{"title":"Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol (review)","authors":"Jessica Hardin","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"193 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43672254","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:Individuals with severe cognitive disabilities are often thought to be born with limited interpersonal capacity, rendering their emotional lives inaccessible. Family caregiving for individuals under these circumstances is portrayed in the contemporary literature variously as ranging from being a positive transformative experience to being a burden. If we focus on the experience of caregiver burden, we see communication or language issues can complicate caregiving, given the interpersonal impenetrability this sometimes entails. However, this focus overlooks the inter-bodily dimensions of caregiving and how parents gain access to the emotional lives of their children in the absence of language. In limiting our disciplinary focus to particular kinds of relationships premised on normative forms of intimacy or reciprocity, we do more to reproduce a particular moral philosophic tradition that views human personhood as dependent upon cognition and language. This article contributes to an anthropology of disability and moralities by exploring how the practice of caregiving within the context of severe cognitive disability shapes the moral lives of fathers. Drawing on my own experience as the father of a multiply disabled son and ethnographic research on men in similar circumstances in the United States, I show how parents become ever-more attuned to the practical and emotional needs of their children through intimate, everyday acts of care and the shared meanings that grow and deepen on the basis of the body’s capacity for resonance and fellow feeling.
{"title":"Attuned Fathering and the Moral Dimensions of Caregiving","authors":"A. Jackson","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0010","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Individuals with severe cognitive disabilities are often thought to be born with limited interpersonal capacity, rendering their emotional lives inaccessible. Family caregiving for individuals under these circumstances is portrayed in the contemporary literature variously as ranging from being a positive transformative experience to being a burden. If we focus on the experience of caregiver burden, we see communication or language issues can complicate caregiving, given the interpersonal impenetrability this sometimes entails. However, this focus overlooks the inter-bodily dimensions of caregiving and how parents gain access to the emotional lives of their children in the absence of language. In limiting our disciplinary focus to particular kinds of relationships premised on normative forms of intimacy or reciprocity, we do more to reproduce a particular moral philosophic tradition that views human personhood as dependent upon cognition and language. This article contributes to an anthropology of disability and moralities by exploring how the practice of caregiving within the context of severe cognitive disability shapes the moral lives of fathers. Drawing on my own experience as the father of a multiply disabled son and ethnographic research on men in similar circumstances in the United States, I show how parents become ever-more attuned to the practical and emotional needs of their children through intimate, everyday acts of care and the shared meanings that grow and deepen on the basis of the body’s capacity for resonance and fellow feeling.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"65 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43149218","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:Caviar or izquierda caviar (caviar left) is a term in Peru that describes privileged actors who advocate for progressive causes. The label is typically employed by right-wing commentators to criticize politicians, intellectuals, and activists. A systematic analysis of uses of “caviar” in Peruvian newspapers draws attention to the way the term comes to refer to the pursuit of wealth and influence through an embrace of progressive ideals and projects, as opposed to merely pointing to a correspondence between social privilege and left political views. This focus on “benefiting” responds to Peru’s uneven neoliberal development and recent experience of political violence but can also be understood as a reconfiguration of class relations and inequality that is characteristic of populist political styles around the globe. Engaging with scholarship on the place of progressive elites in right-wing populist formations, we suggest that anthropological attention to the meanings surrounding figures like the Peruvian caviar offers opportunities for understanding the role of normative ideas of wealth, inequality, and social mobility in contemporary populist appeals to “the people.”
{"title":"Thinking through Right-Wing Populism and Progressive Elites: On the Caviar as a Politico-Cultural Category in Peru","authors":"Joseph P. Feldman, Francisca Moraga Núñez","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Caviar or izquierda caviar (caviar left) is a term in Peru that describes privileged actors who advocate for progressive causes. The label is typically employed by right-wing commentators to criticize politicians, intellectuals, and activists. A systematic analysis of uses of “caviar” in Peruvian newspapers draws attention to the way the term comes to refer to the pursuit of wealth and influence through an embrace of progressive ideals and projects, as opposed to merely pointing to a correspondence between social privilege and left political views. This focus on “benefiting” responds to Peru’s uneven neoliberal development and recent experience of political violence but can also be understood as a reconfiguration of class relations and inequality that is characteristic of populist political styles around the globe. Engaging with scholarship on the place of progressive elites in right-wing populist formations, we suggest that anthropological attention to the meanings surrounding figures like the Peruvian caviar offers opportunities for understanding the role of normative ideas of wealth, inequality, and social mobility in contemporary populist appeals to “the people.”","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"149 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48233674","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 considers the student humanitarianism of an undergraduate university chapter of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) toward a reconsideration of political aesthetics within the anthropology of humanitarian activity. Via what the organization describes as a “modern-day underground railroad,” LiNK aims to assist North Korean refugees within China in transiting to safer havens in third countries, from which they may in turn seek permanent settlement, usually in South Korea. In service to this purpose, it sponsors a network of chapters or “rescue teams” that mostly aim to enroll collegiate or high school youth in the United States and beyond for fundraising as well as parallel goals of advocacy and the building of “awareness.” Focusing on one such group, and drawing on other considerations of the domestic subjects of wide-ranging humanitarian activity, my ethnographic examination explores what I refer to as the “anti-aesthetic aesthetics” of student LiNK, its refusal of the aesthetics of empathy common within other humanitarian practice. Chapter members did not by and large practice the sympathetic magic of much humanitarianism, for instance through the performance of asceticism in homage to the suffering North Korean refugees endure or through the transmission of tokens of care. The overall tone of LiNK student activity was instead quite light, to the point of sometimes being ethnographically jarring. I argue that this affective lightness should not be overlooked or dismissed, for it helped to form an emotional and conceptual armature for student activists’ recognition of North Koreans fleeing the country as “just like” themselves, a recognition present also in the use and reception of LiNK media. Ultimately, this political imagination of similarity between LiNK students and their population of concern suggests a critique of the anthropological critique of humanitarian subjectivities as based on a foundational bifurcation of modes of human being.
