test 1

power (Dana Hickey): (4)

• power is not something possessed by one person, but it is a structural characteristic of a relationship

• power exists only as exercised by some on others, only when it is put into action

• power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social

• faces of power

what are the 3 faces of power?

• decision making face: direct aspects of power

• restrictive face: prevents certain members of society from participating in decision making process

• normative face: influences or shapes the very wants of community members

power of compassion: (4)

• compassion is the sympathetic awareness of others’ distress coupled with a desire to alleviate sufferinge

• empathy plus pro social action to improve the condition of others

• to be compassionate required attention, insight and engagement

• the practice of compassion inherently is about helping others, yet science has shown that it can also help improve the physical health and psychological wellbeing of the person doing good

violence: (2)

• represents the breakdown of meaning, the advent of the irrational and the commission of physical harm

• violence of language, representation and the structures of everyday life are acknowledged as relevant examples of harm but these are peripheral phenomena and dependent on the existence of bodily damage/vicious attacks as a substrate to more ethereal examples of violence

decolonial anthropology: (Dana Hickey) (4)

• indigenous decolonization framework addresses the structural inequities produced by colonization, establishing 3 things in the following research:

1. anticolonial indigenous theoretical perspectives privileged throughout

2. every precaution will be taken to ensure indigenous participants are not further disempowered during the research

3. interest in contributing to research that produces decolonizing outcomes

reflexivity:

an awareness of the place where the author fits within the two worlds that the research navigates - refers to the ongoing assessment of the influence of my background and ways of perceiving reality, experiences, ideological biases, and interest during research

compare & contrast western vs. indigenous epistemologies (Dana Hickey): (8)

western:

• source of power by virtue/right/legitimacy

• allowed people to accumulate disproportionately high levels of power

• goal of power is the production and maintenance of relatively orderly societies based on individualism and competition

• focus on what is superior and inferior

indigenous:

• source of power is the sacred network of interconnectedness of all elements of the universe swirling around in a dance of perpetual change/flux

• indigenous people do not claim that any one person is more entitled to hold a disproportionately high amount of power because imbalances cause ill health in communities and ecosystems alike

• goal of power is to live harmoniously within the delicate balance of forces that constitute the flux that is our lived experiences in indigenous spaces

• focus is on how all of creation is sacred (no comparisons)

eurocentrism:

imaginative and institutional context that informs contemporary scholarship, opinion and law, as a theory it postulates the superiority of european over noneuropeans and is built upon a set or assumptions or beliefs that educated and usually unprejudiced europeans and north americans habitually accepted as true, as supported by the facts or as reality

julian steward/marc pinkoski: a new disciplinary model (3)

• greater self reflexive techniques within the disciplines methodology

• focusing on the necessity for generating a method of disciplinary self reflection and consistently, they offer this need for a new method as a means to acknowledge and level power imbalances between ethnographers and subjects so as to improve the basic anthropological project

• new purpose and method for anthropological enquiry that integrates the hermeneutic insight that the investigator is always situated and must understand the meaning of his cultural practices from within them

julian steward/marc pinkoski: connection between anthropology & colonialism in NA (4)

• connection between colonial law regarding rights and titles and the representation of indigenous peoples as minimally socially evolved - via steward

• conceptualized property rights as a variable land tenure, which in turn was a variable of sociopolitical organization, according to stewards theory, only sociopolitical entities that reached a certain level of organization on an evolutionary scale could have developed concepts of holding land as property

• foundational claims that has become canonized in american anthropology is that stewards theoretical paradigm and the representations of indigenous societies that flow from it are the result of objective scientific analysis and therefore represent a value free foundation for the study of society in general and of indigenous societies in particular - but we know that he had colonial land laws on the brain

• the very nature of the indian claims commission itself placed anthropologists in a position to legitimize the denial of indigenous rights to collectively held land and to other collective rights guaranteed by treaty with the u.s. government

julian steward: how do we know he had colonial land laws on the brain?

