FHS 1

Social Analysis and Interpretation

Travestis

Kulick: sex is in no privileged / necessary relation to gender; in Latin America, gender identity = determined by sexual behaviour.

categories of “men” and “non-men”

majority of travestis = feared, despised + subject to police brutality + murder; incorporation of female attributes: cheap hormones in Brazil + silicone implants. They do not claim to be women - believe this would = mental disturbance; sex changes producing madness w/ semen travelling to the brain.

suggestion in the media of 3rd / intermeidate gender is not accurate - in Euro-American system, transgender people = intelligble as system based on sex whereas travesti = intelligible in system structured by sexuality

Funerals of Transgender People in Turkey

Zengin

the body becomes a site + object of sovereign power + source of multiple interpretations: the body comes from + belongs to Allah

Gendered elements of funeral: ritual cleansing, coffin design, prayers (these are exceptional to the otherwise gender-neutral Turkish language) → body = social body: reproduction of relations of kinship + family; gender-nonconforming bodies invoke questions + challenge Islamic notions of embodiment

The State: official gender transition = 2 yr medico-legal process: necropolitics (Mbembe): inscribing state on communal relations of intimacy - ruining relations w/ the dead: unmarked graves…

kinship: family can turn into necroviolent actor: deceased further killed through abandonment at funerals; blood family = primary holder of obligations for + rights to deceased in state + Islamic traditions; hierarchy of intimate rights to the deceased

Neolithic Gender

Harris + Robb: Eurocentric approaches treat gender within certain predefined limits; gender varies historically + more deeply than is usually recognised in both its basic definition + even in its existence at all: sex-gender distinction achieves immediate understandability but at a theoretical price, fudging the role of the material body. treating gender as a form of difference. Sex-gender framework; sex ontologically precedes cultural gender + provies a substrate.

noting that gender became clearer around 5k yrs ago in Europe + more familiar-looking to modern eyes - real change in the nature of gender; palaeolithic representations w/ male features transforming between human + animal forms; biggest silence in gender history = on origins of gender - evolution of gender = empty space between disciplines. Evolutionary scenarios for gender: arising w/ cognitive modernity as culturisation of preexisting biological difference

Linearbandkeramic, central Europe: gender-specific grave goods; Levantine cave art: clear men’s + women’s activities; Neolithic Britain, lack of concern w/ classification of the body w/ human imagery with neither / both male + female biological attributes. Picture = increasingly clear after the Neolithic; era of deep societal change

state bureaucracies favour gender as a fixed identity, but newly arising genders = often highly performative

comparison to race: always the existence of bodily difference, race harnessed in new ways to devise categories of identity in response to needs of European colonialism.

Kinship in Pulau Langkaei, Malaysia

Carsten: The Substance of Kinship + the Heat of the Hearth

Becoming kin: process of feeding + living together; core susbstances of kinship = blood, food + milk, which are mutable; gives example also of Islamic milk feeding prohibitions

siblingship: asserts itself in the womb: each person contains core of relatedness withinthemself: one of 7 siblings, so a person is both singular + multiple.

Boundaries: must be created: ritual bathing + shaving of the child: assumption that they are not yet properly bounded. Postpartum confinement + heating to counteract the cooling effects of birth.

Sexuality and Kinship in Divided Germany

Bourneman: Caring and Being Cared For

“revising descent”: homosexual couple attemotingto secure inheritance through adoption + key question posed to court was whether the relationship was like that of father + son - falsification of relationship + foreclosure of queer people from participation in kinship as relationship is not oriented towards reproduction

“revisiting affinity”: legal + pragmatic domains = the realms in which the right to care = fought for despite the confusion of actual relationships; encountered groups w/ complex relationships of marriage + divorex under Soviet regime; encountered many people, not only gay men + lesbians who used legal kinship relations to construct relations of intimacy that were not related to the legal requirements of common residence + heterosexual union

Wari

Vilaca: Making Kin out of Others in Amazonia

Animism: need to make a human body in contrast to animal bodies; at many different life stages, ambivilance + susceptibility to the loss of human identity; alterity is the starting point

to change identity = to change body + to become kin, it is necessary to desire to do so, eat together, cohabit, adopt behaviour of those you would like as kin

the “soul” only exists when the body is in some way absent

IVF in America

Strathern: Kinship, Law and the Unexpected

children born in context of assisted pregnancy as the embodiment of the desire of parents; IVF offered in the name of the “nuclear families”; members of families linked through information that their bodies hold about each other: Euro-Americans imagining persons as combinants of elements

recombinant families: Simpson’s study of divorce as cultural expression of kiship rather than a social problem: taking apart components of motherhood + fatherhood + putting them together in new ways

