Anthropology of the State

Following the neoliberal restructuration of the Turkish welfare and banking systems in the 2000s, many veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war faced debt enforcement due to failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Veterans responded to debt collection by turning their own bodies into spectacles of debt and sacrifice by publicly removing and showcasing their debt-ridden prostheses. The media interest in these prosthetic spectacles further amplified the visceral threat of dismemberment evoked by veterans’ embodied performances. The public debates surrounding “prosthesis repossession” cases extended well beyond veteran welfare issues, inscribing all sorts of social and political anxieties on the amputee veteran body, such as anxieties around the incommensurability between the value regimes of nationalism and neoliberalism or around the Syrian refugees. Providing a window into larger questions about the interconnections between disability, gender, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, prosthesis repossession cases show us how debt and disability coproduce each other at the nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare in Turkey. By homing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies in a rapidly changing health milieu, we see how the political economy of violence and the violence of political economy become complicit in the production of debt, dismemberment, and prosthetic rehabilitation.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

There is a dearth of studies on police corruption that have analysed the correlation of economic, cultural, and political causes of police corruption in Pakistan; therefore, the existing studies fail to provide such a holistic picture of the phenomenon. This article aims to fill the gap. It is claimed that police corruption in Pakistan is a politi-cized, institutionalized, and a legitimized phenomenon. The police force entrenched in a kinship-based patron-client social and political culture benefits the political elite to use the police force for controlling the electorate and political opponents. The policy reforms for curbing police corruption have failed and cannot be successful without a strong political will of the political elite. This is a qualitative study using a purposive sampling method. The article will be a useful reference for readers, including police officials who are interested in understanding why corruption could not be effectively prevented and may have some broader relevance to other South Asian countries.

This article tracks the political effects of documents produced in relation to a public
infrastructure project in the Peruvian Andes. By contrast with the recent focus on
bureaucratic documents as aesthetic artefacts and instances of institutional form, I attend to the political processes enacted through project papers, exploring how their relational, material, affective and referential dimensions opened up spaces of political experimentation. In particular, I suggest that the power of documents to mediate the regulatory ambiguities incurred by Peru’s ongoing decentralization lies partly in their capacity to espouse normative formality whilst always hinting at the possibility of its undoing.

Keywords: ambiguity, decentralization, documents, infrastructure, Peru, transparency

In this article, we adopt a socio-anthropological approach to understand how hegemonic international representations are constructed in the politics and theory of international relations, specifically how Southeast Europe is perceived in West European imagination. We focus on various forms of travel writing, media reporting, diplomatic record, policy making, truth claims and expert accounts related to different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars, both old (1912-1913) and new (1991-1999). We show how these perspectives are rooted in different temporalities and historicizations, and how they contribute to international representations that affect international politics, particularly in relation to perpetuating othering and containment of Southeast Europe. We demonstrate through a detailed analysis and problematization how these international representations are culturally and politically constructed. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. As such, how international representations are constructed is itself a form of power and hegemony in both the practice and the theory of international relations.

... a typical naive set of assumptions about "group oriented" cultures it that the participants within them are basically altruistic, self-effacing, self-sacrificing and sociable. A society of such individuals should exhibit the very best of human civilization working in equitable, democratic communities. By contrast, those from individualistic cultures should be cold, grasping, selfish, egotistical and almost incapable of the cooperation demanded by a civil society. Indeed, a society of individualists, by this stereotype would be a dog eat dog affair, dedicated to conflict, riven with disloyalty and betrayal, forever failing to build a stable and humanistic community.

This theme issue re-engages the ghost of Wittfogel in ethnographically grounded conversations around the imbrication of water, power, and infrastructure. It examines social and political relations in ways that take their tensions and correspondences with water seriously, as Wittfogel did half a century ago, but in a less monolithic and totalizing manner. Instead, the contributions pay attention to the situated, partial, multiple, and open-ended encounters that (un)make these links. Together, the papers collected in this theme issue build a critical conversation around the role of water in configuring and reproducing power. Its major threads are the construction of authority through water, the social complexity of water relations, and the interrelationships between water, infrastructure, and political rule.

