Ethos最新文献

This empirical study builds upon prior research concerning cultural influences on spatial mental representations in Oceania. A comprehensive examination of 93 mental maps sourced from 59 lagoon fishers of Moorea (French Polynesia) reveals interesting facts about the way they organize and share their spatial knowledge. Firstly, consistent with previous studies across Oceania, Polynesian fishers exhibit a preference for the allocentric perspective when representing their environment. Secondly, they generally rely on marine landmarks for navigation, with a particular emphasis on four entities: the reef barrier, maritime beacons, coral outcrops, and a key chromatic marker — Moana (blue in Tahitian) — indicating the depth of the lagoon. Finally, the factor analysis we conducted highlights two significant facts: (1) a geographical self-censorship, demonstrated by the low presence or even the absence of landmarks useful for locating their fishing spots; (2) a continuum between the surface and the depths of the lagoon, showing that surface fishers (line, net, troll, etc.) have a proven knowledge of seabed topography, whereas underwater speargun fishers also rely on landmarks located above the water.

In this essay, I introduce an analytic of atmosphere as a way to bridge the gap between the phenomenology of the felt-body and the anthropology of the senses. This analytic of atmospheres as multisensoriality partially aligns with, but also differs from other anthropological approaches to multisensoriality or the anthropology of the senses. Examining the meaningfulness of atmospheres as spatially extended emotions from a neo-phenomenological perspective, I argue that the notion of atmosphere offers advantages for understanding sensory cultural practices such as sounding and lighting. The felt dimensions of these practices often escape full qualification by cultural discourses, but are nevertheless deeply meaningful. Further, I explore how such atmospheric meaningfulness is irreducible to particular single sensory modi. Instead, it rests on diffuse and synesthetic kinds of felt-bodily affectedness with a holistic character. I demonstrate this by way of two ethnographic examples, investigating practices sounding and lighting, respectively, as atmospheric practices.

Parenting practices are inherently related to the sociocultural and material contexts in which children and their caregivers live. Rooted in sociocultural perspectives, this research contributes to the study of contextualized caregiving by ethnographically examining the daily caregiving practices of seven low-income immigrant mothers and their young children. Research participants all live in a precarious material context in a Chilean intercultural city. This study illuminates how caregivers use their understanding of the world to make sense of their realities, both resources and constraints, and actively negotiate with the elements of everyday life. We discuss (a) the mobilizing effect of their hopes and dreams on potential future life (we refer to it as the Third Place), manifested in a constant search for a “better life” and (b) the personal and contextual resources that mothers draw on to provide physical care to their children, despite social constraints and scarcity of material resources.

Gratitude is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday social interactions, yet it has received relatively little attention within anthropology. Past approaches to gratitude have focused on its practical expressions within exchange relationships. In contrast, this article considers the phenomenology of gratitude as a moral mood. Drawing on ethnographic episodes of gratitude between older care-recipients and their unpaid family carers in Japan, I argue that gratitude generates an aesthetic atmosphere that attunes carer and cared-for to each other. I explore this through the Japanese notion “kage,” or the “shadow,” an atmosphere of shared interdependence and vulnerability that is not reducible to darkness or light, pain, or comfort. In the context of informal care of older people, this ambiguity provides space for sharing complex relational experiences and easing the weight of emotional strain. This Japanese example provides a model of new ways to engage with gratitude ethnographically, particularly in situations involving close care.

This paper develops a relational framework to interpret ethnographic data on the way residents of a community-owned estate in the Western Isles of Scotland evaluated and contributed to collective quality of life. The analysis compares conversations with community development professionals and crofters to identify social and cultural structures influencing their contrasting interpretations of locally valued qualities of social attachment, belonging, and community. The framework integrates perspectives from phenomenological anthropology with Heidegger's theory of Being-in-the-world to describe how structures of care, temporality, mood, and discourse influenced the dynamics of sociocultural diversity, interpretations of social relationships, and collective efforts to compose favorable conditions for co-existence in a small population.

This article explores the relationship between schizophrenia, divine encounters, and therapeutics based on ethnographic research in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Contributing to a long history of single-subject ethnographies in psychological anthropology, this article narrates the events leading up to the diagnosis and the emerging life worlds post-diagnosis of an interlocutor I call Dhruv. I depart from symbolic constructions of the divine to an affective divine, a kind of force that enters and alters embodied existence. Following scholars who call for theories that move beyond Western metropolitan epistemologies, I draw upon the Bhagavad Gita, a poetic scripture from the Hindu tradition, as a form of psychological theory to contend how an encounter with the divine might be too much to bear, even traumatic. In doing so, the article offers an alternative entry point to the commonly held assumption of the therapeutic efficacy of divine encounters and religious sites in India.

Drawing on linguistic and biocultural anthropological perspectives on embodiment, this paper advances a “biolinguistic” approach to ethnographic research on intimacy, attending simultaneously to the co-constitutive interactive, psychophysiological, and phenomenological processes that emerge in everyday embodied interaction between long-term, cohabitating romantic partners. Through concurrent attention to natural interactions captured during video ethnography and moment-to-moment shifts in heart-rate variability, this study complements and complicates existing psychological, communication, and anthropological research on intimacy. Three case-studies of long-term couples residing in the Southeastern United States demonstrate how neither pure psychophysiology nor pure linguistic analysis fully encapsulates potential patterns of intimacy among them. Rather, this microanalytical, biolinguistic approach to the complexities of body and language interplay, in treating embodiment and interaction as bidirectional phenomena, emphasizes that meanings and enactments of intimacy might look different for each couple and can change over time in complex ways that index couples’ enduring orientations towards various cultural and relational norms.

Journals are the product of intellectual communities; a publication's health mirrors the field it represents. Current developments in the human sciences, especially the replication crisis and growing awareness of problems with cross-cultural generalization, create opportunities for psychological anthropologists to speak to a broader audience within academia. However, to take advantage of these opportunities, we must write with this potential audience in mind, an academic public that does not share the same theoretical vocabulary, epistemological standards, or methodological principles. Academic publishing has been struggling with the burdens imposed by the pandemic and scandals around misuse of power brought to light in the last few years. At the same time, new models for performance management only increase the pressure falling on editorial staff. This editorial reflects on the necessity of solidarity, innovation, and community investment in a journal to maintain viability in the new publishing landscape.

For decades, social scientists have critiqued the construction of knowledge in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). However, they have not conducted research with an alternate classification from psychoanalytic and psychodynamic practitioners known as the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM), which is beginning to disseminate globally. This article analyzes cultural assumptions underpinning the classification rationale, concept of the self, and relationship between culture and mental disorders through close readings of DSM-5-TR (2022) and PDM-2 (2017). It shows that DSM-5-TR's notion of scientific evidence is informed by an emphasis on biological research in psychiatry, which PDM-2 views as mostly irrelevant to clinical work. Instead, PDM-2 claims to speak authoritatively for the inner experiences of patients and clinicians in the therapeutic relationship. Both classifications share a concept of an ideal self that is individualistic, consistent across time, able to narrate rather than just feel emotions, and in control of cognition, emotion, and relationships. Whereas DSM-5-TR views the culture concept as a lens to interpret the patient–clinician encounter, PDM-2 uses the culture concept inconsistently. I situate these findings within extant anthropological research and propose new directions to examine how both classifications are used in local contexts.