Ethos最新文献

Various manifestations of intergenerational memory transmission have been discussed in many scientific fields. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to these phenomena in the context of dreams. Yet, the sphere of dreaming seems the most informative illustration of how the tragic past influenced the second and third-generation descendants of trauma survivors. Based on my talks with two descendants of WWII survivors—a Russian woman and a Polish man—I define “postmemory dreams” as night visions affected by cultural representations of historical events. The theoretical background of my study is Hirsch's concept of postmemory, Hall's continuity hypothesis of dreaming, and anthropological dream research. Postmemory dreams reflect and are shaped by the ethos of remembering and commemorating the war—the ethos often imposed by political forces and propaganda—in which the dreamers live. In the cases of my interviewees, these are the Polish ethos of victimhood and the Russian ethos of heroism.

This article situates an analysis of facilitated decision-making in the lived relational experience of caring for someone with a profound intellectual disability. Drawing from the experiences of a father and daughter residing in Boston, Massachusetts, I highlight the emotional dynamics and expressions of ableism that reverberate through social institutions and intersubjective relationships in shaping actions and practices around decision-making support. These ubiquitous encounters, rooted in shared relational histories, bring into focus the affective grounds and embodied motivations that inform the practice of facilitated decision-making within public spaces and systems. In the context of this article, these decisions are geared toward carving out a place of belonging, a goal beset with uncertainty. By demonstrating that disability is a relational experience and that decision-making is an embodied evaluative process, deeply entwined with social and communicative practices, I aim to show what this practice looks like in the thick of everyday moral life.

In Pakistan, jinn afflictions reveal the maddening effects of displacement, economic inequality, and household conflicts. In this article, I consider how healers treat conditions of the nafs (soul), specifically its impurity and corruption through material desires, as enhancing the susceptibility of clients to jinn affliction where healers prescribe engagement in pietistic activities and active remembrance of God (ẕikr) as a means of keeping the effects of spirits and the symptoms caused by them at bay. Healing also involves domesticating spirits and making them habitable with their human counterparts, as antagonistic relations between the two are seen as causes of acute symptoms (dauray). This process requires a range of negotiations with jinns, including efforts to convert them to Islam. The condition of the nafs and its continual purification are seen as necessary to ensure a peaceful relation between the jinn and the client, which is possible mainly by drawing upon the authority of Sufi lineages. Nafs and its relationship with spirits provide an opportunity to think about illness through relations between mind and the heart as well as the self and the other.

Drawing upon Stanley J. Tambiah's idea of “world conquerors” and “world renouncers,” this article examines the Burmese political festival (nainganyei pwe) as a ritual, affective, and material space where former political prisoners reinterpret violence and engage in forms of collective and personal “world-making.” The article focuses on one practice in particular: the ritual wearing of white shirts by the 88 Generation. It is argued that there are psychological benefits to donning this symbolic attire. Like sacred amulets described by Tambiah, the white shirt provides ontological security to former political prisoners. For leaders (gaungzaungs) in the movement, the white shirts are integral to how they create and embody power, becoming conduits of charismatic authority. Within the context of the nainganyei pwe and when combined with other “technologies of the self,” the white shirts create a feeling of inviolability and allow survivors of political violence to reassert personal and collective agency.

Bialas, Ulrike, and Sohail, Jagat. 2022. “ Flucht nach vorne (seeking refuge in the future): Trauma, agency, and the fantasy of onward flight among refugees in Berlin.” Ethos 50: 480– 495. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12369

The name of the author of the following article was misspelled as Ulrike Bialis in place of Ulrike Bialas.

We apologize for this error.

