Browsing by Author "Piot, Charles D"

The transnational movement of medicines and medical professionals to post-war settings has given rise to various forms of caregiving, expertise and ethics. However, little is known about the broad range of actors and agents from the Global South engaging health and the body, beyond the spectacle of international NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières. My dissertation, entitled “Beyond ‘Revolutionary Humanitarianism’: Chinese Doctors in South Sudan,” analyzes the historical formation and contemporary reconfiguration of China’s longstanding medical programs in South Sudan. Through extended participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival research, I explore the role of medicine from China in South Sudan, a hybrid system that integrates aid and business. I argue that China’s medical interventions in conflict zones represent an assemblage of “regimes of living,” not only opening up possibilities for sustained care beyond global health agencies’ provision of emergency food and transitory medical campaigns, but also bringing about disparities in quality of life. Rooted in technological advancement rather than Christian tradition, China’s medical programs in Africa are producing a new form of everyday ethics, open to interrogation and debate on the ground. My research is in dialogue with literature on humanitarianism, biopolitics, and the anthropology of life. Focusing on bodily experience and medical expertise in a volatile setting, my project explores the new biopolitical landscape of present-day Africa, offering an alternative to the widely accepted logic and values of medical humanitarianism in places marked by “crisis” or “conflict.”

This dissertation examines the politics of industry and industrialization in Ethiopia. I analyze how multinational alcohol companies and the Ethiopian state are brewing development, meaning spurring the creation of industrial linkages through the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of commercial beer as well as their corresponding socio-cultural consequences as the Ethiopian people respond to such processes. An ethnography at the nidus of corporate supply and value chain management and the state’s industrialization policy, the following pages examine how state and companies are making industry to meet the developmentalist goals of an Ethiopian ruling party and the needs of capital, respectively, albeit not without local collaboration and resistance.

Iraqi academics have had a pivotal role in shaping and building Iraqi society, identity, and national structures, since the country’s independence from British colonial rule. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a significant number of academics were assassinated and forced into exile and internal displacement. Since this population has always been intertwined with the state and different regimes of power, they are uniquely-situated to provide critical and multifaceted analyses on politics, the intertwined relationship between academics and power, and the complexity of exile. Through what I call a “genealogy of loss,” this ethnography traces the academic, political, and social lives of academics in contemporary Iraq to uncover the losses this population-and the Iraqi people- have incurred in contemporary Iraq. Beginning with the period from the ascendancy of the Ba‘ath Party in 1968, to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and up to the present, I examine the lives of Iraq’s exiled academics in three sites: the UK, Jordan, and Iraqi Kurdistan. I first examine their experience during the Ba‘ath era to explore their work, struggles, and hardships, as they made significant contributions to building their society and nation. I attempt to provide a nuanced anthropological account of life under the Ba‘ath regime and its ideals and complex realities. The second part examines these academics’ post-US occupation experiences both inside Iraq and in exile. I argue that the reconfiguration of the Iraqi state, and the shift from a secular, unified, one-party system into a divided space ruled by the occupying forces and their appointed sectarian and ethno-nationalist leaders and militia groups, has reconfigured the role of the academic and of higher education. The occupation and the subsequent Iraqi governments used death threats and assassinations, sectarianism, and “de-Ba‘athification” as forms of governance to restructure society. Many academics and professionals were either assassinated or forced into exile by sending them bullets and threat notes in envelopes. I explore how academics’ relatively stable jobs in pre-invasion Iraq are now “contracted lives” with devastating effects on their personal lives, intellectual projects, and the future of Iraq. Such lives entail living in spaces under precarious and temporary contracts and with residency cards subject to annual renewal or termination. These academics now live in constant fear and what I call a “plan B mode of existence.” While an extreme and violent case, this ethnography argues that the conditions of Iraqi academics in exile are connected to neoliberal global trends marked by the commercialization and corporatization of higher education, adversely affecting academic, social, and political freedoms of writing, thinking, and being in this world.

