Dissertation Fieldwork Research Articles

Small Transport Operators as Democratic Actors: Work, Politics, and Governance in Delhi

AbstractThe paper broadly illuminates how livelihood pursuits and acts of democratic citizenship mutually constitute each other for the urban working poor in South Asia and argues this through the “democratic action” done by the auto‐rickshaw drivers in Delhi. The paper shows how the drivers work their livelihoods and maintain stable work conditions while also trying to protect its very possibilities in the future. The paper does this by tracing first how government regulation envelopes the everyday livelihoods of these drivers, forcing them to master regulation. The drivers go on to perform two kinds of work—challenging regulation on its own terrain and performing electoral activities in lieu of changing regulation and policy. The paper argues that we can understand these two kinds of activities as pertaining to substantive and procedural democracy. The paper draws upon 24 months of dissertation fieldwork in Delhi with auto‐drivers, other small transport operators, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, and others associated with the small transport economy.

A Gendered Return

A Gendered Return

Applied Anthropology, Activism, and Loss: Experiences from highland Guatemala

AbstractIn this essay, I contemplate the ethics of community engagement based on my work as an applied medical anthropologist in Guatemala. During my dissertation fieldwork in a highland community, I lived with a local Mayan family, and our lives together centered on discussing their goals, community organizing, and strategies for improving indigenous rights. I describe how the relationships I built with this family and the social justice work happening in the community gave me a sense of purpose as an applied anthropologist. At the time, it seemed like participatory and collaborative research at its best. A year later, an adult son of the local family was murdered for his community work, calling into question the notions of progress and advocacy. Here, I discuss my struggle with the moral imperative of applied anthropologists to support the human rights of local communities in counterbalance to our ethical obligation to protect research collaborators.

Choice of Hunting Method Influenced Human‐Carnivore Competition in Late Pleistocene Southeast Asia

Competition has been investigated as a source of dispersal pressure in animal species both past and present. Particularly in Southeast Asia, where the Pleistocene carnivore guild remains largely intact to this day, there is a unique opportunity to assess the effects of competition on both dietary and spatial (dispersal) niche partitioning behavior in humans. Here, we investigate the relationship of early modern humans to local carnivores during their likely period of dispersal through Laos and Vietnam (~80‐50ka) to – for the first time – assess humans as a member of a local carnivore guild. By using the Competition Index (CI), a method which has shown success in predicting competitive pressure in island Southeast Asian paleontological communities on a scale of 0 (no competition) to 1 (full prey overlap, maximum competition). We approach this research with a purposeful desire to remove the “bias of human exceptionalism” from our analysis, treating humans as another medium size animal. We find that humans definitively were subject to competitive pressure from concurrent carnivores, particularly medium‐size prey specialists like hyenas, dholes, and leopards (Max CI: 0.6, 0.5, 0.66 respectively). Additionally, we find that the estimated competitive pressure on humans changes accounting for hunting method (solo ambush vs. group hunting), with group hunting practices reducing competitive pressure for medium‐size prey, particularly from leopards. We suggest that hunting behavior may have been used along with dietary and spatial partitioning as a strategy to reduce competitive pressure during initial human dispersal in Southeast Asia and that biotic interactions should not be overlooked in studies of human dispersal in this region.Support or Funding InformationFunding for this work was provided by: National Geographic Early Career Grant #EC‐378R‐18, Wenner‐Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, UIUC Anthropology Department, UIUC Graduate College, The Explorer’s Club Exploration Fund, and the Beckman Institute CS/AI Award.

