Social Anthropology

Fillitz, Thomas and Paul van der Grijp (eds.) 2018. An anthropology of contemporary art: practices, markets, and collectors. London: Bloomsbury. 272 pp. Pb.: £22.49. ISBN: 9781350016231.

This two‐part overview of contemporary Russian anthropology focuses in detail on the work of several scholars and situates it in the changing landscape of Russian academia. The main issue I address is the debated academic identity of anthropology as ‘historical science’ as it is officially classed in Russia. Proceeding in a case‐study manner, I aim to re‐conceptualise the relationship between anthropology and history from the point of view of the anthropology of time, not merely by historicising anthropology but also by anthropologising history. I ask what temporal frameworks underscore the relationship between anthropology and history as it is thought about by the scholars I explore.

This two‐part overview of contemporary Russian anthropology focuses in detail on the work of several scholars and situates it in the changing landscape of Russian academia. The main issue I address is debates about an academic identity of Russian anthropology as ‘historical science’. Given that in Western anthropology, history has become one of the leading modes of anthropological analysis and that the turn to history marked a radical repositioning of anthropology's very subject, it is important to explore how such configurations of history and anthropology work in other anthropological traditions and what the reasons are for turning to history or, conversely, avoiding it, for specific national, continental and transnational anthropological schools. In this article, I explore these questions by focusing on anthropology in Russia with an aim of reassembling the relationship between anthropology and history from the point of view of the anthropology of time. I ask what temporal frameworks underscore the relationship between anthropology and history. I explore these understandings ethnographically, that is, through ethnographic interviews with Russian scholars in addition to close readings of their works.

Ringel, Felix 2018. Back to the postindustrial future. An ethnography of Germany's fastest‐shrinking city. Oxford: Berghahn. 238 pp. Hb.: $120.00. ISBN: 9781785337987.

The Malian town of Timbuktu, long considered the epitome of remoteness in the Western imagination, has undergone a dramatic transformation from tourist outpost to terrorism‐haunted site of a UN peacekeeping intervention, in a shift accompanying conflict‐hit Mali's wider relabelling as a ‘danger zone’. Casting an eye on this distressing turn, this article considers the ‘cartopolitics’ of distance and danger from a historical perspective while analysing the machinations of foreign interveners and cartographers. It shows how Mali's insertion into the ‘war on terror’ drew on colonial and precolonial mappings intermixing desire and danger, domination and fear, science and fantasy. Concluding, the article argues that if military strategy was once seen as paralysed by a ‘Vietnam syndrome’, today we see something akin to a ‘Timbuktu syndrome’ as Western powers obsess about controlling perceived dangers emanating from remote sites yet increasingly fear entering these ‘Timbuktus’ of a revived geographic imagination.

Besnier, Niko, Susan Brownell and Thomas F. Carter 2017. The anthropology of sport. Bodies, borders, biopolitics. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 336 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978‐0‐520‐28901‐7.

Remoteness is as much about a position in topological as in topographical space. Remote areas might look inaccessible from the outside, but, for Ardener (Ardener, E. 1989. , M. Chapman (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell), feel open and vulnerable from the inside, as their connectivity with the outside world is never fully controlled by locals. Drawing on material gathered in northern Chad, we argue that this lack of conceptual reciprocity can also lead to the opposite: a trope of permanent aggression, based on the local endorsement of external negative stereotypes. From the outside, the ‘locals’ are seen to be archetypical raiders, thieves and uncouth. From the inside, people concur in these descriptions to a surprising degree, insisting on their disorder, unpredictability and violence. This endorsement of alterity grants northern Chad a particular place in Saharan history, geography and ethnography.

Nestled in the hinterlands of Amazonia, informal gold mining continues largely unnoticed. The ‘wild’ landscapes that prospectors must negotiate in order to reach and work in these far‐flung mine sites consist of unruly forests, raging waterfalls and unpredictable waterways, locales that restrict and confound formal infrastructural development. In such terrains, prospectors must devise innovative ‘fluid infrastructures’ that allow the mine's continued existence against all odds. Local perceptions of the wilderness in these locales offer insights into remoteness not as regions untouched and inaccessible, but as intimately connected to the diffuse and manifold forms that global economies take. These are zones in which the wild is in fact turned inside out.

