Stephanie C. Kane

AIDS, Addiction and Condom Use: Sources of Sexual Risk for Heterosexual Women

This paper presents an analysis of interviews with two women, in intravenous drug use and a sex partner of an intravenous drug user. Their discourse reveals how women may assume different relations to traditional ideals of womanhood and heterosexual intimacy as defined by mainstream culture, and how the circumstances underlying their everyday personal experience are often in conflict with ideal gender roles. Analysis demonstrates that decisions regarding the use of condoms are constrained by this tension between the circumstances of addiction and mainstream ideals. Interview segments focus on sources of ambivalence toward condoms and the way in which economics, emotions, and addictions may affect womens willingness and ability to negotiate sexual risk reduction with steady male partners.

The Unconventional Methods of Cultural Criminology

This essay is about (a) the dilemmas of doing cultural criminology and (b) the importance of reading criminology through culture. Drawing from the author’s research, it presents three tropes of culture-work on crime (village, city street and media), attending to the implications of the observer’s documentary presence. While describing rules, logics and practices that compose the bundle of habits and inventions we call methods, I highlight the ways in which methods are differentially situated within hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination. I argue that as we become participant observers and analysts in and of these contexts, we commonly transform the narratives we collect into data by linking them to maps in our logistics, epistemologies and rhetoric.

Stencil graffiti in urban waterscapes of Buenos Aires and Rosario, Argentina

Stencil graffiti is an illegal, multi-vocal, visual urban discourse that alters the texture of street experience through inventive juxtaposition of mass-mediated and local imagery. Like street artists and neighborhood assemblies working in a variety of genres, stencil-makers compose public evidence of powerful trans-boundary imaginaries that are at the same time part of a uniquely Argentinean cultural formation. This analysis is based on over 300 digital photographic examples collected by the author in 2007 post-crisis Argentina, where the flourishing of artistic dissent is shaped by vibrant immigrant traditions, widespread poverty, and the recent political history of military dictatorship followed by an economic collapse that radicalized youth and the middle class. Building on Gells argument that art objects, and the places that form part of their causal milieu, share social agency with the artists that produce them, this article shows how stencils confront institutional power by expanding the semiotic range of two aquatic spaces: a neighborhood fountain in Buenos Aires and a national riverfront monument in Rosario. The focus is on developing an approach towards understanding the active role of public waterscapes in the cultural and political performance of collective memory and social change.

HIV Risk and Injecting Drug Use: Implications for Rural Jails

The Department of Justice estimates that 25% of all state prisoners have injected illegal drugs and that needle use is a major factor in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission among state prison inmates. But little is known regarding the problem in rural jails. Data presented here, based on interviews and questionnaires administered to inmates and staff in Indiana rural county jails, indicate that system management procedures may increase HIV risk to inmates and staff. Formulating policies on HIV risk for rural jails may prove crucial to epidemic management within particular institutions and may be a critical dimension of nationwide transmission patterns.

Beach crime in popular culture: Confining the carnivalesque in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Purpose – Focusing on popular culture as unstructured, emergent talk, rather than encapsulated genre or text, this chapter dramatizes a slice of life riven by constant fear of violent assault. Approach – I access accusatory discourse as the victim of the robbery that precipitates it. The chapter creates an impromptu alternative arena for reflexive ethnographic analysis of crime. Findings – Most Brazilians live in South Atlantic coastal cities where beaches are loci of social and symbolic action carried out in a carnivalesque mode. The beach symbolizes the myth of national identity, or brasilidade. Culturally specific, yet transnational, beaches are sexually pleasurable spaces of race and class mixing. Armed robbery is the painful shadow-twin of celebration, as much a part of popular culture as bikinis, drink, and dance, but so, too, are the informal community mechanisms attempting to exclude less desirable carnival propensities from spaces marked safe and respectable. A whirlpool of rumor draws on an array of deviant images and acts. Originality/value – Crime and social control are part of popular culture not merely as engines of re-presentation but as elemental aspects of practical living.

A Feminist Perspective on Bioterror: From Anthrax to Critical Art Ensemble

I n autumn 2001 anthrax was intentionally released through the U.S. mail. With ancestry as ancient as goatskins and dispersal power enhanced by military lab technology, the deadly bacilli puffed through mail-sorting machines and seeped into the skin and lungs of postal workers sorting congressional mail. Symbolically fused with the intentional crashing of four passenger planes by terrorists wielding box cutters, the deliberate release of weaponized anthrax triggered renewed efforts to fight the socalled war on terror at home with a special mandate in the area of bioterror. Since then, basic democratic liberties have been traded for untenable and perverse illusions of safety and control in the polymorphous name of protection from terror. Our critical analysis of the interactive fears and responses generated in and by the bioterror debate between 2001 and 2006 in the United States addresses the militarization of public health and the loss of human rights protections. Using a feminist approach that juxtaposes discourses from apparently disparate domains of art, law, and science, we examine the

Infrastructural Drift in Seismic Cities: Chile, Pacific Rim, 27 February, 2010

Retrospective narrations by maritime authorities trace decision-making in the compressed timeframe between earthquake and tsunami, when geological events literally rupture the skein of communication devices and flows that animate social life and disaster relief. Bringing together ethnography and the social study of science and technology, this article illuminates uncertainties inhabiting military protocol in a crisscrossed public-private infrastructural universe. Focusing in the crucial pre-dawn hours when rogue tsunami waves push against the limits of scientific knowledge, we extend social analysis into the rift between the technologically-desired and the forgotten in order to open up an undiscussed realm of the techno-political. We use the Chilean case to develop the concept of infrastructural drift, which we define as the behaviors, consciousness and unforeseen effects that accompany a systemic but unsystematic shift in technological habits.

