Social Anthropology

Pioneers of the plantation economy

Militarism, dispossession and the limits of growth in the Wa State of Myanmar

Over the past ten years, the Catalan independence movement has intensified and gained considerable social support. State–region relations hit bottom in late 2019, when demonstrations and night street fights occurred as a result of the Constitutional Court decision to imprison Catalan pro‐independence politicians. In the Basque Country, a reverse process may be observed: after decades of its violent ‘Troubles’, the Basque Country now enjoys peace and channels its pro‐independence politics in formal directions. Beyond discursive messages, the Basque and Catalan movements have deployed body techniques to call attention to their political objectives. The historically changing moods and dispositions of the two movements may be traced through the corporeal performance techniques they have chosen as their symbols and allegories. The hand, palm, fist, skin, touch and verticality become ideological configurations that reproduce political imaginaries that express the dispositions, risks and desires of nationalist constructions.

Regnier, Denis. 2021. Slavery and essentialism in highland Madagascar: ethnography, history, cognition. New York: Routledge. 208 pp. Hb: US$115.00. ISBN: 9781350102477.

This paper explores counterinsurgency strategies of the Turkish state during the 1990s and how they affected people’s experience of time and space in Yüksekova, a Kurdish border town in the south‐eastern tip of Turkey. The paper takes up the perspective of children to think about how forcing people to wait indefinitely enables new forms of population and territorial control. Drawing on autobiographical and ethnographic accounts, the paper demonstrates how the Turkish state establishes and maintains its sovereignty in Kurdish borderlands by constricting space, forcing a different rhythm onto the practices of everyday life and instilling ordinary existence with a sense of uncertainty.

This paper looks into the lives of displaced people and their material bonds with the past while waiting for justice during exceptional times in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s Kurdistan. Diyarbakir is known for its central location in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey for many decades. In August 2015, the old city of Diyarbakir called Sur joined other resisting cities and districts in the Kurdish region of Turkey, where Kurdish militants built barricades all around their controlled neighbourhoods against the state’s violent attacks and declared autonomy. Months after the beginning of the resistance, the Turkish state managed to take back control of Sur after heavy clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants. All the resisting neighbourhoods of Sur were razed to the ground, and close to 24,000 residents were displaced. Since then, a massive urban transformation project for Sur has been in the making. The everyday survival of the displaced people from Sur depends on the ways they negotiate with the state in a long process of waiting. Bringing together different accounts of waiting, I intend to shed light on temporal dimensions of forced displacement embedded in the remnants of the past and shaped by present history of subjugation and state violence.

This article focuses on the transformations of therelationship to the future and to its knowledge among mountain populations inSoutheast Asia in a context of economic and social change. Since its spectaculareconomic development in the 2000s, Laos has experienced an increase inrural‐urban migration, which has transformed the configuration of the country.The massive resettlement of highlanders at the end of the 1990s (and continuing to this day), has led to the gathering of peoplefrom former mountain villages into large,multi‐ethnic villages, towns and even cities. This new context of lifegives rise to new aspirations among these "pioneers of the highlands"and thus the desire to better understand the future in order to know and securemore individual and numerous choices. The objective of this article is to showthe transformations of the highlanders’ relationship to time and to the future,through an insight into the ritual procedures linked to their new aspirations.

This article constitutes an argument for both the use and expansion of the philosophical anthropology of Bruno Latour, as established in his recent work (AIME; 2012). Drawing on ethnographies of education as a methodology for empirical inquiry and specifically on meta‐ethnography as a methodology for establishing objectivised knowledge concerning education in a manner that is commensurate to the underpinning epistemological and ontological principles of AIME, this article explicates and then applies the theoretical components of AIME to the field of education research. In doing so and it proposes that education be added to Latour’s schema as an additional mode of existence.

