ABSTRACT:Personal names among the Igbo people of South-eastern Nigeria can also be understood and contextualized within the fringes of their cultural values, worldviews, emotions, and economic resources. This article explores the conceptualization of wealth in Igbo personal naming practices from an ethnopragmatic paradigm, which uncovers the hidden meanings underlying the interpretation of language. Drawing on ethnographic data sourced through participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations with 30 participants (name-bearers, givers, and users) in the eastern heartland of Owerri (Imo State) and Abuja, Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, we contextualize the pattern of wealth-inspired names among the Igbo as symbolic capital aimed at securing the welfare and future life trajectories of their bearers. We conclude that the concept of wealth has an intrinsic value among the Igbo for social class distinction, and it is reinscribed in the onomastic system to reflect parental aspirations for enduring social status, positioning, and belonging in the institutionalized class system. In this way, Igbo personal names function as economic resources for identity construction and social status classification.
{"title":"Wealth is King: The Conceptualization of Wealth in Igbo Personal Naming Practices","authors":"Eyo O. Mensah, Queendaline I. Iloh","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0043","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Personal names among the Igbo people of South-eastern Nigeria can also be understood and contextualized within the fringes of their cultural values, worldviews, emotions, and economic resources. This article explores the conceptualization of wealth in Igbo personal naming practices from an ethnopragmatic paradigm, which uncovers the hidden meanings underlying the interpretation of language. Drawing on ethnographic data sourced through participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations with 30 participants (name-bearers, givers, and users) in the eastern heartland of Owerri (Imo State) and Abuja, Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, we contextualize the pattern of wealth-inspired names among the Igbo as symbolic capital aimed at securing the welfare and future life trajectories of their bearers. We conclude that the concept of wealth has an intrinsic value among the Igbo for social class distinction, and it is reinscribed in the onomastic system to reflect parental aspirations for enduring social status, positioning, and belonging in the institutionalized class system. In this way, Igbo personal names function as economic resources for identity construction and social status classification.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"699 - 723"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45839055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R in terms of its broadest ambitions and reach, Karen Strassler’s Demanding Images is a welcome and absorbing ethnographic study of “the protean and unpredictable nature of political communication in an age of neoliberalism, democracy, and complexly mediated public spheres” (24). The uncertainties of Indonesia’s post-authoritarian politics are the focus of the book, framed by the collapse of the Suharto regime in May 1998 and the election of Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”) as the country’s seventh president in July 2014. This 16-year period witnessed: a studentled reform movement (Reformasi); increasingly pluralistic and participatory democracy, accompanied by decentralization and electoral reforms; growing press freedoms; public demand for transparency and accountability; persistent corruption and scandal; further saturation of society by neoliberal ideologies and economic schemes; a proliferation of new visual and media technologies; and oligarchic control or ownership of media by political elites and corporate figures. This framing begins on an auspicious note—the collapse of an authoritarian regime joined with the exuberant hopes of Reformasi. It ends on one as well—the electoral triumph of the populist, democratic reformer Jokowi. Life isn’t all sunshine, however. Strassler is acutely aware of the “lingering afterlife of authoritarian ideologies and practices” (19) that left Indonesians in a state of anxiety and unease throughout the period. Progressive activists have been key to the energies of reformist moments; so, too, have they been watchful for ghosts from the authoritarian past. It is no surprise then that activists hold
{"title":"Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia by Karen Strassler (review)","authors":"K. George","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0038","url":null,"abstract":"R in terms of its broadest ambitions and reach, Karen Strassler’s Demanding Images is a welcome and absorbing ethnographic study of “the protean and unpredictable nature of political communication in an age of neoliberalism, democracy, and complexly mediated public spheres” (24). The uncertainties of Indonesia’s post-authoritarian politics are the focus of the book, framed by the collapse of the Suharto regime in May 1998 and the election of Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”) as the country’s seventh president in July 2014. This 16-year period witnessed: a studentled reform movement (Reformasi); increasingly pluralistic and participatory democracy, accompanied by decentralization and electoral reforms; growing press freedoms; public demand for transparency and accountability; persistent corruption and scandal; further saturation of society by neoliberal ideologies and economic schemes; a proliferation of new visual and media technologies; and oligarchic control or ownership of media by political elites and corporate figures. This framing begins on an auspicious note—the collapse of an authoritarian regime joined with the exuberant hopes of Reformasi. It ends on one as well—the electoral triumph of the populist, democratic reformer Jokowi. Life isn’t all sunshine, however. Strassler is acutely aware of the “lingering afterlife of authoritarian ideologies and practices” (19) that left Indonesians in a state of anxiety and unease throughout the period. Progressive activists have been key to the energies of reformist moments; so, too, have they been watchful for ghosts from the authoritarian past. It is no surprise then that activists hold","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"759 - 764"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44556097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Media and critical data scholars often critique digital entrepreneurs for endorsing narrow and positivist models of data and corporeality. But what happens when device makers plan for digital uncertainty and are invested in fostering interpretive fluidity of both data and bodies? Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with makers of wearable computing in New York City's Silicon Alley, this article argues that creators of wearable technology work with more pluralized concepts of data than digital scholars often recognize. In marketing materials and public-facing documents, devices makers often do promote the idea that wearable technology can help people to patiently synchronize their digital records so as to compile Borgesian archives of their experiences. In practice, commercial imperatives effectively require that product makers also cultivate a multifaceted regard of personal data and somatic experience. In examining how device makers capitalize on the ambiguities inherent to digital knowing and thus enact a digital economy shaped by pliable rather than atomized notions of corporeality and data, this article opens onto wider debates about the politics of digital representation.
{"title":"The Data Multiple: Seeing Double in Digital Entrepreneurialism","authors":"Y. Grinberg","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0040","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Media and critical data scholars often critique digital entrepreneurs for endorsing narrow and positivist models of data and corporeality. But what happens when device makers plan for digital uncertainty and are invested in fostering interpretive fluidity of both data and bodies? Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with makers of wearable computing in New York City's Silicon Alley, this article argues that creators of wearable technology work with more pluralized concepts of data than digital scholars often recognize. In marketing materials and public-facing documents, devices makers often do promote the idea that wearable technology can help people to patiently synchronize their digital records so as to compile Borgesian archives of their experiences. In practice, commercial imperatives effectively require that product makers also cultivate a multifaceted regard of personal data and somatic experience. In examining how device makers capitalize on the ambiguities inherent to digital knowing and thus enact a digital economy shaped by pliable rather than atomized notions of corporeality and data, this article opens onto wider debates about the politics of digital representation.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"577 - 610"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45643873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate (review)","authors":"Sharika Thiranagama","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"725 - 735"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66209093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A anxiety of anthropologists of southern Africa has long been how to give voice to those who have been rendered voiceless; in this case, Lesotho’s long history of structural violence shaped by South Africa’s historical exploitation of this small landlocked country. Infected Kin: Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho by anthropologist Ellen Block and her husband, literary nonfiction writer Will McGrath, is a recent addition to the Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality, and Social Justice series edited by Lenore Manderson. Infected Kin is a book about exercising agency in the face of adversity in Lesotho, where one-quarter of adults are infected with AIDS and where devastation has swept across communities, felt at every level of kinship. In the context of scholarship on the AIDS pandemic, which is targeted largely at the abstract level of global and public health, or a single disease vertically, Block and McGrath’s Infected Kin is an important book. It is even more so when we consider that COVID-19 has directed health care resources and funding elsewhere. While scholars have largely focused on the ways in which culture and sociality influence HIV/AIDS, their approach has been largely limited to examining its interventions. Block argues:
