Ethos最新文献

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.

Ethnographers engaged in fieldwork with people who are dying face particular demands concerning the nature and limits of their relationships. Drawing on case studies of two patients in the United Kingdom affected by ultimately fatal brain cancer and bowel cancer, we elaborate on the concept of ethnographic sensibility. We highlight the continual attunement of capacities that guide our participation in intersubjective encounters that are suffused by an “existential excess” and help make sense of rapid transformations in our relationships with those who are dying. We situate our approach to ethnographic sensibility within phenomenological notions of shared experience and social becoming to discuss some of the features and challenges of producing knowledge forms about the ends of life.