Uli Linke

Contact zones: Rethinking the sensual life of the state

Much of the recent scholarship in anthropology and related disciplines suggests that attempts to theorize the operations of power under modern capitalism require us to rethink the state as a site of meaning production, emotional investment, and fantasy. But, moreover, as I argue here, modern states are not just imagined or discursive cultural regimes but also embodied forms. Political fields and national spaces have a visual, tactile, sensuous, and emotional dimension: the life of the state has a corporal grounding. My argument is centered on those sensually concrete spaces of power, where the machinations of state and the embodied subject collide: in these zones of contact, the political field assumes a somatosensory gestalt. By a focus on the entanglements of subjectivities, bodies, and states, my essay aims to contribute toward a new cultural analytics of political regimes.

Mobile Imaginaries, Portable Signs: Global Consumption and Representations of Slum Life

Abstract This essay explores how iconic representations of slum life are produced for transnational consumption in Europe. The focus is on the manner in which the logics of spectacle and entertainment have come to organize images of urban poverty. The use of slums as global entertainment spectacle requires that core images be detached from social life to produce a repertoire of free-floating emblems and signs that can be variously deployed, assembled, appropriated and discarded, depending on shifting cultural desires in a capitalist commodity market. The research suggests that a limited register of signs is recycled by artists, photographers, urban critics and private entrepreneurs, some of whom have built faux-shantytowns as theme parks in global cities such as Zurich, London and Berlin. The ‘bare life’ of these informal cities is branded for consumer publics that can afford to refashion their social identities by physical or symbolic contact with the portable icons of poverty.

Ethnolinguistic Racism The Predicaments of Sovereignty and Nationhood Under Global Capitalism

In late modernity, where the making of social worlds is governed by new media technologies, flexible systems of exchange, and an unprecedented traffic in money, markets, and people across sovereign borders, the problematic concept of the nation has been recuperated to fasten subjects to political space. In this context, the projected frontiers of the nation are increasingly mapped out through the medium of language, thereby producing new mechanisms for membership and exclusion. With a focus on German cultural politics, I examine how regimes of nationality and imaginaries of citizenship are forged by a racialization of language. Under the impact of global capitalism and European unification, ethnolinguistic racism emerges as a discursive medium for reconstituting subjectivities and sovereignties.

Manhood, Femaleness, and Power: A Cultural Analysis of Prehistoric Images of Reproduction

Ideologies of reproduction are social facts, collective representations, of the dramatic ways in which human beings construct and appropriate gender for the imaging of social reality. Such symbolic universes are often centered on the body (Foucault 1980; Martin 1989; Turner 1984; Douglas 1973). As a template of cultural signification, the body becomes a model through which the social order can be apprehended. For instance, gender hierarchies are sometimes envisioned by means of an anatomical or physiological paradigm (Needham 1973; Hugh-Jones 1979; Theweleit 1987). However, the operation of societal power is generally focused on womens bodies and bodily processes. Women, according to a widespread (and controversial) paradigm, are grounded in nature by virtue of the dictates of their bodies: menstruation, pregnancy, birth (Levi-Strauss 1966, 1969; Ortner 1974; Ardener 1975; Mac-Cormack and Strathern 1986).

Reimagining Alterities: The Formation of Identities through Memory, History, and Place

Anthropologists have firmly established the need to attend to the paradoxes of mobile cultural and symbolic forms—these portable imaginaries of belonging or exclusion—during periods of transnational crisis and restructuring. In this article, I examine how formations of selfhood and otherness have come to public visibility in the context of globalization. My review of recent anthropological publications scrutinizes the range of possible methodological approaches to social identity practices, both in the past and present. Although contemporary scholars seek to refine anthropological insights on the plausible linkages between identity and alterity, the reliance on select methodological frames produces corresponding limitations in research focus and interpretative acuity.

Collective Memory, Anthropology of

The rapid emergence of global memory archives presents a novel challenge for anthropological research. Media industries, commodity capitalism, and digital technologies have altered the practices and possibilities of collective remembering. Competing representations of the past are forged, deposited, and exchanged in virtual space. How do anthropologists investigate these modalities of social remembering and forgetting when the machinations of past experience and the formations of historical consciousness are increasingly uncoupled from local memory communities? Through a critical engagement with anthropological concepts, research agendas, and debates about the multiple linkages between remembrance, past experience, and history, this article attempts to uncover the impact of globalization on collective memory practices.