Pub Date : 2021-12-21DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.1965641
Natalia Buitron
ABSTRACT Faced with the opacity of other minds, we can either confirm the impossibility of knowing or try to make other minds transparent. Among the Amazonian Shuar, two opposed regimes of intention management embody these two options. One is associated with the predatory agency of arútam, the spirit of prominent elders; the other one with the pacifying agency of the Christian God. Secret vision quests and dialogic duels generate an instability of perspectives and a rule of self, premised on the opacity of persons. By contrast, projects of state legibility, the omniscient Christian God, and the public character of biblical revelations create the conditions for the rule of law, that is, a regime of intentions in which persons are transparent and people are held accountable in public. The novelty of this mode of governing opacity bears emphasis on and contrasts with the arguments stressing continuity in Amazonian engagements with alterity.
{"title":"Rule of Self and Rule of Law: Governing Opacity Among the Shuar of Amazonia","authors":"Natalia Buitron","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.1965641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.1965641","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Faced with the opacity of other minds, we can either confirm the impossibility of knowing or try to make other minds transparent. Among the Amazonian Shuar, two opposed regimes of intention management embody these two options. One is associated with the predatory agency of arútam, the spirit of prominent elders; the other one with the pacifying agency of the Christian God. Secret vision quests and dialogic duels generate an instability of perspectives and a rule of self, premised on the opacity of persons. By contrast, projects of state legibility, the omniscient Christian God, and the public character of biblical revelations create the conditions for the rule of law, that is, a regime of intentions in which persons are transparent and people are held accountable in public. The novelty of this mode of governing opacity bears emphasis on and contrasts with the arguments stressing continuity in Amazonian engagements with alterity.","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":"88 1","pages":"749 - 773"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48814035","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 : 2021-12-21DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.2007156
M. Laws
ABSTRACT Among Jú|’hoànsi in the northern Kalahari, there are differences in the way people address their suspicions about what others might be thinking or feeling – in other words, in the way people confront the opacity of other minds. Among friends, playful forms of mockery allow people to express their suspicions or ill-feelings directly, without the fear of causing harm. Among relatives, by contrast, suspicions and ill-feelings are typically concealed. While people may talk about other minds when those minds are not around, they refrain from direct confrontation. To confront one’s relatives is to make them feel ‘pain in their hearts’, and to do so is to risk losing them to sickness or damaging enduring arrangements of care. Ancestors and shamans, who can see and hear more than others, play a crucial role here in governing opacity: exposing suspicions and ill-feelings when people feel they cannot speak of them.
{"title":"Demanding from Others: How Ancestors and Shamans Govern Opacity in the Kalahari","authors":"M. Laws","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.2007156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2007156","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Among Jú|’hoànsi in the northern Kalahari, there are differences in the way people address their suspicions about what others might be thinking or feeling – in other words, in the way people confront the opacity of other minds. Among friends, playful forms of mockery allow people to express their suspicions or ill-feelings directly, without the fear of causing harm. Among relatives, by contrast, suspicions and ill-feelings are typically concealed. While people may talk about other minds when those minds are not around, they refrain from direct confrontation. To confront one’s relatives is to make them feel ‘pain in their hearts’, and to do so is to risk losing them to sickness or damaging enduring arrangements of care. Ancestors and shamans, who can see and hear more than others, play a crucial role here in governing opacity: exposing suspicions and ill-feelings when people feel they cannot speak of them.","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":"88 1","pages":"702 - 723"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46559426","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 : 2021-12-21DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.2007154
Natalia Buitron, Hans Steinmüller
ABSTRACT The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone else. Yet humans continually attempt to ‘read’ the mental states of others and throughout history have created institutions that attempt to do so by managing intentions and thus addressing the opacity of other minds. The contributors of this special issue argue that the form in which we meet the fundamental challenge of the opacity of mind is decisive for the kinds of government we are able to imagine. Our introduction provides the framework for the exploration of the correlations between the management of opacity and the forms of government humans create. We draw attention to different ways of creating legibility, and corresponding practices of accountability, thus linking particular forms of intention management with particular ways of doing and imagining politics.
{"title":"Governing Opacity: Regimes of Intention Management and Tools of Legibility","authors":"Natalia Buitron, Hans Steinmüller","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.2007154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2007154","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone else. Yet humans continually attempt to ‘read’ the mental states of others and throughout history have created institutions that attempt to do so by managing intentions and thus addressing the opacity of other minds. The contributors of this special issue argue that the form in which we meet the fundamental challenge of the opacity of mind is decisive for the kinds of government we are able to imagine. Our introduction provides the framework for the exploration of the correlations between the management of opacity and the forms of government humans create. We draw attention to different ways of creating legibility, and corresponding practices of accountability, thus linking particular forms of intention management with particular ways of doing and imagining politics.","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":"88 1","pages":"677 - 701"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45483892","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 : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.1981971
T. Widlok
ABSTRACT Governance by domination is easy to ‘read’ for political theory, but what about modes of governance that operate without centralised institutions? Such modes of governance are exemplified in the social relations of San in southern Africa. They rely on deictic practices (most fundamentally, pointing and being pointed at) that remain largely under the analytic radar of political theory. This contribution shows how such practices structure social interactions yet can also undermine domination. While state legibility is built on symbolic action, opacity in non-centralised environments is sustained through deictic action: The contribution shows that San strategies are not geared towards eliminating opacity or towards embracing it but rather towards dealing with it in a way that keeps egalitarian relations and personal autonomy in place. The observed practices are characterised by high degrees of mutuality and transience and are part of the larger repertoire of political levelling mechanisms that sustain egalitarianism.
{"title":"Original Power Pointing: Legibility and Opacity in the Deictic Field","authors":"T. Widlok","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.1981971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.1981971","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Governance by domination is easy to ‘read’ for political theory, but what about modes of governance that operate without centralised institutions? Such modes of governance are exemplified in the social relations of San in southern Africa. They rely on deictic practices (most fundamentally, pointing and being pointed at) that remain largely under the analytic radar of political theory. This contribution shows how such practices structure social interactions yet can also undermine domination. While state legibility is built on symbolic action, opacity in non-centralised environments is sustained through deictic action: The contribution shows that San strategies are not geared towards eliminating opacity or towards embracing it but rather towards dealing with it in a way that keeps egalitarian relations and personal autonomy in place. The observed practices are characterised by high degrees of mutuality and transience and are part of the larger repertoire of political levelling mechanisms that sustain egalitarianism.","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":"88 1","pages":"819 - 836"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41354707","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 : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.2013281
Joe Anderson
ABSTRACT Ethical ways of being form in response to bodily perceptions of vulnerability. Arguments that position firearms as defensive tools have become increasingly common in debates about gun legislation over the last two decades. This rhetoric has its origin in counter-hegemonic movements like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence, which argued that African-Americans need guns to resist state-sanctioned violence from the police. For white men and women, as well as transgender gun rights activists in San Diego, California, vulnerability forms a key part of the argument for expanding access to guns as defensive weapons. This ‘vulnerability politics’ (Carlson [2014a]. From Gun Politics to Self-Defence Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate. Violence Against Women, 20(3):369–377) represents both a lived experience and ideological lens that informs ethical behaviour. Firearms owners fashion an ethical self through a combination of the prescribed, normative politics of gun rights rhetoric and creatively innovate with these scripts through their embodied experiences of threat.
{"title":"The Extraordinary Ethics of Self-Defence: Embodied Vulnerability and Gun Rights among Transgender Shooters in the United States","authors":"Joe Anderson","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.2013281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2013281","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ethical ways of being form in response to bodily perceptions of vulnerability. Arguments that position firearms as defensive tools have become increasingly common in debates about gun legislation over the last two decades. This rhetoric has its origin in counter-hegemonic movements like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence, which argued that African-Americans need guns to resist state-sanctioned violence from the police. For white men and women, as well as transgender gun rights activists in San Diego, California, vulnerability forms a key part of the argument for expanding access to guns as defensive weapons. This ‘vulnerability politics’ (Carlson [2014a]. From Gun Politics to Self-Defence Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate. Violence Against Women, 20(3):369–377) represents both a lived experience and ideological lens that informs ethical behaviour. Firearms owners fashion an ethical self through a combination of the prescribed, normative politics of gun rights rhetoric and creatively innovate with these scripts through their embodied experiences of threat.","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44017173","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 : 2021-12-12DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.2013282
Letizia Bonanno
ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a social clinic of solidarity on the outskirts of Athens, the article explores how modes and values of care are constantly reconfigured at the intersection of an ever-expanding grassroots voluntary medical sector, the state and the household in a moment of severe economic distress. It traces the changing relations of care across these three realms where diverse modes of care have traditionally unfolded. In suggesting that pharmaceuticals have become increasingly crucial to social, economic and political relations amongst citizens who can no longer afford health care, I show how in the Athenian context, the circulation, sharing and exchanging of pharmaceuticals reinforce collective social bonds and argue that domestic modes of care (frontida) have increasingly been informed by biomedical modes of care (iatriki perithalpsi) stemming from the intermittent availability and unavailability of pharmaceutical drugs.
