Browsing by Subject "Cultural anthropology"

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

Despite decades of study, the question of how to achieve sustainable small-scale fisheries is unresolved. Because small-scale fishing is diverse and hard to control, one management approach places fishers at the center of decision-making. Common-pool resource theory has assembled a large body of evidence that resource users, without top-down state control, are able to devise and enforce rules that lead to long-term sustainable resource harvest. The social and ecological characteristics (“design principles”) are well known for systems where this collective action is predicted to spontaneously emerge. However, it is poorly known what precipitates collective action when these design principles are absent. This dissertation draws insights about this question from a seemingly successful case from Baja California Sur, Mexico, where fishers have voluntarily created no-fishing areas (“Fish Refuges” or “Zonas de Refugio Pesquero”) in collaboration with the government fisheries agency and a non-governmental organization, Niparajá, in the absence of the design principles. This work is based on an in-depth study of these Fish Refuges including 180 days in the field from 2016-2018, participant observation, informal interviews, journaling, and semi-structured interviews (n=66). First, I found that collective action was possible because stakeholders had three competing visions about what the Fish Refuges were, each associated with criteria and evidence of whether the Fish Refuges were effective. This implies that policy flexibility to accommodate competing goals and evaluation criteria could facilitate collaboration for fisheries management. Second, I found that fishers’ knowledge was integrated in a process that did not recognize its legitimacy though what I call “ping-pong hybridization”, where the locus of decision making moved between stakeholders who could draw on their own knowledge systems. This implies that policies may be able to integrate multiple knowledge systems if the locus of decision-making moves back and forth. Third, I found that the property rights regime change away from de facto open access was possible because fishers were able to trade formal fishing rights for informal management rights, closing a fishing area to gain government trust and partnership. This work implies that insecure, unofficial, and tenuous property rights may be a first step of property rights regime change to achieve sustainable fisheries. In conclusion, bottom-up approaches to fisheries management may benefit from processes where different stakeholders can define the goals and methods used, and draw on their own knowledge systems to assess success. Shifts away from open access may be precipitated when fishers demand decision-making rights, even if these rights are tenuous.

At the heart of "American Realities, Diasporic Dreams" lies the following question: How and why do people generate longings for diasporic experience, and what might this have to do with nationally-specific affective and political economies of race, gender, and age? This dissertation focuses on the women of Girlfriend Tours International (GFT), a regionally and socio-economically diverse group of Americans, who are also members of the virtual community at www.Jamaicans.com. By completing online research in their web-community, and multi-sited ethnographic research in multiple cities throughout the U.S. and Jamaica, I investigate how this group of African-American women makes sense of the paradoxical nature of their hyphenated-identities, as they explore the contentious relationship between "Blackness" and "Americanness."

This dissertation examines how these African-American women use travel and the Internet to cope with their experiences of racism and sexism in the United States, while pursuing "happiness" and social belonging within (virtual and territorial) diasporic relationships. Ironically, the "success" of their diasporic dreams and travels is predicated on how well they leverage their national privilege as (African) American citizens in Jamaica. Therefore, I argue that these African-American women establish a complex concept of happiness, one that can only be fulfilled by moving--both virtually and actually--across national borders. In other words, these women require American economic, national, and social capital in order to travel to Jamaica, but simultaneously need the spiritual connection to Jamaica and its people in order to remain hopeful and happy within the national borders of the U.S. Their pursuit of happiness, therefore, raises critical questions that encourage scholars to rethink how we ethnographically document diasporic longings, and how we imagine their relationships to early 21st century notions of the "American Dream."

This dissertation examines how un(der)employed South Korean young adults maintain optimism in their pursuit of a “good life” that itself is contingent on regular employment. Based on fieldwork about everyday economic insecurity in neoliberal Seoul, I propose that the labor invested to keep their employability viable includes a labor of the voice. I examine how my informants cultivate the aesthetic, poetic, and communicative qualities of their voice in order to get ahead in a world in which quantitative assessments, communicative labor exchange, and technological mediation—the “digitalities of neoliberalism”—confer value on particular kinds of voice. I attend to the shifting demands that inform what one’s voice can do or should be (or not) to be aurally recognized as an employable subject, arguing for how this conceptual instability keeps Koreans’ aspirational pursuits continuously unfinished, and their social mobility largely horizonal. Listening durationally to how my informants’ vocal articulations register this potential, this dissertation critiques the teleological orientations of neoliberal (im)possibility that aurally implicates their voice and limits their futurity otherwise. Terming this specific process “analog optimism,” I propose that laboring (over the voice) is a process which continuously hints at the qualitative capaciousness of more life, both in the future and the meantime, even as the rationalized logics of a knowledge economy compresses the vitality of life, reduces time for pleasure, incites exhaustion, and complicates their status as a liberal human.

