This paper uses an anthropological definition of culture to examine the intensification of intell... more This paper uses an anthropological definition of culture to examine the intensification of intellectual property policing, coupled with an expansion of its definition. These are ACTA’s aims. I argue that acts of sharing lie at the root of communication; humans must share in order to learn. Furthermore, symbols change their meaning as they circulate in different cultural contexts. Therefore, in denying the fundamental importance of sharing and local interpretation, ACTA will not only fail spectacularly as a policy document. It will also fuel a ―war‖ on file-sharers, users of generic medicines, and manufacturers, sellers, and buyers of imitative goods and services – in sum, a large portion of the world’s population. This avoidable war will be costly, and it will be detrimental to public interests and global health. 2 Flouting the Elmo Necessity WWW.WCL.AMERICAN.EDU/PIJIP ABSTRACT ............................................................................................ 1 I. THE QUOT...
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)It is not enough to say, as the French do, that... more (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares.-Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(Marx 1963:21)As the echoes of the World Cup die away, and the Olympics are poised to alight in Brazil, the world is watching closely. Last summer (or winter, as they call it down south), a series of street protests erupted over a hike in bus fares. This seemingly trivial augmentation of public transportation rates (about US $0.10) catalyzed an already well-organized group (the Free Fare Movement) to put together massive demonstrations in Brazil's major cities. The speed, efficiency, and size of these protests quickly led to the reduction of the fare, but not before the protests had become even larger and considerably more amorphous (Ortellado, Lima, and Pomar 2014). It turned out that despite all the "order and progress" (the words emblazoned on the Brazilian flag) Brazilians across lines of race, gender, and social class, were upset about a whole bunch of things: spending on the World Cup and Olympics, lack of government services and infrastructure, gender inequality, political corruption, educational inadequacies, and police violence. The mainstream media attempted to trivialize the protests by wondering how people could get so fussy about a tiny rise in fares. A series of street signs replied: "It's NOT just the 20 cents, stupid."The protests flew in the face of developmentalist thinking. International financial analysts, political pundits, investors, and journalists writing for publications like The Economist had, up until that point, been framing Brazil as a BRIC success (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Its economy had been growing quickly. The middle class (as indexed by car ownership) had expanded. The World Cup and Olympics were coming. Everything was coming up roses. And yet, all of a sudden, the streets were filled with angry people. Adding to the confusion was the fact that the federal administration at the time was led by a left-leaning successor to the most popular president of all time-Lula. President Dilma Roussef herself had participated in anti-dictatorship protests between 1964 and 1985, and had even been tortured by right-wing military bureaucrats. How could the people be mad with the likes of her? And then, adding a final flourish of incomprehensibility, some observers were flummoxed by the fact that a considerable amount of this upset might derive from money spent on soccer. Surely this was the sacred animating force behind the distinctness of this South American people; would there soon be protests over Carnival and Brazil's special kind of rum, cachaca, some wondered incredulously?The articles in this collection explore these paradoxes. Three of them were originally solicited for a series in Cultural Anthropology called "Hot Spots" (Collins, Gutterres, and Holston). The shorter essays to be found there are part of an admirable attempt to make anthropological writing more accessible and concise; all those pieces can be read during a visit to the bathroom. However, these three authors felt that longer pieces might be able to contribute something different to the discussion, and so we are printing those longer contributions here. …
The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2006
Adventure-based education, drawing on crucial aspects of the muscular Christian ethos, enacts a b... more Adventure-based education, drawing on crucial aspects of the muscular Christian ethos, enacts a bifurcated model of, and for, society, where individual is to group as high is to low. Sublime experiences mediate between these extremes. This adventure-based social model emerged from an engagement with the doctrines of Outward Bound in the 1950s, a modification of contemporaneous programmes that had, in turn, descended from the camping movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The programming analysed here uses the harshness and simplicity of the out-of-doors to dismantle an urban subject, the youth emerging from the poor, black and/or Hispanic city, ridden by crime and addictive substances. Consuming these is said to lead to distinctly urban ‘selfishness’, low ‘self-esteem’ and reduced critical faculties, and, in turn, to violent or drug-related crime, irresponsibility, teen pregnancy and gang affiliation. The destabilizing that the wilderness brings about derives most directly from the nature-based height encountered in high-ropes courses, rock-climbing, rappelling and other activities where a fall would most likely result in severe injury. Height's force in attacking ‘urban’ ways of experiencing the self derives from its ability to generate a sublime mode of consciousness. The narratives of individual conversion that High Ropes' encounter with height bring about are then put back into the service of the ‘group’ in contrasting, collective, ‘low’ ropes activities.
