions on identity, our article will suggest that the recent Krampus boom is indicative of new forms of white identit
“During a busy day I don’t get much done”. On the materiality of immaterial labour in a multinational professional services firm
Full text link“During a busy day I don’t get much done” In this quote from a client consultant condenses the dilemma discussed in this paper: what officially counts as creditable, “real work” rarely corresponds to the daily lived praxis in the office. The case study is based on my ethnographic research in a professional services firm and shows how the organisational understanding of what is recognised as work focuses on ascertainable deliverables such as presentations or spreadsheet reports. The lived praxis at the offices, however, is coined by relational and affective work (Hardt 1999) – paradoxically even more in situations of pressing delivery deadlines. The paper discusses these two conflictive perceptions of work/non-work in the (claiming to be) post-Fordist field of “immaterial” labour (Lazzarato 1996) and questions the proclaimed change towards an immaterial quality of labour of the “informational economy” (Hardt and Negri 2000)
Gendered Modes of Evaluating Work in a Javanese Fishery
Full text linkThis paper discusses two differently gendered modes of evaluating the work of crewmembers in a Northern Javanese fishery, the first focusing on its outcome and the second on the work process itself. Both are familiar from the anthropological literature. In this literature, the relative weight attributed to each and the connection stipulated between them appears as a matter of theoretical choice. In a fishing village in northern Java, however, each mode of evaluating work appears as a gendered perspective, grounded in the different experiences and kinds of expertise acquired by male crewmembers on the boats and by their female relatives who manage household finances. The paper introduces each of these perspectives and then explores how they are shared through narratives and everyday interactions within crewmembers’ households
Gesamtausgabe: Tradition, performance and identity politics in European festivals
No full textGesamtausgabe/Complete editio
„Was ist überhaupt Gemeinschaftsarbeit?“ Über den Umgang mit Arbeit in einer intentionalen Gemeinschaft im ländlichen Sachsen, Deutschland
Full text linkDie Organisation von Arbeit und die Motivation zu arbeiten sind die zwei zentralen Themen dieses Artikels. Die Frage, was bewegt Menschen dazu zu arbeiten, abhängig und unabhängig von monetärer Entlohnung, wird am Beispiel einer intentionalen Gemeinschaft im ländlichen Sachsen – der Lebenstraumgemeinschaft Jahnishausen – untersucht. Weiter wird dargestellt, wie die 44 Bewohner_innen der Gemeinschaft Arbeit organisieren und aufteilen. Die zugrunde liegenden Daten wurden während einer insgesamt dreimonatigen Feldforschung im Rahmen meiner Masterarbeit zur Lebenstraumgemeinschaft erhoben. Das Forschungsfeld, das im noch relativ jungen Bereich der Gemeinschaftsforschung anzusiedeln ist, wird anhand von klassischen Theorien aus der ökonomischen Anthropologie und Soziologie untersucht.E-MAIL: KEYWORDS:
Disambiguating Legalities: Street vending, law, and boundary-work in Mexico
Full text linkIn Mexico City, over 500,000 people are estimated to earn a living working as street vendors. In recent years Mexican street commerce has been increasingly criminalized in the context of “revanchist” neoliberal urban politics which have aimed to “reclaim” and gentrify urban spaces, mirroring a global trend (Leal Martinez 2016, Swanson 2007, Janoschka et al. 2013). Yet the law structures the social lives of street vendors not only in its repressive, revanchist capacity, but through more subtle and quotidian forms of legal disregulation (Goldstein 2015). My goal in this paper, accordingly, is to make sense of the role of legality in shaping the forms of symbolic and affective labor in which street vendors engage beyond those areas which are explicitly targeted by neoliberal urban development schemes. To that end, I propose a framework of “ambiguous legalities” as a way to understand the relationship between law and the everyday production of street vending. Paying attention to ambiguous legalities means looking at the ways not only that legal uncertainties are created and maintained, but on the way in which they influence forms of everyday comportment and the invisible labor of symbolic boundary-work (Lamont 1992). Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Mexico City’s central wholesale market, I illustrate the ways in which ambiguous legality is produced through the legal technology of the vending permit, and describe how street vendors and other social actors attempt to make moral-legal claims through a process I refer to as “disambiguation.” Finally, I discuss how popular discourses about state illegitimacy and corruption contribute to legal ambiguities, and the challenges that they pose to street vendors in their efforts to combat popular perceptions of criminality and illegality
