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This case focused entirely on the warning label on the package insert of a tampons product used by a young woman who subsequently suffered from toxic shock syndrome (TSS). One side of the tightly folded insert contained instructions about how to use the product. The other side was labeled “Important Information About Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS).” The “Important Information” side was compared with the Federal Drug Administration's guidelines for wording on tampon packages and inserts, focusing on the speech acts of warning and on the discourse requirements of prominence and legibility. Linguistic analysis was made concerning the semantics of “association,” “attention,” “alert,” and “warning”; the discourse analysis of topic; topic sequencing; the application of Grice's maxims of quantity, relation, and manner; and the importance of directness rather than indirectness in communications of this type, including an analysis of the lack of prominence and effective document design.

This chapter assesses the development of Sikh culture and politics in Britain in the post-World War II period, stressing the ways in which ideas about 'Sikh identity' were formed through engagement with the British state. It also argues that Sikh identity was defined through a shifting set of engagements with other 'new' communities, including Afro-Caribbean  and South Asian Muslim migrants.  While the chapter locates the discourses and practices that framed these ideas about Sikhism within a longer tradition of Punjabi cultural definition, it highlights the particular pressures that the changing nature of British governmental policy (multiculturalism) and the politics of race and religion in Britain inflected visions of what it is to be a Sikh.

This chapter focuses on the textual strategy of describing the urban built environment. By engaging the visual imagination, this strategy stimulated the recognition of a “cityscape” distinctive from other landscapes in the discourse of place. Describing or depicting the built environment was intended to make cities legible, or comprehensible in terms of their written or graphic representation, and thus to make them compelling as categories of belonging for people whether or not they had firsthand experience of the city. Central to a city’s legibility was often the evocation of a monumental structure, one that dominated the cityscape because of its great size, lavish adornment, powerful patrons, or ritual function. This chapter considers contrasting claims to “insider” and “citational” authority in describing urban built environments and analyzes a variety of texts, including images and poems.

The coda concludes the book's analysis of the way in which particular texts become apocalyptically legible or manifest. It does so by taking account of Spiegelman's self-reflexive meditation on the ethical relation between Maus' literary reception and the dead bodies of the Holocaust that haunt his text. The coda proceeds to compare the fate of two sets of numbers tattooed onto the arms of Anja and Vladek upon their internment in the concentration camp. While Anja later commits suicide by slashing her wrists, thereby fulfilling a fate already inscribed by her number, Vladek is given life by the priest's prognosticatory interpretation of his number. The book concludes by utilizing Benjamin's concept of the “now of legibility” to read the priest's messianic moment of interpretation as a fragile moment of resistance against the law of apocalyptic incorporation.

Chapter Eight shows how working knowledge about fraud and its perpetrators underlies discretionary enforcement action, and thus shapes the realization of fraud control as a government intervention. In the informal criminology of welfare fraud that fraud workers apply to the client population, justifications of punishment foreground the ideas of deterrence and incapacitation; that is, attempting to prevent fraud through changing the climate of program participation and removing clients determined to have deliberately broken rules. Investigators look to catch people who fit their preexisting images of what and whom they are seeking when they seek welfare fraud. In the aggregate, these thought patterns—along with tendencies to prioritize cases involving people with greater informational visibility and perceived patterns of fraud perpetration—hold significant implications for reproducing longstanding structures of social stratification.

This chapter provides a foundation for understanding how media processes, institutions, and discourses have branded mixed race Black and Asian/American stars, making them legible and marketable vis-à-vis the celebrity industrial complex. The use of transracial to denaturalize and disrupt normative racial categories is an attempt to theorize the ways mixed race people access or eschew racialized identities. Ultimately, representations of Blasians may push the limits of mediatized racialization and as such also push the limits for understanding racial authenticity.

