Bearing Witness to the Injustices of Mass Incarceration

Lau-Ozawa, Koji

doi:10.1111/aman.13073

Cited by 7 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Given the uniquely high rates at which the United States incarcerates its own citizens in the contemporary moment, as well as the central role of caging in our border policies and antiterrorism strategies (past and present, in settler colonialism), I remain struck by the notable lacunae in the four central American Anthropological Association journals of work directly on imprisonment in the United States (for exceptions, see Lau‐Ozawa [], Raschig [], and the rich PoLAR series on authoritarianism and confinement by Besteman, Biondi, and Burton []). Based on comparative work on captivity, what might anthropologists have to contribute to urgent debates about mass incarceration and criminal justice reform, prison abolition, immigrant detention policies, as well as strategies of containment in debates over native sovereignty in the United States?…”

Section: On Staying With the Troubles Of Carceralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long-standing themes in cultural anthropology-tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency-even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders?The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long-standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa artículos producidos en las cuatro revistas científicas claves de la Asociación Americana de Antropología a lo largo de 2018, e identifica las formas como los antropólogos culturales aceptaron la invitación de Haraway para "quedarse con el problema" a través de un envolvimiento con las lógicas de la captividad y sus fallas. Este trabajo sugiere atención continua a temas de larga data en antropología cultural -tensiones entre captura y escape, restricción y resistencia, estructura y agencia-aun cuando sugiere que esa captividad y sus fallas ingobernables pueden productivamente llamar nuestra atención a nuevas formas de pensar sobre gobernanza, temporalidad, escala, afecto, economía política, posthumanismo, ontología, cuidado e infraestructura.En esta revisión, pregunto: ¿Qué puede y qué no puede ser contenido en el momento contemporáneo, y qué está en juego en esa contención o en la filtración que supera sus fronteras? La revisión se enfoca en las formas claves en que los antropólogos analizaron estas cuestiones de larga data de nuevo en 2018: captividad y la naturaleza de lo humano, dependencia y exilio, y violencia y fronteras y, por contraste, cambio desenfrenado e incertidumbre, personas rebeldes y afectos, y residuos filtrantes y toxicidad. En general, sugiero que la captividad y la filtración proveen provocaciones productivas para estudio posterior. [año en revisión, antropología sociocultural, captividad, escape, incertidumbre, residuos]

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Section: On Staying With the Troubles Of Carceralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…They manifest and materialize the abstractions (e.g., citizen, nation, legality; immigrant, “Other,” illegality) that lay at the basis of modern power relations and inequalities. Reflecting on such present‐day artifacts of social struggle, Mark Hauser (, ) and several others suggest that archaeologists rethink their discipline, casting it as a means to “bear witness” to the workings of power and its systemic and structural inequalities (Atalay ; Battle‐Baptiste ; Bernbeck and Pollock ; Hernandez ; Lau‐Ozawa ; McGuire ; Rizvi ; Voss ). They build on the example of anthropologist Paul Farmer (, 25), who wrote of bearing witness as a method to reveal the myriad and interconnected ways that people suffer and withstand social disparities and economic imbalances (see also González‐Tennant ; Roller ).…”

Section: Contemporary Politics and Heritagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar to Soto's documentation of the migrants’ discarded backpacks and clothes, archaeology is affording views of the hidden stories, the undocumented lives, and the acts of perseverance that lay beneath the structures of the modern world. Lau‐Ozawa () focuses our attention on a child's footprint in the concrete of a World War II–era internment camp for Japanese Americans, foregrounding this imprint as an emotional reminder of a life in captivity. Bernbeck and Pollock (, ) confront the human remains from Nazi experimentation in a pit below the Free University of Berlin.…”

