Social Anthropology

Anthropologie sociale

ISSN: 0964-0282 (print) • ISSN: 1469-8676 (online) • 4 issues per year

Volume 27 Issue 1

Humanitarian militarism and the production of humanity

Antonio De Lauri

The limits and consequences of humanitarian military operations continue to be major issues in Western public debates on global security, democracy and human rights. This article focuses on the intersection of war and humanitarianism, situating the study of humanitarian militarism within a European context in which a reinvigorated proliferation of the military ethos coexists with ongoing transformations in European military culture and a resurgence of nation‐state ideologies. Building on a reflection of the historical consolidation of humanitarian militarism and interviews conducted with soldiers, the paper explores the politics of humanity produced by humanitarian militarism.

Issue Information

Gaining control over the loss of it. Software as focusing media in digital visual ethnography

Franziska Weidle

Guiding and transforming our creative practices, this paper argues for a critical investigation of the techno‐material affordances at play in doing visual research with digital media. It interrogates how software and skill might interact to mediate creative engagements with digital materialities. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies of and with the Korsakow System – an authoring system for creating generative multiple links between media assets – I show how software combined with other imaging technologies can (re‐)focus attention and action towards the intangible workings of digital code. Three exercises will demonstrate how a with relational media systems challenges and complements ethnographic filmmaking through the adoption of iterative software and design methodologies. Rather than gaining control over code, the aim is to gain control over the loss of it in the field and in front of the screen. In the context of an advancing digital visual ethnography, such a affords an experiential and responsive mode of knowledge production sensitising us to the complexly layered affordances and constraints of digital materialities and the in which they are entangled.

Introduction

Skilled mediations

Cristina GrasseniThorsten Gieser

In this special section, we conceptualise ‘Skilled mediations’ to examine the following questions from several ethnographic perspectives: How do skills and media interact, enable and limit our engagement in our material and social environments? How can this be studied ethnographically? We take our previous works on ‘skilled visions’ and ‘enskilment’ as starting points to define skilled mediation as a mode of engagement with the senses, practice, skill and media.

Albrecht, Eduardo Zachary. 2017. Alter‐globalization in Southern Europe. The anatomy of a social movement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 166 pp. Hb.: US$155.00. ISBN: 9781137599049.

Ilay Romain Ors

Mutualistic vs. zero‐sum modes of competition – a comparative study of children's competitive motivations and behaviours in China

Anni Kajanus

This article investigates the development of competitive motivation in children in the context of the extreme emphasis on competition in post‐reform Chinese society. Drawing from ethnographic and experimental approaches, it compares the competitive modes of children in an urban middle‐class school and a semi‐rural working‐class school. A conceptual model is developed that distinguishes between zero‐sum and mutualistic modes of competition, and the individual orientation and group orientation. The zero‐sum mode emphasises the benefits and losses derived from winning and losing, while the mutualistic mode emphasises the elements of competition that are beneficial to all participants regardless of the outcome. Through these distinctions the article contests the common association of competitiveness with individualism and the opposition between competition and cooperation, and proposes a working model for a comparative study of competitiveness.

A response to ‘skilled mediations’

Rupert Cox

Wade, Peter. 2017. Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism, and Race in Latin America. Duke University Press.

Juan Javier Rivera Andía

Sensing and knowing noises

An acoustemology of the chainsaw

Thorsten Gieser

Within sensory anthropology, scholars have for some time now developed ways to think with acoustic phenomena and to interpret the multiple meanings of sounds and soundscapes. Yet actual practices of listening and experiences of listening subjects feature rather less in that field. Drawing on a case study of chainsaw use in tree felling, this article presents listening as a mode of acoustic knowing that is both aesthetic and epistemological. This is achieved by combining a consideration of listening as a skilled practice with a problematisation of the notion of ‘noise’. Whereas noise is commonly conceived of as unwanted, chaotic and meaningless sound, skilled chainsaw use shows how a particular practice re‐evaluates what is defined as noise and even takes it as an entry to acoustic knowing. Through a careful description and analysis of the process of tree felling, this article traces how skilfully mediated listening with the chainsaw develops from a felt, embodied sense of a sound world that is still indeterminate and ambiguous to recognisable ‘objects’ of clearly identifiable sounds. It is argued that through such a broader conceptualisation of listening as a form of sensing, we can more deeply investigate the sonic orders of sociocultural practices.

Trust and the Other: recent directions in Anthropology

Jamie Coates

The ‘Hunnic eye’

Skilled mediation in popular re‐enactment

Anja Dreschke

During the last decade, mimetic practices of imagining, embodying and situating (past) events evolved into a prevalent phenomenon of vernacular culture symptomatic of an increasingly mediatised world. To explore popular historical re‐enactments as media practices, I draw on the example of the Cologne Tribes () from Cologne/Germany, a community of amateurs whose members emulate the historic lifeworlds of the Huns and Mongolians as a leisure activity. In their performances they creatively appropriate a wide range of global visual, sonic and textual inscriptions that are translated into bodily actions and material artefacts in a complex process of re‐mediation. Whereas academics commonly consider the embodied knowledge produced in popular re‐enactment as false, fake or mere fantasy, to the practitioners the construction of ‘authenticity’ is a matter of continuous negations. This paper explores how the concept of ‘skilled mediation’ resonated with the local notion of the ‘Hunnic eye’ that the Cologne Tribes developed to designate an ‘aesthetic of authenticity’ that is constituted in the eye of the beholder.