The West African coast is prey to an erosion washing away communities’ houses, livelihoods, and ancestral temples. By studying locals’ lived experiences and state resilience efforts my research investigates environmental and social issues and possibilities emerging from this climate disaster. I focus on Aneho, a historic town and former site of transcontinental commerce during the precolonial period, and a center of the famous African Print Textile trade since the early colonial period—which today risks disappearing into the sea. While the situation is dire, Aneho has a long history of survival and resilience to, among others, local wars, the slave trade, and colonialism. Reproduced through collective festivals and rituals, these traits are deployed today in their fight against coastal erosion. The ontological turn shows how native knowledge in the Amazonia and beyond offer alternative ways of being and knowing; however, this literature fails to answer the fundamental question of how this form of knowledge can influence our collective response to the current global climate crisis and change our ways of living. By analyzing Aneho’s biopolitical terrain where both scientific and ontological knowledge intersect, my work addresses this question through the examination of power relations underlying the way policymakers and traditional leaders address coastal erosion. The intersections I am exploring generate new possibilities for local agency and innovation in the face of climate catastrophe while also enabling my work to address the uncanny absence of West Africa’s rich cosmology in the canon of ontological literature. My research essentially pushes environmental anthropology beyond its theoretical limits by engaging the field in a pragmatic conversation with public policy on resilient development.

This is a dissertation about attachment and survival in a small community on the West Coast of Scotland: a tiny village on the edge of a vast landscape, a scenic area valued for its exceptional remoteness and wildness. Glenmara contradicts itself, and this tension creates value. It is a place that is both distant and connected, warm and wild. Remote and hospitable. A place that needs exposure but also carefully tends to its insularity. Falling in love with Glenmara is easy: everyone does. But staying the course takes work. This dissertation cares about endurance as a way of life and the sacrifices that are made for the sake of remoteness and wildness. It is a story about the exhilaration of an otherworldly place and how we struggle to live with each other when we try to hold onto things we can’t keep.

This dissertation is based on 18 months of ethnographic research conducted on the West Coast of Scotland between 2014-2016. It is situated in a small place that dramatizes everything that is human about living together: the promise and impossibility of social cohesion, the pleasures and dangers of intimacy, and the ways we both help and hurt each other, collectively.

This dissertation considers the production of video films by Nàgó–Yorùbá creators along Bénin’s southeastern border with Nigeria. There they find themselves at the margins of three better-funded arts industries with contrasting attitudes toward Nàgó–Yorùbá culture and aesthetics. In Nigeria, much of the Nollywood video film industry supports belonging to global religious movements, such as Pentecostal Christianity and Reformist Islam, all the while portraying indigenous religion as diabolical. The art-film scene of Bénin often dismisses West African video films as amateurish. Finally, Bénin’s state arts programs promote the Vodun religion of the coast as a tourist attraction yet deny Nàgó–Yorùbá people compensation for the state’s appropriation of their religious arts into the category of “Vodun.” Against this backdrop, video filmmakers use movies to celebrate indigenous religion and culture, to promote religious ecumenism, and to seek new sources of material support. Nevertheless, Nigerian media saturates the marketplace in Bénin so that very few local video films can earn a profit. My study thus seeks to determine how Nàgó–Yorùbá media practitioners persist in the face of such precarious conditions. I ask how the production of media becomes a forum to debate and establish norms of community and religious practice, how national identity, religious affiliation, and professional prestige affect negotiations over religious attitudes and conceptions of community, and how the open style of production in Bénin allows a diverse group of people—media professionals and others—to participate in the debates and discussions that shape media projects.

My work is based on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Bénin–Nigeria border. During this time, I learned moviemaking from video filmmakers directly, acting in their productions, learning camerawork and editing, and eventually producing my own video film. I argue that Nàgó–Yorùbá video filmmakers make video movies because doing so is a community-sustaining endeavor. These efforts grant video filmmakers a prominent status in their communities as recognizable and relatable faces, and as the conveners of social activities on sets and in studios where they mingle and discuss productions with colleagues and audience members. This intimacy turns video filmmaking into what I call a production public, a group whose activities not only create media, but also negotiate the audiovisual aesthetics by which religion and culture are shown on screen. In the face of disappearing profits and intense competition, their activities are precarious, but as long as this public continues to make media, video filmmakers assume the role of moral authorities in the community while working with audiences and patrons to shape attitudes toward religious ecumenism, morality, and ethical engagement with regional and global forces. The public crafts an image of ideal community behavior that supports indigenous Nàgó–Yorùbá religion, rejects religious strife, and looks for ways to export its moral outlook to others.

