85492 - Cultural Anthropology and Migration Processes

Learning outcomes

The course aims at providing students abilities in cultural analysis with special reference to the making and representation of cultural diversity (Part 1), and to contemporary migration processes in their historical and political aspects (Part 2). The course aims at improving students participation, providing the gain of a specialistic terminology and of a critical attitude toward social and cultural facts.

Course contents

The course aims to introduce students to some of the ways in which anthropology has approached mobility and migration, placing these in the context of international development processes. The first part of the course will set the scene by giving students a grounding in the anthropology of development. We shall first introduce key themes in the anthropology of development such as neoliberalism and governmentality, and place development in its historical context. The following two sessions focus on critical reflexions on those who devise and implement development programmes, discussing how anthropologists have studied development elites, and examining ‘participatory’ development, especially in conservation. We then look more closely at how development processes appear on the ground, through money, trade and the informal economy. The following sessions offers different perspectives on economic and ideological dimensions of development through the lens of religion respectively. We then explore the role of corporations in development through ‘corporate social responsibility’ in relations between the extractive resource industry and local populations. The following week we consider the relationship between development and democracy, by examining social movements, focusing on food and agriculture; we shall then devote a session to discussing some forms of forced settlement. Finally we shall debate the ethics of development interventions and the anthropologist’s own role. The second part of the course begins with an overview of mobile livelihoods in Amazonia and the arctic, and a discussion of some aspects of slavery and the new social groupings to which it has given rise. The remainder of the course focuses on contemporary migration and borderlands, considering European borderlands, the role of the state and legality, and critical perspectives on humanitarianism, and introducing hospitality as a framing concept for migrant reception. We then discuss responses to migration in material culture in the form of art and research methodology. The final session will be a discussion of migrant death and the movement and treatment of human remains.

 

Readings/Bibliography

Cultural Anthropology and Migration Processes (Prof. M. Brightman)

 

The course aims to introduce students to some of the ways in which anthropology has approached mobility and migration, placing these in the context of international development processes. The first part of the course will set the scene by giving students a grounding in the anthropology of development. We shall first introduce key themes in the anthropology of development such as neoliberalism and governmentality, and place development in its historical context. The following two sessions focus on critical reflexions on those who devise and implement development programmes, discussing how anthropologists have studied development elites, and examining ‘participatory’ development, especially in conservation. We then look more closely at how development processes appear on the ground, through money, trade and the informal economy. The following sessions offers different perspectives on economic and ideological dimensions of development through the lens of religion respectively. We then explore the role of corporations in development through ‘corporate social responsibility’ in relations between the extractive resource industry and local populations. The following week we consider the relationship between development and democracy, by examining social movements, focusing on food and agriculture; we shall then devote a session to discussing some forms of forced settlement. Finally we shall debate the ethics of development interventions and the anthropologist’s own role. The second part of the course begins with an overview of mobile livelihoods in Amazonia and the arctic, and a discussion of some aspects of slavery and the new social groupings to which it has given rise. The remainder of the course focuses on contemporary migration and borderlands, considering European borderlands, the role of the state and legality, and critical perspectives on humanitarianism, and introducing hospitality as a framing concept for migrant reception. We then discuss responses to migration in material culture in the form of art and research methodology. The final session will be a discussion of migrant death and the movement and treatment of human remains.

The course will be taught through the discussion of ethnographic case studies. Students will prepare notes and a set of points for discussion based on the readings for each session. After the introductory lecture, this material will form the basis of an open discussion to delve more deeply into the themes that emerge. The tenth and twentieth sessions will be devoted to student presentations, based on course materials and themes, on subjects of students’ own choice, accompanied by slides, lasting between 8 and 10 minutes.

Assessment will be through oral examination, during which students may choose either to discuss readings that they have chosen from the course, or to discuss an essay of c. 4000 words, on a theme based on the course, to be agreed with Prof. Brightman, which they must submit at least one week before the examination.

 

Part I

1 Introduction: development, neoliberalism and anthropological critiques

Graeber, D. 2002 ‘The anthropology of globalization (with notes on neomedievalism, and the end of the Chinese model of the state)’. American Anthropologist 104(4): 1222-7.

 

Sahlins, M. 2005. ‘On the anthropology of modernity, or, some triumphs of culture over despondancy theory’. In A. Hooper ( ed.) Culture and Sustainable Development in the Pacific. Canberra: ANU E Press, pp. 44-61. http://press.anu.edu.au//culture_sustainable/ch03.pdf

 

Escobar, A. 1995. ‘Introduction’. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: University of Princeton Press.