{"title":"Infected Kin: Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho by Ellen Block and Will McGrath (review)","authors":"H. Macdonald","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0041","url":null,"abstract":"A anxiety of anthropologists of southern Africa has long been how to give voice to those who have been rendered voiceless; in this case, Lesotho’s long history of structural violence shaped by South Africa’s historical exploitation of this small landlocked country. Infected Kin: Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho by anthropologist Ellen Block and her husband, literary nonfiction writer Will McGrath, is a recent addition to the Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality, and Social Justice series edited by Lenore Manderson. Infected Kin is a book about exercising agency in the face of adversity in Lesotho, where one-quarter of adults are infected with AIDS and where devastation has swept across communities, felt at every level of kinship. In the context of scholarship on the AIDS pandemic, which is targeted largely at the abstract level of global and public health, or a single disease vertically, Block and McGrath’s Infected Kin is an important book. It is even more so when we consider that COVID-19 has directed health care resources and funding elsewhere. While scholars have largely focused on the ways in which culture and sociality influence HIV/AIDS, their approach has been largely limited to examining its interventions. Block argues:","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"751 - 754"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49514474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This article explores the contemporary construction of public culture around cybersecurity in the United States, using discourse analysis to critically examine the rise of militaristic rhetoric around digital threats in news reports and public statements by government officials and corporate experts. Cybersecurity has gone from being an obscure focus of tech and security experts to an issue of public concern. My approach advances theorizations of digital media and politics by bringing together insights from digital media studies and the anthropology of security to analyze how public culture around "cybersecurity" is being discursively constructed by authorities, and to advance theorizations of digital media and politics. Given the pervasive role of digital media in Americans' lives, I contend that discourses that represent cybersecurity in terms of national security, equating hacking with cyberwar and cyberterrorism, contribute to the militarization of private civil and social life while failing to address wider vulnerabilities and threats to democracy associated with digital media.
{"title":"The Cultural Construction of Cybersecurity: Digital Threats and Dangerous Rhetoric","authors":"V. Bernal","doi":"10.1353/anq.2021.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2021.0037","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article explores the contemporary construction of public culture around cybersecurity in the United States, using discourse analysis to critically examine the rise of militaristic rhetoric around digital threats in news reports and public statements by government officials and corporate experts. Cybersecurity has gone from being an obscure focus of tech and security experts to an issue of public concern. My approach advances theorizations of digital media and politics by bringing together insights from digital media studies and the anthropology of security to analyze how public culture around \"cybersecurity\" is being discursively constructed by authorities, and to advance theorizations of digital media and politics. Given the pervasive role of digital media in Americans' lives, I contend that discourses that represent cybersecurity in terms of national security, equating hacking with cyberwar and cyberterrorism, contribute to the militarization of private civil and social life while failing to address wider vulnerabilities and threats to democracy associated with digital media.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"94 1","pages":"611 - 638"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47484177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This article draws on intersecting debates on archives, infrastructures, and knowledge in anthropology to analyze a “bioinformational turn” in forensic science. Focusing on transformations in forensic science provision in England and Wales apparent in the history of a forensic archive, the article frames frictions between ways of making knowledge across scientific cultures, law enforcement, and a legal system that aims to create facts and certainty, against forensic scientists’ concern with process and context across disparate realms of practice. Following scientists’ descriptions of the changing conditions under which forensic science is currently practiced and the erosion of forensic provision as a public service, we argue that forensic practitioners interrogate positivist projections of forensic science by thinking with complexity as they follow evidence through multiple registers, infrastructures, and datasets.
