Suchergebnisse

Theory of symbolic violence -- Integration of Limbus in precolonial Sikkim -- Integration of Limbus in colonial Sikkim -- Integration of Limbus in postcolonial Sikkim -- Limbu as a scheduled tribe in contemporary Sikkim -- Configurations of symbolic violence in Sikkim, Darjeeling and Nepal.

Review

Recent times have seen much reflection on the nature of the Anglo-Scottish border region; its past, present and potential future. Political concerns have rightly absorbed much of the attention, but at the same time important light has been shed on the legacy of cultural engagements and forms of interaction that might be said to perform and produce this border over time and render it particularly distinctive. A soft, internal border, the territory considered in this article is one with an ancient feudal past and a heavily conserved, preserved and, in parts, still militarized present. It is predominantly rural and characterized by large swathes of forestry, agriculture, and moorland, all of which raise issues of aesthetic and environmental, as well as social and economic sustainability. The concern in the case studies presented in this article is how, through the relational and processual perspectives of border studies and cultural landscapes, we might comprehend the over layered and sedimented histories, the nature of identities, heritage and experience of place here. I consider too the ways in which recent forms of creative practice are contributing to a wider investigation of this region and re-conceptualizing the cultural significance of the border.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016, this dissertation investigates emerging forms of hacking and tech entrepreneurship by moving between key physical sites in Mexico and the San Francisco Bay Area. The anthropology of hacking has shown that European and U.S.-based advocates of F/OSS (free and open-source software) regard formal politics as counter-productive to their technical craft, which is aimed at liberating information and technology. Anthropologists have mostly focused on an undifferentiated hacker community precisely because hackers themselves claim that markers of difference are irrelevant to their social and technical organization. But what happens when practices of hacking challenge the boundaries of colorblindness and intersect with constructions of race, nation, and class? To examine how the shifting politics of hacking influence models for technology-driven capitalism, I conducted participant-observation in hackathons and co-working spaces with self-identified "hacker-entrepreneurs." At one level, my dissertation makes a comparative analysis of how communities positioned on separate sides of the U.S./Mexico border use their "code work" to make modifications to established technological and entrepreneurial protocols that themselves aim to redress economic injustices. On another level, as these two tech communities coalesce by participating in events aimed at empowering a Latina/o collective, I show how Latinidad gets constructed (and contested) across hierarchies of race, nation, and class.Scholars have long been interested in social protests and movements among Latina/os and in Latin America. I find them in unlikely places-in spaces normally thought to be advancing capitalistic accumulation. My research shifts from thinking about technological capitalism in terms of abstract models and focuses instead on the logics and subjectivities people use to structure their everyday work and social lives. I look at one phenomenon that might ordinarily be broken up into different anthropological domains (technology, racialization, capitalism, global economy) and consider how they all come together by focusing on hacking/entrepreneurship as a critical site of academic inquiry.