Social Anthropology

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Open Access
An Amikwa Family Through Their Eyes: An Auto-ethnographic Study of an Indigenous Community in Northern Ontario Canada
(2017-07-27) Nandlall, Ravindra Atma; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This work is focused on the lived experience in Northern Ontario, on the Pickerel River. The Mcquabbie Family history is used as a platform for discussing larger socio-political issues directly connected to person-hood, and identity politics. Through this discussion, we attempt to unravel the multitude of ways in which knowledge and the production of knowledge can be interpreted and understood in a variance of ways historically, and cross-culturally.
Open Access
Anarchism in the Boonies: Place-Making, Technology and Resistance in Rural Canada
(2016-09-20) Malenfant, Jayne; Alexandrakis, Othon
Looking at various locations around Canada, this thesis aims to better understand the ways in which modern Canadian anarchists are reimagining spaces in both rural and urban contexts. Through focusing on the use of technology and Do-It-Yourself ethics, this research demonstrates the unique ways this "scene" creates new forms of rural living and political opportunities outside of urban activism. In addition, this builds on existing ideas of how new media and technology can be tinkered with in politically meaningful ways--in this case melding aspects of punk, anarchist and "traditional" rural aesthetics and ethics to create fluid spaces of possibility.
Open Access
Audiovisual Indigeneities and Cosmopolitics: Shifting Political Grounds in the New Landscapes of Communication and Resources of Hope in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
(2022-03-03) Castilho Da Silva, Marta; Yon, Daniel Arthur
This dissertation explores how collaborations between Indigenous audiovisual producers from different countries engender political and cultural arenas able to become resources of hope for Indigenous groups facing oppressive local practices. I centred my research on the activism of the Cultural Association of Indigenous Producers, which, since 2008, has cultivated close relations with Indigenous filmmakers from Bolivia and drawn inspiration from Indigenous audiovisual production from Canada. This independent collective is based in Mato Grosso do Sul, the Brazilian state with the second-largest Indigenous population, the largest portion of private lands in the country (92%), and the largest concentration of land for large-scale agricultural and farming operations (83% of private land) (IMAFLORA 2017). This dissertation analyzes how encounters within indigenous audiovisual production have nurtured deep research and creative explorations on subject and identity formation while propelling societal dreams confronting an increasing control of the land in the region by multinational agribusiness. It also examines how "new landscapes of communication" (Beck 2016, 112) created by the emergence of digital media-sharing platforms such as YouTube and Facebook open arenas for the "symbolic confrontation" (Gruzinski 1990) over the meaning of identities, their (re)presentations and their place in different projects of society, as well as spaces of maneuverability for carving paths for transcending the geontopower of neoliberalism (Povinelli 2016, 31). Anthropological interpretations of cosmopolitics present tools for analyzing the antagonistic relationship in Mato Grosso do Sul. Firstly, they draw attention to how political forces are increasingly being "formulated beyond the polis or state form" and how connections, discourses, and actions have been crafted simultaneously inside and outside national borders (Robbins and Cheah 1998, 23). Secondly, understandings of cosmopolitics illuminate political visions lifting the artificial divide between society and nature (Latour 1999, 267). This study is supported by multi-sited fieldwork occurring primarily in Mato Grosso do Sul but encompassing research in La Paz (Bolivia), Montreal (Canada), and online environments. Inspired by Marcus' search for new paths of connection in differently configured spatial canvas (1995, 98), it follows relationships developed during film festivals and audiovisual workshops that enabled participants to imagine contemporary ways of becoming and being indigenous.
Open Access
Bean There, Grind That: Queer Coffee Culture and the Politics of Place, Belonging and Representation
(2016-09-20) Faranda, Daniel; Murray, David A. B.
The gay village located in Toronto, Ontario, is generally thought by mainstream society to be excessively determined by the establishments, individuals and normative LGBTQ identity representations located in the area i.e. mostly white, middle/upper class. Based on this and the interviews with my informants, I assert how the dominance of normative LGBTQ identity makes the area over-determined. However, I will attempt to highlight the importance of alternative queer places along the strip in the Church and Wellesley Street area. My thesis will explore the relationship between place formations, LGBTQ identity construction, and coffee consumption. I aim to create a richer understanding of the various ways in which queer identities are understood, created, and negotiated within coffee shops. I highlight how, at times, queer coffee shops are open and dynamic, and allow for new and old meanings to become generated in and out of these places. Queer coffee shops shed light on how my research informants grapple and work with or against these complex sites of negotiations. Ultimately, queer coffee shops in the Church and Wellesley Street area are microcosms of the larger LGBTQ community in the same neighbourhood. These processes help to shape LGBTQ identity, membership, place, rootedness, and belonging while simultaneously encouraging misunderstanding, tension, conflict, and estrangement.
