ISSN:
0011-3204
Language:
English
Titel der Quelle:
Current anthropology
Publ. der Quelle:
Chicago, Ill : Univ. of Chicago Press
Angaben zur Quelle:
Vol. 56, No. S11 (2015), p. S97-S107
DDC:
570
Abstract:
Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished community in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts— and (Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)—and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretical picture of power over life and death, particularly that posited by Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) distinction between bare and qualified life. They also foreground the ways in which gender is implicated in practices of world making that James Holston (2008) describes as “insurgent” and “differentiated” citizenship. Exploring the ways that people seek to craft lives in contexts that undermine many possibilities, I demonstrate ethnographically both the forms of exposure that poverty produces and the ways that these are countered. I propose a genealogy of bareness that, contra Agamben’s emphasis on sovereign power, is deeply embedded in local ways of understanding persons, relationships, history’s effects, and life’s possibilities.
Note:
Copyright: © 2015 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/682078
URL:
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1735750892
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