Death and Renewal

Death and the rituals that surround it have long been a focus of anthropological passions. Death mediates the social worlds in which we create ourselves as persons and collectivities and defines the moments of transition from one state of being to another. Rituals surrounding death establish an affective sphere through which we are called to bear witness not only to the life of the dead but to the conditions that structured that life and that continue to structure the lives of mourners. These rituals are thus inherently political, as most intimate rituals have been shown to be, and they tell us about both the past and the future as it is envisioned by those who mourn. In August of last year, my advisor—Constance Sutton—died. She was ninety-two years old, and she had served the field for two-thirds of that time from her perch at New York University. Connie was among those first couple of cohorts of Columbia University graduate students who conducted field research in the Caribbean in the mid-1950s. At the time, of course, the Caribbean was not seen as an appropriate venue for anthropological research, being too complex, too colonial, too capitalist, and (perhaps most importantly) devoid of proper “natives.” Most everyone in the region came from somewhere else, and the processes that defined it were quintessentially “Western” and modern (Mintz [1966] 1971; Slocum and Thomas 2003; Trouillot 1992). The space of the Caribbean required a disciplinary retooling, of sorts. Traditional anthropological categories like kinship and exchange were reconceptualized in relation to the postwar processes scholars were observing, conceptual frameworks that had been mobilized in other world regions at important moments (such as various versions of creolization or mestizaje) were tweaked to account for Caribbean realities, and anticolonial and labor movements spurred scholars to think differently about social and political organization. Within this milieu, Connie began a fifty-year relationship with Ellerton, a small sugar village in St. George parish, Barbados. Connie's dissertation centered on a wildcat strike among sugar workers, and therefore interrogated the long history of labor, inequality, and plantation-based development in Barbados. She went on to investigate the plurinational lives many Ellertonians developed after the 1965 changes in US immigration law, helping to elaborate the conceptual rubric of transnationalism, to explore Yoruba norms regarding gender and sexuality in Nigeria, and to interrogate the gendered dimensions of violence, war, and militarism. All the while, Connie was an activist, supporting antiracist work in the United States and spearheading feminist interventions within and beyond anthropology. She trained generations of students who would go on to train many others, and she mentored Caribbean scholars and creative producers, many of whom found refuge in her Washington Heights apartment. That apartment is also exactly where I met so many of the people I would come to see as part of my own scholarly lineage. I came to anthropology accidentally, having landed in Connie's Transnational Processes seminar in my first year as a master's student in Latin American and Caribbean studies. That class was a revelation to me! Not having studied anthropology as an undergraduate, I had no idea there was a legitimate method for what I had been doing with dancers and other creative artists (learning through participatory “deep hanging out”), nor an academic approach to the life processes with which I was experientially familiar. I was thrilled and relieved to be taken under Connie's wing. Over the years, she patiently molded me into someone who could read like an anthropologist and who could ask anthropological questions. She marked up my grant proposals until they were coherent. She introduced me to others who shared my interests and my background. And she walked with me through conference hallways and meeting rooms, teaching me how to ask questions and how to hear and evaluate the answers. I later came to understand these acts as “mentorship,” and also came to realize that not everyone had experienced it. Connie herself had been lucky in this regard, in that she had had two figures—Margaret Mead and Eleanor “Happy” Leacock—spurring her on at a time when it was not the norm for women anthropologists to conduct fieldwork on their own, to earn salaries equivalent to similarly qualified men, or to be expected to have a say in the future of the departments in which they found themselves. Today, these conditions of inequality have shifted a bit (in some cases, quite a lot), but at the same time, new ones have emerged (as limned, for example, in this issue's Vital Topics Forum). Our undergraduate students often carry the weight of the world on their shoulders into our classrooms, as many of them support family members while attempting to attend to their own educational aspirations. Our graduate students often struggle with incredible levels of anxiety, anticipating their confrontations with a job market that is inherently unequal (see the essay by Nicholas Kawa et al. in this issue). In the classroom, in the office, and beyond, it is Connie's example that constantly provokes reflection: Am I doing enough to inspire the anthropological imaginations of our undergraduates? Am I sufficiently supporting my graduate students? Am I providing them the ground of community and lineage into which I was so generously welcomed? Am I encouraging them to be healthy, compassionate interlocutors for each other, and for us? In Jamaica, as elsewhere, death requires a send-off so that the spirit of the deceased doesn't stick around to taunt and torment the living. A good death is a final one, and to be final, there must be a gathering with singing, drumming, and good, strong rum, something that always freely flowed at Connie's kitchen table. A dance step or two never hurts, either, and Connie legendarily loved