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194 research outputs found
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Reflections on Translating, Curating, and Collaging the Wandering Jew
Full text linkThis piece offers a review of the 2024-2025 travelling exhibition ‘The Wandering Jew’, collecting the author’s reflections as translator and curator alongside ethnographic insights. Whilst this special issue considers the agency of minoritised groups as moveable and mobilised subjects, I play with these two characteristics to consider mythical itinerancy as both a punishment and an avenue for creative expansion. For this I draw on the benefactory figures of Georg Simmel’s ‘The Stranger’ and Leonid Livak’s ‘The Helper’. Situated within a dominant narrative of European Christianity, the legend of the Wandering Jew exemplifies fundamental questions related to Jewish cultural heritage and how it may be seen through the immateriality of memory, drawing on the empowering potential of the literary and artistic imagination particularly via methods such as collage and erasure poetry. This article includes reflections on a workshop I hosted at Limmud Festival, a Jewish community event, in 2024. I invited participants to cut up existing textual and visual representations to remake the Wandering Jew, following a tradition of using artistic practices to beautify hateful images. I examine the potential of these reappropriative practices to invoke feelings of identification and ownership
Alter-globalisation, not Anti-globalisation for Europe: Learning from the Anthropology of No-border Activism
Full text linkAnti-globalisation authoritarians and alter-globalisation activists criticise Europe’s liberal political order but offer opposing views. Ethnographic research with no-border activists during the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 reveals how egalitarian assemblies and open borders can counter nationalist exclusion
Moving beyond and towards Liberal Legalism: Legal Anthropology and the Liberal Rule of Law
Full text linkLiberal legalism is under attack from authoritarian movements worldwide. Legal anthropology must respond by studying both: alternative legal orders and how liberal law itself is being transformed and weaponised
Feeling Failure: Appnography and Its Affective Ties to the Ethnographer’s Life
Full text linkMy research seeks to understand queer Filipino men’s digital lives in Manila, the Philippines, and Los Angeles, United States of America. It examines how experiences of failure inform complex negotiations online and offline in the search for connection, especially when feelings are amplified and complicated by social categories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. I apply Rohit K Dasgupta and Debanuj Dasgupta’s assertion from their study participants in India that the sharing of failure in virtual spaces generates different forms of intimate subjectivity forging affective bonds. This essay reflects on failure and disappointment as a prominent topic of ethnographic inquiry and methodological critique but specifically on how the feeling of failure seeped into various parts of the researcher’s life – my writing, my thinking, my belief in myself. It is a feeling that endures. It is a testament to the need for continued ethnographic work, with a caution to the infectious insecurities animating the socialities of dating app relations
Gradual Realities: Making Authentically Strange Connections via Tinder in Cape Town
Full text linkTinder’s streamlined profile set-up and the dating app’s binary swipe system create an illusion of instant realities and neat distinctions. However, engaging with Tinder’s selection process in a meaningful way is much less straightforward than it appears. In Cape Town, a city with a historical legacy of categorical divisions, Tinder serves as a tool to connect with the unfamiliar and the strange, despite the prevalent atmosphere of suspicion. The stories shared with me during my ethnographic research on Tinder in Cape Town reveal that exploring ideals, desires, and degrees of strangeness involves renegotiating past experiences and future expectations. In a cyclical usage, tensions and ambiguities that form part of tindering are negotiated in line with what Katrien Pype has called the ‘technology contract’, changing with every new download. Expectations become blurred and realities gradually formed through these ongoing (re)negotiations and new encounters with relative strangers. In this manner, Tinder becomes a means through which to reflect on one’s own experiences and human interconnections in Cape Town more broadly. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to contrast Tinder experiences with romanticised ideals of authenticity, rendering it tempting to flatten them to simplistic anecdotes and view the app as a metaphor for ‘modern-day dating’
