Ethos最新文献

This paper examines how BaYaka children from the Congo Basin learn to “walk in the forest” (botamboli na ndima). Specifically, after placing forest walking within historical and ethnographic context, we consider how this practice contributes to BaYaka motor, cognitive, and social development, and thus, to the acquisition of culture. To do so, we draw from our own observations and those of other researchers working throughout the region. We outline four ways in which “walking in the forest” is directly and indirectly socialized: through motion-full caregiving in infancy, play and cooperative foraging in early and middle childhood, and exploration in adolescence. Taking “walking in the forest” as a focal point, we argue that the specific ways in which caregivers enhance learning are grounded in BaYaka subsistence and forest management practices, and that learning to walk in the forest is central to the maintenance of BaYaka social networks and the flow of knowledge in the Congo Basin.

This paper examines the moral struggle of family care by focusing on parents’ efforts to raise “healthy” children in irradiated environments of Fukushima following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Drawing on fieldwork between 2017 and 2020, it explores the lived experiences of primary caretakers, mostly mothers, as they strive to cultivate “health” in their children while negotiating conflicting logics of radiological exposure, risk assessment, and gendered childcare. Central to this endeavor is what I call an ethical labor of “balancing:” the daily negotiation between protecting children and allowing them to live fully in risk-laden environments. Emphasizing intercorporeal and interpersonal aspects of embodied care, the paper examines the nuanced ways in which three mothers recalibrate notions of health, personhood, and responsibility to safeguard their children's everyday lives. Such notions of “health” carry significant implications for family dynamics amid the uncertainties of postdisaster life. By highlighting the critical role of family care in potentially stigmatizing environments, the paper advocates for developing frameworks that address the real-life complexities of making life in an increasingly compromised world.

What if we took trauma to be a fundamental aspect of human existence? Prominent in some strands of popular psychology, this is also the stance taken by an eastern Indonesian order of Catholic nuns who “dig up” their hearts as part of a continual process of self-formation. Set against a backdrop of Christian theologies of discernment, state concerns for human development, and local resonances of ritual sacrifice, nuns learn to interpret their childhoods as harmed by emotional trauma sustained in the company of kin. Once excavated, this trauma must be addressed in the convent through conscious efforts of mutual care, making trauma a moral category that creates new forms of subjectivity. Through acts of acknowledgment and support, the idiom of trauma makes the company surrounding a nun directly responsible for her self-formation. This article is about the ways Indonesian Catholic nuns conceptualize trauma as something that all humans sustain, how it grounds self-becoming, and how its causes—and cures—are rooted in the company of other people. I suggest that their experiences highlight the sociality of trauma more broadly and argue that trauma is one articulation of how people become themselves in the company of others.

This comment posits questions and opens debates around the recent article by Scheidecker et al. based in the author's experience in anthropological research and applied work in child development in the Global South. The article advocates for a critical review of how anthropologists in the Global South carry out and disseminate their research, in order to broaden audiences beyond the academy. Finally, it is argued that for anthropological evidence to hold a place at the table on Global Early Childhood Development (ECD), anthropologists must engage in practices, methodologies, and forms of collaboration that make our findings and perspectives hearable. For this to happen, anthropologists should take an active part in institutions and fields of work they tend to avoid. Only in this way can we positively impact children and families by incorporating the inherent diversity of ECD beyond the parameters and values of normalcy that predominate in the so-called minority world.

How do people experience vulnerability, and what can this experience tell us about how states help those living in precarious conditions? According to the Chilean state, people who live in vulnerable encampments do so strictly out of necessity, not choice, and vulnerability is best addressed by demolishing encampments, resettling their communities, and giving the poor opportunities to recover their economic and moral autonomy. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in predominantly migrant informal settlements in Chile's northern border city of Antofagasta, this article shows how the state's project to demolish vulnerable encampments is in tension with migrant women community leaders’ own personal and collective projects of autonomy. Examining one migrant woman community leader's use of the moral concept of “hardness” to express her ethics of autonomy, I attend to ordinary instances where women helping the state resettle their communities instead subtly undermined the state's resettlement plan. This case advances feminist theories of politics and vulnerability that examine how the domain of the political is reconfigured through women's “domestic” work in the everyday. Psychological anthropology, with its recent turn to critical phenomenology, has much to add to this phenomenology of the critical, of politics.

In this comment, we examine the implications of decolonization on decision making in childcare (Kgatla, 2018). Self-empowerment as a cornerstone of change, long part of community empowerment, has finally achieved recognition within the literature on global health and nurturing care (Charani et al., 2022; Sharm & Sam-Agudu, 2023). Varied perspectives discuss the global benefits of shifting responsibility in decision making, for humanizing of the lives of the global majority and creating more sustainable change (Affun-Adegbulu & Adegbulu., 2020; de Laat et al., 2023; Martin, 2016). There still remains much more to be said, to be clarified and understood, before the imbalances and disconnect in responsibility and accountability still inherent in the current framing of child health and welfare systems are removed.

The authors of this comment, both psychologists working in the Global South, have engaged in dialogue for more than a decade, examining our individual and shared experiences of intervention, research and therapy, reflecting on our professional challenges and achievements in the field of global Early Childhood Development (ECD). These discussions have examined the complexity in the process of the decolonization of early childhood frameworks.

Within ECD those closest to the child, the parents and guardians, are held, for the most part, accountable for the failure to adequately address children's needs. However, the responsibility, the position of power, for selecting best practices is taken up by those who control the resources, the expert external to family, community and often too, external to the culture. As we observe this relationship play out, we have increasingly understood that sustainable change can only be built on a rebalancing of responsibilities, and in generating a direct connection between responsibility and accountability (Rasheed, 2021). Supporting this tangible shift in decision-making will create a more direct relationship between informed care, the context and its socio-cultural, environmental, and economic demands and the changing needs of the child (Krapels et al., 2020; Muhamedjonova et al., 2021).

The evidence in the field is predominantly informed by randomized trials conducted under controlled settings with limited generalizability (owing to the bias of being published in medical journals, as noted by Scheidecker et al., 2023). This is where we believe anthropology has a lot to offer and an excellent multi-disciplinary opportunity for incorporating their methods to understand the complexities of human nature so we avoid making simplistic assumptions of the lives of millions of children in the Global South. In this comment, we continue our process of reflective practice through which our insights have developed, sharing where our dialogue has reached in response

Expert freediving explores the limits of human endurance, with some divers staying underwater for over 10 min or reaching crushing depths on a single breath. This article explores the enskilment process, especially how freediving training involves a suite of reflexive bodily practices with psychological, neurological, and physiological consequences. Examined closely and over time, skill acquisition is a multi-dimensional process involving self-driven adaptations in a cumulative, uneven manner. Because skills combine biological, cultural, and psychological mechanisms, practices are ideal for biocultural analysis in psychological anthropology. This account of the behavioral-development spiral in freediving enskilment suggests that transformative practices are inherently developmental, with neurological consequences. Theories of practice that ignore the temporal dimension or the variability of skill acquisition, that is, accounts that erase the slow and uncertain accumulation of expertise, fundamentally misrepresent how persistent practice blends biology and culture, and causes transformation, as well as the usefulness of ethnography for studying these processes.

Bala, Anjana. 2024. “Divine trauma: Schizophrenia and unresolved realities in South India.” Ethos 52: 3−19. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12412

In two locations in the article, the word “affect” was erroneously changed to “effect” during the production process.

The original published article has been corrected. We apologize for these errors.