Ethnographies of U.S. Empire
Duke University Press (2018)
Carole McGranahan and John Collins, co-editors
This volume engages contemporary U.S. empire from an ethnographic perspective. This means that we hope to add field-based anthropological research findings, questions, contradictions borne of embodied experience, and manners of examining systems of knowledge and social ontologies to the historical and political analyses that have dominated the field of colonial and imperial studies. But it also means that we are seeking to do more than “add ethnography and stir” or inject some facile, “presentist” perspective into the sort of interrogation that requires analysts to consider empire as not simply an object, but a set of shifting conjugations that alter the grammars within and through which we find ourselves making claims. Therefore, in taking up calls for more and sharper ethnographies of empire, and in agreeing that empire “is in the details,” we seek to perform a collective double move. This involves bringing anthropology and its established methods to bear on U.S. empire, but also requires a consideration of how empire in turn shapes and re-shapes ethnography, and thus those methods. What, we ask, does it mean to examine empire ethnographically? How might an apparently enduring or reanimated imperial present be addressed and contested through painstaking, self-reflexive, and empirically-grounded, anthropological research and what might “empiricism” look like in such contexts? How might anthropologists develop ethnographic questions, agendas, and methods adequate to considerations of contemporary imperial formations? What might such an anthropological project mean in relation to broader politics and knowledge practices outside academia? Most basically, then, how might the study of empire alter what ethnography is and does, and how might such shifts contribute to political change in the world?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction: Ethnography and Empire
John Collins and Carole McGranahan
Part I Settlement, Sentiment, Sovereignty
2. The ‘Affects’ of Empire: Fearing for the Osage Mineral Estate Trust
Jean Dennison
3. Milking the Cow for All Its Worth: Settler Colonialism and the Politics ofImperialist Resentment in Hawai’i
J. Kehaulani Kauanui
4. Sovereignty, Sympathy, and Indigeneity
Audra Simpson
Part II Colonialism By Any Other Name
5. A School of Addicts: The Coloniality of Addiction in Puerto Rico
Adriana Garriga López
6. Inhabiting the Aporias of Empire: Protest Politics in Contemporary Puerto Rico
Melissa Rosario
7. Training for Empire?: Samoa and American Gridiron Football
Fa’anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa
8. Exceptionalism as a Way of Life: U.S. Empire, Filipino Subjectivity, and the Global Call Center Industry
Jan Padios
Part III Logics of Empire
9. (Re)creating Spaces and Times: The Cottica Ndyuka in Moengo
Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha
10. Shifting Geographies of Proximity: Korean-led Evangelical Christian Missions and the U.S. Empire
Ju Hui Judy Han
11. Sites of the Postcolonial Cold War
Heonik Kwon
12. Time Standards and Rhizomatic Imperialism
Kevin Birth
Part IV Military Promises
13. Islands of Empire: Military Bases and the Ethnography of U.S. Empire
David Vine
14. Domesticating the U.S. Air Force: The Challenges of Anti-Military Activism in Manta, Ecuador
Erin Fitz-Henry
15. The Empire of Choice and the Emergence of Military Dissent
Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz
Part V Residue, Rumors, Remnants
16. Locating Landmines in the Korean Demilitarized Zone
Eleana Kim
17. Love and Empire: The CIA, Tibet, and Covert Humanitarianism
Carole McGranahan
18. Trust Us: Nicaragua, Iran-Contra, and the Discursive Economy of Empire
Joe Bryan
18. Empire as Accusation, Denial, and Structure: The Social Life of U.S. Power at Brazil’s Spaceport
Sean T. Mitchell
Part VI 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Return of Empire
19. Radicalizing Empire: Youth and Dissent in the War on Terror
Sunaina Maira
20. Deporting Cambodian Refugees: Youth Activism, State Reform, and Imperial Statecraft
Soo Ah Kwon
21. Shooting a Deer: Empire in the New Jersey Highlands
John Collins
22. From Exception to Empire: Sovereignty, Carceral Circulation, and the ‘Global War on Terror’
Darryl Li
Afterword
23. Disassemblage: Rethinking U.S. Imperial Formations
Ann Laura Stoler, in conversation with Carole McGranahan