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Parallel: Sophie Spencer-Zavos, ‘The Case of Rasmea Odeh: The parallel biopolitics of the US and Israel’, Radicle: Reed Anthropology Review, 2, 1, 2017

05Sep17

Abstract: Using Foucault and Agamben’s theories of the state’s project of nation building through the inclusive exclusion of bodies, the author casts the Israel-Palestine conflict in different light. The forcible removal of Palestinians is reexamined and situated in the larger narratives surrounding both the creation of the Israeli state and the nature of US biopolitics.


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Health? Caleb Eckert, Unsettling Spring Health, Graduate dissertation, Haverford College, 2017

05Sep17

Abstract: Studying the work of the Springs Stewardship Institute in Northern Arizona, this project considers how springs ecologists work within and against settler colonialism. First, I consider Flagstaff as a settler society, arguing that early settler military expeditions were formative in producing knowledge about and settler dispositions towards springs. Putting Aldo Leopold’s writings on land health in conversation with feminist and Indigenous scholarship, a relational definition of health can be found in springs’ scientific study. Boundaries between discourses on health are blurrier than one might think. Spring health is also political in its knowledge production and research practice. The frame of woven ecosystem, human, and more-than-human health posed by springs scientists is one that understands the world in place-based particularity and communication, implicating settler colonial manifestations and structural paradigms as drivers of springs’ degradation. Making kin, which requires personal and structural work of unsettling, can challenge settlers and scientists alike to recognize relational communicative reality and fulfill ethical obligations with the land, humans, and more-than-human others. Health, for springs and humans, is a vital concept that presents scientists, land managers, and residents with unsettling realities while offering possibilities for flourishing.


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Predating producers: Michael D. Wise, Producing Predators Wolves, Work, and Conquest in the Northern Rockies, University of Nebraska Press, 2016

02Sep17

Description: In Producing Predators, Michael D. Wise argues that contestations between Native and non-Native people over hunting, labor, and the livestock industry drove the development of predator eradication programs in Montana and Alberta from the 1880s onward. The history of these anti-predator programs was significant not only for their ecological effects, but also for their enduring cultural legacies of colonialism in the Northern Rockies.

By targeting wolves and other wild carnivores for extermination, cattle ranchers disavowed the predatory labor of raising domestic animals for slaughter, representing it instead as productive work. Meanwhile, federal agencies sought to purge the Blackfoot, Salish-Kootenai, and other indigenous peoples of their so-called predatory behaviors through campaigns of assimilation and citizenship that forcefully privatized tribal land and criminalized hunting and its related ritual practices. Despite these colonial pressures, Native communities resisted and negotiated the terms of their dispossession by representing their own patterns of work, food, and livelihood as productive. By exploring predation and production as fluid cultural logics for valuing labor, rather than just a set of biological processes, Producing Predators offers a new perspective on the history of the American West and the modern history of colonialism more broadly.


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Listening colonialism: Lee Veeraraghavan, Dirty Ears: Hearing and Hearings in the Canadian Liberal Settler Colony, PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2017

31Aug17

Abstract: Despite vocal opposition from the indigenous people, public hearing processes in Canada play an important part in determining whether or not oil and gas pipeline development projects will be approved. Attention to hearing as an aesthetic and political practice has been theorized by the Canadian composer and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer as a fundamental part of culture and nation building. This dissertation explores the ways the Canadian government and settler society use hearing as a silencing technique, mobilizing the field of aurality to place limits on the expression of indigenous dissent. The research is based on two years of ethnographic work among activists fighting oil and gas development in Vancouver, and indigenous sovereigntists resisting pipelines in the province of British Columbia’s north. Juxtaposing case studies from different struggles over land use in British Columbia with a deconstruction of R. Murray Schafer’s writings and select compositions, this dissertation shows how the field of aurality shapes land and people.


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Learning to settle the apparently unsettleable: Michele Currie Navakas, Liquid Landscape Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017

31Aug17

Description: In Florida, land and water frequently change places with little warning, dissolving homes and communities along with the very concepts of boundaries themselves. While Florida’s landscape of saturated swamps, shifting shorelines, coral reefs, and tiny keys initially impeded familiar strategies of early U.S. settlement, such as the establishment of fixed dwellings, sturdy fences, and cultivated fields, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans learned to inhabit Florida’s liquid landscape in unconventional but no less transformative ways.

In Liquid Landscape, Michele Currie Navakas analyzes the history of Florida’s incorporation alongside the development of new ideas of personhood, possession, and political identity within American letters. From early American novels, travel accounts, and geography textbooks, to settlers’ guides, maps, natural histories, and land surveys, early American culture turned repeatedly to Florida’s shifting lands and waters, as well as to its itinerant enclaves of Native Americans, Spaniards, pirates, and runaway slaves.

