Ethos最新文献

In this article, we examine the subjective experiences of people who, according to their education level and income, belong to the lowest social classes—indicators that are commonly associated with poor health behaviors and poor health status. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork among white, working-class people in Denmark, we draw attention to the negative stereotypes connected to health inequities and how people attempt to navigate and mitigate perceived bias. We draw particular attention to the proposed concept of tuning, which we identify as acts intended to mitigate practitioner bias and secure higher esteem and adequate care by differentiating oneself from stereotypes. Ultimately, we aim to contribute to more nuanced conversations on health inequity and how it is conceptualized and acted upon by individuals through the concept of tuning.

The neighbor concept and relations vary across spatial and temporal milieux. My fieldwork in a rural residential barangay in Marinduque province revalidates the Filipino concept of kapitbahay through the locals’ social interaction and sense of community. Using the pagtatanong-tanong (asking questions) cross-indigenous interview involving ten permanent residents reveals the kapitbahay as a threefold category involving dimensions of space, social relations, and time. The kapitbahay pertains to social responsibility (the “I” or Ako as the kapitbahay), a support system (“They” or Sila as the kapitbahay), and a recognition of kapwa or shared identity (“We” or Kami as magkapitbahay). I propose a “Kapit” at “Bahay” model of Filipino neighboring that views the concept as primarily relational, denoted by kapit (to hold on), and spatial on account of the physical extended neighborhood context rooted in the term bahay (house), with an underlying temporal dimension called panahon.

This article draws upon ethnographic fieldwork among children in Helsinki, Finland, to determine how cooperative behaviors unfold in their everyday lives. Two concepts—fairness and partner choice—emerged as particularly relevant, and related behaviors were examined in the context of ongoing debates regarding cooperation in human societies. Children consistently invoked fairness as an important moral value, and they showed evidence of undergoing a developmental shift from equality-based to equity-based fairness by around seven years old. Children mediated disagreements primarily through partner choice strategies (avoidance and disengagement) rather than partner conflict (punishment). Local social values and child-rearing practices that promote personal autonomy and independence make punishment undesirable and rare in this context. The observed aversion to punishment in Helsinki differs from typical characterizations of so-called WEIRD societies and demonstrates the value that nuanced ethnographic studies in diverse societies can bring to understandings of human cooperation.

Matters of parenting transgender children are ascendant on the cultural landscape. Based on interviews with Israeli mothers of transgender children between the ages of 8–24 I explore how the process of the child's gender affirmation intersects with maternal subjectivities, and how mothers internalize the morally-loaded narratives of good mothering in contemporary Israel. I illustrate that when children undergo gender affirmation, mothers experience their mothering as challenged and transformed. This transformative process can be conceptualized in terms of political becoming and ethical self-formation (Foucault 1997). However, such a conceptualization does not fully encompass the complexity of mothers' daily carework. An anthropological approach, in particular the concept of "moral moods" (Throop 2014), can best capture the spontaneity and ambiguity of mothers' moral lives. This concept can be a valuable theoretical tool to grasp the diffused affective states and moral concerns of those who are constantly subjected to the critical gaze.

Authors in the pragmatic and phenomenological traditions offer several distinct but overlapping theories of meaning. Drawing on a number of these theories, I analyze the speech of a panic sufferer, as he recounts an attack of panic and as he has one, in order to contrast the enactment of meaning with its paralysis. This material offers an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the construction of self as it arises out of the interaction between a human being and their cultural environment.

It is an undisputed fact among attachment researchers that children need stability and continuity in their caregiving environment for optimal developmental outcomes. However, anthropological studies show that informal and often temporally limited kinship-based foster care, including changes of children's primary caregivers, is widespread in some cultural contexts and considered normative and thus beneficial for children. Based on ethnographic interviews with Nso families in northwestern Cameroon, we analyzed the dynamics of caregiving arrangements and relational networks during infancy and early childhood. Exploring household compositions, caregiving responsibilities, children's preferred caregivers, and foster care arrangements revealed multiple caregiver networks, with the importance of the mother decreasing and the importance of alloparents and peers increasing as the children grow older. Also, families have fluid boundaries, with about one-third of the children changing households in the first three years of life. The Nso children's experiences reflect a relational cultural model of infant care as a cooperative task and a communal conception of attachment. The results are discussed in relation to attachment theory's claims about universal patterns of development.

Global Early Childhood Development (ECD)—an applied field with the aim to improve the “brain structure and function” of future generations in the global South—has moved to the center of international development. Global ECD rests heavily on evidence claims about widespread cognitive, social, and emotional deficits in the global South and the benefits of changing parenting practices in order to optimize early childhood development. We challenge these claims on the grounds that the leading ECD literature excludes research from anthropology, cultural psychology, and related fields that could provide crucial insights about childrearing and children's development in the targeted communities. We encourage anthropologists and other scholars with ethnographic expertise on childhood to critically engage with global ECD. To facilitate such an endeavor, this article sketches the history, scientific claims, and interventions of global ECD, points out the critical potential of ethnographic research, and suggests strategies to make ethnography more relevant.

This article focuses on the role of vulnerability and desire in populist politics. I examine the political aesthetics of Argentine populism by analyzing media and supporters’ representations of Argentine politician Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The populist leader tends to conjure the image of the strongman who is either an avuncular man of the people or a muscular, industrious worker. In contrast, Kirchner's followers focus on her sexual appeal and her emotional vulnerability. Drawing on Lacanian notions of love and desire, I argue that Cristinistas’ sustained focus on their leader's appearance and emotional state reveals the libidinal dimensions of populist politics. Moreover, the fetishization of Cristina as incomparably beautiful and bereaved indicates a deeply phallocentric conception of sovereignty. While Cristina's supporters tout her femininity as a departure from the political status quo, their focus on her image and persona reinforces phallocentric conceptions of sovereignty.

According to attachment theory, feeding, including breastfeeding, plays only a marginal role in relationship formation. However, studies—especially in rural traditional non-Western contexts—repeatedly demonstrate that feeding can be an important attachment mechanism. We interviewed 30 urban, middle-class families with 6-to-19-month-old infants in the surrounding greater metropolitan area of San José, Costa Rica, to investigate if they consider feeding relevant for attachment formation. Qualitative content analysis revealed that breastfeeding is a key factor in specifying whether caregivers believed feeding to be relevant for attachment formation. The study found that breastfeeding families considered feeding relevant for attachment, and bottle-feeding families associated feeding with mainly alimentary and no attachment-related functions. Furthermore, breastfeeding seems to foster exclusive maternal attachment, while multiple feeding seems to foster multiple attachments. Consequently, the feeding network seems to regulate a child's attachment network in urban middle-class families in San José. A triangulation of caregiver interviews, interviews with key informants, and member checking with key informants support the validity of the findings.

Women undergo profound psychological and cognitive shifts throughout their life course, and motherhood entails dramatic mind–body adjustments. Growing maternal responsibilities and evidence from social sciences suggest motherhood enhances cognitive functioning, but mothers typically claim otherwise. This article uses maternal life stories to reveal cultural schemas of mommy brain as told by mothers in the United States. Our findings illustrate what mommy brain is in practice and how cultural narratives promote associations between motherhood and diminished cognitive functioning. We found that interruptions, cognitive overload, and newfound anxieties were fundamental components in mothers’ mommy brain experiences. We believe that these factors, along with social isolation, play a salient role in self-reported deficits in maternal cognition. Understandings of mommy brain must move beyond neurobiology and attention and memory studies and consider how interruptions, overload, and other subjective experiences shape our definitions and what we know about maternal cognition.