Ethos最新文献

This article highlights the ontogeny of autobiographical memory and its sociocultural foundations as an important and underrepresented field of research in psychological anthropology. It discusses the results of an explorative photovoice study on the emotional experiences of children and adolescents. Our study discovered that memory practices play a major role in young people's daily lives. Participants often referred to emotionally significant past events, relationships, or life periods by relating them to particular memory objects. We assume that the material dimension of children's memory practices not only facilitates an affective engagement with the past but also makes past experiences communicable to oneself and to others. The memory objects used by our research participants were linked in substantial ways to culturally specific modes of remembering, (auto)biographical narration, and the formation of feeling among adolescents. In discussing broader implications of our results, we draw on insights from developmental psychology, affect and emotion theory, and social anthropological research on memory and materiality. We conclude with a brief comparative look at memory practices in the Indonesian context to hint at a significant field of cross-cultural research that opens at the intersection of studies on material culture, memory practices, (auto)biographical remembering and narrating, and the formation of feeling.

This article is a call to decolonize affect theory through deepening its engagement with fieldwork conducted in the global South. It examines the native Chinese concept of ganying, or resonance, as an ethnographic technique by engaging with the author's fieldwork experiences among Body Mind Spirit practitioners in China. Participating in ganying captures the formation of affective atmospheres through the ethnographer's involvement in their co-creation. Where attunement functions as a normative ideal, resonance becomes a technique of embodying responsiveness and cultivating intimacy that supports efforts to narrativize affect. Examining the genealogy of ganying and its ethnographic applications reveals this concept's alignment with influential theorizations that in recent decades have been constructed as “new” and “paradigm shifting” contributions to the affective turn. It cautions against the risks of erasure resulting from such Eurocentric negligence of kindred notions circulated in scholarly and vernacular contexts outside of the global North.

In constructing a socialist order, Chinese state-raised political movements inflicted violence on families. Drawing on anthropological studies of violence, memory, haunting, affect, and transgenerational transmission, along with ethnographic investigation in Shanghai and Hunan, China, I demonstrate that individual experiences of political suffering will not be self-contained but inevitably be bequeathed to the offspring, shaping both intergenerational relationship and youth knowledge of intimacies. While most anthropologists have explained contemporary Chinese family intimacy through neoliberal cultures, economic privatization, and the one-child policy, I unravel a political history of affective undercurrents and its potential for generating a desire for nonnormative intimacy among the younger generation. I argue that generational relationships in the postviolence era are tripartite not bipartite; families’ aspirations and reproductive practices respond to an unfulfilled state-family reciprocity. This tripartite relationship further suggests that desire formation in socialist nuclear families differs from that in Freudian bourgeois families.

During Yemenite Jews’ stay in Israeli transit camps during 1948–1950, many of their children disappeared in the so-called “Yemenite Children Affair,” undermining the immigrants’ faith in the redemptive ethos of Zionism. To better understand this collective trauma, we return to the original Freudian conceptualization of melancholia as “failed mourning,” locating it within the ethnographic context of the Yemenite Children Affair and integrating its private/individual and public/collective aspects. Moreover, we provide a novel historical reading that integrates the individual loss of children and the collective lack of civic recognition. We use the term “civil melancholia” to reflect on the lingering, hurtful group experience of being overlooked (as refugees and parents) and the continuing collective predicament as “second-rate citizens.” By conceptualizing this civil melancholia and its cultural nuances, the analysis enhances the discussion of cultural traumas and their intergenerational transmission among contemporary ethnic immigrant groups.

Attachment theory sees individual autonomy as childrearing practices’ appropriate goal. But many people in the world do not share attachments theorists’ validation of autonomy. They instead believe that they should train their children into behavior appropriate to hierarchical relationships, ones predicated on differences in obligations and privileges. Their childrearing techniques therefore include teaching children to experience shame should they fail to know their place. Little attended to until recently in the social sciences, shame deserves study as hierarchy's enforcer, and doing so counters attachment theory's provincialism.

