Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231194259
Petra Kuppinger
This article introduces Fairkauf, a charitable thrift store, in Stuttgart, Germany and analyzes its work and participation in alternative economies of reuse, repair, repurposing, sharing, and care, and the store’s contributions to ecological and social sustainability. Thrift stores are contemporary responses to overproduction, hyper-consumption, social inequality, and ecological degradation. This article provides a nuanced ethnographic description of a thrift store. Such stores are often overlooked, yet they play a crucial role in individual and urban sustainability efforts. They are spaces of incidental sustainability that do not loudly advertise their work, but quietly help thrifters pursue more ecological lifestyles and help cities divert huge quantities of materials from landfills and incinerators. Thrift stores’ labor connects thrifters to activities and networks of often similarly hidden sustainability efforts by ordinary people across the world. Theoretically, I engage the role of thrift stores in alternative economies that contribute to more ecologically and socially sustainable lifeworlds and futures.
{"title":"Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany","authors":"Petra Kuppinger","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231194259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231194259","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces Fairkauf, a charitable thrift store, in Stuttgart, Germany and analyzes its work and participation in alternative economies of reuse, repair, repurposing, sharing, and care, and the store’s contributions to ecological and social sustainability. Thrift stores are contemporary responses to overproduction, hyper-consumption, social inequality, and ecological degradation. This article provides a nuanced ethnographic description of a thrift store. Such stores are often overlooked, yet they play a crucial role in individual and urban sustainability efforts. They are spaces of incidental sustainability that do not loudly advertise their work, but quietly help thrifters pursue more ecological lifestyles and help cities divert huge quantities of materials from landfills and incinerators. Thrift stores’ labor connects thrifters to activities and networks of often similarly hidden sustainability efforts by ordinary people across the world. Theoretically, I engage the role of thrift stores in alternative economies that contribute to more ecologically and socially sustainable lifeworlds and futures.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48292798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231194253
Catherine M Tucker, Miriam Elizabeth Pérez Zelaya
Coffee has been a focal commodity for efforts to promote sustainability and social justice through alternative trade arrangements. Certifications such as Fairtrade have promised better prices, fair labor practices, environmental sustainability and improved livelihoods for small-scale coffee producers. A growing literature has examined alternative trade outcomes, but it remains an open question whether certifications help producers and their organizations improve livelihoods and conserve the environment. This study examines Café Orgánico de Marcala, SA (COMSA), which operates on principles of sustainability that emerged in conjunction with certifications. COMSA supports organic production through education and practices that integrate biodynamic principles, indigenous knowledge, and experimentation. COMSA has used fair trade premiums to build a multilingual school and start a recycling program, among other projects. Members and leaders acknowledge that problems exist yet point to progress. This ethnographic research uses grounded theory to examine COMSA’s approach to sustainability, its successes, and ongoing challenges.
{"title":"Fostering sustainability through environmentally friendly coffee production and alternative trade: The case of Café Orgánico de Marcala (COMSA), Honduras","authors":"Catherine M Tucker, Miriam Elizabeth Pérez Zelaya","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231194253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231194253","url":null,"abstract":"Coffee has been a focal commodity for efforts to promote sustainability and social justice through alternative trade arrangements. Certifications such as Fairtrade have promised better prices, fair labor practices, environmental sustainability and improved livelihoods for small-scale coffee producers. A growing literature has examined alternative trade outcomes, but it remains an open question whether certifications help producers and their organizations improve livelihoods and conserve the environment. This study examines Café Orgánico de Marcala, SA (COMSA), which operates on principles of sustainability that emerged in conjunction with certifications. COMSA supports organic production through education and practices that integrate biodynamic principles, indigenous knowledge, and experimentation. COMSA has used fair trade premiums to build a multilingual school and start a recycling program, among other projects. Members and leaders acknowledge that problems exist yet point to progress. This ethnographic research uses grounded theory to examine COMSA’s approach to sustainability, its successes, and ongoing challenges.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45420056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231195420
Petra Kuppinger
Sustainability is a much used and abused term. Sustainability is cool, and sustainability sells. Real estate developers advertise sustainable apartments and neighborhoods, travel agents offer sustainable tours, and retailers offer numerous sustainable products. Beyond this lucrative market for sustainable products and services (including some greenwashing), there exists a vast and growing but less visible landscape of small-scale sustainable practices and efforts where ordinary people address concrete ecological and social issues in their everyday practices, local initiatives, and projects. They act because they care for people and the environment and always did. They develop creative new practices and initiatives to address climate change, environmental degradation, and social inequality. Many small efforts do not focus on the provision of singular sustainable products or outcomes, but seek to transform communities, empower local constituencies, and address multi-layered social and ecological issues. Across the world, people reuse things, mend clothes and appliances, upcycle and repurpose things, experiment with organic farming and urban agriculture, or organize fair cooperatives. Every day, ordinary people are seeding change, tending to their projects, and caring for people and nature around them. Some of their practices and initiatives catch the attention of others and can seed more change beyond their initial realm. Others stay small and local. Yet others might fail. This special issue presents ethnographic accounts of small-scale sustainable and social justice practices, activities, and projects on three continents. In their unique contexts and
