Blockchain Papers

Owen Marshall

No abstract is available for this record.

Authors unavailable

No abstract is available for this record.

Ashley Cordes

Since 2008, cryptocurrencies, or digital peer-to-peer currencies/assets, have amassed interest and proven unique in their ability to circumvent traditional financial institutions (disintermediation). The system can supersede the nation-state, while also garnering the attention of nation-states and marginalized groups. Indigenous individuals and Nations are among those interested in cryptocurrency, experimenting with it to express resistance to economic imposition beginning in the colonial era. Utilizing an Indigenous storytelling method, this article unveils the technological life and afterlife of an altcoin, MazaCoin, as a ghost of empire, insofar as it links the technological present of financial capital and the past (and ongoing present) of US settler colonialism. Throughout its various complicated reanimations, it expresses a relentless remembering of settler colonial injustices, performing productive haunting work within the twenty-first century cryptocurrency ecosystem. This article offers a reminder that there is much to learn about Indigenous alternative currencies in the cultural economy as the strings of racism, settler colonialism, poverty, financialization, and empire continue to tangle.

Jo Walton

Abstract Recently parallels have been drawn between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money. This article focuses on Fitzpatrick and McKeon's (2019) exploration of similarities and differences. The analogy between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money is based on proposed commonalities that are inaccurate, ill-defined, and/or trivial. However, this does not signal a need to refine the comparison, but rather a need to reconsider the rationale for attempting it in the first place. Recent attempts to redefine Yapese stone money using terminology from the field of cryptocurrency reproduces a longer textual history in which writers from the Global North have misrepresented Yap for pedagogic or polemic convenience. Examples include works by William Furness III, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and influential macroeconomics textbooks, such as N. Gregory Mankiw's Macroeconomics. This history features frequent colonialist tropes of Yap as well as the erasure of histories of colonial violence and power. More caution should be exercised in the study and pedagogic use of Yapese economic cultures, and greater effort should be made to center Yapese voices, acknowledge colonial contexts, and reflect positionality and uncertainty.

Xu Huang, Bo Zhao

No abstract is available for this record.

Tarangini Sriraman

Considered within the history of documenting welfare beneficiaries in India, the <italic>Aadhaar</italic> is unprecedented in that the unique number is a digital, portable identity and part of ‘a larger administrative and technological regime’ (Bennett and Lyon 2008) of cloud-based authentication. This chapter argues, however, that the production of this identifier has necessitated miming existing bureaucratic habits of inscription and mobilizing the rhetoric, ritualism and the materiality common to processes of issuing and verifying identification documents. Far from being an ID that is insulated from the host of administratively restrictive genres of identification documents like ration cards and caste certificates, the <italic>Aadhaar</italic> is relevant only within a paper-based matrix of elite norms of proof, urban spatiality of power brokerage, and the politics of staking out regional identities. Based on an intensive ethnography around a rural poor community, the chapter shows that the current welfare ecology still contingent on address norms requires not so much an electronic number identifier but rather a dynamic interplay of popular, quasi-legal, and legal documents of identity.

Elisabetta Iob

As Jinnah defined it, the Punjab represented the cornerstone of Pakistan. Here his party, the Muslim League, fought one of its most interesting political battles in order to defeat its local competitor, the Unionist Party, in the key 1945–6 elections. Taken as a proof of the League’s power and its declared aspiration to be the sole representative of Indian Muslims, the outcome of this electoral campaign shook the local political arena. It indeed challenged the traditional affiliations that had consolidated in the province over the previous decades. Ideas of religious identity and a lethal overlapping of politics and religion provided the raw ingredients for both the 1945–6 League victory and the different bouts of violence that rocked the Punjab after the withdrawal of Khizr Tiwana’s ministry in February 1947. Partition-related communal clashes relied heavily on the value of the symbols ‘handled’ by social actors during the spring and the summer of 1947. The circumstances involved in the early fluxes of migrants and then in later journeys towards what refugees perceived to be safer places or their new home emphasised the relevance of the meanings that local society attached to the political ideas at stake and violence.