• multilinear evolution & cultural ecology

• steward placed the shonshone at the lowest level of his evolutionary taxonomy - claiming them as typologically unique as they were gastric (motivated solely by their want for food)

multilinear evolution:

hypothesis that is based on the assumptions that significant regularities in cultural change occur and it is concerned with the determination of cultural laws

cultural ecology:

a methodology to demonstrate that the relevant characteristics of all cultures are those most closely linked with the physical environment, and the subsistence technologies used to exploit it

IC: power (4)

• in eurowestern view, power understood as power over someone or something; power and violence are interwoven

• toxic/coercive power creates hierarchies and political and economic systems that are ultimately unsustainable

• necropolitics whose prefix necro implies death; relates to the power to destroy life of those deemed the enemy

• sacred power (indigenous epistemology) vs. toxic power (eurowestern epistemology)

IC: colonization:

a system in which one group claims preeminent right over the resources of a group that holds them, on the basis of the supposed inferiority of that group

IC: to decolonize anthropology

means to recognize and confront the disciplines colonial legacies, which have led to the marginalization and exploitation of indigenous peoples and their knowledge; decolonization is an exercise in looking beyond eurowestern colonial models that structure our perceptions of personhood, the body, time and value and to recentre alternate conceptions

IC: ethnography:

the name for the anthropologists description of account of a particular society or community; also the set of activities that an anthropologist engages in while in the field - ethnography is not only the final product or published account that comes out of fieldwork, but also the method that anthropologists use

IC: participant observation

central learning activity undertaken by anthropologists, a method in which a researcher takes part in the daily activities, rituals, interactions and events of a group of people as one of the means of learning the explicit and tactic aspects of their life routines and their culture

can ethnographic fieldwork ever be objective?

it cannot possibly be scientifically neutral or objective because it is performed by humans with biases who interact amidst the messiness of culture; fieldwork is subjective or intersubjective because it is a constant conversation between people

IC: anthropologists must engage in…

reflexivity - a form of reflecting, thinking and acknowledging ones own positionality and biases in research

IC: postmodernist anthropology:

proposes accessing the natives pov by allowing members of the culture themselves to record their own thoughts, to interview one another and to film their society or community

amma: the science of compassion (3)

• amma (mother): a guru/spiritual master in the hindu tradition sometimes referred to as the hugging saint

• born in 1953 in southwest india, amma had hugged over 33 million people

• known for her humanitarian work, credited and directed her own university and is the holder of various awards/degrees

amma: the science of compassion - how does the documentary qualify as decolonial?

1. films title: the science of compassion is ironic as the documentary shows the limits of western science and rationality ; science cannot adequately explain the amma phenomenon

2. films pace: our media reflects the fast pace of work, exchange of capital and more generally the time is money mantra of neoliberal capitalism; contrasted by the documentaries long languid shots, a deliberate attempt to move away from the global/western temporality of busy-ness

3. film maker and amma directly question the western/global concept of individualism; amma recalls the reciprocity and service to others from her childhood that has decreased nowadays with the incursion of global capitalism; why are we addicted to individuality - the tadpoles tail is like our ego, the moment it disappears we are free and we can see ourselves in everyone and feel compassion towards everyone

savage slot:

symbolic and structural framework in western thought that divides humanity into two distinct categories: the civilized us and the primitive/savage others

animism: (3)

term used to refer to the belief that plants, natural phenomena and elements perceived in western thought to be inanimate, in fact have a soul or animus

• may also entail the idea of elements of nature having a will - every being is a spiritual being

• can understand this term as meaning the belief that the entire universe is animated by an all pervasive energy; making the physical or material spiritual

cosmopolotics (De la Cadena): (2)

argues that we have traditionally understood politics as something that happens between rational people - including indigenous politics into eurowestern political systems means not only including indigenous peoples but also earth beings, the relation of humans and other than humans with the state

• including earthbeings fully in politics we would have to confront the idea that nonhuman beings are political, sentient, can have agency, can be rights bearing and are worthy of respect; rather than the silent antagonism between human and nonhuman worlds found under colonialism past and present, we could potentially embrace a notion of expanded politics or cosmopolotics

cosmopolotics:

in short understood as the possibility of politics as an engagement or a conversation between different and at times divergent worlds

ontology: (4)

• how we know knowledge is knowledge

• ontological view = view about the nature of being

• naturalism as the eurowestern ontology; idea that nature is a singular bound and inanimate object that is separate from us (individualism and objectification); where nature is something humans act upon

• attempts to produce a more relational ontology of humans and nature = animism, but it was typically used to describe nonwestern societies and thus emerged as an instrument of othering

relationality is used in 2 ways:

• anthropologist see humans as social species, our adaptive expertise is grounded in our intelligence and capacity for coordinated action through shared meaning or culture - the essence of what it means to be human lies in our social relational abilities; learning about ourselves and others is the more philosophical sense of relationality

• relationality holds that through our engagements with others, who we are changes as others are also changed in relations with us; relationality in this sense argues that social relations are reciprocal relations of transformation

indigenous perspectives on environment as a theoretical model: (2)

• american indian metaphysics: the realization that the world and all its possible experiences, constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because ultimately everything was related

• extend the range of nonhuman beings with which we can be in relation - for many indigenous peoples our nonhuman others may be understood in even critical western frameworks as living

multispecies ethnography as a theoretical model: (2)

• an emerging field in anthropology that seeks to deconstruct the hierarchical relation between humans and the nonhuman

• centres on how a multitude of organisms, livelihoods shape and are shaped by political, economic and cultural forces

multispecies anthropology:

an anthropology that is not just confined to the human but is concerned with the effects of our entanglements with others kinds of living selves

what are the 3 central principles of multispecies anthropology?

1. it arises against human exceptionalism - the idea that only human beings possess self consciousness and that we are therefore the only ones capable of self awareness, intention and agency

2. multispecies ethnography accepts that other animate beings and inanimate objects can have their own biographies and political lives

3. it is concerned with examining how organisms interact with one another across species - this can mean studying how humans engage with other organisms; how humans interact with one another

susan wardell: ecological distress

any forms of emotional, psychological, or existential distress related to present or anticipated ecological or climactic change

susan wardell: doomer

a vernacular term designating someone who believes that global environmental problems will cause a collapse of civilization and significant human loss of life in the near future

all categories of ecological distress are…

invented, emerging in specific cultural contexts or moments amid shifting social meanings, becoming recognized only through a complex set of institutional relations

susan wardell: environmental grief

a sense of loss across various planes; physical ecological losses, disruptions to environmental knowledge and identity, and anticipated future losses

susan wardell: solastalgia

refers to pain associated with the loss of precious places, especially with environmental change and degradation including climate related extreme weather events

wardell: eco-anxiety (6)

originally proposed as a national ailment in usa in 1990 exploring public responses to the growing problem if pollution

• a serious existential condition of distress focused on the image of an apocalyptic future

• anxiety inherently distinguishes itself from fear by its future focus

• anxiety is already used by the public to reference more everyday registers of emotional experience

• Niblock warns that ecoanxiety should be viewed not as a disorder or illness but rather a perfectly normal/healthy reaction in the context of climate change

• discloses the disorder of ecological systems; not the madness of the individual but the madness of the political, social and economic systems that have brought us here

susan wardell: eco-angst: (5)

• coined by daniel goleman to describe his own sudden plunge into despair when exposed to a new bit of unpleasant ecological information

• extends beyond a mental health frame to recognize the existential and moral components of ecological distress

• terms (environmental melancholia and climate trauma along with ecoangst) provide potential for frames extending beyond ideas of individual pathology to acknowledge the impact of climate change on individuals/collective ways of seeing the world and the take of being human within it

climate trauma:

pain specific to moments of dramatic change - advocated by eco psychologist Zhiwa Woodbury as the paradigm in shift towards climate trauma as the best overarching framework for understanding lived experiences today

tendency of biomedicine to pathologize mental distress:

as a system of healing, western biomedicine is argued to have eroded the moral core of experience, does this mean that if people accept a sick role and or begin to desire a cure for their pain, the experience of ecological distress will no longer be an impetus for action and activism?

