Working Through Colonial Collections

What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin’s Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum’s various work practices, this book highlights the Museum’s embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum’s everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum – the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections – and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum’s present – processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn.

The ridge-to-reef approach on Cicia Island, Fiji

Many Pacific countries and territories embrace an officially recognized ‘ridge-to-reef’ approach to environmental management. This is the case of Fiji, where the Lau Seascape Strategy 2018–2030, led by Conservation International, aims for integrated natural resource management across 335 895 km2. This area includes Cicia Island, which deserves particular attention since, years before the design of the Lau Seascape Strategy, its population developed its own informal ridge-to-reef scheme, involving a combination of certified organic agriculture and locally managed marine closures. Based on 1 month of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper presents this scheme and highlights local perception and conceptualization of its positive effects on both the land and the sea. These reflect the iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) concept of vanua, which intrinsically connects the health of the land, the sea, and their (human and non-human) dwellers, while stressing the importance of addressing land-sea processes and management efforts beyond an ecological perspective, i.e. through an engagement with the iTaukei relational ontology.

Collusion, Co-Optation, or Evasion: The Politics of Drug Trafficking Violence in Central America

Why do drug traffickers sometimes decide to use violence, but other times demonstrate restraint? Building on recent work on the politics of drug violence, this article explores how Central American drug trafficking organizations’ strategies impact their use of violence. I argue that three inter-related political factors—corruption, electoral competition, and the politicization of the security apparatus—collectively determine the type of relationship between traffickers and the state that will emerge. That relationship, in turn, determines the primary strategy used by traffickers in that country. Drawing on over two years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in key transshipment points along the Caribbean coast of Central America, I show how co-optation strategies in Honduras have resulted in high levels of violence, evasion strategies in Costa Rica have produced moderate levels of violence, and collusion strategies in Nicaragua have generated the lowest levels of drug-related violence.

Towards a Multilingual Preschool Policy

The effects of immersive strategies and the benefits of a multilingual language policy have been extensively explored in the literature; however, it is valuable to look at the actual application of a multilingual policy. Putting linguistic-educational research into practice by implementing a transformative pedagogical approach is characterized by a process of trial and error, which has remained understudied. This chapter aims to fill this gap by adopting a case study approach that focuses on the implementation of a multilingual/cultural policy at a preschool in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. More than half of the children attending the preschool come from a multilingual background. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, consisting of observations, participations, interviews, and focus group discussions with different stakeholders, this chapter analyzes the mechanisms behind the preschool's switch from negatively undergoing multilingualism to positively engaging with it.

Rainforest Capitalism

Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.

Ethnography From Physical to Digital Contexts

The term ethnography comes from the Greek ethnos (folk, the people, cultures) and gráphein (to write, to describe), and therefore, its literal meaning refers to the description of cultures. The current perspectives of ethnographic research are widening to digital contexts for several interrelated motivations: decolonization, globalization, information and communication technologies (ICTs). The classical loci of digital ethnography is represented by online communities, delimited digital spaces of social aggregation around a given domain of interest. However, in the last years, these privileged sites are complemented or sometimes substituted by social media sites and metadata in digital ethnographic research. As a result, new sites for ethnographic fieldwork are emerging fostering new types of ethnographic practice. The difference in digital ethnographic fields imply an internally diverse array of approaches. The chapter starts from the origins of ethnographic research to investigate its digital developments, methodological challenges, and variety of approach.

Achievement Ideology and Alienation in School: Precarious Worth, Impossible Dreams, and Living Another’s Life

Drawing on over two years of the first author’s ethnographic fieldwork in two suburban high schools, the authors show how alienation is inextricably linked to an achievement ideology common in many forms of American schooling. In contrast to previous work that either no longer studies alienation or emphasizes alienation as a cause or result of student’ lack of achievement, the authors develop a theoretical defense of alienation to show how achieving students can still feel alienated. They describe three forms of alienation using the first author’s fieldwork: precarious worth, impossible dreams, and living another’s life. They close with the research’s political and sociological implications, especially the relationship between the achievement ideology and the study of schools itself.

Aspirational taste regime: Masculinities and consumption in pick-up artist training in China

Based upon 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork, this study proposes “aspirational taste regime” as a critical concept through which to examine the emergence of a discursively constructed normative system in China’s Pick-Up Artist (PUA) training programs. By unpacking how taste is practiced both digitally and corporeally in these programs, the paper argues that Chinese PUA learners carefully curate taste for an illusionary, at times even deceptive, presentation of idealized masculinities to increase their matrimonial chances. In doing so, this paper extends the literature on taste regimes by moving beyond its typically Western focus. It directs attention to an aspirational taste regime that capitalizes on young men’s aspirations for idealized masculinities and prescribes a seemingly effortless but in fact highly curated online presentation of cultural-capital-oriented consumption.

Revisiting Aguabuena Pottery-making Through Discontinuity

Discontinuity plays an important role in the social and material world of Aguabuena potters, a small rural community in the Colombian Andes. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the changes in modes of production and gender division of work during the last decades of the twentieth century and the fractures in space, memory, and materiality to address discontinuities in ceramic production. The wheel and its transformations are taken as an important factor of these processes. Against the common trend in the archaeology of Colombia to see pottery-making as a static craft, rooted in an indigenous past, this article aims to revisit ethnoarchaeological and ethnographic data to argue how cracks and gaps, besides empirical facts, can be seen as complex analytical lenses through which to embrace ruptures and less linear narratives.

Adat and Islamic Law in Contemporary Aceh, Indonesia: Unequal Coexistence and Asymmetric Contestation

Discussions on adat and Islamic law in Muslim societies have been focusing on a tension between the two entities. By looking at adat and Islamic law being respectively applied in contemporary Aceh, this article offers a different approach by considering the unbalanced relationship between adat and Islamic law and thus argues that both have been unequally coexisting and asymmetrically contesting with one another. Based on a lengthy ethnographic fieldwork and recurring visits to Aceh, this study discusses the ways in which adat of Aceh has been reinvigorated along with the official implementation of Islamic law in the past two decades. It includes efforts: 1) to establish adat bureaucracy, 2) to restore a cultural sovereignty of adat, 3) to retrieve adat rights to natural resources, and 4) to reinforce adat mechanism of dispute settlement. Despite all these efforts, however, adat appears to be subordinate and secondary.