This chapter critically questions the ‘naturalisation’ of recourse to the market, namely, the process by which market devices and financial techniques were established and became unchallenged and uncontroversial technical issues. The management of public debt in financial markets was initially one among many strate- gies, and market devices became a naturalised way of financing the state only after long ideological struggles and administrative change.
Drawing on sociological studies of the long-term effects that the development and legitimisation of technical instruments have on public policy,4 I analyse state financing techniques as the products of a histori- cal process, which varies across countries and institutional contexts. The apprehension of the sovereign debt problem cannot be reduced to measures such as debt-to-GDP ratios ; for political and institutional constellations do matter. Throughout history, there have been multiple, non-market, professional tools and administrative apparatuses, which financed public spending and deficits.

http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=29004

La question tribale est réapparue en Algérie suite aux révoltes survenues en Kabylie en avril 2001. Cet ouvrage constitue une contribution aux débats : qu'en est-il de la tribu dans l'Algérie actuelle ? Qu'est-ce qu'une tribu dans le cadre des sociétés contemporaines caractérisées à la fois par l'Etat-nation en tant que système politique normatif et par les recompositions sociales, territoriales et politiques liées aux transformations des Etats contemporains ?

중국을 ‘비서구’ 위치에 두면서 ‘서구’식 개념화를 비판해 온 인류학 접근이 ‘서구’를 극복하면서 ‘보편’의 지위를 도모하는 최근의 중국을 어떻게 이해하고 분석할 수 있는가? 본 논문은 ‘보편’ 중국이라는 쟁점에 한국의 중국 인류학이 어떻게 화답할 수 있는가를 탐색하는 시론적 성격을 갖는다. 국가를 상위의 실체로 가정하면서 구심적 힘의 행사를 정당화 하는 ‘국가중심성(state centrality)’이 서구의 인식론적 우위를 자명한 것으로 만든 현대화 기획의 결과이자 조건임을 환기시키면서, 본 연구는 서구가 스스로를 ‘보편’으로 정립하기 위해 거쳐 온 작업과 ‘보편’ 중국 기획의 관계를 규명할 출발점으로 인류학자들의 국가중심성 비판을 검토한다. 그간 한국 인류학자들의 중국 연구는 ‘국가-사회 관계’ 패러다임에 역동성과 다양성을 부여하면서 ‘하나의 중국’이라는 이데올로기에 균열을 내고, 국민국가의 경계를 고착화 하지 않는 이주와 마주침(encounter)에 주목하면서 정치적 상상의 지평을 확대해왔다. 하지만, 중국이 서구 자본주의와 민족주의 역사에 독점되지 않는 방향으로 국가 개념 자체를 바꿔내고자 한다면 기존 국가 개념의 자명성을 낯설게 보는 작업은 얼마나 유효한가? 서구의 인식론적 우위에 균열을 내는 해체론적 작업은 단순히 신흥 강대국이 아니라 “또 다른 보편”이 되고자 하는 중국의 과업을 분석하는데 여전히 곤경을 유발한다. 이러한 곤경은 ‘보편’ 중국이 새롭게 창안하는 개념들을 직접 문제 삼는 대신 서구의 중국 인식 비판에 초점을 맞춘 영미 유학파 출신 중국 인류학의 접근을 재고하고, 서구의 ‘보편’을 문제화 하면서도 이론의 가공지로서 그 영원한 우위를 암묵적으로 가정해온 성찰적 인류학을 재성찰할 기회를 제공한다.

Can Indigenous language use transform state politics? In Ecuador, speakers of Kichwa (Ecuadorian Quechua) head a national, intercultural bilingual school system that promotes and teaches Indigenous languages. In their professional roles, they give speeches during which they speak as national state agents. Most commonly, they begin such events by using standardized Kichwa to greet and welcome attendees and then switch to Spanish. Although brief, such greetings serve to mark the state as intercultural. However, they also make Kichwa commensurate with Spanish. Speakers encounter a conundrum in how more extensive or illegible Kichwa speech may not demonstrate a modernist, commensurate form of Kichwa for non-Indigenous-identifying addressees and may even trigger anxiety or censure from Ministry of Education higher-ups. Yet, Kichwa state agents simultaneously risk angering Kichwa-speaking addressees with intralinguistic shift and restricting a movement to reclaim a language to curtailed speech acts within extensive non-Kichwa (Spanish) speech, further prioritizing that language and addressees who speak it. Their dilemmas indicate the challenges of language standardization in recognition politics and illustrate how semiotic processes of entextualization and enregisterment are integral to commensuration.