Asif Agha

Abstract What role do forms of money play in social life? What kinds of sociocultural variation do they exhibit? What variety of things do people do with varieties of money? How are activities involving money differentiated into registers of money conduct in specific times and places? How are specific forms of money conduct recognized and differentiated from other cultural routines by those who encounter them? It has long been understood that money is intimately linked to varied forms of discursive semiosis through which distinct forms of money are created and endowed with distinct use characteristics; that specific forms of money are readily linked to (or appropriated by) group-specific interests or ideologies; and that differences in types of money conduct readily differentiate social roles and relationships among persons and groups in social history. Yet the role of discursive semiosis in the existence and use of money is not well understood, a lacuna that links most descriptions of “money” to voicing structures (or discursive positionalities) that are not grasped for what they are by those who offer such descriptions (e.g., “speaking like the State” without knowing it). This article clarifies the role of discursive semiosis in the social life of money. It shows that such clarification is a prerequisite on ethnographic answers to the questions listed at the beginning of this abstract. It presents a comparative framework for reasoning about forms of money in forms of life.

Brian Morris

No abstract is available for this record.

R. Lilian E. Painter, Alejandra Alfonso Durán, E. MIRO

One of the central conservation debates over the last quarter of a century has been the effect of conservation initiatives on local livelihoods. Most recently, numerous negative evaluations have been made of both coercive top-down approaches to management of protected areas, which were dominant before the 1980s and focused on enforcement of protection, and efforts to decentralize governance and increase local participation in resource-management initiatives linked to markets. These critiques are subsets of the general criticism of neoliberal conservation, which is characterized by a lesser role for the public sector, privatization of natural resources, and a greater role for market forces (McCarthy & Prudham 2004; Igoe & Brockington 2007). When natural resources are treated as commodities and state control over them is reduced, local stakeholders in remote rural areas, in particular indigenous peoples, can lose access to critical resources for their livelihoods to economic elites with greater resources to respond to economic opportunities. In this essay, we discuss what conservation means for the indigenous peoples living next to Madidi and Pilon Lajas protected areas in the Bolivian Amazon, a region of high species diversity and levels of endemism, where the state, local stakeholders, and several nongovernmental organizations have implemented numerous projects focused on maintaining biological diversity and improving local livelihoods. These conservation initiatives have strengthened management of protected areas and buffer zones, promoted sustainable natural-resource-use projects, and strengthened mechanisms for local participation in management of natural resources and protected areas. In addition, governance conditions have enabled alliances between conservation organizations and indigenous peoples. Of particular importance, a strong indigenous political movement has established partnerships with conservation practitioners. These partnerships are based on the recognition of rights of indigenous peoples to develop their own representative organizations and secure legal property rights over their ancestral lands. In 1990, before most of the protected areas in Central and South America were established (UNEP-WCMC 2010), the indigenous peoples in the Bolivian Amazon mobilized to obtain legal recognition of their territorial rights. Hence, the importance of indigenous territories for the cultural survival and livelihoods of Amazonian groups, as well as their entitlement to maintain or develop organizational and representation structures and promote traditional practices of natural resource use, has been recognized since the creation of the national protected-area system in Bolivia. The majority of protected areas in Latin America were established after constitutional reforms recognized the multiple cultural and ethnic characteristics of their countries (Van Cott 2010). The principal focus of these reforms was the design and consolidation of democratic institutions, but indigenous movements capitalized on the reforms to demand political inclusion and minimization of the negative effects of development in their traditional lands. The reforms built on the global indigenous mobilization to obtain recognition of their rights through the International