Anthropological Theory

This article explores Begoña Aretxaga's research on women, nationalism and political subjectivity in Northern Ireland during `the troubles' by considering her writings as a field worker as they bear on her work as an ethnographer and theoretical innovator. My goal is to illustrate the knowledge production and representational strategies integral to Aretxaga's analysis of violence, state power, and politicized ethnic minorities in European democracies. The article centers on correspondence between Aretxaga and a republican woman prisoner that evolved into a dialogue about coming of age in situations of state repression and counternationalist resistance. This analysis also considers the ways that women built their own cultural and social worlds in prison as a counterpoint to the changing techniques of prison control from 1971 through the early 1990s.

Doble cara (double/two-faced) is a key trope in Salvadoran political folklore. It is a folk theory of mimesis, which attempts to `master the absent presence of the other' through a discourse of conspiracy. The term has a history in the US-funded Salvadoran civil war. In this article, I consider how doble cara has come to be deployed around a new and pivotal social subject — Salvadoran immigrant gang youth deported from the USA — and how these deported youth emerge as a packed and displaced sign for the trauma of post-civil war violence, the failed promise of peace, and ongoing entanglements between the USA and El Salvador. The article is written in conversation with Begoña Aretxaga, who inspired many of the questions explored here.

This article addresses the politics and history of mestizo nationalism and indigenous identity in El Salvador. Guided by Begoña Aretxaga's insistence that questions of fantasy, fiction, and the unconscious are critical for understanding cultural and political processes, this article analyzes the alleged disappearance of Indians from the Salvadoran national scene following a 1932 massacre by the state and the complicated dynamics of the return of the Indian in contemporary political movements.

This article studies the affects retained, carried, and effected by documents, as they are produced, exchanged, transformed, and transacted among their users. I study the interactions which Turkish-Cypriots (in Britain and on either side of the border in Cyprus) forge with documents, especially those used for identity verification and travel. For those who juggle documents manufactured by several complexes of law and statecraft (including the `illegal' Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), documents generate differential and politically charged affectivities. Bringing anthropological literature on law, policy, and bureaucracy, as well as Actor Network Theory, into dialogue with psychoanalytic work on affect, this article charts a new terrain for the study of affect (in the domain of documents as objects) and explores emotive dimensions previously unattended by scholars of bureaucracy.

This article envisions insurance through the ways in which it comes to inhabit the dailiness of people's lives. Insurance is usually constituted as a technology of risk. Rather than holding risk and insurance to the bare provisions of finance and financial forms, this article tangles with the affective attachments that grow out of insurance technologies. It investigates the place of these attachments (insurance fantasies) and the intimacies that effloresce from these attachments.