Janet McIntosh

2017 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Hon. mention; 2018 AES Senior Book Prize, Hon. mention.


“Janet McIntosh's book Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans is a major ethnographic achievement…far more than a contribution to the field of critical whiteness studies, Unsettled promises to have a long-lasting impact in fields as diverse as postcolonial African studies, sociolinguistics, and the anthropology of subjectivity…Unsettled demonstrates an extraordinary level of intellectual maturity and sophistication, and establishes a high standard for any anthropologist seeking to elucidate the connections between race, inequality and privilege.”
-2018 AES Senior Book Prize Committee.


“Richly nuanced, theoretically sophisticated, and utterly compelling. A major scholarly achievement.”
-Richard Schroeder, author of Africa after Apartheid: South Africa, Race, and Nation in Tanzania. 


“Janet McIntosh lifts the debate on belonging. Her vivid portrait shows how twisted memory does not necessarily undermine sincerity of feeling. Her notion of ‘structural oblivion’ and her magnificent demonstration of the plurality of whiteness offer keys to understanding the vicissitudes of belonging in the present-day world.”
-Peter Geschiere, author of The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe.


“A splendid book, one of the best in the new and growing literature on postcolonial whiteness and in whiteness studies generally.”
-Brett Shadle, author of The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900–1920s.


(Book available on amazon)

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"The 2010 winner of the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion is 'The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethno-religious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast'. . . a sophisticated and highly accessible analysis [that] infuses fresh insight into such well-worn concepts as hegemony, ideology, syncretism and personhood, while at the same time rethinks questions relating to conversion, possession, and the margins of Islam. . . . Commented one member of the jury, McIntosh’s book was the most subtle and engaging study of the entanglements of categories of ethnic and religious identifications that I’ve read. . . . Clifford Geertz would have approved of this choice for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because it is written in such elegant but straightforward prose." (Anthropology News)

Endorsements/Reviews: “An impeccable study. It is work of the highest order, a meticulous analysis, and a mine of insights and information that will serve generations to come.” (David Parkin, University of Oxford) “It is extremely hard to do justice to this remarkable book, which is filled with excellent analysis and narratives.” (African Studies Review) “Very original…very skillful…likely to inspire many other anthropologists working on religion, [and] a ‘must read’ for anthropologists of religion in Africa.” (Islamic Africa) “Janet McIntosh's The Edge of Islam is one of the very best ethnographies of East Africa to emerge in the past ten years. . . . [T]hought-provoking, interesting, and original.” (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) "[A]n exhilarating ethnography. . . [which] reconfigures our understanding of Islam on the Swahili coast.” (African Affairs) "[A book with] rich and wide-ranging ethnographic knowledge and sophisticated theoretical ambitions. . . provocative and analytically rigorous." (Journal of Religion in Africa) “[A] sophisticated discussion of theories of spirit possession, identity, ethnicity, hegemony and ideology. . . beautifully written in a precise, clear and engaging style, and of importance for anthropologists and political scientists as well as for students of religion.” (Leeds African Studies Bulletin) “McIntosh’s account has a sharpness of focus and forcefulness of approach that is an improvement over much that has been published on religion and values in this area. . . . [T]his is a book well worth reading. . . . [An] excellent study, a valuable contribution to our understanding of the East African coast.” (T. O. Beidelman, Anthropos) “The literature on ethnicity is desperate for a work like this.” (Brad Weiss, College of William and Mary) "[A] highly welcome contribution. This innovative and invigorating book provides invaluable insights to the highly complex interplay between religion and ethnicity." (African Studies Quarterly) “A very good book, which I would strongly recommend…sobering insight into tensions which are very real and current" (Justin Willis Journal of Islamic Studies) “The Edge of Islam deftly navigates questions of Islamic authority, including distinctions between scripturalism and bodily practice, virtuous inwardness and pragmatic communalism, rationalism and madness.” (American Anthropologist)

(Book available for browsing and purchase at above amazon url.)

This article augments and complicates Nelson's claim that "we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it" (Dedaić & Nelson 2003, p. 459). Military endeavors require verbal legitimation, but militarizing participants and wide swaths of the civilian population requires more than just a stated rationale. It requires the complex construction of acquiescent selves and societies through linguistic maneuvers that present themselves with both brute force and subtlety to enable war's necropolitical calculus of who should live and who can, or must, die (MacLeish 2013, Mbembe 2003). War also involves vexed, stunted, and deadly forms of communication with perceived enemies or civilian populations. And those who are victims of military deeds, including civilians and sometimes service members themselves, are often left with psychic wounds that they cannot talk their way out of, for such wounds resist semantic expression and may emerge through more complex semiotic forms.

This article examines the blunt conceptual instrument of dehumanizing American military terms for the enemy in the context of the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. I examine language that dehumanizes American service members themselves, who are semiotically framed as expendable. Next, I explore the essentialist, semi-propositional qualities of derogatory epithets for the enemy and the affectively charged, deadly stances they encourage. I examine how generic references to the enemy during training make totalizing claims that risk encompassing civilians in their typifications. And I show that, in the context of war, the instability of derogatory epithets can manifest itself when the servicemember is confronted with the behavioral idiosyncrasies and personal vulnerabilities of actual 'enemies' on the ground. The putative folk wisdom found in generic references to the enemy can thus fall apart when confronted with countervailing experience; in such cases, service members may shift stance by renouncing military epithets.

Whiteness, like all racial categories, is a mythic and cunning construct with little biological credibility but tremendous social power. Historically, White social dominance has been propped up not only by violence, political control, and socioeconomic configurations, but also by language ideology and linguistic practice. This entry explores several ways in which White advantages and subject positions have been constructed through language. It looks at the racial politics of colonial-era language policies and attitudes, and the racial hierarchy implicit in the contemporary valorization of “standard” language, particularly in the United States. It examines whiteness as a verbal performance and a matter of style, and how White borrowings from non-standard linguistic varieties have often functioned to affirm White racism. It describes how some non-white communities have mocked White language (and, by extension, the negative qualities they associate with whiteness). And it examines some of the linguistic strategies, from code choice to subtle discursive maneuvers, pursued by self-conscious Whites at pains to avoid accusations of racism.

A B S T R A C T This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learning invites a reckoning in which whites grapple with questions of interracial dynamics in the new South Africa and their own "structural oblivion" —that is, their failure, as elites, to understand precisely the reasons for which they are resented. Some critics charge that white self-congratulation can amount to what I call " lingwashing " : using language learning as a moral cover for enduring inequities. I suggest a potential remedy is to conceptualize language learning as a process not of self-comforting but of self-discomfiting, requiring both listening and humility.

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