Focaal

While in many places of the world people are starving from hunger, in other regions we are deeply concerned with the quality of our abundant food. The mad cow disease that broke out some years ago in the UK was a reason for many people to stop eating beef or meat altogether— especially after several dreadful documentaries of patients with the Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, the human variety of the mad cow disease.

Genetically modified organisms in agriculture have become objects of contention, crystallizing some of today’s major political and social controversies. As human-made objects that are alive and have agency, they invite the anthropologist to follow their trajectories and to analyze the power relationships and political economies of meaning in which they are inscribed. Taking as a point of departure Hans Jonas’s principle of responsibility for the unknown effects of technological developments, this article questions why a culture of urgency is attached to GMOs in spite of the unpredictable consequences that may arise when they are set free into the environment. As naturally reproducing objects that have intellectual property rights attached to them they raise issues of political governance and of economic power and control. They provoke not only repertoires of contention but also silences that speak about the link between technology and policy in con- temporary societies.

In the Mexican debates over genetically modified (GM) corn, critics reject the official narrative about risk expertise and the inefficiency of maize production. Corn is used to symbolize the Mexican countryside and traditional culture threatened by the forces of neo-liberal globalization. At times, however, both GM critics and proponents portray maize-based livelihoods as a culture of use-values beyond the reach of the market. This article explores these claims in relation to neo-liberal policies and their effect on small-scale cultivators. While critics draw our attention to how such policies exacerbate the difficulties faced by peasants, their notion of a corn culture obscures some of the changes taking place. Drawing on research in the Tehuacán Valley, where maize production is increasingly monetized and rejected by a younger generation, this article suggests that such agriculture is a dynamic practice, rather than a millennial culture, which interacts with processes of capital accumulation and state policy.

This article explores the lack of controversy over genetically modified objects (GMOs) in the daily life of a research laboratory in Canada. Scientific perceptions of GMOs and the types of knowledge valued in scientific research contribute toward an absence of discussion on the wider social implications of GMOs. Technical and epistemic knowledge are crucial for the success of a scientific project, whereas discussion of the social values involved may be allocated to particular settings, people, or research stages. GMOs, within scientific circles, are seen as many individual projects with different goals, rather than as a single object. Therefore, according to this view, it is inappropriate to be opposed to or to support GMOs in general, without first ascertaining the specifics of a particular project. How then are scientists engaged in seemingly local, distinct projects seen as globally defending this technology? Scientific expertise unevenly translates into political voice, transforming into silences as well as debates.

This article presents a comparative investigation of anti-GMO activism in two regions in France. It shows how activists’ participation in acts of ‘civil disobedience’ was not necessarily motivated by the same reasons or directed toward the same goals. During my ethnographic fieldwork at two trials against activists who destroyed GMO test plots in France I found that although protagonists were in agreement on rejecting GMOs, their deeper motives differed significantly. I draw five socio-biographical portraits of anti-GMO activists and highlight their divergent opinions on their role in the court case, which illustrate how in their utilization of the court activists relate differently to the legal system and society at large. The anti-globalization organization Attac and the farmers’ trade union Con- fédération Paysanne clearly had different relations to politics but I also analyze why in Ariège these differences could be harmonized whereas in Droˆme differences between activists lead to serious divisions. I do so by considering how different local activist cultures are shaped within a competitive organizational arena.

Since the late 1990s genetically modified foods, crops, and products have provoked a great deal of controversy in Britain. This article does not challenge the presence of debate over genetic modification in Britain, but rather calls attention to public silences on genetic modification that have often been overlooked. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in two parts of the north of England, I explore the ways in which these silences were not equally present across both fieldsites. I argue that this is partly due to the intersection of local histories with the ideological framing of genetic modification by the British government as a question of and for scientific expertise. I also explore how silence on the topic may be a form of what Sheriff (2000) has termed ‘cultural censorship’. Finally, I discuss the theoretical and methodological difficulties of studying and writing about silence, proposing that silences can importantly highlight issues of political and social salience.

Patents on objects that have agency such as seeds pose new challenges for governance, raising fundamental questions of control and responsibility. In May 2004 the Supreme Court of Canada found the farmer Percy Schmeiser guilty of infringing the Monsanto patent on genetically modified canola, because he reseeded part of his canola harvest although he knew or ought to have known that it contained seeds of GM canola plants that had blown into his field. In May 2005, a group of organic farmers tried a legal procedure to get certification as a class against two biotechnology corporations Bayer CropScience and Monsanto for polluting their fields with GM canola. At stake are questions on the type of ownership that can be claimed over plants—and whether ownership can be claimed over a plant at the same time that liability for its reproduction is denied. The two court cases I discuss allow us to more closely see how genetically modified canola plants have become objects of contention among Western Canadian farmers, how they transformed the farmers’ daily work and relations between neighbors, and how they increased farmers’ dependency on agro-biotech corporations.

