Volume 47, Issue 1

Editorial May 2024

A month after I (Georgina) gave birth to my first child in 2023, we woke to reports that a maternity hospital had been shelled in Palestine. In the days immediately following the birth of my child (an experience that was more terrifying and visceral than I could have ever prepared for), I anguished over how any birthing person could survive such an experience in an active war zone. Then, to survive only to witness children around you—perhaps your own—suffer, starve, perish, become maimed physically and psychically for life. I am sensitive to the ways that the figure of the child victim is invoked in political imaginations as a means to erase structural violences and historic inequalities. Yet, a death toll of more than 12,000 child victims in the span of less than 6 months is a number that, in my view, sobers any attempt to critically analyze the humanitarian gaze. At least, not while I stand gazing at my own newborn. Postpartum days can be dark and isolating at the best of times. I say this, as someone with the privilege of paid maternity leave, in a country where reproductive rights are under attack while policies to support caregivers are limited. But how do people endure these rites of passage when postpartum darkness is shadowed by war? Especially when, in many cases, the spaces that are supposed to be safe are those that are targeted? What does safety mean for anyone in such circumstances?

Safety—or lack thereof—has been of increasing concern to anthropologists (and publics) as we move into 2024 amidst new and persistent outbreaks of conflict and political insecurity worldwide, climate anxieties, and, within the United States from where I am writing, a Presidential election looms in which basic rights to protect the lives of trans people, allow access to reproductive healthcare, and recognize the legal right for migrants to cross borders and seek asylum, are at the center of political debate. In regard to these and many other political hotspots, safety is a fraught term that is invoked in juridical discourse to justify increased surveillance, monitoring, and management of people and situations in ways that produce new forms of vulnerability and violence. The safety and protection of American citizens is pitted against the perceived threat of migrants; the safety and protection of children and cis-women is pitted against the perceived threat of trans and gender non-conforming people; and the safety and protection of the unborn is pitted against the perceived threat of abortion. Within these grossly sensationalist and violent discourses, where can we locate (and support) the material and psychic grounds of safety and justice?

Anthropology is grappling with this question in a number of areas. The upcoming American Anthropological Association [AAA] meeting to be held in Tampa, Florida in November has emerged as one of the areas most fraught with debate. Increasingly repressive legislation in Florida has targeted the rights of trans people, restricted voting rights (particularly in communities of color), limited reproductive choices, and constrained free speech. Given this context, many AAA members, including the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA), have called to boycott the November annual meeting. As SJ Dillon writes, in their pertinent essay for PoLAR Online published in December 2023, choosing to follow through with hosting the meeting in Florida sends a clear signal to that state’s legislature that explicit fascism is not enough to dissuade an organization as seemingly progressive as the AAA from accepting a financial loss. In January 2024, the AAA Executive Board made a sudden decision to continue with the plan to host the annual meeting in Tampa (without, it seemed, meaningful consultation with the AAA membership). The decision about whether or not to host (or attend) the meeting in Tampa is certainly a complex one. As the AAA Executive Board pointed out, continuing to host the meeting in Florida can be, for some, a way to defy repressive state logics, and there are many other good arguments that support attending the meeting in Tampa, particularly from colleagues located in Tampa and Florida. As part of their commitment to hosting the meeting in Florida, the AAA Executive Board have set out a number of initiatives that aim to protect the membership and maintain communication with Sections to hear concerns as these are raised. Yet, the whole process has, in this Co-Editor’s view (and as echoed by others), brought up larger questions about the transparency of decision-making processes undertaken by the AAA (and existing conversations about the inclusivity of annual meetings overall). Now, the decision about whether or not to attend the meeting is left up to individual members. Many Sections including APLA, are providing hybrid options for participation. Perhaps we could see these pivots as their own kind of political possibility: a move towards inclusivity that could be applied beyond 2024 and make future participation in annual meetings more accessible to those managing financial burdens, travel restrictions, or balancing participation with health concerns.

As the Co-Editor of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, I believe it would be remiss to ignore this larger political context within which this May issue is being developed. The stakes of the debate—if we can call it that—over the Tampa boycott reflect the larger political milieu of fascist politics within the United States and are indicative of a concerning lack of transparency from the organizations that are supposed to support people to navigate careers and professional pathways within these contexts. Whatever the outcome, whether the meeting is well attended or not, it is clear that some of the most vulnerable people within the AAA membership and anthropological community at large, graduate students, contingent professors, and scholars of color, will be most negatively impacted. For many, the stakes of participation are not a “debate” but an anxious question about whether to participate in a ritual that is often crucial for developing one’s professional profile while putting themselves at risk through that participation. We are not welcoming these future colleagues into a community that feels particularly safe.