{"title":"Forensic Apophenia: Sensing the Bioinformation Archive","authors":"EJ Gonzalez-Polledo, Silvia Posocco","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article draws on intersecting debates on archives, infrastructures, and knowledge in anthropology to analyze a “bioinformational turn” in forensic science. Focusing on transformations in forensic science provision in England and Wales apparent in the history of a forensic archive, the article frames frictions between ways of making knowledge across scientific cultures, law enforcement, and a legal system that aims to create facts and certainty, against forensic scientists’ concern with process and context across disparate realms of practice. Following scientists’ descriptions of the changing conditions under which forensic science is currently practiced and the erosion of forensic provision as a public service, we argue that forensic practitioners interrogate positivist projections of forensic science by thinking with complexity as they follow evidence through multiple registers, infrastructures, and datasets.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"123 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49124442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
B sex workers and missionaries have long struggled to have their labor recognized as such. Sarah Luna’s terrifically engaging and accessibly written ethnography Love in The Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico–US Border makes clear just how much labor—emotional and physical—goes into both forms of work. At first glance, readers might assume that both sets of workers are at odds with one another, since missionaries so often strive to end sex workers’ labor. But what sets this monograph apart from books that explore efforts to “rescue” or “save” sex workers is Luna’s persuasive portrait of the mutual respect, obligation, and friendship between the women missionaries and sex workers. Their respective labor and their relationships unfold against the backdrop of a “narcoeconomy” in Reynosa. Both groups of workers navigate this environment of ever-increasing violence while pursuing their “intimate, economic and moral projects” (3). The book draws on a year of field and archival research in Reynosa with sex workers and missionaries who had migrated there. To round out her archival research, Luna interviewed men between the ages of 65 and 90 who were members of the “Historical Society of Reynosa” and the “Veteran’s Club of Reynosa.” She also makes good use of handwritten memoirs by two sex workers, as well as blogs maintained by missionaries. The book opens with two excerpts that lay out why these women came to la zona, a prostitution zone composed of several city blocks and enclosed by cement walls in Reynosa, part of the state of Tamaulipas. Lucía, a former sex worker, “came to earn more money,” while Stacy, an American missionary, “never felt so invited into a genuine relationship with Jesus as
{"title":"Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico–US Border by Sarah Luna (review)","authors":"Denise Brennan","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"B sex workers and missionaries have long struggled to have their labor recognized as such. Sarah Luna’s terrifically engaging and accessibly written ethnography Love in The Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico–US Border makes clear just how much labor—emotional and physical—goes into both forms of work. At first glance, readers might assume that both sets of workers are at odds with one another, since missionaries so often strive to end sex workers’ labor. But what sets this monograph apart from books that explore efforts to “rescue” or “save” sex workers is Luna’s persuasive portrait of the mutual respect, obligation, and friendship between the women missionaries and sex workers. Their respective labor and their relationships unfold against the backdrop of a “narcoeconomy” in Reynosa. Both groups of workers navigate this environment of ever-increasing violence while pursuing their “intimate, economic and moral projects” (3). The book draws on a year of field and archival research in Reynosa with sex workers and missionaries who had migrated there. To round out her archival research, Luna interviewed men between the ages of 65 and 90 who were members of the “Historical Society of Reynosa” and the “Veteran’s Club of Reynosa.” She also makes good use of handwritten memoirs by two sex workers, as well as blogs maintained by missionaries. The book opens with two excerpts that lay out why these women came to la zona, a prostitution zone composed of several city blocks and enclosed by cement walls in Reynosa, part of the state of Tamaulipas. Lucía, a former sex worker, “came to earn more money,” while Stacy, an American missionary, “never felt so invited into a genuine relationship with Jesus as","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"207 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46836302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S Archaism interrogates the assumptions that underpin modernist models of social order presided over by technocratic elites. Its protagonists are marginalized people who refuse to grant primacy to the modern state’s vision of national heritage, which leave little space to alternative forms of community. However, against difficult odds they persist, and mobilize their own definitions of tradition to carve out a niche within the formal polity that encapsulates them. In a nutshell, this is an account of the apparent triumph of the nation-state form and of the varieties of social aggregation that cannot be permitted to exist within it. Herzfeld’s “subversive archaists” are recalcitrant traditionalists, often radically conservative. Theirs is not a revolutionary impulse as much as it is a reformist one. However, while they do react to the strictures imposed by modern forms of sociopolitical organization, their subversivism is not a form of “primitive rebellion” (Hobsbawm 1959) as much as it is a desire for recognition of unsanctioned models of tradition that are fully loyal to the nations of which they are part. Despite this, they are targets of state suspicion and bourgeois disdain because they do not fit within the master plan of the sanitized order that projects onto the global plane an image of the nation-state as sober, serious, and respectable, and, importantly, Western-inflected. They are the lower classes who eagerly play the game of national heritage, but not according to the rules devised by technocratic elites at the helm of the national bureaucracy. As conceptual holdouts against a modernizing order that seeks to displace their folk model of the society, they provoke within the nation-state bureaucracy an “anxiety of
