Showing papers in "Ethnos in 2013"
TL;DR: Drawing upon a long-term study of a group of African-American families caring for children with significant illnesses and disabilities, this paper examines people's attempts to transform not only themselves but also the social and material spaces in which they live.
Abstract: Through what kind of inaugural scenes is the moral self born? And what are the practices, within that scene, through which one tries to become a moral person, or a different sort of moral self, a person one is not but wishes to be? These questions are at the heart of the recent ethical turn in anthropology and sociocultural studies more broadly. In this paper, I explore three moral imaginaries: the trial, the artisan workshop and the moral laboratory. Turning to ethnographic material, I compare how these social imaginaries illuminate the moral work of people engaged in trying to create good lives for themselves and those they care about. Drawing upon a long-term study of a group of African-American families caring for children with significant illnesses and disabilities, I examine people's attempts to transform not only themselves but also the social and material spaces in which they live.
104 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an approach to the seasons as rhythms that emerge in the articulation of human and non-human processes is presented. But the season is not defined as a set of temporal blocks.
Abstract: This article argues for an approach to the seasons as rhythms that emerge in the articulation of human and non-human processes. First, it contrasts two anthropological conceptions of the seasons, as temporal blocks and as rhythmic dynamics, and subsequently indicates how life on the Kemi River conforms more to the latter approach. It goes on to show that the seasons exist in the context of many other rhythms, for instance those of discharge and water level in the river. Finally, it explains how river dwellers not only adapt to the rhythms of river and landscape, but in practising their activities they also shape these rhythms. Therefore, the seasons and the plethora of longer and shorter rhythms of which they form part are simultaneously ‘social’ and ‘natural’.
55 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the transnational appropriation of aesthetic literary and embodied performative traditions, objects, sartorial styles or foods in the diaspora points to the transformational power of mimesis: what appears on the surface to be derivative and imitative, taken from elsewhere, engenders authentically felt cultural competences and a sense of ontological presence.
Abstract: How are transnational aesthetics transformed and appropriated in the diaspora? In theorising the very possibility of a transnational aesthetics, our primary focus goes beyond cognition to aesthetics as ‘sensuous participation’ – the making of beauty, distinction and sensual pleasure as participatory performance, embedded and re-embedded in social worlds of literary art or celebration forged in diaspora. Going beyond current debates in the anthropology of aesthetics, we argue that the transnational appropriation of aesthetic literary and embodied performative traditions, objects, sartorial styles or foods in the diaspora points to the transformational power of mimesis: what appears on the surface to be derivative and imitative, taken from elsewhere, engenders authentically felt cultural competences and a sense of ontological presence. Thus it is that diasporic sociality and aesthetic cultural performance create the grounds for appropriation and ownership in the alien place of non-ownership, that is, in th...
35 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that traffic congestion constitutes a unique zone in which cross-class encounters take place and that urban inequality is produced not only through segregated social spaces, but also on the move.
Abstract: Anthropological studies have paid too little attention to the everyday experience of traffic, a fact all the more striking given the central place that traffic has come to occupy in urban life worldwide. I submit that the daily experience of traffic is a critical and underutilised medium for examining social inequality in a global, urban social order. My analysis invokes the spectrum of inequalities in relation to traffic in Istanbul, mapping both the hierarchies born out in paradigmatic traffic situations and certain extremes – those barred or excused from participating in the traffic scene. I argue that traffic congestion constitutes a unique zone in which cross-class encounters take place. This analytical focus on the daily experience of traffic demonstrates that urban inequality is produced not only through segregated social spaces, but also on the move.
32 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose an analytics of movement through which to apprehend experiences of ontological transformation brought about by the many violences of service in a combat zone, which suggests ontology, rather than pathology, as the ground for understanding the matter of US soldiers' being after combat.