This book is about the legibility of human rights; about the literary, political, and juridical effects of transcribing into international legal conventions what the ancient Greeks regarded as unwritten law; about the tensions and gap between what everyone knows and what everyone should know; about how norms of legal obviousness manifest in literary forms; and about how, in an era of intense globalization, those legal and literary forms cooperate to disseminate and legitimate the norms of human rights, to make each other's common sense legible and compelling. The book elaborates the conceptual vocabulary, deep narrative grammar, and humanist social vision that human rights law shares with the Bildungsroman in their cooperative efforts to imagine, normalize, and realize what the Universal Declaration and early theorists of the novel call “the free and full development of the human personality.”.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of sovereign agency. Sovereign agency denotes the variety of practices, strategies, and future-oriented claims that constitute institution and subject in ways that make the latter politically recognizable and capable of agentive action. In this sense, sovereign agency is often more aspiration than realization. It is an aspiration for forms of institutional recognition and political legibility that enable efficacious action, or what can be called “state desire.” The desire for sovereign agency, in turn, often emerges from a sense of loss — of political voice, of political legibility, of political order — and a yearning to regain it. This book situates sovereign agency at the foreground of anthropological inquiry. Who or what is the locus of political imagination in claims to “take back control?” What does sovereignty look like from the ground up?

The Introduction provides an overview of current theories of state formation and shows how the book contributes to those debates. It does so by developing a conceptual framework that incorporates crisis into theories of order. It treats crisis as something other than a temporary aberration from the normal operation of the state. Instead, it focuses on the ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices undertaken in the name of the state that produce the illusion of the ordinary and the mundane. Chapter One also discusses why it is so important to maintain the illusion of the everyday and why it is so difficult to see behind the mask of the state. Central to the analysis are the mechanisms by which the delusional nature of state activity is rendered rational and routine. Equally important are the processes that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms.

This chapter analyzes the efforts of the Pizarro-Rubio casta to implement the central government’s sacropolitically-motivated plans to modernize the Chachapoyas region during the 1920s. The period is an interesting one for scholars of state formation because the developments of the 1920s provide a direct challenge to institutional understandings of the state. According to these views, state formation depends on the ability of central powers to eliminate violence-wielding competitors, who interfere with the monopoly on force the state seeks to establish. The ability of the central government to impose its will in Chachapoyas, however, was contingent not upon the elimination of violence-wielding actors but on their preservation. The fact that the Pizarro-Rubio had succeeded in eliminating all competing elite factions meant that the clients of the ruling casta were able to work together to ensure that government projects proceeded un a timely and efficient manner.

I begin this book with the story of my spouse and I essentially being kicked out of the Des Moines YMCA for being lesbians. I use this narrative to introduce the ways relationships between social and legal definitions of “legitimate” family are used to regulate access to social rights and resources. The most pervasive stories in public dialogues about families headed by lesbians and gay men at the turn of the twenty-first century suggest that legalizing same-sex marriage should be either the panacea for all the constitutional vulnerabilities of queer citizenship, or the downfall of civilization due to the crumbling of the institution of marriage. I argue that the construction of lesbian-headed families should be explored in the context of other arenas of social policy, including adoption, immigration, and welfare. I discuss my family’s location in this research.

This chapter examines how French and Spanish colonial intervention forged a protonational territorial space in Morocco. It first considers the physical and human geography of state building in Morocco, with particular emphasis on precolonial and colonial conceptions of the state's territorial reach. It then explores how the French and Spanish in their respective zones moved in stages from goals of limited to total military control. It also discusses the completion of total pacification by the central government in the early 1930s, describing it as a historic watershed in the state's achievement of an unprecedented territorial monopoly on the use of force. It shows that total pacification transformed state space in Morocco, giving rise to a colonial political field characterized by new forms of territoriality and new modes of legibility.

This chapter examines the symbolic and classificatory forces in play that set constraints and opportunities for both colonial and Moroccan actors in the colonial political field. Focusing on the Palace of Morocco exhibit at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition outside Paris, which showcased France's treasured North African possessions (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco), the chapter analyzes the path-dependent effects of the initial French decision to employ oy an indirect mode of rule in Morocco. In particular, it explores the intertwined logics of legitimation and legibility that formed this “protectorate” imaginaire and how these ordering forces were expressed in ethnographic, preservationist, and developmental modes of colonial rule. It shows how logics of legitimization that were contingently determined at an initial critical juncture influenced, directly and indirectly, the logics of legibility that were subsequently employed in the field.