to dance. It was my past as a dancer that prompted her to let me into her advanced seminar, for which I was patently unqualified, and it was her own passion for moving that kept her out on the dance floor when the rest of us were ready to go home. I know, in her mind, she danced into death, and into the next dispensation of life. We begin this issue with an “editorial provocation” from our Associate Editors for Biological Anthropology. In their essay attending to the history of biological anthropology in American Anthropologist, Adam P. Van Arsdale and Mary K. Shenk interrogate the field's “sacred bundle” while also outlining their vision for promoting theoretical and empirical work within the subfield of biological anthropology. They review some of the anxieties and misgivings that have emerged in relation to publishing in American Anthropologist and outline the process for recruitment and review that we have put into place in the hopes that the journal can continue to be a location for the publication of outstanding work in the subfield. This disciplinary provocation is followed by another, “The Social Network of US Academic Anthropology and Its Inequalities.” In this essay, authors Nicholas C. Kawa, Jose A. Clavijo Michelangeli, Jessica L. Clark, Daniel Ginsberg, and Christopher McCarty interrogate the ways academic anthropology often reproduces its own inequalities. Kawa et al.’s focus here is US academic hiring, and they are interested in the extent to which inequality and hierarchy (related to the influence of academic prestige) outweigh merit on the job market. Drawing from the departmental websites of anthropology PhD-granting institutions in the United States, they gathered information on all tenured and tenure-track faculty (N = 1,918). They used both statistical and social network analyses to explore faculty placement, asking questions about where nodal points emerged and how reciprocity worked. The authors present their findings in order to make an intervention into understanding the ways hierarchies are reproduced within academia and to provide some suggestions regarding how to destabilize these hierarchies, as well as how to think about other (nonacademic) career options within the field of anthropology. Dylan Gaffney, Glenn R. Summerhayes, Katherine Szabo, and Brent Koppel's “The Emergence of Shell Valuable Exchange in the New Guinea Highlands” takes on a long-standing area of interest to anthropology: the exchange of valuable shells among band communities in the New Guinea Highlands. They use zooarchaeological and technological analyses of materials found at the Kiowa site in Chimbu Province, PNG, to trace both the origins and changes in shell use from the terminal Pleistocene to the Late Holocene eras. They argue that while evidence of locally procured riverine mussels dates to the terminal Pleistocene, marine shell valuables only appear in the Late Holocene, which challenges the commonly accepted idea that marine shells appeared in the highlands simultaneous to (and as a result of) the spread of agriculture around the Wahgi Valley at the start of the Holocene. Instead, they argue, the development of shell exchange in the highlands resulted from what they call “punctuated pulses of coastal contact,” which suggests that we look again at the connections between interior and coastal communities during this period, and at the forms of social exchange and hierarchy that facilitated these connections. “Planting and Performing: Anxiety, Aspiration, and ‘Scripts’ in Telangana Cotton Farming,” by Andrew Flachs, focuses on the ways cotton farmers in Telangana, India, make decisions about planting genetically modified seeds within the context of familiar “scripts” of rural life. As many readers will know, Telangana has become a central site of low yields as a result of pest attacks and unreliable credit, and thus also of farmer suicide, within India. Genetically modified (GM) seeds are supposed to have ameliorated these problems, and yet farmers can't keep pace with the new seed brands that have come on the market, and therefore cannot use their long-standing agricultural knowledge and skill to evaluate their yields over time. For Flachs, “scripts” have to do with the learned and socially mediated expectations and norms regarding rules and values within a community. The script of manci digubadi (good yield), he argues, structures the use of new seeds within a context in which actual seed knowledge is uncertain and social emulation is a strong value, and where neoliberalism has shaped the temporal limits generating both the anxieties and aspirations of rural life. Using performance as a lens through which to understand how farmers’ sense of themselves is connected to their historical and material context, and thus of the relationship between their precarity and industry attempts to manage it, Flachs argues that when proponents of GM agriculture in India read “good yield” as economic rationalism, they are misreading both the process and result of farmers’ decision-making. Sonia N. Das's article, “The Unsociability of Commercial Seafaring: Language Practice and Ideology in Maritime Technocracy,” examines the language practices and ideologies of commercial seafarers who spend months at a time aboard cargo ships, working in difficult conditions without protections of citizenship. Her investigation of two spaces of what she calls “maritime technocracies” (Newark and Montreal) illuminates the difficulties faced by the industry in relation to media infrastructures, language policies, automation, and neoliberal reform. Interested in the limits to communication and sociality on ships where people have few linguistic repertoires in common, Das limns a situation in which industry leaders, who are interested in amping up productivity within a context in which it's easy for workers to become isolated, end up turning to Christian ministries, who are interested in ethical conviviality, to identify gaps in