Introducing Anthropology. Laura Pountney

in my leisure time: it was a cathartic activity, a release valve as though it served some sort of function for me, the ritual and the rhythmic coming together; it was a socially accepted way of moving, a movement system that was aesthetic and non-utilitarian; it gave me a sense of community in an increasingly isolated society – I was grounding myself quite literally through my feet; and it was a liminal time and space set between day and night, performed in a temporary fashion on a clearly delineated sprung floor, with my clothes being selected for that time with colour, sparkle, glitter to contrast with my everyday outfits of sober jackets and ties. These dance experiences and reflections led to some two decades of dance anthropology research.

For about a decade, I danced, taught, performed, researched, interviewed, observed and participated in social dancing in Belfast (Northern Ireland) and Sacramento (California). They are both very different cities: Belfast a city divided and traumatized by The Troubles – an ethnonational conflict lasting the last three decades of the twentieth century; and Sacramento, state capital, an ‘androgynous’ urban space according to one respondent. The salsa dancing of choice in these two urbanscapes looked very similar, and the rhythms, beats and sounds were the same. They did, however, mean very different things to the dancers. In the former, it was a cross-community activity, a leisure practice during which Protestants and Catholics could come together. It was also escapism from Northern Ireland, something exotic and different for the night. In Sacramento, the dancing is also social but is a more Hispanic migrant scene. There, the same moves are performed to the same tracks but with different meanings and feelings: the dancers are Spanish-speaking and so follow, interpret and sometimes sing along with the songs. Many of the dancers feel their movements with a nostalgia from their homelands as dance parties they grew up with. Salsa dancing in Sacramento can thus be a dancing back to their youth, and an expression of identity and solidarity. The expression is that ‘it’s in the hips’, as a natural and, for some, suggested genetic predisposition to move in a particular way. For me, this is very much an interpretative anthropological approach to the dancing as an observing participant and not just traditional participant observer. Participation is essential to this research, to feel it and not just see it. It shows me an involved glocalization ‘at work’ – the local reception and accommodation of global forces, in this case the international commoditization of a movement system. The salsa dancing has even been described as an ‘Esperanto of the body’ by my colleague, anthropologist Joanna Menet (2020), as an international language of the body is learned so that we can communicate with other salsa dancers as we travel around the world. In a deterritorialized hypermodern world, this return to the body for contact and to connect with each other is a welcome return – I feel it is important to keep me grounded as in my second dance decade I have turned to Argentine tango and the complexities and wellbeing nature of the tango embrace.

      The Guest (dir. Kira de Hemmer Jeppesen, 2012)

      Following the personal story of a Danish first-time surrogate mother, The Guest explores issues of maternal bonding, modern families, relatedness, and desired control over body and mind. In the film, the mature surrogate and her female partner are followed through the pregnancy, and, through intimate interviews, a rare insight is provided into the taboo and secretive world of surrogacy in Scandinavia. In a society where surrogacy is a legal grey area surrounded by much stigmatization, the surrogate and her family deal with prevailing social norms and the possible condemnation by the outside world. The surrogate expresses motivational factors, ethical considerations and thoughts about motherhood, family concerns, gift giving, LGBT rights, and alternative assisted reproduction.

This Is My Face (dir. Angélica Cabezas Pino, 2018)

      In Chile, people living with HIV fear stigma and often conceal their condition and remain silent about what they are going through. This Is My Face is a documentary film that explores what happens when a range of men living with HIV open up about the illness that changed their life trajectories. It follows a creative process whereby they produce photographic portraits that represent their (often painful) memories and feelings, a process that helps them challenge years of silence, shame and misrepresentation. This is lesson in the power of collaborative storytelling.

       ‘Masculinity under the knife: Filipino men, trafficking, and the black organ market’ (Yea 2015)

      Sallie Yea explores the meanings of commercial kidney provision amongst male providers drawn from the Manila slum of Baseco. This area of Manila has achieved notoriety as a ‘hotspot’ for organ trafficking in a global market for cheap kidneys. However, Yea feels that this framing disguises ‘how transplantation becomes a site for the enactment of social processes and relationships.’

      Yea realized that in almost all documented cases, those selling their kidneys were men, thus raising interesting questions about the ways in which poor men invoke local inscriptions of Filipino masculinity through processes of bodily commodification associated with commercial kidney provision. She felt that the complex links between constructions and performances of masculinity for economically and socially marginal men and commercial organ provision may be missed in accounts only focusing on men as being exploited. Yea thus wanted to also focus on how men manoeuvred and critiqued discourses of exploitation that situated them as victims of trafficking. Such rhetoric obscures the trafficked person’s agency, casting them as powerless, duped innocents lacking the ability to manage or overcome their situations of exploitation.

      There are many different ways in which kidney sales are organized in the Philippines, but the most common are those who seek out ‘kidney brokers’ or were approached by a broker in their neighbourhood. The broker charges a fee for facilitating the sale of the kidney, and, once they have been paid, connects the provider with a doctor who is willing to perform the transplant. The doctor in turn connects with prospective renal failure patients abroad.

Although the circumstances under which kidney transactions occur differ – some men seek out brokers, others have to be convinced by a recruiter – it is clear that the men who provide a kidney on Manila’s commercial organ market could be seen as trafficked in the sense that their vulnerability as economically marginal family breadwinners is the key inducement to selling a kidney and they are undoubtedly exploited in the process. It is their status as impoverished and poorly educated slum dwellers that leads to their vulnerability and subsequent exploitation in the kidney market. Yet such discussions of trafficking tell us little about the motives for providers to sell a kidney or the consequences of their involvement in this market and how this informs and in turn reconfigures their sense of masculinity. Such an undertaking requires us to look beyond broad iterations of exploitative transactions to the narratives of the providers themselves.

      agency The capacity for human beings to make choices, create their own world, have their own ideas, etc.

      Discussions of how people situated in structures of inequality manoeuvre themselves within them have often been limited solely to women. It is important therefore to attend to the ways exploitation, inequality and masculinity may be intertwined in many men’s experiences. Despite their socioeconomic status, male kidney sellers in Baseco draw on normative ideas of what it means to be a successful man in the Philippines, particularly concerning heroism and family providership. They construct themselves as masculine exemplars, or as idealized versions of masculinity.

      Men’s providership in the familial space is one of the most significant signs of masculinity in the Philippines and emerged often within men’s narratives about their decisions to sell a kidney. It is estimated that around 3,000 of Baseco’s 100,000 residents have sold a kidney, with the vast majority being men. All the men interviewed cited economic considerations as the major motive for selling a kidney. However, probing more deeply into the men’s motivations the economic imperatives that informed men’s decisions were themselves embedded within the men’s familial situations and perceived responsibilities.

      Supporting their families had been the primary motive for selling a kidney. It was in the men’s narration of the possibility of their children or wives having to work that they touched on the male breadwinner role most explicitly and