Since the 2011 meltdown, the health of “Fukushima children” has become a problem for parents, politics, and future imaginaries in post-nuclear Japan. What are the ethical and political implications of making life around a child imperiled by radiation when (re)productivity of life must be remade in a compromised environment? This dissertation investigates (re)production of life in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan by studying the strivings of families who seek to raise healthy children amidst radiation as a condition of living: what I call “anxious care.” By foregrounding the family as a site for environmental struggles in an emerging politics of life, I examine the work of making children live against and within radiation, looking to consider the radical implications of caring for children in radioactive uncertainty. In particular, this project focuses on inner cities of Fukushima Prefecture that have been on the frontline of radiation debates for having been exposed to disaster-induced radiation while not designated for evacuation. Shifting focus to the edges of delimited disaster zones, I examine the multifaceted aftermath of the nuclear disaster, ranging from differentially altered forms of life conditioned by radioactive uncertainty, the unequal distribution of radiation risk through public/private organizations such as the family form, and the everyday impact of post-Fukushima radiation. Theorizing the stakes of living with nuclear risk as situated political ecologies which generates tensions and possibilities for new forms of life, this dissertation argues that notions of life are undergoing a moment of reconfiguration in post-nuclear Japan by both real-life families and the family form. In doing so, it contributes to critiquing and broadening the anthropological horizons of life amid environmental uncertainty in and beyond Japan.

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.

Nearly half a century ago, acclaimed jazz musician Alice Coltrane (1937-2007), marital partner of saxophonist John Coltrane, began disseminating Hindu (Vedanta) teachings and jazz-inflected bhajans (songs of praise) in her predominately Black, though multiracial, spiritual community in Southern California. Despite all her accomplishments–becoming the first African American guru, authoring two revelatory sacred texts, composing fifteen devotional albums (many on major record labels), and founding and directing a Vedantic center and quasi-monastic community for over thirty years–the highly acclaimed Alice Coltrane is overlooked by scholars of religion, especially of Asian religions. Similarly, Cleveland-born, Princeton graduate Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950-2005)–who initiated hundreds of disciples across North America, Africa and Eastern Europe into a Hindu religious tradition (Gaudiya Vaishnavism), authored nineteen books, and acted as a consultant to several world leaders–has also passed away hardly noticed. Since at least the 1960s, Black Americans have made lifelong religious commitments to Vedantic teachings and South Asian religious practices such as performing kirtans and bhajans. Despite this, their presence and contributions remain virtually invisible to scholars. My dissertation seeks to disclose Black Americans’ presence and influence in Hinduism since the 1960s as well as raise an urgent ethical and theoretical question for the study of religion: Can a Hindu be Black?

Through intellectual and aesthetic artifacts, literary publications, and twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Black Americans across several U.S. Hindu communities, my doctoral research illustrates Black Americans’ participation in Hinduism since the 1960s through the charismatic leaders Alice “Swamini Turiyasangitananda” Coltrane, John “Bhakti Tirtha Swami” Favors, Clarissa “Krsnanandini Devi Dasi” Jones, and a successive generation of Black practitioners. Thus, my study answers the above question affirmatively; yet, building on recent scholarship on the racialization of religion and genealogies of religion, my study also provokes an indispensable examination of race, ethnicity, and geography in academic constructions of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism,’ assessing how theory and discourse have, at times, foreclosed the possibility of a Black Hindu.