Open Access
Composing Care: The Aesthetics and Politics of Music Therapy in the Clinic
(2022-03-03) Evans, Meredith Glendyre Brown; Myers, Natasha
This dissertation examines the care work of music therapists in North American hospitals. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2020 in Canada and the United States, this ethnography investigates the clinical aesthetics of music therapy, or how music therapy is sensed and made sense of in the clinic. I show how, through its foundation in Western art music traditions, the profession of music therapy is depoliticized—grounded in the values of universality, rationality, and objectivity—and aligned with biomedicine. It is through an association with biomedical knowledge systems that, I argue, music therapy is made into a health profession. I found that music therapists struggle to have their work taken seriously as they care for patients on the margins of hospital systems. Music therapists are in pursuit of what I call clinical recognition—being seen and valued from a biomedical perspective. As they strive to be recognized as indispensable to biomedical care, I show how music therapists attempt to ameliorate biomedical care structures from within. They cultivate sensitivities to sensory experience, especially to sound, that inform their movement through hospitals and guide their interactions with patients and staff. By intervening in what I describe as the clinical sensorium—the dominant structuring of sensory modes of attention that shape what is sensible in the clinic—music therapists disrupt the stultifying anaesthetic, or numbing, qualities of the clinic by reconfiguring clinical attunements, composing atmospheres of care, and structuring feelings in their extra/ordinary care practices. These care practices, I argue, are grounded in reciprocity; through musical gift exchange, music therapists foster affective connections and attachments for hospital patients that reimagine care in ways that remain partially tethered to yet exceed biomedical logics. Mobilized for and against biopolitical care regimes that attempt to delineate, capture, and govern life and death, I argue the care practices of music therapists reimagine the sensory-affective possibilities of living and dying in the clinic.
Open Access
Creating Imagined Homelands and the Politics Behind the Balikbbayan Identity
(2016-09-20) Humilde, Angeli Grace; Holmes, J. Teresa
Balikbayan is a Filipino term used to describe Filipinos who have left the homeland, and have returned for temporary visits. Due to the large economic contribution of balikbayans in the past, the Philippine state has hailed those who occupy this status as Heroes of the Nation. In the recent years, balikbayans have been targeted by real estate development companies as sources of capital due to the widely held belief by Filipinos that balikbayans are very wealthy. Many development companies specifically look to target balikbayans to purchase luxury enclave development properties in the Philippines as investment properties. Using data that I had gathered from my fieldwork in the Philippines in the summer of 2014, I will examine what role these luxury properties and consumer consumption have in displaying the balikbayan identity, why it is such a desired subject position by Filipinos, and the discrepancies between the state definition of balikbayan, versus on the ground definition of balikbayan.
Open Access
Framing Absence: Visuals of the Wall and the Vanishing Landscapes in Palestine
(2017-07-27) Hatoum, Nayrouz Abu; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This dissertation explores peoples relationship to the landscapes of material, abstract, and visual borders in the context of Palestine-Israel. Since 2002, the construction of the Israeli separation Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has significantly transformed the way locals, particularly on the Palestinian side of the Wall see and articulate their relation to the landscape. Already living in a state of military occupation through restriction of movement, limited access to land and urban expansion on occupied territory, the Wall has considerably shifted Palestinians relationships to the landscape. To them the landscape has become a visual field on which power dynamics and political structures are embodied and expressed. Moreover, for many Palestinians the Israeli construction of the Wall is visible evidence of the on-going process of destruction of the Palestinian landscape. But what is the view of Palestinians and Israelis living on the Israeli side of the Wall and those living in Palestine but in close proximity to the Wall? What is their engagement with the Wall? To answer these questions, this dissertation draws on more than 12 months of ethnographic research in Israel and Palestine that involved extended interviews with Palestinian and Israeli photographers and activists in Israel, as well as Palestinians whose lives were affected by the Walls construction in proximity to their homes and for whom the Wall route brought them into direct confrontation with the Israeli military. This research also examined representations of the Wall in different visual projects. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation asks how do visual fields facilitate the structuring of national imaginaries and what sights and future visions are offered by different readings of the landscape? To answer these questions, I employ anthropological theories of violence, borders and the visual, and propose the concept of landscapocide, a violent visual process through which landscapes are framed, and made to be seen and unseen. Through landscapocide and other anthropologically grounded theories and concepts I offer a new reading of the ways in which people in bordered contexts give meaning to what they see.