The Soviet Union and its successor states have been avid supporters of a modernisation paradigm aimed at ‘overcoming remoteness’ and ‘bringing civilisation’ to the periphery and its ‘backward’ indigenous people. The Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad, built as a much‐hyped prestige project of late socialism, is a good example of that. The BAM has affected indigenous communities and reconfigured the geographic and social space of East Siberia. Our case study, an Evenki village located fairly close to the BAM, is (in)famous today for its supposed refusal to get connected via a bridge to the nearby railroad town. Some actors portray this disconnection as a sign of backwardness, while others celebrate it as the main reason for native language retention and cultural preservation. Focusing on discourses linking the notions of remoteness and cultural revitalisation, the article argues for conceptualising the story of the missing bridge not as the result of political resistance but rather as an articulation of indigeneity, which foregrounds cultural rights over more contentious political claims. Thus, the article explores constellations of remoteness and indigeneity, posing the question whether there might be a moral right to remoteness to be claimed by those who view spatial distance as a potential resource.

Since the 1990s, several ‘special zones’ have appeared along China's border with Myanmar and Laos. Often described as lawless enclaves of vice, gambling and smuggling, the study of those spaces has focused mostly on their exceptionality and ambiguous form of sovereignty. However, rather than simply keeping the state out, those special zones bring the state in, through investments, infrastructures and deals with government officials. Through an analysis of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, in northern Laos, this paper argues that it is precisely through the ambiguous presence of the state that these spaces manage to maintain a unique level of autonomy. Moving from James Scott's famous discussion of highland communities in Southeast Asia, I term this Zomia 2.0: a modern attempt to keep the state out at the edges of Asia's greatest power, characterised as much by political remoteness as by neoliberal connectivity.

What makes a place remote? Is remoteness a factor of geography and topography, is it a construct of connectivity, or is it an outcome of politics and history? For the Monpas of Arunachal Pradesh in North East India, inhabiting the Indo‐Tibetan borderlands, remote denotes multiple aspects: lack of material infrastructure and transport, improper communication and geographical isolation. Living an enclave existence far away from centres of commerce, governance and industry, Monpas consider themselves to be backward. Yet, Monyul, the traditional homeland of the Monpa communities, is of high strategic importance in the still unresolved India–China border conflict. Its present remoteness is woven into the politics of borders and frontiers. Through a focus on the particular history and politics of Monyul, I show how colonial and postcolonial policies transformed the region into a remote periphery. While infrastructure and connectivity can lead to the economic and political integration of a region, the withholding of the same makes a region appear remote. I bring the concept of selective connectivity to understand how road infrastructure is a particular form of exercising state control.

In response to the Syrian conflict, the biggest humanitarian challenge since the Second World War, aid organisations have set up large‐scale cross‐border operations. Aid convoys and workers within Syria have become targets, forcing most operations to be carried out remotely from the Turkish border city of Gaziantep, a ‘little Aleppo’ hosting more than 300,000 Syrians. This produces a transnational humanitarian social field embedded in historical, political and economic relations. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among aid workers and organisations providing relief assistance remotely, this article analyses the production of humanitarian remoteness, both rhetorically and in practice, shaped by remote technologies and the division of labour. In the case of Syria, the normalisation of remote practices and the dependency on local aid workers and organisations ultimately increases the distance between donors and beneficiaries inside Syria, although it reinforces the illusion of control among aid managers.

Remoteness has returned to world politics. Instead of the flat world’ once proclaimed by leading liberal voices, the world map today looks more rugged and uneven than it has in a long time. While some areas are smoothly connected to global capital and cultural flows, others are becoming more marginalised and ‘distant’, at least from the viewpoint of global centres of power. In this introduction, we build an analytical approach to remoteness as a social and political process rather than a primordial condition. We emphasise three key aspects of remoteness: its deep entanglement with forms of connectivity; its economic usefulness; and its amenability to ‘remote control’. In considering these aspects, we bring anthropology's long heritage of studying ‘marginal’ societies to bear on the political resurgence of remoteness in a new world disorder of proliferating global dangers, lucrative frontier economies and heritage‐making.

Based on fieldwork carried out in the highlands of Madagascar since 2013, this article explores how insecurity and banditry are reshaping the relations between state authority and rural Malagasy regions perceived as ‘remote’ despite their increasing connections with transnational – and often illegal – trade networks of natural resources. Often classified as dangerous ‘red zones’ because of the presence of bandits () who combine cattle theft with attacks against villages, trucks and , these areas become crucial for local processes of reaffirmation and renegotiation of state power in historically marginalised regions. By analysing the connections between ‘remote’ areas and illegal trade networks of a global scale, I discuss how remoteness acquires different meanings according to people's power and economic positions, and how social inequalities and power relations are reshaped in areas that are increasingly connected with neoliberal global markets, thanks to – and not in spite of – their supposed remoteness.

Smart, Alan and Josephine Smart 2017. Posthumanism. Anthropological Insights. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 128 pp. Pb.: $19.95. ISBN: 9781442636415.