Social Anthropology

Strategic alliance and the Plantationocene among the Makushi in Guyana

Climate change mitigation pilot projects (REDD+ – Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) affect and interact with the local population in Central Kalimantan and many other parts of Indonesia. Rather than being politically and economically neutral activities, climate change mitigation projects tend to objectify the value of carbon, land and labour, contributing to a process of commodification of nature and social relations. In this specific case study, a set of values – equality and autonomy – central to the Ngaju people, the indigenous population in Central Kalimantan, become contested in the course of the climate change mitigation project. These central values are produced in everyday activities that include mobility and the productive base – subsistence and market‐based production – among the Ngaju people. On the other hand, the climate change mitigation project‐related environmental practices and actions produce values that point to individual (material) benefit and stratification of the society. The aim of the paper is to draw attention to and create understanding of value production and related tensions in the efforts to ‘fix’ environmental degradation problems through the climate change mitigation pilot project in Central Kalimantan.

Montgomery, David W. (ed.) 2018. Everyday life in the Balkans. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 442 pp. Pb.: US$42.00. ISBN: 9780253038173.

Gammerl, Benno, Philipp Nielsen and Margrit Pernau (eds.) 2019. Encounters with emotions: negotiating cultural differences since early modernity. New York: Berghahn Books. 316 pp. Hb.: US$135.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78920‐223‐6.

This paper explores the need to understand the cultural aspects of the production of space and the use of communications technologies in the Chinatown area of Milan, Italy, centred on Via Paolo Sarpi just to the northeast of the city centre. I argue that although we can understand some aspects of this space and Chinese migrants’ production of it in terms of the history of Chinese, largely Wenzhounese, migration with its associated social and economic models and practices, in order to understand the dynamic negotiation of space in the restrictively controlled Via Paolo Sarpi we need also to incorporate the cultural use of contemporary communications technologies – smartphones in particular – into that understanding.

Goût biologique et labour dans les plantations de thé indiennes Cet article adopte une perspective multi‐espèces sur le goût pour explorer comment l’agriculture biologique affecte à la fois les relations non humaines et le travail humain dans les plantations de thé indiennes. Les planteurs de thé biologique utilisent le goût pour évaluer les conditions du sol et les changements climatiques et pour appliquer des pratiques biologiques en conséquence. L’article soutient que, d’une part, les planteurs cultivent stratégiquement des formes de collaboration entre les théiers, les champignons, les vaches et les micro‐organismes du sol pour améliorer le goût des cultures en monoculture. D’autre part, puisque ces formes de collaboration requièrent et reproduisent le travail précaire des travailleurs et des superviseurs du thé, leur résistance aux pratiques biologiques affecte également les goûts. Le terroir du thé biologique se caractérise à la fois par l’unité des espèces dans les monocultures et par les inégalités du travail dans les plantations.

Dzenovska, Dace. 2018. School of Europeanness: tolerance and other lessons in political liberalism in Latvia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 467 pp. Hb.: US$114.00. ISBN: 9781501716850.

State and life in Cuba

Calibrating ideals and realities in a state‐socialist system for food provision

In this article I examine the work of home visiting volunteers as an expression of state intervention. I draw on my experience as an ethnographer based at an NGO office in South Manchester. I show how the state is made manifest in the mundane and quotidian practices of volunteering, parenting and ‘helping out’. I argue that volunteering operates as a governing technology promoting values such as self‐regulation, self‐help, independence and decision‐making as elements key to the right kind of citizen. The state conceals itself and its modes of operation through volunteering, but in the process it is also diluted. In this case, it relies on ideas of self‐development and self‐improvement, but people go further in exploiting governing technologies for their own purposes. It not only concerns (self‐)discipline but also maternal and gendered practices, social policy and different kinds of knowledges. The distinction between ‘indigenous’ or local knowledge and ‘expert’ or professional knowledge is key. Volunteering becomes a visible form of indigenous or local knowledge promoting the self‐regulation of women’s capacities and in doing so acts as a concealed expression of the state.

By analysing how shamanist nomads who previously opposed large infrastructure works have suddenly become enchanted by the prospect of the construction of a large gas pipeline, this paper ethnographically investigates how technology and infrastructure become perceived as promising by ordinary people on the ground in post‐Soviet Siberia. Drawing attention to the discursive impact of large gas corporations and the role of deeply embedded Soviet conceptions of modernity in filling pipelines with cultural meaning, this paper provides unique insights into the highly localised engagements with infrastructure. As such, this paper contributes to the anthropology of Russia, where infrastructure has only recently received academic attention. It also corresponds to the ‘infrastructural turn’ in anthropology by studying the social, cultural and material conditions ensuring that infrastructure becomes perceived as promising. Furthermore, this paper explores the significant impact of ancillary infrastructures connected to a construction project in entangling people with technology and infrastructure.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses the recent phenomenon of the mass search for Russian citizenship by Tajikistani nationals and critically engages with the emerging concept of strategic citizenship. Bringing together the literature on strategic citizenship and affective documents, it argues that the notion of strategy is incomplete and can be misleading when used to analyse citizenship seeking. Drawing an opposition between ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ aspects of citizenship, there is a danger in looking at strategising through the assumptions grounded in formal rationality placing a rational individual seeking to ‘maximise utility’ through their citizenship choices at the centre of analysis. My ethnography shows that grounded in the local systems of value, practices of citizenship‐seeking go far beyond the calculative logic of cost–benefit analysis and should be theorised in the context of family projects and subsequent ideas about social becoming. It also shows that acts of taking citizenship emerge as affective responses of people trying to figure out what is the ‘rational’ thing to do in the context of uncertainty and instability of labour markets, mobility regulations and documentary regimes, affects being distributed not only in persons and their relations but in and around documents.