Labor Organization No. 169 Convention on Indigenous and Tribal People in 1989. Bolivia is in the heart of South America where the Andes, Amazon, and Chaco come together; thus, it is one of the most species-rich countries in the world (Ibisch & Merida 2003). This high species richness is accompanied by a high cultural diversity. The 30 different indigenous groups present in the country represent 66% of the population, the highest percentage in Latin America (Del Popolo & Oyarce 2005). Forty-four indigenous lands are linked to protected areas in Bolivia, 30 are in the buffer zones; 5 are entirely within a protected area, and 9 overlap partially with a protected area (Salinas 2007). The relation between biological and cultural diversity is exemplified in northwestern Bolivia, a region of exceptional species richness resulting from topographical and climatic diversity and where the Bolivian government established three protected areas: Madidi National Park and Natural Area of Integrated Management (1895750 ha), Apolobamba Natural Area of Integrated Management (483744 ha), and Pilon Lajas Biosphere Reserve and Indigenous Territory (400000 ha). Seven indigenous lands overlap or border these protected areas: the Lecos Apolo, Lecos Larecaja, San Jose de Uchupiamonas, Mosetene, Takana I, Takana II, and Pilon Lajas (T’simane Mosetene). The meaning of conservation, as used by contemporary conservation practitioners, in relation to these seven indigenous groups has evolved as a result of threats to biological diversity that also threaten indigenous lands and livelihoods, in particular illegal timber extraction, new settlements, and, more recently, large energy and infrastructure projects. These shared threats have brought together conservation and indigenous organizations in efforts to preserve biological diversity and develop sustainable economic activities, based in natural resource extraction and ecotourism, to improve indigenous livelihoods. There has been increasing consensus among Bolivian conservation practitioners that empowering local communities through the consolidation of their territorial rights establishes a strong constituency for maintaining protected areas. The Amazonian Bolivian indigenous movement worked for land reforms to establish indigenous lands as collective property which cannot be sold or divided. This has prevented land titling from opening up these areas to private markets and has led to strengthening access by indigenous communities to their traditional indigenous lands, including those overlapping protected areas. Under this approach the Bolivian Protected Area Service (SERNAP) and Wildlife Conservation Society have worked to support effective participation of the indigenous communities and their representative organizations in the land-titling process by developing their capacity to use spatial analyses to guide internal consensus and negotiations with nonindigenous neighbors. As a result, legal titles have been obtained for over 672941 ha of Takana, Lecos Apolo, and Lecos Larecaja indigenous lands. The Bolivian government has also recognized the San Jose de Uchupiamonas and T’simane Mosetene indigenous lands, which completely overlap with Madidi and Pilon Lajas protected areas. Parallel to the process of land titling, the indigenous organizations have received support from the Bolivian government and international and Bolivian nongovernmental organizations to develop and implement indigenous territorial plans (CIPTA 2002; CRTM-SERNAP 2007; CIPLA 2010; PILCOL 2010). Indigenous communities have received support to control illegal timber extraction, wildlife hunting, and forest clearance by outside settlers. As a result, deforestation rates within the indigenous lands are similar to those in neighboring protected areas and are much lower than in unprotected areas in the region (Forrest et al. 2008). Monitoring of wild animals has shown that current hunting levels are sustainable, connectivity for movements of these animals between the protected areas and surrounding indigenous land is being maintained, and illegal hunting is being prevented (Chumacero et al. 2010; R. Wallace, private communication). Several community-based tourism, cacao, handicraft, coffee, and palm-management initiatives have been established with support from the protected-area service and nongovernmental organizations, and these provide increased family incomes and greater control of the land by indigenous peoples. For example, in 1992, no indigenous forestry-management organizations existed in this region and indigenous peoples were engaged in forestry as contract laborers under unfair terms. Today, there are over 20 indigenous, community-level forestry associations. Hence, conservation programs have favored devolution of natural resource management to the indigenous organizations and promoted both social justice and conservation. Democratization