 

Ferguson, J. 1990. ‘Introduction’. The anti-politics machine: Development, depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

2. Studying developers

Goldman, M. 2001. ‘The birth of a discipline: producing authoritative green knowledge, World Bank style’. Ethnography 2(2) : 191-218.

Harper, R. 2000. ‘The social organisation of the IMF’s mission work: an examination of international auditing’. In M. Strathern (ed) Audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy. London: Routledge.

Lewis, D. and D. Mosse 2006. ‘Introduction’, Development brokers and translators: the ethnography of aid and agencies. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press.

Stirrat, R. (2000) Cultures of consultancy, Critique of Anthropology 20(1), 31–46.

 

3 Participation and post-development

Cepek, M. 2011. ‘Foucault in the forest: questioning environmentality in Amazonia’. American Ethnologist 38(3): 501-13.

Escobar, Arturo 2010 Latin America at a Crossroads: Alternative modernizations, post-liberalism, or post- development. Cultural Studies 24 (1): 1-65.

Turner, T. 1996 ‘An Indigenous Amazonian People’s Struggle for Socially Equitable and Ecologically Sustainable Production: The Kayapo Revolt against Extractivism’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1(1): 98–121.

Walsh, C. 2010. Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional Arrangements and Decolonial Entanglements. Development 53 (1): 15-21.

 

4 Informal economy, money and trade

Bolt, M. 2014. ‘The sociality of the wage: money rhythms, wealth circulation, and the problem with cash on the Zimbabwean-South African border’. JRAI(N.S.) 20: 93-112.

Hart, K. 2009. "On the informal economy: the political history of an ethnographic concept," Working Papers CEB 09-042.RS, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Available at: http://ideas.repec.org/p/sol/wpaper/09-042.html

Guyer, J. “Cash Economies.” Paper for the conference on Rethinking Economic Anthropology. A Human-Centered Approach. London. [http://anthropology.jhu.edu/Jane_Guyer/CashEconomies2.pdf] http://anthropology.jhu.edu/Jane_Guyer/CashEconomies2.pdf

Shipton, P. (1995). Luo entrustment: foreign finance and the soil of the spirits in Kenya. Africa, 65, pp 165-196.

 

5. Development and religion

Bornstein E. 2002. Developing faith: theologies of economic development in Zimbabwe. Journal of Religion in Africa 32(1):4–31 .

Haynes, N. 2012. ‘Pentecostalism and the morality of money: prosperity, inequality, and religious sociality on the Zambian copperbelt’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute(N.S.) 18: 123-39.

Keane, W. 2002. Sincerity, ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants. [http://sitemaker.umich.edu/webbkeane/files/sincerity_modernity_prots.pdf] In Cultural Anthropology vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 65-92.

Wright, R. 2009. ‘The Art of Being Crente: The Baniwa Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Sustainable Development’. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 16: 202–226.

 

 

6. Energy, mining and (corporate) social responsibility

Coumans, C. 2011. ‘Occupying spaces created by conflict: anthropologists, development NGOs, responsible investment, and mining’, with comment by Stuart Kirsch. Current Anthropology 52(S3): S29-S43.

Rajak, Dinah (2011) Theatres of Virtue: Collaboration, Consensus and the Social Life of Corporate Social Responsibility. Focaal 60: 9-20.

Welker, M. 2009. “Corporate security begins in the community”: mining, the corporate social responsibility industry, and environmental advocacy in Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 24(1):142–179.

 

 

7 Food, agriculture and social movements

Edelman, M. and C. James 2011 ‘Peasants’ rights and the UN system: quixotic struggle? Or emancipatory idea whose time has come?’ [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2010.538583] Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1): 81-108.

Galemba, R. 2012. ‘“Corn is food, not contraband”: the right to “free trade” at the Mexico-Guatemala border’. American Ethnologist 39(4): 716-34.

Graeber, D. 2014. "A Practical Utopian's Guide to the Coming Collapse" [http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse] . [http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse] . http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse

Wittman, H. “Reworking the metabolic rift: La Vía Campesina, agrarian citizenship, and food sovereignty” [http://landfood.ubc.ca/publications/Wittman_2009_JPS_Food_Sovereignty.pdf] Journal of Peasant Studies 36 (4): 805-826. 2009.

