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Articles 1 - 30 of 97
Full-Text Articles in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Teaching Time; Disrupting Common Sense, Kevin Birth
Teaching Time; Disrupting Common Sense, Kevin Birth
Publications and Research
In my course “Time” I set out to disrupt the connection between cognitive tools used to represent time (clocks and calendars) and experiences of time. This article documents some of the topics and pedagogical methods I use: using unusual due dates for assignments, making the clock look strange, disrupting the idea of “now,” showing how clocks cultivate gullibility, exploring the different hour systems of the past, criticizing clock-based logics used in primatological research, explaining the theory of special relativity, and exploring the political and economic consequences of sleep loss.
George Floyd In Papua: Image-Events And The Art Of Resonance, Karen Strassler
George Floyd In Papua: Image-Events And The Art Of Resonance, Karen Strassler
Publications and Research
This article offers an introduction to the “image-event” as both concept and method through a focus on the circulation of images around the killing of George Floyd. It examines how these images reverberated and resonated in West Papua, a restive region of Indonesia that has been the site of a long-standing separatist movement. It critically examines a celebratory media discourse that sees the US-based Black Lives Matter movement as expanding outward to spark similar movements elsewhere, a logic that reiterates long-standing colonialist narratives that figure places like Papua as backwaters belatedly receiving and imitatively taking up ideas that flow from …
Borders: A Story Of Political Imagination, Miriam Ticktin
Borders: A Story Of Political Imagination, Miriam Ticktin
Publications and Research
This article traces three different political imaginaries about borders, suggesting that the dominant imaginary—the one of border walls, driven by a fear of invasion—is only one way to live in the world. The goal is to make space in our political imaginations to rethink how we live together, including thinking beyond nation-states as containers that keep people in or out. By first showing how the vision of invasion is built and maintained with intersecting transnational technologies and ideologies, I open the way to thinking otherwise. Second, I trace the counterpolitics of borders developed by artists and activists, resisting borders and …
The Nature Of Anti-Asian American Xenophobia During The Coronavirus Pandemic: A Preliminary Exploration Into Envy As A Key Motivator Of Hate, Daisuke Akiba
Publications and Research
Background. The current Coronavirus pandemic has been linked to a dramatic increase in anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate incidents in the United States. At the time of writing, there does not appear to be any published empirical research examining the mechanisms underlying Asiaphobia during the current pandemic. Based on the stereotype content model, we investigated the idea that ambivalent attitudes toward AAPIs, marked primarily with envy, may be contributing to anti-AAPI xenophobia. Methods. Study 1 (N = 140) explored, through a survey, the link between envious stereotypes toward AAPIs and Asiaphobia. Study 2 (N = 167), …
Building A Feminist Commons In The Time Of Covid-19, Miriam Ticktin
Building A Feminist Commons In The Time Of Covid-19, Miriam Ticktin
Publications and Research
The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been structured around the idea that human connection and sociality are bad—they are dangerous. This essay suggests that, perhaps paradoxically, rather than isolating to stay healthy, people are forging new egalitarian forms of connection. I argue that COVID-19 has enhanced experiments in what I will call a “burgeoning feminist commons.” These foreground new, horizontal forms of sociality, and they build the grounds of resistance, refusing to separate the time of political organization from that of reproduction. I discuss three such experiments: masked mobs, friendly fridges, and pandemic pods. Each form of connection …
Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski
Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski
Publications and Research
Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …
Civility And Its Discontents: Subway Etiquette, Civic Values, And Political Subjectivity In Global Taiwan, Anru Lee
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
The House Of Love And The Mental Hospital: Zones Of Care And Recovery In South India, Murphy Halliburton
The House Of Love And The Mental Hospital: Zones Of Care And Recovery In South India, Murphy Halliburton
Publications and Research
The Movement for Global Mental Health has defined the person suffering psychopathology in low-income countries as an abused and suffering subject in need of saving by biomedical psychiatry. Based on fieldwork in Kerala, South India, carried out at psychiatric clinics and a psychosocial rehabilitation centre, this paper examines patients’ experiences of illness, the degree and quality of family support, and attributions made to the role of ‘sneham’, or love, in recovery. The role of love and family involvement may help explain the provocative finding by WHO epidemiological studies that ‘developing’ countries – and India in particular – showed better rates …
Nonsovereign Racecraft: How Colonialism, Debt, And Disaster Are Transforming Puerto Rican Racial Subjectivities, Isar Godreau, Yarimar Bonilla
Nonsovereign Racecraft: How Colonialism, Debt, And Disaster Are Transforming Puerto Rican Racial Subjectivities, Isar Godreau, Yarimar Bonilla
Publications and Research
Using the concept of “racecraft” to describe the state production of racial subjectivities, we argue that this process has been increasingly compromised in Puerto Rico by a lack of sovereignty and by the current socioeconomic crisis. We argue that the state-sponsored idea that Puerto Rican white and mixed-race identities operate separately from the US racial framework is receding. Based on the unconventional use of an open-ended question for racial identification in a survey administered to over one thousand Puerto Ricans, we found: a reluctance to identify racially, an awareness of a normative “whiteness” that excludes Puerto Ricans, and a tendency …
The Video Camera Spoiled My Ethnography: A Critical Approach, Katherine Gregory
The Video Camera Spoiled My Ethnography: A Critical Approach, Katherine Gregory
Publications and Research
As videography and other media technologies are normalized in the field of qualitative methods for the purpose of data collection, there is a growing need to discuss the benefits and limitations of these data collection tools. This article chronicles an ethnographic video study focused on the experiences of Muslim adults living in the Netherlands, and why the author opted to end the project. Issues focus on reckoning with the imperial gaze of the camera, performative behavior of participants before the camera and interdisciplinary tensions the researcher faced from conflicting trainings as a qualitative methodologist and media practitioner.