of decision making has replaced a system in which decisions were made by local nonindigenous elites. Indigenous communities have established internal consensus, developed their technical capacity, and then engaged other organizations from a position of strength. The last 25 years have marked a transition period for the valuation of indigenous culture and for indigenous peoples’ leadership in the establishment of protected areas that are integrated with indigenous lands in landscapes managed for both improved indigenous livelihoods and conservation. The support of conservation organizations has been critical to the development of indigenous capacity to manage their land and resources and has avoided the problems associated with devolution of regulatory responsibility to local organizations without the necessary skills (McCarthy & Prudham 2004). The Bolivian experience supports the hypothesis that when indigenous peoples have recognized land rights, autonomy, and establish clear regulations about access to and use of natural resources, relatively large forest areas are less likely to be intensively exploited (Chhatre & Agrawal 2009). Indigenous organizations in Bolivia have exclusive land rights, and consolidating their organizational and technical capacity is critical to ensure they continue to protect the ecological integrity of their territories from expanding extraction of natural resources. In the next quarter century, indigenous organizations need to monitor the effectiveness of their territorial management plans and develop sustainable finance strategies to implement the plans that include the contributions of community natural resource management to the collective costs of territorial defense. They also need to develop incentives for maintaining vulnerable areas without human extractive uses (e.g., valuing environmental services). The external challenge to meeting indigenous demands for greater political and administrative autonomy is state development of road, mining, and energy projects throughout the Amazon. Conflicts with gold miners, loggers, and large development projects are intensifying and conservation professionals and indigenous peoples are allied to improve practices and governance of these projects. Traditionally, Amazonian indigenous institutions base decisions on consensus and encourage widespread participation. Accordingly, strengthening their capacity for conflict resolution could also help increase transparency and broaden citizen participation during the consultation processes associated with these projects. Two aspects have facilitated the alliance between conservation organizations and indigenous organizations in Bolivia. First, the political strength of indigenous organizations established a favorable legal framework for recognition of their territorial rights. Second, human population densities within Amazonian indigenous territories are relatively low, so there is still opportunity to achieve goals for improved livelihoods through natural resource use and conservation and to reconcile these two purposes. Indigenous peoples in Amazonia use a wide range of forest products that require sustainable management of large areas. Their capacity to articulate and defend their traditional rights on the basis of these requirements will determine the future of much of the Amazon. Conservation professionals have important roles to play in identifying critical connectivity requirements between strict protection cores and the surrounding matrix; identifying the area of indirect effect of development projects by modeling land use resulting from changes in economic drivers, political and regulatory conditions, and local topography; guiding implementation of actions to achieve no net loss of biological diversity and local livelihoods, as represented in indigenous territorial plans; and documenting the importance of territorial rights over natural areas for indigenous livelihoods and cultural survival. Lilian Painter is a Bolivian wildlife ecologist who has worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society in northern La Paz since 2001. She supports Takana, Lecos, T’simane, and Mosetene indigenous communities in land-use planning. Angel Duran is a Leco indigenous leader and ex Vice-President of the Lecos Apolo organization. He has led the land-titling and land-planning processes of the Leco communities and successful negotiations with nonindigenous neighbors, local authorities, and the protected-area service. Edwin Miro is the past president of the T’simane Mosetene Regional Council and has led the land-titling and land-planning processes of the communities in the Pilon Lajas Biosphere Reserve and Indigenous Territory. As a result Pilon Lajas is jointly managed by the indigenous organization and the Bolivian protected-area service. We thank K. Redford and E. Fleishman for their valuable comments on this essay.