This article uses concepts from anthropological linguistics to examine a cover of &am... more This article uses concepts from anthropological linguistics to examine a cover of ''Achy Breaky Heart'' within the genre of Brazilian commercial country music (mu´ sica sertaneja). I argue that cross-cultural cover songs create spaces in which culturally located notions of time and ...
... The kind of singing that amateur folkloricist, brick-factory owner, circus tent master, and h... more ... The kind of singing that amateur folkloricist, brick-factory owner, circus tent master, and hick-poet Cornélio Pires drew upon to make ... Zezé's difficulties as a solo artist became clearer when his much younger brother Luciano (Welson David de Camargo, off-stage) determined to ...
Would the Real Pirates Please Stand Up? What is piracy? Is it an occasional immoral tear in the f... more Would the Real Pirates Please Stand Up? What is piracy? Is it an occasional immoral tear in the fabric of an otherwise harmonious market? A justified critique of a coercive labor system or pricing scheme? Both? Or something altogether different, such as Johnny Depp channeling Keith Richards (with permission, one hopes)?1 One of the problems with answering these questions is that the term "piracy" can polarize any discussion into which it is introduced. But this polarization only increases the urgency of answering the questions. Due to the increased policing of intellectual and material properties on the part of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies both public and private, we are all (yes, all) pirates. We all have truck with "stolen" music and movies, text-artifacts (perhaps including these very words you're reading, you thief), or own a pair of fake designer sunglasses and a knock-offsoccer shirt. So as we begin, we should probably all admit that this special collection is partly an exercise in self-analysis. Dawdy and Bonni (this issue) admit as much when they engage in some lighthearted soul-searching over the popularity among undergraduates of a course they taught which explored the possibility that pirates might form "a culture." While Dawdy and Bonni start offwith comedy, however, they conclude in decidedly less funny territory with the argument that monopoly capitalism in the present may have much in common with its predecessors in the days of the classic Caribbean pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries. For them, piracy is the lens through which to see the modernized mercantilism in which we currently live. So deciding who the real pirates are is not just a question for our memoirs. Exploring the topic of piracy is anthropologically significant for a series of reasons, among them, because pharmaceutical companies, fashion designers, NGOs, football players, and tribes, to name just a few, are increasingly appropriating the concept of "intellectual property." From the perspective of those claiming to own the infringed ideas, violators of such properties are most assuredly pirates.2 Piracy is also important to anthropology because our status as consumers lies at the core of neoliberal economic and social practice, and the complementary opposition between fully "consummated" (Dent 2012) consumption and degenerate knock-offs orients that status. Contemporary ideologies surrounding brands, trademarks, copyrights, and patents, provide the ground upon which our appropriations become either moral lapses, victories over oppression, getting a good deal, or just plain stylish (see Nakassis, this issue). Corporate dictums say that piracy in its intellectual and more material forms clearly leads to an inadequate form of consumption, and the repercussions for diverse forms of self-awareness and self-definition are immense. Piracy becomes a way of fashioning subjectivities that draw on local histories (benevolent Jamaican gangsters for Galvin, this issue) and mechanisms of social control (envy for Guatemalan clothing producers for Thomas, this issue). Piracy has also become an increasingly important way for developmentalists of various stripes to evaluate the success or failure of "states;" indeed, what "the state" might be in the first place: think Somalia, most obviously, though as Skinner reveals in his treatment of music piracy (this issue), postcolonial African countries such as Mali should be included here, too. In such contexts, successful states are able to curtail the naughtiness, while unsuccessful states seem to live by it. But what becomes clear in the context of a collection in which contributors juxtapose varied geographies and histories is that while some of this discourse associated with piracy is brand new, other elements are decidedly not. As Gaynor shows in a detailed historical account (this issue) piracy has been at the center of debates over boundaries between oceans, polities, castes, dynasties, and even religions for quite some time. …
This paper uses the Bakhtinian monologic to examine the properties of authoritarian language. I ... more This paper uses the Bakhtinian monologic to examine the properties of authoritarian language. I argue that authoritarianism seeks to narrow the interpretive field, both in the production and in the reception of discourse. Furthermore, I suggest that authoritarianism is broadly distributed in contemporary North American society; it is, therefore, a concern for much more than one political party and its leader. Contemporary North American authoritarianism is characterized by an attempt to use humor to undercut humor's capacity for social change.