This preoccupation with Floridian terrain and populations, argues Navakas, reveals a deep American concern with the challenges of settling a region so exceptional in topography, geography, and demography. Navakas reads a vast archive of popular, literary, and reference texts spanning Revolution to Reconstruction, including works by William Bartram, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to uncover an alternative history of American possession, one that did not descend exclusively, or even primarily, from the more familiar legal, political, and philosophical conceptions of American land as enduring, solid, and divisible. The shifting southern edge of early America produced a new language of settlement, belonging, territory, and sovereignty, and that language would ultimately transform how people all across the rapidly changing continent imagined the making of U.S. nation and empire.


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Seeing indigenes die: Julius H. Rubin, Perishing Heathens Stories of Protestant Missionaries and Christian Indians in Antebellum America, University of Nebraska Press, 2017

31Aug17

Description: In Perishing Heathens Julius H. Rubin tells the stories of missionary men and women who between 1800 and 1830 responded to the call to save Native peoples through missions, especially the Osages in the Arkansas Territory, Cherokees in Tennessee and Georgia, and Ojibwe peoples in the Michigan Territory. Rubin also recounts the lives of Native converts, many of whom were from mixed-blood métis families and were attracted to the benefits of education, literacy, and conversion.

During the Second Great Awakening, Protestant denominations embraced a complex set of values, ideas, and institutions known as “the missionary spirit.” These missionaries fervently believed they would build the kingdom of God in America by converting Native Americans in the Trans-Appalachian and Trans-Mississippi West. Perishing Heathens explores the theology and institutions that characterized the missionary spirit and the early missions such as the Union Mission to the Osages, and the Brainerd Mission to the Cherokees, and the Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees.

Through a magnificent array of primary sources, Perishing Heathens reconstructs the millennial ideals of fervent true believers as they confronted a host of impediments to success: endemic malaria and infectious illness, Native resistance to the gospel message, and intertribal warfare in the context of the removal of eastern tribes to the Indian frontier.


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A post-settler society? Elsa Koleth, ‘Unsettling the Settler State: The State and Social Outcomes of Temporary Migration in Australia’, Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 3, 1, pp. 33-50

29Aug17

Abstract: The exponential growth of temporary migration to Australia since the late 1990s has unsettled the model of permanent migration, state supported settlement and multicultural citizenship on which Australia has been built. This article draws attention to the emergence of a gulf between Australia’s immigration policies and social policy frameworks for migrant integration in the course of Australia’s transition from a permanent to a temporary migration paradigm. It does so through an analysis of interviews with migrants, government officials at federal and local levels, and migrant service providers. It argues that the system by which temporary migration has been governed in Australia has enabled the Australian state to strategically divest itself of responsibility for the social welfare of temporary migrants and the long-term outcomes of temporary migration policies. Specifically, this has been achieved through the construction of temporary migrants as disposable, risk-bearing subjects, the exclusion of temporary migrants from social policy frameworks for migrant integration, and the elision of long-term social outcomes of migration policies through a focus on short-term economic outcomes. It concludes by pointing to changes required for instituting a temporal re-orientation of government policies from short-term economic outcomes towards the long-term social outcomes of migration.


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Anthropology, sovereignty, settler colonialism: Circe Sturm, ‘Reflections on the Anthropology of Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism: Lessons from Native North America’, Cultural Anthropology, 32, 3, pp. 340–348

29Aug17

Excerpt: Any consideration of what sovereignty has come to mean in Native North America, as a conceptual framework that names a particular kind of lived indigenous experience, has to be understood within the context of settler colonialism. Yet anthropology has been slow to take up settler colonialism as a key analytic, even though the discipline has long been engaged with understanding different types of colonial orders. This hesitation results in a missed opportunity for anthropologists to learn from scholars working in indigenous studies. Sovereignty and settler colonialism are frequently expressed as entwined critical frameworks that center indigenous perspectives. Each has merits when considered on its own, but taken together, they offer greater theoretical insights about the nature of political authority, ones widely applicable beyond the confines of Indian Country. In this brief essay, I outline some of the key conversations regarding sovereignty happening in Native North America, specifically within cultural anthropology, indigenous studies, and other related fields, paying particular attention to those that have proven highly productive for scholars working in the region and that hold the greatest promise for advancing intellectual debates in the discipline as a whole.


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It’s not a binary: Jason Scott Cooke, Indian Fields: Historicizing Native Space and Sovereignty in the Era of Removal, PhD Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2017.

