Focaal

The articles in this theme section are based on papers presented at a three-session workshop on World Anthropologies at the 2008 Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Drawing on analyses of the position of anthropological disciplinary practices in Poland, Spain, Hungary, and the US, as well as their global reception, these articles ask important and timely questions about where anthropologists conduct their research, what professional and academic societies they join, what types of relationships they should forge with scholars who live in the country or nation in which they conduct fieldwork, and how they should engage with other disciplines beyond anthropology. As these articles demonstrate, practices of collaboration are enmeshed in politically, socially, and geographically grounded histories. Although at some level this may not be a surprise to readers, specific issues remain well worth examining further and discussing within the profession.

It is well accepted that the discussion about intellectual centers and peripheries has a reductionist character that conceals the complexity of a globalizing world. Despite this, we cannot ignore that in the academic history of anthropology central traditions and hegemonic discourses were established, while others were rendered as peripheral or marginal. This historical context has set a disciplinary framework of inequalities and imbalances that created the conditions of possibility for the global production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge. By re-examining the controversy surrounding the anthropology of the Mediterranean and its relation with debates about native anthropology, this article points out the challenge of revising this disciplinary framework in the project of developing a truly global anthropology.

Western representations of the Other are criticized by anthropologists, but similar hegemonic classifications are present in the relationships between anthropologists who are living in the West and working on the (post-socialist) East, and those working and living in the (post-communist) East. In a hierarchical order of scholars and knowledge, post-socialist anthropologists are often perceived as relics of the communist past: folklorists, theoretically backward empiricists, and nationalists. These images replicate Cold War stereotypes, ignore long-lasting paradigm shifts as well as actual practices triggered by the transnationalization of scholarship. Post-socialist academics either approve of such hegemony or contest this pecking order of wisdom, and their reactions range from isolationism to uncritical attempts at “nesting intellectual backwardness“ in the local context (an effect that trickles down and reinforces hierarchies). Deterred communication harms anthropological studies on post-socialism, the prominence of which can hardly be compared to that of post-colonial studies.

Both inside and outside Europe, many societies have drawn on their own textual traditions to generate bodies of knowledge possessing some affinity to comparative socio-cultural anthropology. The premise of this article is that even where the focus is restricted to one country or one nationality, such “national ethnography“ should be considered as a legitimate branch of a broadly conceived anthropological field, rather than belittled or denigrated. Under socialism, both native and foreign researchers carried out fieldwork in similar rural locations in Hungary. A dialogue began, but it seems to have weakened in recent years, despite the fact that access to the region has become incomparably easier. Another change is that Hungarian students are now able to study socio-cultural anthropology as a seperate program in a separate faculty, distinct from Hungarian néprajz. This article is critical of such developments and takes the Hungarian example to argue for the benefits of institutional unification. The resulting department would be larger and more cosmopolitan than the old departments of néprajz, but it would retain its local roots. The integration of “national ethnography“ into research and teaching programs in anthropology would facilitate the persistence of distinctive national, regional, and institution-specific intellectual traditions; such departments could also facilitate the work of fieldworkers from abroad.

Paradoxes shape the relationship of the US anthropological community to its counterparts elsewhere and require new thinking about leadership that focuses on mutuality, responsibility, reciprocity, and pragmatism. Explored here are some key contradictions I see in ways of looking at the current, past, or plausible role of the US anthropological community and, in particular, the American Anthropological Association and its nearly forty Sections. Marked inequality exists among national and international anthropological organizations in size, finances, journal production, and conference attendance and often in perceived degree of importance, control, vibrancy, or agenda-setting. Yet this intervention argues for ways to mitigate that marked inequality, nonetheless, by refusing a binary us-them conceptualization and emphasizing creative pragmatism, mutuality, and responsibility. Unconventionally it even asks whether US anthropology should lead more in the world of anthropology than it currently does or lead less, and why both are worth exploring.

These comments—made originally in my role as discussant for the panel in Ljubljana—address the recent history of the question of world anthropologies and identify three issues for further critical debate: (1) hegemonic claims concerning our discipline (including the issue of hegemony within our discipline), (2) the difference between power and authority, and (3) reasons that alterity continues to be a crucial concept in post-colonial anthropology.

