Ethos最新文献

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.

Is selfhood socially constituted and distributed? Although the view has recently been defended by some cognitive scientists, it has long been popular within anthropology and cultural psychology. Whereas older texts by Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Hazel Rose Markus, and Shinobu Kitayama often contrast a Western conception of a discrete, bounded, and individual self with a non-Western sociocentric conception, it has more recently become common to argue that subjectivity is a fluid intersectional construction fundamentally relational and conditioned by discursive power structures. I assess the plausibility of these claims and argue that many of these discussions of self and subjectivity remain too crude. By failing to distinguish different dimension of selfhood, many authors unwittingly advocate a form of radical social constructivism that is not only incapable of doing justice to first-person experience but which also fails to capture the heterogeneity of real communal life.

This article discusses an ethnographic theater project designed to explore how social performances of gender and disability shape the experiences of those with Turner syndrome, a genetic condition causing short stature and infertility. Working alongside two interlocutors with the condition, our rehearsals demonstrate subjectivity to be an ethical, relational, and generative practice of striving for good that fosters self-care and empathy for others. Our collaboration exemplifies how anthropological approaches that engage vulnerability and improvisation encourage our interlocutors to investigate their self-understandings with us in real time. Such communal explorations are frequently punctuated by uncertainty, contradiction, and tension, which shape interrelational processes of self-formation and invite the ethnographer to reflect and improve upon shared expectations for the research encounter. This article, therefore, outlines a care-oriented anthropology that prioritizes accessibility, recognizes the creative in the everyday, and embraces failure as an inextricable part of our research and the lives of our interlocutors.

care, ethics and morality, performance, subjectivity, Turner syndrome

Researchers have observed high rates of recovery from first episode psychosis in some cultural settings. This study explores the course and long-term outcome of a small set of cases of first episode psychoses, focusing on clinical predictors of outcome and local cultural processes supporting recovery in Javanese society in Indonesia. Researchers followed nine individuals with a first episode of psychosis intensively during one year of ethnographic research and measured clinical markers of the outcome at onset and at two- and 14-year follow-ups. Despite some relapses, a majority of individuals substantially recovered at one year and continued to function near-normal at 14 years; two cases represent long-term illness. Clinical factors associated with recovery included the acute onset of illness and short duration of untreated psychosis. Ethnographic research identified cultural models, linked to Javanese folk stories and local Islamic ideas, and social and cultural processes supportive of recovery from psychosis.

Rural-to-urban migrants in China have often been portrayed as striving subjects, living in “suspension” for the sake of the entrepreneurial futures they desire. Drawing on fieldwork conducted alongside young café workers in Shanghai, this article highlights more ambivalent engagements with the future obscured by emphases, within the social sciences, on the intentional, active aspects of subjectivity. Relatedly, it analyzes moments of purposelessness as more than emotional downsides of precarity, in a context where official discourses of the “Chinese Dream” coexist with vernacular celebrations of indolence. Purposelessness is a form of refusal, allowing young migrants to dwell in the present, if only momentarily. Yet, the very act of articulating unwillingness through playful idioms of indolence does not mean embracing disengagement as a norm. Rather, it nurtures a sense of ethical discomfort and self-responsibility. This malaise of indolence might prevent the translation of temporary disinvestment into a clear politics of refusal.

This paper proposes a novel perspective for thinking about ideophones, which are imitative words that communicate sensory perceptions and emotions with linguistic sounds and with so-called “paralinguistic” features, especially gesture and intonation. By considering their performative and depictive qualities with concepts from mindfulness and meditative practices, it is argued that a contemplative, mindful impulse underlies their use by Kichwa-speaking Runa living in Amazonian Ecuador. Using concepts from traditional meditation treatises, a contemporary guided meditation, and contemporary ethnographic research, the paper argues that, whatever else may motivate their articulations of ideophones, whether for expressive, humorous, or dramatic purposes, Kichwa speakers are mindfully and meditatively attending to the rising and falling of ordinary perceptions and giving a voice to the dynamic nature of their lived realities. By voicing the dynamic nature of sensory experiences, speakers are also able, momentarily, to become what they imitate, thereby expressing the perspectives of nonhuman beings according to their sounds, movements, appearances, and energies.