Neil L. Whitehead

This issue derives from a panel session at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in 2006 that was sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. The topic of violence is central to our current social and cultural life as much as it is for those beyond the United States. The mediation of our political relations, economic entanglements, and cultural imagination through the exercise of violence has become an almost unremarkable feature of modern life. Certainly our own militarization since the events of September 11, 2001, as the needs of “homeland security” and an ever-expanding “war on terror” keep growing even with the advent of a new presidency suggest that we must think about violence as integral to the social and cultural life of modern society, and as a valued part of expressive culture. Some would suggest that it is no longer sufficient to imagine violence as the marginal and pathological expression of negative social and cultural value, but that it may be integral and inevitable in human social and cultural relationships (Whitehead 2007). The problem of whether, when, and how that may be true is precisely a measure of cultural difference, and anthropology has only just begun to engage this problem ethnographically, despite the prevalence of the phenomenon of violence. As Michael Harkin also argues in this issue with regard to the system of exchanges among Algonquians and colonists, much the same has been true in the interpretation of ethnohistorical evidence, and violence has been factored out of otherwise holistic ethnological depiction. The result of this culturological and uniform treatment of violence is also clearly illustrated by Bilinda Straight in this issue. As she argues, where such wholesale treatments have permitted violence to become part of the perceived ethnological order the effect is to imprison others in a form of cultural reductionism, such that individuals who are part of “violent cultures” are necessarily expressive of their cultural norms. Bilinda Straight writes: These unidimensional representations can distract from the culpability of political elites and from the role of economic and political disenfranchisement in sustaining violence. They can also mask the ways in which some elites benefit from the propagation of cultural stereotypes even while deliberately engaging in manipulation of ethnic fault lines. As Straight emphasizes, and as this issue highlights overall, such ubiquitous representations based on cultural stereotypes and endlessly recycled in the media, contribute to a global political order in which the violence of the marginalized is seen as “politically expedient, routine, and forgettable.” Accordingly, the topic of the ethnography of violence is timely and was appropriate to the AAA theme of “dangerous ideas” in a number of ways. “Dangerous” because any attempt to challenge normative categories, even those embedded within anthropology, risk at best incomprehension and at worst vilification. Moreover, there are critical issues to be considered as to the relevance of ethnographic methods to the understanding of violence, because even to observe violent acts is already to be entailed in the cultural production of violence as culturally meaningful (Whitehead 2009). However, humanistic interpretations and approaches to violence have proved highly innovative and therefore of wider relevance to anthropology as a whole—particularly in the matter of ethnographic approaches to the issue. Emphasis on the meaningful and performative aspects of violence, the subjective experience of violence, and the ways in which perpetrators might be considered as cultural agents are all themes that have informed recent ethnographic approaches to violence. Many of those themes are therefore also reflected in the articles collected here, as well as the original panel contributions. For example, as was shown in the papers given during the original panel by Ventura Perez and Andrew Darling, current archaeologically and ethnographically based presentations on cannibalism—a notoriously ideologically constructed exotic savagery—have been greatly improved by the example of humanistic approaches that produce more nuanced and contextualized interpretations of sacral manipulations of the human body (see also Whitehead 2008). Also, more widely, such approaches encourage a direct engagement with indigenous understandings of the anthropological and archaeological process—as in the case of current debates over Anasazi “cannibalism” and how that impedes Native American causes. Similarly, not just ritual but also “religious” violence and the putative connections between religion and violence (Whitehead and Abufarha 2008), can be fruitfully explored by humanistic approaches. Part of the resolution of the problem of how violence can be engaged ethnographically, without contributing to that violence through its further representation, stems from the way in which ethnographic understanding allows for forms of cultural contextualization. Such contextualization may show how violence may be in one sense meaningful and valued, rather than inevitable, socially negative, and culturally destructive for the Western cultural order, as it is always construed. Specifically, this may happen through the ways in which the performative, poetic, and semiotic aspects of violence and its imagination are only revealed through close ethnographic engagement with the subjectivities of others. In this way Zucker's discussion in this issue of “matters of morality” among Cambodian villagers recalling the days of the Khmer Rouge, illustrates how the cultural “habitus” for violence is deeply intertwined with other aspects of moral life, and so how it is that violence (which all may condemn in the abstract) is intimately grounded in the moral calculations of everyday life. More widely recent work on state terror, terrorism, and suicide bombing, for example, all demonstrate the timeliness and relevance of ethnographic attention to such “dangerous ideas” (Aretxaga 2004; Strathern et al. 2005; Whitehead and Abufarha 2008). The ethical commitments that the ethnography of such violence implies also means that anthropological witnessing of ethnic and class-based struggles entailing both state terror and armed resistance or civil disobedience of various kinds are also critical areas of ethnographic research. Such research also speaks directly to recent controversies, as in the case of the Venezuelan Yanomamö and the AAA El Dorado Report (2002). This officially sanctioned inquiry examined professional responses to the publication of a series of accusations as to the unethical conduct of field work by anthropologists in the Venezuelan Amazon (see Tierney 2002). This professional cause célèbre underlined the serious professional issues academia and media representations raise through the way in which they can play into the outcomes of civil conflicts, development projects, and human rights campaigns. Assault sorcery, witchcraft, and other forms of mystical violence are deployed in a wide variety of life contexts for many different purposes, and this makes “witchcraft” a fundamental and pervasive ethnographic reality in many regions of the world today. My own ethnographic focus in recent years has been on the dark shamanism of the Patamuna and Makushi of the Guyana Highlands, peoples who straddle the borders of Guyana with Venezuela and Brazil. The term kanaimà refers to a particular mode of assault sorcery that involves the ritual mutilation and killing of its victims. The term also can allude to a more diffuse idea of active spiritual malignancy that possesses the assassins and has existed from the beginning of time. Kanaimà as an ethnographic issue is thus complex because it is a phenomenon that operates at a number of levels, referring simultaneously to the dynamics of the spirit world, physical aggression by individuals, the tensions and jealousies between villagers and family members, and the suspicions of distant enemies and outsiders. As a result one is simultaneously dealing with convincing case histories, wild rumors, considered attributions of blame, false accusations, ungrounded gossip, and justified suspicion. As Finnström shows in his chapter for this issue, “rumor” or “gossips,” are critical social vectors for the meaning and making of violence. The paradox of violence may be considered this way, that it is an imagined material physical harm and the product of what is imagined. But, as Finnström notes: The rumors are stories that say something profound about lived entrapments and political asymmetries in Uganda and beyond. . . . So, rather than seeing rumors as the expression of some bizarre conspiracy of alienation, we need to acknowledge that people live with a seriously harsh wartime reality. The circulation of stories and rumors in a society is in reality no different from what anthropology has often, as a result of failing to appreciate the dynamic and changing nature of oral literatures, called myth making. Like myth in anthropological theory, stories reach a subjective level within individuals in the midst of what may be unwelcome and bewildering events (“violence”), just as such stories also simultaneously refer to the social groups among whom they circulate. Such routes of knowledge or culturally recognized understanding may be part of the violence in the cultural order like any other aspect of social life. The pervasive and profound discourse of kanaimà is a central ethnographic fact of the lives of the people of the Guyana Highlands. It both dramatizes the human condition and can appear to suggest its futility. It is a daily matter of conversation and appears closely to influence the decisions that people make through the vision it supplies of a cosmos filled with predatory gods and spirits whose violent hungers are sated on humans. The decision to go to the farm, to go with another or not, to carry a gun or not, to pass by the spirit abode of a famed killer or to walk by a longer route, thus appears to be woven into the texture of every day life. For those who participate in this discourse there are also the distant but steady rumors of killings that are discussed as possible proof of the malign nature of the cosmos and the enmity of others. For the people of the Guyana Highlanders the practice of kanaimà involved criminal activity, and informants would include the families of victims, as well as avowed killers and practitioners. However, a constant theme in commentaries on such killings was the indifference and inattention of the Guyanese national government and police. In this context, the people felt that ethnographic forms of witnessing and reporting were relevant to their attempts in gain development resources and government infrastructure. At the same time this risked provoking a campaign of “Law and Order” being unleashed on the people of the Highlands, and such exercises in justice are themselves apt to become indiscriminately lethal. Given this situation kanaimà is somewhat accepted and endured as a mark of Amerindian autonomy even as it is energetically projected to an external audience. In this way it can easily be appreciated how the politics of ethnographic representation in Amazonia, as elsewhere, are complex and how the issues raised by the increasing “darkness in El Dorado” at that moment, because of the uproar over Tierney's book, weighed heavily in my own subsequent publications about kanaimà. In short, the issue of how representations of assault sorcery might be used beyond the anthropological community needs careful assessment, including a consideration of how anthropological representations might be used in the service of the state. Western ideas about kanaimà sorcery, as with cannibalism more widely, cannot be taken as simply reflecting the results of an encounter with some objectively present form of native savagery or exoticism. Rather, our Western interest in the savagery of others, and in particular when it supposedly takes the form of cannibalism, clearly has served an ideological purpose in both politically justifying and morally enabling violent conquest and occupation of native South America. Nonetheless, this cultural proclivity on our part does not rule out forms of cultural practice by others that are truly challenging to interpret, in the sense that others do apparently give meaning and value to acts that we might abhor or simply deny to be “real.” This “lack of reality,” however, more often constitutes a misunderstanding on our part, and what we actually mean is that the “incomprehensible” act is one of savagery. 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As a the of or its to become means that operates as a form of terror and our ideas about the of being and may even suggest or is also a of but also the to is also the of that to spiritual the on and also the of the who culturally through to other and whose is by almost The of professional ethnographic therefore takes through the of the other the of the on their part the of the other by As with the results of ethnography are always the that they are justified by the of professional research and As in of the or with for Yanomamö with other in the Tierney book, the of the ethnographic as a of means that the of in both and can produce the kinds of knowledge we culturally At the of there is only a for the of the other The of is the of what is to on September 11, 2001, as with suicide as with ethnic and with also it is the of such that our violent our need to make the perpetrators also in and they are also because there in our they in the sense of we are with they be to the of some anthropologists has been precisely to and forms of ethnographic In which case it is the interest and of those as much as the that and research that into or not the so has value on the is a different because the of particular kinds of research professional and the or not kinds of are sufficient to the practice of ethnography as a not a violence to others. As reflected on the of the what to not to be to a society it must already be to It is also to such the of that both anthropology and the in which it is have In both the is and for the of knowledge This practice also with the idea of as to Western forms of understanding and

