Focaal

For the new Eastern citizens of the European Union, the sprawling map of the budget airlines signifies an emergent geography of citizenship that weaves the continent together. Predictably, such spatial practices highlight the huge inequalities involved as well as the associated contrastive imaginations of what this new Europe could be about.

By giving an extensive literature review and presenting the central objectives of this theme section, this introductory article develops a programmatic call for a critical anthropology of 'home' in relation to violence and place. Challenging assumptions that territoriality, rootedness, and memories of violence are necessarily the primary determinants of identification among people on the move, it proposes conceptual tools to investigate how and when such discourses may provide or prohibit the making of 'home'. In particular, it draws attention to issues of political and economic transformation and the changing forms of violence and movement produced by them.

This article confronts the nationalist and foreign interventionist discourses on 'home' in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina with the everyday experiences of a category of persons who are perceived as the ultimate embodiment of the promised homecoming encapsulated in sedentarism: minority returnees. It ethnographically traces the initially mirroring movements of two households and their differential ways to overcome the effects of displacement as well as their insertion in broader transformations. Infusing the notion of 'home' with an eye for security in its widest sense, and, in particular, highlighting the importance of the life course, it investigates the significance of place through a contextualized household political economy of 'home'. In that way it explores the conditions in which certain remakings of 'home' come to be seen as more feasible than others.

Charting the life course of Malathi, a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman, this article attempts to discuss the ways in which people and places in Sri Lanka are remade through experiences of violence. The article suggests moving away from a notion of 'home' as fixed on one place; instead, it considers the movement of people between different places. Further, it suggests that senses of home are also embedded within uneasy, constantly negotiated relationships with those people with whom we feel at home. Moreover, the article argues that ideas about 'the future' as equally as 'the past' inform the possibility of being at home.

Liberal emplacement

Violence, home, and the transforming space of popular protest in Central America

The Dutch language has become the key technology of the Netherlands' new integration and immigration policy regime. Given the impassioned debates that accompanied language-planning policies in the 1980s, what is most remarkable about the stringent new language policy initiatives is the consensus regarding their necessity. This article analyzes the most ambitious program of the integration regime, inburgering, in the context of the transition to a post-industrial economy and the concomitant restructuring of the labor market. Introduced under the Third Way social democrats in the mid-1990s, the inburgering program was designed to produce the literate laborer of late modernity. This article traces the shift from the 'one nation, one language' ideology associated with welfare state forms of governance to the 'language as commodity' ideology promoted by the Third Way regime. I argue that the inburgering program acted as the Trojan horse of integration politics, introducing the necessity for Dutch language skills into an integration regime that has become the basis for a new politics of exclusion under the current neo-conservative administration.

This article discusses the networked forms of governance that have arisen as part of roll-out neo-liberal policies in Mumbai, India, focusing on the flood of 26 July 2005 and its aftermath. The municipal government's inaction during and after the flood is attributed to the decentralization of governance, as well as to cutbacks to public health and basic services in recent years. The rise of competitive urbanism as a part of roll-out neo-liberalism is analyzed as producing gaps in disaster management planning and implementation. The article concludes with a call for a refinanced state and a centralization of municipal bodies under a unified municipal council, seen as necessary to provide the professionalized services required during large-scale emergencies such as floods.

For every official registered Romanian migrant in Italy there are between one and three illegal, unregistered migrants. This article examines the informal forms of self-organization that arise among the migrants in order to manage the challenges migrants face under a system that needs their labor but refuses to acknowledge this need publicly or institutionalize it openly. Semi-tolerated illegality determines the forms of networks both in the organization of the migration and in the forms of its integration into the labor and housing markets. This strictly ethnographic and qualitative presentation focuses on informal solutions to housing and the creation of informal labor markets and the consequences for the migrants of this enforced informality. It shows how the Italian state is caught between toleration and repression, arbitrarily switching from one mode to the other.

This article is based on fieldwork conducted among Romanian and Bulgarian students working under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme in the UK. It shows how a public discourse on the benefits of and for immigrant seasonal workers silences the voices of these workers. It also discusses how a hidden transcript of the student workers shows they are deeply frustrated about their exploitation in terms of wages, living conditions, and the fact that they have come to the UK on false promises of cultural exchange and learning. The confinement of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants—such as these student workers—to the unskilled and underpaid labor sector in the UK, which continues despite Romania and Bulgaria's recent accession to the EU, not only reproduces the dual labor market in the UK itself but it also reduces Romania and Bulgaria to 'second-hand' EU members states.

Why has the recent period of global centralization of capital, from the 1970s to the present, also been a period of resurgence of indigenous movements and of forms of global civil society that have supported indigenous rights? This article argues that tackling this question can only be done by using concepts that emphasize what Hegel called the 'cunning' of history: the fact that the same historical process can on the one hand bring devastation to indigenous habitats and on the other hand create opportunities for political leverage by indigenous societies to gain recognition of the legitimacy of their different social, cultural, and economic systems within their ambient nation-states. Politically engaged anthropological theory, it seems, needs concepts that emphasize these contradictions—which in a nutshell means more Marx and less Foucault.

Kamala Kempadoo, Trafficking and prostitution reconsidered: New perspectives on migration, sex work, and human rights. London and Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005, 247 pp., ISBN 1-59451-096-2 (paperback).

Kathryn Farr, Sex trafficking: The global market in women and children. New York: Worth Publishers, 2005, 262 pp., ISBN 0-71675-548-3 (paperback).

David Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 247 pp., 0-19928-327-3 (paperback).

Patrick Bond, Against the global apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and international finance. 2nd ed. London and New York: Zed Books, 2003. 326 pp, 1-84277-393-3 (paperback).

Holger Jebens, Pathways to heaven: Contesting mainline and fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2005, 256 pp., ISBN 1-84545-005-1 (hardback).

James Leach, Creative land: Place and procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004, 256 pp., ISBN 1-57181-693-3 (paperback).

Bruce Kapferer (ed.), Oligarchs and oligopolies: New formations of global power by Jelena Tosic

John Clammer, Sylvie Poirier, and Eric Schwimmer. Figured worlds: Ontological obstacles in intercultural relations by Alberto Arce

Eric Venbrux, Pamela Sheffield Rosi, Robert L. Welsch (eds.), Exploring world art by Jeremy MacClancy