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“Nothing is Going to be Named After You”: Ethical Citizenship Among Citizen Activists in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Full text linkTwenty-three years after the end of the war many Bosnians feel they have been stuck in an endless post-war transition, yearning for a better life for so long that an idea of a brighter future is almost unimaginable. While the political elites are focusing their attention on ethnic divisions, the rest of the country is falling deeper into economic regression with high unemployment rates and widespread corruption in politics and business. This dissertation is an ethnography of contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina that examines the ways citizen activists are widening the cracks between ethnic territories and in that space practicing the kind of belonging that turns residents who are merely sharing a certain space as subjects of ethnic collectivities, to citizens who are members of a shared community going beyond the primacy of ethnic identification. This way, citizen activists are creating an alternative to widespread political focus on identitarian politics by concentrating on social justice for all, positioned against the backdrop of pervasive and institutionalized ethnicization of everyday life and politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Thus, citizen activists are experiencing citizenship differently, not as a legal membership that ties one to the respective ethnic group but as a belonging that ties one to a community of people who have been disenfranchised and who, regardless of the precarious situation they find themselves in, put their bodies to work to create lives worth living by engaging in citizen activism. However, citizen activists are not only rejecting identitarian politics but also positioning themselves as discontent with neoliberalism, where the beneficiaries of political party-family infrastructure are the ones reaping the benefits of an unequal system and accumulation by dispossession. I call this form of alternative citizenship emerging among citizen activists in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ethical citizenship, where the ethics is located in the bodily acts of resistance to the mainstream politics of consensus and part-taking in something one is excluded from. The ethics is also located in the very process of people working on their selves and transforming themselves through self-care and self-reflection, in order to obtain a state of normality in their lives. This normality is often lodged in those moments of indignation where citizen activists get to experience, practice, and exercise a sense of control over their lives such as demanding a solution to a problem by trapping public officials in the Parliament, as well as day-to-day, subtler acts of refusal or resistance. These ethical acts of citizenship are creative endeavors where people are rejecting the way they are supposed to act and responding to a crisis with invention and creativity by building alternative forms of direct citizen action. This dissertation is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork working with citizen activists primarily in Sarajevo, with frequent visits to other cities such as Mostar, Tuzla, Banja Luka, and Prijedor
The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia
No full textIn 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in a new “democratic cultural revolution,” Morales promised to overturn neoliberalism and inaugurate a new decolonized society. In this perceptive new book, Nancy Postero examines the successes and failures that have followed in the ten years since Morales’s election. While the Morales government has made many changes that have benefited Bolivia’s majority indigenous population, it has also consolidated power and reinforced extractivist development models. In the process, indigeneity has been transformed from a site of emancipatory politics to a site of liberal nationstate building. By carefully tracing the political origins and practices of decolonization among activists, government administrators, and ordinary citizens, Postero makes an important contribution to our understanding of the meaning and impact of Bolivia’s indigenous state
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Generating the Nation: Memory, Family, and Citizenship in Post-Dictatorship Chile
Full text linkMembers of the post-dictatorship generation in Chile have been the first to organize large-scale political protest since Augusto Pinochet’s military authoritarian regime ended in 1990. How do these individuals interpret this recent past, and how does it influence their conceptions of politics? How is their political action shaped by discourse and vice versa? Ethnographic data collected from interviews with Chilean university students is analyzed using a practice theory approach adapted from Sherry Ortner’s concept of the loosely structured actor. This analysis reveals the family to be a primary source of information and affect guiding young adults’ interpretation of meaning, with regard to both the past and the present. I argue that there exists currently a discourse of memory according to which Chilean citizens are shaped to remember the past in certain ways and not in others, and the political action of post-dictatorship actors is shaped by this discourse but also challenges it. Further ethnographic research must attend to the family as a site of political consciousness, and to the dialectical processes by which Chile’s historical narrative and its present political climate are mutually shaped
Del "Yemboaty" a la autonomía: El trabajo de Xavier Albó con los Guaraní del Chaco Boliviano
No full textThis article analyzes Xavier Albó’s work with the Guarani people of the Bolivian Chaco, focusing on iconic texts during three important moments in Guarani history. I argue that, by documenting the structures of political economy and history under which the Guarani have lived, as well as their cultural resources, Albó’s work contributes to current debates in anthropology about the constructed, fluid, and dynamic nature of cultural identity and its relation to power and domination. His engaged academic work established the basis for understanding that contributed to concrete proposals for political change, which I call “world-making,” based in culturally significant notions of autonomy and self-determination. Albó’s work serves today as a valuable model of engaged academic research. Este artículo analiza el trabajo de Xavier Albó con los guaraní del Chaco boliviano, enfocándose en textos icónicos durante tres momentos importantes de la historia guaraní. Sostengo que al documentar las estructuras de la economía política y la historia bajo las cuales han vivido los guaraní, al igual que sus recursos culturales, el trabajo de Albó contribuye a los debates actuales en antropología sobre la naturaleza construida, fluida y dinámica de la identidad cultural y su relación con el poder y la dominación. Su trabajo académico comprometido estableción las bases para un conocimiento que contribuyó con propuestas concretas para el cambio político, a las que llamo “construcción de mundos,” basadas en nociones de autonomía y auto-determinación culturalmente significativas. Hoy en día, el trabajo de Albó sirve como un valioso modelo de investigación académica comprometida.
