Suchergebnisse

The politics of bisection: a visual ethnography of rebordering and rajando -- Not walls, bridges: rituals of necrocitizenship -- Necrocitizenship enacted: raping white women and consolidating the State of exception -- Bleeding like the State: the open veins of Latin America -- Necrocitizenship kills.

Border walls permeate our world, with more than thirty nation-states constructing them. Anthropologists Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga argue that border wall construction manifests transformations in citizenship practices that are aimed not only at keeping migrants out but also at enmeshing citizens into a wider politics of exclusion. For a decade, the authors studied the U.S.-Mexico border wall constructed by the Department of Homeland Security and observed the political protests and legal challenges that residents mounted in opposition to the wall. In Fencing in Democracy Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga take us to those border communities most affected by the wall and often ignored in national discussions about border security to highlight how the state diminishes citizens' rights. That dynamic speaks to the citizenship experiences of border residents that is indicative of how walls imprison the populations they are built to protect. Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga brilliantly expand conversations about citizenship, the operation of U.S. power, and the implications of border walls for the future of democracy. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1340/thumbnail.jpg

Since the 1990s, citizenship has been transformed into an anthropological genre. Anthropologists have employed terms such as "transnational," "insurgent," and "patriotic" to describe the subjective, cultural, and political dimensions of citizenship. Anthropologists have also differentiated between formal and substantive, legal and cultural, and full and partial citizenship to theorize the disjunction between the promise of state-granted rights and everyday experiences of belonging to a nation-state. And, with increasing mobilities, anthropologists have reconceptualized the politics of exclusion that underlies state policies aimed at undocumented migrants. Now more than ever, anthropology is needed in the study of citizenship and noncitizenship both to illuminate the particulars of how social actors navigate national belonging and to rescue citizenship from state policies aimed at exclusion, death, and the diminution of rights.

Residents of South Texas live in a "Constitution free zone," as one of our informants explained. Court rulings have declared that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution does not apply at checkpoints and spaces up to 100 miles north of the U.S.‐Mexican border. This article draws upon Agamben's arguments about "states of exception" and Foucault's notion of the "carceral state" to show that border residents live in a state of legal exception, in which the modalities characteristic of mass incarceration are extended from prison, where search and seizure is always classified as "reasonable," into everyday life. We introduce the concept "state of carcelment" to describe how these modalities operate on the ground, through mass incarceration and internal checkpoints, to inter, so to speak, an entire region. With the potential diffusion of this "state of carcelment" beyond the border region, anthropologists are poised to critically engage its legal and cultural normalization. [State of exception, border security, Mexican American, Constitution free zone, prisons, checkpoints, race, gender, carcelment]

Anthropology is the study of human behavior and culture, and anthropologists in the United States divide their research into four sub-fields of study: physical anthropology; archaeology; linguistic anthropology; and cultural anthropology. North American anthropology draws its impetus from the foundational work of Franz Boas, a professor at Columbia University who lived along the Arctic Circle on Baffin Island, Canada for one year in the late nineteenth century where he kept copious notes of the language, life ways and customs of the Inuit. The following year, Boas collaborated with several museums conducting fieldwork along the North Pacific Coast setting the tone for anthropologists working closely with native peoples taking extensive field-notes about their world and worldviews as well as collaborating with museums to educate the public about these very issues. Following Boas's example, anthropologists have conducted ethnographic research on cultures throughout the world and have, through museums, archival collections, and publications, created a rich record of humanity's diverse belief systems, forms of social organization, and political dynamics.The Border Studies Archive, with it focus on the U.S. Mexico border in general and the Rio Grande Valley in particular, represents one such documentation and preservation initiative.

Senator Barack Obama played a key role in supporting bipartisan efforts led by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy to legislate "comprehensive immigration reform." This new legislation calls for augmenting border security, enforcing employer sanctions for firms that hire "undocumented workers," and creating a path to "earned" citizenship for workers already in the United States. The authors argue that Senator Obama uses a "both . . . and" rather than an "either . . . or" approach to immigration that seeks to shift the terms of the debate. In this article, the authors chart Senator Obama's stance on immigration in relation to conservative and liberal positions. By doing so, they explore how Obama's constructed understanding of "earned" citizenship stands in sharp contrast to ultraconservatives' essentialized notion of "patriotic" citizenship.