This dissertation focuses on raiding and sovereignty in the Central African Republic's (CAR) northeastern borderlands, on the margins of Darfur. A vast literature on social evolution has assumed the inevitability of centralization. But these borderlands show that centralization does not always occur. Never claimed by any centralizing forces, the area has instead long been used as a reservoir of resources by neighboring areas' militarized entrepreneurs, who seek this forest-savanna's goods. The raiders seize resources but also govern. The dynamics of this zone, much of it a place anthropologists used to refer to as "stateless," suggest a re-thinking of the modalities of sovereignty. The dissertation proposes conceptualizing sovereignty not as a totalizing, territorialized political order but rather through its constituent governing capabilities, which may centralize or not, and can combine to create hybrid political systems. The dissertation develops this framework through analysis of three categories of men-in-arms -- road-blockers, anti-poaching militiamen, and members of rebel groups -- and their relationships with international peacebuilding initiatives. It compares roadblocks and "road cutting" (robbery) to show how they stop traffic and create flexible, personalized entitlements to profit for those who operate them. The dissertation also probes the politics of militarized conservation: in a low-level war that has lasted for twenty-five years, the European Union-funded militiamen fight deadly battles against herders and hunters. Though ostensibly fought to protect CAR's "national patrimony" (its animals and plants), this war bolsters the sovereign capabilities of a range of non-state actors and has resulted in hundreds of deaths in the last few years, many of them hidden in the bush. The dissertation then shows how CAR's recent cycle of rebellion has changed governance in rural areas. Though mobile armed groups have long operated in CAR, they used to work as road cutters and local defense forces and only recently started calling themselves "rebels" -- a move that has landed them in new roles as "governors" of populations while leaving them without the welfare largess they seek. Throughout these various raiders' projects, the idea of the all-powerful state serves as a reference point they use to qualify themselves with sovereign authorities. But their actions as rulers undermine the creation of the unitary political authority they desire and invoke. Failure to appreciate these non-centralized micropolitical processes is a main reason peacebuilding efforts (such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) in the region have failed.

My dissertation traces undocumented migrants' experiences at the edge of Europe, as well as their struggles to emerge from the spatio-temporal void to which they are being increasingly confined. By providing an ethnographic account of sans papiers who live, work, and organize politically in Marseille, I show how undocumented mend and women in the border-city are being dislocated, depersonalized and devalued, and then account for the practices by which they seek to include themselves in the political community that refuses to see and hear them. In so doing, I elucidate the production and experience of exile in a city increasingly transformed by urban enclosure and the reconfiguration of (supra)national borders. I investigate moreover sans papiers' capacity to rupture, through a series of spontaneous and/or organized actions, the naturalized space-time of the neoliberal security state.

In my exploration of the sans papiers predicament, I deploy a dialectical political economy framework supplemented with a Badiousian reading of the political event. I examine how migrant `illegality' is produced at the juncture between capital and the state, and assign centrality to space and time as key (mediating) categories of migrant experience. In turn, I construe the political subjectivation of sans papiers as a negating gesture grounded, not in the desire for free circulation, but in the experience of radical lack. In so doing, I critically engage the most recent literature on irregular migration, as well as ongoing debates surrounding the common's enclosure and the contradictions of citizenship in the neoliberal moment.

