Suchergebnisse

"Secrecy and Insurgency deals with the experiences of guerrilla combatants of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces) in the aftermath of the peace accords signed in December 1996 between the Guatemalan government and guerrilla insurgents. Drawing on a broad field of contemporary theory, Silvia Posocco's Secrecy and Insurgency presents a vivid ethnographic account of secrecy as both sociality and a set of knowledge practices. Informed by multi-sited anthropological fieldwork among displaced communities with experiences of militancy in the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, the book traces the contours of dispersed and intermittent guerrilla social relations, unraveling the gendered dimensions of guerrilla socialities and subjectivities in a local context marked by violence and rapid social change. The chapters chart shifting regimes of governance in the northern departamento of Peten; the inception of violence and insurgency; guerrilla practices of naming and secret relations; moral orders based on sameness and sharing; and forms of relatedness, embodiment, and subjectivity among the combatants. The volume develops new critical idioms for grappling with partiality, perspective, and incompleteness in ethnography and contributes to new thinking on the anthropology of Guatemala. Secrecy and Insurgency will be of interest to social and cultural anthropologists, human geographers, and those interested in Latin American studies, human rights, women's studies, and gender studies"--

AbstractDrawing on long‐term anthropological research in Guatemala, the article examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as 'Sepur Zarco'. Focusing on the scene of selected court hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, the analysis focuses on 'bodying forth' (Das 2007), as a process of witnessing, materialization and subjectification that emerges in the declarations of the different parties, as they conjure up Dominga Cuc Coc, a local Maya Q'eqchi' woman, on the riverbank washing army uniforms under duress, or as the body of the forensic exhumation. 'Bodying forth' is tied to performative forensic imaginaries and forensic aesthetics in the courtroom, the broader Guatemalan body politic, and beyond. It challenges the epistemological underpinnings of law and science to re‐center the necessary differential and differentiated accounts of the witnesses and their appeals to justice.

Purpose
What difference, if any, does it make to appeal to the ordinary and the everyday, the situated and always-already-in-relation, the emergent and the quasi-event (Povinelli, 2011), as simultaneously sites, objects and frames? The paper aims to discuss these issues.


Design/methodology/approach
Through a focus on epistemological and methodological reflection, this paper asks: what is the relation between the biopolitical and necropolitical terrain in and through which experience unravels and the conceptual apparatuses which hold the promise of analysis and critique? What analytics, methods and ethics do contemporary life and death formations and intersecting precarious modes of existence elicit?


Findings
In this paper, I approach these questions ethnographically, with reference to debates in social and cultural theory and drawing on long-term anthropological research in Guatemala.


Originality/value
This paper aims to make contribution to debates on biopolitical and necropolitical processes and dynamics, by reflecting on the implications for epistemologies, methods and infrastructures.

The article provides an examination of how adoption files, or expedientes, have "fissured" the legality of transnational adoption processes in Guatemala. By focusing on declarations and disclaimers as an entry point to explore controversies over adoption files, the article argues that files point to the "prior" histories of adoption that are intimately connected to local histories of violence in the country. Through the analysis of the politics inherent in these legal documents, and the legal frameworks regulating the production of adoption paperwork, the article offers a critical insight into the extra-judicial processes and forms of "exceptionalism" that made transnational adoptions possible in the thirty-year period between 1977 and 2007. At the same time, the analysis of declarations and disclaimers brings to light how the technologies of their production allow the emergence of "anti-social affects" that saturate, and internally disrupt, transnational adoption files. The article proposes a critical, "anti-social" analysis of international adoption, by illuminating the problems that come from taking for granted the values of futurity and reproduction in adoption studies.

This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the 'bioinformational turn' in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated, or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service delivery promised connectivity, prosperity and wellbeing, in reality it also brought forward new levels of risk and vulnerability, generating new tensions and frictions in the body politic. As genetic science reaches post-archival horizons through new genetic sequencing technologies, forensic science in postarchival times raises questions concerning the differential impact of the fragmentation of analytical and archival infrastructures and increasingly asynchronous bureaucracies whose role is displaced by the relative autonomy of datasets and computational architectures that elude governance oversight and citizens' scrutiny.

"This handbook documents the impact of the study of gender and sexuality upon the foundational practices and precepts of anthropology. Individual chapters survey specific thematic areas. It introduces contemporary anthropological theory through in-depth ethnographical discussion of key topics in the study of gender and sexuality"--

Covers -- Editorial advisory board -- Bordering, exclusions and necropolitics -- Borders and margins: debates on intersectionality for critical research -- Recollection-as-method in social welfare practice: dirty work, shame and resistance -- Life, death, ethnography: epistemologies and methods of the quasi-event -- Gather in my name, my skin, my everything… ("Gather in myName": Maya Angelou, 1974) -- Location as method -- Dislocations, dis-possessions: more movements of the people

"Queer Necropolitics comes at a time when the intrinsic and self-evident value of queer rights and protections, from gay marriage to hate crimes, is increasingly put in question. It assembles writings that explore the new queer vitalities within their wider context of structural violence and neglect. The book mobilises the concept of 'necropolitics' in order to bring into view everyday death worlds, from more expected sites such as war, torture or imperial invasion to the mundane and normalised violence of racism and gender normativity, the market, and the prison-industrial complex. Its contributors interrogate the distinction between valuable and pathological lives by attending to the symbiotic co-constitution of queer subjects folded into life, and queerly abjected racialised populations marked for death. Moving between diverse geopolitical contexts - the US and the UK, Guatemala and Palestine, the Philippines, Iran and Israel - the chapters interrogate claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and everyday. Drawing on textual and visual analysis, ethnography, historiography and more, the authors argue that the distinction between 'war' and 'peace' dissolves in the face of the banality of death in the zones of abandonment that regularly accompany contemporary democratic regimes. The book will appeal to activist scholars and students from various social sciences and humanities, including cultural and media studies, critical legal studies, gender, transgender, queer, sexuality and intersectionality studies, critical race and ethnic studies, violence and conflict studies, as well as those studying nationalism, colonialism, prisons and war. It should be read by all those trying to make sense of the contradictions inherent in regimes of rights, citizenship and diversity"--

Purpose
Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices that underpin and sustain the multiplication of frontiers that define essential differences between populations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy that analyze and subvert the logic of bordering inherent in the bio/necropolitical gaze. In different ways, this paper examines operations of delimitation and differentiation that contribute to monolithic definitions of subject and subjectivity.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors question border construction processes in terms of their static, homogenizing and exclusionary effects.


Findings
Instead of hierarchical stratification of populations, the papers in this special issue explore the possibilities of relationship and the conditions of such relationships. Who do we relate to? On which terms and conditions? With what purpose? In which ethical and political manner?


Originality/value
A critical understanding of the asymmetry in research practices makes visible how the researcher is legitimized to produce a representation of those researched, an interpretation of their words and actions without feedback or contribution to the specific context where the research has been carried out. Deconstructive and relational perspectives are put forward as critical strands that can set the basis of different approaches to research and social practice.