the cost of ecological education: living alone in a world of wounds (3)

• invokes pain without making the speaker the subject of a clinical gaze

• in this way, ecological distress becomes a technology for diagnosis - for the planet, not the person - and a way in which the body and mind bear witness to external realities

• there is scope to argue for this kind of distress as an embodiment of cultural memory or specially as an embodied memory of the future —> forces thought about the shape if the collective future and what can be done about it

IC: appropriateness of grief in relation to environmental threats?

because grief has 5 stages in psychology which are meant to lead to acceptance, is acceptance truly what we need in the case of climate change?

IC: pros & cons of medicalizing ecological distress: (3)

pro: medicalization of ecological distress offers some recognition of the urgency of the issue and of communities that share in this affect, and can lead to greater mobilization of societal resources

cons: when medicalizing something you focus on

• the sufferer; distracting from the fact its morally correct to be worried about the environment

• the cure; problems with medicalizing ecoanxiety is that it may prevent sufferers from seeing the problem of environmental degradation as an arena for action

Lou Loretta: art of unnoticing (4)

• a contrived form of ignorance that enables (residents in china living adjacent to petrochemical plants and their toxins) them to live with the reality of pollution and reclaim their agency in face of the unavoidable

• refers to how people justify living in certain environments and living with certain adversities

• ignorance is not only a vehicle to reveal the proper workings of knowledge it is also a location for understanding the workings of power

• ignorance is a concerted effort one produced and sustained by people in positions of power, as well as those subject to it as a way to cope, deceive others, avoid conflict, preserve peaceful relationships, and maintain the status quo

lou loretta: what are the 3 strategies of unnoticing?

1. slow observation

2. assenting to fate

3. engaging in complicity

lou loretta: slow observation (4)

• in china public perceptions of pollution are marked by uncertainty and ambiguity; there is little environmental monitoring data and what does exist is aggregated at country level thus its difficult for the general public to access pollution exposure at the community and individual level

• people resort to using their own bodies to assess the severity of pollution; causing residents to regard longevity as evidence that petrochemical pollution is not that harmful

• used slow observation to convince themselves that people and crops were strong enough to survive the pollution in this area - thus a form of resilience

• villages dismissal of petrochemical pollution resulted not from failing to notice but from the culmination of years of slow observation

lou loretta: assenting to fate (5)

• fatalism and inevitability were different for huangpu residents; to accept that pollution is part of living in china today was considered not only a realistic but also a stoic response to grim yet unavoidable circumstances

• chinese idea of fate/ming must be understood with the notion of capability/nengli; ming can be altered with an individual’s hard work, thrift, frugality, moderate risk taking, and with one’s ability to cooperate with and manipulate others

• fate explains peoples success or failure only when they have exhausted all other efforts

• people are left to cope with pollution as individuals rather than as community forged by environmental injustices, but they are also made to feel inadequate because they cannot escape their predicament

• assenting to fate not a sign of powerlessness but rather an art of unnoticing the trade off and unnoticing the uncontrollable by acknowledging fate/ming the one incapable regain power and agency by giving up the desire to strive for control

lou loretta: community of complicity (4)

• boom of real estate agents; homeowners; people in this district had learned to normalize the insidious effects of the petrochemical industry doing so to justify buying a home and living there

• homeowners here understood some pollution should be expected - complaining about occasional minor pollution was considered greedy selfish or ungrateful

• it makes little sense for homeowners to complain about pollution after having made the financial and emotional investments of their lifetime

• community of complicity; by focusing in their own gated communities, homeowners in huangpu were complicit in unnoticing pollution in the commons; serving as a proponent of the status quo because it helped everyone in the midst of such a struggle

alter lives (in chemoethnography):

lives irreversibly altered by petrochemical world orders - the slow violence that toxicity brings

lou loretta: fenceline communities (5)

• term refers to the neighbourhoods near a facility that emits noise, toxic pollution or hazardous waste - realizing the danger of having petrochemical facilities so close to residential areas, local govs in china have relocated fenceline communities away from petrochemical zones but what qualifies as a fenceline community in china?