This article provides ethnographic insights into the Southeast Asian peasantry’s engagements with agrarian change. It speaks both to Southeast Asian studies’ longstanding interest in the dynamics of socio‐economic transformation, and to anthropology’s burgeoning focus on how future‐oriented aspirations are produced, negotiated and enacted under specific socio‐political, material and historical conditions. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnic Khmu hamlet in northern Laos, I show upland peasants on the cusp of agrarian transition engaging aspirational migration through ‘controlled experiments’: pioneering pursuits of betterment, crucially buttressed by multiple, locally specific factors. These factors include a still largely intact peasant natural economy, historically endowed intimacy with the modernising state and, not least, a precariously persistent ‘intergenerational contract’ in which youthful mobility and parental stability remain ambiguously yet irreducibly intertwined. Notably, whereas much research on Laos has focused on communities (adversely) impacted by transition, this article discusses a community that is both politically connected and, concomitantly, still relatively unscathed by the (transitory) detriments of commodification, enclosure and dispossession. In sum, this article confirms that while striving for a better future is probably a basic aspect of the human condition, definitions and pursuits of such futures are contextually contingent, not least along generational lines.

Drawing on various ethnographic case studies from upland Southeast Asia, this special issue explores uplanders’ pioneering agency and challenges the stereotype of the remote and marginal uplander. We consider upland areas as dynamic sites of future‐making and change – initiated by pioneering individuals or local elites who seek out and explore different potential sources of (economic and spiritual) potency. By using the figure of the pioneer as heuristic device, we realign our ethnographic gaze on uplanders by giving particular emphasis to: (1) agents of sociopolitical dynamics in Zomia, (2) questions of remoteness and pioneering mobility, (3) old and new sources of potency, from ‘the state’ to the religious domain, (4) aspirations and future‐making and (5) pioneers of change and emergent elites.

This article focuses on the role of new Hmong religious leaders – predominantly young men – who have played an important role in spreading Protestant Christianity across Vietnam’s highlands over the past 30 years. These pastors and evangelists have directly challenged the authority of previously established Hmong local elites, whose legitimacy rested on traditional religious authority and/or state patronage, causing significant social conflict along the way. Some new Christian pioneers have gained local elite status as political and development brokers for their community, enjoying a potent combination of spiritual authority, strong external networks and financial success. As such, international religious networks can function as alternative patrons to the state for well‐placed Hmong Christian elites to tap into and redistribute to their communities – to varying degrees. Contextualising such leadership dynamics within wider anthropological scholarship of upland Southeast Asia affirms the ‘pioneering ethos’ of local elites in challenging, complying with or mimicking state forms of governance in their attempts to draw in and channel external potency. This highlights the degree of political manoeuvring space available to non‐state actors in a supposedly authoritarian state, as well as ongoing tensions and controversies facing pastors who negotiate ambiguous relationships with powerful external forces.

Given that houses have become a key signifier of an orientation towards the future, several villagers in Pliya can be regarded or regard themselves as pioneers of the construction of a new type of house. I will suggest here that the construction of new concrete houses is not to be understood merely as an adoption of lowland styles but as a self‐conscious and selective use of a style of building. Those who are pioneering these houses also discuss their efforts in terms of pioneering acts, emphasising the self‐taught nature of their appropriation of new aspects of craftsmanship. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork among the Khmu of Pliya, and especially on more recent fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, I wish to argue that the way in which new houses have entered the local cosmos and are materialised by pioneering builders highlights a pioneering ethos that infuses local attempts at future‐making, from wet rice cultivation to concrete villas.

Hat Ang, mythological culture hero of the Phong (an ethnic minority in Laos), exemplifies the figure of the upland pioneer. Taking the legend of Hat Ang as a vantage point, this paper discusses the ethnohistory of this specific Austroasiatic group and offers a mythological perspective into the discussion of uplanders’ agency and future‐making. This key myth of the Phong addresses questions of remoteness and relationality, of individual aspirations and hubris. Therefore, investigating mythology is key to understanding past and present representations of Phong culture and society within a multi‐ethnic upland context.