The articles in the May 2024 issue of PoLAR illuminate concerns that move our attention well beyond the politics of an annual meeting. Questions of neo-colonial governance are at the center of Hird-Younger and Sullivan’s article, “Signing Documents: Accountability Politics and Racialized Suspicion in Africa’s Development Audits,” whereby they trace signatures in development organizations and show how these reveal entrenched racialized logics of suspicion towards African NGOs. Similarly focusing on NGOs and development, but within Indonesia, Rasyadian’s article “(Non)Governing Machine: Seized Activism and NGOization as Forms of Governance in Indonesia,” develops a theory of NGOization as a mode of governmentality that straddles political forms that emerge between local politics and transnational networks. Both articles bring important new insights into development theory in anthropology, extending existing critiques of NGOs as neoliberal institutions to show NGO practices reflect and refract particular forms of global politics and governance.

Turning our attention to regional politics and law, Hughes’ article, “Beyond Retributive and Restorative Justice: In Search of Mercy with Jordan’s Bedouin,” considers how approaches to mercy in Jordan inform local efforts against mass incarceration, providing new insights into a kind of practical and localized decarceral activism that challenges utopian visions of restorative justice. Ackerman’s article, “Everything I Have Seen There, That I Know…”: Witnessing the Colombian Armed Conflict Through Refugees’ “Narratives of Implication,” theorizes testimony as a “chain of violence” that collapses the distinction between witness-as-observer to witness-as-survivor, an argument which has important implications for thinking through contemporary forms of exclusion through asylum and immigration systems.

Staying with everyday violence, Pozzi’s article, “Looking for Trouble. (Infra-)Law Enforcement, Penal Populism, and Professional Habitus against Squatting in Italy,” engages us in attending to the “infra-law enforcement” exercised in Milan where squatters are scolded by the enforcers of anti-squatting law, “Fix this mess, this is a public house, not a pigsty.” Pozzi thus explores the pervasive reality, in Italy, of what is referred to as “penal populism” and both infra-legal instruments and extra-legal manifestations of anti-squatting law that call into question the rule of law amidst complex cultures of normative and political governance. Turning our gaze to the infra-/extra-legal role of religion in law, Coyle Rosen’s article, “Copresent Jurisdictions: Courts, Policing, Theopolitics, and Akan Spirituality in the United States,” reveals the ways in which both those victimized by formal law and the extralegality that emerges around it—and often even those who perpetrate its violence—ultimately believe not so much in law’s power but that of the divine. Hence, Rosen shows us the copresence of the transnational jurisdictions of Akan spirituality originally from Ghana (and its priest who continue to exist across these national and spiritual borders), on one hand, and formal law in the United States, on the other.

In this issue’s Directions section, the section editors introduce the two curated commentaries that tackle the ever timely and challenging concern that we ethnographers should have with ensuring the ethic of care for our interlocutors (individuals and communities) we should display in and through our research and citation practices. Focusing on the present and future, Peacock explores the contemporary issues raised by digital technologies and the de-anonymizing potential they hold as well as the promise they might offer for how we might potentially navigate them responsibly. Taking a more retrospective view of the present, Hopper interrogates our citational practices that center the authority of texts whose historical research and writing may contradict and thus usher into our present and future work problematic ethical and political practices of the past. Both authors prompt us to rethink and recommit to the primary centrality of our obligations to our interlocutors while they also remind us that the shadow of history over the present is long and that our present works will themselves one day be the historical authorities on which future generations of scholars will rely and therefore demands that we honor them too by engaging in ethical research practices in the present including drawing on the past selectively because critically.

As I (Georgina) finish writing this Editorial within the throes of life with a new baby and amidst the constancy of various global crises, I am increasingly thinking about what Cindy Katz (2001, 711), characterizes (layering feminist theory onto Marxist analysis) as social reproduction: the “fleshy, messy, and indeterminate” stuff of life which is necessary for all of us to live. As Co-Editor of a journal focusing on emergent themes in political and legal anthropology, it is easy to get lost in the spectacular forms that violence takes, whereby the basic stuff of existence: eating, resting, sheltering, laboring is taken for granted as the grounds upon which daily life (and anthropological work) is reproduced. But there is nothing to be taken for granted about these practices of everyday life. While basic care work—the work of caring for children, the elderly, or households—has historically been diminished, without these forms of care the ability to labor, and to re-produce life itself, would be impossible. There is something powerful about returning to the basic elements of a safe existence as a lens to think through the current political contexts. What kind of world, as anthropologists, do we hope to reproduce through our work and our professional lives? How can we best support our colleagues to exist without concerns about their material, economic, and psychological safety? If the personal is, truly, political, then it is time to move some of these topics from debates to considerations of material safety and the ability to survive.

