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Legacies.” Following on last year’s success, this year’s SEAA hosted twenty five sessions, including two invited panels and four double panels.

Two of our invited panels, chosen based on their coherent themes and quality of their abstracts as they related to our yearly theme, happened to be sessions focused on China. The panel “Transformations in Chinese Views of the World and the World’s Views of China,” examined the rapid changes in the relationship between China with the rest of the world as China has become more influential in the world economy. By tracing people’s experience as migrants from rural areas and as travelers from and to foreign countries, and also Chinese leadership and business involvement in the paths of development of other countries, this panel explored how Chinese citizens and leaders reconcile “the legacies of China’s recent past as a developing country and the ever-rising trademarks of its emergence as an economic superpower.” Another invited panel, “The Political Economy and Cultural Practice of Care in Contemporary China” visited legacies of neo-Confucianism, socialism, and the market economy as they operate in competition with each other in China, through the window of care politics, utilizing a “cross-disciplinary approach to problems of both public policy and everyday/every night experience through facilitating an examination of core activities of caring in public, private and familial spaces.”

Many volunteered sessions were also devoted to tracing legacies through geopolitical and economic transformations. For example, “Legacies, Transitions, and Futures of Hope in Trans/national Korea” looked into the ways in which South Koreans think of their past and future in the historical legacy of eras of colonialism, postcolonialism, the Cold War authoritarian regime, liberal democracy, and neoliberalism. Joining geographers, political scientists, and sociologists with anthropologists, this panel explored interdisciplinary ethnographic approaches to account for the ways in which hope and memories are manifested in contemporary South Korea beyond its territorial boundary. Further, there were interesting panels exploring the colonial and imperialist legacies of border-crossing transnational subjects of the East Asian region, such as “Privileged Minorities, Innocent Victims, or National Heroes?: Anti-Korean Activism and the Lingering Legacies of Japanese Imperialism,” “Intimate Cosmologies of Kinship: Tracing Spiritual and Affective Relatedness in Tibetan and Inner Asian Societies,” “Neoliberalism Inherits the Cold War: Intimate and Affective Legacies of the Geopolitical in Northeast Asia,” and “Negotiating Marriage, Sex, and Self in Transnational Asia.”

Last, this year has been a significant tidemark in terms of multiple disasters happening in Japan, including an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear exposure. Linked to the yearly theme were events including “Eight Months after the Great East Japan Earthquake: Reports from the Field” (a roundtable panel), and “Accidents, Disasters and Human Fallout: Anxieties, Memories, and Recovery in Post-Earthquake Japan” (a volunteered session).

Overall, we had highly stimulating and engaged panels focused on East Asia. Thank you for your participation in Montréal and we look forward to your applications for the AAA meetings in San Francisco.

Contact SEAA Contributing Editors Anru Lee (alee@jjay.cuny.edu) and Bridget Love (loveb@ou.edu).

Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

Annelou Ypeij, Contributing Editor

The Bodily Localization of Global Capoeira

By Menara Lube Guizardi (Autonomous U Madrid)

Capoeira is a cultural practice created by African and Afro-descendent slaves in Brazil between the 18th and the 19th centuries. Although there are controversies about its origins, capoeira was probably born as an urban phenomenon in the port cities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife. It is considered a complex cultural genre, being simultaneously a martial art, a game, a dance, a musical style, a ritual, a strategy of conflict mediation and a hierarchical community model (the capoeira groups). The

expertise in capoeira evolves the application of its collectivities’ worldviews and “logics of reciprocity” in social life as a whole. In this sense, this art can also be understood as a life philosophy. Between the 1930s and the 1990s, capoeira was popularized in Brazil, becoming both an icon of Brazilian national identity, and a strong popular movement in the peripheries

of the greatest Brazilian cities. From 1975 onward, the capoeira groups crossed the Brazilian national borders to establish their teaching and artistic activities in other regions of the world. Nowadays, capoeira is considered a global reality, adapted to over 155 countries.