This paper explores infrastructural disruptions of utility provisioning caused by stealing of copper infrastructural parts in a copper‐processing town in Serbia. Such illicit practices of infrastructural stripping were part of copper circulation via theft, cynically referred to as ‘recycling’ of copper, and were incentivised by increased copper price and the specific local economy. Drawing from ethnography among the citizens who reacted to the disruption of the heating provision caused by infrastructural stripping and the disfranchised citizens who illegally recycled parts of infrastructures, I shift so far predominant scholarly focus on engagements with infrastructural material flows and/or their stasis to show how governance hinges on the very liquidation of infrastructural channels. Following the underlying mechanics of the ‘state’ and its uneven distributive politics, I argue that stripping of infrastructures and the consequential disruptions were vital in configuring the state as a desired framework necessary to regulate everyday (infrastructural) lives. I analyse how such process was arranged infrastructurally via socialist and post‐socialist patterns, which enabled the maintenance of some configurations of power (from the socialist past) to govern the everyday (infrastructural) lives. The paper contributes to the intersection between anthropological literature on infrastructures and the state and the study of post‐socialist infrastructures.

After recognising Hmong Protestantism, the Vietnamese state continued an ‘anti‐conversion’ politics. It did so by encouraging the revival of what they saw as traditional Hmong religion as a bulwark against Protestantism and by enriching the range of cultural commodities for the growing ethno‐tourism market. For the non‐converts, not only their resistance of Christianity began to be redefined as ‘the battle’ against Christianity, their belief and practices, up to then highly despised of by authorities, began to be restructured in order to gain new strength to rebound on the national and global religious stage. The new consciousness of the non‐Christian Hmong, however, worried the Vietnamese state. This contribution charts the annual competitions held since 2005 between Christian and non‐Christian groups in Lao Cai province in organising yearly Hmong communal rituals. It shows that what was meant to become a folklorised bulwark against Christianity became a new mêlée of ritual competition, as pioneering Hmong quickly seized the central stage. Ritual festivals thus become arenas of identity struggle in which none of the usual identity markers (secular, religious, communist, Christian, modern, traditional) can be taken at face value.

This article situates the case of in a broader context of sovereignty, law and waiting in Turkey. To do so, I put the production of a category for the relatives of the disappeared through a peculiar temporal lens, scrutinising different waiting types that create intertwined notions of hope, loyalty, anxiety and ambiguity. Different forms of waiting mean different temporalities, along with other demands. I thus scrutinise the performances, acts and demands of these temporalities. I then analyse the trajectory for , revealing insights into the limits of legal space and the notion of justice, since this trajectory interrupted the typical waiting patterns for the relatives of the disappeared, transforming their temporal subjectivity. Although it ended without any form of recognition, the case itself was followed by the relatives of the disappeared, who participated attentively. This participation, I believe, reveals crucial information about temporality, subjectivity, violence and legal space in Turkish Kurdistan.

Due to the difficulties in accessing detention facilities, the discussion on immigration detention often draws on limited empirical data with varying degrees of attention paid to the heterogeneity of the detained population and their different stakes in an impending removal. Although a closed institution, various legal and administrative processes related to the enforcement of immigration decisions render immigration detention a relational field. Drawing on my fieldwork experiences while conducting multi‐sited ethnographic research on the immigration detention system in Finland, I discuss how methodological choices, theoretical presuppositions and circumstantial factors affect the production of knowledge on immigration detention. I address the relevance of: 1) the case selection among detainees with considerably varying immigration histories, social situations and detention times; 2) a multi‐sited research setting to conceive the various processes of immigration enforcement during detention; 3) an engaged research strategy to access detainees’ first‐hand knowledge of their immigration cases beyond dramatic representations; and 4) the employment of administrative data in contextualising empirical findings. I argue for the importance of examining detainees’ negotiations with the deportation apparatus, which shapes available options for detainees as well as determines the outcome of detention from the ‘outside’, despite its absence in everyday life in detention.

Upland pioneering involves variations of two themes: drawing in power from the outside and the transcendence of local bounded social entities. Both integrate the distinction between inside and outside at the base of sociality in upland Southeast Asia. Pioneering is a valorised activity that continuously takes on new forms and thereby exemplifies the dynamics of inside and outside. Data from the Rmeet in Laos show that these movements have a gendered dimension.

: This special section sheds light on the relationship between sovereignty and temporality through practices of waiting in the militarised Kurdish cities and border provinces of Turkey. It reveals different feelings, practices, discourses, and imaginations derived from the waiting experience of citizens and refugees living in the midst or aftermath of the states of exceptions at the margins of the sovereign states.

Traditional culture as a vehicle for Christian future‐making

Ethnic minority elites pioneering self‐representations in northern Myanmar