The term “Cloud Player” (云玩家) has been widely used as a put-down of the alleged pseudo-players who actively engage in online game discussion but seldomly play games themselves, and game live streaming is considered as the major channel for those to indirectly experience games. This paper enquires into the identification and population of the so-called cloud players in China by investigating Chinese players’ habits, consumption, and preferences in game and game live streaming through survey and interviews. The study showed that cloud players are an endogenic subgroup of the Chinese game community that has been marginalized and stigmatized. Cloud player as an identity is not a static but fluid and composite status an individual can opt for in experiencing one game at a time. To analyze the complex play mechanism of cloud players, a particular play conduct named proxy play by which gamers actively take on avatars of avatars and tune their levels of agency to varying play scenarios, is proposed and elucidated based on the established research on individuals’ motivations for and engagement in game live streaming as well as reflective discussion of prominent theoretical frameworks in game studies such as the magic circle and the frame theory.

This dissertation research explores participatory sea turtle conservation monitoring through a comparison of two case studies, one in North Carolina (NC), USA and the other in Baja California Sur (BCS), Mexico. Participatory approaches in conservation management can supplement state capacity as well as strengthen the involvement of citizens in environmental governance and knowledge production. Despite scholarship challenging the validity of the categories of developing and developed nations, this categorical assumptions derived from this binary world divide continue to inform conservation, and theoretical vocabularies for local roles in conservation management. In developed nations, participatory conservation management is framed through the broader administrative rationalism discourse, and is identified as volunteer conservation or citizen science. In developing nations, participatory conservation management is approached through the discourse of biodiversity and the threats human society poses to it, and is identified through community-based processes of conservation stewardship. The two case studies analyzed in this dissertation serve to interrogate the ways in which these distinct discourses influence outcomes, and consider what may be obscured or overlooked due to discursive constraints.

Conducting ethnographic research in each case study site, I participated in and observed sea turtle conservation activities and conducted in-depth interviews with relevant sea turtle conservation actors as well as collected documents pertaining to the conservation programs. Sea turtle conservation monitors in NC and BCS perform functionally similar conservation tasks, and I collected data using similar techniques in order to maximize comparability. I compare the case studies, not to generalize to a population, but instead to speak to theoretical propositions and inform existing theory on participatory conservation monitoring.

Although participatory monitoring in NC and BCS does not result in a democratization of science, there are beneficial outcomes to participants in both places. NC sea turtle monitors are enabled to take ownership of sea turtle stewardship, and BCS sea turtle monitors are enabled to promote conservation and cultural change using the authority of science. These outcomes challenge assumptions about state capacity and local engagements with science in participatory conservation, and the disparate approaches to local roles in conservation in each `world.' The overall findings suggest that a multitude of factors are involved in the production of conservation program frameworks and participant outcomes, and more deeply interrogating the taken for granted assumptions behind conservation designs and implementation can offer stronger understandings of what participatory conservation management can (and cannot) achieve.

This dissertation examines French and Francophone texts, contexts and thematic problems that comprise a genre I call "ethnographic fiction," whose development we can trace throughout the twentieth century in several geographic locations and in distinct historical moments. During the twentieth century in France, anthropology as an institutionalized discipline and "literature" (writ large) were in constant communication with one another. On the one hand, many French anthropologists produced stylized works demonstrating aesthetic sensibilities that were increasingly difficult to classify. On the other hand, though, poets, philosophers and other literary intellectuals read, absorbed, commented on and attacked texts from anthropology. This century-long conversation produced an interdisciplinary conceptual field allowing French anthropology to borrow from and adapt models from literature at the same time as literature asserted itself as more than just an artistic enterprise and, indeed, as one whose epistemological prerogative was to contribute to and enrich the understanding of humankind and its cultural processes. In this dissertation I argue that fiction can be seen to travel in multiple directions within France's twentieth-century conversation between literature and anthropology such that we can observe the formation of a new genre, one comprised of texts that either explicitly or more implicitly fuse fictional forms and contents together with the methodological and representational imperatives of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork. Additionally, I argue that fiction moves geographically as well, notably from the metropole to Francophone West Africa which became an anthropological hotspot in the twentieth century once extended field research was legitimated in France and armchair anthropology was thoroughly discredited. By investigating ethnographies, novels, memoirs and films produced both in metropolitan France, Francophone West Africa, and the French Caribbean (including texts by Michel Leiris, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Jean Rouch, Jean-Claude Izzo and Raphaël Confiant), I aim to shed light on the kinds of work that elements of fiction perform in ethnographic texts and, by contrast, on how ethnographic concepts, strategies and fieldwork methods are implicitly or explicitly adopted and reformulated in more literarily oriented works of fiction. Ethnographic fiction as a genre, then, was born not only from the epistemological rapprochement of anthropology and literature in metropolitan France, but from complex and often fraught encounters with the very locations where anthropological praxis was carried out.

