Suchergebnisse

Defining political correctness -- The origins and the debate -- Words and authorities : dictionaries and lexicographers -- The evolution of the word field -- Issues of race, nationality, gender, and difference -- Agendas old and new -- Political correctness in the past -- Culture -- Conclusion : The right thing to do? Progressive orthodoxy, empty convention or double standard?

AbstractPopular debates about criminal justice reform often pose restorative justice as a humane (if utopian) alternative to retributive justice. Drawing on fieldwork with Jordan's Bedouin, I offer an unvarnished account of a longstanding and still‐vibrant tradition of restorative justice that also includes violent and punitive elements. While acknowledging how Bedouin justice can fail women, the poor and the poorly connected, I highlight how Bedouin justice also cultivates mercy as a social good, transforming enmity into forgiveness (if not friendship) and encouraging perpetrators to materially compensate victims. I conclude by considering how contemporary Jordanian practices of mercy might inform efforts to escape from the seeming inevitability of mass incarceration in modern society.

As it has spread globally, the pathogen SARS-CoV-2 (known colloquially as the coronavirus) has already caused untold suffering, with more most certainly to come. Yet as the virus afflicts, it has also encountered a range of human responses – from initial indifference and outright denial in parts of the Anglo-American West to society-wide mobilizations in much of the rest of the world. In doing so, the virus has become a sort of diagnostic tool that can reveal a lot about any body politic that it happens to enter, something we attempt to leverage in this issue's forum through reflections from ethnographers working in both India (Dey) and the United States (Brinkworth et al., McGranahan).

This issue's forum continues a lively discussion of Nigel Rapport's notion of 'cosmopolitan politesse' that was previously featured in these pages in the summer of 2018. Rapport has long proposed this sort of politesse as a 'form of virtue' and 'good manners' (2018: 93) premised on 'the ontological reality of human individuality', which in turn necessitates an 'interactional code' according to which we must presume both 'common humanity' but also 'distinct individuality' to the point where we 'classif[y] the Other in no more substantive fashion than this' (92). Given anthropology's history of intricately taxonomising humans according to various criteria, this is indeed a challenging proposal – all the more so in the context of legal anthropology, where being subject to specific norms and laws is often taken to be constitutive of distinctive subjectivities, sensibilities and survival strategies. In this issue, Don Gardner responds, directing his critical attention towards the notion of personhood undergirding Rapport's plea for a revitalised Kantian liberalism in an era of resurgent xenophobia and ethnonationalism. In the process, we see two accomplished scholars taking positions within (and consciously outside of) a whole range of classical debates in the Western philosophical cannon with pressing relevance for contemporary legal anthropology, from nature versus nurture to free will versus determinism, individualism versus collectivism and structure versus agency.

Drawing on many years of fieldwork in rural Jordan, Kinship, Islam, and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan provides a firsthand look at how expectations around marriage are changing for young people in the Middle East even as they are still expected to raise money for housing, bridewealth, and a wedding. Kinship, Islam, and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan offers an intriguing look at the contrasts between the traditional values and social practices of rural Jordanians around marriage and the challenges and expectations of young people as their families negotiate the concept of kinship as part of the future of politics, family dynamics, and religious devotion.

The local uptake of new media in the Middle East is shaped by deep histories of imperialism, state building, resistance and accommodation. In contemporary Jordan, social media is simultaneously encouraging identification with tribes and undermining their gerontocratic power structures. Senior men stress their own importance as guarantors ('faces'), who restore order following conflicts, promising to pay their rivals a large surety if their kin break the truce. Yet, 'cutting the face' (breaking truces) remains an alternative, one often facilitated by new technologies that allow people to challenge pre-existing structures of communication and authority. However, the experiences of journalists and other social media mavens suggest that the liberatory promise of the new technology may not be enough to prevent its reintegration into older patterns of social control.

At a time when Western humanitarian rescue discourses seek to save Muslim women from irrational and violent Islamic masculinities, the Jordanian Islamist charity 'the Chastity Society' seeks to train young men to restrain their excessive masculine passions to ensure that Muslim women are spared the fate of the benighted and oppressed Western woman. This article traces parallel emphases on gender essentialism, rationality, cultural pathology, and abjection to argue that a shared language of contention unites both Islamists and those who advocate for Western humanitarian interventions. I explore how several kinds of social control are legitimized through these symmetrical polemics about gender, order, and civilization.

Abstract
Ethnographers today find themselves experimenting with new approaches to digital ethnography amid pandemic-related restrictions on research. Yet such developments only accelerate a broader trend toward the dissolution of the traditional ethnographic 'field' due to new communications technologies and the emergence of a globalized 'knowledge economy'. Through six contributions from around the world, this forum explores how the emergence of a more diffuse, interconnected ethnographic field is impacting fieldwork's status as a rite of passage, creating new affective entanglements and shifting power relationships between researchers and participants. Despite the potential for influence and surveillance that new technologies cede to already powerful institutions, the discussions underline how ethnographic interlocutors are auteurs in their own right—and that ethnographers are also often bit characters in other people's stories.