Social Analysis

This article discusses the relationship between the researcher and a field affected by armed conflict. Based on ethnographic research in Sri Lanka during the ceasefire of 2002, it investigates how deep polarization that emerges in the course of a violent conflict determines the researcher’s scope for positioning vis-à-vis the different groups. The article argues that the unpredictibility of the research site necessitates careful navigation of the self and requires thorough reflection on the consequences of particular moves at the point of decision making. In order to maintain relationships with different sides, there is a need to deal carefully with sensitive issues, both during and after fieldwork. This article pleas for a balance between pragmatism and ethics.

Drawing on Caroline Humphrey’s analysis of the personal consequences of ‘decision-events’, in this article we interpret the 2013 protests around Gezi Park in Istanbul as an eventful situation that instigated a break with participants’ previous political sentiments, recomposing them as transformed subjects in the process. We argue that an effective political humor prompted the emergence of a new subject, causing certain features of pre-Gezi political subjectivity to recede from active memory. We use a particular case study to illustrate our claim, comparing pre-Gezi Atatürkist anti-government humor with the political humor of Gezi Park. The article concludes by showing that humor, place, and political amnesia changed activists’ interests, moods, and embodied capabilities, reshaping their manner of relating to the city and generating a distinctive subject.

The oil industry tends to remain disconnected from local realities surrounding production sites, a situation that can be explained by theories of enclaving and technological zones. Despite these barriers, local people try to connect to and profit from oil projects that are set up in their vicinity. This article explores the relationships between a Chadian merchant, who started as a worker in the oil fields, his suppliers of goods and credit, and a Chinese oil company. The analysis focuses on the improvisation that the merchant and his Chinese clients undertook in order to develop trade in a difficult supply situation. The African system of trade enabled the Chinese company to overcome challenges to its project, while helping the merchant convert oil money into commercial capital.

This article analyzes the effects of a World Bank–promoted oil revenue distribution model in Chad. The authors engage the classic anthropological concerns of kinship and land tenure to examine how oil money has affected the southern Chadian oil zone. In determining whether oil money differs from money originating in other industries, two examples are used: the effects of salaries from pipeline construction on marriage payments and the effects of compensation payments on land ownership and kinship. With regard to these effects, the authors argue that oil generates a uniquely disruptive form of local inflation. They conclude that despite the World Bank’s measures to ensure that its oil model is transparent and socially just, these disruptions inhere in the model itself.

Criminal law in the United States values conceptual definitiveness in its quest for resolution. But the work of open-ended humanization required of sentencing mitigation advocates in American death penalty cases defies this call for definitiveness. Even as formal legal processes seek to limit the knowledge that can be brought into the courtroom, new theoretical approaches that justify more understanding and fact-finding can help attain tangible goals of defense advocacy. This article provides an ethnographic account of how capital defense practitioners in the United States engage with anthropological theories of culture as a behind-the-scenes advocacy strategy that succeeds by exploiting the anti-definitiveness inherent in culture. I develop the concept of ‘subtension’ as an analytical trope to help elucidate these processes.

This article explores how the Internet is reshaping relationships between the living and the dead. Drawing on data from the online memorial site ForeverMissed.com, it examines why online memorials are increasingly being used to commemorate the deceased instead of the more traditional genre of the obituary. It depicts how the Internet is providing new means for the bereaved to communicate with the dead and how these changes might signal new forms of consciousness and avenues of connectivity. Inspired by the findings of media theorist José van Dijck, I argue that online memorials serve both a commemorative and a ‘communicative’ function, allowing for relationships with the deceased to be maintained and for connections to be made with living others. This article also analyzes the Internet’s role as a ‘techno-spiritual system’.

In Bali, land and labor are increasingly defined in terms of the market and dispossession from land, and subsistence is understood as a ‘natural’ precursor of desired ‘development’. The rapidly expanding mass tourism industry today dominates the economy of the province, employs half the workforce, attracts global investors and work migrants, and unceasingly demands land and skilled labor. Three waves of dispossession, all tied to the uses of land and labor, have through ‘accumulation by dispossession’ been key moments of class formation in Bali’s recent history. While the two first waves (re)shaped both land and labor relations, the current wave dislocates and reorganizes labor, producing a moment of enclosure from below that is indicative of a new logic of expulsion.