Open Access
From coal pits to tar sands: examining labour migration between the Athabasca oil sands and an Atlantic Canadian region
Ferguson, Nelson Charles; Schrauwers, Albert; Holmes, Teresa; McAllister, Carlota
In less than two decades, the Oil Sands industries of Northern Alberta have transformed from a costly experiment in oil production hidden in the Canadian hinterlands to a mega-industry employing over 100 000 individuals situated at the centre of the Canadian economy. This rapid growth is due in large part to industries' adoption of certain neoliberal strategies, in particular making use of mobile and flexible temporary migrant workforces drawn from communities from across Canada undergoing processes of deindustrialization, capital flight and high levels of unemployment. One such region is Industrial Cape Breton, a former centre of coal mining and steel milling. The region has become strongly connected to the Oil Sands industries following the demise of its central industries at the turn of the millennium and is now dealing with the impacts that patterns of long-distance labour migration have on local communities and families. Based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Industrial Cape Breton and the Oil Sands region, the present dissertation examines this emerging pattern of labour migration as an aspect of the ongoing neoliberalization of the labour force. Through an examination of the political economies of migration and resource extraction, an exploration of the sending and receiving regions involved in these commutes, and use of work-life narratives as a methodological tool to examine the lived experiences of those involved in these mobile labour arrangements, this dissertation argues for attention to the connection of class and migration. Such labour migrations are both cause and consequence of a shift in classed subjectivities among a mobile working class involved in long-distance commute work. The processes that allow for labour migration fall fundamentally within the scopes of a broader neoliberal project yet rest on the foundations formed through the pre-established Fordist project. The promises of Fordism and the Fordist legacy allow for the establishment and continuation of certain forms of neoliberalism and of certain forms of labour migration as workers attempting to re-create Fordist patterns of stable and secure relations to work instead become implicated in insecure and unstable work relations which highlight the neoliberal era.
Open Access
From the ground up: archaeology as colonial knowledge production in Upper Canada, 1830-1860
Sutton, Catherine Elizabeth; Holmes, Teresa; Hirji, Zulfikar; Van Esterik, Penny
This thesis presents a study of archaeology as a form of colonial knowledge production employed in Simcoe County in the years between 1830 and 1860, set against the backdrop of the Native assimilation policies in Upper Canada. I argue that the identification of archaeological sites, their survey, documentation, excavation, and the collection of their contents shaped new epistemologies that contributed to the administration and governance of Aboriginal populations, their territories and the nation-building efforts of this period. I ask: Who took on the tasks of digging, mapping and collecting in Simcoe County? Why were Aboriginal remains and artifacts tom from their original contexts and reinserted as new forms of knowledge into European historical chronologies? What did settlers, colonial administrators and missionaries cum archaeologists know, and how did they know? To address these questions, I draw on the theoretical framework advocated by historical anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism. Cultural studies of colonialism have revealed how, in the nineteenth century, all across the globe, territory was conquered not only through physical force and economic expansion but also through the creation of facts that gave colonial agents and settlers power over indigenous societies, their natural resources and their culture. Colonial domination was enacted through the defining and classifying of space, the counting of populations, the codifying and representation of the past, and the insertion of this information into government reports and archives (Cohn 1996; Dirks 1992). While historical anthropologists have focused heavily on the textual documentation found within these archives, I also interrogate the material, archaeological archive to reveal the complex architecture of colonialism. Yet, as this thesis demonstrates, colonial knowledge production was not monolithic, nor was it without its uncertainties: what was observed and how it was recorded and made into governable knowledge was conditioned by particular socio-political circumstances (Stoler 2009; Thomas 1994). Through the four case studies that structure this thesis, I seek out the ways in which the project of colonial archaeology in Simcoe County was both contingent and often unsettled. In addition, I identify how the production of archaeological knowledge was not an isolated activity. Published reports and archaeological evidence from Simcoe County moved quickly across imperial space, influencing the formation of emerging racial typologies and categories of difference within the metropole that, as I conclude, reverberate in the present.