The effect of hand preference on skeletal asymmetry in human limbs

The study of asymmetry offers valuable insight into the biomechanical factors, such as hand preference, that influence development of the human body. Previous studies of human skeletal asymmetry often lack known handedness data and tend to presume right‐handedness without specifically analyzing upper limb elements. Here, we investigate differences in individual asymmetry (IA) in elements of the upper limb (i.e. humerus, radius) and lower limb (i.e. femur, tibia) from a modern sample of 40 males and females for whom hand preference was documented. The shape of these four bones was quantified using landmark configurations on 3D bone models. All possible distances between landmarks were calculated for the left and right sides of each bone and were used to calculate average IA for each individual bone. The results found that IA for the four bones was only correlated between the humerus and radius (r = 0.33, p = 0.038), suggesting that the upper limb does not always correlate with the lower limb as previously thought. Kruskal‐Wallis and Mann‐Whitney U tests found no significant differences in IA across sex or handedness groups for the limb bones but left‐handed males and females had higher left‐side dominance in the radius and tibia as compared to right‐handed individuals. Thus, the results suggest that handedness can affect asymmetry in the lower limb. Further addition of specimens, particularly left‐handed individuals, will elucidate the relative effects of handedness in shaping human skeletal asymmetry patterns.Support or Funding InformationThis was supported by funding from the Wenner‐Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (Grant #9641), the Mark Diamond Research Fund (SP‐18‐19), and the 2017 Morris E. and Lucille R. Opler Dissertation Research Scholarship.

Gracia Clark: Scholar, Editor, Advocate

In a series of interviews in 2020, Gracia Clark, an economic and feminist anthropologist, reflects on her nearly forty years of research working with Kumasi Central Market traders in Ghana. From physical and rhetorical attacks against "parasitic" market women during her dissertation fieldwork, to the economic development projects on which she consulted, to her collection of more than fifty life histories, Clark discusses her commitment to center market women's perspectives and ideas concerning regional and transnational economic matters. This interview traces key events throughout Clark's career, beginning with how she became interested in Kumasi Central Market (KCM) to her ten-year tenure as an editor of Africa Today, and concluding with her lasting contributions to the fields of anthropology and African studies.

Escape-Bound: Juana Luz Tobar Ortega's Fugitive Poetics

Escape-BoundJuana Luz Tobar Ortega's Fugitive Poetics Barbara Sostaita (bio) photographs by Alex Morelli juana luz tobar ortega's garden lies just beyond St. Barnabas Episcopal Church's tree-lined gravel driveway, past a weather-worn statue of Jesus and a vacant parking lot where birds rest in large flocks. You have to look to find it. But here, sun-warmed tomatoes twine around a trellis. A wheelbarrow rests next to a raised garden bed, where fuchsia zinnias and rosemary bushes bloom without restraint. This plot of land offers my friend respite from the confines of sanctuary, where she has lived in exile and away from her family since 2017. Patiently, she tends the soil—uprooting and unearthing alternatives to incarcerated life. Juana's fragrant herbs and lush shrubs offer her a sanctuary away from sanctuary, a haven where she can momentarily escape the psychological and emotional violence of the present. For years, Juana was protected by the Obama administration's "felons, not families" policy, which empowered immigration agents to use discretion when processing long-term residents without criminal records. Yet, during an annual check-in with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) in April 2017, the Guatemalteca received a deportation order along with instructions to evacuate her home in thirty days, a practice that activists refer to as "silent raids." Instead of obeying the government's directive, Juana fled to St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Greensboro, North Carolina—participating in a long-standing tradition of seeking refuge in houses of worship. In anticipation of her arrival, family members and parishioners repurposed a cinder block nursery into a bedroom and installed a shower in one of the church bathrooms, fashioning a home out of wooden pews and stained glass. Juana's granddaughters decorated the concrete walls of her cramped space with posters and drawings that profess their love. One stands out: [End Page 42] Click for larger view View full resolution Juana tends her garden. All photographs at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Greensboro, North Carolina, August 2020. [End Page 43] Click for larger view View full resolution View from the road. [End Page 44] a winking watermelon on a square of blue construction paper with the message "usa is a free country." Juana spends her days within sight of her makeshift bedroom accompanied by volunteers who come in six-hour shifts, though the covid-19 pandemic has limited visits to family members. She has trained her body to wake up at 6:00 a.m. because idling in bed often leads to depressive thoughts. Restricted to the grounds of the church, her absence has been felt at graduations, holidays, and even the birth of a grandchild. She has gained weight as a result of her confined lifestyle. The bulky ankle bracelet gripping her right foot is a visceral reminder that sanctuary is not synonymous with safety. Juana is surveilled at all times. Though she is protected from deportation, the state quite literally still has a hold over her. I befriended Juana in 2019, months before travelling to the Sonora-Arizona borderlands to complete dissertation fieldwork. Interested in the Sanctuary movement that emerged in Tucson in the 1980s, I wondered about the woman living on sacred grounds in my own backyard. I sought out sanctuary because I idealized this tradition as one of resistance and refusal, a practice that could defy the violence of the state. I went searching for a garden that grows despite the Trump administration's strategies to destroy and disappear migrant bodies. I found a church repurposed into a home. I encountered a congregation-turned-conspiracy against a deportation machine. And yet, I also found a woman who is restless and eager to escape. Juana experiences sanctuary as both safety and captivity, both refuge and confinement. Juana was the first undocumented migrant in North Carolina to enter sanctuary following the election of President Trump. Since then, she has been followed by Minerva Cisneros Garcia, Samuel Oliver Bruno, Jose Chicas, Eliseo Jimenez, Oscar Canales, and Rosa Ortez-Cruz. The latter, who lived at the Church of Reconciliation in Chapel Hill for two years before a court of appeals withdrew her deportation order, revealed the quotidian violence...