{"title":"The Work of Pharmaceuticals in Austerity-Burdened Athens. Modes and Practices of Care in Times of Crisis","authors":"Letizia Bonanno","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.2013282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2013282","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a social clinic of solidarity on the outskirts of Athens, the article explores how modes and values of care are constantly reconfigured at the intersection of an ever-expanding grassroots voluntary medical sector, the state and the household in a moment of severe economic distress. It traces the changing relations of care across these three realms where diverse modes of care have traditionally unfolded. In suggesting that pharmaceuticals have become increasingly crucial to social, economic and political relations amongst citizens who can no longer afford health care, I show how in the Athenian context, the circulation, sharing and exchanging of pharmaceuticals reinforce collective social bonds and argue that domestic modes of care (frontida) have increasingly been informed by biomedical modes of care (iatriki perithalpsi) stemming from the intermittent availability and unavailability of pharmaceutical drugs.","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48136098","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 : 2021-12-07DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.2007157
Chuck Sturtevant
{"title":"The Hill at the End of the World: Cosmopolitics and State Effects in the Bolivian Amazon","authors":"Chuck Sturtevant","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.2007157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2007157","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46594528","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 : 2021-12-02DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.2009535
Daniela Castellanos, Cristian Erazo
ABSTRACT In the city of Mocoa in the Colombian Amazon, indigenous leaders capture desired resources for their communities using skilful navigation and engagement in the diverse institutional landscape of this bureaucratic centre of the Putumayo region. Interactions between these leaders and multiple political actors are locally known as gestión. In this article, we explore this ethnographic category by analysing the ways in which gestión interweaves kinship, politics and temporality. Describing gestión in the lives of two cousins, two Inga women who are both experienced leaders, we argue that it entails generating and fostering friendships and alliances by means of kinship networks and practices, which are central to capturing resources and maintaining relationships among ethnic leaders and communities, where mistrust is part of political dynamics and family life. We also show how leaders incorporate the temporalities of gestión into their lives through kinship notions to become powerful political agents in Mocoa.
{"title":"Gestión: Ambivalence and Temporalities of Kinship and Politics in the Colombian Amazon","authors":"Daniela Castellanos, Cristian Erazo","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.2009535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2009535","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the city of Mocoa in the Colombian Amazon, indigenous leaders capture desired resources for their communities using skilful navigation and engagement in the diverse institutional landscape of this bureaucratic centre of the Putumayo region. Interactions between these leaders and multiple political actors are locally known as gestión. In this article, we explore this ethnographic category by analysing the ways in which gestión interweaves kinship, politics and temporality. Describing gestión in the lives of two cousins, two Inga women who are both experienced leaders, we argue that it entails generating and fostering friendships and alliances by means of kinship networks and practices, which are central to capturing resources and maintaining relationships among ethnic leaders and communities, where mistrust is part of political dynamics and family life. We also show how leaders incorporate the temporalities of gestión into their lives through kinship notions to become powerful political agents in Mocoa.","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48726113","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 : 2021-11-24DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.2007158
C. Christiansen
ABSTRACT Studies have proposed that participatory arts, particularly literature reading, enhance empathy, supposedly leading to enhanced moral judgment. Building on fieldwork in a Literary Empowerment Programme for people with mental vulnerabilities in Denmark, I seek to qualify the role of empathy, the ability to imaginatively put yourself in other people’s shoes, when reading literature in a social setting. I describe encounters with empathy and the limits thereof, as it happened in the reading groups investigated. Taking inspiration from Jarrett Zigon, these encounters are situated within the moral and ethical assemblage of the programme, whose objective was to create ‘literary free spaces’. I connect this objective to Scandinavian and Scottish Enlightenment values of freedom, equality and civil society. These insights are finally used to discuss future pathways for the anthropology of literature and reading, moving beyond a focus on understanding and meaning-making processes.
{"title":"Does Fiction Reading Make us Better People? Empathy and Morality in a Literary Empowerment Programme","authors":"C. Christiansen","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2021.2007158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2007158","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Studies have proposed that participatory arts, particularly literature reading, enhance empathy, supposedly leading to enhanced moral judgment. Building on fieldwork in a Literary Empowerment Programme for people with mental vulnerabilities in Denmark, I seek to qualify the role of empathy, the ability to imaginatively put yourself in other people’s shoes, when reading literature in a social setting. I describe encounters with empathy and the limits thereof, as it happened in the reading groups investigated. Taking inspiration from Jarrett Zigon, these encounters are situated within the moral and ethical assemblage of the programme, whose objective was to create ‘literary free spaces’. I connect this objective to Scandinavian and Scottish Enlightenment values of freedom, equality and civil society. These insights are finally used to discuss future pathways for the anthropology of literature and reading, moving beyond a focus on understanding and meaning-making processes.","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48844389","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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