Social Anthropology

In this article, I examine a range of petty transactions in Guyana which also render the state visible in everyday practices. Various police and other officials intervene in domestic incidents and minor affrays where they are ‘topped up’ by ‘ordinary people’, as payments for them to be less powerful. They rely on a local ideal model of the state which constructs it in opposition to people. Both the particular officials and people use or contest this model in power negotiations. The transactions occur through or alongside violence, variously experienced. Certain officials compete for the role of victims with the people who suffer at their hands, while their victims can make efforts to empower themselves. The resulting mode of victimhood is also about agency. In the alternating roles of victim and agent, people and officials also engage in complicit partnerships. The partnerships relate to another local ideal model about corruption as necessary to make things work. The power negotiations and violence, however, both question this model and that of the state as one of containment and as isolated from society. While sudden brutal violence occurs, it is the trivial violence as part of the everyday which constantly demonstrates victims, agents and the state in a landscape of power relations. The transactions also illustrate an ideal model of the state as extraordinary. In turn, trivial violence routinises these understandings.

This article considers violence and the urban landscape as implicated occurrences. Urban landscapes are approached as something other, and more, than the scenes of violence – backdrops or settings for unkindness. Instead the paper explores the ways in which the terrain and fabric of the city can partake of violence, can be caught up in its delivery. This is to posit landscape as something not so easily divisible from the encounters and experiences taking place within and across it. I develop this loosely phenomenological argument by serial illustration, ranging over time and space and touching down in the cities of Manchester, London, Paris and then Cardiff, a 21st century capital city busy ‘regenerating’ its urban core. Bringing the article to a close, and following in the steps of street‐level bureaucrats working with Cardiff's city centre homeless, I consider some contrary pairings of cruelty and kindness, and insist on (pedestrian) movement as constitutive of the urban landscape.

This paper examines the political economy of violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a landscape marked by genocidal campaigns where residents are raped and robbed of cattle and crops, and the extent to which that terror has been abetted by the global market for columbite‐tantalite, or coltan. Coltan is a dense silicate ideal for digital technologies, and an estimated 80% of the world's reserves lie in the eastern region of the Congo, where the profitability of its mining to local warlords and the frenetic pace of digital speculation have made both agricultural production and pastoralism untenable. As a result, Congolese have had constantly to improvise production systems in order to survive. This improvisation, easy to gloss over as a survival strategy or adaptation, is in fact performed by creative agents who forge elaborately devised artisanal production systems, at times dangerously against the regimes of local warlords, to meet the insatiable global demand for digital products. Coltan is thus a conductor in a dual sense: of digital capacitors for cell phones or PlayStations, but also of the broader social and political economic processes that underlie the global production of knowledge. Indeed, in both a material and symbolic sense, this ore is a veritable source of information production in the digital age. As such, coltan holds importance for understanding the conflicting and diffuse global role of the digital age, as a source hope and creativity on the one hand; and as an instrument of terror, regimentation, and routinisation on the other.

In Colombia, a country with a long‐standing multipolar armed conflict, the performance of violence in the form of massacres, selective assassinations, threats, disappearances, rape and forced displacement has turned fear into a powerful language by which the various armed actors communicate with society, reconfigure the landscape and regulate everyday life. Understanding forced migration as a form of displacement under coercion and fear, this article examines forms and notions of memorialized fear that are inscribed in the narratives of displacement and exile of a group of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Colombia and Colombian refugees in Canada. The article explores the relationships between memory, fear, and forced migration as a means to advance an anthropological analysis of the ways people reconstruct their lives in the midst of displacement and change. I suggest that a continuum of fear marks the journeys of displacement and exile of Colombian forced migrants. Fear is expressed as embodied memory and narrative thread to remember the past, the journey of forced migration, the interactions with the forced migration regime and the arrival and experiences in another host society. In the context of change and the liminal situations of IDPs and refugees, I consider the weight of emotions such as fear in shaping experience and remembrance so as to offer a critical starting point in reconsidering approaches towards, and conceptualizations of, identity, re‐establishment of rights and incorporation into new social landscapes.

This article examines the processes underpinning the restructuring of violence in urban Jamaica. Focusing upon the formation of Portmore, a planned community built to provide an alternative to the overcrowded and violent living conditions in west and central Kingston, I analyze planners and residents attempts to disrupt and erase the everyday experience of violence and poverty among working class Jamaicans. Tracing the shift away from politically motivated violence to what residents have termed ‘freelance violence’, I illustrate the socio‐spatial dimensions of violence and poverty in urban Jamaica and the changing relationship between state support, political engagement and citizenship.