• fenceline communities in china are composed primarily if peasants, rural ro urban migrant workers and people employed in industries such as mining, metallurgy, construction, nonferrous metals and chemical industries

• many residents who do not think being close to facilities is the only thing that determines whos affected - it is wind direction that determines that

• those who lived in immediate radius of the plant were not the most outspoken critics of the company or its pollution; they were more likely than other to downplay the severity of petrochemical pollution suggesting that exposure to environmental risks doesnt necessarily translate into heightened risk perception

• middle class homeowners were more outspoken, even though they lived further away; complaints never escalated into mass protests; most if the environmental complaints either took place privately or were confined to online discussions (think about the repressive polciies of xi xingping since coming to power in 2012)

IC: eco-acceptance (3)

the acceptance of environmental degradation - a contrived form of ignorance that enables individuals to live with the reality of pollution and to reclaim their agency in the face of the unavoidable

• discusses agency arising from people’s deliberate inaction when faced with the slow violence brought about by toxicity under conditions of late industrialization

• engaging in reflexivity lou concludes that noticing is the privilege of the person who is there temporarily, and can leave the region and country at will

IC: 3 strategies to eco-acceptance in loretta lou’s example

1. practicing slow observation; refers to residents careful observation of crops and populations to determine the effects of petrochemical pollution - where long lives were taken as evidence that pollution was not as dangerous as generally thought, justifying remaining in the country

2. assenting to fate; acceptance or giving in to the forces of life (pollution) was actually liberating and resulted in a new sort of agency; acceptance as a testament to the populations stoicism in face of harsh conditions

3. engaging in complicity; when one willingly participates in something that may be morally questionable, showing how the real estate market thrived in the area because of relative affordability of homes where it is unseemly for new residents to complain about pollution - pollution that residents believed should be an expected trade off for affordable housing

american dream/the dream critique: (3)

• capitalist ideology posits that every person who works hard enough has a chance to succeed economically

• real meritocracies = idea of equal opportunity for success

• ideology makes capitalist systems appear so open and flexible that those who fail to succeed are often blamed for their lack of effort or poor work ethic; placing blame on the exploited population itself wherein these populations often fair poorly because of political and economic structures that constrain their individual potential

Coates, on “The Dream”: (5)

• thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions and on privileging immediate answers

• an illusion or front that covers up the actual history and current logics of dispossession; dream rests on the destroyed bodies of black/indigenous peoples

• media painting poc as criminals seeks to hide what is actually happening (the opposite): a system of white domination, black people are the ones with a gun against their temple while someone is emptying their pockets

• can only be sustained if there is a class of people who exist at the bottom

• there is no them without you, and without the right to break you, they must necessarily fall from the top, lose their divinity and tumble out of the dream

class: (4)

• should not be understood relationally

• not simply a relationship of economic difference characteristic of capitalism but is a phenomenon that articulates in complex, historically specific ways with other features of social and cultural life

• bound up with other aspects of society in ways that often serve to reinforce the power of social difference

• we are not born subjects but rather we are made into subjects

ideas: (3)

the entire range of mental constructs rendered manifest in the public domain, whose functions are to lay out features of the world and render it amenable to some human use

• ideas are shared and public ways or organizing the flow of reality so that we can act in and intervene upon the world

• ideas become ideologies only when they are developed in service of power

ideology: (4)

unified schemes or configurations developed to underwrite or manifest power

• serves a purpose or a function in that it works to reproduce power and the social inequality that goes along with it

• a system of meanings and values that is an expression or projection of a particular class interest

• alternative knowledge claims in and of themselves are rarely threatening to conventional knowledge or dominant ideologies ; such claims are routinely ignored, discredited or simply absorbed and marginalized in the existing paradigm

Therborn: how do ideologies work? (4)

ideologies tell people:

• what exists and does not exist: it makes us see only a limited set of realities and hides or obscures others

