“Development Anthropology is a Contact Sport” An Oral History Interview with Michael M. Cernea by Judith Freidenberg
Michael M. Cernea and Judith Freidenberg
The editors and editorial board of Human Organization are pleased to introduce readers to the following oral history interview with Michael M. Cernea, a development social scientist who has militated throughout his academic career and applied work for “putting people first,” in the forefront of development projects and policies. Working for a long time for the promotion of anthropological and sociological knowledge, either in the activities of the World Bank or in the policies and programs of governments of both developed and developing countries, Dr. Cernea cleared pathways for applied social science that are sure to benefit people in development settings for many years to come.
Entrapment Processes and Immigrant Communities in a Time of Heightened Border Vigilance
Guillermina Gina Núñez and Josiah McC. Heyman
In processes of entrapment, police and other state agencies impose significant risk to moving around, while people themselves exercise various forms of agency by both limiting themselves and covertly defying movement controls. Recent US immigration and border enforcement policy has entrapped undocumented immigrants, in particular on the United States side of the US-Mexico border region. We explore how to operationalize this “macro” pattern in ethnographic research, making the conceptually and methodologically significant point that political-legal forces are only one among many elements leading to entrapment and immobilization; other factors include transportation constraints, poor health, etc. The concept of “morality of risk” is also introduced to help us understand how and why trapped people would take severe risks to defy immigration policing. Three ethnographic cases are examined, noting the complex mix of movement and barriers found in them. We conclude with the significance of entrapment for applied and basic social science: first, for the analysis of spatial mobility, enclosure, and inequalities of movement; second, for public policy; and third, for the methods and ethics of researching trapped and hidden populations.
Key words: Migration, Mobility, Entrapment, Morality, Risk, Networks, US-Mexico Border, Colonias
Development Economics, Developing Migration: Targeted Economic Development Initiatives as Drivers in International Migration
Gregory S. Gullette
This paper explores how market liberalization, privatization, and deregulation can result in low economic growth or unequally distributed economic expansion, which may lead to social inequality and new motives for emigration. Mexico’s neoliberal policies and their economic and social performances are critically analyzed in comparison to variants of developmental states, where governments choose greater involvement with economic direction. Comparative analysis deepens the understanding of Mexico’s economic development difficulties and how such complications impact its people and influence emigration patterns. To understand the differences in state-led or neoliberal development I utilize the example of tourism in Huatulco, Oaxaca. I seek to explain how tourism development in Mexico has not only shifted since the 1982 Debt Crisis, but how this shift, along with greater openness to foreign investment, has resulted in markedly different growth rates among tourist destinations created prior to and subsequent to 1982. Different patterns of growth and increased social inequalities have partially hampered Huatulco’s development and have created new motivations for emigration. Alternate economic and political policies in Huatulco are suggested in the hopes of alleviating social inequalities and unequal growth distributions.
Key words: Mexico, migration, tourism, development statism, neoliberalism
“…As Soon as She Stepped off the Plane”: Understanding and Managing Migration, Chronic Illness, and Poverty in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Nancy J. Burke
This paper addresses immigration and diabetes treatment management through exploration of the experience of a Cuban immigrant household’s negotiations with providers and clinics around a grandmother’s type 2 diabetes treatment. (Mis)understandings and (mis)communications around blood draws, dietary modifications, and medicines illustrate the differences between provider and family perceptions of “compliance.” Specifically, this ethnographic study of family centered chronic disease management illustrates that, in the context of resettlement in an unwelcoming environment, language barriers, lack of clinical coordination, and differential meanings combine to decrease effective management and to increase stress levels within the family about management. In addition, this study illustrates the embedded nature of illness and its management in the broader circumstances of individual’s lives, with factors such as work schedules, children’s needs, responsibilities to family left in the home country, and neighborhood environment competing for the time and attention required by the treatment regimen. Competing priorities of the clinic, problems with communication across clinics and providers, and complicated home lives contribute to struggles to “control” sugar.
