This article examines the discourse surrounding the circulation of legal information in urban Gambia. It argues that ideas of information sharing suggest that Gambian law is fundamentally opaque, not simply in that it is not transparent but that it is only partially known. Drawing on the insights of Marilyn Strathern and other 'Melanesianists', the article further proposes that information sharing is a kind of relation and that opacity is a way of cutting relations. This in turn presents a way of apprehending African law that differs from the current emphasis on illegality and sovereignty in Africanist legal anthropology and focuses instead on emendation as a modality of engaging the law.
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The Shadows of Knowability
Reading between Opaque Narrative and Transparent Text
Younes Saramifar
ember that is burning? How can it make itself apparent to me - whatever that ‘it’ is? The torch of ember is an example of opacity. It is a puzzling knowability that stands in-between opacity and transparency. 1 It could be about to become fire and
Atlantics
The Ocean as Another Place
Tina Montenegro
and give dignity to those who have died. Citing Édouard Glissant's concept of opacity, she sees the ocean as a “no-answer zone,” which confers power to those who have experienced there something that is unknowable (the “s” of the title's plural is a
Jess Dorrance
on opacity and Denise Ferreira da Silva's (2009) work on the racial and gendered parameters of recognition as a way to think about the possibilities of resisting the state's injunction toward transparency, visual and otherwise. McDonald's, Stanley
Danger, Moral Opacity, and Outrage
Fear of Jihadism and the Terrorist Threat in Southern Mali
Tone Sommerfelt
everywhere and evildoers potentially hide in people’s midst, public moral outrage is elicited by moral opacity. In effect, moral outrage takes the form of a confrontational interpretative quest that brings forth demands to expose subjects’ moral makeup to a
In Conflict and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jan 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 23–39 (17 total)
Natalia Buitron and Hans Steinmüller
legibility and with anthropological arguments about mind legibility (to do with the opacity of mind doctrines and public mind reading). This leads us to our core question: what can we learn about non-state government seen from the perspective of state and
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 39–55 (17 total)
The Limits of Knowing Other Minds
Intellectual Disability and the Challenge of Opacity
Patrick McKearney
‘opacity’ centers around particular small-scale societies that appear to deny, disable, or prohibit the possibility of having knowledge about what is going on in the minds of other people. 2 The Urapmin of Papua New Guinea are at the heart of the debate
Alan Dowty
Research on Israeli nuclear weapons policy is seen as the classic case of conflict between security constraints and the academic ethos of openness. However, the 'ambiguity' of Israel's declared policy has eroded considerably over time, first to 'opacity' and now to simple non-acknowledgement. Furthermore, there have been vast changes in strategic circumstances: the initial rationale as a nuclear deterrent to conventional attack has been eclipsed by deterrence of other weapons of mass destruction. This is potentially a more promising platform for arms control agreements. The changes also call into question the need for the continued extension of censorship into academic research on the topic.
In Israel Studies Review
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2005
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 3–21 (19 total)
Introduction
Infrastructures of Certainty and Doubt
Matthew Carey and Morten Axel Pedersen
Debates surrounding notions of certainty and conviction and, conversely, of doubt, uncertainty and opacity have proved to be some of the liveliest and most anthropologically productive of recent years. The contention that a kernel of
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2017
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 18–29 (12 total)
Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions
Article with comments and response
Guido Sprenger, Anthony J. Pickles, Ilana Gershon, Joel Robbins, Rebecca Bryant, and Marilyn Strathern
terms instead means that each taxon (like gift exchange or commodity trade) is defined by a specific configuration of the same terms (like transaction, value, expectation, alterity, opacity—see below). The defining elements of each taxon can then be