My dissertation is organized around the following three questions: 1) How have recent transformations in Marseille's urban landscape and the European immigration regime reconstituted the space-time of undocumented migrants in the cosmopolitan port-city? 2) What novel subjectivities are emerging out of these processes? 3) How can sans papiers rebuild, if at all, the common at the border of a nation predicated on their simultaneous exclusion and exploitation? In answering these questions, my dissertation follows the experiential trajectory of migrants in Marseille from an (heterotopic) `off-place' to the `void of exile'--a shift produced by the neoliberal reorganization of labor and the reconfiguration of (supra)national borders in Europe. It also traces the formation of a `generic class' of overexploited workers who, in spite of contributing to building the new `global Marseille,' are deprived of the right to have rights, of any social visibility, and indeed of any future to speak of.

My dissertation argues that, in the moment they emerge from the void and onto the political scene, sans papiers dissolve (if only momentarily) the walls that keep them locked within a regime of invisibility/hypervisibility. They interrupt, moreover, the logic of circulation and accumulation that is driving the enclosure of Marseille's spatio-temporal common. Thus they point to the possibility of building--in a universalizing gesture--a radically different world: beyond papers, beyond value and towards radical equality.

From 2008-2012, a dramatic upsurge in incidents of maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean led to renewed global attention to this region: including the deployment of multi national naval patrols, attempts to prosecute suspected pirates, and the development of financial interdiction systems to track and stop the flow of piracy ransoms. Largely seen as the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land, piracy has been slotted into narratives of state failure and problems of governance and criminality in this region.

This view fails to account for a number of factors that were crucial in making possible the unprecedented rise of Somali piracy and its contemporary transformation. Instead of an emphasis on failed states and crises of governance, my dissertation approaches maritime piracy within a historical and regional configuration of actors and relationships that precede this round of piracy and will outlive it. The story I tell in this work begins before the contemporary upsurge of piracy and closes with a foretaste of the itineraries beyond piracy that are being crafted along the East African coast.

Beginning in the world of port cities in the long nineteenth century, my dissertation locates piracy and the relationship between trade, plunder, and state formation within worlds of exchange, including European incursions into this oceanic space. Scholars of long distance trade have emphasized the sociality engendered through commerce and the centrality of idioms of trust and kinship in structuring mercantile relationships across oceanic divides. To complement this scholarship, my work brings into view the idiom of protection: as a claim to surety, a form of tax, and a moral claim to authority in trans-regional commerce.

To build this theory of protection, my work combines archival sources with a sustained ethnographic engagement in coastal East Africa, including the pirate ports of Northern Somalia, and focuses on the interaction between land-based pastoral economies and maritime trade. This connection between land and sea calls attention to two distinct visions of the ocean: one built around trade and mobility and the other built on the ocean as a space of extraction and sovereignty. Moving between historical encounters over trade and piracy and the development of a national maritime economy during the height of the Somali state, I link the contemporary upsurge of maritime piracy to the confluence of these two conceptualizations of the ocean and the ideas of capture, exchange, and redistribution embedded within them.

The second section of my dissertation reframes piracy as an economy of protection and a form of labor implicated within other legal and illegal economies in the Indian Ocean. Based on extensive field research, including interviews with self-identified pirates, I emphasize the forms of labor, value, and risk that characterize piracy as an economy of protection. The final section of my dissertation focuses on the diverse international, regional, and local responses to maritime piracy. This section locates the response to piracy within a post-Cold War and post-9/11 global order and longer attempts to regulate and assuage the risks of maritime trade. Through an ethnographic focus on maritime insurance markets, navies, and private security contractors, I analyze the centrality of protection as a calculation of risk and profit in the contemporary economy of counter-piracy.

Through this focus on longer histories of trade, empire, and regulation my dissertation reframes maritime piracy as an economy of protection straddling boundaries of land and sea, legality and illegality, law and economy, and history and anthropology.