This article discusses the relationship between violence and public space in light of a collectively perpetrated and widely televised arson attack that took place in 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, and its recent on-site commemorations. It draws on critical theoretical perspectives developed since the 1990s to consider conventional models of public space as entangled in violence, while also aiming to contribute to contemporary scholarship on contrarian responses to this entanglement. The tendency in this scholarship is to identify these responses as bottom-up, unscripted, performative and direct, and therefore as diametrically opposed to those identified as top-down, scripted, rational, and legislation-facing. The multifarious initiatives and interventions involving contextually shifting priorities, positions and strategies that mark the case discussed in this article call this tendency into question. Unassimilable under such binary oppositions, these initiatives and interventions have not refrained from engaging conventional models of public space while also developing and mobilizing contrarian ones. This article ultimately argues that public space is not just where violence occurs but also where its semantic disambiguation is pursued; this pursuit, which involves various forms of socio-political work, in turn defines and continually redefines the very distinction between conventional and contrarian imaginaries of public space.

Até o ano de 2010 não havia na Constituição Federal Brasileira o direito à alimentação básica. Esse processo de inclusão do direito à alimentação se deu em conjunto com diversas medidas do governo brasileiro desde 2003, sendo a principal delas o Programa Fome Zero. Treze anos após sua criação, o programa ainda é tema de discussão, apesar de, atualmente, ter sido diluído em diversas políticas de segurança alimentar, e até mesmo distribuição e geração de renda.
Pensando então, neste programa central do início do governo Lula, pretendo neste paper apontar algumas discussões iniciais sobre meu projeto de doutorado que busca partir da análise da trajetória deste programa, em relação à construção da categoria fome, para realizar uma etnografia das políticas públicas de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional. Desta forma, pretendo discutir essas ações governamentais explorando as inter-relações construídas neste processo, as diferentes arenas em jogo e os diferentes sujeitos políticos que se projetavam e consolidavam em tais planos, buscando compreender algumas categorias imbricadas nesta disputa, tais como a noção de direitos, assistência, vulnerabilidade e bem-estar social em ação/circulação/pauta.
Tendo em vista que estou atualmente no terceiro semestre do doutorado em Antropologia Social, tenho como objetivo central desta apresentação levantar algumas questões apontadas acima, a partir das quais pretendo pensar o extinto programa Fome Zero, considerando- o como um marco das políticas sociais brasileiras.

This book examines the ways Cuban families struggle to access food and maintain a decent quality of life as the socialist welfare state continues to falter in post-Soviet Cuba. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Santiago de Cuba, book reveals how Cuban families struggle to acquire food and assemble “a decent meal,” a local social category where families determine whether food quality and cultural-appropriateness meet their standards. The research illuminates the social and emotional dimensions of the practices of food acquisition. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and subsequent the loss of its most significant trade partner, Cuba entered a period of economic hardship known as the “Special Period.” Although new trade agreements have significantly improved the quantity and quality of rationed food, supplies have not returned to Soviet-era levels. Several years after the worst scarcities of the Special Period, many people from Santiago reported that they continued to live with food shortages and economic hardship. This book reveals that one of the most common ways of dealing with food scarcity, was “luchando la vida” (struggling for life): the arduous task of finding ingredients seen as essential to what is considered a “decent” meal. To understand this situation, the book introduces “the politics of adequacy,” which details how people resist and make sense of scarcity or changing availability of basic life necessities, such as food. This work is based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork inside the homes of 22 families in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city. Spanning neighborhood, social class, household income level, and skin color, this book captures previously undocumented details of household dynamics, community interaction, and individual reflections on everyday life in Cuba today.

Book Keywords: Food, Cuba, Socialism, Inequality, Consumption, Adequacy, Caribbean, Distribution, Household, Everyday Life

This paper presents the results obtained from a review of the archaeological record available for the prehistoric site of Valencina de la Concepción (Seville, Spain), one of the most important settlements of SW Iberia in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. Two main variables, namely demography and metallurgical production, are examined in the light of both conventional and spatial statistical methods (with particular emphasis on significance testing) with the aim of assessing the wider issue of social complexity. Among the various conclusions emerging from this empirical study, two stand out. Firstly, neither the correlation between the total extension of the settlement and the complexity of its internal organisation, nor the spatial delimitation
between domestic/productive and funerary practices is as straightforward as previously claimed. Secondly, no simple, clear-cut statistical patterns are found in the spatial distribution of human remains or metal objects. These conclusions
provide the basis for a critique of currently held interpretations of Valencina de la Concepción as the political centre of an early state extending across the lower Guadalquivir valley.