Missionaries on Imperial Frontlines: Religious Geopolitics and Latter-day Saints during the Samoan Civil Wars

Research Article| July 01 2019 Missionaries on Imperial Frontlines: Religious Geopolitics and Latter-day Saints during the Samoan Civil Wars Dylan Michael Beatty Dylan Michael Beatty DYLAN MICHAEL BEATTY received a BA in history at Rutgers University and an MA in geography at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He currently lives in Palawan, Philippines, conducting dissertation fieldwork about the geopolitics of fishing in the Spratly Islands. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Mormon History (2019) 45 (3): 83–110. https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.45.3.0083 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dylan Michael Beatty; Missionaries on Imperial Frontlines: Religious Geopolitics and Latter-day Saints during the Samoan Civil Wars. Journal of Mormon History 1 July 2019; 45 (3): 83–110. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.45.3.0083 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Mormon History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Municipalization for privatization’s sake

PurposeRapid economic growth and urbanization in India have increased demand for municipal services. In response, privatization has emerged as a policy solution to a growing deficit in urban infrastructure and service provision. But, privatization assumes prior state ownership of those services. Certain waste management services, specifically doorstep waste collection, have never been truly public in the sense that private informal actors have historically provided them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the tensions and contradictions between two related policy imperatives – universal service provision and privatization – that appear to be guiding the municipalization of solid waste collection services in urban India.Design/methodology/approachResearch for this paper relies on detailed analysis of key government documents (reports of various committees, regulations and laws) that have been important in defining municipal responsibilities for waste management in India from 1990 to 2016. In addition, where appropriate, research materials from the author’s doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Delhi from October 2012 to December 2013 have also been used.FindingsAn analysis of key policy documents revealed that the government’s efforts to document deficits in service provision ignored, and thus rendered invisible, the work of the informal sector. While a consensus on the need for universal waste collection service had emerged as early as the late 1990s, it was not until 2016 that municipal responsibility for service provision was codified into law. The rules issued in 2016 municipalized this responsibility while simultaneously opening up spaces for the inclusion of the informal sector in waste collection service provision.Originality/valueThis paper fills a gap in the existing literature on how policy interventions have brought the space of the doorstep into the ambit of the state such that it allows for the opening up of those spaces for the entry of private capital. Under the guise of universal service provision, the shift to municipalization and outsourcing to private corporations is not in fact privatization – service provision is already private – but involves the dispossession of informal workers and the transfer of their resource to the formal, corporate sector.

