The characteristic urban experience of solitude challenges traditional anthropological theories of urban life. This article surveys urban theories that treat solitude primarily as loneliness, anomie, and social disorder. It then challenges these theoretical perspectives with ethnographic cases of gay identities and "being alone together," drawn from fieldwork in New Delhi, India. I develop a heuristic concept of "social solitude" in contrast to "solidarity," and examine the political and philosophical consequences of focusing on solitude as an urban way of life and an expression of sexuality. I discuss representations of solitude in modernist literature and conclude with a reading of Deleuze.
Infrastructure and interpretation:Meters, dams, and state imagination in Scotland and India A B S T R A C TThe technical infrastructures of modern life-energy, communications, transport-stand at the juncture between material orderings of society and collective meaning. Public utilities are both material and symbolic, and both aspects require maintenance-and anthropological understanding. However, recent anthropological approaches building from science studies have tended to pursue "flat" descriptions that replace mystical or hypostatizing concepts of "social forces" with material associations and have focused on micrological discipline rather than ritual sites where collective identity is formed. By contrast, I identify an "aporetic relation" between material ordering and symbolic form as the site of ritual, and hermeneutic, processes by which large-scale political collectives are built up-and infrastructures are shaped to serve collective projects. I analyze examples of contemporary and historical infrastructural politics from India and Scotland to develop insights into how collectivities and states are formed, interpreted, and challenged in symbolic contests over their infrastructures. [infrastructure, state power, nationalism, totemism, Durkheim]
Corporate Identity in Citizens United: Legal Fictions and Anthropological TheoryThe United States Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [2010] from the outset has been a contested, highly politicized case, where judicial interpretation affected more than just election finance law; the majority's opinion explicitly intervened in a wider political struggle over personhood and the boundaries of citizenship. This article moves beyond questions of legal doctrine to highlight the social-theoretical-political contexts of the decision and its consequences for anthropological understanding of American citizenship. I trace how the majority decision appropriated and reshaped a discourse of identity. In its first formulation in social movements, "identity" was offered as a positive basis for rights and inclusion; however, the Court's appropriation reformulated identity on a negative basis, barring both regulation and recognition of identity-based claims by the State. It also went further than a traditional liberal demarcation of rights by specifically attributing agency and authoritative representation to corporate speech. Drawing on previous theoretical discussions of the corporate form and American citizenship and personhood, this article concludes that Citizens United not only allowed for new corporate power in the political sphere, but actively worked against the flourishing of a more humane and inclusive American citizenship in ways that legal anthropologists may wish to address as a matter of theory as much as politics.
This article presents a narrative of urban mobility and desire, and critically examines recent ethnographic approaches to subjectivity and “becoming” among rural–urban migrants and in urban life. Lately, ethnographic approaches to urban lives have emphasized mobility over fixity and sought to describe possibility and potential, even in cases of extreme abjection, in part inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. I examine the strengths of this “vitalist” approach to urban ethnography through an extended analysis of a fragmentary narrative of urban mobility, setting it in a wider context of political change in Delhi to show that both the reality and the interpretation of these events depend upon the prior occupation and affective shaping of distinctive urban places, or milieux, and the ongoing conceptual structuring and discursive elaboration of political meanings. I argue that such affective structures and urban mediations deserve more attention in ethnographic accounts of migratory desire and becoming.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.