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doi: 10.1111/aman.28028pmid: N/A
Since the mid‐2000s, the use‐of‐force continuum—a global standard for providing law enforcement with guidelines on the proportionate use of force—has been central in Turkish police training and reporting practices. Liberal police accountability tools, like the use‐of‐force continuum, rely on standardization to prevent police violence. Yet these techniques still result in maimed bodies and psyches and police impunity. Rather than taking the standardization of police force simply as a failed project, a sham, or a mere techno‐fix, I examine how powerful actors like police align with such standards and how they start thinking and acting through them while repurposing them. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 among the Turkish National Police, I show how the transnational standardization of police force has in fact enabled police in Turkey to redefine and ultimately reclaim the violence they are professionalized in as what I call “force experts.” Force defies standardization in both theory and practice; however, what sanctions police violence now is not just technical standardization but the expert framing of the democratically reformed police force. This is the violence of standardization, especially in contexts where governments retool reforms to criminalize suspect Others whom they perceive as a “threat” to their rule.
doi: 10.1111/aman.28038pmid: N/A
In a world of proliferating displacement crises and restricted mobility pathways, low‐wage labor migration has become, for many, a more feasible refuge than formal asylum. The refugee‐as‐displaced‐migrant has thus become emblematic of our time. But how do contemporary displacement crises, and violent ones at that, shape the predicament of the migrant‐refugee in countries of arrival? And how might the particularities of the displaced migrant's vulnerable condition be read as clues, both to violence committed abroad and to the profitable leveraging of said violence in countries of arrival? In this article, I engage these questions through an investigation into how displacement‐inducing violence lingers, as traces, in the lives of Myanmar migrant‐refugees in Thailand. Unfreedom, I find, is internal to ostensibly free market relations. Advancing this claim, I turn to a growing anthropology of borders to grasp the nation's geopolitical perimeter as a social relation that border crossers cannot easily discard—a relation that conditions social life, even at sites far from a given country's territorial margins. I show, in sum, how employers and other regulatory actors in countries of arrival internalize, across borders, displacement‐inducing violence perpetrated elsewhere.
doi: 10.1111/aman.28031pmid: N/A
This article examines how tours of an industrial pig slaughterhouse reinforce the continued enfoldment of Danish pigs into the fabrication of Danish national identity, an enfoldment that underpins the formulation of subjects, human as well as more‐than‐human. A discourse analysis that weaves ethnographic moments from the tours and tour narratives along with historical and literary influences on Danish national identity and current debates on “Danishness” explores how narrativizing industrial slaughter is a means of formulating subjects that are sustained by agricultural histories, existential texts, and fairy tales. Through “humanizing” slaughterhouse conditions, tour guides are performing a kind of affective and pedagogical labor that produces modernist subjects, from the citizen‐consumer to that of the happy pig. In consuming happy Danish pigs, citizen‐consumers consolidate what it means to be Danish as they tacitly accept the industrial sacrifice of pigs, whose lives are worthy of living but crucially, also, worthy of taking. This work demonstrates how a multispecies awareness can enrich our understanding of the complex, unstable, and inseparable emergence of value production, nationhood, and capitalist subjects.
doi: 10.1111/aman.28036pmid: N/A
Emergent scholarship in political geology highlights multiple ways of knowing the earth and its materials. By examining the politics of Western knowledge production within the earth sciences, political geology queries who has the power to define geomaterials and the sociopolitical impacts of such categorizations. Simultaneously, political geology demonstrates how earthly formations cocreate politics alongside humans through their vibrancy, with societies and geomaterials transforming each other. Here, I develop a political geology of archaeological ceramics to move beyond Western categories that can sometimes hinder interpretations of politics due to their rigidity. I use the concept of geopower—how earthly forces engender new collectivities and political possibilities—to overcome the interpretative challenges archaeologists face when describing Recuay sociopolitical organization (Ancash, Peru, ca. 100–700 CE). Specifically, I show how so‐called “impure” kaolin helped to temporarily organize otherwise insular villages through their emergence and meaningful position on the landscape. To recognize geopower in the deep past, I present a layered narrative framework that blends interpretations of earthly materials, thereby making space for the existence of many worlds. In this sense, political geology can learn from archaeology, particularly Indigenous archaeologies, which advocate for the integration of myriad knowledges of the earth and its histories.