NRT in Lebanon

Clarke

Western kinship studies overemphasise biology because sexual legitimacy has declined in importance, but in Lebanon biology is less important as sexual propriety still shapes kinship

“New kinship”: reinstatement of cultural imperialism

Lebanon has a rich medical sector w/ a lack of regulation + numerous fertility clinics + many different opinions about what is right

official rhetoric + hidden practices co-exist: sexual morality, especially that of women, must be maintained

nasab = legitimate kinship lineage, not just “biological” relatedness: there is no social fatherhood unlike Euro-America

ICDS Program, India

Ferguson + Gupta

Integrated Child Development Services; addressing high child mortality rate

unequal spatial mobility: surprise inspections w/ higher level officials “swooping down” into villages whereas lower level Anganwadi workers have restricted access; officials higher in hierarchy circulate across wider geographic spaces reinforcing encompassment: representation + reproducing the state as both above + encompassing local communities

record keeping = extensive: functions to embody + reprduce hierarchy, less about meeting state needs

World Bank Village Planning

Li - Indonesia

infrastructure planning program in Indonesia spending approx $1b on governance reform, which is novel in process; seeking to eliminate corruption + waste by reshaping village decision-making

designed by anthropologists (following Scott’s recommendations), explicitly aiming to empower villagers + build on indigenous knowledge

conditional: villagers had to perform prescribed behaviours to access funds; functioning as exercise as power by positioning planners as experts who know how villagers should live rendering poverty as issue of village-level deficiencies

Mahila Samakhya

Gupta + Sharma - Indian women’s empowerment program

Writing: struggle for social change resting on access to basic literary skills, knowledge of state procedures + sympathetic officials; majority of clients non-literate + understood that struggle for chage rested on access + that, if they to are expect any action on development goals, they must forward concerns in writing

Suspicion: many officials suspicious of program that attempts to empower womrn + challenge social + state hierarcies - ignorance + hostilities from officials

postcolonial Indian state: positions itself as harbringer of national development ; although MS = state-initiated, it does not receive uniquivocal support as relatively small budget + inability to distribute benefits

MCC

Maoist Communist Centre - Jharkhand - Shah

support: contrary to common belief, does not gain support primarily from the rural poor or operate strictly against the state. rather, intertwinement between terrorist + state organisations; gains support primarily because it controls a market of protection rather than through a shared communist ideology

success: local politicians + bureaucrats hire the MCC to protest their own corrupt dealings; operation on pre-existing market of state corruption: embedded in existing power structures

violence: immense power created through actual propensity for violence: engagements in killings inc of those refusing to cooperate w/ demands; maintaiing visible armed squads + guerrilla platoons

omnipresence: cultivated aura of omnipresence + omniscience which = particularly effective in rural areas where people = uncertain about who might be connected + where information spreads through rumour

Southeast Asia

Scott

Irrigated Rice Cultivation: foundation of Southeast Asian State-making. Creation of dense + concentrated populations + a material legible to tax collectors - predictable + visible ripening aboveground + easy to confiscate, transport + store; all major precoloial states arising in settings faourable to wet-rice cultivation; states attaching themselves to existing productive cores

Seasonality: states = radically seasonal phenomena w. roads becoming impassible in monsoon rains, so military campaigns, tax collection + state projection all occuring in November-February

Limits: hills + swamps effectively outside state control; sparse populations, mixed cultivation + difficult terrain requiring extensive provisioning + difficulty in taxing

The Nuer

EP - semi-nomadic people in South Sudan

maintaining order: kinship obligations + balanced system of cattle feuds preventing escalation w/out formal legal system - internal competition, but uniting against external threats: fission + fusion: self-regulating balance of power w/out permanent hierarchy

North Sudan long sought control of Nuer land

earlier accounts presenting Nuer society as internally cohesive and statuc, which = challenged by scholars who highlight community’s dynamic responses to broader historical processes like colonial rule → while social logic of statelessness persists, it is now entangled in nation state system which it cannot opt out of

Zomia

Scott - Highlands of Southeast Asia

“largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not been fully incorporated into nation-states”

reframes statelessness as resistance - deliberately putting distance between themselves + lowland state centres; among strategies deployed = physical dispersion in rugged terrain, agricultural practices enhancing mobility, pliable ethnic identities, devotion to prophetic millenarian leaders + maintenance of largely oralculture allowing them to reinvent histories + genealogies

invertion of traditional development narrative: active ongoing political project of evasion