Discussant: Sanghamitra Das (Post-Doc, Anthropology)

Building on visual representations of animals in circuses featured in circus advertisement and in the mass media between 1965 and 2018 in India, this article investigates the changing figure of the circus animal as it has been animated by circus companies themselves and more recently by their main detractors: organizations working for the ethical treatment of animals, spokespersons for animal rights, and prominent animal lovers in India, working together towards the ban of animal presence in circus companies. After contextualizing the circulation of representations of circus animals in relation to the history of the Indian circus and of animals in circuses, I document the interest taken by animal rights activists into the genre-defining image of interspecies performance and sociality circulated by circus companies to promote their shows. I argue that animal rights activists invested, reframed and transformed the aestheticization of multi-species sociality that circus companies cultivated, and thereby successfully amplified the battles they led in the name of animal welfare. I contend that the success of this reframing hinged upon the projection of pervasive social hierarchies onto the field of commensurability circus publicity cultivated between human and non-human circus artists. The foregrounded “wildness” of circus sociality opened a possibility to draw circus animals close to those benevolently working for their well-being (animal rights activists), and farther from those caring for them in the context of circus entertainment (circus professionals), represented as profit-seeking and suspect on account of the atypical lifestyle their profession occasions for themselves and for their non-human counterparts.

Discussant: Bob Offer-Westort (PhD student, Anthropology)

Discussant: Karlyn Gorski (Assistant Instructional Professor, Harris)

In order for democracy to function, some people in a meeting or other decision-making events have to be ignored. In this paper, we turn to recent US school board meetings to explore how people organize to ignore specific participant roles in local democratic contexts. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, school boards across the U.S. gained widespread public attention as ideological battlegrounds, as mask mandates and the pivot to online teaching emerged as vehicles for articulating and contesting the foundations of political action. This was not exactly new, since school boards were crucial sites at which the state met the street in prior moments, even if mediatized public attention was being directed in novel ways. Yet more than the variable substance of the policies-qua-“issues” that refracted binary partisan frames (and vice versa), what emerged in these school board meetings was a persistent question of how the state listens to its citizens – or not. In this paper, we conceptualize the “state ignoring subject” and its corollary, the “state-ignored subject,” as figures that gets institutionally structured and interpersonally inhabited in the reflexively public space of the U.S. school board meeting. We elaborate the semiotic and institutional strategies through which procedural listening gets used to block the forms of substantive listening that are variously demanded by meeting attendees, both explicitly through verbal discourse, and implicitly through conduct. We show how individuals work to inhabit and challenge ignoring/ignored subject-positions, not in order to refuse seats at the metaphorical table, but to strategically manage what happens after seats are allocated and voices are given space in situations where it has been determined in advance that some groups’ called-for outcomes should be categorically ignored. We build on scholarship in the anthropology of the state and bureaucracy along with linguistic anthropological theorizations of the racially hegemonic listening subject to show how ignoring stands as a constitutive modality of liberal democracy.

Discussant TBA

In this chapter, I consider the ways in which settler colonial land-grabs provided the historical conditions for the connective tissue between today’s family inheritance and the broader American imperial project in the desert West. I show how exclusions were legally framed on a continental scale and discuss how they show up in the neighborhood of Sun City, Arizona, an age-restricted community 13 miles north of Phoenix. Under Western property regimes, home / land / property is weighted down with the signification of kinship, put to work via an economization of the rooms we sleep in and the halls we walk through inheritability. This chapter thus explores what happens when certain Western property regimes confound this relation, when family feeling, or kinship, is not tied to property—and when land and property are become like / fungible as / dissolved with kin ties.

Discussant: Anna Prior (PhD student, CHD)

This is a chapter from a dissertation based on ethnographic data collected at a shamanic training course run by an indigenous Shipibo healer in the Peruvian Amazon. The dissertation investigates how students from around the world who attend the course understand and experience “plant diets” –  ritual processes to connect to and learn from a plant spirit and invite the plant’s consciousness into the dieter’s body. 

In this chapter, I discuss how dieters navigate tensions around following the rules of the diets (messages conveyed by the healer and facilitators), messages from their diet plants (presumed to be directly received from the plant spirit), and their own inner knowing (asserting their own individual will and selfhood). Dieters ultimately learn to balance “dominating” but not “crossing” the plants – i.e. asserting their will enough to properly take charge of the relationship without crossing the line and thus upsetting and provoking punishment from the plants. By closely examining teachings about and narratives of experiences with “dominating” and “crossing” the plants, I explore how dieters listen to or push back against themselves, human others, and non-human others. Ultimately, the body becomes the arbiter of truth, as discernment is measured through bodily outcomes. I show how those negotiations at the boundaries of self and other are an integral part to the process of healing and transformation as dieters adjust to their new hybrid human-plant bodies

Discussant: Fadi Hakim (Teaching Fellow, Anthropology)

What do Diyanet’s clients want to learn most from its preachers? In a typical Diyanet sermon (sohbet) for women, the moment that captivates the audience most is when the preacher teaches them a prayer, dua, often in Arabic. Teaching a dua forms an important interaction for one-on-one consultations taking place at Diyanet’s Fatwa Call Centers or Family Bureaus as well. The usage of prayer and the accompanying metapragmatic commentaries on prayer hence play a central role in Diyanet’s religious education for adults. By delving into interactions and tensions centered around the register of prayer, I first aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of “religious needs” because, for many, learning how to pray properly is to effectively communicate with and seek divine intervention from God to solve their problems. Second, however, not all Diyanet preachers endorse the idea of using prayer to “solve” one’s problems. Even when they teach prayers relevant to specific situations, they ground the use of these prayers in Prophet Muhammad’s exemplars. They consistently remind the audience of the importance of embracing uncertainty regarding whether God’s response will align with their hopes. These cautions, I argue, demonstrate how the teaching of religious registers aims to inculcate a particular understanding of limited human agency in contrast to that of an omniscient and omnipotent God, which invites people to embody the virtue of humility. From this ethnographic moment, I suggest theorizing intention as a category of human interiority distinct from action, which represents an exterior aspect of human agency. Third, I discuss the social dimension of prayer, as praying for others is considered a significant act of goodwill that leads to the acquisition of merit in the eyes of God. I aim to show how intention, as a form of interiority, can take a social manifestation in creating a community of prayer.