Sasha Newell

Godrap Girls, Draou Boys, and the Sexual Economy of the Bluff in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

In Abidjan, both economic and sexual exchanges are structured around the bluff, a mimetic performance of modern urban identity that is both a form of deception and a means of social transformation. Men and women attempt to seduce each other through the bluff and exploit the relationship for material gain. While marriage is held up as an ideal, it is increasingly elusive as kinship has come to mimic the peer networks of the informal economy. Like drag, the bluff collapses oppositions between appearance and reality, highlighting the performative aspects of ‘modernity’. I suggest that widespread urban sexual antagonism may be constructed around gendered performative consumption, such that the impossible demands of maintaining a deceptive appearance of success produces sexual exploitation and anxiety on both sides of the gender divide.

Estranged belongings A moral economy of theft in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

Arguing that ethnographies of cities must do more than highlight their fluid, boundless nature, this article seeks forms of social order produced in tension with forces of dissolution. I argue that even in the society of thieves I worked with in Abidjan, theft was ruled by relationships of exchange and obligation and social relationships were prioritized over financial gain. I discovered a tenuous moral community regulating the arbitration of justice in cases of social crisis, a process built upon the tracing of social networks and the determination of who really ‘belongs’. Using my own experience of being robbed and its social aftershocks as an example, I trace the processes through which social networks constrain the interpretation of an event, while at the same time redefining their identities (as group and individual) through this interaction. The juncture of stranger and community is the axis through which such negotiations are carried out.

Remote and edgy: New takes on old anthropological themes

Eight anthropologists working in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America reflect on an essay by Edwin Ardener on the concept of remote areas recently reprinted in Hau(Volume 2, Issue 1). These reflections all show that the idea of the remote can be detached from its geographical moorings and understood not simply as a spatial concept but as a relativistic social construct. Considered in conjunction with the notion of edginess, they understand remoteness not so much as a place, but as a way of being. By purposefully comparing work in cities and in places more commonly described as remote, they show that the remote may be present in any site of anthropological inquiry.

The matter of the unfetish: Hoarding and the spirit of possessions

In this article, I employ West African ideas of spirited materiality to rethink the semiosis of possession in North Atlantic societies. I investigate this ethnographically through the lens of storage—those things kept out of sight and unused in US attics, basements, closets, and storage units. Things contained in storage form a residual category of animated detritus that US society often pathologizes as “hoarding” when it makes public appearances in the visible space of the home or the television set. Arguing that the concept of fetishism is hopelessly tied to the “naturalist” divide of Western rationality and the dichotomy between persons and things, I argue that objects typically labeled as fetishes are not fetishized but rather reflect a cosmology of material entities as containers for spirit. By constructing an ethnographic model of the unfetish in West Africa, I explore the sociality of possessions as belongings that truly belong.

Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage

Domestic storage spaces are containers for the concealment of things whose value is inarticulable. Unlike the curation of collections, material accumulations grow of their own accord, accruing mass...

The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality, Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn

In response to an oft-encountered stance against semiotic or symbolic analysis in current anthropological theory, I argue for a broader understanding of semiosis as inherently both affective and material. Affect theory and new materialism move away from conceptualizations of human subjectivity and cultural construction and toward an ontological framework focused on material entities and vital flows. By meshing their language with that of classic symbolic anthropology, I demonstrate how the materiality of symbols produces and transmits affect and that, indeed, the efficacy of ritual is based on the manipulation of affect. Rather than thinking of signs as delimited representations fixed in structures, I emphasize their indeterminacy and ambiguity as the source of their social efficacy. Drawing on my research on affectively charged material objects in the storage spaces of US homes, I demonstrate that the affective force of these things stems from their open-ended and often unrecognized chains of semiotic associations. Ultimately, I present semiotic affect as a way to return to theorizing the social as an intercorporeal force that precedes the conscious determination of the subject.