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Journal ArticleDOI

Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good

Joel Robbins
- 01 Sep 2013 - 
- Vol. 19, Iss: 3, pp 447-462
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TLDR
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.

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Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties

TL;DR: The authors consider several emergent trends in anthropology since the 1980s against a backdrop of the rise of neoliberalism as both an economic and a governmental formation, and consider a range of work that is explicitly or implicitly a reaction to this dark turn, under the rubric of "anthropologies of the good, including studies of "the good life" and "happiness", as well as studies of morality and ethics.
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Ethnography in Late Industrialism

TL;DR: In this article, the authors situate contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media.
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Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy. An introduction to supplement 9

TL;DR: A holistic understanding of how people organize their economic lives is attentive to both the temporality of value and the relationship between different scales of value as mentioned in this paper, and attentive to the spatial configuration of economic life in many societies in which the future has become synonymous with geographical mobility.
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Anthropology of Aging and Care

TL;DR: In this paper, a review traces the circulation of care across aging bodies, everyday practices, families, and nations, highlighting connections and fissures between global political-economic transformations and the most intimate aspects of daily life.
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Immobilizing mobility: Border ethnography, illiberal democracy, and the politics of the “refugee crisis” in Hungary

TL;DR: In the summer of 2015, more than 350,000 migrants moved through Hungarian territory and almost immediately there emerged a dialectic between, on the one hand, depoliticizing narratives of crisis that sought to immobilize the migrants and on the other, concrete political mobilization that facilitated their mobility as discussed by the authors.
References
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The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology [and Comments and Reply]

TL;DR: Mintz as mentioned in this paper discusses the themes of l'anthropologie de la cosmologie judeo-chretienne in the context of a discussion of Sweeteness and Power.
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The Anthropology of Christianity

TL;DR: The authors surveys the literature that constitutes the newly emergent anthropology of Christianity, arguing that demographic and world-historical forces have made it such that anthropology has had to recently come to terms with Christianity as an ethnographic object.
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Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change

TL;DR: The authors argue that a model of cultures as structured by values can help explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as they show with data from Papua New Guinea.
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Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the processes through which imaginative effects come about in an anthropology that takes the imagination seriously and how far could an exploration of the processes of imaginative effects serve to distinguish the im...
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What is a Christian? Notes toward an anthropology of Christianity

TL;DR: In this article, what is a Christian? Notes toward an anthropology of Christianity are given, with a focus on the role of the Bible in the formation of the Church and its history.