ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS最新文献

In 2001, I experienced severe radial neuropathy, leading to permanent dysfunctions in the fingers of my left hand. In this personal account of nerve damage, medical and surgical treatment, and adaptation, I first describe the sequence of neuropathies, then turn to how through serendipity, the brace enabled other connections—nervelines—with individuals and places. The brace is a metonym of a severed nerve with its associated loss of movement and capacity; it is also both a functional orthotic and an affordance. It carries me forward, activating other nervelines and networks to make things happen. I write of literal and metaphoric nerves, evolving connectivities, and fiber lines, thought lines and collaborations. I then extend the idea of nervelines and networks to global connnections; I emphasize how the organization of labor, the distribution of goods and services, and the expectations of workers shape body histories and life outcomes.

The English word digital (from the Latin, digitus) etymologically connects both fingers and technologies. In this special issue, we honor this dual meaning of the digital by foregrounding how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our senses, particularly our sense of touch. Ethnographically, the articles gathered offer intimate accounts of tactile experiences that intertwine with the digital in both direct and indirect ways. Despite ongoing—and often legitimate—anxieties about the disappearance of touch from our increasingly digitized world, our special issue shows that human engagements with digital technologies are more complex. We theorize touch through a phenomenological and relational lens and as a sensory experience that is deeply shaped and reconfigured by local, sociotechnical and political-economic concerns. This special issue illuminates how attention to hands, fingers, or touch can help us understand the relationship between bodies, ethical life, social relations, selves, and subjectivities through a new lens.

The article explores how digital images of hands are used as a symbolic representation of intimacy and intimate emotions in influencer communication on Instagram. Based on digital ethnography with female influencers in the Czech Republic, the analysis focuses on three categories of communicative practices, where hands function as a visual representation of intimacy—creating community, a sense of vulnerability, and the notion of rawness and openness. The analysis points to the gendered nature of influencer communication. It explores how intimacy is established specifically by women influencers who need to navigate vulnerability with the need to protect themselves against gender-based online violence in the form of hate comments and sexualized hate speech.

This article looks at a smart ring as a window into how contemporary datafication in fitness and medical wearables is informed by the longer history of notions of fitness and the datafication of health within the practice of medicine. After introducing some of the concerns arising from the history of eugenics, specifically out of disability studies critiques, and the more recent organizing of health through data-driven algorithmic medicine, as well as discussing the difference between non-optional wearables and their use as part of transhumanism, I briefly consider how wearables could be a site of intervention, to seize rather than relinquish power over our datafied bodies.

The digital era in which we live has led to countless online social movements, all driven by emotions. This paper builds on fieldwork that stretched over 2 years, starting March 2020 as Norway went into lockdown due to COVID-19. Emotions as experienced online seem to differ from those that are materially embodied or physically present among the studies' 25 young adults. Through two young women, this paper explores reflections on slow writing, holding a letter in their hands, in juxtaposition to fast scrolling on their phones, receiving and sending messages and pictures. In the meetings between their hands and paper, their hands, and their phone screens, they sense time and experience emotions through touch and imaginaries. Amelia and Embla connect mind, body, and senses, as they share their understanding of touching what others have made by hand, imagining the thought behind the embodied materiality.

This article wrestles with the question of the relationship between the digits of our hands and the digital in a dispersed but connected world. What can be held and what fails our grasp in such a universe? How the everyday and habitual skills of cooking and cleaning come into consciousness or vanish into habit, in a constant choreography of remembering and forgetting, with the digital as aid or hindrance. In the process of thinking through posture, gesture, and infrastructure, it reflects on the enduring contemporary challenge of doing ethnographic work at multiple transnational locations, by an ethnographer with a passport that does not travel well, made worse by the restrictions of a pandemic. In the process, it shows how the same hands that can heal, can also hurt.

We use our hands for many tasks and sensory orientations, including eating, communicating, and bathing. We hold, and manipulate a variety of objects, artifacts, and people, feeling for warmth, coldness, texture, hardness, and softness. We approach people or objects with greetings, embraces, and caresses, and to shove, hit, or defend ourselves against other people and potentially dangerous things. Yet just because our hands play such a central role in so many aspects our lives, they may also play an inordinate role in our memories and imagination. This paper highlights the place of hands in memory and imagination and how these memories and imaginings, in turn, affect not only how we use our hands and for what purposes, but with whom we use them and under what circumstances.

Through an extended ethnography of a sports team of boys growing from 7 to 11 years old, I explore Norwegian parents' anxieties about the digital world encroaching on their children's lives. I compare parents' monitoring of their children's (non)digital leisure activities with how kids interact (non)digitally. On the surface, as parents observe how their children's bodies move from screens to sports, they see their kids' attentive hands shifting focus from electronic gaming and screen swiping to a more welcomed ballplaying and high-fiving with nonelectronic teammates. However, close inspection reveals that my interlocutors never completely enter or leave the digital, but dwell within both worlds simultaneously. The result shows the meaning of children sports as changed by the digital, how the digital appears in the foreground or the background of our interactions, and how an emphasis on attentive hands can help unearth how the digital passes through us to constitute our lifeworlds.

A recent Letter to the Editor in Anthropology of Consciousness, by Sosteric, Ratkovic, and Sosteric, is positioned as a critique of my article “Imaginal Research for Unlearning Mastery: Divination With Tarot as a Decolonizing Methodology.” The letter posits that the esoteric tarot is a repository of colonial ideological propaganda, and because of that, it cannot and should not be used as a tool for decolonial practices. However, the letter is misleading in its implications that what I have proposed in my article cannot be a methodology for decolonizing mental models, and includes statements about my position which are incorrect. This response clarifies and expands on ideas from my article—both about the tarot and also about the carceral mental models my article attempts to address—in part by highlighting the modern/colonial underpinnings of Sosteric et al.'s critique.

“A Brief Hystery of the Phantasm.” Anthropology of Consciousness, 2023, 34 (1), 181–228.

In paragraph 8 of the “The Return of the Mythological Phantasm” section, the text “Deleuze's phantasm becomes the ‘transcendental ideal of phantasy’³¹ (1987, 155) juxtaposed to his earlier Nietzschean-Bataillian notion of phantasm as immanence and deeply subversive, base materialism” was incorrect. This should read: “Deleuze's phantasm becomes the ‘transcendental ideal of phantasy’³¹ (1987, 155) juxtaposed to his earlier Nietzschean-Bataillian notion of phantasm as immanence and deeply subversive difference in itself”.

In the “References” section, the text “Tracz, R. Brian. ‘Imagination and the Distinction between Image and Intuition in Kant.’ Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6 (38): 1087-1120.” was incorrect. This should read: “Tracz, R. Brian. 2020. ‘Imagination and the Distinction between Image and Intuition in Kant.’ Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6 (38): 1087-1120.”

In the “References” section, the text “Hollan, Douglas W. and C. Jason Throop. The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies. Brooklyn, NY: Berghahn Books.” was incorrect. This should read: “Hollan, Douglas W. and C. Jason Throop. 2011. The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies. Brooklyn, NY: Berghahn Books.”

In the “References” section, the text “Baudelaire, Charles. ‘Every Man His Chimæra.’ In Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by Thomas Robert Smith and translated by F.P. Sturm, 113–114. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47032/47032-h/47032-h.htm#Page_113.” was incorrect. This should read: “Baudelaire, Charles. 2014. ‘Every Man His Chimæra.’ In Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by Thomas Robert Smith and translated by F.P. Sturm, 113–114. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47032/47032-h/47032-h.htm#Page_113.”

We apologize for these errors.