{"title":"Introduction: Seeding change – the importance of small sustainable projects and activities","authors":"Petra Kuppinger","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231195420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231195420","url":null,"abstract":"Sustainability is a much used and abused term. Sustainability is cool, and sustainability sells. Real estate developers advertise sustainable apartments and neighborhoods, travel agents offer sustainable tours, and retailers offer numerous sustainable products. Beyond this lucrative market for sustainable products and services (including some greenwashing), there exists a vast and growing but less visible landscape of small-scale sustainable practices and efforts where ordinary people address concrete ecological and social issues in their everyday practices, local initiatives, and projects. They act because they care for people and the environment and always did. They develop creative new practices and initiatives to address climate change, environmental degradation, and social inequality. Many small efforts do not focus on the provision of singular sustainable products or outcomes, but seek to transform communities, empower local constituencies, and address multi-layered social and ecological issues. Across the world, people reuse things, mend clothes and appliances, upcycle and repurpose things, experiment with organic farming and urban agriculture, or organize fair cooperatives. Every day, ordinary people are seeding change, tending to their projects, and caring for people and nature around them. Some of their practices and initiatives catch the attention of others and can seed more change beyond their initial realm. Others stay small and local. Yet others might fail. This special issue presents ethnographic accounts of small-scale sustainable and social justice practices, activities, and projects on three continents. In their unique contexts and","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41873286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231192305
Eeva Kesküla
This paper critiques the centrality of work in capitalist societies and looks at people who have abandoned their location-bound jobs for the lifestyle of a digital nomad. Five months of fieldwork in Thailand during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that digital nomads aspired to have autonomy over their work, including reducing their work time. However, pursuing their ideal meant negotiating the desire to minimise labour hours on the one hand and guilt about not fitting the hegemonic values of hard work on the other. Digital nomads try to overcome the dominant work ethic in their talk about working productively. While these digital nomads generally spoke of ‘productivity’ in terms of autonomy and efficiency, concerns over ‘appearing lazy’ shifted the register to mainstream concepts of productivity, such as ‘hard work’. Drawing on philosophers of work and the need to take utopias seriously, this article proposes that even if small-scale and individualised, digital nomads’ attempts to reorganise their working lives are an important critique of work, especially in post-COVID trends toward more remote working.
{"title":"Challenging the dominant work ethic: Work, naps, and productivity of location-independent workers","authors":"Eeva Kesküla","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231192305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231192305","url":null,"abstract":"This paper critiques the centrality of work in capitalist societies and looks at people who have abandoned their location-bound jobs for the lifestyle of a digital nomad. Five months of fieldwork in Thailand during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that digital nomads aspired to have autonomy over their work, including reducing their work time. However, pursuing their ideal meant negotiating the desire to minimise labour hours on the one hand and guilt about not fitting the hegemonic values of hard work on the other. Digital nomads try to overcome the dominant work ethic in their talk about working productively. While these digital nomads generally spoke of ‘productivity’ in terms of autonomy and efficiency, concerns over ‘appearing lazy’ shifted the register to mainstream concepts of productivity, such as ‘hard work’. Drawing on philosophers of work and the need to take utopias seriously, this article proposes that even if small-scale and individualised, digital nomads’ attempts to reorganise their working lives are an important critique of work, especially in post-COVID trends toward more remote working.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43016410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-24DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231192308
E. Bähre
This article examines court cases brought by clients against private health insurance companies and against Brazil’s public health system. When clients take private health insurers to court, they successfully claim that the insurer violated their dignity, which entitles them to a moral damage payment. Similar cases against the state did not include moral damage claims. In relation to public healthcare, it is somehow not possible to equate dignity with economic value. One might conclude that the dignity of consumers in the market is worth more than that of citizens vis-à-vis the state. Instead, I argue for a more subtle approach by concentrating on the ethics of incommensurability. What legal and ethical considerations lead to such a fundamental incommensurability between personhood and economic value? How do the actors involved in court proceedings (claimants, prosecutors, judges, and insurers) perceive the differences between cases against insurance companies and against public health authorities? What can we make of the differences between the legal and everyday understandings of dignity and morality?