Decreased Density of Cholinergic Interneurons in the Medial Caudate Nucleus in Humans with Williams Syndrome

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by the hemideletion of approximately 25–28 genes at 7q11.23. Its unusual social and cognitive phenotype is most strikingly characterized by the disinhibition of social behavior, in addition to reduced global IQ, with a relative sparing of language ability. Hypersociality and increased social approach behavior in WS may represent a unique inability to inhibit responses to specifically social stimuli, and is likely rooted in part in abnormalities of frontostriatal circuitry. Recent research has demonstrated that selective ablation of striatal cholinergic interneurons (SCINs) results in significant increases in compulsive conspecific‐directed, but not object‐focused, exploratory behavior in mice, indicating a role for SCINs in social approach behavior. Here, we examined the density of SCINs and parvalbumin‐positive interneurons in the striatum of five postmortem specimens from subjects with WS and five typically‐developing (TD) subjects. We found a significant reduction in the density of SCINs in the medial caudate nucleus, an important region receiving cortical projections from the orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in circuitry involved in language and reward systems. This pattern of decreased SCIN density in WS is contrasted by anatomical findings in other disorders, including Tourette syndrome and schizophrenia, where differing patterns of SCIN depletion are found. Taken together with findings from neuroimaging, differences in the brains of individuals with WS at both the macro‐ and microstructural level further indicate a role for frontostriatal circuitry in the disorder's distinctive behavioral phenotype.Support or Funding InformationThis research is supported in part by NIH #P01NICHD033113, #1R03MH103697‐01(KS), and a Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (KLH).This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Capturing the Informal Economy in South Sudan

During the course of my dissertation fieldwork in South Sudan, from 2014 - 2015, I found many discrepancies between the realities I witnessed and encountered on the ground, and the images that were being promulgated by the international community providing aid as well as the journalists reporting on conflict in the country. For outsiders that depend on these constricted views, it is easy to underestimate the level of labor and productivity that occurs in South Sudan to generate income and assume that the majority of citizens are complacently dependent on foreign aid due to underdevelopment and the conflict. Unfortunately, this view was perpetuated at times by the international aid workers that I interviewed, and then exacerbated by representatives of the national government where it was purported that community members were too reliant on the government for services. However, in approaching my research project with an expanded view of what constitutes self-determination, productivity, and growth on the part of communities, I was able to contribute to the documentation of the vital role that community self-determination has in meeting the needs of citizens in areas where governments and NGOs have failed. This narrative is often missing from existing literature, which inherently limits our knowledge of both the historical and contemporary realities we encounter when designing programs, policies, and research studies. Part of the missing narratives is hidden in the informal economy of South Sudan. Parents that I interviewed shared that they worked diligently to ensure their children’s school fees were paid, or medical costs were covered, by pursuing low-cost income-generating activities to raise funds. In order to document and institutionalize these missing narratives, I will argue for the inclusion and valuing of informal economies in current standards and measurements of economic development. Specifically, I will make a case for South Sudan’s extensive informal economy to be considered in country-based assessments and international indices. Given that the majority of the population participates in the informal economy in one form or another, this is a critical tool for policy-makers to possess in order to obtain a holistic perspective of South Sudan.

Embodied moments: revisiting the field and writing vulnerably

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I revisit past dissertation fieldwork to interrogate the presence and absence of my pregnancy in performances and textual accounts. I return to time spent in the former Yugoslavia working with the Swedish organization Kvinna till Kvinna (Woman to Woman) and their local partner organizations. Through a series of brief flashbacks, I work through ongoing moments of tension surrounding reflexive research, emerging subjectivities, and vulnerable writing. This essay contributes to conversations on how feminist ethnographers locate themselves within the field in relation to participants and on reflexivity as an evolving practice that expands across temporal and spatial boundaries.

