Andrew Dawson

Post-fordist death: A comparative ethnographic analysis of milling and mining in Northern England

ABSTRACT Building on work on post-Fordist affect, we argue that the group-based and person-centered forms of production in mining and milling, respectively, produce contingent conceptualizations of culture, identity, and personhood and, in turn, of dying and death. The “communal solidarism” characteristic of post-mining milieu engenders senses of dying and death entailing a communal merging of erstwhile individual selfhoods. In post-milling milieu dying and death are conceptualized as individuated, but subject to social evaluation. The evaluative criterion in this regard is ability to “perform” dying and death in ways that reflect the valorized essence of local culture, identity, and personhood, “resilient autonomy.”

Life’s end: Ethnographic perspectives

ABSTRACT In this introduction to the special issue, Life’s End: Ethnographic Perspectives, we review the field of anthropological studies of death and dying. We make the argument that, largely because of its sub-disciplining into the larger field of the anthropology of religion, ritual and symbolism, the focus of anthropological research on death has been predominantly on post- rather than pre-death events, on death’s beginnings rather than life’s ends. Additionally, we argue that an anthropological aversion to the study of dying may also lie in the intimacy of the discipline’s principal method, ethnography. Contrastingly, we argue that this very methodological intimacy can be a source of insight, and we offer this as a rationale for the special issue as a whole, which comprises eight ethnographic studies of dying and social relations at life’s end from across Africa, Australia, Europe, and North America. Each of these studies is then summarized, and a rationale for their presentation around the themes of “structures of dying,” “care for the dying,” “hope in dying,” and “ending life” is presented.

The Sydney riots

This article describes the recent Sydney riots and the commentary surrounding them. The author demonstrates how, through processes of ‘analytical et nic cleansing’, ‘ethnic homogenization and specification’, and ‘blame displacement’, the Lebanese Muslim community, a target of the initial rioters, came to be victimized in commentary on the riots. While the riots may not have been particularly significant in themselves, the commentary surrounding them provides an important window onto the state of cultural politics in Australia at a specific juncture in time when multi-culturalism is simultaneously hegemonic but subject to attack from Australia’s ruling federal political regime. The author claims, moreover, that the victimization of Lebanese Muslims is indicative of a particular current process in which a discourse of multi-culturalism, engendered largely by its liberal advocates and drawing on the scholarly works of anthropologists and other social scientists, is utilized to undermine multi-culturalism as a form of social policy and organization.