The article analyses from an anthropological perspective the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, the first state-supported Parade in Serbia, as a part of the building of a democratic and European Serbian nation. In their discursive framing of the Parade and making claims on the state to take it under its auspices, the organising NGOs bound the event to the EU integration process of Serbia. This policy link helped them forge a political alliance with the state, but was also instrumentalised by the government to avoid an ideological conflict with the opponents of the Parade. Owing to the perception of the alliance as “elitist” and to the militarised and depoliticised nature of the state’s involvement, the event materially actualised and reified rather than transcended the enduring conflict of liberal and collectivist citizenship visions in Serbia. The article argues that the overall discourse of the government on Europeanisation is informed by the same top-down and instrumental logic. However, members of civil society develop political subjectivities which demand active citizen participation and critically engage with the discourse to restore its democratising potential. Similarly, the emerging “populist” politics of LGBT rights, illustrated by the pop singer Jelena Karleuša's participation in the domestic debate, are better placed to face the legacies of socialist and ethnonationalist nation-building than the human rights and Europeanisation approaches

Townsend Middleton's The Demands of Recognition is an invitation to think through the everyday dilemmas of ethnic minorities as well as the state anthropologists who certify them as 'scheduled tribes' in contemporary India. Through an extended case study of Nepali-speaking groups that are collectively known as 'Gorkhas', Middleton shows how late liberal governmentality and what he calls the 'ethno-contemporary' make and remake each other. As the postcolonial state has devised affirmative action policies to redress the historical disadvantages of socially marginalized groups, a new kind of 'ethnopolitics' has emerged to claim the loaves and fishes offered by the state. In turn, this new ethnopolitics has compelled the state to rethink its classificatory schemas and mechanisms in order to decide which groups ought to be considered as 'tribes', and hence, merit affirmative action. In most cases, the primary aim of ethnopolitics in contemporary India is to enter official lists or 'schedules' that record castes and tribes as well as other groups deemed to be 'backward' enough to warrant affirmative action. The situation with the Gorkhas was no different after their demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland went unmet a generation ago. By undertaking a fine-grained ethnographic exploration of the Gorkhas' ethnopolitics and the travails of their interlocutors within the postcolonial ethnographic state, Middleton challenges us to interrogate our received notions of ethnicity and about the place of anthropology in our world.

Dit proefschrift gaat over de relatie tussen de Marokkaanse overheid en Marokkaanse Nederlanders. Het perspectief van Marokkaanse Nederlanders staat hierin centraal. Wat zijn hun percepties over, ervaringen met en reacties op de zogenaamde 'lange arm' van Marokko?

In riferimento a un personale percorso di ricerca nel campo all'antropologia medica, l'Autore presenta, in forma provvisoria, appunti che riflettono sulla elaborazione di una prospettiva "italiana" nel rapporto fra antropologia medica e governo dei corpi.

This thesis examines the reconstruction of state images in the process of contracting out public services. It basically investigates the entire process of certain public services offered by Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality from their design to tender, from delivery to control. In the scope of this study, the state is accepted as a concept constructed by the social relations and experiences. It is argued that the “practices” of people during providing and receiving public services construct different state “images”.
After 1980, in Turkey public administration has been reformed through neoliberalism. Due to new policies on decentralization and empowerment of local governments, municipalities have taken more responsibility in the delivery of social services. Management techniques started to be used in public administration, and private companies have become crucial actors in the delivery of public services for the purpose of efficiency, which has brought about the employment of the subcontracting system in public sector.
This thesis is based on a qualitative research, which focuses on certain social services of the İBB and illuminates the effects of the subcontracting system on state images. The fieldwork consists of in-depth interviews conducted with people employed in different departments of social services and participant observations conducted in an elderly care facility, during an inspection tour of Home Care Service, and in a workshop of subcontracted workers. At the end of the research three state images are found out: a company-like state, a gracious state, and a corrupt state.

Book Reviews / 253 Contributions to Indian Sociology 52, 2 (2018): 230-261 of unique historical circumstances and coupled with an emancipative theory of a future roadmap out of the present impasse. This book's case studies leave the reader without compelling theoretical insights that transcend the cases and apply to other Indian states. Ultimately, the book appears dated not merely because of its focus on violence in the 1990s leading up to 2002 but due to its inability to offer new insights to a rather time-worn question that does not speak to significant shifts in democratic politics in India today. With the unprecedented victory of the BJP in the 2014 parliamentary elections, it is perhaps time to adopt fresh analytical frames that locate the question of Hindu-Muslim violence within larger issues about the crisis of liberal democracy and capitalism in India and the world at large. REFERENCES Brass, Paul. 1997.

