AN101 Final Exam Key Authors and Films

Anne Allison

Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunchbox as Ideological State Apparatus

• Ethnography of lunch boxes in Japan

• Children must eat their meals according to school rules

• Mothers devote a huge amount of time to both please their children and to affirm that they are good mothers

Argument: The Japanese state creates compliant citizens through obentos—they convey the imperative of order, precision, and obedience

• Becomes desirable and normalized

Evidence: 

• Obentos as a symbol of national identity

• Obentos socialize children and their mothers into the norms of Japanese society.

• Children learn how and what to think and what the roles and positions they will later assume as members of society

• Obentos used to scrutinize a woman's commitment as a mother and her inspiring her child to being similarly committed as a student

  • Labor is inspected and judged

  • Mothers are reprimanded for insufficient devotion to their children

→ Power is exerted in ways that seem innocuous and devoid of violence

Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa

Hashtag Activism

• Social media and cell phones are political tools 

  • Allow people to document

• Can help challenge representations in mainstream media about racialized communities

  • Offers counternarratives to victim-blaming narratives and helps humanize victims of police brutality

• Bridges virtual activism and everyday activism → people united across time and space

Lila Abu-Lughod

• Palestinian anthropologist

• Human rights, global liberalism, and feminism in the muslim world 

The image of the veiled Afghan woman in the context of the War on Terror

• The war on Afghanistan was justified as an effort to save Afghan women from their taliban oppressors

• War led by the “civilized” West against Islam and its alleged dogmatism and restrictions on people's freedom

• The veil became a sign of subordination 
  

Why is saving others dangerous?

→ For Abu-Lughod, it evokes colonialism and the civilizing mission to help and save barbaric and/or savage societies

• Makes the savior feel superior, morally righteous, culturally advanced

• It essentializes the root cause of the problem: the problem is the veil (or Islam) and not poverty, underdevelopment, war, or foreign intervention

The veil is not a form of subordination 

• Modesty: honor, morality, piety, feeling closer to God

  • Does not mean a lack of agency

• Veiling is a voluntary act by women who are deeply committed to being moral and have a sense of honor tied to family

• After the US invaded Afghanistan, Muslim women did not abandon their headcoverings 

This forces us to question our assumptions about resistance and liberation

→ Other trajectories of positive social change might be more meaningful 

• Instead of removing their veils, people might have other priorities, aspirations, and understandings of justice 

→ We should not be indifferent 

→ Rather than salvation, people need to embrace more egalitarian forms of solidarity: coalition building and forming alliances

→ Think about our societal responsibility in creating injustices elsewhere

Jason De Leon

→The weaponization of desert environments

• Prevention through deterrence → funnel migrants through dangerous environment so that they won’t want to do it 

• The desert is intentionally used by the US state as a tool for discouraging immigration 

  • The desert is a weapon and mechanism of social control

  • Turns into a place of violence and death

→ Borders as spaces of exception

• Migrant deaths are of little consequences (out of sight, out of mind)

• Deserts not only exert violence against migrants but also against their bodily remains: more than 800+ bodies remain unidentified

Kathryn Takabvirwa

Make Shift — Ethnography of street vendors in Harare (Zimbabwe)

Study of how residents create places and communities outside of formal urban planning, laws, and institutions

Street vending is crucial for economic life: a way of coping with hyperinflation and a means of survival

Vendors are constantly being harassed by the local police

National discourse vilifies vendors

Argument: Street vending is a form of vernacular urban infrastructure

Vending is an infrastructure of survival where the informal sectors of the economy function as a form of scaffolding for the tatters of the national economy. Yet it is an infrastructure that is constantly being disassembled and reassembled, unmade and remade. It is vital yet disavowed, with displacements vitiated through logics of exclusionary citizenship

Infrastructure by the wrong people: Post-colonial views that black vendors belong to and should return to rural areas

vendors as purveyors of illegality: criminalization

Blamed for cholera outbreak

Vendors as defiant actors: citizens who defy state authority

Restorative infrastructure: A form of reclaiming the city

A counterargument to the modernist city: Rather than seeing vending as that which spoils urban centers, as a regressive form of urban life, as the antimodern, this conceptualization of vending opens up a space for considering noncolonial infrastructural forms and for speaking into the problematization of the relationship between infrastructure and modernity in African cities.