The geographical dispersion of this Afro-Brazilian genre can be correlated to the expansion of a soundwave: a persistent movement starting in some Brazilian specific localities, and running concentrically from these epicenters to even greater radial distances through the globe. Full of slyness, this “sound wave” reaches the bodies in which the time-space-movement categories of capoeira will be drawn and recreated. Capoeira’s embodiment is ontologically connected with Brazilian social inequalities, recalling meanings of resistance and accommodation that constitute a cultural capital of those who survive in the margins of a social order based in violence, exploitation and institutional racism.

During the process of internationalization of this cultural capital, capoeira will challenge certain “techniques of the body”, expanding elsewhere a particular sense and experience of corporality. Meanwhile, capoeira’s bodily social dynamics are

transformed as this geographical expansion goes further. In every single place where an atabaque (capoeira drum) reverberates, an evocation of the local bodies also happens, inviting local subjects to assume the capoeira performance as their own way of life, as their own way of being. Paraphrasing Appadurai, the capoeira groups build localities by building locally

Mestre Pantera (right), the Brazilian founder of the Descendents of Panter Capoeira Association, plays with his Spanish disciple (left) in a Capoeira ring performed in the Spanish National Museum of Anthropology (Madrid, May 16, 2009). Photo courtesy Menara Lube Guizardi

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coherent subjects. Instructing new generations of students, they settle their roots in places where the capoeira game will stop being an imported culture to become a locally adapted culture.

At the same time, this internationalization is deeply inf luenced by a migratory dimension. The life stories of Brazilian capoeiristas (the ones who practice capoeira) enable to state that their group’s networks export worldwide a “migratory social capital” acquired in Brazil. As a migratory phenomenon, the capoeira collectives constitute sui generis social nets, distinguished by the specialization of a service offered by Brazilians migrants to other Brazilians, but preferably destined to European and North American people. Simultaneously, these nets consolidate the commerce of “originally Brazilian” capoeira products, therefore activating an economy that changes substantially many Brazilian localities. From this point of view, the global capoeira is a migratory phenomenon that gives rise to a transnational economy. Both this economy and the circulation of people mobilized by the capoeiristas are strongly connected to the net of international localities to which the capoeiristas emigrated.

A surprising fact is to be pointed out: these capoeira groups located in globalized cities remain in touch with—and in often many cases are commanded by—their Brazilian headquarters. The complex, symbolical (and yet communitarian) life of the capoeira groups is the key to understand how Brazilian masters—which are usually located in poor communities, and often situated in peripheral stratum of Brazilian society—can still exercise both a leadership and a charismatic authority strong enough to allow them coordinate, command and determine the way their disciples from different nationalities worldwide would live their quotidian experience as capoeiristas.

Please send any comments, suggestions and ideas, including photos for future columns, to Annelou Ypeij at j.l.ypeij@cedla.nl or to CEDLA (Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation), Keizersgracht 395-397, 1016 EK Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Society for Linguistic Anthropology James Stanlaw and Mark Peterson, Contributing Editors

DLAB and ALAB: Lives are on the Line

By James Stanlaw

The Defense Language Aptitude Battery (“Dee-Lab”) is the military test used to determine those likely to succeed in learning one of the 50 languages taught at the Defense Language Institute. The DLAB is said to also statistically predict success in partic-ular languages. If candidates score high enough they can apply to study a language in one of four groups: Category I (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish); Category II (German or Indonesian); Category III (Dari, Hebrew, Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek); and

Category IV (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean). The University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL)—“Language Research in Service to the Nation”—has updated this test. CASL claims DLAB 2 now incorporates “new cognitive measures, as well as non-cognitive measures such as personality and motivation.”

