Music Worlding in Palau

Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness is a detailed study of the performing arts in Palau, Micronesia as holistic techniques enabling the experiential corporeality of music’s meaningfulness—that distinctly musical way of making sense of the world with which the felt body immediately resonates but which, to a significant extent, escapes interpretive techniques. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research alongside Pacific Islander and neo-phenomenological conceptual frameworks, Music Worlding distinguishes between meaning(s) and meaningfulness in Palauan music-making. These are not binary phenomena, but deeply intertwined. However, unlike meaning, meaningfulness to a significant extent suspends language and is thus often prematurely considered ineffable. The book proposes a broader understanding of how the performing arts give rise to a sense of meaningfulness whose felt-bodily affectivity is pivotal to music-making and lived realities. Music Worlding thus seeks to draw the reader closer to the holistic complexity of music-making both in Palau and more generally.

Moral urban citizenship and the youth problem in a Danish ghetto

PurposeThis article examines the interventions from municipality, state and other actors in the Gellerup estate, a Danish “ghetto” by focusing on the youth problem and its construction, by examining a cross-disciplinary academic workshop intending to “solve the youth problem” of the estate.Design/methodology/approachThe article is based on the two authors' participation in the academic workshop, as well as their continued engagement with the Gellerup estate through separate project employments and ethnographic research projects in the estate, consisting of both participant observation and interviews.FindingsIn the article the authors suggest that the 2015 workshop reproduced particularly the category of idle urban young men as problematic. The authors analyze this as a form of “moral urban citizenship”. The article also analyzes some of the proposed solutions to the problem, particularly architectural transformations, and connects the Danish approach to the problems of the “ghetto” to urban developments historically and on a global scale.Originality/valueCross-disciplinary academic attempts to solve real-world problems are rarely incorporated as ethnographic data. In this article the authors attempt to include part of their own practice as academics as valuable data that opens up new perspectives on a field and their own involvement and analysis of it.

Coping with Conundrums: Lower Ranked Pakistani Policewomen and Gender Inequity at the Workplace

Scholarship on gender and policing has frequently applied gendered organizational theory to understand how this type of organization and the men who run it produce gendered difference and inequity at the workplace. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research on lower ranked policewomen in Pakistan and contend that to fully fathom women’s marginalization at work, an analysis must not limit itself to the organization or the men who create the inequity but must also focus on women’s workplace behavior. My research sheds light on women’s anxieties about working with a large number of men and about people questioning their morality and character because they do so. I also demonstrate how their subsequent coping strategies can impede their professional development and reproduce their marginalization at their workplace. This woman-centric approach, which examines how policewomen navigate gendered landscapes in different patriarchal social spaces, therefore shows that workplace inequity is the collective result of the interplay between different actors and social structures, and leads to a more complex understanding of this phenomenon.

The Centripetal Force of Expression: Drawing Embodied Histories into Glassblowing

Getting at the tacit understandings of an artful practice is critical in coming to understand the processes of creativity. To achieve this, the researcher, specifically the ethnographer, must place herself in the position of the maker, that is she must herself, make and create. This article provides an account of arriving at the methodological imperative of in situ ethnographic research through actual ethnographic research on the relation of maker and material. From an in situ position, it theorizes the modalities of expression in practice, from problem-solving, to personal style, to the intentional drawing in of embodied histories in practice. This incorporation of varying embodied histories into a current practice is then explored as the possibility for affecting what is recognized in the field as ”new” or ”innovative”. We will see, however, that is affect is grounded more in the corporeal revealing of unexpected aspects of the material worked up.

Sovereignty as new beginnings: Action beyond the liberal subject, among undercover police investigators in Europe, for example

This article argues that Schmitt's “state of exception” is only one expression of the deeper sovereign phenomenon, specifically the human capacity to inaugurate new beginnings in shared space. Sovereign action thus includes anything from Schmitt's vertically-imposed state of exception, which eliminates political subjecthood, to the thrill of horizontally-arranged movements, which enable it. To make this argument, the article foregoes the idea of the bounded, internally coherent liberal subject in favor of a relational subject, who is both internally divided and inherently tied to others. The subject's instability and relationality make new beginnings possible and renders sovereign action promising, even if risky. An unexpected example of this fuller view of sovereignty appears in an undercover police team in southern Europe that investigates global human smuggling and trafficking rings. Based on extensive ethnographic research, this article shows how they often act on their own ethical judgments, reached by considering the standpoints of people tied to their investigations, rather than through obedience to law, policy, or superior command. Acting outside constitutional order, these investigators, (re)constitute themselves as particular persons through their joint actions and simultaneously constitute modest sovereign spaces, however tentatively.

Self-Organization Among Delivery Platforms Workers in Neoliberal Latin American Countries. The Cases of Peru and Chile

Recently in Latin America, numerous mobilizations of workers against the precariousness of work in delivery platforms have been developed. In this study, we argue that consolidation into strong organizations for defending platform workers’ interests is strongly related to the socio-political and institutional contexts they are involved in. Drawn upon the understanding of solidarity among workers as a phenomenon rooted in the labor process, as well as the relevance of socio-political and institutional context for the organizing processes among precarious workers, this study addresses the cases of self-organization of platforms deliverers in Chile and Peru. Based on ethnographic research, the results show common characteristics of workers’ self-organization, which are related to similar labor processes in delivery platforms. In addition, results shed light on the relevance of the socio-political and institutional context in providing resources for the consolidation of grassroots organizations, especially after platform counter-actions.

Mobile, Alabama’s Joe Cain Procession

This article investigates the contradictions that characterize Mobile, Alabama’s Joe Cain Day celebration. We look at the official narratives that established Mobile’s Mardi Gras origin myths and the event’s tradition invention in 1967 with a People’s Parade centered around Cain’s redface character, Chief Slacabamorinico. Then we discuss the complicated and ever-evolving symbolism surrounding the character by discussing more recent iterations of this public performance. In its inception, the Joe Cain celebration was a clear example of Lost Cause nostalgia, yet it has been adopted, adapted, and embraced by historically marginalized people who use it as a way to claim their space in the festivities. Employing both historical and ethnographic research, we show that carnival can simultaneously be a space for defiance and reaffirmation of social hierarchies and exclusionary discourses. We discuss here some of the concrete material elements that lend this public performance its white supremacist subtext, but we also want to complicate the definition of “materiality” by claiming a procession as a Confederate monument/memorial.

Beyond the Nature-Culture Frontier

In order to challenge the culture–nature dichotomy, this article investigates two festivities centered around fishing and consuming the sea urchin in two different locations: the Suape Bay Ouriçada (Brazil) in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Carry-le-Rouet Oursinade (France) in the Northern Hemisphere. This study employs both bibliographic and ethnographic research carried out at the two festivals over the last six years. The communities that originated these sea urchin festivals are both historically connected to artisanal fishing traditions that aim at creating bonds of sociability and connection with nature. While these festivities feature a wide variety of “things,” the one that stands out is the sea urchin itself. During these festivals, this species is taken by human hands from their habitat on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea to become the main reason for celebration and sociability in two different communities. On the one hand, sea urchin festivals can be seen as the heritage of local immaterial culture and as a symbol of the struggle for environmental protection. On the other hand, they are both the victim and the perpetrator of environmental degradations that threaten the event’s survival. Although the communities in these two geographic locations devised very different celebratory rituals around the same marine creature, by comparing and contrasting the two festivities we can contend that, despite their specificities, these sea urchin festivals challenge the culture–nature dichotomy. In other words, it is precisely through food that the natural and cultural worlds can become one.