{"title":"Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage by Michael Herzfeld (review)","authors":"Antonio Sorge","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"S Archaism interrogates the assumptions that underpin modernist models of social order presided over by technocratic elites. Its protagonists are marginalized people who refuse to grant primacy to the modern state’s vision of national heritage, which leave little space to alternative forms of community. However, against difficult odds they persist, and mobilize their own definitions of tradition to carve out a niche within the formal polity that encapsulates them. In a nutshell, this is an account of the apparent triumph of the nation-state form and of the varieties of social aggregation that cannot be permitted to exist within it. Herzfeld’s “subversive archaists” are recalcitrant traditionalists, often radically conservative. Theirs is not a revolutionary impulse as much as it is a reformist one. However, while they do react to the strictures imposed by modern forms of sociopolitical organization, their subversivism is not a form of “primitive rebellion” (Hobsbawm 1959) as much as it is a desire for recognition of unsanctioned models of tradition that are fully loyal to the nations of which they are part. Despite this, they are targets of state suspicion and bourgeois disdain because they do not fit within the master plan of the sanitized order that projects onto the global plane an image of the nation-state as sober, serious, and respectable, and, importantly, Western-inflected. They are the lower classes who eagerly play the game of national heritage, but not according to the rules devised by technocratic elites at the helm of the national bureaucracy. As conceptual holdouts against a modernizing order that seeks to displace their folk model of the society, they provoke within the nation-state bureaucracy an “anxiety of","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"193 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42649171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I their beautifully illustrated manifesto, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden seek to “lift the cotton wool and peek at some real things” (4). Following Virginia Woolf’s idea that “moments of being are experiences on a purely sensual level,” the authors provoke the reader to think deeply about how to dispense with the veils of ideology that shutter dark times and to collaborate in imagining better futures. The book offers something completely new and wonderful: an object worthy of an afternoon engaged in careful reading and looking, followed by rethinking and relooking. The images are stunning. Small, nearly miniature figures fly, swim, float, and wander across a spectacular and entertaining array of page layouts. While a few pages rely on standard graphic novel paneling, most offer fresh imagery and design elements. The most notable aspect is the largess that illustrator Corden creates through vast swaths of color, flying books used as surfboards, spiraling libraries, and the like, all creating the feeling that gravity (in both senses of the term) could be played with, harnessed, and reformatted. Many swatches of color might have been sky, water, or something else—who knows? who cares? They work as a sort of in-between suggestion of space that enable the reader to soar alongside the authors. The sumptuous color palette presses stunning, bright lights and dark darks into constant tension. Illumination is a central theme that cuts across the text and illustrations. Illumination, the book claims, is a key goal of anthropology; and the thick, golden, glowing thread that leads the main characters—Waterston and
{"title":"Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning by Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden (review)","authors":"Lochlann Jain","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"I their beautifully illustrated manifesto, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden seek to “lift the cotton wool and peek at some real things” (4). Following Virginia Woolf’s idea that “moments of being are experiences on a purely sensual level,” the authors provoke the reader to think deeply about how to dispense with the veils of ideology that shutter dark times and to collaborate in imagining better futures. The book offers something completely new and wonderful: an object worthy of an afternoon engaged in careful reading and looking, followed by rethinking and relooking. The images are stunning. Small, nearly miniature figures fly, swim, float, and wander across a spectacular and entertaining array of page layouts. While a few pages rely on standard graphic novel paneling, most offer fresh imagery and design elements. The most notable aspect is the largess that illustrator Corden creates through vast swaths of color, flying books used as surfboards, spiraling libraries, and the like, all creating the feeling that gravity (in both senses of the term) could be played with, harnessed, and reformatted. Many swatches of color might have been sky, water, or something else—who knows? who cares? They work as a sort of in-between suggestion of space that enable the reader to soar alongside the authors. The sumptuous color palette presses stunning, bright lights and dark darks into constant tension. Illumination is a central theme that cuts across the text and illustrations. Illumination, the book claims, is a key goal of anthropology; and the thick, golden, glowing thread that leads the main characters—Waterston and","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"217 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41416437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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