While physical infrastructure has been faltering—potholes marring tarred roads, water pipes rusting from disuse, power outages accompanied by ominous warnings about the Kariba Dam wall and hydroelectric turbines—the human infrastructure has continued to push on

Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss: Techniques of the Body 

• Variations in swimming techniques, ways of walking, marching, and squatting

• Archive of miscellaneous

• Such differences are not arbitrary but are learned: society teaches people how to use their bodies

Techniques of the body:

→ Effective and traditional 

Mauss Key Points:

→ Different societies have different techniques of the body

• Each society has its own special habits

→ techniques of the body are hard to learn and unlearn

• I cannot get rid of my technique

• Role of education and enculturation in teaching us how to walk, how to run, how to swim, how to dance, etc. 

→ Techniques of the body vary throughout the life cycle

• Techniques of…

  • Birth

  • Infancy

  • Adolescence

  • Adult life

  • Care: rubbing, washing, eating 

→ Techniques of the body are an expression of cultural frameworks

• For Mauss, the body is psychological, biological, societal

• People must use their bodies appropriately 

• In every society, everyone knows and has to know and learn what they have to do in all conditions 

Kyrstin Mallon Andrews

The color of seawater

Dominican Republic: fishing communities

Underwater ethnography: learning to see and sense fish, and learning to navigate my own body through marine environment 

→ Perceiving the colors of seawater is a way of knowing the ocean

• Color palettes for fishermen are shifting rapidly from deep blue and purple to yellow and white

• Color is a way local communities narrate climate change and its impact on ocean ecologies and their livelihoods

→ Colors of seawater have ecological and cultural meaning

• Blue, black, yellow, green, white, purple, and chocolate point to different ocean conditions and socioeconomic possibilities

• Chocolate: dirty water caused by weather incidents: restlessness, disenchantment, economic dread about not being able to provide

• Blue and purple: optimal possibilities for fishing

→ Conservation agencies blame local fishing communities for declining ocean ecologies

• Overfishing is framed as the main cause of diminishing marine species

• Restrictions on fishing practices, bans on capturing certain species, and criminalization of 

→ We need to take seriously the knowledge of local communities impacted by climate change

• Color knowledge is a way of describing the same ocean conditions that interest marine biologists and conservationists, yet more holistically 

• Agricultural industries, disorderly coastal development, corruption, and  poor environmental laws

Piers Locke

Elephants as persons in Nepal

Ethnography of a human-elephant companionship

Elephants as research informants

Becoming a hattisare

• Sensorial communication

• Body as a research tool

How can elephants have personhood?

Elephants have “intentionality, playfulness, attentive concern, and an ability to convey preferences and desires”

Engage in forms of gift-giving and reciprocity

View some humans as “theirs” (fictive kin)

Elephants act occasionally as teachers

“I came to understand “my” elephant as a conscious person with desires not entirely dissimilar to my own, with whom I could develop a relationship involving meaningful, two-way communication, and crucially, as a being who could reject her human companion if she wished”

Boundaries between animality, humanity, and divinity are permeable

Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett: How can anthropology help prevent pandemics?

→ Ebola outbreak in West Africa (2013-2016)

– From a bird’s eye view to a worm’s eye (ethnographic view)

• Ebola response anthropology platform

  • Clash between local perspectives and WHO guidelines

  • Widespread mistrust of the government

  • Local anxieties about not being able to perform death rites adequately

→ Proposed solutions

• Alter the design of treatment centers

• Recruitment of village elders for health campaigns

• Guidelines for practicing death rites in medically safe ways

→ Effective?

• Yes, by the spring of 2015, the contagion slowed

• No, with Covid-19 we did not learn our lesson 

Anand Pandian

Extreme political polarization

Book argument: people need to pay more attention to the everyday walls and divides that Americans have come to rely on in their daily lives

• Walls: fortified homes and neighborhoods, bulked-up cars and trucks, visions of the body as an armored fortress, media that shut out contrary perspectives

Why should we care about these walls? 