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Feminisms, Political Mobilization, and the Transnational Sex Trade: Contestation over Categorizing Social Reproductive Labor
Full text linkNumerous scholars and activists attempt to define what the transnational sex trade is and what it should or should not be. Each of the groups involved in this struggle to categorize sex labor channel different representations of the category, or discourses. This paper analyses how three feminist scholars, of varying perspectives, define transnational sex labor, and despite their widely different viewpoints, marshal similar conceptual categories. Their discourses rely on notions of or attempts to police women’s “appropriate” labor and/or comportment and human rights and workers’ rights discourses. While the authors do not identify their works as such, I argue they are all part of a wider conversation of defining the realm of social reproductive labor. Throughout these three scholar’s writings, the category of social reproductive labor is silent, but represents another way of understanding and interpreting both transnational sex labor and political mobilization, contextualized within capitalism
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An Anthropological Perspective: The Cultural, the Political, and the Ontological in Kichwa Studies
Full text linkIn this thesis, I argue that the anthropological study of Kichwa-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon is characterized by two categories of analysis: one with a focus on structuralist topics of interest and the other with a decidedly political economy overtone. Through a selective literature review of each theoretical shift, I offer a critical analysis of both of these trends, examining their origins, strengths, productions, and erasures, as well as their relative successes in reflecting Kichwa self-interpretations. I also describe how these trends build off of each other, forming, in part, out of reactions to the other’s shortcomings while still falling short of either the political or religio-cultural aspects of Kichwa life. In sum, structuralism lacks emphasis on power and politics, while political anthropology tends to undermine the importance of ethnography and unique indigenous cosmologies.Because of these limitations, I propose that the best way to bridge the gap between the structural and the political is through political ontological literature, which brings to light indigenous cosmology and radical difference while also highlighting how indigenous uniqueness is played out in the political arena. Although not without its own failings, political ontology attempts to bring together the benefits of both of these theoretical shifts without falling into their traditional traps. Political ontological analyses have been applied to indigenous peoples elsewhere in Latin America, but it has yet to be applied to lowland Kichwa. Furthermore, such an analysis is vital in order to understand anthropologists’ intellectual approaches to difference, including indigeneity as difference
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Discovering the Self: A Critical Phenomenological Paradigm for Tourism Research
Full text linkTravel is becomingly increasing associated with self-work, in the form of self-discovery,self-transformation, or self-documentation through writing and photography. In light of this expansive social trend, I argue that tourism research would benefit from an exploration of the existential self. I suggest that by discovering the self, anthropologists can connect tourism research to broader theoretical questions, such as: What is the relationship between structure and agency, subjectivity and power in an individual’s self-experience? I draw heavily on Douglas Hollan, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu to propose a critical phenomenological paradigm that moves to address this complex set of questions. To demonstrate the utility of this paradigm for tourism research, I analyze two contemporary ethnographies, one on young Israeli backpackers and the other on multinational pilgrims who walk and cycle the Camino to Santiago, Spain
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The Politics of Equality: Negotiating Reproductive Rights in Highland Guatemala
Full text linkReproductive health has gained new ethical and political significance in post-war Guatemala with the increasing participation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the pursuit of gender and racial equality. This dissertation is concerned with the way young, marginalized women understand and re-articulate ideas about power and equality as they participate in reproductive health initiatives organized by NGOs. I analyze the political nature of this vernacularization of reproductive health by looking closely at how global discourses of social equality, human rights, development, empowerment, and decolonization are vernacularized by ordinary women in their everyday practices. As a political project, reproductive health interventions decenter questions of development and female empowerment, leading to an ongoing negotiation over the very nature of equality and rights themselves. I draw from extensive ethnographic fieldwork that traces the intimate conversations and debates between women participating in spaces of rights-based reproductive health interventions organized by both grassroots and NGOs in the highland departments of Sacatepéquez and Chimaltenango.My research critically examines ethical practices of world-making in reproductive rights workshops to ask how they act as a form of politics for marginalized women to imagine and construct a valued future. I argue that reproductive health interventions are a site where equality and the right to a “good life” are reimagined. In a region marked by significant socioeconomic precarity and religious taboo, women’s ability to assert their reproductive rights hinged on both appropriating and contesting global discourses of social justice. These intimate negotiations are a political practice rooted in Guatemalan women’s embodied experiences of gender, race, and class. My dissertation clearly illustrates how negotiating a “good life” resulted not only in emancipatory but also ambiguous realizations of these rights. This ambivalent political process raises new questions over what it means to imagine and pursue a fulfilling and valued life in neoliberal contexts, marked by the increasing relegation of social justice to apolitical and depoliticizing NGOs
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