Abstract: Using ethnographic vignettes of three American soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, this article proposes an analytics of movement through which to apprehend experiences of ontological transformation brought about by the many violences of service in a combat zone. I juxtapose a range of experiences of movement to explore the subjective experience of certain kinds of bodies as they move, see, and are seen to move in certain kinds of spaces. In the case of American soldiers who have been marked by their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, this approach is a displacement of post-traumatic stress disorder, the dominant frame for understanding soldiers’ post-combat transformations. In its stead, the analytics of movement offers a sense of the vertiginous new worlds soldiers inhabit, which suggests ontology, rather than pathology, as the ground for understanding the matter of US soldiers’ being after combat.
28 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that youth practices and discourses of morality are multiple and flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure, and interpretive flexibility may work to redefine notions about leisure within a framework of religiosity such that some of the rules of piety itself are perceived as flexible.
Abstract: Challenging both polarized depictions of Muslim youth and scholarship that over-privileges piety as a focal point in Muslims’ lives, this article highlights the complexity of the moral worlds of Shi‘i youth in Lebanon Through ethnography of youth choices when going out, we argue that youth practices and discourses of morality are multiple and flexible in their deployments, perhaps especially when it comes to ideas about leisure This interpretive flexibility may work to redefine ideas about leisure within a framework of religiosity such that some of the rules of piety itself are perceived as flexible
23 citations
TL;DR: In Gamrie (a Scottish fishing village of 700 people and 6 Protestant churches) as mentioned in this paper, local experiences of "divine providence" and "demonic attack" abound, and the life of the Christian resembles an enchanted struggle between God and the Devil.
Abstract: In Gamrie (a Scottish fishing village of 700 people and 6 Protestant churches), local experiences of ‘divine providence’ and ‘demonic attack’ abound. Bodily fluids, scraps of paper, video cassettes and prawn trawlers were immanent carriers of divine and demonic activity. Viewed through the lens of Weberian social theory, the experiences of Scottish fisher families show how the life of the Christian resembles an enchanted struggle between God and the Devil with the Christian placed awkwardly in-between. Because, locally, ‘there is no such thing as coincidence’, these Christians expected to experience both the transcendent ordering of life by divine providence through God's immanence and the transcendent disordering of life by demonic attack through the Devil's immanence. Where this ordering and disordering frequently occurred through everyday objects, seemingly mundane events – being given a washing machine or feeling sleepy in church – were experienced as material indexes of spiritual reality. Drawing on ...
20 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the conditions of cultural production that enabled the invention of the Philippine nation from afar among literary and artistic diasporan elites in the metropolitan centres of Europe in the late nineteenth century.
Abstract: This paper explores the conditions of cultural production that enabled the invention of the Philippine nation from afar among literary and artistic diasporan elites in the metropolitan centres of Europe in the late nineteenth century. I draw together Bourdieu's analysis of the creation of the autonomous field of cultural production and Anderson's analysis of the origins of nationalism to demonstrate how affective and aesthetic investments in art and the nation enabled historically one group of people – the ilustrado (elite Filipino nationalist) – to overcome and exchange the estrangement and humiliations of race for national belonging and recognition in colonial fields of power. Doing so critically extends Bourdieu, moving beyond his methodological nationalism to foreground the racial hierarchies embedded in the making of the classed habitus and situate the aesthetics of diaspora within a translocal field of distinction.
17 citations
TL;DR: For Akan-speaking Ghanaians in London, public events and rites of passage are constitutive of their diasporic subjectivity and sociality, re-establishing and reinforcing material and symbolic connections within the diaspora and the home country as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: For Akan-speaking Ghanaians in London, public events and rites of passage are constitutive of their diasporic subjectivity and sociality, re-establishing and reinforcing material and symbolic connections within the diaspora and the home country. Their participation reasserts their ontological presence in the world and renders them visible and distinct in the eyes of fellow migrants, thus denying their social marginality. This ontological presence is produced through a uniquely Akan aesthetic, realised in linguistic terms, through proverbs, mottoes and wise sayings; in material terms, through sartorial ostentation and the use and display of elaborate dresses and other material objects; in taste, through the consumption of ethnic food; and in visual terms, through the use of videos and photographs. By drawing on a range of ethnographic examples from London and Ghana, this paper shows the complex overlap between the discursive and the material in the formation of Akan migrants’ aestheticised subjectivity as ...
