Table Of ContentEthnography in Unstable Places
Ethnography in Unstable Places
Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change
Edited by Carol J. Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz, and Kay B. Warren
d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s d u r h a m & l o n d o n 2 0 0 2
∫ 2002 Duke University Press All rights reserved
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Contents
Carol J. Greenhouse 1
Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives
Part One. Law against Culture
Carroll McC. Lewin 37
Ghettos in the Holocaust: The Improvisation
of Social Order in a Culture of Terror
Robert J. Gordon 61
Unsettled Settlers: Internal Pacification
and Vagrancy in Namibia
Howard J. De Nike 85
Judges without Courts: The Legal Culture
of German Reunification
Part Two. Ethnographies of Agency in the Fissures of the State
Stacia E. Zabusky 113
Ethnography in/of Transnational Processes: Following Gyres
in the Worlds of Big Science and European Integration
Phillip C. Parnell 146
The Composite State: The Poor and the Nation in Manila
Elizabeth Faier 178
Domestic Matters: Feminism and Activism
among Palestinian Women in Israel
James M. Freeman and Nguyen Dinh Huu 210
‘‘Best Interests’’ and the Repatriation of
Vietnamese Unaccompanied Minors
Part Three. Resistance and Remembrance
Eve Darian-Smith 249
Beating the Bounds: Law, Identity, and
Territory in the New Europe
Nancy Ries 276
‘‘Honest Bandits’’ and ‘‘Warped People’’: Russian
Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay
Judy Rosenthal 316
Trance against the State
Part Four. Conclusion
Elizabeth Mertz 355
The Perfidy of Gaze and the Pain of Uncertainty:
Anthropological Theory and the Search for Closure
Kay B. Warren 379
Toward an Anthropology of Fragments,
Instabilities, and Incomplete Transitions
Contributors 393
Works Cited 395
Index 427
Carol J. Greenhouse
Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives
The essays in this volume explore experiential connections between
political instability and social life. The contributors consider situations
in which established social routines—including taken-for-granted un-
derstandings of society itself—have been altered by transformations of
state power. In the absence of routines, other social connections and
registers proliferate, some more productively than others. The authors’
explorations of the agencies, interests, desires, and identities further
lead them to reassess the nature of state power under more normal
circumstances; their reassessments extend to some of anthropology’s
classic representations of the state, politics, and social organization—
and ethnography itself. Indeed, the book is as much about ethnography
as it is about political transformation; the book’s main claim is that
these are necessarily connected issues.
Today, the question of how people manage their lives in the midst of
dramatic political change engages many scholars in the human sci-
ences, including a widening circle of anthropologists and others for
whom ethnography is a primary mode of inquiry. In this exciting new
literature, this volume is distinctive in theorizing reflexive ethnography
in relation to the junctures of states and subjectivities. Specifically, by
eschewing the assumption that states are organizational forms, the
authors demystify the conventions of scale that ordinarily would ob-
scure such junctures. They resist the anthropological convention that
places states and society at some remove from personal life, as if they
were merely neutral or natural settings for action. In the following
chapters, such reified notions of ‘‘state’’ and ‘‘society’’ become eth-
nographic objects in themselves as authors follow the careers of these
ideas in contexts of crisis and change. Crisis does not necessarily ex-
tinguish the e≈cacy of taken-for-granted notions of politics or social
life as platforms for action or as discrete objects of rational planning. As
the authors show, however, maintaining the illusion of states’ concrete-
ness calls for new kinds of creative energy on the part of the people who
inhabit these states. This is as true for individuals, who act in o≈cial
capacities as it is for people who do not. In the following essays, such
creativity takes many forms. In some cases, it entails survival and re-
newal as well as new ethical challenges, political forms, and forms of
governmentality. In other cases, a failure to survive does not negate the
vitality of personal and collective e√orts but instead reminds us of the
potential force of events. Overall, the essays show that under circum-
stances of extreme instability and doubt, society itself can become a
genre of performance, narrative, remembrance, critique, and hope—
even as it loses any stable referent to empirical conditions, places, per-
sons, or predictable propriety (compare Desjarlais and Kleinman 1994).