Open Access
"God Willing, I Will Do Something Else": Affective Intensities in Cruise Ship Tourism Encounters in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic
(2022-03-03) Yusuf, Sarah Rubeyah; Little, William Kenneth
Based on 7 months of fieldwork conducted in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, this dissertation explores the affective intensities that emerge from an ever-changing, unstable tourism imaginary of a paradisiacal Puerto Plata, a frame into which Carnival Cruises sails. Located in the Bay of Maimn, just west of Puerto Plata, Amber Cove is the first cruise ship venture in the area since the last cruise ship sailed away in the 1980s, a venture meant to reinvent and reinvigorate the tourism industry in the province. Touted as an "incredible project" by tourism officials, this research traces the tensions, the frustrations, the disappointments and the hopes that overspill from the tourism encounters that unfold in this new project that promised so many things. Drawing on Gordon's (1997) notion of haunting, this research contributes a unique perspective to important work in tourism studies already examining the historical and contemporary socioeconomic and political consequences of the tourism industry. It is a way to explore the particularities of individual experience without disconnecting them from the political economy (ibid., xvii), throwing into stark relief the structures of power that reach across time and space to make themselves known, felt and sensed in the present. By informing this project using theoretical work on affect, I consider the things that "don't add up" (Stewart 2008, 72), the things that provoke and compel, the "something more" (Stewart 1996, 5-6) that efforts to codify would "[strip] of the dense and deeply mortal flesh of life" (Pandian and McLean 2017, 4). In so doing, this dissertation addresses two questions: 1) How does the cruise ship tourism industry shape tourist-local interactions and the expectations, desires, confusions and disappointments on which these relationships are fashioned? 2) How do locals frame, understand and experience these new kinds of encounters given the shift from enclave resort tourism to cruise ship tourism? By exploring how the cruise ship tourism industry animates and enlivens the tourism frame in Puerto Plata, my research contributes to our understanding of what tourism encounters in a cruise ship tourism context can look and feel like, moving beyond a representational or "critical" theory approach to the industry (Stewart 2008).
Open Access
Governance and Empowerment in Clinical Encounters: An Ethnography of Toronto's Sexual Health Landscape
(2022-08-08) Odger, Allison Rachael; MacDonald, Margaret
This dissertation is an ethnography of the clinic. My fieldsite was a sexual health organization, comprised of what I call The Centre and The Mobile. Created in the 1970s, The Centre was a pioneering force in the history of sexual health care and the women’s health movement in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This organization was created by and for immigrant women with the goal of providing free and accessible sexual health care. However, providing sexual health care to these populations in Canada’s public health care system needs to be understood in terms of the increasing emphasis placed on the managerial tasks of reporting as a form of accountability. I use the conceptual framework of sexual health governance to examine the delivery of sexual health care in Toronto. Sexual health governance is an assemblage of institutions, social actors, and expert knowledge, which regulates, counts, and fosters sexual health via technologies of care, surveillance, and metrics. In this dissertation, I ask: How is the sexual health landscape organized, and how does the sexual health governance shape everyday practices and experiences of care? I carried out participant observation in The Mobile and The Centre. I interviewed an array of sexual health social actors, including counsellors, physicians, administrative staff, executive directors, volunteers, sexual health promoters, and clients. In this dissertation, I argue that both The Centre and The Mobile were a part of, and were shaped by, sexual health governance. While their funding requirements meant they had to carefully manage their metric data (counting clients and services), they also remained productive spaces for meaningful forms of care. I argue that sexual health social actors were invested in biomedicine while also seeking to do it differently via valuing choice, bodily autonomy, and agency. Clients, too, exercised agency-within-compliance as they accessed sexual health care, both desiring biomedical information and care while also challenging it, revealing nuance in the operations of neoliberal disciplinary power. This is a dissertation about entanglements—highlighting the tension between care and surveillance, empowerment and governance—through an ethnographic study of sexual health clinical encounters and the meaning this held for the landscape’s social actors.
Open Access
Hamdard and Unani: The Contested Terrain of Indo-Muslim Medical Knowledge
(2016-11-25) Shah, Radha; Gururani, Shubhra
This thesis is a historical anthropological study of the Indian branch of herbal pharmaceutical company Hamdard. I examine Hamdards commercial representation of the Indo-Islamic tradition of medicine called Unani, through a document analysis of a variety of company commissioned literature, including marketing pamphlets, conference proceedings, scientific journal articles, newsprint media, educational materials, and print advertisements. Established in 1906, Hamdard emerged and developed during a period of Indian Muslim cultural modernization, Hindu nationalism, and anti-colonial politicization. I analyze the ways in which Hamdard literature contextualizes a narrative of the companys growth within this history, which sets the backdrop for Unanis professional reform in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century India. An emergent theme in my textual analysis, which I address throughout my project, is how Hamdardas an Indian Muslim companynegotiates this identity while articulating belonging in India.
