JHB Archives

Violent Affections

Violent Affections uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Based on analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of ‘gay propaganda’ law, the book shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials. It then utilises an original methodology of studying ‘legal memes’ and argues that these individual affective states are directly connected to the political violence aimed at queer lives more generally.

The main aim of Violent Affections is to explore the social mechanisms and techniques that impact anti-queer violence evidenced in the reviewed cases. Alexander Sasha Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature – queer theory and affect theory – in order to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. Taking the empirical observations from Russia as a starting point, he develops an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon.
The book traces how exactly affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus and eventually invade the body that responds with violence. In this analytic effort, it draws on the arguments from memetics – the theory of how pieces of information pass on from one body to another as they thrive to survive by continuing to resonate. This work makes the argument truly interdisciplinary.

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

*** Winner: EASA Early Career Award 2018 ***

What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people’s conventional values is losing its effective power, allowing for new opportunities for recuperation.

Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: a street market in Tallinn where concepts such as ‘market’ and ‘employment’ take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a multi-purpose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses difficult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial and temporal co-evolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO and the European Union, and represents a place of continual negotiation; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu, that has avoided promoting a single narrative of the past.

By exploring these places of cultural and historical significance, which all contribute to our understanding of how the new generation in Estonia is not following the expectations and values of its predecessor, the book also demonstrates how we can understand generational change in a material sense.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3

For a post-human hitchhiker, human life – with its anxiety, ageing, illness and constant need for problem-solving – may look unviable. Yet, for humans, the life struggle is softened by human touch, human emotion and human cooperation.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 continues the journey of the two previous volumes into the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules and hidden practices. It focuses on issues of emotional ambivalence and pressures of the digital age. The informal practices presented in this volume demonstrate the urgency of alleviating tensions between continuity and all-too-rapid change and the need to tackle the central problem of modern societies – uncertainty.

The volume takes a reader on a ‘biographical’ journey through elusive, taken-for-granted or banal ways of getting things done from over 70 countries and world regions. It offers innovative understanding of the significance of fringes, and challenges the assumption that informality is associated exclusively with poverty, underdevelopment, the Global South, oppressive regimes or the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It also maps the patterns of informality around the globe; identifies specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way; and documents their ambivalent impact on people engaged in problem-solving, on societies in which these problems arise, and on humanity overall.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 2

Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this book shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this volume are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies.

By mapping the grey zones, blurred boundaries, types of ambivalence and contexts of complexity, this book creates the first Global Map of Informality. The accompanying database ([www.in-formality.com][1]) is searchable by region, keyword or type of practice, so do explore what works, how, where and why!

Central Peripheries

Central Peripheries explores post-Soviet Central Asia through the prism of nation-building. Although relative latecomers on the international scene, the Central Asian states see themselves as globalized, and yet in spite of – or perhaps precisely because of – this, they hold a very classical vision of the nation-state, rejecting the abolition of boundaries and the theory of the ‘death of the nation’. Their unabashed celebration of very classical nationhoods built on post-modern premises challenges the Western view of nationalism as a dying ideology that ought to have been transcended by post-national cosmopolitanism.

Marlene Laruelle looks at how states in the region have been navigating the construction of a nation in a post-imperial context where Russia remains the dominant power and cultural reference. She takes into consideration the ways in which the Soviet past has influenced the construction of national storylines, as well as the diversity of each state’s narratives and use of symbolic politics. Exploring state discourses, academic narratives and different forms of popular nationalist storytelling allows Laruelle to depict the complex construction of the national pantheon in the three decades since independence. The second half of the book focuses on Kazakhstan as the most hybrid national construction and a unique case study of nationhood in Eurasia.

Based on the principle that only multidisciplinarity can help us to untangle the puzzle of nationhood, Central Peripheries uses mixed methods, combining political science, intellectual history, sociology and cultural anthropology. It is inspired by two decades of fieldwork in the region and a deep knowledge of the region’s academia and political environment.

‘Am I Less British?’

‘Am I Less British?’ focuses on the children of refugees and immigrants in North London, whose parents migrated from Turkey.

Providing a rich ethnography of the lives of the children, the book studies their sense of identity, belonging and their transnational experiences. It aims to understand how the children position themselves within a range of locations (London, North London and Turkey), where they face class hierarchy, racism and discrimination, and explores how they think about their sense of belonging within the contemporary political context in Britain and Turkey. De-identifying themselves from national identities and holding onto the oppressed identities appear as new forms of resistance in response to racism and exclusion.

The experiences of the young people reflect the complexity of their lives in changing political and social circumstances across the borders of nation-states, and the importance of other categories of identity, including local identities. Overall, the book argues that the intersections of local, national and transnational approaches, the political context through which the lives of young people are framed, and their sophisticated engagement with ideas of race, class, ethnicity and gender, are crucial in understanding their identity formation.