Runne-Beana: Dog Herds Ethnographer

Saami society in Lapland (now often called Saapmi), particularly the seasonally-nomadic reindeer-breeding sector, is predicated upon mobility and autonomy of its actors. Runne-Beana, a talented reindeer-herding dog, exhibited both mobility and autonomy when allocating to himself a peripatetic ethnographer, on the first day of five years of doctoral dissertation fieldwork in arctic Norway in 1972. That family’s and the wider community’s reactions to Runne-Beana’s behavior, and mine, highlight the tensions when mobility and autonomy compound with ideologies of ownership and control. At the same time, his companionship profoundly shaped all field relationships, engendering an understanding of dog culture as it is manifest in the herder/herding dog/reindeer triad and in the interpenetration of assumptions concerning child/dog enculturation.

Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community by Axel Borchgrevink

Reviewed by: Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community by Axel Borchgrevink Kristian Karlo Saguin AXEL BORCHGREVINK Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014. 292 pages. Skillfully combining approaches that highlight morality and knowledge, Axel Borchgrevink’s Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community presents an insightful analysis of village social dynamics in Bohol. The book is a welcome addition to ethnographies of Philippine lowland rice-farming communities. Like many of the strongest works in this tradition, Borchgrevink’s monograph paints a detailed picture of rural life—rich in characters and stories that alternate between the magical and the everyday—to illustrate how morality pervades practices, beliefs, and behaviors in a tight-knit community. Morality is not an essentialized, unchanging black box but is instead a dynamic kind of knowledge internalized and constituted through experiences, social interactions, and emotions. Trained as an anthropologist and currently an associate professor at Oslo and Akershus University College in Norway, Borchgrevink draws [End Page 304] from his dissertation fieldwork between 1995 and 1998 in the village of Ginopolan, Valencia, Bohol. He maintains an active presence in the book’s narrative, both as a situated observer guiding us through the analysis of the empirical material and as a figure sometimes implicated in the turn of events. Reflections on authorial positionality are necessary, particularly as they elucidate aspects of the research process often obscured (such as the complexities of employing an interpreter in ethnographic work) and as they provide a sense of how researchers end up choosing their study areas (in the author’s case, upon catching a glimpse of Ginopolan’s idyllic, green vista). The latter point deserves a little more space in the discussion as these motivations are not mere idiosyncrasies but are relevant analytically in light of the book’s call for a more attuned understanding of local variations in studies of the lowland Philippines. What drove the author to select the municipality of Valencia and the province of Bohol, for instance? The choice of study area shapes the case’s comparative usefulness and the kinds of engagement with existing studies it might have, especially if, as Borchgrevink argues, aspects of Ginopolan social life diverge from those documented elsewhere in the Philippines. Clean and Green’s narrative begins with what seemed to the author a behavioral puzzle: why would tenants continue to pay more than the legally mandated share of their harvest to landowners? He then proposes an alternative reading of this question, one that focuses on morality and departs from explanations often mobilized in studies of rural Philippines, including standard analyses that focus on class position, peasant rationality, and patron–client relations, among others. He scales up the argument further, using morality-as-knowledge as the thread that weaves various disparate issues together. For example, morality establishes the link between the spiritual potency of anting-anting, or amulets, and political success in barangay elections. Spiritual potency needs to be morally acceptable to the community for it to translate into a political following. Strong moral ideals also underpin the ubiquitous cleanliness ethic (hinlo) in rice farming and village life, wherein the practices of keeping clean become associated with the virtues of hard work, diligence, and community cooperation. In both examples he shows how morality as a type of knowledge is internalized or learned and reproduced in a tight-knit community like Ginopolan. Analysis in the book’s first half pivots on morality’s role in fostering collectivity and cooperation in village-level associations (chapter 2), in [End Page 305] avoiding open confrontation to foster harmonious relationships (chapter 3), and in (de-)legitimizing local political authority through “murmuring” (chapter 4). In the second half Borchgrevink turns to how moral models translate medical and supernatural expertise into power and prestige (chapters 5 and 6) and organize, store, and reproduce different kinds of agricultural knowledge (chapters 7 and 8). Indeed, this processual emphasis on how morality structures practices and knowledge is one of the book’s key contributions, going much beyond a dead-end analytical claim that the village is a moral community. While adept at...

