Stuart Kirsch

Capitalism and the Politics of Resignation

Anthropologists since the 1990s have paid greater attention to the state and governmentality than to one of the most consequential forms of power in our time, the corporation. The lack of attention to corporations is especially problematic when the harm they cause is readily apparent and substantial. We propose to reorient the study of power in anthropology to focus on the strategies corporations use in response to their critics and how this facilitates the perpetuation of harm. We identify three main phases of corporate response to critique: denial, acknowledgement and token accommodation, and strategic engagement. In case studies of the tobacco and mining industries, we show how corporate responses to their critics protect these industries from potential delegitimization and allow them to continue operating in favorable regulatory environments. Finally, we connect these corporate strategies to pervasive feelings of discontent about the present and the perceived inability to change the future. Although c...

Anthropology and advocacy: A case study of the campaign against the Ok Tedi mine

■ What are the responsibilities of anthropologists towards the communities with whom they work? This article examines debates on anthropology and advocacy in relation to the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Since the early 1990s, the indigenous communities living downstream from the mine have carried out on an international political and legal campaign to reduce the mines environmental impact and gain compensation for the damage it has caused. I argue that neutrality may not be possible in disputes between transnational corporations and indigenous communities because of structural inequalities that make it easier for corporations to take advantage of anthropological expertise and silence opposing voices. This article invokes questions raised in recent discussions of cultural property rights to consider the proprietary responsibilities of anthropologists towards the information that they collect and the claims made on anthropologists by the subjects of their research. Finally, the article considers the implications of recent political and economic trends regarding the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in monitoring international capital for anthropological activism.

Ethnographic Representation and the Politics of Violence in West Papua

■ This article examines how ethnographic representations of violence inflect contemporary understandings of West Papua and influence its politics. It describes how colonial depictions of perpetual warfare in the highlands became paradigmatic for the region. Recent forms of extreme tourism draw on these images in offering encounters with ‘lost tribes’ that undermine the credibility of West Papuan political actors. Similarly, an American mining company paid the Indonesian military for protection against the West Papuan resistance movement while ignoring the violence of state actors. However, the collapse of Suharto’s New Order Indonesia has facilitated the reinterpretation of merdeka (freedom) as social justice, suggesting alternative ways to conceptualize West Papua’s relationship to the Indonesian state. Recent efforts by West Papuan activists to mobilize the discourses of human rights and indigenous politics are contingent on displacing the narratives of violence that dominate popular understandings of West Papua. This article shows how ethnographic representations may have negative consequences for indigenous politics.

Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru, by Fabiana Li

The editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy are excited to announce a new review feature: the Review Exchange. From time to time, we will ask two authors to review one another’s monographs; they will then have the opportunity to respond in an open-access forum on the Journal of Cultural Economy website. In our inaugural Review Exchange, Stuart Kirsch and Fabiana Li, authors of two important books on the politics of mining, reflect on the environmental damage wrought by extractive industries, the social movements mobilized in response, and the role of knowledge in navigating the resulting conflicts.

Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste, by Victoria C. Stead

experiences might have shaped the people’s view of the US military, I wonder from whose perspective, exactly, South Korea was ‘one of the most US-friendly in the world’. My fieldwork in Okinawa in the late 1990s showed that even bar owners, construction workers, and other residents who supported the US military presence for economic reasons concealed uncertain, often hostile, feelings toward it behind the façade of ‘friendliness’. One such resident confessed, ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry an American’; another noted, ‘When the money is gone, the friendship [with US servicemen] will also be gone’ (Inoue 2017, 123). The sentiments of these so-called ‘pro-base’ Okinawans, if extended outside the local context, urge me to hypothesise that both pro-American and anti-American sentiments may have always already existed in South Korea ever since US forces began to be stationed there in 1945. This hypothesis, if proved, would allow Schober to reconceptualise the binary between a US-friendly South Korea from 1945 to 1960 and a US-antagonistic South Korea since the 1990s. This reconceptualisation, in turn, may suggest ambivalence, the simultaneous existence of love and hate, as an organising concept around which South Korea’s varied practices, sentiments, and perspectives concerning the US military can be investigated across the entire history of its presence there. Schober establishes herself as a first-rate scholar of an anthropology of militarism through Base Encounters. Exploration of this hypothesis in future research might solidify her scholarship even more.