communication and develop new forms of face-to-face sociality to offset this isolation. She wants to think through the semiotics of capitalism in relation to the politics of infrastructure in order to understand how ship owners, port officials, and other industry stakeholders collaborate in the technocratic management of their workers. In “Strangership and Social Media: Moral Imaginaries of Gendered Strangers in Rural China,” Tom McDonald addresses the figure of the “stranger” in rural northern China. He observes that while his interlocutors often stated that they didn't interact with strangers, they in fact participated in a number of different kinds of stranger relationships online through social media. McDonald demonstrates how online stranger relations work to reconfigure the normative boundaries between friends, family, and strangers, generating additional scrutiny when these relations occurred between married people across gender and sex lines. He argues that we need to more fully develop the conceptual frame of “strangership,” which would recognize this as an analytically distinct human relation imbued with a kind of radical alterity, one whose potentiality can shape new understandings of the self as well as the self in relation with others in face-to-face contexts. Shaundel Sanchez's article, “Protecting the Passport: Defending US Borders Built in the United Arab Emirates,” investigates the ways Muslim-American women who have lived or are now living in the United Arab Emirates develop a hierarchy of marriage-eligible partners based on their assessments of potential partners’ ability to travel. Sanchez shows how citizenship and visa status in the post-9/11 context became important determinants of men's marriageability, and therefore how the women with whom she conducted research, in conjunction with their families, internalized and reproduced US security practices. The passport (and visa) became a kind of fetish, one they had to protect, and one that allowed women both to discriminate against men without “powerful” passports and to legitimate their own national and religious legitimacy. The borders of the US state were thus embodied in these women's ability to wield their citizenship as either a kind of weapon or an incentive. “Performing Alterity of Desire: Bodiliness and Sexuality in Spirit Mediumship in Northeast Thailand,” by Visisya Pinthongvijayakul, also takes on women's roles as social mediators, this time literally in relation to mediumship in ritual performance in northeast Thailand. Pinthongvijayakul explores the ways sexuality has been conceptualized in relation to mediumship and how it is experienced by mediums. He argues that women mediums’ bodies in ritual must be understood not only in relation to their representationalist effect but also vis-à-vis heterogeneous modes of desire as these are expressed in the language of “feeling.” Using Brian Massumi's formulation of affect, Pinthongvijayakul argues that we must understand Thai spirit possession as something that can account for sex and desire, thus disturbing the commonly maintained binaries between the sacred and the secular. In this way, ritual expression also becomes a means to experience and express non-normative sexual desires, providing a kind of authorization for embodied intensities. The body, here, becomes a site for alterity, and therefore also a site for theorizing. The focus of Vania Smith-Oka and Megan K. Marshalla's “Crossing Bodily, Social, and Intimate Boundaries: How Class, Ethnic, and Gender Differences are Reproduced in Medical in is also but this time in relation to in Smith-Oka and conducted fieldwork in and in to understand and and students and social boundaries in the of and that and being are processes shaped by and political they how forms of and knowledge and not be used in based on the and expectations by both and Using the (and their own frame of to how train their they how through while forms of social and violence, also as an important of L. of and A of of our focus on The essay investigates the ways women in practices within the context of and shows how women reconfigure by creative practices that on but also long-standing forms of among in order to their lives and those of their She is interested in how they practices of in the of and and argues that on can provide a lens through which to understand the ways is lived in the We are also to an and one that in different examines the of and its and on explores the ways both and as they to from the in The context here is and postwar as people and new to support themselves and their This essay is both in and in a of one The the historical and social context in relation to the labor practices we see in the and the us to experience both the and sociality and that are constantly and expressed during the process of we have across is thus an in what us that and In this us to interrogate and we and where our look in relation to others, also A. and with and in us a on the theoretical of our through the lens of one on his own having conducted research in the and the United States, us a into some of the in anthropological across the of the as well as into some of the among national across the Our this issue focuses on and its and argue that these are not only conceptual but also to publication and knowledge up his own experience of attempting to a of his The and of in of this and often difficult process into the and linguistic to anthropological knowledge across The to his essay, and the that his points in various the various levels of and desire that the to this our a on The and two are in this The to this ask us to explore the and of and other media as research They us to think about what an means for and In other they are interested in the the and in the and that can in and through this This also two Cotton A by and by Our an online on anthropological with by an essay we in the issue of the journal by K. 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