The dissertation considers how young people in northern Uganda navigate post-conflict life through participant observation, interviews, and ethnographic focus groups with youth working as security guards, current and formerly incarcerated youth, and young people seeking employment in South Sudan. It offers a detailed, sustained view into the everyday practices young people undertake to envision a future after prolonged civil conflict despite intense social, political, and economic constraints. I worked extensively with individuals who occupied different positions of vulnerability and security in order to investigate how these categories overlapped and intertwined in their daily lives. By doing so, the research makes broader interventions into theories of youth and of post-conflict recovery including how individuals encounter post-war legal authority, how humanitarian interventions impact intergenerational and familial relationships, and what strategies young people employ when the resources and opportunities afforded to them through the expansive humanitarian network that once surrounded them leaves the region, or transforms into something else entirely. I argue that the constraints young people face, coupled with the state’s attempt to securitize them as a potentially destabilizing political and economic force, generate impossible predicaments which often require them to take on increasingly dangerous risks, which in turn open them up to further securitization in a cycle that leaves young people unable to build anything but fraught futures despite being the future of the nation. A central aim of my research was to destabilize the "post" in post-conflict, not only to point to the ways in which conflict has afterlives (which is well treaded territory in anthropology) but also to disrupt the clean temporality the term presumes. I argue that young people do not take the “post” as a new dawn from which to build possibility, but instead draw on their past experiences to make sense of the present despite the uncertainty of the future. Building on other recent scholarship, my research interrogates the durability of the "post" as a way of opening up pathways which young people (and others) draw on to make sense of their daily lives.

This dissertation explores the emergence of Millennium Development and the promise to end poverty by 2015. After exploring the global scale phenomena, the project turns to the implementation of the "end of poverty" in the model Millennium Village of Sauri, Kenya.

This dissertation examines the relationship between city planning and everyday life in Kigali, Rwanda. It focuses on markets, neighborhoods, and streets where Kigali residents encounter emerging technologies of architecture, finance, and expertise. These technologies are aimed at converting Kigali into a global metropolis with world-class tourist facilities, hi-tech service industries, and a “green” urban metabolism. Many city residents, however, experience these processes through mass evictions, market closures, and an ongoing utility crisis in the city. In response, they are going kukikoboyi (literally “to cowboy”), creating rogue markets, housing settlements, and ad-hoc utility networks. While Kigali’s international team of managers and consultants disavow these spaces and practices as informal, illegal, and antithetical to the city’s “world-class” future, they are nevertheless unable to erase them from the city’s surface. My research explores these divergent practices of city-making to show that a new Kigali is being built: a 21st century metropolis that, despite being a rogue version of its planned future, is a cosmopolitan urban center that no single interest, process, or population fully controls. Methodologically, this dissertation places the popular practices and expertise that hold a city together in conversation with global city modeling and design theory. Instead of focusing on a single neighborhood or population, The Kigali Model is an ethnography of an entire city that asks how differently situated social actors share the costs of producing, subverting, and negotiating their urban future. During twenty-seven months of fieldwork in Kigali, I interviewed foreign technocrats who were employed by multinational design and consultancy firms, paid by international finance organizations, and housed in Rwandan government ministries. I spent months following illegal street traders as they produced nomadic market spaces and (often correctly) anticipated that city authorities would be unable to enforce new zoning and tax laws. I participated in community infrastructure building projects and—when the pipes we laid failed to deliver services—became myself incorporated into the city’s hydraulic system by lugging twenty-liter jerry cans of water up forty-degree slopes. I also mapped the social and economic networks that produce and continually re-make Kigali’s largest “slum,” and debated views of urban modernity with second-hand clothing vendors, their hipster clients, and planners who wish to demolish the markets that both populations depend on. I use these ethnographic encounters to theorize Kigali beyond the categories of slum, crisis, and laboratory so often applied to African cities. I show how these seemingly disparate spaces, populations, and practices produce urban ecologies, cultures, and human and material infrastructures that persistently reinvent the city and the people who live there.

