Suchergebnisse

"Ancestral Presence tells a history that has more than one history in it while also telling the story of the relation between worlds. For the Fuyuge people of the Papuan highlands, the past is not 'history' in a conventional sense. For them, the world and its history derives from a creator force called Tidibe which is central to Fuyuge cosmology: the Fuyuge are at the 'centre of the world'. But Fuyuge people are part of another history, too: they have experienced decades of mission and government influence from centres of power located elsewhere, to which their mountain home is marginal and remote. Through a detailed exploration of Fuyuge myth, changes to ritual life and cosmology, Eric Hirsch weaves an account of the relationship between these two histories. He documents the real changes wrought by colonialism, government and Christianity from the late nineteenth century to the turn of the millennium. Yet this is not a story of 'continuity and change'. Hirsch demonstrates how transformation was always central to Fuyuge life: changes brought by missionaries and government were processes they themselves initiated in the ancestral past through Tidibe, the cosmological creator force. Engaging in debates that have been pivotal to Melanesian anthropology, the book presents an ethnographically rich account of a distinctive world, cosmology and ideas of historical change. It also raises questions regarding assumptions central to Western History, its worldview and ideas of historical time"--

Abstract
As intensifying floods and other climate extremes proliferate, narratives of unidirectional climate migration have become ubiquitous in media coverage and policy debates. This article reviews new scholarship that attends to an underreported dimension of climate change impact exposure. Emerging conversations in Indigenous climate justice research, mobility studies, and critical urban adaptation scholarship seek to understand why so many marginalized communities find themselves immobilized in the face of climate extremes. I argue that these scholars are building a concept of forced emplacement to politicize and historicize the uneven distribution of climate harms. Drawing on this scholarship and brief ethnographic sketches from my work in Peru and the Maldives, I follow forced emplacement across diverse case studies that root devastating immobilizations from flooding in local histories of colonial confinement, unevenly policed mobility, and varied efforts to control marginalized populations. I also illuminate how climate-exposed communities contest adaptation projects that reproduce their immobilization.

AbstractMarshall Sahlins described divine king forms for a wide range of societies from Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, among others. In this article, I document a divine king form among the Fuyuge people of the Papuan highlands, revising my previous understanding of this powerful figure. At the same time, I argue there is an inextricable connection between Sahlins's theory of divine power and Marilyn Strathern's model of Melanesian gift exchange: both operate according to distinct ideas of otherness. The capacity to engage in transaction derives from cosmological sources while evidence of cosmological power is provided by the ability to engage in transactions with others in effective and powerful ways. More generally, I argue that conventional Melanesian figures of big‐men, great men, and chiefs are all versions of the alterity of power in related political forms; each instantiates the mutual relations between cosmological and transactional otherness.

In this issue's forum, Nigel Rapport takes his lead from Georg Simmel, who asked how society is possible. Simmel notes that every individual has a sense of being connected to others, and it is through these connections that the individual has a 'grasp of the whole complex as society' (1971: 8). But this understanding is only realised through particular, concrete interactions. The individual in Simmel's sociology, then, can only exist as an individual through this engagement with others – with, in short, 'society'. It is this set of relations, it seems, that makes society possible. However, Simmel suggests that the picture an individual gains of the Other through personal contact is based on certain distortions – classifications of a general and conventional nature, some of which may be alienating. At the same time, Simmel also indicates that the individual simultaneously remains separate from society: 'It seems, however, that every individual has in himself a core of individuality which cannot be re-created by anybody else whose core differs qualitatively from his own. . . . We cannot know completely the individuality of another' (9–10).

Abstract This article asks how people envision lives without economic growth in contexts where conventional development ceases to be feasible. It presents ethnographic research I conducted in Peru and in the Maldives, which policymakers see as two climate crisis frontiers. I argue for defining resilience as a grounded, necessarily local, actor's theory of permanence; it is a theory people from diverse social classes and institutions generate in situations of vulnerability and crisis. In the Andes' Colca Valley, which some residents predict has only several habitable decades left due to increasing water scarcity, sustainable development projects are attenuating their presence as their budgets shrink, while mining enterprises and their corporate social responsibility programs have emerged as development's new agenda setters. The Maldives is one of the world's lowest-lying nations, which rising seas could soon render uninhabitable. Between 2008 and 2012, President Mohamed Nasheed made addressing the climate crisis a policy priority by substituting conventional industrial development with a short-lived quest for national carbon neutrality. Examining this contrapuntal pair of frontier sites, I argue that defining the unit of resilience is a political act: forging this definition means prioritizing what, in a human-driven ecosystem, should remain permanent and what should be left behind. Keywords: resilience, degrowth, climate change, Peru, Maldives

Abstract This article asks how people envision lives without economic growth in contexts where conventional development ceases to be feasible. It presents ethnographic research I conducted in Peru and in the Maldives, which policymakers see as two climate crisis frontiers. I argue for defining resilience as a grounded, necessarily local, actor's theory of permanence; it is a theory people from diverse social classes and institutions generate in situations of vulnerability and crisis. In the Andes' Colca Valley, which some residents predict has only several habitable decades left due to increasing water scarcity, sustainable development projects are attenuating their presence as their budgets shrink, while mining enterprises and their corporate social responsibility programs have emerged as development's new agenda setters. The Maldives is one of the world's lowest-lying nations, which rising seas could soon render uninhabitable. Between 2008 and 2012, President Mohamed Nasheed made addressing the climate crisis a policy priority by substituting conventional industrial development with a short-lived quest for national carbon neutrality. Examining this contrapuntal pair of frontier sites, I argue that defining the unit of resilience is a political act: forging this definition means prioritizing what, in a human-driven ecosystem, should remain permanent and what should be left behind. Keywords: resilience, degrowth, climate change, Peru, Maldives

This article investigates the relationship between political identity and public space in the communities of the Colca Valley, in Peru's rural Andes, by examining two moments in which the built environment became a medium for formatting and engaging a local indigeneity. The first is the colonial invasion, during which the reducción plan condensed and dispersed "unruly" native subjects around a public square and a church. The second is the contemporary moment, in which that same space is used to stage audits, evaluations, and competitions in the context of a development paradigm shifting from service provision to investing in indigeneity by financing the promotion of entrepreneurial and agricultural practices that organizations classify as typically indigenous. This article offers two arguments: (1) in the colonial era, notions of indigenous identity configured efforts to improve and regulate daily life—or, to achieve development; and (2) through changing historical contexts, the built environment is used as a medium for defining Colcan indigeneity, deploying it to generate strategic knowledge and regulatory force, and investing it with the potential for various kinds of salvation. This approach suggests that transnational paradigms do not simply "touch down," but also, adjust and push existing dynamics through the local media at their disposal.