doi: 10.1111/aman.28029pmid: N/A
This article considers how ideas about technology take on distinct and divergent meanings in different centers of power. Through a study of the virtual reality (VR) community in Los Angeles, I identify concepts and ideas that seem to immutably travel between LA and San Francisco's Silicon Valley but that through ethnographic examination reveal flexible, local meanings. VR's charismatic identification as an empathy machine, connections between storytelling and innovation, and appeals to workforce diversity all travel widely through networks occupied by tech elites. While these common concerns were discussed in multiple places, attention to local differences revealed the flexible meanings attached to these conversations. This, in turn, surfaced overlooked narratives and understudied networks of power that expand the terrain upon which VR in specific and tech in general can be critiqued and understood.
doi: 10.1111/aman.28041pmid: N/A
Anthropological studies of risk have long focused on how people respond to and aim to manage potential harm. But despite its long and important genealogy, this article suggests that risk can pose an analytic blind spot that potentially occludes other ways of understanding how people aim to live well in potentially harmful situations. In doing so, it argues for anthropological attention to a Mongolian “protection” concept: an optimistic idea that imaginatively tethers defense against harm with prospects of living well in the conditions that follow. This approach aims to recast and deepen anthropological understanding of how people conceptualize, deal with, and move beyond harms encountered in everyday life.
doi: 10.1111/aman.28034pmid: N/A
Resilience is everywhere in contemporary US discourse. In this article, we map anthropological research on resilience and suggest future contributions to resilience studies. To date, anthropological work either uses resilience to describe practices of human survival in adversity or studies resilience as a policy discourse. While anthropologists have long been concerned with human adaptation to adversity, we theorize that resilience discourses hold a particular appeal to a Euro‐American middle class newly affected by crisis and precarity. We offer scenes from preliminary fieldwork on resilience discourses in three domains in the United States: middle‐class parenting guides, urban governance and future planning in St. Louis and New York City, and the cultural productions of Black and Indigenous activists and artists. Drawing these sites into the same analytic frame reveals how resilience discourses can serve distinct political ends, from accommodation to the status quo to qualified social reform to resistance to socially unjust systems. We conclude with a call for more synthetic and comparative research, greater clarity about the distinctiveness and benefits of resilience over other terminologies, and analyses that consider resilience as both a discourse and a ground‐level experience in different global sites.
doi: 10.1111/aman.28043pmid: N/A
Much anthropological scholarship on war—particularly “civil war”—focuses on violence perpetrated between organized political groups within the confines of a national space. In contrast, this article examines how “internal armed conflict” manifests across international borders, irrupting as interpersonal violence in spaces that are supposedly external to war. More specifically, I demonstrate how “the Colombian armed conflict” unfolds between refugees and their persecutors in Quito, Ecuador, through fleeting encounters based upon processes of life‐threatening recognition. These everyday encounters constitute “intimate war,” a relational condition of world‐making involving terrifying social attachments—threatening verbal and physical gestures and cues—between “strangers,” or people who are not necessarily familiar with each other. In this context, refugees enact strategies of evasion to avoid detection by their persecutors, such as bus hopping, visually scanning their surroundings, and avoiding other Colombians. Terrifying encounters across borders, and refugees’ strategies to avoid them, unsettle normative assumptions about the desirability of recognition, where and how war happens, and what constitutes escape.
doi: 10.1111/aman.28044pmid: N/A
Over the past century, debates have raged about the validity of United States corporate personhood and the scope of a person‐corporation's rights. While important, these discussions have also erased marginalized peoples’ use of corporate personhood as a strategy for securing the rights denied them by governments. This is the case with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), who incorporated in 1847 to ensure their own rights and protections at a time when their political sovereignty and human rights were being systematically violated. Although legal recognition of corporate personhood began in 1818, the granting of previously human‐only rights to person‐corporations has accelerated via recent court cases. In this article, I briefly examine how, over time, the US has conferred personhood on corporations. I then deconstruct what this personhood can tell us about the beliefs and practices regarding the meaning of being a person in the United States. Through this, I demonstrate that the act of conferring personhood—the accountability of who is counted as a person and by whom—manifests the underlying ontologies and purposes of what it is to be a person, whether it is through US incorporation laws or in the EBCI's sovereignty protections.
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