Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

Visualizing environmental change is one way people experience ecological degradation and changes in land-use practices. In Placencia, located in Belize, the intensity and scale of development has been increasing without participation by local populations. Through interviews and photovoice, we document the ways residents have encountered changing environments, in order to explore how global and local processes of uneven development intersect. Areas of concern included coastal erosion, dredging, and impacts to marine environments. Participants asserted the need for greater enforcement of environmental regulations and more equitable decision-making practices related to land and resource ownership in the context of rapid development.

This article explores the potentials and challenges of employing digital and interactive media as part of the research–design process. The Portal to Peru project features an online exhibition of Andean textiles, focusing on the work of the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco, Peru. The website shares the rich weaving traditions of the Andes with a broad public, including Andean studies scholars and Peruvians who live in Peru and the United States. The research and content for the website draw on key Andean textile studies texts, combined with interviews with weavers and others associated with the Center for Traditional Textiles and a portion of the extensive photographic archives of the Center for Traditional Textiles itself. This article examines this digital design project from the perspective of participatory research, participatory design, and design ethnography, seeking to identify insights about how ethnographers and others can present cultural heritage online in a way that attends to the dual nature of intangible heritage as artifact and process.

This article provides an overview of a project combining anthropological practice and research to examine various aspects of U.S. Marine Corps culture, conducted at the organization's request, in the wake of significant gender-related misconduct involving Marines on social media. We examine the context and practice leading up to the research, address research design and execution, and describe both the broader Marine population and the characteristics of those in our sample. By examining the details of the project's context and execution, the article aims to advance anthropological discussion about the complexities of research with active duty military personnel, as well as provide insights into practice and research conducted from a standpoint within a military organization.

Theories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of vulnerability can be insulting to individuals and communities with whom we work, and/or with whom we identify. There is a growing discomfort that categorizing the “vulnerable” acts to discursively nullify the everywhere-visible “resilience,” toughness, and genius that exist in communities that are habitually exposed to risk and hazards. We argue that constructing vulnerability as a characteristic of subaltern peoples and marginalized places is truncated at best and can perpetuate violence—epistemic, semiotic, and material—at worst. To identify the “vulnerable” is, we contend, necessarily a process of otherizing and essentializing. We see and are concerned to further encourage an emergent form of disaster anthropology that is particularly oriented toward understanding and theorizing the institutions, systems, and individuals that structure risk, and in the process to focus attention away from “the vulnerable.” To our surprise, this has emerged in recent anthropological writings in very particular ways. We find the orientation away from vulnerable populations among our colleagues who write at the intersections of disaster institutions and local communities. Here, we recognize vulnerability conceived not merely as historical inequity that produces negative outcomes, but as nested and contested sites of struggle for different visions of utopian futures, for contrasting articulations of what constitutes risk, and for diverse cultural logics of the good.