• what is good: it determines what is moral as opposed to immoral, what is beautiful, what is valuable & what is true

• what is possible: it sets the parameters of what is feasible and thinkable, and in doing so it can limit our field of action and even our imagination

capitalism:

an economic system dominated by the supply and demand price mechanism called the market; an entire way of life that grew in response to and in service of the market

• an ideology and economic system; a set of ideas that justifies existing capitalist arrangements of power, convinced people that these arrangements are right and natural, and obscures and inequalities or negative effects of the system, with the effect that these arrangements system is successfully reproduced

culture of capitalism: (3)

capitalist formations peel the individual out of encompassing ascriptive modes (belonging to a community) and installs people as separate actors free to exchange or barter in the market as well as in other areas of their lives

• we are not born individuals; autonomous individual is an effect of life in a capitalist system

• land/labour/wealth/ideas are viewed as commodities or goods with monetary value that can be sold

panopticon: (4)

• to see everything; foucault uses this metaphor to help us understand the transition from being regulated from above (by gov or a king) to regulating oneself or what we call self regulation

• panopticon is an ideal prison designed by jeremy Bentham in the early 1800s; logic is to optimize surveillance of the power exercised through deliberate techniques of watching

• circular tall tower in the middle for guards to see into every cell, each window faces outside the building, prisoners cannot see into the tower because its windows are mirrors

• because prisoners fear being watched, they constantly watch themselves becoming their own guards = self regulation or self surveillance

self-regulation:

self regulating or self surveilling individuals are a product of a particular form of capitalism; neoliberalism

• ex: think about panopticon of following the covid foot arrows even while shopping alone

neoliberalism: (3)

radical laissez faire form of capitalism marked by free trade, deregulation, privatization, and reduction in government control of the economy

• signals the death of the welfare state through a significant reduction in social programs

• neoliberal subjectivities are all about being ruled through our freedom to choose ; through our autonomy

responsibilization:

the process whereby citizens are encouraged by various means to take their lives in their own hands and be responsible for their own success in a capitalist system; the state still wants control over population, thus they exercise control through citizens themselves as citizens internalize state and other authority and begin to self regulate or self govern

Rabinow: subjectification

process in which an individual is made into a self-regulating subject, individuals are active in this process thus individuals are both subjected to various forms of power and actively shape themselves into particular kinds of subjects

Indigenous knowledge (social movements + theoretical perspective: (3)

• in idle no more her community has lived through 4000 years of settler colonial violence “our bodies are attacked for the purpose of dispossession and maintaining dispossession through heteropatriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism”

• critique of political mobilization in the digital age, claiming that the use of social media, even when necessary to the spread of the movement, nevertheless enriches corporations and reproduces capitalism; 1) enhances settler colonial surveillance 2) perpetuates inequality by underlining unequal access to internet connectivity across indigenous territories 3) moves people away from the temporality of movement building 4) moves people away from face to face interactions and relations

• internet constitutes a digital dispossession from ourselves; the only way to build a radical alternative present is to make it on the ground in real time with real people, just as our ancestors did

historical materialism:

implies that control over the material benefits of economic activity requires the ability to act within and shape the social and cultural norms and values that legitimize economic activity

Marxism (theoretical perspective): (5)

• historical materialism; materialist in that he argued that control over how a society produces the goods and services it values (economy) is centrally important to analyzing the distribution of power

• power comes from control over the production process

• what is possible in production reflects the particular environmental, technological, social and cultural legacy available to a specific group

• method which requires examining all of the factors that shape economic activity

• core philosophical commitment to dialectics; opening up the possibility of a multiplicity of different factors interacting with one another at a given moment which generate novel outcomes via such interactions

dialectics:

position that our world is not a seamless place but rather rife with tensions, contradictions which exist between things, whether people, ideas, objects or other features of the environment

mode of production in marxism: (3)

capitalism: the way humans organize themselves to satisfy requirements

• capitalist class in control of the means of production (tech, land, intellectual property, labour, other resources need to produce value)