This article is based on fieldwork we each conducted with refugees in Berlin between 2016 and 2021. We were both puzzled by our interlocutors’ repeated professed desires to leave Germany, often when their lives here were improving. We wondered how they could possibly fantasize about repeating the experiences of their initial flight, which were deeply wounding and traumatic. We argue against a reading of trauma and agency as existing in opposition to or in spite of each other. We revisit the moment of trauma to uncover the transformative potential built into it—a crucial step in explaining the puzzling desires of our interlocutors for onward flight. We contrast popular notions of agentive mobility with the German term Flucht nach vorne (literally, “onward flight”) to indicate the complex contradictions, and even “unreason,” built into these fantasies.

This article draws on fieldwork in upland Indonesia to explore how discursive genres mediate political and affective transformations. Since the millennium, IMF-driven governance reforms have disseminated novel ideals of transparent accountability, representative democracy, and individual entrepreneurialism, which at once presuppose and generate a market-oriented subject endowed with the freedom to express desires and choose among multiple options. Transnational discursive genres play a key role in these transformations by foregrounding a consumerist notion of desire as a site of emancipatory imagining. These discursive technologies are, however, only partially successful. By describing their partial uptake I discuss the predicaments posed by the ethnographic scrutiny of reformist rationalities emerging in post-authoritarian contexts. Indeed, while the emancipatory promise of democratic reforms irradiating from transnational lending agencies undermines entrenched social hierarchies, the emphasis on individual aspirations may also conceal new forms of subjection to capitalist valorization, whereby individuals are turned into bundles of measurable desires.

This article theorizes chronic crises of care parents face concerning how to morally/ethically support their young adult child diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Grounded in five years’ attendance at a support group for families living with BPD and interviews with parents, the article asks: In the era of deinstitutionalization of those with mental illness, what are the moral/ethical dimensions of parents’ experiences caring for their young adult? The concept of demoralization and “moral breakdown,” an ethical crisis demanding a resolution, characterizes parents’ experiences. The parents featured convey anguished struggles over what they ought to do in a context where risks are high, and nothing parents do seems right. I suggest that dwelling indefinitely in demoralizing care is untenable and that a state of demoralization emerges as a testimony to the parents’ inability to identify a morally/ethically acceptable resolution to the crises of care.

During COVID-19 stay-at-home orders (SaHOs), people faced drastic shifts in their work and home lives. These shifts, in combination with the temporary closure of gyms and fitness centers, led to exercise-routine disruption. We conducted a survey to assess how people were affected by SaHOs in terms of exercise-routine change, feelings about exercise, perceived physical and mental health, as well as exercise-routine plans once SaHOs were lifted. In this article, we examine why affluent white American women exercised before and during COVID-19 SaHOs. The article focuses on the role of pleasure and entertainment as key components of exercise practices for these women. We found that changes in motivation reveal that exercise regimens are part of contemporary vitality politics, or current cultural and subjective desires and abilities to manipulate and optimize biological human processes, that include both health and entertainment. Therefore, we argue that exercise is a meaningful cultural, entertainment, and biopolitical activity.

What is it like to know and be known by other creatures? And when do people place ethical importance on knowing or being known by other creatures in particular ways? This article brings ethnography of British equestrianism into dialogue with anthropological inquiries into the cultural variability of intersubjective understanding. I will show that riders’ desire for authentic mutual understanding with horses is part of their critical relationship with the concept of representation. At the same time, riders’ efforts to improve their perceptual “feel” in fact reinvigorate their requirement for a representational model of mind and a skepticism about their senses. To do justice to the distinctive experience of other-mindedness that this brings about, I will argue that comparisons between the knowability of minds in different cultural contexts are best forged in terms of varied stances toward intersubjectivity, rather than in terms of varied ethical expressions of underlying universal intersubjective states.