{"title":"The value of dignity: Health insurance, ethics and court cases in Brazil","authors":"E. Bähre","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231192308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231192308","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines court cases brought by clients against private health insurance companies and against Brazil’s public health system. When clients take private health insurers to court, they successfully claim that the insurer violated their dignity, which entitles them to a moral damage payment. Similar cases against the state did not include moral damage claims. In relation to public healthcare, it is somehow not possible to equate dignity with economic value. One might conclude that the dignity of consumers in the market is worth more than that of citizens vis-à-vis the state. Instead, I argue for a more subtle approach by concentrating on the ethics of incommensurability. What legal and ethical considerations lead to such a fundamental incommensurability between personhood and economic value? How do the actors involved in court proceedings (claimants, prosecutors, judges, and insurers) perceive the differences between cases against insurance companies and against public health authorities? What can we make of the differences between the legal and everyday understandings of dignity and morality?","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42249930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175973
Ben Eyre
The promotion of smallholder dairy farming in Rungwe District, Tanzania has been enormously successful, with the vast majority of households now in possession of productive dairy cows. This article compares supposedly traditional loans with self-help groups directly established by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that both reveal ‘big’ recipients rather than distributors of resources, and that those carrying out development activities often benefit most from them. Rather than advocating a moral judgement, the article suggests the value of thinking with and against the concept of distributive labour to explain the pragmatics of interdependent relations that are key to doing development. Detachment between beneficiary and donor is essential, and mediates salutary claims that distributive labour is a means to advocate for shared values about the distribution of wealth across the globe.
{"title":"Concerning distributive labour: Exploring the pragmatics of globalised interdependence","authors":"Ben Eyre","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175973","url":null,"abstract":"The promotion of smallholder dairy farming in Rungwe District, Tanzania has been enormously successful, with the vast majority of households now in possession of productive dairy cows. This article compares supposedly traditional loans with self-help groups directly established by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that both reveal ‘big’ recipients rather than distributors of resources, and that those carrying out development activities often benefit most from them. Rather than advocating a moral judgement, the article suggests the value of thinking with and against the concept of distributive labour to explain the pragmatics of interdependent relations that are key to doing development. Detachment between beneficiary and donor is essential, and mediates salutary claims that distributive labour is a means to advocate for shared values about the distribution of wealth across the globe.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44121662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-26DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175986
Simon Theobald
Following the Iranian Revolution, ideologues within the Republican system promised the possibility of ethical perfection so long as Iranians adhered to guidelines promulgated by the state. Drawing on a case study of both critics and supporters of the government living in Mashhad, I argue that one of the inadvertent outcomes of this commitment to perfectionism has been its instrumentalization by government critics as a tool to condemn the behaviour of state supporters. Inconsistencies of behaviour demonstrated by state supporters were interpreted by these government critics as gross indecencies and major evils, rather than as part of a modality of ‘ethical static’ that has been advocated for as an understanding of everyday morality. The ethnographic tension in this article illuminates both the impacts of state-led projects of moral utopianism, and their ramifications for anthropology.
{"title":"The perils of utopia: Between ‘ethical static’ and moral perfectionism in Iran","authors":"Simon Theobald","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175986","url":null,"abstract":"Following the Iranian Revolution, ideologues within the Republican system promised the possibility of ethical perfection so long as Iranians adhered to guidelines promulgated by the state. Drawing on a case study of both critics and supporters of the government living in Mashhad, I argue that one of the inadvertent outcomes of this commitment to perfectionism has been its instrumentalization by government critics as a tool to condemn the behaviour of state supporters. Inconsistencies of behaviour demonstrated by state supporters were interpreted by these government critics as gross indecencies and major evils, rather than as part of a modality of ‘ethical static’ that has been advocated for as an understanding of everyday morality. The ethnographic tension in this article illuminates both the impacts of state-led projects of moral utopianism, and their ramifications for anthropology.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48087517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-14DOI: 10.1177/0308275x231173567
Sangmi Lee
Based on ethnographic research in a multi-ethnic village in Laos, this article examines how global tourism reconfigured racial and ethnic relations between foreign tourists and locals, as well as among villagers of different ethnicities. While tourists of various nationalities were homogeneously racialized by the locals as farang (white foreigners) who are fundamentally different, they were generally in a dominant socioeconomic position. However, such global hierarchies could be upended when they became long-term stayers employed by local tourist businesses and were incorporated into the power structure. Likewise, ethnic hierarchies among local villagers that used to privilege majority youth on the job market were temporarily reconstituted as minority youth became more desirable employees in the tourism industry because of their superior English-language abilities acquired from an NGO-supported, informal class in the village. Nonetheless, recent changes in global tourism indicate that structural ethnic hierarchies persist and continue to subject ethnic minorities to employment uncertainty.