Key words: diabetes, family, migration, poverty
Trading Old Textiles: the Selective Diversification of Highland Livelihoods in Northern Vietnam
Sarah Turner
This paper aims to advance our understandings of rural Hmong livelihoods in Northern Vietnam. It investigates the local production and trade dynamics that link the livelihoods of a number of highland Hmong minority women in the province of Lao Cai to local, national, and global trade networks. Anchored in ethnographic research, the paper focuses on the actors, exchange systems, and locations implicated in the trade of embroidered fabrics, and how these have been shaped through time. Drawing on commodity chain analyses of three textile products—one chain fairly localized, another cross-border, and a third increasingly globalized—the paper examines the processes whereby new relationships, hierarchies, and values have been produced, manipulated, and challenged among the many actors involved. These include not only Hmong women, but also lowland Vietnamese, the State, and tourists. The study concludes that this textile trade has resulted in the selective diversification of Hmong rural livelihoods, the women not fully reliant upon such trade, but becoming involved when the time is right for them in a very flexible form of engagement.
Key words: Hmong, Vietnam, commodity chains, livelihoods, textiles
Household Exchange Networks in Post-Socialist Slovakia
Julianna Acheson
This article describes the exchange networks among extended families in Slovakia, the rights and duties of those involved in them, and their importance to these families and the Slovak economy. Special emphasis is placed on delimiting the conditions under which these networks arise and how they function. These exchange networks are best described as what institutional economist Oliver Williamson calls a “hybrid” organization, having some of the characteristics of both markets and firms. Examination of these networks, I believe, expands our understanding of production and exchange in contemporary rural societies in newly emerging market systems.
Key words: family and household exchange networks, economic anthropology, hybrid organization, kitchen gardens, post-socialist transition, migrant labor, peasants, villagers, Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Slovak Republic
Three Paths from Law Enforcement to Compliance: Cases from the Fisheries
Stig S. Gezelius
The article addresses three mechanisms whereby enforcement may generate compliance among citizens: the Hobbesian mechanism, which emphasizes deterrence, the Habermasian mechanism, which emphasizes rational communication, and the Durkheimian mechanism, which emphasizes enforcement’s symbolic meaning. It addresses these mechanisms in three ethnographic studies of compliance in fisheries, and argues that the Durkheimian view of law enforcement has unjustly been neglected in compliance research and deserves a place alongside the Hobbesian and Habermasian views.
Key words: enforcement, fisheries, compliance, morality
In the Power of Power: The Understated Aspect of Fisheries and Coastal Management
Svein Jentoft
As with other forms of governance, fisheries, and coastal management rests ultimately on power; power to decide, enforce, and implement management decisions. Power is in this sense a productive force. Without it, managers could not do their job. But power can also be disruptive, corruptive, and, hence, negative. It can be used to block management initiatives and/or to make management serve special interests, creating thus inequity and injustice. Therefore, power in fisheries and coastal management involves potentials as well as risks, making it one of the key challenges in institutional design. Yet, although power is perhaps the most central issue in social science, a literature search on power in fisheries and coastal management research yields very little. We may wonder why this is so. But what is power in the first place? Where does power sit? And what does power actually do? How can fisheries and coastal management benefit from the way social scientists have debated these questions? This paper attempts to demonstrate what power involves and how it should be addressed in fisheries and coastal management research.
Key words: Power, Governance, Fisheries Co-management, Knowledge, Phronesis
The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis Applied to Big 5(4) Public Accounting Firms’ Assessments of Client Internal Controls
Mark Dirsmith and Mark E. Haskins
It has been increasingly reasoned that language and organizational culture mediate between independent observers and the organizations they are trying to understand. We apply the linguistic relativity hypothesis and interpretive cultural anthropology to probe two discursive styles – metonymy and synecdoche – that may be used by the Big 5 (and following the collapse of Arthur Andersen, Big 4) public accounting firms to describe the internal control systems of their clients. Based upon a test instrument distributed to audit teams and interviews, we find that the more “mechanistic” audit firm cultures employ metonymy, while “organic” audit firm cultures employ synecdoche. Implications are explored.
Key words: Linguistic relativity hypothesis, organizational culture, discursive styles, metonymy, synecdoche, social constitution of reality, internal control assessment, Sarbanes-Oxley Act
