Social Anthropology

On the (in)visibility of whiteness and Galician immigration in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

This paper offers a new perspective on the relationship between the contested terrain of race and the politics of heritage and belonging in postcolonial Europe. Presenting material from the Netherlands, I argue that instead of reproducing the dyadic white‐majority–black‐minority framework, we must situate the negotiation of race in the triangular relationship between the persistent ‘whiteness’ of Dutch nationhood, the country’s postcolonial Afro‐Caribbean population and its more recent African postmigrant population. Discussing ‘African heritage’ projects by young Dutch people of Afro‐Caribbean and Ghanaian descent respectively, I discern two different critiques of the racialised exclusivity of Dutchness. Struggles for ‘Black citizenship’ seek recognition of African heritage as part of Dutch colonial history and seek to inscribe Blackness into Dutch nationhood; ‘Afropolitan’ celebrations of ‘being African in the world’ not only question the primacy of Dutch national belonging but also resist hegemonic formulations of Blackness. In this ‘trialogue’, race gets done and undone in intersection with other axes of difference and inequality, including citizenship status, migration trajectory and African origin. The triadic framework the paper advances not only conveys the complexity of racial dynamics in heritage‐making, but also sensitises to alternative understandings of belonging and alternative sources of critique.

In this paper, we argue in favour of an anthropological focus on the ‘doing’ of whiteness, which is necessary to understand how various, contrasting but interconnected articulations of whiteness come into being. We focus on two ethnographic vignettes that reveal the different structural positions, within a culturalised and racialised order, of the anthropologists developing them. The vignettes focus on liberal and progressive ‘middle‐class’ articulations of whiteness that often remain unrecognised and – especially – bathed in innocence, but that go to the heart of the contemporary European question. We take issue with the liberal peripheralisation of racism, a discursive practice that locates racism in the ‘white working class’ and symbolically exorcises it from the ‘moderate’, centrist core of Europe. Rather than truly facing racism, what seems at stake for many liberals and progressives is the self‐image of being well‐meaning ‘respectable’ and ‘good’ middle‐class people.

Brković, Čarna. 2017. Managing ambiguity: how clientelism, citizenship, and power shape personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina. New York: Berghahn Books. 196 pp. Hb.: US$120.00. ISBN: 9781785334146.

The materiality of and daily life in urban high‐rise buildings has barely been researched, especially when compared to the rich anthropological and architectural studies that exist on rural architecture. This article engages with indoor climate control in an urbanising environment. It considers urban architecture as a social field characterised by the interaction of diverse actors such as architects, policymakers, investors and residents. Based on ethnographic data from subtropical Chongqing (China) in winter, the broader aim is to outline an urban architectural anthropology that approaches the house from a holistic perspective with regard to its materiality, namely by considering both its structure and interior architecture, all embedded in the larger political and economic context. With regard to thermal comfort, architects often focus on the qualities of the material structure of a building for indoor climate control, while social science approaches tend solely to consider the objects and practices inside those structures. In following a practice–arrangement nexus approach as put forward by Schatzki (2010), I propose to think the two levels as interrelated. Ethnography‐based research thus contributes significantly to grasping how people react to buildings and make themselves comfortable in social, socio‐material and thermal terms.

Through an ethnography of the practices of certain agri‐food distribution channels, I propose to examine the interactions and exchanges that take place between a peasant world and a citizen world, both having rather different imaginations and strategies. This approach focuses on the perceived temporality of the actors and their management of the complex relationships between progress and nostalgia. Some aspects of the countryside's economic dependence on the city, combined with a set of creative micro‐entrepreneurial strategies orientated towards subsistence and opposed to the downgrading of agricultural work, give substance to an ambivalent relationship. In this scenario, small farmers are a symbolic and moral resource. They feed a political imagination that allows urban consumers with high social capital to satisfy their own desire to reclaim the space they inhabit as ‘critical’ consumers. This circuit is driven by a flow of exchanges that involves economic, symbolic and political aspects: in order to distinguish interactions, I shall be challenging the notion of moral economy.

Doing race in Europe

Contested pasts and contemporary practices