Sindiso MnisiWeeks, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Georgina Ramsay, University of Delaware, are Co-Editors-in-Chief of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

SINCERE THANKS TO THE 2023 POLAR REVIEWERS

Omolade Adunbi

Elias Alexandar

Lori Allen

Jaime Alves

Myriam Amri

Roslynn Ang

Philipp Angermeyer

Alize Arican

Adam Ashforth

Krithika Ashok

Tianyi Bai

Michelle Bellino

Dalal Benbabaali

Jonas Bens

Julie Billaud

Stefano Bloch

Noor Borbieva

Avram Bornstein

Laurian Bowles

Glenn Bowman

Lydia Boyd

Gwen Burnyeat

Marta Cabezas Fernández

Alejandro Camargo

Kim Cameron Dominguez

Estella Carpi

Upal Chakrabarti

Uday Chandra

Yogesh Chandrani

Liviu Chelcea

Elaine Chun

Cynthia Cohen

Kimberley Coles

John Collins

Nicole Constable

Risa Cromer

Kari Dahlgren

Julia Dahlvik

Deepa Das Acevedo

Bhavna Dave

Sharyn Davies

Erin Dean

Michael Degani

Anthony Dest

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

Aurora Donzelli

James Doucet-Battle

Yazan Doughan

Kristin Doughty

Darlène Dubuisson

Erin Durban

Stener Ekern

Susan Ellison

Harriet Evans

Can Evren

Bilge First

Miranda Forsyth

Brady G’Sell

William Garriott

Ilana Gershon

Zoltan Gluck

Jessica R. Greenberg

Miranda Hallett

Abdelmajid Hannoum

Elina Hartikainen

Nomaan Hasan

Zehra Hasmi

John Haviland

Tiana Hayden

Benjamin Hegarty

Tinashe Hofisi

Brian Horton

Rebecca Howes-Mischel

Mythri Jegathesan

Thijs Jeursen

Livia Johannesson

Ben Jones

Carla Jones

Rachael Joo

Sunila Kale

Jessica Katzenstein

Gulay Kilicaslan

Satendra Kumar

David Lewis

Adam Liebman

Zhenru Jacqueline Lin

Jinee Lokaneeta

Martin Lundsteen

Maurice Magaña

Neil Matthews

Catherine McGlynn

Carole McGranahan

Julian Millie

Margaretta Mitchell

Jeremy Morris

Meghan Morris

Fiona Murphy

Keith Murphy

Smoki Musaraj

Nicole Newendorp

Martin Nøkleberg

Maria Fernanda Olarte

Arzoo Osanloo

Vita Peacock

Federico Pérez Fernández

Romana Perez

Lina Pinto-Garcia

Leah Pope

Stefano Portelli

Natasha Raheja

Sonya Rao

Elana Resnick

Analiese Richard

Jennifer Riggan

Sandra M. Rios

Cory Rodgers

Gilberto Rosas

Theunis Roux

Jane Saffitz

Sayantan Saha Roy

Pietro Saitta

Zainab Saleh

Jovia Salifu

Hesham Sallam

Kristin Sangren

Younes Saramifar

Nelli Sargsyan

Caress Schenk

Victor Shammas

Dhardon Sharling

Sam Shuman

Maria Sidorkina

Rachel Sieder

Omar Sirri

Alan Smart

Dagmar Soennecken

Lynn Stephen

Fatima Tassadiq

Ferdiansyah Thajib

Tatjana Thelen

Marnie Thomson

Annie Tucker

Lieke van der Veer

Sonja van Wichelen

Stacey Vanderhurst

Lieselotte Viaene

Richard Wilson

Thomas Wilson

Frederick Wojnarowski

Otto Wolf

Lauren Woodard

Mingyuan Zhang

Research Articles

Signing Documents: Accountability Politics and Racialized Suspicion in Africa’s Development Audits
Miriam Hird-Younger, Sarah O’Sullivan

(Non)governing Machine: Seized Activism and NGOization as Forms of Governance in Indonesia
Yuda Rasyadian

Beyond Retributive and Restorative Justice: In Search of Mercy with Jordan’s Bedouin
Geoffrey Hughes

“Everything I Have Seen There, That I Know …”: Witnessing the Colombian Armed Conflict Through Refugees’ Narratives of Implication
Alana Ackerman

Looking for Trouble: (Infra-)Law Enforcement, Penal Populism, and Professional Habitus against Squatting in Italy
Giacomo Pozzi

Copresent Jurisdictions: Spirits, Theopolitics, and the Rise of Akan Spirituality in the United States
Lauren Coyle Rosen

Directions

Beyond Pseudonyms: Ethics and Politics of Ethnographic Representation
Deniz Yonucu and Caroline Mary Parker

Writing Opacity: Going Beyond Pseudonyms with Spirit Portraiture
Vita Peacock

The Good Thief: A Note on Revisits in Long-Running Ethnography
Kim Hopper

Book Review Editorial

Book Review Editorial: Recent Contributions in Political and Legal Anthropology
Matthew Canfield, Smoki Musaraj

Book Reviews

Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe Apostolos Andrikopoulos (The University of Chicago Press, 2023)
Elsemieke van Osch

Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine Greta Lynn Uehling (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2023)
Jessica Storey-Nagy