Silvia Posocco

Substance, sign, and trace: performative analogies and technologies of enfleshment in the transnational adoption archives in Guatemala

In Kinship, Law and the Unexpected, Marilyn Strathern (2005, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a Surprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) shows how, through analogies, Euro-American knowledge practices turn offspring into property, information into knowledge, and relations into relations. This article takes this Strathernian insight as a point of departure for a consideration of the analytical possibilities – and the instances of incommensurability – of a juxtaposition of transnational adoption and migration. Drawing on ethnographic research in Guatemala, the article argues that kinning in this context relates not only to the construction of new forms of relatedness, but also, crucially, to the suspension and severing of relations, and to politically charged claims for the reactivation of connections and enfleshment. Against figurations of kinning as commodified and inequitable relations of ownership and exchange, struggles for ‘searches’ and ‘reunions’ in contemporary Guatemala bring into view a range of subjectivities and relations ‘under erasure,’ within the horizon of the Guatemalan conflict (1960–1996). Analogizing transnational adoption and migration is a cultural and analytical practice that performatively reveals and occludes. The article proposes a historically and idiomatically grounded reorientation of the analogic flow sideways, in the directions of the archive, as substance, sign, and trace.

Expedientes: Fissured Legality and Affective States in the Transnational Adoption Archives in Guatemala

The article provides an examination of how adoption files, or expedientes, have “fissured” the legality of transnational adoption processes in Guatemala. By focusing on declarations and disclaimers as an entry point to explore controversies over adoption files, the article argues that files point to the “prior” histories of adoption that are intimately connected to local histories of violence in the country. Through the analysis of the politics inherent in these legal documents, and the legal frameworks regulating the production of adoption paperwork, the article offers a critical insight into the extra-judicial processes and forms of “exceptionalism” that made transnational adoptions possible in the thirty-year period between 1977 and 2007. At the same time, the analysis of declarations and disclaimers brings to light how the technologies of their production allow the emergence of “anti-social affects” that saturate, and internally disrupt, transnational adoption files. The article proposes a critical, “anti-social” analysis of international adoption, by illuminating the problems that come from taking for granted the values of futurity and reproduction in adoption studies.

Violence and affective states in contemporary Latin America

This special issue brings together scholars interested in the analysis of the social, cultural and affective dimensions of violence. The contributions explore the connections between situated experiences of violence and shifting affective states, relations, sensations and contingencies in contemporary Latin America. The articles consider how violence might constitute a nexus for the production of subjectivities and forms of identification, relationality and community, alterity and belonging, in a range of Latin American contexts including Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico and in the Mexican diaspora in Spain.

Ethnography and Incommensurability in the Aftermath of Insurgency

Does ethnography in some way enact and perform what it names? If one foregrounds this performative dimension, what exactly does ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency do? The article explores these questions as they emerge in the context of ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency (insurgencia) in Guatemala, and in relation to debates in social and cultural theory. It is argued that ethnography activates—and is responsive to—performative modes of subjectification and desubjectification discussed, inter alia, with reference to notions of ‘the archive’ and ‘testimony’. The article shows that ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency conjures up insurrectionary modalities of action. It establishes realignments and relations, enacts substitutions, and arouses modes of cross-identification between subjects, directly referencing how the insurgency was sustained during the Guatemalan conflict. However, rather than crystallizing or stabilizing an account of the insurgency, ethnography deals specifically with incommensurability and the slips— or gaps—that result from oscillations between representation—as in the multiply populated archive that holds the voices of many speaking subjects—and non-representation—as in the indexical domain of the subjectless archive that is all that there is that can speak.

Introduction: anthropology’s queer sensibilities

This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. The special issue centres on explorations of anthropology’s queer sensibilities, that is, experimental thinking in ethnographically informed investigations of gender and sexual difference, and related connections, disjunctures and tensions in their situated and abstract dimensions. The articles consider the possibilities and challenges of anthropology’s queer sensibilities that anthropologize queer theory whilst queering anthropology in ethnographically informed analyses. Contributors focus on anthropologizing queer theory in research on same-sex desire in Congo; LGBT migrant and asylum experience in the UK and France; same-sex intimacies within opposite gender oriented sexualities in Kenya and Ghana; secret and ambiguous intimacies and sensibilities beyond an identifiable ‘queer subject’ of rights and recognition in India; migrant imaginings of home in Indonesian lesbian relationships in Hong Kong; and cross-generational perspectives on ‘coming out’ in Taiwan, and their implications for theories of kinship and relatedness. An extensive interview with Esther Newton, the prominent figure in gay and lesbian and queer anthropology concludes the collection.

A commitment to difference: An interview with Esther Newton:

Esther Newton (b. 1940) is an influential American anthropologist, whose pioneering work on drag queens and gay and lesbian communities has contributed to the emergence of gay and lesbian anthropology, and gradually also queer anthropology, as a recognized sub-field within socio-cultural anthropology. Newton undertook her graduate work at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of Professor David Schneider. Newton is currently Professor of Women’s Studies and American Culture, Department of Women’s Studies, University of Michigan. Her memoir, My Butch Career, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Newton was interviewed at the 113th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Washington DC, on Friday 5 December 2014. Prior to the interview, co-editors Boyce, Engebretsen and Posocco along with Gonzalez-Polledo developed a list of themes and questions that guided the conversation that follows. We have aimed to maintain the sense of informal and jovial atmosphere that guided the interview, as it began over a lunch meal in the hotel lobby and continued afterwards in the quiet of Esther’s hotel room, with Elisabeth joining in on Skype from China, and Ellen Lewin – Esther’s room-mate and also notable feminist and queer anthropologist – entering the room and contributing to the latter part of the discussion. The following conversation is between Esther Newton (EN) and Paul Boyce (PB), Elisabeth Engebretsen (EE), EJ Gonzalez-Polledo (EJG), Ellen Lewin (EL), Silvia Posocco (SP).

Life, death, ethnography: epistemologies and methods of the quasi-event

Purpose What difference, if any, does it make to appeal to the ordinary and the everyday, the situated and always-already-in-relation, the emergent and the quasi-event (Povinelli, 2011), as simultaneously sites, objects and frames? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Through a focus on epistemological and methodological reflection, this paper asks: what is the relation between the biopolitical and necropolitical terrain in and through which experience unravels and the conceptual apparatuses which hold the promise of analysis and critique? What analytics, methods and ethics do contemporary life and death formations and intersecting precarious modes of existence elicit? Findings In this paper, I approach these questions ethnographically, with reference to debates in social and cultural theory and drawing on long-term anthropological research in Guatemala. Originality/value This paper aims to make contribution to debates on biopolitical and necropolitical processes and dynamics, by reflecting on the implications for epistemologies, methods and infrastructures.

Bordering, exclusions and necropolitics

Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices that underpin and sustain the multiplication of frontiers that define essential differences between populations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy that analyze and subvert the logic of bordering inherent in the bio/necropolitical gaze. In different ways, this paper examines operations of delimitation and differentiation that contribute to monolithic definitions of subject and subjectivity.,The authors question border construction processes in terms of their static, homogenizing and exclusionary effects.,Instead of hierarchical stratification of populations, the papers in this special issue explore the possibilities of relationship and the conditions of such relationships. Who do we relate to? On which terms and conditions? With what purpose? In which ethical and political manner?,A critical understanding of the asymmetry in research practices makes visible how the researcher is legitimized to produce a representation of those researched, an interpretation of their words and actions without feedback or contribution to the specific context where the research has been carried out. Deconstructive and relational perspectives are put forward as critical strands that can set the basis of different approaches to research and social practice.