Critique of Anthropology

During the 1990s, Venezuela saw both an intensification in the levels of everyday violence and in the ideological operations blaming the poor for this state of affairs, resulting in a large-scale criminalization of shantytown dwellers, especially young men. This production of social stigma is of one piece with the implementation of repressive state policies. Based on one-year’s ethnographic fieldwork on the well-known spirit possession cult of MarÌa Lionza in the shantytowns of Caracas, this article discusses one relevant aspect of the extensive social trauma taking shape in the shadow of these events. As an emergent form of popular religion where different styles of embodiment are constantly being produced, the cult quickly activated spirits of a particular type dormant in its populous pantheon: the delinquents – malandros. These spirits, which became an instant success among young spiritist mediums, trace out the tragic encounter of scores of poor Venezuelans with the change of the century.

This article is concerned with the efforts of a Garifuna community in Honduras to claim a space in the growing local tourist economy. Its inhabitants maintain that they suffer a form of culture loss because they do not control the commodification of their culture through tourism. By examining the local perspective, we argue that cultural performances could be treated as cultural property and consumed by tourists in a context of mutual exchange as opposed to a hegemonic one. We suggest that every cultural performance entails a statement about collective identity and thus the local battle for cultural ownership relates to the politics of self-representation and the position of the community in the wider world. The members of the community we studied articulate their desire to become an attraction, which can fully satisfy the tourist quest for authenticity and difference. Only this has to take place on their own terms, to serve their interests and to promote the image they have about themselves and their culture.

This article assesses the global implications and structural limitations inherent in the history/identity production of traditionally oppressed Indian communities in the Ecuadorian Andes. This particular engagement of history is closely linked with development, since this paradigm profoundly structures all interactions between North–South global communities and nation-states. In this regard it is impossible to research historical exigencies without understanding the limits of political power, subtle forms of domination and development constraints that are immediately invoked by and structure the historical enterprise (as well as the ethnographic one). To this effect I highlight the writing of James Baldwin, which offers an insightful means of assessing the ‘conundrums’ of native identity production in the face of history(ies)’s crushing political power.

The article explores how the concept of community has become the nodal point for political power struggles, state formation and the production of political subjectivity. The ethnographic focus of the article is on the coloured townships in Cape Town, and the ways in which the local state bureaucrats and policy makers engage with and are engaged by township politicians. The article illustrates that community is a polyvalent category, invoked by a multiplicity of political representatives. It forms the central focal point in state-endorsed participation projects; perceptions of the townships and their people are organized around it, and it is the organizing principle for local power struggles in the townships over the right to define, defend and represent the people. The article also testifies to the continued marginalization of the townships and illustrates how fraught with ambiguities the production of political subjectivity is in situations of poverty, violence and marginalization.

The question that guides this article is how to articulate, on the one hand, huge bureaucracies and bewildering governmental techniques, and, on the other, a regime of rule where power is to a large extent based on money, personal relationships and ultimately violence. An in-depth ethnography is presented of land conflicts between a peasant community and private landowners in Mexico. The article shows how, in their fight for agrarian justice, peasants get lost in a labyrinthine bureaucratic world, in which they create their own magic, fantasies and fetishes. Instead of implementing standardized procedures the bureaucracy applies governmental techniques in personalized ways and on an ad hoc basis. In this context, brokers thrive. This points to the need for new ways of conceptualizing the relation between governmentality and state power.