These essays may be read as outtakes of late-twentieth-century state
nationalisms and capitalism rendered ambiguous by decolonization,
globalization, and the end of the cold war (the horizons of change
closest to this volume’s case studies). Most of the essays are set in the
1990s in contexts transformed by state responses to transnationalism
and the globalization of capital. (The exceptions address Germany’s
wartime occupation of Poland and colonial administration in what is
now Namibia.) The geographical locations and the specific aims and
perspectives of each author di√er, but there is a strong overarching
theme. Our collective concern here is to expand the limits of ethnogra-
phy by demonstrating that the connections between the political re-
structuring of states and personal and collective subjectivity and agency
are accessible to ethnographic methods. In each chapter, the contribu-
tors reflect on these connections by articulating their own responses as
ethnographers to the challenges of dramatic change for contemporary
ethnography.
In most of the chapters of this book, the specific context in which
states are unmade or remade is one in which the structural tensions
between the globalization of capital and the rights of citizens expose
critical gaps in states’ administrative fabric. Specifically, the absence
of e√ective mediating institutions or established routines (even within
state agencies) is marked by highly improvisational maneuvers on the
part of state actors as well as among those whose situations put them at
the margins (often quite central margins) between public and private
sectors. The focus then is not on bureaucratic structures as these ‘‘struc-
tures’’ do not, in fact, exist experientially, but rather on the people
whose lives—on the job or elsewhere—pressure them to maintain the
existence of a social order that their everyday experience does not in fact
confirm. Accordingly, the essays focus on the imaginative and perfor-
mative work that states’ spatialized claims to legitimacy and authority
charter, as well as on the ways such claims sometimes elide and some-
2 Carol J. Greenhouse
times enable a host of other, often uncoordinated purposes. The con-
texts for the studies reported here include colonial, postcolonial, na-
tionalist, postnationalist, and postcommunist societies—precisely at
the junctures where one or another element of the taken-for-granted
association between state sovereignty, the circulation of capital, and the
expectation of some ‘‘return’’ (in the form of rights or livelihood or
both) falls away. The chapters point to the practical necessity of rework-
ing conventional representations of agency in such contexts as well as in
their embedded forms in classic sociological notions of labor, markets,
∞
value, and purpose.
Importantly in this regard, the people featured in the following chap-
ters occupy a variety of status positions, all of them ambiguous in the
long run. Some are oppressors, some are oppressed, some are neither
or both. In some chapters, the focus is on elites in the employ of the
state (German judges, German colonial administrators, European sci-
entists) and personal or collective struggles at or past the margins of the
state (orphaned refugee children in Vietnam, Filipino urban squatters,
Palestinian feminist activists in Israel). In most chapters, the focus is on
ordinary people—neither activists nor elites—who (like those others)
recognize their own situations as signs of the times (new middle classes
in post-Soviet Russia, Togolese Ewe villagers, urban Polish Jews, En-
glish ‘‘county folk’’). We witness all of them in the midst of their e√orts
to manage their everyday lives against the palpable transformation of
the world they thought they knew but now feel pressed to reassess
through the lens of their everyday circumstances.
Another distinctive feature of the authors’ approach is their focus on
the arenas and media (discursive, technological, institutional, and so
forth) through which people assert their ideas of social form. These
entail symbolic, discursive, and ritual displacements of the familiar.
They also involve literal displacements of people’s actual lives (in ghet-
tos, squatter settlements, refugee camps, and work-related relocations,
among others) and also, less tangibly, of time (for example, as nostalgia
for the past or hopes for the future) and self-identification (for example,
as the perception of a break between internal and external worlds, be-
tween ‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us’’). But these ethnographic essays are not (or not
just) about finding some foothold of emotional comfort in the middle of
turmoil. They are also about the ways the determined momentum of
improvisation even in previously unimaginable circumstances makes
meaning itself a mode of social action and not merely a reaction. Ritual,
Introduction 3