This article explores the motivations behind the moral code of delivery rider migrant workers who served in Wuhan, China, during the pandemic. Based on ethnographic research, we analyze how riders experienced the challenging situation of everyday work. Influenced by socialist and neoliberal contexts, the riders’ actions reflect diversified moral values combining individualistic and collectivist ethics. The precarious conditions gave rise to alternative visions and opportunities for the migrant laborers. They created a new mode of autonomy with economic rationality and emotional bonds to a geographical locality. Simultaneously, the riders’ identity was temporarily reshaped by both the public and themselves, creating responsibility and meaning. This act of strong “social responsibility” reconnected individuals trapped in the plight of the pandemic. This kind of altruistic behavior exemplified the process of people seeking meaning through their work.

This study explores how mothers of children who are young adults with developmental disabilities in South Korea experience identity strain and tension when they engage in advocacy on behalf of their children. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 mothers in Korea who are members of parents’ advocacy groups, this article found that women experienced feelings of tension that arose when they deviated from normative understandings of what it means to be “devoted mothers.” Furthermore, they created two alternative versions of maternal roles—professional “I” mothers and professional “WE” mothers—that supported their identities as “disability advocates” in order to alleviate their emotional experiences. Such differences led them to practice different styles of advocacy in their interactions with disability welfare services. Based on these findings, this article discusses identity strain that emerges during the mothers’ political engagement on behalf of their disabled children. In doing so, it contributes to expanding current attention to parental advocacy activities in order to more deeply understand women's agential power to force social change and to act against existing state policies and power.

While spouses of military veterans have not been directly exposed to threats during deployment, they often experience a substantial post-deployment-related health burden while living with and caring for a partner with deployment-related mental health issues. Drawing from in-depth interviews, this study examined how female spouses of military veterans deal with the psychosocial effects of deployment. We show how these women cope. They keep their family lives going by maintaining hope for the future. We argue that hope is a dynamic practice between reality and possibility, and different forms of hope co-exist. These range from temporary formulations of present-centered hope, and permanent hopes directed towards the future. We illustrate how spouses challenge discourses around curative futures and adjust their hopes to maintain a more satisfactory everyday life and a positive horizon towards the future.

Our previous companion article situated practices in a socio-ecological framework to propose action landscapes as person-specific fields of possible practices that are place- and time-contingent. Here we expand this approach to social actors as they navigate complex, fluid social worlds to pursue meaningful lives. Embodiment, social homeostasis, and social interactions shape actors’ abilities to enact specific practices and meet adversity. The expectable range of daily demands and affordances delineates the bounds of individual social homeostasis, whence social actors evaluate experience and draw motivation for behavior in the action landscape. The dynamic interface between actor-specific factors and cultural forces configures individual possibilities for action vis-à-vis their social homeostatic range. We use this model to track interactions of culture and social actor that generate diverse lives and differential well-being or resilience and apply it to two examples, revealing factors and dynamics overlooked in current research.

This article unpacks the construction of the Jewish spiritual self in three current projects of Jewish spirituality in North America—Jewish mindfulness, the neo-Musar movement, and the nascent Positive Judaism—and explores their relations with the neoliberal economic regime and ideology. Based on the content analysis of 30 popular online and offline texts, among them promotional websites, podcasts, and published works, and data gathered during long-term ethnographic study on Jewish spirituality in Israel and North America, the article argues that the highly individualized Jewish spirituality has become an institutionally mediated form of Jewish self-expression. By building on anthropological works about the cultural implications of neoliberalism on the self and following the lead of the foundational works linking Jewish cultural production and neoliberalism in North America, this article offers a perspective on Jewish spirituality that recognizes the relations between neoliberalism, self-cultivation, and community life. Fusing the spiritual, therapeutic, and neoliberal discourses, projects of Jewish spirituality package neoliberal ideals such as choice, emotional, resilience, well-being, and happiness as Jewish spiritual commodities. At the same time, the subjectivity cultivated in these projects is a Jewish-specific formation—a self that is highly individualized but remains strongly connected to its religious-ethnic community and cultural tradition. Jewish spirituality is thus used here as a case study for how neoliberalism affects contemporary forms of religious practice and creates new ethical orientations to communal belongings.