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
Citations
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The Interlocutor Slot: Citing, Crediting, Cotheorizing, and the Problem of Ethnographic Expertise
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Introduction Special Issue “Paradoxical orders: Parenting encounters, the welfare state, and difference in Europe”:
TL;DR: The authors examines welfare programs as sites where Europe's increasingly diverse societies are being shaped and negotiated, and zooms in on parenting as a central governmental domain where families are shaping and negotiating.
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Patient waiting: care as a gift and debt in the Thai healthcare system
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine poor Thais and Shan migrants' experiences of receiving healthcare from a public hospital, and, in parallel, care from the state, and suggest that flows of affects that loom large in social interactions within the public hospital denote not only poor people's subordinate position but also their effort to achieve a sense of mutuality and moral autonomy.
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From Wrestling with Monsters to Wrestling with God: Masculinities, "Spirituality," and the Group-ization of Religious Life in Northern Costa Rica
TL;DR: This paper explored the support group movement's role in restructuring Latin American religion and contributing to the trans-denominational and trans-secular spread of the "reformation of machismo" focusing on transforming men and masculinity.
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Cumbered Cries: Contextual Constraints on Maternal Grief in Northeast Brazil
TL;DR: This paper analyzed 316 ethnographic interviews about childhood death collected in the interior of Ceara and identified seven contexts that constrain how mothers grieve: historical, political, economic, ecological, biological, social, and spiritual.
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.