This dissertation examines the recent influx of Pentecostal-charismatic churches into the Northern Region of Ghana, a rural, underdeveloped region whose predominantly Muslim population has increasingly become the target of evangelistic efforts undertaken by Christians from the south. Based on ethnographic and archival research, my study considers the locus of this incursion as a densely layered zone of anxieties and emergences, desires and contestations, in which the elaboration of novel horizons of sensibility and experience is refracted through the vicissitudes of the region's social, economic, religious, and political history. I argue that the churches' impassioned campaign to "take back the north for the Lord" - a campaign whose exemplary medium is the evangelistic crusade in which "signs and wonders" are mobilized as particularly potent technologies of conversion - demarcates a complex field of intervention animated by a plurality of forces irreducible to those of strictly religious provenance. An ethos of progress and success fostered by the country's development apparatus; the longstanding prejudices surrounding northerners and "the north" in the Ghanaian national imaginary; the specter of a Muslim threat that surfaces in a post-9/11 world and perpetuates amidst a global war on terror - these are among the contingencies that have come together to render this encounter possible. Yet, far from simply overlaying these historical-political logics with the veneer of Christian discourse, my work charts the dissemination of a faith whereby, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, converts are anointed with a power to conceive themselves and, by extension, the world as nothing less than a totally "new creation." I contend that such practices of salvation, so characteristic of Pentecostalism's proliferation across the continent as a whole, are being recast in ways both subtle and sensational by their transposition into the allegedly pathological space of northern Ghana - as are, I suggest, the lives of the men and women who inhabit it.

This dissertation examines the interplay between sovereignty and governmentality in the domain of welfare provision in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast through the analytic of debt.

The dissertation shows that debt lies at the heart of Turkish and Kurdish political identities in Turkey, but with a significant difference. For decades the Turkish state has exerted strong control over the economy and selectively distributed economic resources in favor of allegiant populations while dispossessing the unruly. This dynamic has given way to a common conception among the mainstream Turkish citizenry that allocation of economic resources is at the mercy of the state and citizens owe allegiance and obedience to the state for all that it bestows on them.

Although this debt morality pervades Turkey, it is interrupted and transformed in the Kurdish region. Considered the internal other of the Turkish nation and resisting ethnic homogenization and economic and political centralization policies for decades, Kurds have been subjected to systematic state violence and dispossession. This state violence and resistance to it have engendered a counter-debt morality in the Kurdish region, finding expression in the idiom bedel ödemek (paying the price). Foregrounding a history of state violence and dispossession rather than state benevolence, bedel reverses the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey, rendering the state indebted to the Kurds. Moreover, having emerged out of the Kurdish struggle, bedel redefines the Kurdish political identity around a new set of obligations: to stand up against the state for individual and collective self-determination and to pay tribute to those who made sacrifices in resisting the state.

This dissertation unpacks the political, economic and cultural logics of these two competing debt moralities and traces their contestation in the domain of welfare bureaucracy in an effort to demonstrate how struggles over sovereignty permeate governmental practices in the region.

My two years of ethnographic research (2012–2014) largely focused on the decision-making practices of local welfare officials, who enjoy an immense discretionary power in selecting beneficiaries. It showed that many officials’ practices were informed by the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey that promotes welfare as state benevolence and expects beneficiaries to repay their debt through allegiance and subservience. Although bedel leaks into welfare distribution—through the moral judgments of Kurdish officials—it works in the shadows, remaining largely silent and secret. This suppression of bedel, I suggest, bespeaks the state’s role in denying its own violence and asserting a unidirectional debt relation on beneficiary citizens. Illustrating how state-sponsored social welfare governance operates as a violent, debt-producing mechanism, the dissertation suggests that sovereign violence is intrinsic to the state’s governmental practices in the Kurdish region.

However, the domain of social welfare is not limited to the central state-sponsored social assistance programs. Over the years Kurdish movement has initiated its own welfare programs. Just as with centrally organized welfare programs, alleviation of poverty constitutes the main framework in which these initiatives operate. However, bedel plays a more overt role in these initiatives’ approach to social welfare than it does in centrally organized public social assistance programs. This difference can be traced to the categories and vocabularies that Kurdish movement-led initiatives use as well as to their practices of beneficiary selection. The dissertation traces the ways in which bedel is incorporated into the workings of Kurdish movement-led welfare programs and illustrates how this incorporation opens up room for the nurturing of resistant subjectivities and socialities that challenge the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey as well as the political and economic dispossession it entails. I thus argue that incorporation of bedel in Kurdish initiatives politicizes welfare and constitutes an obstacle to the Turkish state’s establishing and maintaining its sovereign power in the Kurdish region by means of welfare governance.