16 citations
TL;DR: Aboriginal Australian acrylic paintings have long been considered representations of mythologically invested landscape as discussed by the authors, but the relationship between acrylic paintings and the land is more complex than such an interpretation.
Abstract: Aboriginal Australian acrylic paintings have long been considered representations of mythologically invested landscape. This understanding has been made problematic by recent writings on ‘dwelling’. As common usage of the term ‘landscape’ seems to prioritize vision, to suggest that the acrylic paintings are landscapes only strengthens the suspicion that they are artifacts of displacement or distancing, rather than examples of the emplacement emphasized in this ‘dwelling perspective’. However, this paper will demonstrate that the relationship between acrylic painting and the land is more complex than such an interpretation. It will argue that the Aboriginal objectification of their relationship to the land is not inherently a distancing of the land.
16 citations
TL;DR: Tibetan activists and their supporters are interpreting the lyrical and visual symbolism of contemporary Tibetan music videos from China as a call for Tibetans to return to a shared Tibetan identity, centered around religious piety and implied civil disobedience, in order to counter fears of cultural assimilation as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Tibetan activists and their supporters are interpreting the lyrical and visual symbolism of contemporary Tibetan music videos from China as a call for Tibetans to return to a shared Tibetan identity, centered around religious piety and implied civil disobedience, in order to counter fears of cultural assimilation. As the popularity of some videos on social-networking sites dovetailed with the 2008 protests in Tibet, viewers employed a progressive hermeneutical strategy which demanded a sectarian political interpretation of the lyrics and imagery of the most popular videos out of Tibet. Within China, Tibetans have begun to add these videos to the growing canon of an emerging uncivil religion, which emphasizes Tibetan cultural, linguistic, and religious autonomy within China. Through comparing online and offline ethnography, this article explores the relationship between offline and online worlds and the connections between Tibetans in China and their supporters.
TL;DR: The moral ambiguities of this courtship for students, who face the paradox that while the party centre and collectivist authoritarian ideology invariably claim moral superiority, individual party cadres are frequently exposed as morally corrupt, become the nodal point for questioning party morality.
Abstract: In contemporary China, university students play a key ideological role as the future vanguard of the nation and for this reason they are intensely courted by the Chinese Communist Party. This article addresses the moral ambiguities of this courtship for students, who face the paradox that while the party centre and collectivist authoritarian ideology invariably claims moral superiority, individual party cadres are frequently exposed as morally corrupt. The evil of cadre corruption becomes the nodal point for questioning party morality, a central stake in support of collectivist authoritarian ideology as well as in its denunciation. For students, the problem of evil within the force, representing the collective good is never resolved in either false consciousness or an unmasking of ideology. Doubt instead proceeds as two incommensurable interpretations of party morality persist in suggesting themselves, and this I suggest has important implications for our understanding of political legitimacy in authorita...
TL;DR: The authors investigates the sensual participation of Filipina care workers in Israel, more specifically in the urban space of Tel Aviv, and foregrounds the performative aspects and centrality of objects, appearances and the senses in migrants' making of community.
Abstract: This article investigates the sensual participation of Filipina care workers in Israel, more specifically in the urban space of Tel Aviv. By creating a rich communal life, by parading icons of the Virgin Mary through the streets, and by crafting Origami paper swans that have conquered urban spaces in all sizes, shapes and colours, migrants have fashioned modes of aesthetic and sensual belonging in the city. Their popular aesthetics, I argue, is intricately linked to the ironic Americanisation of a post-colonial nation, as well as the gendered niche of care, which Filipinos in the global economy have come to occupy. Drawing on the concept of ‘aesthetic formation’, this article foregrounds the performative aspects and centrality of objects, appearances and the senses in migrants’ making of community. Filipinos’ aesthetic formations in diaspora speak of collective struggles as well as of the emergence of new subjectivities beyond ethnic or cultural identities.