• working class with the sole resource being their own labour that they must sell to the capitalist class as a commodity in order to live

class process:

theoretical label for the multiple ways in which the economic aspects of class relations are reinforced or challenged by other aspects of social life in particular contexts; highlights how class relations are made dynamic through their dialectical relations with other sources of social difference that provide the basis for imagining or struggling for change

rose nikolas: governing enterprising individuals (3)

• presupposition of the autonomous, choosing, free self as the value, ideal and objective underpinning and legitimating political activity imbues the political mentalities of the modern west

• foucaults work on the self to forms of power rejected two ways we habitually think of power and subjectivity

• foucault analyzes power as the creation, shaping and utilization of human beings as subjects; conceiving of power as that which transverses all practices through which persons are ruled, mastered, held in check, administered, steered, guided, by means of which they are led by others or have come to direct or regulate their own actions

government (rose nikolas):

term suggested by rose as a portmanteau notion to encompass the multiple strategies, tactics, calculations and reflections that have sought to conduct the conduct of human beings

3 interlinked dimensions of government:

1. political or governmentality

2. institutional or human technologies

3. ethical field or technologies of the self

political/governmentality:

complex of notions, calculations, strategies and tactics through which diverse authorities; political, military, economic, theological, medical etc; have sought to act upon the lives and conducts of each and all in order to avert evils and achieve such desirable states as health, happiness, wealth and tranquility

institutional/human technologies:

instituions (prisons, asylums, workplace, schools, home) can be seen as practices that put in play certain assumptions and objectives concerning the human beings that inhabit them - embodied in design of institutions, space, time, activity, procedures of reward and punishment and operation of systems or norms and judgements

ethical field/technologies of the self:

techniques which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality

entreprise culture can be understood in terms of the particular connections that it establishes between the 3 dimensions of political, institutional and ethical field: (2)

• entreprise - connects up the general political deliberations with the formulation of specific programs that simultaneously problematize organization practices in many different social locales and provide rationals and guidelines for transforming them

• entreprise as denoting a kind of organizational form with individual units competing with one another to be encouraged in a multitude of areas

3 technologies of the self:

1. therapeutics

2. expertise

3. self-help

therapeutics:

may be analyzed as a heterogeneous array of techniques of subjectification through which human beings are urged and incited to become ethical beings, to define and regulate themselves according to a moral code, to establish precepts for conducting or judging their lives, to reject or accept moral goals

expertise: (3)

• grounding of authority in a claim to scientificity and objectivity establishes a distance between systems of self regulation and the formal organs of political power/rationalities of gov

• can mobilize or be mobilized within political argument, producing new relationships between knowledge and gov

• it operates through the particular relation that it has with the self regulating capacities of subjects; plausibility inherent in a claim to scientificity and rationality binds subjectivity to truth and subjects to experts

self-help:

signifies an alliance between professionals claiming to provide an objective, rational answer to the question of how one should conduct a life to ensure normality, contentment, success, and individuals seeking to shape a lifestyle in the hope of personal happiness and improved quality of life

idle no more movement building in the era of the internet:

movements must respond to the basic social needs of our communities ; relief from crushing poverty, clean drinking water, listening to youth and then doing what they tell us so as to create meaningful existences for them in their communities right now, supporting harm reduction approaches to addictions, dismantling childrens aid, supporting people recovering from the damage these have caused; setting up alternative accountability structures for gender violence, so two spirit, queer, transgender, gender nonconforming people, women and children are safe; supporting midwifery, breastfeeding and families with children

what are some social effects of race?

white privilege and or the daily experience of police brutality

race: (4)

a biologically flawed concept, category of race serves a critical purpose within the colonial project: a justification of maintenance of inequality, arising specifically as colonizers moral justification for slavery and the illegal seizure of land from indigenous populations

• socially race serves the colonial project by justifying the maintenance of inequality

• no biological basis for racial categorizations

• race exists as a cultural/ideological category for marking social difference; globally common often with serious negative impacts on the groups assigned negative racial characteristics

Coates: racism (2)

the need to ascribe bone deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce and destroy them

