Ethos最新文献

During fieldwork among older adults in middle-class families in the city of Bhaktapur (2018–2019), I recurrently came across comparative narratives of moral decline, depicting a stark contrast between the present time and a mythical past where ageing parents were treated “as gods.” In this paper, I analyze how, through acts of comparisons involving the weighing of opportunities between the past and the present and between difficulties facing parents and children, older people define their “moralities of expectation,” through which intimate politics of giving and taking are weighed against perceptions of hardship in the context of precarious middle-class livelihoods. I suggest that comparison functions as a social practice with epistemological and affective connotations and that by comparing with real and imagined others, older people validate themselves as virtuous by anchoring to fluid and ever-changing social systems. Ultimately, these findings shed light on how moral selfhoods are shaped through comparison with models of the past and the present, revealing how it is in this careful and purposeful evaluation of one's own behavior and that of others that social change is negotiated and the broader ethos revised.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected over 16 months of fieldwork with Indonesian hypnotherapists, this article investigates the suitability of different relationalities for providing therapeutic care. Clinical literature often advocates the merits of self-hypnosis over hetero-hypnosis, while anthropologists express skepticism regarding therapies that encourage individualized regimes of the self. Taking a less sweeping approach, this article develops the notion of “aQompaniment”—adapted from the liberation theology and activist concept of “accompaniment”—as a rubric under which to evaluate the provision of care and support. The rubric of aQompaniment encourages situated evaluations of whether hypnotherapeutic relations enable therapists and clients to successfully “walk together” toward their respective goals, encouraging nuanced judgments about what constitutes good care. Viewing psychotherapy as aQompaniment also affords new perspectives on the aQompaniment work that can be undertaken during ethnographic research.

For all the ways in which anthropologists have addressed relations during the history of the discipline, from kinship to the contemporary focus on comparison, it is surprising that anthropologists rarely write about the pragmatics of the messy dynamics of relating between interlocutors themselves and between interlocutors and ethnographers. This is despite some anthropologists having highlighted the work of these relations and our approach to them as crucial for the discipline. In this paper I argue that the inquiry practiced in one particular psychotherapeutic approach, namely systemic psychotherapy, is relevant to this micro practice of anthropology. I will present a transcription of a piece of systemic psychotherapeutic work. I will make three points, inspired by work in systemic psychotherapy as well as anthropology. My first point concerns plurality, my second point refers to second-order observation or the use of reflexivity, and my third to the temporal dimension of the inquiry as a process. I suggest that considering these three points will enhance methods of inquiry in both disciplines.

We advance an anthropological approach to human visual experience that opposes reductive conceptions founded on notions of historically and socio-culturally abstract and unsituated subjects. Instead, we propose that vision is part of an ongoing semiotic relation between seeing subjects and visual contexts that are not just psychological but also socio-historical and cultural. We engage with the other articles in this special section to argue that human vision works by seeing together. People calibrate their seeing with that of those around them, thereby shaping what's seen and the seeing subjects themselves. These processes are accomplished through overlapping (or “thick”) circuits of intromission and social “extromission” (i.e., actions appropriate to the things seen within specific socio-historical trajectories), so that mutuality of seeing is integral to “mutuality of being.” Understanding seeing processes requires historical and ethnographic investigations of the varieties of visual experience that extend far beyond biophysical mechanisms. The other papers in this section consider the apprenticeship of skilled visions, an account for a vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a Chicago underpass, the semiotics of perspective and the tactility of seeing in Tamil cinema, and the role of engineers’ theories of vision in their efforts to develop a prosthetic retina.

Knowledge is constructed and embedded in our bodies, which means that the material conditions of our own anatomy and environment intrinsically inform our understanding, as do the social practices in which we are immersed within our communities. Cognitive and affective processes are also thus inseparable since we know together with others, always insert in asymmetrical relationships that leave a trace on our cognitive-affective tie to the world. As Argentinean anthropologists, we contend with the ongoing effects of universalizing “Global North” psychologies in the contexts of global inequalities that impact children as well as southern researchers. Given this, the aim of this article is to present an anthropology of knowledge that puts these two effects of inequalities in dialogue while addressing the affective-cognitive debates from South America in conversation with contributions of authors from the “Global North.” Building upon fieldwork in our home country that explores the religious formative experiences of Toba/Qom children and the political experiences of children who live in squatter buildings, we use ethnography and the clinical method of psychology to examine the diverse ways in which children form and participate in communities, and in so doing, appropriate and transform their experiences into knowledge.

