Suchergebnisse

Introduction: An ethnographer among the anthropologists -- The world at hand: between scientific and literary inquiry -- A method of experience: reading, writing, teaching, fieldwork -- For the humanity yet to come: politics, art, fiction, ethnography -- Coda: The anthropologist as critic.

"A rough spade for a rugged landscape" : on savage selves and more civil places -- "What remains of the harvest when the fence grazes the crop?" : on the proper violence of agrarian citizenship -- "The life of the thief leaves the belly always boiling" : on the nature and restraint of the criminal animal -- "Millets sown yield millets, evil sown yields evil" : on the moral returns of agrarian toil -- "Let the water for the paddy also irrigate the grass" : on the sympathies of an aqueous self

This article concerns the politics of security and caste difference in the late nineteenth century Madras Presidency. Relying on a vernacular principle of interpretation emerging from the colonial archive itself—a Sanskrit 'Law of Coincidence'—the article makes a case for collective identity in colonial India as a conjunctural attribution. I closely examine the trajectory of a widespread peasant movement that sought in 1896 to evict a single caste from hundreds of settlements altogether. The article tracks an intimate traffic between administrative sociology and native stereotype that converged on an assessment of this caste as thieving and predatory by nature. This racialised politics of intrinsic character enabled a popular programme of violent eviction. At the same time, peasant efforts to secure property and territory from threat may be understood as an alternative project of rural government, one that marked a crucial turn in the development of a moral order in the southern Tamil countryside.

Pandian reviews STITCHES ON TIME: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles by Saurabh Dube.

Taking the hunt as both metaphor of rule and political practice, this paper compares the predatory exercises of two imperial formations in India: the late British Raj and the sixteenth‐century Mughal empire. The British pursuit of man‐eaters confronted feline terror with sovereign might, securing the bodies and hearts of resistant subjects through spectacles of responsible force. The Mughal hunt, on the other hand, took unruly nobles and chieftains as the objects of its fearful care, winning their obedient submission through the exercise of a predatory sovereignty. Both instances of 'predatory care' shed light on the troubling intimacy of biopolitical cultivation and sovereign violence.

Introduction: Archipelagos, a voyage in writing / Paper Boat Collective -- Ambivalent archive / Angela Garcia -- Writing with care / Michael Jackson -- After the fact : the question of fidelity in ethnographic writing / Michael Jackson -- Walking and writing / Anand Pandian -- Anthropoetry / Adrie Kusserow -- Poetry, uncertainty, and opacity / Michael Jackson -- Taʻbīr : ethnography of the imaginal / Stefania Pandolfo -- Writing through intercessors / Stuart McLean -- Desire in cinema / Anand Pandian -- Flows and interruptions, or, So much for full stops / Stuart McLean -- Denial : A visit in four ethnographic fictions / Tobias Hecht -- Ethnography and fiction / Anand Pandian -- SEA / Stuart McLean -- Writing otherwise / Lisa Stevenson -- Origami conjecture for a Bembé / Todd Ramón Ochoa -- Ethnographic excess / Daniella Gandolfo and Todd Ramón Ochoa -- Conversations with a hunter / Daniella Gandolfo -- On writing and surviving / Lisa Stevenson -- A proper message / Lisa Stevenson -- Fidelity and invention / Angela Garcia

"The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word.

The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole.

The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril."