Ethos最新文献

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.

Numerous programs have been set up to support women entrepreneurs on the basis that inequality results from incompatibilities between gendered emotional culture and the affective governmentality of the entrepreneurial paradigm. In the context of Spanish entrepreneurial training programs, this article identifies technologies of the self in young women's narratives of successful entrepreneurship. Using a crossed-narrative approach, as part of three case studies, we conducted 14 interviews with program participants and 6 with program trainers. The analysis shows that, to overcome their supposed deficiencies, the participants understood that female entrepreneurialism required unlimited efforts to self-modulate their emotional dispositions. The analysis identified three broad cultural narratives that frame entrepreneurialism as an epic quest, a vocation or calling, and a ludic pursuit of pleasure. Each of these provides an interpretative frame within which the limitless efforts demanded of feminized entrepreneurialism were resemanticized into three moral values that characterized the story protagonists (heroism, sacrifice, passion). The article further explores the vulnerability of young women to the depoliticization of entrepreneurialism by analyzing emotional suffering and lack of well-being, distancing, ambivalences, and microresistances to the hegemonic paradigm.

This article is about the fear of terrorism. The few and mainly quantitative studies on the topic have categorized people as afraid or not afraid, treating fear as a known constant detached from time and space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article argues instead that the fear of terrorism is momentary and transient; it flares up as flashes of fear. These flashes are triggered by the sensory experience of the urban environment combined with recollections of mediatized horror stories about previous terrorist attacks. This article shows how affects related to historical events, such as terrorist attacks, do not exclusively linger in the exact places or cities where they unfolded. Rather, affects can also, via media, travel to and flash up in scenarios that are geographically distant yet aesthetically resonant with historical events. This article thus provides an understanding of the temporal and emplaced dimensions of fear, and conceptualizes the relationship between the affects we experience, the surroundings we live in, and the stories we are exposed to via media.

Early childhood science and intervention (ECSI) or simply early childhood development (ECD) is now a multi-billion-dollar industry that seeks to export one form of family model, parenting practices, and perspective of child development to the rest of the world. This practice occurs through the efforts of agencies such as the World Health Organization, United Nations Children's Fund, the World Bank Group, and the LEGO Foundation. As a result, Gabriel Scheidecker and colleagues (2023) are justified to characterize ECSI as global ECD that seeks to improve the brains of children in the majority world to break the vicious cycle of poverty. I complement Scheidecker et al.’s (2023) arguments by highlighting a key link that sustains global ECD—the academics and practitioners from the majority world who, knowingly or unknowingly, perpetuate this practice. In this commentary, I discuss why and how such academics and practitioners contribute to the practice of global ECD.

Responses to the trauma of rape vary. People find different responses helpful and a multiplicity of trauma theories should be considered. Through an autoethnography and critical phenomenology of myself and my collaborators in Sierra Leone after I was raped there, I analyze how subjective and cultural frames for managing rape impact an individual's processing of the experience; how they shape ideas of self, community, and world; and how they frame their unraveling and remaking. While I retreated, internalized, and individualized my rape, my collaborators wanted me to externalize it, let the community help, and undergo a ritual to disconnect me from my rapist. Cross-cultural exchange can enhance understandings of responses to trauma and approaches to healing. This is done not to cement cultural frames, to localize or to particularize trauma, nor to overgeneralize but to consider interlocking factors, fill in politically created gaps in focus and memory, and consider multiplicity as enriching on a level playing field. This may help decenter Euro-American notions of trauma and foster an ethics of care.