This paper uses Melville's analysis of confidence to look at the importance of uncertainty in con... more This paper uses Melville's analysis of confidence to look at the importance of uncertainty in contemporary capitalism. I focus, in particular, on the invocation of confidence in political spheres as a way to index ostensibly underlying economic realities. In "The Confidence Man," Herman Melville proposed that scrutiny of confidence was crucial for any understanding of 19th century America. He posited that, following PT Barnum, a larger and larger portion of communicative events were becoming conceivable as "pitches," where a seller tried to turn his or her interlocutor into a "buyer." The decision to buy required that the buyer accept the seller's claims about his subject position at a moment in which the buyer had very little to go on. The appeal of this economistic approach to communication has only increased with time, making an understanding of confidence urgent. Anthropologists of finance and politics in the United States ask us to consider the importance of debt, risk and precarity. This paper proposes that confidence is the other face of this oft-tossed coin.
This paper uses an anthropological definition of culture to examine the intensification of intell... more This paper uses an anthropological definition of culture to examine the intensification of intellectual property policing, coupled with an expansion of its definition. These are ACTA’s aims. I argue that acts of sharing lie at the root of communication; humans must share in order to learn. Furthermore, symbols change their meaning as they circulate in different cultural contexts. Therefore, in denying the fundamental importance of sharing and local interpretation, ACTA will not only fail spectacularly as a policy document. It will also fuel a ―war‖ on file-sharers, users of generic medicines, and manufacturers, sellers, and buyers of imitative goods and services – in sum, a large portion of the world’s population. This avoidable war will be costly, and it will be detrimental to public interests and global health. 2 Flouting the Elmo Necessity WWW.WCL.AMERICAN.EDU/PIJIP ABSTRACT ............................................................................................ 1 I. THE QUOT...
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)It is not enough to say, as the French do, that... more (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares.-Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(Marx 1963:21)As the echoes of the World Cup die away, and the Olympics are poised to alight in Brazil, the world is watching closely. Last summer (or winter, as they call it down south), a series of street protests erupted over a hike in bus fares. This seemingly trivial augmentation of public transportation rates (about US $0.10) catalyzed an already well-organized group (the Free Fare Movement) to put together massive demonstrations in Brazil's major cities. The speed, efficiency, and size of these protests quickly led to the reduction of the fare, but not before the protests had become even larger and considerably more amorphous (Ortellado, Lima, and Pomar 2014). It turned out that despite all the "order and progress" (the words emblazoned on the Brazilian flag) Brazilians across lines of race, gender, and social class, were upset about a whole bunch of things: spending on the World Cup and Olympics, lack of government services and infrastructure, gender inequality, political corruption, educational inadequacies, and police violence. The mainstream media attempted to trivialize the protests by wondering how people could get so fussy about a tiny rise in fares. A series of street signs replied: "It's NOT just the 20 cents, stupid."The protests flew in the face of developmentalist thinking. International financial analysts, political pundits, investors, and journalists writing for publications like The Economist had, up until that point, been framing Brazil as a BRIC success (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Its economy had been growing quickly. The middle class (as indexed by car ownership) had expanded. The World Cup and Olympics were coming. Everything was coming up roses. And yet, all of a sudden, the streets were filled with angry people. Adding to the confusion was the fact that the federal administration at the time was led by a left-leaning successor to the most popular president of all time-Lula. President Dilma Roussef herself had participated in anti-dictatorship protests between 1964 and 1985, and had even been tortured by right-wing military bureaucrats. How could the people be mad with the likes of her? And then, adding a final flourish of incomprehensibility, some observers were flummoxed by the fact that a considerable amount of this upset might derive from money spent on soccer. Surely this was the sacred animating force behind the distinctness of this South American people; would there soon be protests over Carnival and Brazil's special kind of rum, cachaca, some wondered incredulously?The articles in this collection explore these paradoxes. Three of them were originally solicited for a series in Cultural Anthropology called "Hot Spots" (Collins, Gutterres, and Holston). The shorter essays to be found there are part of an admirable attempt to make anthropological writing more accessible and concise; all those pieces can be read during a visit to the bathroom. However, these three authors felt that longer pieces might be able to contribute something different to the discussion, and so we are printing those longer contributions here. …