India’s border with Bangladesh figures in the Indian national imagination as a unifying construct for multiple anxieties from illegal immigration to cattle smuggling, thus garnering public support for increased border security. What does a view from the lived and messy realities of the borderlands offer when we shift our focus from the fetish of the borderline as a political and religious marker of difference? This essay tracks the binary of legal–illegal through which cattle in the borderlands are framed, showing how bovines move across different terrains of the agrarian, the sacrificial and everyday cross-border trade in the borderlands and so resist this binary.

This article discusses the transformation of the Moroccan state under contemporary neoliberal globalization, and considers what this transition means for the ways in which scholars view state-society interplay in Morocco and the Arab world more generally. Specifically, it examines the protest of unemployed graduates in Morocco, suggesting that public demonstrations are not only a means to communicate and mobilize demands, but also a technology to reclaim and reproduce a particular “truth” in public. This truth does not necessarily equate with the reality of the neoliberal state as a dispersed material force. As such, by looking at the case of Morocco, we hope to instigate further debate on the nature of the state and its specific relation to phenomena as globalization, society and social protest.

The article analyses the activity of so-called "margouillats", informal go-betweens found arounf the Abidjan court house, who work to "get papers released" for people having filed a request for civil documents - particularly birth certificates and other documents proving citizenship. The article describes their integration into the administrative practices of document production and the interpersonal networks of the court "food chain". Analysis of bureacratic corruption is of secondary importance, in our frame, if compared to the study of moral justifications brought to the commodification of nationality. Focusing on the morally liminal space of the production of a false identity document, the article suggests that these intermediaries do not erase the politicalboundaries of citizenship, but rather, through capillary action, extend the discriminating action of the state into the streets.

El objetivo general del curso es explorar los principales enfoques y núcleos de debate propios de la antropología política como especialidad disciplinar. El programa se propone discutir ejes claves del área, incluyendo un panorama sobre su surgimiento y sobre las discusiones contemporáneas. En particular, el curso pretende contribuir a desnaturalizar algunas prenociones acerca de “lo político” que son recurrentes tanto en los usos sociales así como en los usos académicos puestos en juego en el ámbito de las ciencias sociales y de las humanidades (por ejemplo, el tratamiento de la política como un campo diferenciado y autónomo; como un ámbito dominado más por el interés y lo pragmático que por la dimensión moral; o a la reificación del estado al tratarlo analíticamente como una entidad bien delimitada y diferenciada de la “sociedad civil”). A fin de promover una perspectiva crítica, el curso se propone problematizar las relaciones entre conceptos teóricos y categorías nativas, entre instrumentos analíticos y concepciones locales sobre la política, lo político, el gobierno, el estado, la justicia, etc. La propuesta se centra en el análisis de “la política”, “lo político” y términos asociados, abordándolos como categorías prácticas que forman parte de los universos sociales que estudiamos antes que como definiciones teóricas preestablecidas. En ese camino, el curso articulará la perspectiva de la “antropología política” tradicionalmente interesada en la identificación y estudio de los procesos políticos y aquella de la “antropología de la política” preocupada por el modo en que las personas entienden, clasifican y producen los límites de aquello que en diferentes contextos se reconoce como “lo político”. Se pretende promover el análisis de las formas en que las representaciones sociales sobre lo político, el Estado, el gobierno, la militancia, etc. son socialmente producidas, reproducidas, desplegadas e impuestas por actores situados en el marco de procesos sociales concretos, incorporando el rol de la/s propias/os antropóloga/os en la producción de conocimiento sobre el tema.

This project builds on James' Scott synthesis of “reactive statelessness” theory (famously beginning with Pierre Clastres), in which he argues that pastoralism, nomadism, and foraging were often secondary forms of adaptation in response to the coercive forces of agrarian states (Scott, 2009).

“[The] argument reverses much received wisdom about “primitivism” generally. Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a “secondary adaptation,” a kind of “self-barbarianization” adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion. For those living in the shadow of states, such evasion is also perfectly compatible with derivative, imitative, and parasitic state forms in the hills. (Scott, 2000, pX)”

My contention is that new foraging and nomadic livelihoods are on the rise  in the wake of global neoliberalism and the transnational corporatization of power on the one hand, and the techno-militarization of States on the other. These need to be examined and contrasted with studies of the new forms of alienation that are also arising among the world's “middle” and “affluent” classes. There is nothing new here, of course (see David Graeber on the past 5000 years), except for a question of scale.