Section: Contemporary Politics and Heritagementioning

confidence: 99%

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

Kosiba

2019

American Anthropologist

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Anthropological archaeology has long been a process of categorization. The history of the subdiscipline could be rendered in terms of an ongoing project to create, critique, and then refashion the categories by which archaeologists understand and explain social and ecological processes. Despite ever-changing theoretical tides, many archaeologists have continued to adhere to a lingua franca that demarcates their object of study, whether "the past," "nature," complexity, material culture, or historical knowledge. In 2018, strong currents in archaeological scholarship have both challenged and washed out the boundaries of many of these epistemological mainstays. This was more than a postmodern exercise to question metanarratives of history or to destabilize supposed social universals. The recent scholarship develops innovative theoretical perspectives and sophisticated methodological tools to shed light on the varied human interactions, practices, and projects that were previously occluded by research too sharply focused on bounded categories such as periods, polities, adaptations, and meanings. Furthermore, archaeologists are now more than ever critically examining the colonial institutions that they perpetuate and seeking to establish new common ground with Indigenous communities. A decidedly archaeological perspective seems to be taking shape.This is a view that sees social life from the ground up in terms of complicated relationships between people, things, and other organisms that cannot be reduced to catchall categories. [year in review, archaeology, archaeological theory, current issues, Indigenous archaeology, environmental anthropology] RESUMEN La arqueología antropológica ha sido durante mucho tiempo un proceso de categorización. La historia de la subdisciplina podría ser descrita en términos de un proyecto continuo de crear, criticar y luego rehacer las categorías a través de las cuales los arqueólogos entienden y explican los procesos sociales y ecológicos. A pesar de las mareas teóricas siempre cambiantes, muchos arqueólogos han continuado adhiriéndose a una lengua franca que demarca su objeto de estudio, ya sea "el pasado", "naturaleza", complejidad, cultura material o conocimiento histórico.En 2018, corrientes fuertes en la investigación arqueológica han tanto retado como difuminado los límites de muchos de los pilares epistemológicos. Esto fue más que un ejercicio posmoderno para cuestionar metanarrativas de la historia o para desestabilizar supuestos universales sociales. La reciente investigación desarrolla perspectivas teóricas innovadoras y herramientas metodológicas sofisticadas para arrojar luz sobre las variadas interacciones humanas, prácticas y proyectos que estuvieron previamente ocluidos por investigación excesivamente enfocada en categorías delimitadas tales como períodos, unidades políticas, adaptaciones y significados. Además, los arqueólogos ahora están más que nunca examinando críticamente las instituciones coloniales que perpetúan y buscando establecer un nuevo terreno común con las c...

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“…Some articles have similarly observed techniques used by incarcerees to achieve the same goals, such as Ng's and Ozawa's study of gardens in incarceration camps (Ng 2014;Ozawa 2016). This research focuses on the archaeology of spaces made by incarcerees to demonstrated the expression of Japanese identity (Ng 2014;Ng and Camp 2015;Ozawa 2016;Lau-Ozawa 2018). Ng's 2014 thesis on Manzanar examines (1) Japanese resistance via altering environments to create private spaces (such as basements) contrary to regulations and (2) the attempt by incarcerees to alleviate anti-Japanese sentiment by presenting their culture through the construction of Japanese style gardens in a way that would be deemed positive and benevolent by the WRA and non-Japanese Americans.…”

Section: The Increasing Archaeological Interest Of Incarceration Camp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These improvements are evidenced by many architectural remains, such as such as storage cellars and Japanese furo baths in Manzanar (Burton, Farrell, and Sato 1996:54;Kamp-Whittaker 2020). One of these improvements frequently discussed due to its prevalence in incarceration camps (including Manzanar), are Japanese gardens (Burton, Farrell, Lord and Lord 2002;Ng 2014;Ng and Camp 2015;Ozawa 2016;Lau-Ozawa 2018). Ng and Camp discuss how Japanese Americans constructed gardens with the intention of facilitating understanding and antiracism (Ng and Camp 2015:158).…”

Section: Daily Life At Incarceration Centersmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Transnational Approach to the Ceramics of Manzanar

Jesse¹

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Manzanar was one of ten sites used as an incarceration center for the forced removal of Japanese Americans during World War II. Manzanar is located in between Independence and Lone Pine, California and was in operation from 1942-1945. Archaeological surveys and excavations were conducted in 1993 by National Park Service archaeologists. This case study uses ceramic artifacts recovered from these excavations at Manzanar to study ceramic consumption patterns by Japanese Americans. The period of focus for this study is 1942-1945. Ceramics have been used successfully by archaeologists to explore the political, social, economic, and personal lives of individuals within a community. This thesis uses a transnational framework to expand on previous archaeological studies to explore how political, social, and economic relationships affected the consumption of ceramics by Japanese Americans. Glossary of TermsEuropean ceramics: European is meant in the contemporary geographical sense of the word, and includes British and German ceramics Executive Order 9066: The Executive Order signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt which authorized the Secretary of War to create of military zones which could exclude or keep in any persons.This Order was used to create military zones along the West Coast and remove Japanese Americans from their homes.Incarceration: this term is used in favor of terms such as "relocation" and "evacuation", which imply benevolence reasons for the removal of Japanese Americans, and "internment", which often refers to prisoners of war and "enemy aliens". This term acknowledges the euphemistic language of the time and the removal of American citizens who did nothing wrong.Issei: first generation Japanese who immigrated to the United States Japanese American: for the context of this topic, where incarceration camps held Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese immigrants who were prevented by U.S. policies from becoming citizens, Japanese American refers to people in the United States of Japanese descent regardless of citizenship Nisei:second generation Japanese Americans, children of Issei and American citizens at birth Nikkei: immigrant of Japanese descent that lives outside Japan, but is not specific to generation nor the country of residence War Relocation Authority (WRA): a civilian organization created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to decide where Japanese Americans would live after being forcibly removed from their homes, and would continue to have power of the incarcerated Japanese American population throughout the war via incarceration camps. vi

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Bearing Witness to the Injustices of Mass Incarceration

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

A Transnational Approach to the Ceramics of Manzanar

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