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.

The central question this dissertation engages with is why modern states in the Persian Gulf rely heavily on informal networks of untrained and inexperienced recruits from the region of Balochistan, presently spread across Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The answer, it argues, lies in the longue durée phenomenon of Baloch conquering territories abroad but not ruling in their own name. Baloch, I argue, conquered not to establish their sovereign rule, but to open channels of mobility for others. The rise of nation-states and citizen-armies in the twentieth century limited the possibility of Baloch conquest. Yet, the Baloch continued to find a place in the Gulf’s protection industry through historically shaped informal, familial, commercial, and parapolitical transnational networks. Flexible and persistent Baloch networks provided territorially bounded states the ability to access resources outside their boundaries without investment in formal international contracts.

Moreover, this dissertation makes the argument that mobile Baloch operated as ‘Portfolio-Mercenaries’, offering their military-labor to foreign states in order to build their own portfolio of transnational economic, social and political activities. At times these portfolio projects contradicted state interests; at other moments they corroborated them. In either situation, the non-soldiering activities of mercenaries went on to transform the nature of political order in the twentieth-century space of the Indian Ocean. They shaped the nature of international law, carried state order beyond borders, stabilized unpopular regimes, and provided ready sources of labor. Through the example of Baloch Portfolio-Mercenaries, the dissertation thus highlights the thick and enduring relationships between state and transnational networks.

This dissertation examines how perceptions of beauty in Brazil reflect both the existing social inequalities and the struggles to produce a more egalitarian society. While hegemonic discourses about beauty in Brazil foster an upper-middle class, white standard, the working-class make claims to citizenship by redefining beauty according to their own affective, sensory experiences. As I see it, the affective relationship that plastic surgery patients have towards their own bodies is central to understanding why beauty is a source of social recognition in Brazil. In this dissertation, I argue that even though discourse attempts to discipline the body to perceive only the "truths" it produces, subjects reinhabit discourses through their immediate sensory experiences, opening up the political space to generate social change.

In order to access this form of "cosmetic citizenship," however, working-class patients undergo low-cost aesthetic surgeries in public hospitals, which are subsidized by the State and help build the national reputation of plastic surgeons. I argue that this national investment in beauty establishes personal appearance as a precondition for citizenship and inclusion in the nation. While media narratives construct beauty as a vehicle for upward mobility in Brazil, the medical discourse about beauty imagines the Brazilian population as becoming progressively homogeneous through "miscegenation" and surgery. These discourses depend on the raciology established by Neo-Lamarckian eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later popularized by the work of Gilberto Freyre.

This dissertation research explores the practices and aspirations to national belonging among Evangelical Egyptians, converts to a distinctively Euro-American form of Protestant Christianity through the proselytizing efforts of European and American missionaries between the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although Evangelical Egyptians have historically been known as politically quietist, in the wake of the January 25 Revolution, leading Evangelicals began to adjust their practices of public engagement with the revolution, civil society, and political activism. Through participant observation, in-depth person centered interviews, and archival research, this dissertation argues that far from severing Evangelical Egyptian imaginations, desires for, and practices of national belonging, conversion from the historic Coptic Orthodox church and to a more internationally connected form of Christian community, in fact provides Evangelicals with some of their most potent tools for articulating their historical and contemporary place in the nation-state of Egypt. This dissertation aims to bring timely and productive debates on the anthropology of religion to bear on the shape of global evangelicalism in the global south as a key shape of politics and sociality. Indeed, this dissertation argues that it is precisely the ‘will to the global’ as the future imagined community of ‘God’s kingdom’ that paradoxically roots Evangelical Egyptians in a robust nationalistic articulation of their faith.