How are psychotherapeutic approaches adapted and transformed in diverse contexts? This study situates the question in the global yet stratified field of psy knowledge production. Exploring the work of a group of psychological counselors in Sri Lanka, I theorize how such transformation takes shape at the intersection of explicit knowledge and tacit, embodied understanding through the concept of textures. Drawn from ordinary ethics and a phenomenological understanding of habit, the concept points to the felt qualities of interactions and the shared cultural sensibilities and ethical orientations they reflect. Focusing on the counselors’ discourse of “showing the way,” I illustrate how therapeutic practice may be textured, in this case, by forms of moral discernment that evoke Buddhist ethics and by a framing of distress that foregrounds the scene of the problem rather than the client's emotional experience. I argue that attending to such textures of care makes it possible to deconstruct hierarchies of expertise and recognize forms of practice which appear to go against the grain of normative therapeutic frameworks as generative. This makes visible the diverse understandings of emotion, personhood, and well-being that localized forms of therapeutic practice engender within the contemporary, global psy imaginary.

When one partner in a couple moves into a nursing home, the sense of shared everyday life and home is disturbed. In this article, we examine how couples respond to radical ruptures in their shared everyday lives, homes, and imagined futures when one partner moves into a nursing home due to severe illness. We draw on the field of imagistic anthropology that attends to the uncertain, ambiguous, and imaginative dimensions of life to capture the often overlooked, albeit important, dimensions of peoples’ lives in situations of uncertainty, rupture, and loss. Inspired by the concept of spectral kinship, we delve into experiences of transgressing space and time, the material and the immaterial, the “real,” the dreamed of and imagined as they are anchored in a play of imagination, a book, and a dream. We call these anchors of belonging. We suggest the concept spectral relatedness to highlight both mundane and spectral dimensions of homemaking and being together. We argue that attending to imagistic qualities in fraught life situations can help bring forth nuances and complexities of how couples face severe illness and the relational and practical changes such life situations entails in the context of homemaking in institutional settings.

This study presents a qualitative ethnographic exploration of professionally successful lifestyle migrants' self-perceptions of premigration etiologies of “modern distress,” and postmigration pathways of healing and outcomes in Guatemala. Reflexive accounts of perceived etiologies of distress include self-commodification, atomization, and disengagement from “true-selves” as stressors motivating relocation. Migrants depict postmigration healing practices as embedding popularized therapeutic narratives that amplify introspective self-dialog reproducing hypercapitalist and emotional capitalist “liquid-modern” unstable and disengaged selfhood. Constituting what we term a “pure relationship with the self,” lifestyle migrants describe a “modern trap” of “addictive” chronic healing, self-seeking, and unfulfillment while resultant self-deliberations continue to exhibit no less liquid and potentially adaptive life paths. Implications will be considered pertaining to self-dialogic therapeutic processes that reproduce distressed liquid selfhood and the potential of sites of self-relocation to amplify socially disengaged introspection. Yet reflexive self-dialog problematizes reductionist readings of structural subjectification, calling for further examination of the way distressed selfhood is a product of shifting social structures and zeitgeists but no less a self-crafted outcome of self-deliberation that critically evaluates emergent selves and alternative contexts of self-constitution.

What follows is an exploration of an experience of seeing. The experience of interest here is the seeing of Our Lady of the Underpass, a Marian apparition that was seen in an underpass in Chicago in early 2005. Taking the images and objects brought to the make-shift shrine as clues, we explore the constitutive poetic resonances ingredient to this seeing. We point to how these constitutive poetic resonances function both as an explanation of and as instructions for the seeing of the Virgin Mary in the underpass. We then consider how the semiotic multimodality of these poetic resonances made this seeing so robust, paying particular attention to the historical dimension of seeing. The resulting analysis offers the outlines of a cultural historical onto-poetic approach that builds and expands upon existing physiological approaches to seeing by highlighting the essential role of social, cultural, and historical contexts for seeing.