Ethos最新文献

This article examines Perú’s transition from mental healthcare in psychiatric hospitals to a Community Mental Health (CMH) model. Based on 18 months of fieldwork on the outskirts of Lima, I show that one of CMH's effects has been an unexpected increase in rumors and accusations between neighbors. While mental health reforms have been characterized as a withdrawal from the state, I argue that CMH involves a series of interventions under the ethos of community care that create a new type of sociality and that bring together multiple actors who are now responsible and accountable for the care of deinstitutionalized individuals and their community. I propose the analytics of suspicion as care to evidence and analyze how residents are recruited and incorporated into CMH, and how suspicion, rumor, and accusation are conceived of as acts of care.

Political subjectivity is of growing interest within anthropology. In this article, I argue that within any political ethos, the constitution of political subjectivity takes place at the nexus of orientation and atmosphere. In this formulation, orientation defines subjectivity's intentional directionality in terms of value and desire, while atmosphere defines the socioemotional space in which that orientation takes place in terms of power and position. Drawing on research that utilizes an ethnographic, feminist, phenomenological, and psychodynamic approach, the article argues that the concepts of orientation and atmosphere can be leveraged to get a better purchase on understanding political subjectivity. Empirically, I show this across an array of situations, including political violence, incivility, gendered inequity, psychotic affliction, natural disaster, and the development of political awareness. Conceptually, I show that examining processes of self and will, empathy and power, denial and repression at the nexus of orientation and atmosphere can advance the theorization of political subjectivity within psychological anthropology and allied fields.

For the professionals who work or volunteer with detained migrants, providing care or advocacy requires navigating morally conflicting responsibilities and exposure to an environment of harm. Working in immigration detention spaces has a cost, both for the professional's mental health and for the detainees who rely on professionals’ capacity to intervene in a system of harm and neglect. Bringing together moral injury and tactics, this article examines how professionals navigate and counter the morally injurious contexts of their work. Ethnographic interviews with detention employees, case workers, forensic psychologists, and medical evaluators revealed a range of strategies and outcomes of moral injury. While professionals used tactics like moral numbing or avoidance to protect themselves and continue providing care, the withholding or lessening of care has consequences for the detainees relying on their intervention. Yet not utilizing strategies has its own cost, as professionals experience burnout, trauma, and hauntings. Just as migrants are literally “caught” as they chase the American Dream, professionals feel morally entangled in circumstances of harm. In attempting to intervene or lessen harm, care becomes a justification for and a source of moral violence in professionals' lives. Through this analysis, I argue that a framing of tactics incorporated into moral injury better captures the diversity in how professionals navigate and respond to their moral injuries in ways that can disrupt or support the continued systemic violence in immigration detention contexts. Examining the moral dimensions to professionals’ experiences and distress allows for more informed, targeted interventions to disrupt this harm and empower professionals’ efforts to provide care and advocacy within detention spaces.

This article explores recurring problems in post-conflict studies of trauma through the lens of evolving discourses of psychic woundedness in post-genocide Rwanda. Research suggests that global psychiatric discourses did not enter the Rwandan public sphere until after the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, at which point local iterations of trauma focused on (Tutsi) survivors of the genocide. However, in recent years Rwandans have begun to use an expanded notion of trauma to analyze individual and collective responses to not only the genocide but also other forms of historical and material violence. At the forefront of this trend are Rwandan “societal healers” who study trauma at a country-wide level. I argue that in order to overcome entrenched social divisions, societal healers deploy a “sociogenic” approach to trauma, or one that focuses on how structures of oppression produce psychic “wounds” across levels of society. Broadening their understanding of both trauma and identity, societal healers are invested in exploring how cycles of violence—physical and metaphorical—have shaped the lives of all Rwandans over time and how those cycles may end.