 

 

8 Displacement and sedentarisation

Brightman, M. A., & Grotti, V. (2017). Indigenous Networks and Evangelical Frontiers: Problems with Governance and Ethics in Cases of 'Voluntary Isolation' in Contemporary Amazonia. In V. García Reyes, & A. Pyhälä (Eds.), Hunter Gatherers in a Wider World. New York: Springer.

Tania Murray Li (2017) Intergenerational displacement in Indonesia’s oil palm plantation zone, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44:6, 1158-1176, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2017.1308353

https://medium.com/social-environmental-stories/isolated-but-for-how-long-6ea25bc0dd5f

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyB1iCkOS1s

High, Casey 2013. Lost and Found: Contesting isolation and cultivating contact in Amazonian Ecuador. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 3(3): 195-221.

Taddei, Renzo, Rodrigo C. Bulamah, and Salvador Schavelzon 2020 (eds) Bolsonaro and the Unmaking of Brazil. Cultural Anthropology (relevant entries) https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/bolsonaro-and-the-unmaking-of-brazil (read online to explore links to further material)

 

9 The ethics of development and the anthropologist’s role

Edelman 2009 "Synergies and tensions between rural social movements and professional researchers [http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/843855__911009441.pdf]," Journal of Peasant Studies 36(1): 247-67.

Escobar 1991. ‘Anthropology and the development encounter: the making and marketing of development anthropology’. American Ethnologist 18(4): 658-82.

Gow, D. 2002. ‘Anthropology and development: evil twin or moral narrative’ Human Organization 61(4): 299-313.

Stirrat, R. and H. Henkel 1997. ‘The development gift: the problem of reciprocity in the NGO world’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 554: 66-80.

 

10 Presentation session 1

 

Recommended Further reading Part 1:

Crewe, E. and R. Axelby 2012. Anthropology and Development: Culture, Morality and Politics in a Globalised World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, M. (1991). 'Governmentality', in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–104.

Hann and Hart 2011. Economic anthropology Cambridge: Polity Press.

Polanyi, K. 2001[1944] The great transformation. Boston: Beacon.

Rist, G. 1997. The history of development, from Western origins to global faith. London: Zed.

Tsing, A. 2005. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wolf, E.R. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

 

Part II

 

11: Mobility as a way of life

Claudio Aporta and Eric Higgs 2005. Satellite Culture: Global Positioning Systems, Inuit Wayfinding, and the Need for a New Account of Technology. Current Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 5, pp. 729-753

Politis, Gustavo. 1996. ‘Moving to produce: Nukak mobility and settlement patterns in Amazonia’. World Archaeology 27(3): 492-511.

 

12: Slavery and colonialism

Testart, Alain 2002. The extent and significance of debt slavery. Revue française de sociologie 43-1 pp. 173-204, available at https://www.persee.fr/doc/rfsoc_0035-2969_2002_sup_43_1_5570

Price, Richard, 2010. Uneasy Neighbors: Maroons and Indians in Suriname. Tipití 8 (2). Available at http://www.richandsally.net/index.htm

Howard, Neil 2019 ‘Neither predator nor prey: What trafficking discourses miss about masculinities, mobility and work’. Anthropology Today 35(6): 14-17.

 

13: European borderlands

Green, Sarah 2013. Borders and the Relocation of Europe. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42, p. 345-361

Pelkmans, Tobias 2012. Chaos and Order along the (Former) Iron Curtain, in A Companion to Border Studies (edited by Wilson and Donnan), available at

https://www.academia.edu/2606255/Chaos_and_Order_along_the_Former_Iron_Curtain_2012_

Grotti, V., C. Malakasis, C. Quagliariello, N. Sahraoui 2019. Temporalities of emergency: Migrant pregnancy and healthcare networks in T Southern European borderlands Social Science & Medicine 222 (2019) 11–19

 

 

14: Borders and alterity

Brightman, Marc and Vanessa Grotti 2014. 'Securitization, Alterity and the State: Human (In)Security on an Amazonian Frontier', Regions and Cohesion 4(3).

Andersson, Ruben. 2014. ‘Time and the migrant Other: European border controls and the temporal economics of illegality’. American Anthropologist 116(4): 795-809.

Altman, T. 2020. Making the State Blush: Humanizing Relations in an Australian NGO Campaign for People Seeking Asylum. Social Analysis, 64 (1).

