Anthropological Theory

Using examples of migration of Mixtecs from Oaxaca and of Mexican nationals in general across the US–Mexican border, this article explores and illustrates the proposition that the political importance of social borders varies directly with the degree to which they serve two basic missions. The first of these missions is classificatory in the sense of defining, categorizing, and otherwise affecting the identities that are circumscribed and divided by borders and that cross them. Such kinds of identities are ethnicity, nationality, the cultural experience, markers of social class and so on. The second mission is also classificatory, but in the sense of affecting the economic CLASS positions and relationships of migrants who cross borders. This second mission of borders is effected by differentially filtering and transforming forms of economic value that flow across them and between identities defined by them. It is argued that these two complementary processes – classification of identities and CLASSification (uneven value exchange) – are the primary de facto missions of significant borders.

Most scholars argue that ‘race’ has no relation to human nature. A minority contend that it does. I argue that ‘race’ is a cultural category which can become an embodied part of the human experience. This embodiment helps account for the power of the idea of race.

Pauketat argued (2001: 73–98) that a new paradigm – historical processualism (HP) as operationalized by practice theory – is preferable to processual, behavioral, and evolutionary archaeologies as a source of explanation for culture change. To make his case, Pauketat sets up several contrasts between HP and the other three approaches. He claims that HP is superior because it neither essentializes behavior nor calls on potentially false universal laws to create explanations. He argues that HP holds that human practices – individual, particularistic human behaviors – generate new practices as they are continuously re-enacted and renegotiated, and thus practice is the proximate cause of cultural change. Evolutionary archaeology incorporates such particularistic and proximate causes but goes far beyond HP by providing an explanatory theory that specifies ultimate causes of culture change. It employs Darwin’s scientific theory of historical change, rewritten in testable , archaeological terms. In contrast, HP provides no testable implications of historical change.

In late modernity, where the making of social worlds is governed by new media technologies, flexible systems of exchange, and an unprecedented traffic in money, markets, and people across sovereign borders, the problematic concept of the nation has been recuperated to fasten subjects to political space. In this context, the projected frontiers of the nation are increasingly mapped out through the medium of language, thereby producing new mechanisms for membership and exclusion. With a focus on German cultural politics, I examine how regimes of nationality and imaginaries of citizenship are forged by a racialization of language. Under the impact of global capitalism and European unification, ethnolinguistic racism emerges as a discursive medium for reconstituting subjectivities and sovereignties.

This article elaborates a hermeneutical approach to social science by evaluating and drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s early and late philosophy, as well as James Weiner’s articulation of an overtly Heideggerian anthropology. It argues that Heidegger’s privileging of an irreducible and ultimately contingent ‘symbolic order’ that renders beings apparent, while withdrawing and remaining concealed, provides important resources for rethinking questions of freedom, ethics and subjectivity. Nevertheless, it argues that such an approach falls short of a fully-fledged research programme. Both Heidegger’s and Weiner’s projects fail to develop a sufficient set of ontological categories for analysing concrete social relations at the ontical level, and do not address crucial epistemological and methodological issues, such as those pertaining to the precise relationship between explanation and understanding, or the role of causal explanations, that necessarily arise in the social sciences. The article concludes by addressing these deficiencies from a post-structuralist perspective inspired by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Ernesto Laclau.