Benasní–I Remember: Dene Sųłiné Oral Histories with Morphological Analysis by Josh Holden

Reviewed by: Benasní–I Remember: Dene Sųłiné Oral Histories with Morphological Analysis by Josh Holden Thomas McIlwraith Benasní–I Remember: Dene Sųłiné Oral Histories with Morphological Analysis. Josh Holden. Brill’s Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas 4. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xiv + 524. $203.00 (hardcover). Josh Holden’s book offers a substantial and important collection of autobiographical narratives from Dene Sųłiné (Chipewyan) speakers from northern Saskatchewan, Canada. The collection is twelve accounts of life in the area of Dillon, Saskatchewan, during the middle and later parts of the twentieth century. The narrators were born between 1908 and 1944. Ten of the accounts are interviews and include Holden’s questions. The other two are monologues recorded before Holden began this work. Each autobiographical narrative is presented in three forms: unbroken Dene, continuous free translation, and interlinear form (p. 29). The readability of texts is important to Holden and the multiple presentations ensure that school children and professional linguists alike will want to return to this book over and over again. Further, the stories reported by Holden are almost entirely accounts of everyday life and personal experience. They are not myth texts and, as a result, offer a significant contribution to both the ethnography of the Dene Sųłiné and to linguistic analysis embedded in everyday speech and vocabulary. The twelve oral histories found in Benasní describe the experiences of Dene Sųłiné community members facing and experiencing rapid cultural change. Holden recorded these accounts during dissertation fieldwork and he describes the book as “a cohesive multi-voice oral history of cultural loss and survival” (p. xi). The accounts of men and women, all elderly at the time of recording and some now deceased, offer rich presentations of seasonal foraging activities, trapping, the preparation of moose hides, hand-games, gender roles, and the impact of diseases like tuberculosis. Many speakers describe the tribulations they experienced at residential schools. As a resource for linguists, Holden’s work presents a large collection of texts in the Dene Sųłiné language. As an ethnographic resource, the collection of “told-to” narrative histories (McCall 2011:2) is immensely important. It takes readers through events of the twentieth century and provides a compelling account of Dene Sųłiné lives during times of cultural, economic, religious, and linguistic transformations (p. 9). The preface and first three chapters of the book present the linguistic and ethnographic contexts for the narratives. These chapters are brief, general, unpretentious, and readable without special knowledge of linguistics or cultural studies. They set the stories into a broader Dene cultural area and offer a community history of Dillon. Holden admits this is not a professional ethnography and the supporting material relies on only a small number of ethnographic and historical sources (p. xii). The third chapter, “The Narratives,” is the most expansive chapter of the preliminary material. In it, Holden offers brief biographies of the storytellers and explains how the transcriptions and translations were accomplished. Orthographic conventions and challenges for transcription are explained. The impact of residential schooling on the Dene Sųłiné speech community at Dillon is addressed. These introductory chapters situate the stories. They are not distracting, nor are they even required reading for an [End Page 343] appreciation of words of the elders. In fact, many readers will gain tremendous insights into Dene Sųłiné lives by simply opening a narrative chapter. By its form, the book encourages readers to dip in and out of its pages. The final analytical chapter comes after the narratives. Here, Holden addresses issues of morphology and etymology found in the interlinear translations. He offers extensive explanations of unorthodox choices relating to the segmentation and glossing of grammatical elements (p. 441). Additionally, he departs from standard Athabaskan terminology related to verb structure in order to avoid the problems posed by the fact that multiple definitions can be found in the literature for terms like root or stem (pp. 447–48). The position of this technical chapter at the end of the book is mindful of readers who may be less interested in specialized content related to verbs, verb stems, and the Dene lexicon. It will challenge nonlinguists...