• race is born of racism; as a way to give name to someone who is at the bottom of the ladder - intersecting with class in capitalist systems

amphibious subjects:

individuals or groups who deliberately navigate, embody and move between multiple, often contradictory social, cultural or political worlds, rather than fitting into a single rigid western category

• amphibious meaning lifeforms that live both under water and on land; a metaphor to speak to the way the self-making of a particular individual operates both openly (as with sasso who work to grace parties and festive occassion) and secretly (as when a mother is not informed that her son has sex with other men)

double consciousness:

the internal conflict and twoness experienced by marginalized or colonized groups who must view themselves through both their own eyes (as the oppressed) and the prejudiced eyes of a dominant group (the oppressors)

intersectionality: (4)

the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference… and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power

• term devised by feminist sociology to highlight the multidimensionality of human experience - originally coined by black feminist kimberle williams crenshaw

• how our multifaceted social relational identity, creates a range of possible responses in different situations but also allows for the possibility of reinforcing advantage or disadvantage

• suggests that persons are not defined by singular identities but rather have multiple identity possibilities; their subjectivity/sense of self and their capacity to act within a particular set of structuring constraints is thus intersectional

social relational categories: (4)

the various terms that are used within social science to identify the different ways in which people create identity and distinction among themselves

• important concept; & a social construct

• relational perspective argues that statements about reality are always claims based on particular positions, experiences and histories

• each of the social relational categories considered are publicly recognized categories that at once create solidarity among social groups while separating those groups from others; corresponding to cultural systems of knowledge which are normative thus social relational categories are part of ideologies of power that rank people relative to each other

ethnographies of the particular:

particular reflects not only an awareness of the variability in perspective, constant change, and cross cultural influences that prevail in any social situation at present, but also the particular of the anthropologists own particular position in relation to the situation they are studying including relations of power that might facilitate or condition what the anthropologist can see

social situations:

analysis of social situations can lead to assertions about social organization but these are no longer viewed as definitive as in earlier anthropology, but rather as provisional, historically specific and subject to change

relationality is central to conceptualization of social relational categories for the 3 following reasons:

1. relationality recognizes the complexity of social analytical terms that are at once popular and also the foundational tools of social science analysis

2. we embody studied categories; we have gender, race, class, sexual categories that inform how we are perceived and relate to the people with whom we are engaged in ethnographic research

3. social relational categories are not independent of each other but rather interact synergistically

critical race theory (theoretical model):

adapted as an analytical framework to examine race not as a biological or fixed trait but as a fluid, culturally invented social process

postcolonial theory (theoretical model):

critical framework that examines the enduring cultural, political, economic and psychological impacts of european colonialism on both colonizers and colonized societies

kwame: sasso and the contested politics of queer self making in neoliberal ghana (4)

• african christian subject as the product of african christian modernity vs. queer subject as the product of queer liberal modernity; where queer liberal modernity is respectable and proper and christianity improper and inhumane to sexual minorities

• sasso are regarded as subjects contaminated by western culture - i was once scolded for being uncivilized and referred to as an animal by a medical doctor

• hillary recalled how men seeking men did not patronize healthcare services for fear of being castigated by health workers who allowed their christian worldviews to interfere with their duty to offer healthcare to sass

• current anxieties around transnational LGBT+ human rights activism cannot therefore be detached from the conditions created by neocolonial liberal modernity

while sasso articular amphibious subjectivity in the face of the increased visibility of same sex politics and concomitant homophobia, Aidspan…

evades the precarious contexts of their subject positions as well as their decision to have their public secret out and circulating in the public domain

• “i am sasso because that is the term that the people in jamestown understand, gay is sometimes too negative. once you say you are gay people immediately think you get fucked in the ass; yes i am a believer of gay liberation in ghana, however in jamestown i feel that when i say i am sasso i do everybody and myself great good - sometimes one must know when, where and how to be gay.”

cruel optimism:

term used to capture the insidious character of liberal projects that claim to produce freedom - wherein liberal projects ultimately represented and destroyed the lives of the victims on whose behalf they spoke