Enclave Ecology: Hardening the Land-Sea Edge to Provide Freshwater in Singapore's Hydrohub

The island city-state of Singapore is a futuristic, industrialized, densely populated port city. Water independence is central to security. The national government devotes considerable resources to mobilizing urban surface waters. All major rivers have been integrated into a technologically sophisticated aquatic enclave called the hydrohub. Recreational and educational spaces, aesthetically designed into the system, contribute to public acceptance of this radically altered ecosystem. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how flash floods can undermine dominant cultural, political and technical registers that systematically emphasize hydrohub benefits. And I pinpoint a blind spot in the heart of Singapore’s infrastructural culture: the biological richness of estuarine environments where freshwater meets and mingles with seawater—the flux critical to reproduction of maritime plants and animals—is marginalized biophysically and discursively. Applying an infrastructural culture framework to the hydrohub shows how this ecological enclave model may build resilience into freshwater ecology by degrading resilience in maritime ecology. The hydrohub frames sustainability as a set of interior problems to be solved (assuring clean water and preventing flooding) while disregarding possible unintended consequences of excluding the exterior (probable decline of biodiversity and fishery resources). Yet enclave ecologies such as the hydrohub may become an increasingly popular model given worldwide water pollution and sea level rise accompanying climate change. By bringing technical aspects of engineering into cultural analyses, applied anthropologists can more effectively reveal the trade-offs associated with ecological enclaves and contribute to models of sustainability that better integrate the maritime surround into the urban fabric of islands and coasts.

Book review: Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend

difficult questions about what it means to be visual criminologists in real time: How does one confront images as they unfold? How can criminologists make sense of their untold meanings and consequences? What differentiates the work of criminologists from reporters in spaces where narratives are tightly constructed and quickly dispensed? Their interrogation of the manufacturers of news captures how journalists’ quest for ‘balance’ neatly dichotomizes death penalty debates while actively skirting any meaningful discussion about the killing state. Damián Zaitch and Tom De Leeuw’s essay, ‘Fighting with images’ examines prosumers in online football communities—individuals who generate ‘violent’ images that have become a staple within ‘hooligan-related’ productions for supporters. Rather than focus solely on the consumption of such images, the authors analyze their production as identity-making tools at both the individual and community level within virtual communities. Zaitch and De Leeuw demonstrate that one need not view digital research as a ‘safe alternative to ethnography at the edge’ but a meaningful pursuit of understanding violence and subcultures through the shared meanings around the production and consumption of images. In the volume’s last chapter, Wayne Morrison invites the reader to examine ‘genocidal tourism’ as he reads four images of historical atrocity that help to shape our understandings and approach to contemporary images of atrocity, such as the photographs of American military guards torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib. Similar to Muzatti’s instructive methodological reflection, Morrison reminds visual criminologists that images and their resultant meanings are culturally constructed and that images of atrocity, more specifically, should be viewed as tied to the broader context and processes of ‘terror and state-sanctioned violence against the vulnerable’ (p. 204). Framing Crime demonstrates that the call for a visual criminology can and has already begun to be realized. The essays within this anthology demonstrate the myriad ways that scholars can engage with images, from print to digital, consumed to produced, historical to contemporary. Collectively, the authors of these 12 pieces illustrate the power of images not only to define and control but also to transgress and resist. The methodological reflections present in each chapter mark a way forward and lay out visual criminology’s challenge to the uglier and passionless domains dominant within the field—a ‘must have’ volume for anyone interested in confronting the place and politics of the image in criminology.

General Noriega's Toads: An Ethnographic Theater of the Absurd

War has a way of overturning ethnographic fieldwork, preventing return, interrupting the whirl of deepening experience that gives rise to classic texts. Television, radio, newspaper, book, and magazine images emanate from sources in the region of your field site, taunting you with questionable data. Writing out the shared-time experience of participant observation seems almost foolhardy; cut off from current events, field notes may seem downright surreal. This essay tracks the sense of surreality that shadows observations from the field of ethnographic research and from the mass media. The sense of surreality, distilled in the figure of the Toad, is derived from stories the Emberd Indians of Darien, Panama, told to me in 1984 and 1985. (At that time, even radios were rare in rain forest settlements of Darien, although I once saw an old woman with a bunch of children watching MTV in the first caciques village.) This sense of surreality is the basis for my essay, in which I incorporate my earlier ethnographic record with reports of events relating to the 1990 U.S. invasion of Panama City and the war on drugs. This strategy allows me to record some of the worlds wildness in ways that exceed even the experimental boundaries of the ethnography I wrote (Kane 1994).1 For structure, I borrow Marcel Duchamps idea of a hinge picture (tableau de charniare). Opening out or folding back, physically or mentally, a hinge picture depicts other vistas, other apparitions of the same elusive object (Paz 1973, 144). The toad-containing vistas come from diverse sources, deflected through various modes of perception and production. The hinges are interpretations pulling the vistas into conjunction. The subjects are the problematics of sorcery and the demonic absurdity of images that can turn the public tide toward war.