TL;DR: This paper examines how some Mexican dentists, pharmacists and physicians in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Progreso have broadened their appeal to American patients by associating their procedures with US biomedical standards, building facilities that shadow US counterparts, and facilitating access to the Mexican medical system.
Abstract: The cost of health services within the USA has increased in recent years, limiting access for many Americans. In response, a growing number of Americans are traveling to medical border towns in Mexico to meet their needs. However, many US patients feel uncomfortable traveling to Mexico for healthcare because they are unsure how the system works and believe that Mexico is dangerous, unregulated, unsanitary, and premodern. To reconcile these beliefs with the need for quality medical care, Mexican medical providers appropriate aspects of the US medical system to encourage patronage and alleviate the concerns of patients. This paper examines how some Mexican dentists, pharmacists and physicians in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Progreso have broadened their appeal to American patients by (a) associating their procedures with US biomedical standards, (b) building facilities that shadow US counterparts, and (c) facilitating access to the Mexican medical system.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore political and phenomenological aspects of landscape through an ethnographic study of new access rights in Scotland and show that the continuing divisions between higher ground and lower ground access issues are based on the qualities of walking that combine gesture, confidence, and features in the landscape.
Abstract: This paper explores political and phenomenological aspects of landscape through an ethnographic study of new access rights in Scotland. Drawing on a Nordic tradition of common access rights, the recent legislation in Scotland takes a radical approach to landscape by providing access to Scotland's outdoors in its entirety. Olwig's descriptions of ‘customary’ and ‘natural’ landscape law provide a basis for identifying the intentions of those involved in the access agenda in inculcating a national sense of an accessible landscape. But ethnographic evidence, beginning with the premise of moving subjects rather than static viewers of landscape, shows that the continuing divisions between higher ground and lower ground access issues are based on the qualities of walking that combine gesture, confidence, and features in the landscape. The political landscape thus comes into being through the progression of footsteps of those on the ground as much as through discourse in legislative centres.
TL;DR: The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland as mentioned in this paper is an exquisitely crafted and multi-layered ethnography, which is unique in its comprehensive, longitudi...
Abstract: Cheryl Mattingly's masterful book, The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland, is an exquisitely crafted and multi-layered ethnography. It is unique in its comprehensive, longitudi...
TL;DR: In this article, an Egyptian Sufi leader makes sense of his experiences of displacement in migration through Sufi vocabularies and disciplines, thus exploring the ways in which religious beliefs and ritual practices coalesce with the existential quest.
Abstract: This article describes how an Egyptian Sufi leader makes sense of his experiences of displacement in migration through Sufi vocabularies and disciplines, thus exploring the ways in which religious beliefs and ritual practices coalesce with the existential quest. In the first part of the text, I concentrate on how, through notions such as bâṭin and ẓâhir, as well as through his experience of the haḍra ritual, he responds to the subjective needs and material contingencies he is confronted with during his travels. In the second part of the paper, I trace the genealogy of my interlocutor's understandings of Sufi praxis, highlighting his capacity of blending together different cosmologies and traditions in the wake of our dialogue. Combining questions of narration and individual biography with questions of religious subjectivity and subjectivation, the text engages with some of the most central concerns of recent ethnographic and theoretical inquiries into Islamic religious practice.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse the co-occurrence of two concerns often expressed by indigenous leaders involved with reparations for victims of paramilitaries in Colombia: discomfort with the intense use of hegemonic "gender" discourses in the context of the reparations and a feeling that leaders' involvement in the latter brings about a betrayal of the family and of themselves.
