Social Analysis

During the Vietnam War, unprecedented numbers of dead soldiers were buried in unmarked graves and remain missing today. Starting in the mid-1990s, the services of psychics came into high demand, prompting the establishment of a state-approved Center for Research into Human Capabilities that continues to offer grave-finding assistance for the general public. This article discusses the cases of two well-known female psychics. As the case studies demonstrate, such research programs have established a niche for psychics on the perimeters of the official discursive nexus of truth, science, and visuality. They also highlight the variability of social and semantic proc esses by which different psychics are positioned in relation to recognized distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge practices and truth claims.

Through an analysis of Fijian children's essays about the future, this article explores ideas of sociality, personhood, and the self that are the very stuff of intersubjectivity and thus of the imagination, as this gives rise to the lived social reality that is manifested in people's ideas and practices. The material presented here bears on a single aspect of data derived from 75 essays by Fijian village children aged between 7 and 15 years old, that is, their constitution over time of a spatiotemporal orientation toward a view of generations to come. I use this example of spatiotemporal orientation to show how, seen through the perspective derived from long-term participant observer fieldwork, data such as these enable an ethnographic analysis of meaning-making as a transformational, historical process.

This article proposes using the theoretical discussions of Deleuze and Guattari as a means of comprehending the various ways in which individuals speak about their ethnic identity. This is done through a case study of a state-run educational boarding school offered to subjects identified as 'ethnic' in Israel. The findings expose two ways of talking about ethnic identity: 'minor language' and 'major language'. What I term the 'major language of ethnicity' makes substantial use of state language and offers two hierarchical categories that serve as an archetype for classifying groups. The 'minor language of ethnicity', on the other hand, offers multiple local identifications and potential identity alternatives. The article suggests using dynamics at the foundation of these concepts to consider the position of the researcher and to expose existential 'lines of flight' and life inventions of subjects in everyday life.

The subject of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness in South Asian society has largely been analyzed as a temporal condition in which there is a harmonious or inharmonious conjunction of people and events in time. In this article, the construction of houses by high-caste people living in a hamlet in Nepal is used to argue for a reconceptualization of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness as practices of emplacement in space and time. The analysis demonstrates how the rituals associated with the various stages of construction ensure the new house's compatibility with its spatial milieu—the soil, the site, the cardinal directions, and the reigning deities, as well as the vital force of the earth. Together with the auspicious timing of each stage of construction and its associated ritual with the owner's horoscope, the result of the building process shows auspiciousness to be a harmonious conjunction of person, place, and time.

Drawing on ethnographic work on menstruation and gynecological examinations and surgeries in Salvador, Brazil, this article explores the way that bodily boundaries are constituted through medical practices. Focusing on the re-enactment of the boundary between the inside and the outside of bodies, it analyzes that which is detached from bodies and, by falling away from them, contributes to their constitution. It then considers how the gynecological examination and vaginal plastic surgery can be used to speak of the problematic and contingent act of delimiting bodies from the inside out.

This article draws attention to the ways that Alaskan Native sovereignties and economies are increasingly driven by market-rational logics. I examine a proposed land exchange between the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Alaska Native Doyon Corporation that would enable Doyon to pursue oil development ventures on lands exchanged out of the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge. This plan was made possible due to uneven political and structural relationships created through Native land claims legislation in Alaska, as well as shifts in federal land management policies that have made land more easily exchangeable and developable. These structural inequalities and shifts in state policy have laid the groundwork for neo-liberal development schemes that are pursued in the name of Alaskan Native communities and economies but are also often at their expense.

The field of autism interventions, as well as advice given to parents on educating children with autism spectrum disorders, is characterized by competing claims and controversy. This article compares two events targeted at parents, both of which were staged on the same weekend in Sydney, Australia, in 2007. One centered on applied behavioral analysis, holding out the promise of potential normalization for children with autism and their families. The other, mobilizing civil rights rhetoric, pushed for the full educational inclusion of all children with disabilities. This article investigates the assumptions underlying these varied positions and assesses some of the ways in which parents, especially mothers, make sense of and situationally negotiate these often emotionally charged claims and counter-claims.