The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2006
Adventure-based education, drawing on crucial aspects of the muscular Christian ethos, enacts a b... more Adventure-based education, drawing on crucial aspects of the muscular Christian ethos, enacts a bifurcated model of, and for, society, where individual is to group as high is to low. Sublime experiences mediate between these extremes. This adventure-based social model emerged from an engagement with the doctrines of Outward Bound in the 1950s, a modification of contemporaneous programmes that had, in turn, descended from the camping movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The programming analysed here uses the harshness and simplicity of the out-of-doors to dismantle an urban subject, the youth emerging from the poor, black and/or Hispanic city, ridden by crime and addictive substances. Consuming these is said to lead to distinctly urban ‘selfishness’, low ‘self-esteem’ and reduced critical faculties, and, in turn, to violent or drug-related crime, irresponsibility, teen pregnancy and gang affiliation. The destabilizing that the wilderness brings about derives most directly from the nature-based height encountered in high-ropes courses, rock-climbing, rappelling and other activities where a fall would most likely result in severe injury. Height's force in attacking ‘urban’ ways of experiencing the self derives from its ability to generate a sublime mode of consciousness. The narratives of individual conversion that High Ropes' encounter with height bring about are then put back into the service of the ‘group’ in contrasting, collective, ‘low’ ropes activities.
This article uses concepts from anthropological linguistics to examine a cover of &am... more This article uses concepts from anthropological linguistics to examine a cover of ''Achy Breaky Heart'' within the genre of Brazilian commercial country music (mu´ sica sertaneja). I argue that cross-cultural cover songs create spaces in which culturally located notions of time and ...
... The kind of singing that amateur folkloricist, brick-factory owner, circus tent master, and h... more ... The kind of singing that amateur folkloricist, brick-factory owner, circus tent master, and hick-poet Cornélio Pires drew upon to make ... Zezé's difficulties as a solo artist became clearer when his much younger brother Luciano (Welson David de Camargo, off-stage) determined to ...
Would the Real Pirates Please Stand Up? What is piracy? Is it an occasional immoral tear in the f... more Would the Real Pirates Please Stand Up? What is piracy? Is it an occasional immoral tear in the fabric of an otherwise harmonious market? A justified critique of a coercive labor system or pricing scheme? Both? Or something altogether different, such as Johnny Depp channeling Keith Richards (with permission, one hopes)?1 One of the problems with answering these questions is that the term "piracy" can polarize any discussion into which it is introduced. But this polarization only increases the urgency of answering the questions. Due to the increased policing of intellectual and material properties on the part of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies both public and private, we are all (yes, all) pirates. We all have truck with "stolen" music and movies, text-artifacts (perhaps including these very words you're reading, you thief), or own a pair of fake designer sunglasses and a knock-offsoccer shirt. So as we begin, we should probably all admit that this special collection is partly an exercise in self-analysis. Dawdy and Bonni (this issue) admit as much when they engage in some lighthearted soul-searching over the popularity among undergraduates of a course they taught which explored the possibility that pirates might form "a culture." While Dawdy and Bonni start offwith comedy, however, they conclude in decidedly less funny territory with the argument that monopoly capitalism in the present may have much in common with its predecessors in the days of the classic Caribbean pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries. For them, piracy is the lens through which to see the modernized mercantilism in which we currently live. So deciding who the real pirates are is not just a question for our memoirs. Exploring the topic of piracy is anthropologically significant for a series of reasons, among them, because pharmaceutical companies, fashion designers, NGOs, football players, and tribes, to