Journal ArticleDOI
Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good
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In this article, the authors trace the change from the anthropologists' focus on the "other" to the "the other" and suggest that some strengths of earlier work were lost in the transition.Abstract:
In the 1980s, anthropology set aside a focus on societies defined as radically ‘other’ to the anthropologists' own. There was little consensus at the time, however, about who might replace the other as the primary object of anthropological attention. In important respects, I argue, its replacement has been the suffering subject. Tracing this change, I consider how it addressed key problems of the anthropology of the other, but I also suggest that some strengths of earlier work – particularly some of its unique critical capacities – were lost in the transition. The conclusion considers how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses.read more
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Beyond the evaluative lens: Contextual unpredictabilities of care
TL;DR: Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in three distinct contexts of elder care, it is shown the central role that contextual unpredictability plays in care experiences and argues for scholarship that recognizes care as a form of becoming, embedded in processual and historically contigent relations.
Deexceptionalizing Displacement: An Introduction
TL;DR: The authors argue for a more expansive utility of the framework of displacement (thus deexceptionalized), while attending to how specific forms of displacement unfold on the ground, and argue that displacement is often framed as exceptional to a presumed norm of national sedentism.
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Little People, Ghosts and the Anthropology of the Good
TL;DR: The authors describes Fijian ghost stories and talk about veli, mythical little people, and offers an analysis of them as alternative perspectives on the morally marked relationship between past and present.
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Orientation and Crafted Bureaucracy: Finding Dignity in Nicaraguan Food Safety
TL;DR: The authors explored how food-safety inspectors (hygienistas) in Nicaragua monitor and certify foodservice workers and facilities, and they described their job not as law enforcement but as orientation, which integrates state regulation with interpersonal exchanges of gifts and jokes.
References
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BookDOI
Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity
TL;DR: Asad as discussed by the authors explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of the secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East, and concludes that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational.
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On Ethnographic Authority
TL;DR: The frontispiece of Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific is a photograph with the caption "A Ceremonial Act of the Kula." A shell necklace is being offered to a Trobriand chief who stands at the door of his dwelling, behind the man presenting the necklace is a row of six bowing youths, one of them sounding a conch as mentioned in this paper.
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Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time
TL;DR: The authors trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain, and suggest that the near-future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event-driven temporal frames.
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Continuity thinking and the problem of christian culture : Belief, time, and the anthropology of christianity
TL;DR: A close reading of the Comaroffs' Of Revelation and Revolution illustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished as discussed by the authors.
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For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom
TL;DR: The authors propose an approche possible for l'etude comparee et ethnographique de l'ethique et de la liberte, and quelques commentaires succincts on le jainisme servent a l'illustrer.