Ethos最新文献

This article analyzes trauma as an interplay of mass violence connecting imperial occupation in British Hong Kong, and an Anglo-Chinese family in England. It takes Devereux's concept of countertransference to interrogate how killings in the author's family reverberate as traumatic transferences in fieldwork engaging the transgenerational violence of Partition in postcolonial Pakistan. Routing through transferences, it advances a comparative analysis of colonial trauma; moving from the individual to universal through layerings of traumatic silence, existential struggles, and the unconscious. It asks: what kinds of reflexivity are entailed by the double-nature of the traumatized subject writing about trauma? Can colonial trauma retain specificity, while speaking to the discordant temporal settlement and relational formation of broader interconnected histories, geographical partitions, and generational loss? Psychological anthropology offers a mode for filling in blanks; privileging the subjectivity of inheritors of colonial trauma for ethnographic theorizations into ways anthropologists might reckon with the psychic violence of colonial pasts.

Based on an ethnographic study among Chinese Indonesians who practice Tibetan Buddhism, we analyze doctrinal beliefs and meanings associated with the appearance of spiritual teacher in dreams. The most common meanings conveyed in their narratives were the beliefs that Guru-related dreams signify successful spiritual practice, a prophetic insight into future events, and an encouragement for further endeavor in spiritual practice. For a significant number of them, these meanings centered around the precarious feeling of being perceived as the source of the nation's problem. Analyzing the dynamic of these positive/optimistic meanings and negative/pessimistic feelings with regard to Guru-related dreams, we conclude that both represent the ongoing negotiation between spirituality and ethnic belonging and are connected to the soteriological project of forging a new ethical self.

To explain cultural diversity, many theories refer to the social construction of reality. In this telling, we frame the world to make it meaningful. In my analysis of what people in Namibia and Germany know about “SARS-Cov-2” and “climate change,” I propose an anti-constructivist alternative. Drawing on the work of the phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, I argue that experience comes first and exceeds language and the conceptual and symbolic orders we use to describe it. Waldenfels refers to this excess as “the alien” (das Fremde). This alienness calls us and demands a response. Only by responding, do we make the world meaningful. Since the alien is the excess to a particular order it becomes important to explore how orders are applied in situations. To explain this, I draw on recent developments in “4E” cognition that describe the mind-world relation as fourfold intertwined: embedded, embodied, extended, and enacted. Combining Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology and “4E” cognition thus allows it to be shown how knowledge emerges as an enactive response to the demands situations create. I conclude by showing how this opens up new possibilities for addressing the plurality and situatedness of knowledge in anthropology.

This qualitative study presents an analysis of data taken from 16 participants who were interviewed during and 1 year after they attended a course in Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT), a meditation course that seeks to help participants cultivate empathy and compassion. The study sought to examine what benefits, if any, participants in a CBCT course reported with regard to their understanding and practice of empathy and compassion; and secondly, if their statements in the interviews exhibited understandings and practices consonant with emotional, social, and cognitive resilience as identified in the existing literature, and consonant with empathy and compassion as defined in CBCT and in existing literature on compassion. The study found that participant interviews provided significant evidence of the development of skills identified in the literature as components of emotional, cognitive, and social resilience, and that participant descriptions and definitions of compassion closely matched those existing in the literature.

Psychology has tended to conceptualize loneliness as a lack of intimate and social relationships. This analysis draws on the journal entries of 100 participants in the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP; a research study and online journaling platform that invited participants to chronicle their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic) to illustrate a more foundational sense of loneliness as a lack of bodily attunement, interaction, and intersection with others in a world of places. This bodies-in-places perspective reveals important material dimensions of loneliness that have often been overlooked. Loneliness is understood not as a static characteristic of the individual, but rather as an embodied and emplaced relational and ecological phenomenon.

This book review essay tries to bring together two extremely pivotal books to understand how we can reimagine dominant modes of communication and how debunking the normative ideas surrounding it helps us to cognize personhood and intersubjectivity better. Michele Friedner's ‘Sensory Futures’ and Wolf-Meyer's ‘Unraveling’ are both critical attempts that try to understand how the sensory and neurological experiences of our body are essentially social, thereby reimagining how we understand personhood and subjectivity. Through a comprehensive analysis of both these texts individually, and in tandem with one another, this book review aims to highlight how we can find pathways to reimagine the body-mind as inherently social and how we can try to build a more inclusive and inhabitable world that is multisensorial and multimodal.

This article explores how university students with mental health struggles engage in “illness-identity” work, the process by which an individual resituates their self in relation to their illness, using a phenomenological approach. Grounded in 24 semi-structured interviews with Canadian university students between the ages of 18 and 24 years who self-identify as experiencing mental health struggles, I argue that students do not perform illness-identity work by making the “I Am” or “I Have” illness identity statements commonly cited in the anthropological literature. Instead, these students focus on the phenomenological content of their struggles making what I call “I Experience” statements. In doing so these students normalize their struggles by understanding them as fluid and ephemeral experiences which exist as a continuum, refuting a construction of mental health struggles as discrete entities objectively present or not in the individual body.

This article examines the discursive construction of moral conflict in a military veteran's (post)war story. By closely examining the linguistic details of a single veteran's narrative of war, this article addresses how moral conflict is revealed in shifts among varying modes of morality: from the conventional moral dispositions of the military, in which soldiers are socialized into acting, often violently and without reflection, to conscious ethical reasoning, which soldiers have historically been socialized not to engage in. The analysis of this veteran's narrative, informed by ethnographic research on veterans’ experiences of combat and return after deployment, outlines how structural and linguistic components of the narrative engage shifting modes of moral experience. As such, the article provides a critical discussion of moral injury, as well as a potential model for the study of language and morality.