name just a few, are increasingly appropriating the concept of "intellectual property." From the perspective of those claiming to own the infringed ideas, violators of such properties are most assuredly pirates.2 Piracy is also important to anthropology because our status as consumers lies at the core of neoliberal economic and social practice, and the complementary opposition between fully "consummated" (Dent 2012) consumption and degenerate knock-offs orients that status. Contemporary ideologies surrounding brands, trademarks, copyrights, and patents, provide the ground upon which our appropriations become either moral lapses, victories over oppression, getting a good deal, or just plain stylish (see Nakassis, this issue). Corporate dictums say that piracy in its intellectual and more material forms clearly leads to an inadequate form of consumption, and the repercussions for diverse forms of self-awareness and self-definition are immense. Piracy becomes a way of fashioning subjectivities that draw on local histories (benevolent Jamaican gangsters for Galvin, this issue) and mechanisms of social control (envy for Guatemalan clothing producers for Thomas, this issue). Piracy has also become an increasingly important way for developmentalists of various stripes to evaluate the success or failure of "states;" indeed, what "the state" might be in the first place: think Somalia, most obviously, though as Skinner reveals in his treatment of music piracy (this issue), postcolonial African countries such as Mali should be included here, too. In such contexts, successful states are able to curtail the naughtiness, while unsuccessful states seem to live by it. But what becomes clear in the context of a collection in which contributors juxtapose varied geographies and histories is that while some of this discourse associated with piracy is brand new, other elements are decidedly not. As Gaynor shows in a detailed historical account (this issue) piracy has been at the center of debates over boundaries between oceans, polities, castes, dynasties, and even religions for quite some time. …
This paper uses the Bakhtinian monologic to examine the properties of authoritarian language. I ... more This paper uses the Bakhtinian monologic to examine the properties of authoritarian language. I argue that authoritarianism seeks to narrow the interpretive field, both in the production and in the reception of discourse. Furthermore, I suggest that authoritarianism is broadly distributed in contemporary North American society; it is, therefore, a concern for much more than one political party and its leader. Contemporary North American authoritarianism is characterized by an attempt to use humor to undercut humor's capacity for social change.
This paper uses Melville's analysis of confidence to look at the importance of uncertainty in con... more This paper uses Melville's analysis of confidence to look at the importance of uncertainty in contemporary capitalism. I focus, in particular, on the invocation of confidence in political spheres as a way to index ostensibly underlying economic realities. In "The Confidence Man," Herman Melville proposed that scrutiny of confidence was crucial for any understanding of 19th century America. He posited that, following PT Barnum, a larger and larger portion of communicative events were becoming conceivable as "pitches," where a seller tried to turn his or her interlocutor into a "buyer." The decision to buy required that the buyer accept the seller's claims about his subject position at a moment in which the buyer had very little to go on. The appeal of this economistic approach to communication has only increased with time, making an understanding of confidence urgent. Anthropologists of finance and politics in the United States ask us to consider the importance of debt, risk and precarity. This paper proposes that confidence is the other face of this oft-tossed coin.
This article explores ambivalence to understand the cellular technology use of teenagers, their p... more This article explores ambivalence to understand the cellular technology use of teenagers, their parents and teachers in Washington, DC. Our interlocutors view phones as crucial for managing school, work, friendship and family — while also providing potentially dangerous ‘distractions’. The intimate possibilities afforded by these cell phones interact in unpredictable ways with the vast and largely unknown networked publics that phones often provide access to. As these tensions play out in teenagers' lives, these ambivalences are an increasingly important framework by which they confront worrisome trends towards greater social and digital inequality, as well as racial divides. As seductive as dystopian and utopian views of technology are, we need to lean into one of the hallmarks of anthropology and do what ethnography does best: seek to understand the lived realities — in this case, of the relationship between technology and ambivalence.
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