Open Access
Is it Worth the shot? Ontario Women's Negotiations of Risk, Gender and the Human Papillomavirous(HPV) Vaccine
(2014-07-09) Wyndham-West, Catherine Michelle; Adelson, Naomi
This research project has been an endeavor in understanding how Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy became gendered in Canada, how women in Ontario negotiated the concepts of “risk” and “gender” deployed in pharmaceutical marketing and public health programming, and how they folded these mediations into decision making about the vaccine. Eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork revealed that the federal and Ontario governments developed HPV vaccine policy by using gender based analyses frames, based on the parameters of Merck Frosst’s gender-based marketing. This case study of the HPV vaccine highlights how corporations and governments work hand and hand to set public health policy in the neoliberal era of public health. However, these sales/governance strategies and the gendered at-risk subject formation they created and circulated were not passively integrated by women into their daily lives. The women interviewed – mothers of daughters affected by the grade eight school vaccination program, women university students and patients at a hospital vaccine clinic – demonstrated that the concepts of “risk” and “gender” are productive and movable ontological modes of being, which shift in and out of focus depending upon the context. Mothers were intensely focused on gender and doing mothering, students were doing gender politics and intermittent risk, and patients were living with risk. What sales/governance strategies had tried to “fix,” women continually unfixed. These accounts of situated risk and gender demonstrated that when assembled, women’s experiences helped transform their ethical being or sense of self. This knowledge of the self then informed vaccination decisions. Thus, decision making was not a discrete event or a linear, cost-benefit analysis. Instead it was an inherently social and cultural process, which was embedded in women’s experiences of finding meaning in their efforts to be good mothers, strong young women emerging into adulthood and pre-cancerous patients seeking respite amid the anxiety of protracted medical procedures. Women’s ontological decision making provides an analytical framework through which to tie together risk- and gender-related theory, individual accounts of risk encounters and the social, political, historical and economic context in which these mediations occur.
Open Access
"Keeping the Kids out of Trouble": Extra-Domestic Labour and Social Reproduction in Toronto's Regent Park, 1959-2012
(2018-03-01) James, Ryan Kristopher; Schrauwers, Albert
This dissertation is an historical ethnography of social reproduction in Regent Park, Canadas first public housing project. Built from 1948 to 1959 as part of a modernist slum clearance initiative, Regent Park was deemed a failure soon after it opened and was then stigmatised for decades thereafter, both for being a working-class enclave and for epitomising an outdated approach to city planning. A second redevelopment began in 2005, whereby the project is being demolished and rebuilt as a mix of subsidised and market housing, retail space, and other amenities. Despite its enduring stigmatisation, however, many current and former residents retain positive memories of Regent Park. Participants in this study tended to refer to it as a community, indicating senses of shared ownership and belonging that residents themselves built in everyday life. This dissertation emphasises the capacity of working-class people to build and maintain community on their own terms, and in spite of multiple and intersecting constraints. To theorise community-building, I begin from the concept of social reproduction: the work of maintaining and replenishing stable living conditions, both day-to-day and across generations. Much of this work is domestic labour unpaid tasks done inside the household such as cooking, cleaning, and raising children. In Regent Park, social reproduction demanded even more of residents: the stability of households was often threatened by dangers and challenges unique to life in a stigmatised housing project, and it was largely left up to residents themselves to redress these. To account for the considerable effort this involved, I propose a concept adjacent to domestic labour that I call extra-domestic labour: unpaid work done outside the household, usually through informal collaboration among members of different households, that is necessary for social reproduction. Extra-domestic labour built community and fostered a territorial solidarity that, I argue, is the primary means through which Regent Parkers developed class consciousness. This was often expressed through emic class categories, which were defined in relation to the locality more so than the workplace, and through which people interpreted their position in the wider social order.