The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century Economy

The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century Economy contributes to the understanding of the ambivalent nature of power, oscillating between conflict and cooperation, public and private, global and local, formal and informal, and does so from an empirical perspective. It offers a collection of country-based cases, as well as critically assesses the existing conceptions of power from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

The diverse analyses of power at the macro, meso or micro levels allow the volume to highlight the complexity of political economy in the twenty-first century. Each chapter addresses key elements of that political economy (from the ambivalence of the cases of former communist countries that do not conform with the grand narratives about democracy and markets, to the dual utility of new technologies such as face-recognition), thus providing mounting evidence for the centrality of an understanding of ambivalence in the analysis of power, especially in the modern state power-driven capitalism.

Anchored in economic sociology and political economy, this volume aims to make ‘visible’ the dimensions of power embedded in economic practices. The chapters are predominantly based on post-communist practices, but this divergent experience is relevant to comparative studies of how power and economy are interrelated.

Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan

Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, it foregrounds the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. Elena Borisova examines the role of mobility in historical and cultural ideas about the good life and how it becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral and modern subjects. Addressing the complex relationship between the economic, imaginative and moral aspects of (im)mobility, she shows that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigating ethical personhood as it is a quest for economic resources.

This book reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person and the family. It is a contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centred on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia.

Crisis for Whom?

Children feature centrally in the ubiquitous narratives of ‘migration crises’. They are often depicted as essentially vulnerable and in need of special protections, or suspiciously adult-like and a threat to national borders. At the same time, many voices, experiences, and stories are rarely heard, especially about children on the move within the global South. This bilingual book, written in English and Spanish, challenges simplistic narratives to enrich perspectives and understanding. Drawing on collaborations between young (im)migrants, researchers, artists and activists, this collection asks new questions about how crises are produced, mobility is controlled, and childhood is conceptualised. Answers to these questions have profound implications for resources, infrastructures, and relationships of care. Authors offer insights from diverse global contexts, painting a rich and insightful tapestry about childhood (im)mobility. They stress that children are more than recipients of care and that the crises they face are multiple and stratifying, with long historical roots. Readers are invited to understand migration as an act of concern and love, and to attend to how the solidarities between citizens and ‘others’, adults and children, and between children, are understood and forged.

La niñez ocupa un lugar central en las narrativas omnipresentes de las “crisis migratorias”. A menudo ésta es representada como esencialmente vulnerable y necesitada de protección especial, como sospechosamente parecida a los adultos, o como una amenaza para las fronteras nacionales. Al mismo tiempo, existen muchas voces, experiencias e historias que rara vez son escuchadas, especialmente aquellas que hablan sobre las infancias en movimiento dentro del Sur global. ‘Este libro bilingüe, escrito en inglés y español, desafía las narrativas simplistas para enriquecer nuestra perspectivas y comprensión. Basada en colaboraciones entre jóvenes (in)migrantes, investigadores, artistas y activistas, esta colección plantea nuevas preguntas sobre cómo se producen las crisis, cómo se controla la movilidad y cómo se conceptualiza a la infancia y la niñez. Las respuestas a estas preguntas tienen profundas implicaciones para la distribución de recursos, la infraestructura y las prácticas de cuidado. Las y los autores ofrecen perspectivas que surgen de diversos contextos globales, construyendo un rico y detallado tapiz sobre la (in)movilidad infantil. Destacan que niñas y niños son mucho más que simples receptores de cuidados y que las crisis que enfrentan son múltiples y estratificadas, con profundas raíces históricas. Se invita a las/os lectoras/es a entender la migración como un acto de concientización y amor, y a poner atención en cómo se entienden y forjan las solidaridades entre ciudadanos y aquellos que son percibidos como “otros”; entre adultos y niñas/os, y entre las/os niñas/os mismas/os.

全球智能手机超越青年科技

智能手机通常就在我们眼皮子底下，也许你以为对它足够了解，但真的是这样吗？为了探寻手机的真面目，11位人类学家分别在亚、非、欧和南美洲进行了16个月的田野调查，关注当地中老年人智能手机的使用情况。他们深入了解智能手机如何成为每个人的科技，而非年轻人专属。

通过全球比较研究，《全球智能手机》（The Global Smartphone）一书呈现了一系列全新视角。与我们朝夕相处的智能手机，不仅是“无限机会主义”（perpetual opportunism）的设备，也是我们的居所。本书作者展现了智能手机如何不仅仅是 “手机应用载体”，并探索人们对智能手机的不同看法和使用。

智能手机拥有前所未有的可塑性，因而迅速成为人们价值观的载体。要理解这一点，我们必须细致体察不同地区和文化的微妙不同：比如中国和日本的视觉传播、喀麦隆和乌干达的移动支付，又或者是在智利和爱尔兰,人们如何获取健康信息，同时，在耶路撒冷、巴西和意大利人口老龄化的情况也不尽相同。只有如此，我们才能真正了解智能手机及其对全球人类生活产生的影响。