The dissertation contributes to broad theorizations of power and statecraft, redistribution and dispossession, and political conflict in the Middle East. These lines of inquiry have dominated social sciences for decades, but they have often remained separated. This disconnect obscures the close connections between governmental practices and the workings of sovereign power, preventing us from accounting for the moral and economic dynamics that inform political conflicts. I take debt as both an empirical object and an epistemological vantage point to bring these literatures together and offer different historical and ethnographic strategies of analyzing the state, political subjectivities and their conflictual construction.

Virgin Capital explores the impact of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) program in the US Virgin Islands and asks, "How do contemporary circulations of capital and people alternately build upon and complicate long-present hierarchies?" This dissertation approaches the EDC, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix, as a space in which struggles over quasi-offshore capital produces tensions rooted in race, class, color, gender, and generation. These clashes surrounding `appropriate' financial and social investment have both integrated St. Croix into the global financial services market and produced a great deal of tension between EDC community and residents of St. Croix. Moreover, the presence of this program has generated new categories of personhood that in turn have sparked new debates about what it means to `belong' in a territory administered by the United States. These new categories of personhood are particularly gendered and alternately destabilize and shore up long-standing hierarchies of generation, gender, and place.

The ethnographic basis of Virgin Capital is 16 months of fieldwork I conducted on St. Croix, USVI. Throughout the dissertation, I bring academic writing together with the perspectives of Crucians and `EDC people.' These interviews, both formal and informal, are central to this project as they make clear the ambivalent positioning of the EDC program and its participants in the current moment of increasingly global circulations.

The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, created a rupture with a series of neoliberal policies implemented in Mexico and on a global scale over the last few decades of the 20th century. In a moment when alternatives to neoliberal global capitalism appeared to have disappeared from the world stage, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) initiated a movement and process that would have significance not only in Chiapas and for Mexico, but for many struggles and movements around the world that would come to identify with a kind of "alter-globalization" project. This dissertation examines the historical moment of neoliberal globalization, what the EZLN calls the "Fourth World War," the Zapatista initiative to construct an alternative political project, and the importance of this process of rupture and construction for our understanding of social organization, political participation, struggle and subjectivity.

Taking up theories of new forms of domination as dispersed forms of power operating through non- state institutions and a kind of participative subject in the public realm (following Raúl Zibechi and Stefano Harney), I argue that lines of antagonism can no longer be drawn between public and private, or state and non-state realms, but must be viewed as different strategies of subjectification, one as the subject-making of a form of governance, still but more subtly a form of domination, and one as a form of struggle for collective self-making. While both forms employ mechanisms and imaginaries of cooperation, the former cultivates subjective compatibility with an existing system while the latter I associate with the Zapatista concept and practice of autonomy.

Drawing on several years of fieldwork in Chiapas as well as the extensive theoretical work of the Zapatistas themselves, I trace the development of Zapatista autonomy as a concept and exercise of power and in its implementation as a system of self-government and provision of services through the construction of autonomous territory. This use and understanding of power has been both encouraged by and enabling of the autonomous judicial, health, education, communication and production systems in Zapatista territory. My argument here is that, beyond control over land, services, and the mode of production, territorial and political autonomy has permitted the Zapatistas to create an entire system of "new" social relations, an ecology of practices that create a mutually constructive relationship between (autonomous) system and (self-determined) subject in a cycle that continually widens and deepens the scope of what is possible for both. I then turn to an investigation of the Zapatista initiative to create a larger political project, and a more extensive and diverse collective subject of struggle, through the launching of the "Other Campaign" as a non-electoral anti-capitalist movement. If governance as a new form of domination performs the function of interpellating individuals into, using Stefano Harney's terms, a "class with interest" identifiable by its stakes in the system, I understand the Other Campaign to be a project to gather those "without interest," often considered expendable or dangerous to the system or "society" in general, into a "class beyond interest," a self-determined community engaged in a struggle not for a moment of liberation to be won but as the construction of emancipation as a way of life.