Open Access
Killing Matters: Canadian War Remembrance and the Ghosts of Ortona
(2015-08-12) Cosh, David Ian; Yon, Daniel Arthur
This dissertation combines critical discourse analysis with person-centred ethnography to examine the dissonant relationships between Canadian war veterans' narratives and the national discourse of Canadian war remembrance. The dissertation analyses Canadian war remembrance as a ritualized discourse (named Remembrance) that is produced in commemorative rituals, symbols, poetry, monuments, pilgrimages, artwork, history-writing, political speeches, government documents, media reports, and the design of the Canadian War Museum. This Remembrance discourse foregrounds and valorizes the suffering of soldiers and makes the soldier's act of dying the central issue of war. In doing so, Remembrance suppresses the significance of the soldier's act of killing and attributes this orientational framework to veterans themselves, as if it is consistent with their experiences. The dissertation problematizes this Remembrance framing of war through an analysis of WWII veterans' narratives drawn from ethnographic fieldwork that was conducted in western Canada with 23 veterans of the WWII battle of Ortona, Italy. The fieldwork consisted of life-story interviews that focused on veterans' combat experiences, supplemented by archival research and a study of the Ortona Christmas reconciliation dinner with former enemy soldiers. Through psychoanalytically-informed discourse analysis, the narratives are interpreted in terms of hidden meanings and trauma signals associated with the issue of killing. The analysis shows that many of these veterans were strongly affected by killing even when they did not know if they had killed and even though most of them tried to suppress their dissonant affects. In sum, these Ortona veterans' narratives constitute dissonant acts of remembrance that unsettle the limited moral frame within which Canadians imagine war.
Open Access
Mythologizing a 'Zone City': Urban Fantasies of and in Songdo, South Korea
(2016-09-20) Posner, Simon Dennis; Gururani, Shubhra
Songdo is a city built within Koreas first Free Economic Zone (FEZ). The city has become imbued with three distinct yet interrelated fantasies a grand state project envisioned to guide the country towards modernity; a blank slate onto which an organized and efficient utopian community can be built; and an urban node in a frictionless world. In this thesis, I present an anthropology of and in the city by exploring the relations between the urban imagination of Songdo and particular groups in the city. I argue that Songdos fantasies shape the behaviours, perceptions, and material practices of people working and living in the city, who in turn interpret and act upon Songdos physical and symbolic spaces. I attempt to demonstrate that while Songdos mythologies and their concomitant practices link to global trends, the production and experiences of the city reflect a situated and locally embedded urban form.
Open Access
'Nai-rob-me Nai-beg-me Nai-shanty: Historicizing Space-Subjectivity Connections in Nairobi from its Ruins
(2018-05-28) Kimari, Wangui; Holmes, J. Teresa
What can personal histories from poor urban settlements in Nairobi tell us about the history and future of this city? How do these entangled life stories belie vogue narratives of phenomena such as rural-urban migration, urban-development and postcoloniality, while also shedding light on the durability of empire? Through an ethnographic and archival exploration of the poor urban settlement of Mathare, located close to central Nairobi, I argue that urban planning emerges from within an assemblage of imperial political, social, economic and ecological ideas and practices, to produce what I term ecologies of exclusion. In essence, these planning interventions, materializing from within epistemologies of empire, co-constitutively manifest as neglect and force in Nairobis margins to create and sustain inequality in certain neighbourhoodsits ruins. In addition, I show how, both now and in the past, this mode of urban governance conjures up and sustains negative stereotypical subjectivities about certain populations in order to legitimize inequalities within its formal spatial management practices. Furthermore, contemporary colonial modes of urban planning require a constant and ever more forceful militarization of poor urban spaces. Notwithstanding this now naturalized violent space-subjectivity enterprise, those who have long been categorized as the robbers, beggars and shanty dwellers of Nairobi engage with and emerge from these ruins of empire through unexpected ethical and political projects. And, from within their urban struggles, they render alternative subjectivities of self and space that articulate more grounded narrations of the history and possible futures of this city.