Background: Emotions are shaped through the internalization of culturally relevant values. Contextualized systems of meaning influence an individual’s experience of emotion, the consequences of a given response, and their connection to long-term functional outcomes. The present study aims to explore the socioemotional world of Nepali adolescents, in order to understand emotional needs and identify opportunities for psychosocial intervention. Methods: A tablet-based battery of quantitative assessments was administered to 102 students in grades 7-9 (age 12-18) in an earthquake affected region of the Kathmandu Valley. Assessments included measures of anxiety, PTSD, functional impairment, and a local idiom of distress (problems in the heart-mind). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 students and explored the emotional experience of a recent stressor. Results: Three domains of emotion experience emerged: cognitive, physical, and social. While key differences in emotional distress across gender and cultural groups emerged, similarities in the overarching model suggest a shared understanding of negative emotion among Nepali adolescents. Of particular note is the social domain, involving both interpersonal and communal elements, which included the local idiom of distress, which has previously been linked to depression risk. Conclusion: This tripartite conceptualization of emotion is a critical step toward understanding cultural meanings of emotional wellbeing, and the connection between socially experienced emotion and psychopathology underlines the importance of psychosocial integration in future interventions.

This dissertation examines the conjuncture of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and migrant social life in the urban space of Beijing as a problematic of what Foucault called biopower, where distinct logics of market and state power deploy techniques of civil society and culture in the form of public-private partnerships. The unique effect of this conjuncture is an expanding logic of power that obfuscates lines of antagonism between capital and labor, requiring new theoretical and methodological insight into how power, resistance, and antagonism might be conceived in the biopolitical era.

Drawing on recent work on biopower and new theories of antagonism and subjectivity, I argue (following Badiou's work) that both power and resistance must be articulated in their divided tendencies, which allows us to work through how certain tendencies may be contradictory and complementary, and to redraw the lines of antagonism at the level of subjectivity in terms of these divided tendencies. These lines of antagonism don't fall between public/private, market/state, or civil society/state, but along a process by which subjectivities are produced and sustained at a "distance" from the logic of their placement in society, or integrated into power by various strategies of civil society and culture. The practices and theoretical productions of one migrant cultural organization in Beijing, whose project centers on the production of new migrant subjectivity and culture in the transformation of self and society, provides insight into how we might conceive of politics as new forms of "distance" from the logic of biopower.

Through over twelve months of intensive fieldwork from 2010-2011 and follow up trips the following year on the intersection between Corporate Social Responsibility and migrant social life in Beijing, I trace the techniques by which antagonistic subjectivity is intervened upon. First, I examine the surrounding discourses, logics, and conditions of knowledge production on culture that inform the projects of migrant subjectivity from a historical perspective, and reveal a theoretical impasse in the displacement and disavowal of revolutionary culture to grapple with how to re-think antagonistic contradictions in the pervading market logic of difference. The continuation of this impasse into the biopolitical era is brought into focus through the state and market turn to "culture industries" that include, mirror, and delimit migrant social life in Beijing. Problematizing the rise of self-articulated migrant subjectivity and migrant culture amidst these public-private projects, I then turn to the practices of one migrant organization whose project draws upon a legacy of struggle for self-organized and self-run migrant collective practices to successfully confront and block a situation of forced demolition and displacement. Analyzing how elements from state, market, and "civil society" interacted through public-private partnerships in the situation of daily migrant struggles, I identify the importance of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in the urban space of Beijing and the growth of biopolitical practices of intervention upon the migrant issue. I argue that the effect of the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility as a social practice is to enroll migrants as active participants in a social life that makes their subjectivities and productive activities visible to the public sphere. Lines of antagonism can thus be drawn by taking up distinctions between subjectivities oriented toward "the public," "self-governance," and the CSR "community," versus collective self-organizing. I conclude by arguing that if biopower seeks to mirror practices of resistance and power by drawing upon the self-activities of cooperative subjects, then thinking about the self-organized and self-run migrant organization as a new form of "distance" may shed light on how antagonism and political struggle might be redefined today.

“Guangchangwu,” or what is literally translated as “square-dancing,” is a form of public dance that has been exceedingly popular, albeit controversial, in China over recent years. Most of the participants are elderly women in their late-50s or above, who roughly fall in the category called “dama” (“big-mother”). Usually, a dancing group assembles in the evening and dances on a daily basis to the music played through a portable loudspeaker. Yet, because many dancing sites are in or close to residential compounds, the music played, or, the alleged “noise pollution,” have caused numerous conflicts nationwide. During the summer 2014, I conducted a three-months fieldwork on the dance in China. In this thesis, I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama. I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerges from a series of long existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulates China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.