In recent years police violence and impunity have become important items on the societal and political agenda in Argentina. The family members of police victims, coming together in the Movimiento del Dolor, take up a prominent place in holding the government accountable by means of repeated demonstrations, the creation of civil society organizations, and participation in public debate. In response, the Kirchner administration started a ‘politics of rapprochement’ in an attempt to establish alliances with family members of victims. The clearest expression of this politics is the creation of the PNAI, the national program against impunity, an initiative in which family members of victims participate actively. Consequences for the relations between the latter and the state and among family members of victims themselves will be examined. The ‘politics of rapprochement’ is an attempt to co-opt the Movimiento del Dolor, but at the same time includes elements of cooperation. It is a government initiative to show it is on the side of the victims but at the same time is criticized by part of the victims for being just symbolic politics that ignores the necessary large-scale transformations that the police and the judiciary have to undergo in order to stop the impunity in Argentina.

This essay in comparative history considers how governing elites and rural publics have interpreted rules of law and criminal behavior in times of radical tenure transformation. During the twentieth century, Russians experienced three state-sponsored attempts at property rights revolution: firstly, the pre-1917 Stolypin Reforms to privatize the ubiquitous peasant communes, secondly, Stalin’s 1930s campaign to forcibly collectivized peasant communes, and thirdly, the 1990s ‘shock therapy’ reforms to replace Soviet collectivism with wholesale privatization. In each case, adherents of the pre-existing property systems were excluded from the decision-making process that established the new one. Russia’s historical experience is viewed in light of the contested emergence of private property regimes during England’s enclosure movement, and during the nineteenth-century Euro- pean settler appropriation of American Indian land as private property—with African-born plantation workers also later claimed as private property. In some cases, resistance was viewed as criminal; in others, it was punishable as treason.

This essay answers the question: what is interpretation? It does so by proposing that interpretation involves certain brain operations. These utilize perceptual and procedural culture stored in neural networks. The parts of the brain performing interpretation are said to constitute a cultural neurohermenetic system, hypothesized to function according to an interpretive hierarchy. It is argued that such an approach has two benefits. The first of these is to provide a non-sociobiological, non-reductionist way of analyzing interactions between culture and biology. The second benefit is to provide conceptual tools for explaining how the micro-realm within individuals (I-space) makes connections in the macro-realm (E-space) of events in social forms. Conceptualization of such connections forms a basis for a variety of social analysis termed complex string being theory.

This article, based on almost eight years of continuous anthropological research amongst the Tuareg people of the Sahara and Sahel, suggests that the launch by the US and its main regional ally, Algeria, in 2002–2003 of a ‘new’, ‘second’, or ‘Saharan’ Front in the ‘War on Terror’ was largely a fabrication on the part of the US and Algerian military intelligence services. The ‘official truth’, embodied in an estimated 3,000 articles and reports of one sort or another, is largely disinformation. The article summarizes how and why this deception was effected and examines briefly its implications for both the region and its people as well as the future of US international relations and especially its global pursuance of an increasingly suspect ‘War on Terror’.

Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Chris Hann, Turkish region: State, market, and social identities on the East Black Sea Coast. Oxford/Santa Fe: James Currey/School of American Research Center, 2001, 244 pp., ISBN 0-85255-279-3 (paperback).

Micheal E. Meeker, A nation of empire: The Ottoman legacy of Turkish modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 420 pp., ISBN 0-520-22526-0 (paperback).

Deema Kaneff, Who owns the past? The politics of time in a ‘model’ Bulgarian village

William F. Kelleher Jr., The troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and identity in Northern Ireland

Don Kalb and Herman Tak, Critical junctions: Anthropology and history beyond the cultural turn

Jonathan Xavier Inda (ed.), Anthropologies of modernity: Foucault, governmentality, and life politics

Tatjana Thelen, Privatisierung und soziale Ungleichheit in der osteuropäischen Landwirtschaft. Zwei Fallstudien aus Ungarn und Rumänien

André Celtel, Categories of self: Louis Dumont’s theory of the individual

Gerald Sider, Living Indian histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora people in North Carolina