“I Was in Crisis”

This article explores the illicit labor and imprisonment of two women, Cynthia and Dinah, in the Santa Monica prison in Lima, Peru through the lens of gendered motherwork. Because the unequal distribution of care places the burden of this labor on women, Cynthia and Dinah were primarily responsible for the care of their adult children who were diagnosed with AIDS. Both women entered the transnational cocaine commodity chain in order to provide their children with medication that was not administered by the state. Neoliberal healthcare in the form of cuts to national health systems makes the motherwork of poor women more difficult to perform. In order to afford care for their children's health, Cynthia and Dinah entered a labor market that is criminalized by punitive war on drug policies and they were subsequently imprisoned. Illicit labor was therefore an extension of their motherwork and the removal of this care from their children resulted in tragic health consequences. This article is based on ethnographic dissertation fieldwork in 2008–09 in the largest women's prison in Peru.

The Santa Monica prison and illegal cocaine: a mutual relationship.

This paper will demonstrate how women's labor in the transnational cocaine commodity chain (TCCC) links together the Santa Monica women's prison in Lima, Peru and the illicit cocaine market. Peru is one the fastest-growing economies in Latin America largely due to a neoliberal free market approach to economic development. It has encouraged foreign investment and also has a growing middle class. But a significant portion of the country's population has not benefitted. This has resulted in some women turning to drug smuggling or selling in order to generate an income. Due to war on drug strategies, many of them are caught and sentenced on drug trafficking charges. I argue that the prison and larger criminal justice apparatus benefit financially from the growing number of drug arrests due to the systemic blackmail of incarcerated women. The cocaine sector benefits from the internment of its ex-workers. It is able to recruit new low-level employees and maintain the protection of middle managers. It is in this way that this prison and the illegal drug market are enmeshed together through the labor of subordinate female smugglers and retailers. This study is based on ethnographic dissertation fieldwork conducted in 2008-2009 in the Santa Monica prison.

Curating Ambivalence: An Interview with Erica Lehrer, Concordia University

Jane Lief Abell (JLA): What made you choose anthropology? Did it have anything to do with your interest in photography? Erica Lehrer (EL): I chose anthropology because I wanted to be able to tell good stories that came from sustained attention to small things. I hoped—and still hope— that seeing how individuals (and also objects) are constrained and enabled by the larger social and cultural forces that they are caught up in can create both critical consciousness and empathetic understanding. Photography was an early tool that helped justify my desire to observe and analyze the world around me. I grew up with parents who developed and printed their own photos, so looking closely at the social and material world was part of my upbringing, which I later pursued on my own. My mom liked to take surreptitious photos of couples kissing; my dad preferred seaweed and rusty nails. My earliest attempts to document, make sense of, and communicate about what would later become my dissertation fieldwork (and then my book Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places [2013]) was through photography—photo essays, and later exhibits, which included field notes and then some material artifacts I had collected during fieldwork. The impetus for making exhibitions grew out of a few parallel realizations. First, I began to see that the topic of my research, namely Jewish heritage brokering in Poland, was a source of great dispute among the people whose cultural imaginaries it implicated. I felt like I needed to be in conversation with these broader audiences—foreign Jews and local Poles (including some Jews)—alongside the ostensibly primary goal of writing for other anthropologists. I was also struggling to capture and transmit what for me was the peculiarity of the forms that “Jewish culture” was taking. These included wooden figurines of Jews and “kosher” vodka in bottles with caricatured Jews on the labels and also the particular aesthetic of the urban landscape—atavistic, candlelit cafes with “Jewish” food

Book Review: S. Ann Dunham, 'Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia'

Review of “Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia”, the post-humously published book by the late mother of President Barack Obama, S. Ann Dunham. The book is based on Dunham's dissertation fieldwork in Central Java, mostly carried out in the mid-1980s.

