Anthropology

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the highlands of Barinas, this article investigates the impact of “twenty-first century socialist” policies on the Andean peasantry and the relationships established as part of Venezuela’s ongoing agrarian reform. The analysis explores the historical and material-cultural factors surrounding the production of coffee in the Andes and the dynamics, which have shaped a small group of growers. It also examines the recent efforts of the Bolivarian Government to increase domestic coffee production and support internal growers, suggesting that attempts to insert the state into the rentier structure of the coffee economy have somewhat inadvertently fostered working class consciousness. The ethnographic vignette illustrates the present relationship of state functionaries to coffee growers and narrates their analysis of the conditions, showing the contradictory effect these relations have on growers. The rest of the analysis locates the sources of this social awareness and its potential effect on state formation. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of hegemony in history and a few observations about the future of peasant politics in the twenty-first century.

Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of a transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, insist that only their own form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) is capable of spreading Islamic virtue. Tablighis dismiss the efforts to spread Islam by a diverse array of Islamist actors, including political parties, corporations, NGOs, and popular televangelists. This highlights a central cleavage within the Islamic revival in Pakistan. While Islamists have adopted a modernist conception of religion associated with egalitarian individualism, Tablighis understand dawat to be a religious practice that entails an ethics of hierarchy in which one becomes virtuous by submitting to the authority of pious others. In dawat, Tablighis create a hierarchically structured world of pious sociality against the threat of egalitarian individualism in liberal and Islamist varieties.

This article explores the ritual creation of a distinct form of pious masculinity
among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic
piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani Tablighis practice a ritualized
form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) that they claim cultivates the
pious virtues that allow them to live ethically with kin, neighbors, and fellow
citizens. I argue that dawat entails a reflexive ethical stance on male
agency and represents an effort to manage the growing problem of male
violence in Pakistani life. I conclude by arguing that constructions of “religious
violence” so prevalent in the age of the Global War on Terror are
underpinned by liberal–secular assumptions about ritual as an absence of
critical thought and hierarchy as intrinsically violent. This liberal–secular
framework not only rationalizes secular power, it also elides the ethical work
that Tablighis are doing to address the violent afflictions of postcolonial modernity
in Pakistan.

This dissertation focuses on the history and culture of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Specifically, it addresses the intricate relationship between disjuncture, cultural revitalization, public presentation, and legitimation. Historically presented as “Paleolithic Man” by prominent theorists like Charles Darwin and Edward Burnett Tylor, the Tasmanians were conceptualized as the “rudest” culture ever documented. They became an iconic case of savagery extinguished in the name of progress following their perceived extinction in 1876. Despite this powerful narrative of disappearance, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people have long been at the forefront of indigenous rights movements in Australia. My dissertation strives to explain why this is so. After analyzing the place of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people in social thought, I proceed to challenge the centrality of race in popular conceptions of indigeneity. I contend that, in Aboriginal Tasmania at least, racial purity is secondary to geographical and familial ties in the comparative evaluation of community status and social esteem. Next, I examine the ways in which the Tasmanian Aboriginal people have revived many elements of their “lost” culture, including material culture production (basketry, bark canoes, kelp water carriers, etc.) and language. The investigation of these processes of cultural revitalization, and how they interact with post-colonial and “unbroken” traditions, provides a valuable lens through which common understandings of continuity and hybridity are challenged and complicated. These articulations, and the ways in which they are formatted for public consumption in museum exhibits, heritage campaigns, and education programs, are emblematic of broader efforts to form connections in the face of notable gaps and separations. This “gap-work” highlights the continuity between the ancestors and today’s community. I argue many of these connections are compensatory; they compensate for gaps that cannot be closed. Alternatively, they highlight the productivity of disjuncture in the formation of emergent meanings and identities. All this work, through revitalization programs and other avenues, is informed by post-settlement identities shaped on the Bass Strait Islands and Tasmania proper. The present and the past connect and interact in compelling ways, defining contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginality in a dialectical manner.

This article focuses on the design and execution of two
exhibits about Tasmanian Aboriginality at the Tasmanian
Museum and Art Gallery. The first is a Tasmanian Aboriginal
group exhibit from 1931, which was heavily informed
by ideologies of Tasmanian primitivity and extinction. The
second is 2008’s tayenebe, a celebration of the resurgence
of fiber work among Tasmanian Aboriginal women. In each
instance, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people are on display,
but the level of community control and subtext is notably
different. This article builds on discussions of cultural revitalization
and reclamation by showing the process and
how it is depicted for public consumption. [cultural revitalization,
representation, indigeneity, Tasmania, Australia]

Over the past forty years the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, long marked as an iconic case of extinction , have revitalized many elements of their 'lost' culture. Palawa kani, the constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language, is an example of such efforts. The construction and utilization of palawa kani is one element of a broader Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural politics working to strengthen the Indigenous status, authenticity, and presence in Tasmania specifically and Australia more generally. In this article I recount the historical documentation of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages and analyze the process through which multiple historical languages were utilized in the construction and consecration of a single 'official' Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Rather than existing strictly as a tool for communication , I argue palawa kani is a cultural artifact that, like an emblem, works to distinguish the Tasma-nian Aboriginal community, one that lacks many of the stereotypical components of Australian Aboriginality, within Tasmanian society. As such, it is best understood in relation to Clifford's 'indige-nous articulations' (2001) and Cowlishaw's mythopoeia of Aboriginality in Australia (2010, 2011). I examine what palawa kani does for, and what it represents to, the larger Tasmanian Aboriginal community.