Critique of Anthropology

Recent literature on citizenship practices and discourses highlights processes of ‘subjectification’ or ‘self-making’ in relation to a local community rather than the rights and responsibilities associated with the legal status bestowed on full members of a national community. In this paper, set in the town of Chicaloma in the Yungas region of Bolivia, I argue that this self-making is not simply a response to hegemonic national norms, nor to a communally defined image of its ideal member, but rather is bound up in simultaneous processes of ‘community-making’. Further, I argue that community-making is itself a hotly contested process. Access to specific social and economic resources is differentially available to those members of the community who are able to make more convincing claims to belonging. In this context, community members are engaged in an on-going process of making claims to belonging which work by constructing the social space in the image of the claimant as much as by producing the subject. They constitute an important citizenship practice through which subjects assert their rights in various instances of local governance, but they work by constructing the community as well as the citizen-subjects who populate it. Rather than yield clear categories of included and excluded, though, these practices and discourses result in fluid and unstable differentiations among actors, and, in fact, a fluid and unstable constitution of the community as a social space.

As the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic enters its fourth decade, universal access to treatment has begun to extend the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS. While the South Africa’s ruling party – the African National Congress – has seized on improved health to bolster their political profile, the key agitators in producing this outcome were South African HIV/AIDS activists. Narrative accounts of the extended initiative have focused on the organisations that led the campaign for treatment access, such as the Treatment Access Campaign. Reflecting present trends in social movement theory, the emphasis in these accounts has been on transnational and/or ‘horizontal’ ties in alliance building. This approach obscures continuities with early South African HIV/AIDS activism during the late apartheid era. The concept of verticality is proposed as a means of highlighting the role of interpersonal relationships in the development of institutions and transmission of knowledge practices that link the waves of South African HIV/AIDS activism.

This article examines the Venezuelan government’s efforts to establish a ‘communal state’ through the eyes of working-class chavista activists in the city of Valencia. It argues that the attempt to incorporate grassroots community organisations into a state-managed model of popular democracy produces a series of ‘utopian disjunctures’ for the actors involved. These disjunctures, the article contends, stem from conflicting political temporalities within the chavista project, as long-term aspirations of radical democracy clash with more short-term demands to obtain state resources and consolidate the government’s power. The case highlights the tensions generated by efforts to reconcile radical democratic experiments with left-nationalist electoral politics.

This article analyzes how environmentalism reinscribed violent forms of state sovereignty in the disputed region of Kashmir in the aftermath of a decade-long uprising against Indian rule. After the return of an elected government, six years after its suspension in 1990, environmental restoration legitimized new forms of state and nature making in Kashmir. Nature rather than territory emerged as an arena of citizen activism, which further strengthened the state's ability to regulate the use and management of Kashmir's water resources. State and civic bodies deployed discourses of history and restoration to create new and imagined ecologies based on visions of nostalgia, commerce, and esthetics. By undermining place-based understandings of nature and ecology, discourses of environmental stewardship and conservation ended up fostering violent mechanisms of social and political control.

In recent years, the Ugandan government has proposed a number of laws that attempt to control the sexual conduct of the Ugandan population. The much-debated Anti-Homosexuality Bill, signed by Museveni in February 2014 but overturned on constitutional grounds in August 2014, is only the most well-known. Further examples include legal measures related to HIV/AIDS, defilement, prostitution, and pornography. This article analyzes why and in which contexts these laws and recent public debates on sexuality have emerged and what consequences they entail. I argue that they must be seen in relation to ongoing power struggles at the local and national level – between men and women, youth and elders, state, and citizens. Based on discourse analysis and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how both state and non-state actors exploit popular concerns about recent processes of social change and instrumentalize ‘sexuality’ to extend their control and reinforce a normative order based on patriarchal values.