Social Anthropology

. Dons, échanges et complicités dans les Andes méridionales

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in the concept of circulation in the field of anthropology. This article aims at elaborating the idea of circulation, namely, in the context of media anthropology. We illuminate the workings of circulation by illustrating how violent media images travel on YouTube and how video clips contribute to the formation and reformation of globalised social imaginaries of violence. Special attention is given to the circulations of school shooting videos on YouTube. Through fieldwork on YouTube videos associated with the Columbine, Virginia Tech, Jokela and Kauhajoki massacres, the article draws on George Bataille's ideas on symbolic violence to claim that the school shootings as visual media spectacles of violence, death and terror can be seen as paradigmatic examples of deadly events that have a potential to stimulate social imaginaries of horror and anxiety through the cultural logic of circulation in the era of globalisation.

This article studies Chinese student migrants who are at risk of becoming undocumented through their engagement with the labour market in the Republic of Ireland. The migrants I am concerned with are not elite dual‐passport holders, but rather individuals who strategically participate in transnational migration as part of an emerging Chinese middle class. By closely examining the interrelation between the educational sector and migration industry through the everyday lives of Chinese student migrants, I argue that criteria set up by states are often translated into bureaucratic categories which can be manufactured and commercially supplied in the process of migration.

Based on research about Bangladeshi migration in Portugal, carried out between 2003 and 2008, the main objective of this article is to explore ethnographically the ambiguity of the migratory imagination. This ambiguity is expressed in two figures – the patron (the in Portuguese) and the madman (the in Bengali). The first is the exemplary migrant, economically successful and morally responsible while the second is an extreme case of failure and a source of a difficult knowledge. Both are constant reminders of the possible (and opposite) fates of all those that are now arriving in Portugal, therefore producing a strong normative ideal about success and failure.

This article discusses crisis, and responses to crisis, in the global maritime industry. In order to stay ‘afloat’ in recession times, ship owners increasingly opt for Flags of Convenience. During research aboard a mixed nationality crewed cargo ship, I observed how a local crisis of a flag change impacted on the ambience and social cohesion onboard, and how crewmembers responded by reinforcing ties to their families back home. By showing how crises and their responses play out on multiple levels, the article argues that the ship's ‘local’ population, despite its apparent isolation, is deeply embedded in global events and processes.

This article discusses the meaning of justice in the context of cosmopolitan law and human rights movements in Argentina. Specifically, it addresses the practice of , an alternative path to justice introduced by the organisation HIJOS, and the current trials against the ‘perpetrators’ of the last military regime. In doing so, the article traces the connection between an emergent consciousness of genocide as a historical ‘truth’ and the innovative localisation of cosmopolitan law in order to meet this ‘truth’ on a juridical level. As such it offers the idea of social and legal practices to be analysed not just as local articulations of justice, but as legal theory productions with potential lessons for elsewhere.

In a recent debate with Sarah Pink in the pages of , concerning the prospects for an anthropology that would highlight the work of the senses in human experience, David Howes objects to what I have myself written on this topic, specifically in my book (Ingold 2000). In doing so, he distorts my arguments on six counts. In this brief response, I set the record straight on each count, and argue for a regrounding of the virtual worlds of sense, to which Howes directs our attention, in the practicalities of sensing the world.

Reply to David Howes

by Salazar, Noel B.