A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough
A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough
Publications and Research
This essay examines the media coverage surrounding two African weddings of lesbian and gay couples in South Africa, as a lens onto the evolving cultural politics of black queerness in that country. Two decades after South Africa launched a world-leading legal framework for LGBTI protections, I argue that these media representations depict the growing inclusion of black LGBTIQ people as a process of bridging the supposed “gap” between homosexuality and African culture. This new “bridging the gap” script seemingly rejects the older, dominant script portraying homosexuality as intrinsically “un-African.” But I argue that it instead reproduces the “un-African” script in …
Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, And La Futura Cuir, Yarimar Bonilla
Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, And La Futura Cuir, Yarimar Bonilla
Publications and Research
This essay discusses how Puerto Ricans are imagining and building new futures out of a political context of material and affective ruin that is not guided by the promise of a modernist future or the palliative anticipation of a sovereignty to come. It examines how the politics of ruination might lead to a “hopeful pessimism” that could break with the nostalgic immobility of the arrested present. It concludes by exploring the possibilities of an emerging cuir (queer) futurity that breaks with raced and gendered scripts of postcolonial sovereignty to envision a new postdisaster future.
Food Frights: Covid-19 And The Specter Of Hunger, Maggie Dickinson
Food Frights: Covid-19 And The Specter Of Hunger, Maggie Dickinson
Publications and Research
Worries over widespread food shortages in the first few weeks of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States eclipsed the real hunger crisis on the horizon—one intimately tied to already existing inequalities. In the midst of the pandemic, the specter of hunger is haunting the same people it always has—the poor, the undocumented, low wage workers, the un- and under employed. It is not our supply systems that are breaking down and causing hunger, but our systems for ensuring people can access the food that exists which have been broken for a long time.
The Public Reckoning: Anti-Debt Futures After #Rickyrenuncia, Sarah Molinari
The Public Reckoning: Anti-Debt Futures After #Rickyrenuncia, Sarah Molinari
Publications and Research
This essay argues that the summer 2019 mobilizations in Puerto Rico and the renewed demand for a debt audit help to imagine anti-debt futures that disrupt the terms and temporalities of public debt and indebted lives. The essay discusses one form of debt resistance-a comprehensive citizen debt audit-as central to deepen the process of public reckoning marked by #RickyRenuncia and to build upon the landscapes of protest and solidarity emerging in its wake.
The Coloniality Of Disaster: Race, Empire, And The Temporal Logics Of Emergency In Puerto Rico, Usa, Yarimar Bonilla
The Coloniality Of Disaster: Race, Empire, And The Temporal Logics Of Emergency In Puerto Rico, Usa, Yarimar Bonilla
Publications and Research
This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both “resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogesti� …
Puerto Rico: Necrópolis, Yarimar Bonilla
Puerto Rico: Necrópolis, Yarimar Bonilla
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
The United Nations Declaration On The Rights Of Peasants And Other People Working In Rural Areas, Marc Edelman, Priscilla Claeys
The United Nations Declaration On The Rights Of Peasants And Other People Working In Rural Areas, Marc Edelman, Priscilla Claeys
Publications and Research
In December 2018, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. UNDROP is the product of 17 years of struggle by La Via Campesina, other transnational agrarian movements and allies that included NGOs, states, UN mandate holders, and academics. It recognises the dignity of rural populations, their contributions to global food production, and their ‘special relationship’ to land, water and nature, as well as their vulnerabilities to eviction, hazardous working conditions and political repression. It reiterates rights protected in other instruments and sets new standards for individual and collective rights …
The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer
The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer
Publications and Research
In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …
Thinking Like An Ethnographer, Kristina Baines
Thinking Like An Ethnographer, Kristina Baines
Publications and Research
Learning to conduct ethnographic research means more than simply learning about the different ethnographic methods and putting them into action. To gather data ethnographically, we say we need to use ourselves--our bodies and our minds--as the tool of data collection. Ethnographers use their five senses to observe human behavior and write about what they observe, however, they need to develop those senses to help them collect accurate data. Part of this process is developing what is called the “ethnographic mindset.” This chapter outline ways in which ethnographic researchers can begin to develop this mindset.