Person-centered interviewing and observation—an ethnographic approach that attempts to describe and represent human behavior and subjectivity from the point of view of the acting, desiring, intending, sensing, reflecting, and attentive subject—inevitably engages the emotions and memories of ethnographers and subjects alike as they interact and affect one another in both intended and unintended ways. In this article, I provide two brief examples of such mutual influence from my early Indonesian fieldwork, and I discuss how such dynamics are implicated in anthropological theory and ethics. I argue that person-centered interviewing and observation is a humbling practice that underscores experiential diversity and the limits of what we can know about others and ourselves.

A wealth of societal concerns about loneliness has surfaced in recent years, raising questions about the negative impacts of increasing social lacks. Exploring a widespread saying among Danish vigil volunteers that “No one should die alone,” we ask: What is at stake in this concern with lonely deaths? And how is relationality practiced at life's end? Inspired by Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology, we explore the concerns and actions of the vigil volunteers as a dynamic of haunting call and hesitant response. The call is voiced in heart-wrenching images and in more clearly formulated critiques of loneliness in aging and dying processes within a transforming Danish welfare state. The response, “just holding hands,” comprises a “poeisis of cessation” through minute embodied and sensed acts of being with. The volunteers do not expect their response to remedy the call; they more humbly seek to patch up perceived relational lacks in contemporary Danish society.

What percentage of American citizens believe that the real America is a White Christian America? How many would prefer to live in a more homogeneous or singular country, one occupied primarily by members of their own ethnic, racial, or religious group? In the face of contemporary changes in the composition of the population, to what extent have the White Christian citizens of the United States become fearful of demographic replacement? Alternatively posed: To what extent is ethnic, racial, and religious diversity valued by American citizens? Is it or is it not a basic feature of their ideal of what America means? Those are the questions addressed in this study. A representative sample of American citizens (n = 986) was asked to estimate the actual and the desired distribution of ethnicities, races, and religions in the United States on the national level. We find that two-thirds of our respondents want a more ethnically/racially diverse United States than the current demographics and over half of respondents want a population that is more religiously diverse than the status quo in 2020. Only a tiny percent idealizes a country that is ethnically or religiously homogeneous. The survey results suggest that the ideal of a multicultural country composed of diverse ethnic, racial, and religious groups is widely accepted. The results also suggest that the supposed fear of a national “Great Replacement” of White Christian Americans by non-White or non-Christian minority groups may have been greatly exaggerated.

Empowerment can be considered a traveling concept, present in several spheres from community psychology to international development, with different definitions, theories, and applications. It became salient in interventions targeting marginalized and vulnerabilized communities. Through an ethnographic study of a trauma-therapy center for exiles in Sweden, this paper explores how psychotherapy, in addition to focusing on trauma, took on a new role of “women empowerment.” It analyzes the forms of power and empowerment in the trajectories of women exiles and the therapeutic space and encounter. With a lens that is attentive to life-desire, a concept developed by Eva Tuck, contrasting with the damage-lens that marginalized and exiled populations are usually portrayed through, this paper attempts to unfold how the therapeutic space became a space where new subjectivities of “empowered women exiles” emerged, and how they were sustained despite the structural barriers and challenges to fulfilling the lives they tend to live. Through the psychotherapeutic process, the women and their therapists construct selves aware of their strength and desire, and oriented away from “traditional interdependence” and toward “modern autonomy,” raising questions of how much control over their lives they are allowed to have but also illustrating the opportunities and limitations of therapeutic tools and practices.

This paper examines the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting remote research on child-animal relationships across thirty communities in 17 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. It critically assesses remote research as a mode of collaboration informed by decolonial aspirations, highlighting the complexities of navigating temporal and geographical distances, mitigating global inequalities, and addressing political and methodological tensions at the intersection of psychological anthropology and cross-cultural developmental psychology. By engaging with these challenges, the paper fosters critical dialogue on research ethics and methodologies between anthropology and psychology, advancing a broader intellectual engagement toward translocal equity.