No one is supposed to know what is on the DLAB ahead of time, and those who take it are not supposed to talk about it. Lately, however, more information has come out through the grapevine and the internet. The Navy, under its “cryptology” job description site even has some sample questions, though some claim these are easier than the actual exam. The test is about two hours, consisting of an audio and visual portion. In the audio portion, test-takers are asked to identify stress patterns in nonsense words. Next, an almost-English pig-Latin-like language is presented in a foreign accent. You are told rules for this language and asked to select the correct translation for a short phrase, such as “red car,” from the choices spoken only once. Then new rules are added, like verbs begin and end in –i. Next, you may be asked to extrapolate a rule for tense by looking at example sentences.

In the visual portion of the test, you are given a picture and asked to extrapolate some linguistic features of the item presented. You might be given these pictures and glosses: a black dog, black cat and white dog. You are then asked to give a gloss when shown a picture of a white cat.

However, in spite of all these efforts at recruitment, the number of US nationals in Afghanistan who speak Dari or Pashto is still quite small. The vast majority of translators are Afghanis who speak English—to varying degrees. The Western media has often ques-tioned their English proficiency. For example, Brian Ross in a Nightline report in September 2010 claimed that more than a quarter of Afghani translators in the battlefield could not speak passable English. CASL again has offered a solution. They are currently vali-dating their ALAB (Afghan Language Aptitude Battery), designed to find Afghanis who will succeed in the Defense Language Institute’s English language program. However, this test differs from DLAB in several significant ways. First, there is a range of non-linguistic tests for general intelligence (like spatial reasoning). The language analysis test examines things like case marking, using an artificial language as in DLAB. For instance, given these examples—zorit (“farmer”), volip (“the worker”), zorit volipu pigom (“The farmer pushed the worker”)—the test-taker would be asked to translate “The worker pushed the farmer.” But ALAB also tests for ability to be numerically and orthographically literate, as well as being able to trans-literate scripts between Dari, Pashto, and the artificial language.

The predictive power of DLAB seems supported by several decades of testing by applied linguists. However, ALAB is still new. Never before has the mili-tary taken on such a vast and expensive undertaking—a billion and a half dollars to provide intensive English language training from scratch to hundreds of locals during a war. But this is a mission that must be accom-plished. As one wrote on The Economist blog, “Yes, training competent linguists is hard. So is … training F-18 pilots. But the American military does [the latter] … in superlative fashion.”

Please send your comments, contributions, news and announcements to SLA contributing editors Jim Stanlaw (stanlaw@ilstu.edu) or Mark Peterson (petersm2@muohio.edu).

Society for Medical AnthropologyKathleen Ragsdale, Contributing Editor

Death, Dying, and Biomedicine: “Thinking with Film” as a Teaching Resource for Medical Anthropologists

By Rafael Wainer (U British Columbia)

As medical anthropology gains caché within Schools of Medicine around the globe, we are increasingly asked to contribute to the education of medical students, interns, and practicing physicians. In 2007, I received such an invitation to present a seminar to medical residents and staff physicians at a public hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I decided that a good topic for health care providers (HCP) would be using anthropological perspectives as a platform to explore the complexities of death and dying and how historical, socio-economic, and political changes have altered the relationships between death and dying and biomedicine. I designed the PowerPoint presentation to gradually engage the audience in a discussion about their medical knowledge, practices, and personal experiences linked to multifaceted processes associated with death and dying. My first slide asked the audience to engage in a “free listing” exercise using the word “death,” which produced words such as “anguish,” “powerlessness,” “nothingness,” and “relief.” I asked the audience to keep their list of words in mind while viewing the film clips I was about to show them.

During the seminar, many HCP enthusiastically engaged in listening to each other’s experiences related to death and dying, such as examples of particular patients or situations. Occasionally though, audience members had difficulties expressing their feelings and the room was wrapped in silence. At such moments of unease, I used the film clips to visually illustrate particular points, catalyze discussions, and engage the audience in self-reflection and critical thinking.

Rafael Wainer at the Jewish Cemetery in Villa Dominguez, Entre Rios, Argentina. Photo courtesy Ana Vivaldi

To structure the seminar, I organized the film clips around three main perspectives germane to end- of-life issues: (1) the dying person’s perspective(s); (2) the