Open Access
Places, Memories and Religious Identity: Muslim Places of Worship in Badakhshan Region of Tajikistan
(2015-01-26) Oshurbekov, Sharaf; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This study examines the ways in which the Ismailis of the Badakhshan region of Tajikistan understand and relate to their sacred sites. It explores the sacred sites of Badakhshan within the framework of anthropological literature on space and place. Using the concept of chronotope, this study shows that the sacred sites disrupt the materialist and historiographic understanding of and relation to the spaces and places. Through the stories of the miracles of the saints, sacred sites validate and confirm the presence of the transcendent in the lived environment of the people. Beyond the legends about the miracles of the saints, sacred sites are chronotopes that evoke the memory of the Soviet campaigns against these places. Through the retrospective narratives about the Soviet past, people allocate the responsibility for the destruction and desecration of these sites at that period to members of their communities. Although these retrospective narratives are about recent events, they include transcendent intervention; that is, they show how these sites punished those that were involved in the Soviet campaigns against them. Moreover, through these discources and through their visitations to the sacred sites, people unconsciously attribute certain agency to them, which emerges in the relationship between people and these places. People seek the help of these sites to grant their wishes. In most cases, these wishes are about curing the seriously ill family member or curing infertility problems. In that sense, sacred sites help people to recapture the sense of agency in situations where they experience its loss. Therefore, sacred sites are chronotopes, the physical sites in the inhabited space of the community that incorporate and evoke the legends about the miracles of the saints, the stories about the recent Soviet past of these sites and the discourses about their current status in the life of the community. The stories and discources associated with the sacred sites affect and shape people’s perceptions and articulations of their inhabited spaces and places.
Open Access
The Politics of Intimacy: An Ethnography of Illegalized Migrant Women and Their Undocumented Children in Tel Aviv, Israel
(2016-04-07) Shapiro, Maya
This study of migrant women and their undocumented children in Tel Aviv, Israel is based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork spanning 2009 to 2011. It draws upon participant observation, as well as interviews and informal conversations, in order to describe and analyze the social and political patterns that emerged when migrant women from the Global South, who were employed as caregivers for the elderly through Israel's Foreign Worker Program, chose to become pregnant, give birth and settle in the city to which they migrated as so-called temporary workers. Using a public debate over the proposed deportation of 1,200 Israeli-born, but undocumented, children of migrant workers as a point of departure for this investigation, I asked how illegalized migrant women and their children were situated in political, economic and cultural terms in Tel Aviv despite the fact that they were never supposed to permanently live there. I found that far from existing on the margins of Israeli policies, laws, bureaucratic practices and social expectations, as may be assumed of people without legal status, illegalized migrant women and their undocumented children were, in fact, embedded in their very core. I use the term "politics of intimacy" to describe the daily interactions of illegalized women and their children with Israeli government offices, medical facilities, social and legal welfare institutions, employment agencies, popular media and individual citizens, arguing that intimacy is not just an interpersonal condition, but a socio-political one that encompasses the possibilities ofboth empowerment and exploitation. Following from Stoler's observation of the "tense and tender ties" (Stoler 2001) of colonial rule, I describe the paradoxical conditions that are generated when marginalized individuals are brought into an intimate relationship with the structures and ideologies of the place in which they live. Specifically, illegalized migrant women and their undocumented children in Tel Aviv live in states of "permanent temporariness", "visible invisibility'' and "inclusive exclusion" as they come to constitute a "privileged underclass" that is simultaneously dependent on, and vulnerable to, intimate engagements with Israeli society.
Open Access
Pulp Friction: Nature, Politics and Plantation Forestry in Soriano, Uruguay
(2016-09-20) Switzer, Michelle Barbara; McAllister, Carlota
Based on 14 months of fieldwork carried out in the capital of Montevideo and interior department of Soriano, Uruguay, this dissertation analyzes the growing tension between supporters and resisters of the countrys expanding pulp and exotic tree plantation industry. Since the creation of the Forestry Law in 1987, monoculture plantation forestry has grown, currently covering 1 million hectares of land. The ruling left-wing coalition, the Frente Amplio, has continued to support the large-scale, foreign-owned pulp/plantation industry despite its founding principles of carrying out agrarian reform and supporting the rural worker. Drawing from the theoretical work on boundary objects in science and technology studies (STS) as well as writings on the dialectical relationship between the state and civil society, this dissertation is broadly framed by three thematic concerns: 1) How do processes of state formation and market logics rearrange the natural environment? 2) How do such processes impact the relationships between local populations, their physical environment, and the state? 3) What does neo-extractivism do? Is neo-extractivism under the direction of a progressive state different from the kinds of extractivist projects that dominated in Latin America during the 20th century? Exploring how and why local populations respond to these entanglements in the ways that they do, I note that anti-industry activists make logical arguments based on their particular interpretations of economic development, natural production, and progressive politics, which clash with the states technical and reformed approach. As such, my research contributes to our understanding of the ways that social and political relationships and state formation projects form within in the context of large-scale neo-extractivist projects.