 

15: Humanitarian reason and the ethics of migration

Ticktin, Miriam 2014 “Transnational Humanitarianism [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5RX4kUysDHKTnd5UHBNTllaMTg/view?usp=sharing] ” (pdf) Annual Review of Anthropology, 43: 273-289.

Lucht, Hans 2010. Violence and Morality: The concession of loss in a Ghanaian fishing village. The Journal of Religious Ethics 38 (3): 468-78

Ilesanmi, Simeon O. A response to Hans Lucht’s “Violence and Morality: The concession of loss in a Ghanaian fishing village. The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 38, No. 3 (September 2010)

 

16: WORKSHOP: ‘Searching for Models of Intercultural Management of Social Conflict’

 

17: Hospitality and cosmopolitanism

Candea, Mattei and Giovanni da Col 2012. ‘The return to hospitality’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), S1-S19.

Ben-Yehoyada, N. 2015. “‘Follow Me, and I Will Make You Fishers of Men’: The Moral and Political Scales of Migration in the Central Mediterranean.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

22 (1): 183–202. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467- 9655.12340 [https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-%25209655.12340]

 

18 Art and Materiality of migration

Hamilakis, Y. 2017 [2016] Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration . Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 3(2): 121-139.

(and either) De León, Jason 2012. “'Better To Be Hot Than Caught': Excavating the Conflicting Roles of Migrant Material Culture." American Anthropologist 114(3):477-495.

Bachelet, S. & L. Jeffery. 2019. Creative engagement with migration in Morocco: An ethnographic exploration of photographic encounters. Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 10, 1. [https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/cjmc/2019/00000010/00000001/art00003]

Soto, Gabriella 2018. Object Afterlives and the Burden of History: Between “Trash” and “Heritage” in the Steps of Migrants. American Anthropologist 120, No. 3, pp. 460–473,

 

19 Death and migration

Langford, Jean 2018. Gifts intercepted: Biopolitics and Spirit Debt. Cultural Anthropology, 24(4), pp. 681–711.

Wagner, Sarah. 2015. A curious trade: The recovery and repatriation of Vietnam MIAs, Comparative Studies in Society and History 57(1): 161-190.

Available at:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9494671&fileId=S0010417514000632

 

LECTURE 20 (16 May) Presentation session 2

 

Recommended Further reading part 2:

Ferguson, James, 2013. Declarations of Dependence: Labor, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19:223-242. PDF [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12023/pdf]

Fioratta, Susanna 2015 ‘Beyond remittance: Evading uselessness and seeking personhood in Fouta Djallon, Guinea’ American Ethnologist, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 295–308

Hart, Keith. 2014 Money and finance: For an anthropology of globalization. The Memory Bank.

Hart, Keith (n.d.) ‘Movement as a human right’

https://www.academia.edu/36398419/Movement_as_a_human_right

Jackson, Michael, 2013. Ethics, migration and the question of well-being. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kusimba, Sibel, Yang Yang, and Nitesh Chawla, 2016. Hearthholds of mobile money in western Kenya. Economic Anthropology 3: 266–279.

Teaching methods

The course will be taught through the discussion of ethnographic case studies. Students will prepare notes and a set of points for discussion based on the readings for each session. After the introductory lecture, this material will form the basis of an open discussion to delve more deeply into the themes that emerge. The tenth and twentieth sessions will be devoted to student presentations, based on course materials and themes, on subjects of students’ own choice, accompanied by slides, lasting between 8 and 10 minutes.

Assessment methods

Assessment for all students (attending and non-attending) will be through oral examination, during which students may choose EITHER:

1) to discuss readings that they have chosen from across and beyond the course (see below for recommendations), demonstrating critical engagement with the course material, and with the overarching themes connecting weekly topics

OR

2) to discuss an essay of c. 4000 words, on a theme based on the course, to be agreed in consultation with Prof. Brightman, which must be submitted at least one week before the oral examination. In this case the quality of the essay itself will also contribute to the final assessment.

IN BOTH CASES, i.e. whether conducting the examination with or without having submitted an essay, students should demonstrate initiative and are encouraged to explore readings beyond the course bibliography, and to draw on their own experience, fieldwork etc.

Students are also recommended to familiarise themselves with one or two detailed ethnographic case studies, and to illustrate how these illustrate ideas discussed during the course.

For this purpose, it is useful to explore work published in major anthropology journals, such as Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Current Anthropology, L'Homme (in French) or Mana (in Portuguese).

Office hours

See the website of Marc Andrew Brightman