23Aug17

Abstract: Familiar to most anyone with knowledge of U.S. history, antebellum Indian removal likely evokes a drama comprised of two roles: on one hand, Indian peoples as represented by elite Cherokee activists, and, on the other, their political antagonists in the nascent states’ rights movement, among whom the infamous Andrew Jackson stands both as agent and symbol. What may be surprising, however, is that Americanist scholarship on Native removal similarly reduces it to an overarching Indian-Anglo binary. As against a two-worlds model that frames removal writ large in terms of a single political dualism, I argue that regionally specific forms of Native dispossession around the time of the Indian Removal Act (1830) yield different narrative assemblages of Indian identity. Further, these assemblages correspond with differences in the historical conditions of settler colonialism in different parts of the country, conditions irreducible to a single narrative premised on the territorial claims of the United States. Combining work in the field of Native studies by scholars such as Gerald Vizenor and Jodi Byrd with poststructuralist insights into the relationship between narrativity and historicism, this dissertation develops a geographic paradigm that emphasizes the ways in which both Native and settler actors use linear narratives of history to fashion claims to territory. Each chapter situates the work of an Indigenous activist of the period (the Cherokee spokesperson Elias Boudinot, the Pequot minister William Apess, and the Sauk warrior Black Hawk) in relation to non-Native political and literary texts that lay claim, whether implicitly or explicitly, to lands otherwise held by these activists’ respective nations. Accordingly, the project argues for a change in the conceptualization of Indian identity. Rather than a vexed yet essentially referential signifier for Native peoples, Indianness as a narrative construct marks the point at which uneven and at times competing territorial claims by different settler actors gives way to a portrait of the historical necessity of a given claim. What is more, this narrativity becomes available to Native peoples themselves as these regional struggles unfold. Insofar as it renders a linear historicity in the service of land claims, narrating Indianness gives Native activists a means to represent place-based Indigenous sovereignty to audiences not inclined to make sense of this concept.


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On the settler religious experience (when the ‘displaced body of the settler becomes the central placeholder of religious experience’): Erin D. Yerby, Spectral Bodies of Evidence: The Body as Medium in American Spiritualism, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2017

23Aug17

Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnography of the body as medium in the North American Spiritualist tradition. With its origins in the “burned-over district” of upstate New York, Spiritualism is a homegrown religious movement rooted in the radical Protestant milieu of “Great Awakenings,” which evolved into an international religious movement with a distinctly secular bent. Spiritualists, unlike Pentecostals and Evangelicals, de-emphasize faith or belief and understand the spirits as present to the “natural” senses and thus demonstrable as “evidences, ” complicating the dialectics of faith and skepticism. Situated within North American “metaphysical” traditions, 19th century and contemporary Spiritualism foregrounds the centrality of mediumship and thus the spirit medium’s sensorium, through its practices of spirit communication. The medium is a figure of mediation, one who communicates the spectral presence of the dead—or as the Spiritualists’ say, “There are no dead!”—to the living. This dissertation looks at how this emphasis on spiritual evidences draws out modern antinomies between secular and religious experience, and the certainty and doubt engendered by the medium’s attention to ephemeral affects, sensations and images that define spirit presence. As such, it takes as its point of departure the Spiritualist medium’s discernment of the spirit world as a practice of making the body a media, or instrument, for the visual, auditory, and haptic sensation of the spirits of the dead. Based upon over three years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this anthropological study was conducted in Spiritualist Churches, home circles, training courses, and in mediumship centers in New York City, upstate New York, New Jersey and London, including many summers spent in the long-standing Spiritualist camp of Lily Dale, in northwestern New York State. As this dissertation proposes, a focus on bodily mediation allows us to think the body not only as a specific kind of media in the common technological sense, but as a sensory instrument for mediation in the originary ontological sense, as religious mediation across thresholds—between people and spirits, the living and the dead, God and creation, human and nonhuman forces. This work argues that Spiritualism places secular and religious notions of experience within an immanent frame, making visible the problem of a body affected—in this case, by “clouds” of spirits—and, more fundamentally, the problem of the body’s doubleness: as if always already shadowed by its own spectrality. Mediumship, it argues, addresses itself to a kind of evidence, where what is sought is a kind of experience: an experience in which the spirits become discernible, and are figured into a verifiable state to become evidence for others. By making the body the central instrument for mediating invisible forces of spirit, history, and affect, North American Spiritualism—it proposes—opens onto a set of problems connecting image, settlement and experience, laced together as a problem of the body. If mediumship concerns the fact of sensation, the fact of being-affected, affects are the foreground, not the background, against which everything else takes place: to speak of the experience of mediumship is to speak of attunements to overlooked images and affects and the way these are concretized into more enduring spirit figures. It is to this cloudy realm of fugitive images and affections that this work tries to attend. Specifically, and in light of Spiritualisms’ focus upon spiritual experience as the unmediated ground of divine apprehension, this dissertation situates Spiritualism within a broader stream of Protestant iconoclasm, albeit at the margins, as a syncretic “metaphysical” movement of diverse spiritual and occult influences. This work suggests affinities between the Spiritualist medium’s mediation of spirit images, and a Puritan iconoclasm at the foundation of North American settler spirituality—where the displaced body of the settler becomes the central placeholder of religious experience and sacred image, the body itself figured as the sacred image or icon of God. Drawing upon these inheritances, Spiritualism is here situated within a spiritual geography of settlement. In particular, this concerns a geography connecting 19th century and present-day practices of spirit communication with spectral “Indians” and North American settlement’s iconoclastic foundations: a history of violence haunted by spectralized others. This dissertation would be of interest to readers of religious/mystical experience, philosophy of religion, media theory, affect theory, settler colonialism, Native American studies, gender studies, and ethnographic writing.


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