The Leaked Texts At The Heart Of Puerto Rico’S Massive Protests, Yarimar Bonilla
The Leaked Texts At The Heart Of Puerto Rico’S Massive Protests, Yarimar Bonilla
Publications and Research
With Governor Rosselló refusing to step down, Puerto Ricans are gathering today in what could be the island’s largest-ever protest.
Authenticating Loss And Contesting Recovery: Fema And The Politics Of Colonial Disaster Management, Sarah Molinari
Authenticating Loss And Contesting Recovery: Fema And The Politics Of Colonial Disaster Management, Sarah Molinari
Publications and Research
The chapter discusses how institutional regulators of disaster recovery "authenticate" loss and contribute to the process of disciplining disaster subjects. Drawing on ethnographic research after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the chapter suggests that alternative grassroots approaches to disaster recovery point to a reimagining of "recovery" organized around a framework of support and affective relations.
But Are They Actually Healthier? Challenging The Health/Wellness Divide Through The Ethnography Of Embodied Ecological Heritage, Kristina Baines
But Are They Actually Healthier? Challenging The Health/Wellness Divide Through The Ethnography Of Embodied Ecological Heritage, Kristina Baines
Publications and Research
A holistic definition of ‘health’ remains difficult to operationalize, despite decades of attempts by medical anthropologists and the World Health Organization to do so. Anthropologists routinely reject dichotomous notions – belief vs. knowledge, wellness vs. health, mental vs. physical, environment vs. self – yet demands for physiological evidence of ‘health’ persist. In this article, I ask what evidence would sufficiently demonstrate health, and explore the possibility of measures that move beyond the physiological. Using ethnographic data collected in indigenous Maya communities in Belize and in immigrant communities in New York City, I argue that ecological heritage practices can provide a …
‘Haciendas And Plantations’: History And Limitations Of A 60-Year-Old Taxonomy, Marc Edelman
‘Haciendas And Plantations’: History And Limitations Of A 60-Year-Old Taxonomy, Marc Edelman
Publications and Research
In 1957, Eric R Wolf and Sidney W Mintz published ‘Haciendas and Plantations in Middle America and the Antilles’ in the Jamaican journal Social and Economic Studies. This article discusses the production of the Wolf and Mintz article, its analytical framework and the theoretical tensions it contains, and its subsequent influence, mainly though not exclusively on anthropological and historical scholarship about large landed properties in Latin America and the Caribbean. ‘Haciendas and Plantations’ appeared at a time when anthropologists such as Elman Service, Charles Wagley, and Marvin Harris were trying to make sense of agrarian Latin America by developing typologies …
Burning Libraries: A Community Response, Thomas H. Mcgovern
Burning Libraries: A Community Response, Thomas H. Mcgovern
Publications and Research
Archaeology is increasingly seen as a global change science as well as a provider of community heritage resources. Rapid climate change is destroying archaeological sites at an unprecedented rate, and community- based response is urgently needed.
Bad Bunny, Good Scapegoat: How 'El Conejo Malo' Is Stirring A 'Moral Panic' In Post-Hurricane Puerto Rico, Yarimar Bonilla
Bad Bunny, Good Scapegoat: How 'El Conejo Malo' Is Stirring A 'Moral Panic' In Post-Hurricane Puerto Rico, Yarimar Bonilla
Publications and Research
Article examines the Moral Panic around the music of trap artist Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico
The Intentional De-Cohesion In Deportability, Talha Issevenler
The Intentional De-Cohesion In Deportability, Talha Issevenler
Publications and Research
A critical exploration of loss or decohesion of political agency in deportability.
Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage Within Ongoing Struggles Over African Marriage In South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough
Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage Within Ongoing Struggles Over African Marriage In South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough
Publications and Research
This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in …
Jewish Germany: An Enduring Presence From The Fourth To The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki
Jewish Germany: An Enduring Presence From The Fourth To The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki
Publications and Research
Review of the book Jewish Germany: An enduring presence from the fourth to the twenty-first century.
Book Review-The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On The Disaster Capitalists, Sarah Molinari
Book Review-The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On The Disaster Capitalists, Sarah Molinari
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury
Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury
Publications and Research
In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly …