Social Analysis

It is conventional to point out the disintegrative and dysfunctional effects of violence and relegate it to processes outside the social realm. Yet this study argues that a reflexive approach to ethnography can reveal the integrative potential of violence. It examines the theoretical importance of the ethnographer's anxieties about (a) violence, (b) the precarious dependencies during fieldwork in a violent setting, and (c) concerns about representing violence in academic work. Such a reflexive approach shows why these anxieties can both conceal and reveal the sociality of violence. The study draws on personal fieldwork experiences to show how violence became central to the relationships the author developed with his assistants during research in South Africa.

This article is the result of research that focused on street art and graffiti in the city of Lisbon from 2004 to 2007. The empirical arguments presented draw from ethnographic work and from an analysis of inscriptions on urban walls. In my understanding, these visual manifestations can be understood as political and aesthetic devices, fundamental expressive resources in the negotiation of power and agency in the urban environment. They are vernacular creations that may be interpreted as discursive instruments forged in the context of symbolic struggles, characteristic of the 'field of visibility'. Furthermore, I put forward an analytical framework of graffiti and street art as an urban transgressive grammar, while considering the articulation of produced text and the context of production.

This article examines the temporalizing effects of Tidlig Innsats—Early Years (TIEY), a literacy instruction program building on the school effectiveness pedagogic model. Ethnographic descriptions from several Norwegian first-grade classrooms document how the program's rigid and meticulous pedagogic standards shaped the social timing of TIEY lessons. In sum, the interaction dynamics in the classrooms were forced into patterns that we call 'learning effectiveness temporalities'. Several effects were observed beyond those officially intended, most notably an increased emphasis on producing orderly and disciplined behavioral norms. As TIEY implementation was politically driven, the learning effectiveness temporalities that it generated have been analyzed as state effects. Their intensity was found to fluctuate with seasonal activity cycles and administrative surveillance patterns.

This article examines the informal housing practices that the urban poor use to construct, transform, and access citizenship in contemporary South Africa. Following the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, the provision of formalized housing for the urban poor has become a key metric for 'non-racial' political inclusion and the desegregation of apartheid cities. Yet, shack settlements—commemorated in liberation histories as apartheid-era battlegrounds—have been reclassified as 'slums', zones that are earmarked for clearance or development. Evictions from shack settlements to government emergency camps have been justified under the liberal logic of expanding housing rights tied to citizenship. I argue that the informal housing practices make visible the methods of managing 'slum' populations, as well as an emerging living politics in South African cities.

During times of crisis, economic practices organized on principles of reciprocity often arise. Greece, with the vibrant sociality pertaining to its 'solidarity economy', is a case in point. This article is premised on the idea that crises make contradictions in societies more visible. I suggest that a central contradiction is at play in Greece between informal and formalized economic activity, as demonstrated in the tension between the fluid features of 'solidarity' networks and the formalization proposed or imposed on them by state institutions. In Thessaloniki, the informal solidarity economy proves to be more efficient than the work of NGOs. Arguing that such economic activities are built around the rise of new forms of sociality rather than a tendency toward bureaucratization, the article contributes to anthropological understandings of solidarity and welfare, as well as their relation.

'Spiritual mapping' is a transnational Pentecostal 'spiritual warfare' practice that aims to identify and fight 'territorial spirits', or demons that possess specific places. It was unique in Cape Town, South Africa, at the beginning of democracy, because it was both racialized and sexualized. This article examines how Pentecostals in Cape Town employed spiritual mapping techniques to identify and police groups they understood as morally and spiritually 'dangerous': black and 'coloured' communities and gays and lesbians. I argue that South African spiritual mapping was a response to the material and physical insecurities of democracy, particularly the declining economy, failed promises of the African National Congress, and some of the highest rates of crime in the world.

Martin Demant Frederiksen, Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013), 214 pp. ISBN 9781439909188.

Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 320 pp. ISBN 9780745664798.

Ørnulf Gulbrandsen, The State and the Social: State Formation in Botswana and Its Pre-colonial and Colonial Genealogies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 343 pp. ISBN 9781782383253.

Franco La Cecla and Piero Zanini, The Culture of Ethics, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013), 119 pp. ISBN 9780984201044.

Madeleine Reeves, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 292 pp. ISBN 9780801477065.