Sujatha Fernandes

Abstract This chapter examines the contemporary relationship between politics and evangelical activity. Focusing on the northeast Indian state of Manipur, it makes comparisons with Mizoram, Nagaland, and Meghalaya and draws out the implications of the historical data for the contemporary political climate. The first section explores the interaction among Christian missionaries, tribals, and the British state in the colonial context, showing how the attempt of missionaries to build an autonomous tribal leadership was hampered by the diversity of tribal groupings and the ties of the missionaries to the colonial state. The second section focuses on two themes: how evangelical practices of congregationalism have given expression to diversity, but also how, in a context of ethnic violence and rivalry, this decentralized organization leaves the church unable to overcome fragmentation. The final section explores a third theme, suggesting that the evangelicals' desire for stability in the region has impeded their ability to foster social movements for justice and equality, leaving the space open for insurgent and terrorist organizations.

Judith Butler

If one wants to begin with most common of beginnings, namely, with the claim that one would like to be able to consider sexual politics during this time, a certain problem arises. Since, it seems clear that one cannot reference ‘this time’ without knowing which time, where that time takes hold, and for whom a certain consensus emerges on the issue of what time this is. So if it is not just a matter of differences of interpretation about what time it is, then it would seem that we have already more than one time at work in this time, and that the problem of time will afflict any effort I might make to try and consider some of these major issues now. It might seem odd to begin with a reflection on time when one is trying to speak about sexual politics and cultural politics more broadly. But my suggestion here is that the way in which debates within sexual politics are framed are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time. That there is no one time, that the question of what time this is, already divides us, has to do with which histories have turned out to be formative, how they intersect – or fail to intersect with other histories – and so with a question of the how temporality is organized along spatial lines. I'm not suggesting here that we return to a version of cultural difference that depends on cultural wholism. In fact, I oppose any such return. The problem is not that there are different cultures at war with one another, or that there are different modalities of time, each conceived as self-sufficient, that are articulated in different and differentiated cultural locations or that come into confused or brutal contact with one another. at some that be a it would namely, that of progress and a temporality that they for the of the what time are we are of in the and has in and has are in the of The cannot be to a my that sexual than to the of this is in the of and that to or sexual are that of – within – that would try to and the of as the where sexual and not the claim is that such a of freedom be the with that claim for the it with it a of that be trying to in this But the that this is a one that is a that to notions of sexual and of within a that and into the of freedom and In my the problem is not that there are different in different cultural locations we to cultural to more and That of the and for each of these and then question about how they might the problem is that certain notions of – the spatial of – are this of a certain notions of what ‘this time’ and be are on the of the of I make clear that I not notions of and not of that I if not means for progress and the time of the and that that is of what I to on a of sexual I to a of sexual politics of that is my is that there be no of sexual politics without a of the time of the now. claim will be that the problem of temporality and politics in this way a different to cultural one that the of and The is not just to of the and spatial of some of the that if not of But to that of what is is with a certain on the of the and a to what to of time if we the problem of the the and what and the means and of that or to be to any of The of sexual politics is I would with and that the time of sexual politics as a the of progress is one within that and it is one that for come into is to on how certain of and of what is a within politics on a of freedom that is to time, and which is in and freedom and progress is what is when and to like I to that this is they I do to that a certain of freedom is as a and for certain of and this of have as a sexual politics in a In this I to to a of sexual politics and that that certain of the progress of a sexual politics and the and the of the issues that such a is that a certain version and of be as of and most when sexual freedom or the freedom of and for and is to cultural on that we freedom and in the of or we is not to freedom as a to about and to consider how it be if it is to in the and have that might for a In the for for are to at of and to are they are to and the are to in a that the of to and are in of the claim that of is the as in such how is as sexual and the sexual freedom of is to a as to one that would be It would seem that the has for a of are The the are to the and more than are of the and where is not to be or In the of this has for some time. 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