→ makes it more difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously

→ societies built around boundaries, gates, and walls; seals and armor; and containers and dividers, tend to produce exclusionary viewpoints

→ shape the possibility or impossibility of meaningful relationships and what we feel or cant feel for others

Sarah Lewinger

Kampala Poets → triumph narratives—what they overcame rather than current struggles

• Heavy coded language for specific topics 

• Discussing them can have consequences

• Openness allows different listeners to have different interpretations

  • Protects the artist

Uganda

– Young nation, old leader

• Same president since 1986

– Independence from Britain in 1962 

– HIV/AIDS legacy

• One of the highest rates in the world

• Devastated the older populations

– Economic realities

• Adopted neoliberalism in the 80s

• Weakened public sector

• Cheap Western goods flooded Uganda

• Boom in private universities → not necessarily good quality education 

  • Migration because there are no jobs

  • Sex work 

  • Not using degrees in the way they had hoped

– Kampala: cosmopolitan meeting point 

• Hub of creativity, struggle, and cultural hybridization

• Youth from different backgrounds come together

• Refugees

• Over 50 languages spoken 

Ugandan youth are not passive, but not progressive 

Social media: lots of Western media coming through 

Pentecostalism – direct interactions with spirituality 

• Religion can happen during performances and workshops, and is not separated from secular time 
  

Key takeaways 

→ Strategic ambiguity: a survival method and a condition of living under surveillance and constraint

• Under authoritarianism and economic exclusion, holding contradictory positions isnt a choice; it's often a requirement for survival

→ globalization is messy remix culture: it is not always progressive, but it is never passive

• Globalization isnt one way; it's contradictory, creative, sometimes troubling, sometimes inspiring

→ Poetry is world-making when institutions fail

• Through poetry, unemployed youth become, if only temporarily, the revolutionaries, intellectuals, and cultural authorities they aspire to be

Syeda Rumana Mehdi

Who are the Shias?

• One of the minority sects in Islam 

• Largest population resides in Iran and Pakistan

• Shias believe that the successor of Islam after Prophet Muhammad was Ali ibn-e-Abu Talib

Caravans – Arabaeen pilgrimage 

Days of nonstop walking - polls along the way for guidance

Thousands of food stalls, resting places, and medical care (gifted from all over the world)

Shrines

Red and black = mourning

Green and white = celebrations

Iraqi people make booths that reenact the tragedy

The body can become a vessel of faith 

Anthropological knowledge and understanding is not just produced through observation and analysis but through feeling, movement and vulnerability

Anthropological analysis makes way for affective, spiritual, and non-linear ways of knowing where divine apparitions, intense emotions serve as sites for meaning making

To do anthropology is to walk with others, not just to write about them

Joanna Davidson

Maquilapolis

Maquilapolis (2006): documentary of maquilas in Tijuana, near the U.S.-Mexico border

Assembly plants located in tariff-free zones, especially along the U.S.-Mexico border

Second largest industry in Mexico after oil: over 3000 maquila plants

Maquila boom after NAFTA in 1994

Maquilas offer a cheaper workforce: lower wages (about one-sixth of the cost of an industrial worker in the U.S.), fewer labor regulations and workplace safety laws, and flexible work contracts

Gendering of the maquila workforce

The experience of work in a maquila:

1) Discipline

• surveilence

• harrasment

• coercion from male supervision

2) Bodily experience

• fatigue

3) Few or no workers’ rights and very limited enforcement of environmental regulations

4) No properity no future

• Maquilas leave once they find cheaper workers elsewhere (Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.)

• Working-class neighborhoods remain without electricity, water, roads, and decent housing

I Like Dirt

Shifting american attitudes towards the body, death, and possible afterlivess

Yet, there is still a need to ritualize death

Sweetgrass

Human Terrain: How War Becomes Academic

Recruitment of anthropologists to serve as cross-cultural experts in Iraq and Afghanistan

Ethnographers offered advice to military commanders on how to navigate local communities

Arguments for the Human Terrain System:

It allows the U.S. army to wage a ‘more humane war’: it reduces collateral damage

Anthropologists are not in a position to decide whether any war is just or unjust

Arguments against the Human Terrain System:

Use of anthropological knowledge as a weapon of combat

Grave violation of AAA’s Code of Ethics:

• Do no harm?

• Transparency about the purpose of the research?

• Covert research?

• Informed consent?

It negatively affects the reputation of anthropology as a discipline