Abstract: This article analyses the co-occurrence of two concerns often expressed by indigenous leaders involved with reparations for victims of paramilitaries in Colombia. These concerns revolve around discomfort with the intense use of hegemonic ‘gender’ discourses in the context of the reparations, and a feeling that leaders' involvement in the latter brings about a betrayal of the family and of themselves. By engaging with the local category of eirruku (flesh), I argue that ways of engaging women in reparations entail the commoditisation of caring relationships. This article, based on 13 months of fieldwork with an indigenous organisation and the communities integrated into it between 2007 and 2008, contributes to the understanding of the articulation of gender and ethnic/racial identification in the context of contemporary forms of governance of indigenous peoples, while delving into ‘carnality’ as a concept to understand gendered forms of reproduction, reparation and selfhood.
TL;DR: The authors investigates Bollywood's popularity among Bene Israel immigrants in Israel and explores the aesthetics of diaspora, understood as a politics of consumption, embodied performance of identity and claims to ownership of tradition shaped by commercialized popular culture imported into Israeli society.
Abstract: Research on Bollywood cinema's increasingly global presence identifies the genre as a significant cultural domain for the articulation of diasporic Indian identity and its constitution. Focusing on the appropriation of Bollywood cinema and its filmi song and dance, regarded as a multi-sensual media, the article investigates Bollywood's popularity among Bene Israel immigrants in Israel and explores the aesthetics of diaspora, understood as a politics of consumption, embodied performance of identity and claims to ownership of tradition shaped by commercialized popular culture imported into Israeli society. I suggest that a sentient anthropology may provide insights into cultural identity as emerging out of material, social and aesthetic practices. The participatory culture and multi-sensual milieus inspired by Bollywood's sensorium are constitutive, the paper argues, of diasporic identity and community through their potential to evoke shared emotions and a sense of place and subjectivity, mediated by the qu...
TL;DR: The authors explored the hidden transfers between law and religion by focussing on the conditions of existence of "liberated" peasant subjects in contemporary China and argued that contemporary "feudal superstition" does not represent a form of anti-secular resistance, but rather confirms the central tenets of Chinese secularism from the perspective of failed peasant subjects.
Abstract: This article explores the hidden transfers between law and religion by focussing on the conditions of existence of ‘liberated’ peasant subjects in contemporary China. The post-Maoist era sought to create new citizens from the collectivised Maoist masses who are subject to market reforms and a new politics of ‘governing through law’ (fazhi). At the same time, new religiousities have blossomed in the Chinese countryside. Representing ‘feudal superstition’, their collective practices remain illegal until today. I argue that, beyond the issue of belief, contemporary ‘feudal superstition’ does not represent a form of anti-secular resistance, but rather confirms the central tenets of Chinese secularism from the perspective of ‘failed’ peasant subjects. Where the realities of market liberalisation and governing through law are experienced as corruption, feudal superstition recreates the conditions to realise liberated peasant subjects: a participatory local public sphere, political visibility, investments in the...
TL;DR: At Akan anti-witchcraft shrines in New York City shrine-priests incorporate into their sacred discourses revelatory knowledge drawn from the American mass-marketing of celebrities, their fashions and lifestyles as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: At Akan anti-witchcraft shrines in New York City shrine-priests incorporate into their sacred discourses revelatory knowledge drawn from the American mass-marketing of celebrities, their fashions and lifestyles Attempting to capture this powerful commodity fetish Hollywood stardom is tacked onto Kente cloth imported from Ghana Through a powerful act of mimesis, a new hybrid sacred object is created Young African clients come to shrines desiring fame, fortune and contact with the stars, but witchcraft, perpetuated by female relatives, prevents them from attaining For shrine-priests, however, the insurmountable problem is that of uncovering any new information about celebrities or discovering witches who camouflage themselves behind the image and aura of stardom so as not to be discovered by the gods Thus witches and celebrities come to be entangled in clients' social networks
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore human play with scale, focusing on what happens when historical and fantasy figures are made to dwell in miniature landscapes and argue that the pleasure that modellers derive from miniature landscaping is a quintessentially contemporary pleasure that owes as much to contact and immersion in materials as to a distancing and abstracting from the miniature terrain through different forms of measurement and layers of representation.
