Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute最新文献

This paper explores the role of Lutheran ritual in value formations in Norwegian folk high school education. Folk high schools, subsidized by the state, offer gap year programs that are meant to instil values in young adult students before they attend higher education or enter the workforce. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Christian folk high school in south-eastern Norway, I assess how the school's Lutheran masses were designed to develop values relating to community, experience, and equality by inviting all students and staff, irrespective of their personal relationships with the Christian faith, to participate. I argue that despite prevailing stereotypes of Norway being predominantly secular, the ‘hidden sacrality’ of Norwegian political and social life was made visible through these masses at the state-sponsored Christian folk high school. I take the body as an analytic, arguing that the school's rituals, designed to encourage students to ‘embody God’, were situated in students’ bodies in such a way that sameness and difference, secularity and sacrality, and faith and doubt could co-exist.

This article demonstrates the important role family narratives can play in providing ethical, person-centred support for people with severe intellectual disabilities living in supported accommodation. Focusing on the story of Daniel, a 65-year-old man residing in a group home in Australia, I illustrate, through the lens of his mother Arleen, how family narratives foreground those with intellectual disabilities as holders and makers of memories, offering valuable social and narrative contexts for their ethical treatment. I conceptualize family narratives as evolving frameworks that give meaning to the lives of people, both individually and as a group, grounding shared and individual ways of being and understanding through the passage of time. In a time where the disability sector increasingly emphasizes personal autonomy and choice for service users, I argue for an embodied understanding of ethics, of paying the other their due, by attending to the stories that constitute people as relational beings. This is particularly relevant in the context of consumer-oriented support, which can drive individualizing, one-size-fits-all approaches to a person's ethical treatment. Such narratives have the potential to influence professional practice and promote a more connected approach to person-centred support that recognizes the embodied and relational dimensions of our lives.

The article focuses on the predicaments faced by return migrants to Cuba and how they respond to societal pressures to make a valuable difference ‘back home’, opening analytical avenues at the juncture of the anthropology of ethics and morality and migration. It does so by uncovering five distinct but complementary ways in which returnees respond to migration-related demands. Conceptualized as efforts to ‘make a difference’, it first considers the importance for returnees to exemplify and share the economic gains that are widely expected from a successful migration, before addressing alternative attempts to carve out other sources of prized difference from experiences abroad. To deflect the pressure that weighs on them as (ex)migrants and generates feelings of exhaustion and estrangement, returnees also endeavour to ‘unmake’ migration-related differences. They do so by deconstructing migration promises, reframing notions and forms of belonging, and downplaying the possibilities afforded by life in Cuba. While the combination of different anthropological approaches to ethics and morality befits the analysis, the returnees’ resistance to scrutiny of their moral lives questions the limitless reach and suitability of such interpretative lenses. Ultimately, this helps assess their relevance and pitfalls in research on migration and beyond.

The crisis of disappearances in Mexico started in 2006, when then-president Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs framed by a military perspective. Since then, more than 111,000 disappearances have been reported nationwide. Faced with this panorama of violence and uncertainty, a bureaucratic body has emerged which attempts to manage the search by, and mourning of, families who are still waiting for the return of their loved ones. This article addresses the way in which the official investigation carried out by the authorities plays a central role in the search process. Through the voices of thirteen mothers whose daughters and sons have disappeared, the investigation files adopt the category of a person-object, which represents a type of presence of the victim. Thus, one of the central arguments is based on a reflection of how missing persons, through objects, continue to participate both in the daily lives of their relatives and in claims for justice against the Mexican state apparatus.