This chapter examines the role of gender in both the legibility and legitimization logics that structured the colonial political field as well as the interactive identity struggles in which external and internal social boundaries were contested and negotiated in Moroccan society. More specifically, it considers the centrality of gender for the colonial state's attempts to maintain ethnic and religious social divisions, the nationalist struggles to redefine Moroccan identity, and Mohamed V's active engagement with the Woman Question in the 1940s. It also discusses external identification processes in which gender played a significant role and the ways in which elite and non-elite urban and rural Moroccan women influenced identity politics during the protectorate period. Finally, it explains how the status of Moroccan women became intertwined with nationalist classification struggles and with Mohamed V's attempt to challenge the legitimizing logics of colonial intervention.

This chapter reorients the history of Panama Canal construction by focusing on water management rather than soil excavation.In addition to earth moving, the construction of the waterway involved transforming both physical and human geography across the Chagres River basin. As the volatile river and its tributaries were reorganized to create a manageable waterscape for navigation, the US government depopulated the Canal Zone to establish a sanitary andlegible governmental space.Water management linked imperial land and resource enclosures to more focused efforts to govern households and citizens. If earth was the element that represented the attitude of conquest that defined modern humans’ relationships with nature at the turn of the twentieth century, then water is the element that reveals how we live with the legacies of that era. Contemporary engineering challenges and environmental politics around the canal have been shaped by this history.

This chapter examines the efforts to make the high-latitude ionogram legible, tracing the effects of that new legibility into wider, resonant views of the relationship between the North and communication failures. It first focuses on the transformations in the way the high-latitude ionogram was read. The same geophysical phenomena that disrupted Northern radio communications made high-latitude ionograms unreadable using standard techniques. Led by one of its founding members, Jack Meek, the Radio Physics Laboratory developed a set of reading regimes that would make these records readable for the first time. The second part of the chapter investigates how the connections built up through these techniques resonated far beyond the laboratory. By linking Northern geophysics and communications disruptions, the Laboratory furnished visual arguments for how defining elements of Canada’s northern-ness threatened reliable communications, feeding back into broader cultural narratives put forward by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin.

The first field study in this book describes BME, an online platform for people interested in body modification. I describe the community’s attempts to manage membership by analysing changes to the Terms of Service. I also describe threats to BME’s community in terms of the increasing popularity of body modification as a cultural practice.

AIDS media lead unexpected lives once diffused through urban space: billboards fade, posters go missing, bumper stickers travel to other cities. In this chapter I argue that the material qualities of AIDS campaign objects and the urban settings in which they are displayed structures how the public interprets their messages. Interview data and ethnographic observation of AIDS media in situ reveal how the materiality and circulation of objects and their sites of reception shape the availability of AIDS knowledge in Accra, Ghana. I find that the decay and displacement of these advertisements enable new meanings (e.g. when red ribbons fade to pink) and give audiences the opportunity to use these posters creatively (e.g. as interior decoration). Material qualities disrupt campaigns by undermining their perceptibility and legibility. Significantly for AIDS organizations, these material conditions often systematically obstruct access to AIDS knowledge for particular groups. In this sense, cultural entropy is as much a material condition as a symbolic one.

This chapter studies the connection between the imagination and practice of public space and the conceptions of freedom. It explains that political wall writings and political posters serve as examples of spatial imagination that link the body, city, space, and the body politic, turning on the attempt to open a space between freedom and violence. This is done by revealing the susceptibility of the walls to a different order of legibility, challenging the privileged materiality of public space aimed at aiding the spatial imagination of the state.

This chapter analyses the efforts to make Dimapur more city-like. Beginning with attempts to hold municipal elections with reserved seats for women in 2017, we navigate the deeply contentious politics around the classification and re-classification of space in the city. As the largest city in a tribal state, Dimapur is an experiment in the production of legible urban space in areas with customary law and constitutional protection. At present the experiment is provoking deep anxieties. Producing legible urban space from the collection of settlements, villages, barracks, commercial zones, ceasefire camps, encroached tracts, and wastelands under various socio-legal regimes is rarely coherent and often chaotic. We argue that the city is a space to challenge and transgress customary law in ways unthinkable at the village level. However, transgression was a catalyst for crisis, a scenario likely to remain constant in urban politics for the conceivable future.