{"title":"Global tourism and local ethnicity: Reconfiguring racial and ethnic relations in central Laos","authors":"Sangmi Lee","doi":"10.1177/0308275x231173567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231173567","url":null,"abstract":"Based on ethnographic research in a multi-ethnic village in Laos, this article examines how global tourism reconfigured racial and ethnic relations between foreign tourists and locals, as well as among villagers of different ethnicities. While tourists of various nationalities were homogeneously racialized by the locals as farang (white foreigners) who are fundamentally different, they were generally in a dominant socioeconomic position. However, such global hierarchies could be upended when they became long-term stayers employed by local tourist businesses and were incorporated into the power structure. Likewise, ethnic hierarchies among local villagers that used to privilege majority youth on the job market were temporarily reconstituted as minority youth became more desirable employees in the tourism industry because of their superior English-language abilities acquired from an NGO-supported, informal class in the village. Nonetheless, recent changes in global tourism indicate that structural ethnic hierarchies persist and continue to subject ethnic minorities to employment uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41288367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-13DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175995
Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar
Rather than theorizing trust and mistrust in the abstract, recent anthropological scholarship has shown how trust and mistrust emerge in particular social settings. In this article, I build on this scholarship by drawing on fieldwork with the members of an anti-capitalist Catalonian cooperative who looked to create alternative economic systems that were said to be based on trust. The central aim of this article is to redirect analytical attention from the emergence of the experience of (mis-)trust in particular contexts, toward an analysis of how trust and mistrust are mobilized to make particular iterations of an ‘alternative economy’ emerge out of competing grassroots economic conceptualizations. By analysing how trust and mistrust are constituted within a relational field involving the state and a broader landscape of cooperative movements, this article shows that socio-economic formations are continually formed through embodied, affectively charged practices instead of being solely ‘based’ on trust or mistrust.
{"title":"“The economy of trust”? Competing grassroots economics and the mobilization of (mis-)trust in a Catalonian cooperative","authors":"Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175995","url":null,"abstract":"Rather than theorizing trust and mistrust in the abstract, recent anthropological scholarship has shown how trust and mistrust emerge in particular social settings. In this article, I build on this scholarship by drawing on fieldwork with the members of an anti-capitalist Catalonian cooperative who looked to create alternative economic systems that were said to be based on trust. The central aim of this article is to redirect analytical attention from the emergence of the experience of (mis-)trust in particular contexts, toward an analysis of how trust and mistrust are mobilized to make particular iterations of an ‘alternative economy’ emerge out of competing grassroots economic conceptualizations. By analysing how trust and mistrust are constituted within a relational field involving the state and a broader landscape of cooperative movements, this article shows that socio-economic formations are continually formed through embodied, affectively charged practices instead of being solely ‘based’ on trust or mistrust.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48888211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-12DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175982
Guilherme Fians
Since Malinowski, taking the natives seriously has been a core issue for ethnographers, as this principle encloses two terms nurturing much theoretical debate in sociocultural anthropology: ‘native’ and ‘point of view’. Yet, this entails a parallel issue: aside from taking one’s natives seriously, have anthropologists been taking other anthropologists’ natives equally seriously? The discipline came to take for granted the legitimacy of Others constituted by discourses of race, sex, class, ethnicity and colonialism. However, anthropology seems to continuously marginalize groups – from children and speakers of ‘invented’ languages to UFO witnesses – whose practices are routinely mocked or dismissed as foolish. This article analyzes certain anthropologists and their ethnographies of unsanctioned interlocutors who were cast aside by scholarship. I argue that ‘taking seriously’ must be not only an experiment that builds rapport between individual anthropologists and natives, but also one that makes room for the natives’ viewpoints to flow within the discipline.
{"title":"The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough","authors":"Guilherme Fians","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175982","url":null,"abstract":"Since Malinowski, taking the natives seriously has been a core issue for ethnographers, as this principle encloses two terms nurturing much theoretical debate in sociocultural anthropology: ‘native’ and ‘point of view’. Yet, this entails a parallel issue: aside from taking one’s natives seriously, have anthropologists been taking other anthropologists’ natives equally seriously? The discipline came to take for granted the legitimacy of Others constituted by discourses of race, sex, class, ethnicity and colonialism. However, anthropology seems to continuously marginalize groups – from children and speakers of ‘invented’ languages to UFO witnesses – whose practices are routinely mocked or dismissed as foolish. This article analyzes certain anthropologists and their ethnographies of unsanctioned interlocutors who were cast aside by scholarship. I argue that ‘taking seriously’ must be not only an experiment that builds rapport between individual anthropologists and natives, but also one that makes room for the natives’ viewpoints to flow within the discipline.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42628450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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