Abstract: Taking its cue from the combination of life-size and miniature re-enactment that takes place in living history settings, this paper explores human play with scale, focusing in particular on what happens when historical and fantasy figures are made to dwell in miniature landscapes. I discuss relations between modellers and the miniatures that they display in dioramas or manipulate in war games, drawing on multi-sited fieldwork leading up to a small-scale exhibition I organised in Aberdeen in 2008. Taking issue with a discourse of disenchantment in modernity, which has led to a renewed interest in embodied human presence in a material world, I argue that the pleasure that modellers derive from miniature landscaping is a quintessentially contemporary pleasure that owes as much to contact and immersion in materials as to a distancing and abstracting from the miniature terrain through different forms of measurement and layers of representation. This interplay between closeness and distance is brought into shar...
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Kelly as mentioned in this paper provides a number of concrete examples of such cross-cultural misunderstandings that are based on the mutual unawareness of homonymy, and articulating the potential of anthropological theorizing to mitigate in these situations, Kelly's analysis is thus not only a timely addition to the Amazonian literature on "indigeinity" which aims to reconfigure indigenous peoples as contemporaneous actors in society but also instructive in showing how ethnographic theory and cosmologically-informed anthropology can be reconciled with applied, activist, or policyoriented approaches.
Abstract: mami and whites but describe very different things for both. For example, state representatives and Yanomami both frame discussions about extending health services in terms of a larger ‘civilizing project’ but civilization denotes something fundamentally different for Yanomami and nonYanomami respectively. While, as we have seen, the civilizing project is for the Yanomami an open-ended historical transformation which involves ‘putting white culture at the service of reproducing Yanomami society’ (3), it is for the representatives of the health system above all about installing in Yanomami bodies the very docility on which the bio-medical, and thus also bio-political, state apptus’s functioning depends. Throughout his ethnography Kelly provides a number of concrete examples of such cross-cultural misunderstandings that are based on the mutual unawareness of homonymy. In articulating the potential of anthropological theorizing to mitigate in these situations, Kelly’s analysis is thus not only a timely addition to the Amazonian literature on ‘indigeinity’ which aims to reconfigure indigenous peoples as contemporaneous actors in society but also instructive in showing how ethnographic theory and cosmologically-informed anthropology can be reconciled with applied, activist, or policyoriented approaches.
TL;DR: In this article, Malanggans, ordinarily painted and used at funerals are displayed, unpainted in New Irelands ‘international’ airport, where they witness the return of dead political leaders returned to their home-clans for burial.
Abstract: Malanggans, ordinarily painted and used at funerals are displayed, unpainted in New Irelands ‘international’ airport. There they witness the return of dead political leaders returned to their home-clans for burial. Malanggans themselves in funeral use re-centre the dead in kin networks. In the airport, they inspire me to ponder (as perhaps they ponder) the loss of Papua New Guinea socialist democracy, which I elucidate using Mauss' concept of taonga, that was once the postcolonial nation-state. The article draws on Benjamin to show that ‘brushing memory against the grain’ exposes how the transformations of equality as a value in the socialist democracy into the new social forms of equality as a value in the neo-liberal state occurred through many imperfect transactions. The ethnographic description of the changes in the display of the art to fit with the purposes of the new airport terminal shows, in even the most personal terms, just how fleeting were the promises of equality during independence.
TL;DR: In recent years, the percentage of the world's population living in cities has tipped from less than to more than half and that number is only expected to climb, and developing countries are likely to...
Abstract: In recent years, the percentage of the world's population living in cities has tipped from less than to more than half. That number is only expected to climb, and developing countries are likely to...