Enacting a Daoist Aesthetic through Taiji quan Training

176 Enacting a Daoist Aesthetic through Taiji quan Training ADAM D. FRANK136 In Jet Li’s classic, pre‑Hollywood film Taiji Zhang Sanfeng (1993, aka The Tai Chi Master and Twin Warriors), the young monk Junbao (portrayed by Jet Li) and his trouble‑making best friend Tianbao are expelled from the Buddhist Shaolin monastery, the famous and infamous cradle of China’s most popular martial arts. Later betrayed by Tianbao, Junbao is so crushed he suffers a nervous breakdown. Recovering in seclusion, he finds himself one day standing next to a well full of water in which an inflated ball is floating. He pushes the ball down. It pops back up. He repeats the exercise several times. Soon he realizes that here is the es‑ sence of a new kind of martial art that favors softness and flexibility over hardness and rigidity, inner buoyancy over muscular strength, inward peace over outward power. Junbao dubs the new art “taijiquan,” taking the ubiquitous taijitu 太极图, Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate, as the symbolic handle on which to hang his new art. Junbao, it turns out, is none other than the legendary founder of taijiquan, Zhang Sanfeng, and, with his new found “Daoist” martial art, he ultimately defeats the evil Tianbao.137 136 This essay began as a paper presented at the ARGOEMR Workshop: The Viewpoint of the Technique: Managing Time and Crisis Resolution in Eastern Religions and Medicines, University of Oxford, in January 2010. My thanks to the organizers, Profs. Elisabeth Hsu and Katherine Swancutt, to Profesor Ana Lora‑Wainwright at Oxford, and to the Honors College of the University of Central Arkansas for making my participation in the symposium possible. I also thank Profs. Hsu, David Palmer, Gry Sagli, and Lim Chee Han for their in‑ sightful comments on previous drafts. 137 Variations of this film plot summary also appear in Frank 2006 and 2010. Frank, “Enacting a Daoist Aesthetic” / 177 In this article, I use the martial art of taijiquan, specifically the two‑ person training method of push hands and accompanying body structur‑ ing practices, to address two questions, both of which draw upon the complementary work of Marxist philosopher Li Zehou and anthropolo‑ gist Tim Ingold. First, what is the aesthetic basis for making the claim that the modern martial‑exercise system of taijiquan is somehow “Daoist”? Second, in terms of transmittable techniques, how is that aesthetic actu‑ ally enskilled and enacted through the social milieu of everyday practice among taijiquan practitioners? Douglas Wile(1996) has argued that taijiquan is to some degree an invented tradition of nineteenth century Chinese literati seeking a sort of post‑Opium War re‑emasculation (Frank 2006). It is this group of literati who begin to blend Daoist principles, cosmological notions of qi, and esoteric meditative practices with the nuts‑and‑bolts, highly practical martial elements of Chinese boxing. Wile notes that the term “taijiquan” does not appear in written texts until the mid‑to‑late 19th century, mak‑ ing the case that the term itself is a reifying agent for actualizing the Dao‑ ist credentials of the art. In contemporary China, however, origin tales are as likely as not to get mixed together with current popular culture. During my dissertation fieldwork on taijiquan practice in Shanghai in the early 2000s, one practi‑ tioner told me the story of how Zhang Sanfeng, a former Shaolin monk, “discovered” taijiquan when he pushed a ball down into a pool of water and it bounced up. My practice partner placed a hand on his dantian 丹田 (cinnabar field, a point about two inches below the navel) and empha‑ sized its significance in creating a sense of buoyancy. When I asked if he had seen Taiji Zhang Sanfeng, he not only admitted that he had seen it but also admitted that he had drawn his own version directly from the film, arguing that it seemed as good an account as any of the origins of the martial art.138 138 A slightly different version of the origin story and my fellow practitio‑ ner’s response appears in Frank, 2006. 178 / Journal of Daoist Studies 6 (2013) Taiji quan and the Daoist Aesthetic As an operational strategy for fruitful ethnographic fieldwork...