I argue that the world's old and new foragers have a lot to teach us about sustainable knowledge and livelihoods, socio-political organization, and ecological justice.

The aim of this research effort, then, is to gather ethnographic and empirical data to support the claim that there are strong overall benefits (social, political, ecological, epidemiological, etc.) to foraging lifestyles.

A word of warning, of course, about using  “foraging” as an ideological, atemporal, naturalized category. 19th and 20th century science and anthropology have produced too much of that.
My use of the term is heuristic. Tim Ingold's critique of narrow extrapolations of Optimal Foraging Theory and rational choice in biology, economics, and anthropology is a good starting point for this discussion (see Ingold, 2000; see also Barnard, 1983; 2004, or anything by Richard Lee). Following Ingold and others (see bibliography below), I focus on a few broad aspects of livelihood that can be loosely characterized as foraging, and contrasted to the increasingly standardized systems of “modernity”.

An emphasis on autonomy, immediacy, and sharing at the level of social organization; autonomy being defined as relational—in contrast to the self-contained, self-interested 'rational' individual of modern societal constructs (Ingold, 2004); relationality being forged through decentralized, established or emerging relationships among humans and non-humans in a non-finite, complex, and dynamic field of operation.
Knowledge derived and kept alive from (not just of) the environment (“natural” or not); collaborative knowledge established through the “fine-tuning” of  these “relational contexts” between humans and the world (Ingold, 2000);
Perceptual and relational involvement with the world through open-ended wayfinding, or wayfaring practices, in contrast to grid-and-point, goal-and-destination oriented navigation and cartography (Ingold, 2000; 2007).

While we must be cautious about using modern constructs like “equality” (e.g., in terms of “gender” or “poverty”--Karen Endicot (2004) has a good review of debates on gender equality among foragers), the emphasis on relational autonomy must include more-or-less conscious efforts to avoid coercion and alienation. This usually entails knowledge of more coercive systems (e.g., agrarian, industrial, militaristic, etc.), and the “reactive” adaptive efforts to “vote with one's feet” (Lee, 2004), or “take to the hills” (Scott, 2009).

“Traditional Ecological Knowledge” is not a model to be put in a powerpoint pie-chart! The point here is to look for anti-model forms of wayfaring knowledge and social organization that are constantly renegotiated in adaptive contexts.  The Inuit Elders Saullu Nakasuk, Hervé Paniaq, Elisapee Ootoova, and Pauloosie Angmaalik put it best in their group interviews with anthropologists Jarich Oosten & Frédéric Laugrand:

“Traditional knowledge is not static and not something abstract and separated from the context in which it is produced, but is always related to the present. In this respect, it contrasts with the modern education system, which sets great value on the absorption of objectified knowledge”. (Aupilarjuk  et al, 2002, p3, emphasis added)

Memories before the State examines the discussions and debates surrounding the creation of the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion (LUM), a national museum in Peru that memorializes the country’s internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. Emerging from a German donation that the Peruvian government initially rejected, the Lima-based museum project experienced delays, leadership changes, and limited institutional support as planners and staff devised strategies that aligned the LUM with a new class of globalized memorial museums and responded to political realities of the country’s postwar landscape. The book analyzes forms of authority that emerge as an official institution seeks to incorporate and manage diverse perspectives on recent violence.

In Roots of Our Renewal, Clint Carroll tells how Cherokee people have developed material, spiritual, and political ties with the lands they have inhabited since removal from their homelands in the southeastern United States. Although the forced relocation of the late 1830s had devastating consequences for Cherokee society, Carroll shows that the reconstituted Cherokee Nation west of the Mississippi eventually cultivated a special connection to the new land—a connection that is reflected in its management of natural resources.

Until now, scant attention has been paid to the interplay between tribal natural resource management programs and governance models. Carroll is particularly interested in indigenous environmental governance along the continuum of resource-based and relationship-based practices and relates how the Cherokee Nation, while protecting tribal lands, is also incorporating associations with the nonhuman world. Carroll describes how the work of an elders’ advisory group has been instrumental to this goal since its formation in 2008.

An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Carroll draws from his ethnographic observations of Cherokee government–community partnerships during the past ten years. He argues that indigenous appropriations of modern state forms can articulate alternative ways of interacting with and “governing” the environment.