This article analyzes the struggles of the petroleum labor movement against the neo-liberalization of the petroleum industry in Ecuador. Though originally focused on defending collective bargaining rights, since the 1990s the movement has put forward a populist, nationalist critique of the state's governance of petroleum. The article traces the roots of the movement and focuses on two contested terrains of petroleum politics, refineries and oilfields, to examine labor's role in resource governance. The article argues that by strategically joining concerns over class and nation, over a number of administrations from the 1970s to the 2000s (from populist, military juntas, to neoliberal), the petroleum labor movement became a defining actor in petroleum governance.

The following article by Andrés Guerrero is an unedited translation of the sixth and final chapter of his recent book, Administración de poblaciones, ventriloquía, y transescritura (Admini stration of Populations, Ventriloquism, and Trans-writing, 2010), a remarkable text of political history and philosophy that has been largely inaccessible to readers outside the Andean region. 1 Our publication of that chapter in this issue, with commentaries on it and an interview with the author, reflects the unusually loud “echoes” (to use a Guerreroism) we heard in it of Focaal’s efforts to promote unorthodox ways of addressing the global and historical composition of political critique. Extracting a chapter such as this from its source cannot but leave scars. Here we aim to fill in some of the missing pieces to the story that follows.

The article simultaneously explores three lines of reflection and analysis woven around the comparative reverberations (in space and time) between citizenship and the administration of populations (states of exception) in the Republic of Ecuador during the nineteenth century and the Kingdom of Spain in the twenty century. The first thread tries to answer the question whether it is possible for concepts generated in a country of the Global South to be used usefully in analyzing a different Northern reality, inverting the usual direction in the flows of transfer and importation of “theory.“ The second theme of comparative reverberation explores a network of concepts concerning the citizenship of common sense and the administration of populations, that is the “back-patio“ aspect of citizenship, particularly its historical formation in the domination of populations in the Republic of Ecuador during the nineteenth century. It is centered on the process of identification in the daily exchanges between interpares citizens and extrapares non-citizens. The last section involves testing concepts forged in the author's studies of Ecuadorian history for their utility in analyzing the current situation of modern sub-Saharan immigrants in Spain (using concrete examples), and their reclusion to the private sphere in spaces of exception and abandonment. Here, the article concentrates on the difference between the public administration of populations and the private administration of citizens. The article uses documentary material relating to nineteenth-century Ecuador and twentieth-century Spain and Senegal.

Interviewed and translated by Tristan Platt

TP: Andrés, you have recently published a book which has provoked considerable interest, and which presents the results of your reflections over several years on the history and anthropology of Ecuador. Let me start by asking you what led you to these two disciplines, and how you think the combination has led you to understand better an Andean and Latin-American society such as Ecuador?

The echoes that Andrés Guerrero hears and shares with us here are strictly inequivalent: the one is an echo of an archival silence, the other of sensational newsflashes. The newsflash conjures more telling silences, and perhaps a film (Biutiful comes to mind); but the echo of such silences demands not film but theory. How so?

In this theoretically ambitious article, Andrés Guerrero aims to rethink the North’s Master Narrative of liberal citizenship, comparing the administration of Indians in past Ecuador with the administration of illegal immigrants in Spain today “as a sort of distorted reflection.”

I begin with the commentary by João Biehl and Sebastian Ramirez. I don’t know which is the author, but I know that my article has not been read as a “signifying machine,” with openness toward “what it may tell,” or wondering “if it works or not” (Deleuze 1990: 3–21), or simply “with openness to the existence of a third” (Biehl and Locke 2010: 347). Of course there is a lack of fit between the positions I put forward and those defended by the authors of the critique. Although our positions may differ, they are not necessarily incompatible: at least one of their several “intersections and junctions” (Biehl and Locke 2010: 347) might be revealed through a reading that is open but not a-critical. The divergence between the positions adopted by the authors and those I defend is, for me, one of the fruits of the diversity that characterizes intellectual creativity, and in particular that of history and anthropology.

The protest movement that emerged in Iran in the wake of the presidential election of 2009 has seen a subsequent decline due to the combined effects of repression and the timidity of the reformist leadership. The growing conflict between Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad around the upcoming parliamentary election of March 2012 has created a new political crisis. The radical section of the movement tries to use this split to launch a subversive strategy against the Islamic regime. Alternatively, Khamenei tries to rid himself of the last vestiges of the autonomy of any elected institution and establish a full theocratic dictatorship. Iranian society has two choices—either to subvert the Khamenei regime or to be subjugated by it.