{"title":"The Bearable Lightness of Being LiNK: Anti-Aesthetic Banality and Student Humanitarianism Concerning North Korean Refugees","authors":"R. Oppenheim","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article considers the student humanitarianism of an undergraduate university chapter of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) toward a reconsideration of political aesthetics within the anthropology of humanitarian activity. Via what the organization describes as a “modern-day underground railroad,” LiNK aims to assist North Korean refugees within China in transiting to safer havens in third countries, from which they may in turn seek permanent settlement, usually in South Korea. In service to this purpose, it sponsors a network of chapters or “rescue teams” that mostly aim to enroll collegiate or high school youth in the United States and beyond for fundraising as well as parallel goals of advocacy and the building of “awareness.” Focusing on one such group, and drawing on other considerations of the domestic subjects of wide-ranging humanitarian activity, my ethnographic examination explores what I refer to as the “anti-aesthetic aesthetics” of student LiNK, its refusal of the aesthetics of empathy common within other humanitarian practice. Chapter members did not by and large practice the sympathetic magic of much humanitarianism, for instance through the performance of asceticism in homage to the suffering North Korean refugees endure or through the transmission of tokens of care. The overall tone of LiNK student activity was instead quite light, to the point of sometimes being ethnographically jarring. I argue that this affective lightness should not be overlooked or dismissed, for it helped to form an emotional and conceptual armature for student activists’ recognition of North Koreans fleeing the country as “just like” themselves, a recognition present also in the use and reception of LiNK media. Ultimately, this political imagination of similarity between LiNK students and their population of concern suggests a critique of the anthropological critique of humanitarian subjectivities as based on a foundational bifurcation of modes of human being.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"121 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49385443","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 global Land Back movements and Indigenous assertions of sovereignty in the face of settler colonialism, Mareike Winchell’s After Servitude examines the ongoing struggle to achieve justice in the wake of colonial violence and Indigenous dispossession in Bolivia. Following the election of Evo Morales in 2005, Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party re-centered land reform as a means to redress the legacies of racialized servitude epitomized by the country’s former hacienda system. Those efforts built on revolutionary and reformist projects dating back to the early 20th century, which sought to end the unpaid, obligatory servitude known as pongueaje that pervaded large rural estates, alongside other racial and often sexual exploitations that accompanied hierarchical labor relations between Indigenous, white, and mestizo Bolivians (Anthias 2021, Fabricant 2012, Soliz 2021). The Morales Administration framed its iteration of land reform as part of a broader decolonizing platform bent on responding to Indigenous demands and breaking with both a colonial past and neoliberal present. Yet, as Winchell shows in After Servitude, Morales-era land titling projects shared foundational assumptions with Liberal (Lockean) framings of emancipation as something best achieved through property ownership and as a means to secure mastery over oneself as a modern, autonomous citizen, threatening to eclipse other ways of being in relation with the land and each other. Given the centrality of land to so many movements for reparation, Winchell was surprised to find that many of the presumed beneficiaries of these Morales-era policy agendas frequently expressed skepticism about state-led individual and collective land titling in the rural Cochabamba
{"title":"After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia by Mareike Winchell (review)","authors":"S. Ellison","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"A global Land Back movements and Indigenous assertions of sovereignty in the face of settler colonialism, Mareike Winchell’s After Servitude examines the ongoing struggle to achieve justice in the wake of colonial violence and Indigenous dispossession in Bolivia. Following the election of Evo Morales in 2005, Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party re-centered land reform as a means to redress the legacies of racialized servitude epitomized by the country’s former hacienda system. Those efforts built on revolutionary and reformist projects dating back to the early 20th century, which sought to end the unpaid, obligatory servitude known as pongueaje that pervaded large rural estates, alongside other racial and often sexual exploitations that accompanied hierarchical labor relations between Indigenous, white, and mestizo Bolivians (Anthias 2021, Fabricant 2012, Soliz 2021). The Morales Administration framed its iteration of land reform as part of a broader decolonizing platform bent on responding to Indigenous demands and breaking with both a colonial past and neoliberal present. Yet, as Winchell shows in After Servitude, Morales-era land titling projects shared foundational assumptions with Liberal (Lockean) framings of emancipation as something best achieved through property ownership and as a means to secure mastery over oneself as a modern, autonomous citizen, threatening to eclipse other ways of being in relation with the land and each other. Given the centrality of land to so many movements for reparation, Winchell was surprised to find that many of the presumed beneficiaries of these Morales-era policy agendas frequently expressed skepticism about state-led individual and collective land titling in the rural Cochabamba","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"181 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44799477","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}
O February 21, 2022, the Colombian Constitutional Court decriminalized abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. This ruling is part of a vital wave of activism for greater reproductive rights in Latin America. The Colombian case follows important victories for the right to decide in Mexico (in the state of Coahuila, to be specific) and in Argentina, where abortion has been legalized for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. In contrast to this reality are the recent Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade—the 1973 Court landmark decision that made access to safe and legal abortion a constitutional right—and the latest measures toward a near-total abortion ban by more than a dozen U.S. states, including Idaho, Texas, and Tennessee. These recent legal decisions have reignited crucial debates on reproductive justice, defined as the right to bodily autonomy— to decide whether to have children and raise them in a healthy, safe, and sustainable environment. As feminist activists have reminded us, these measures have historically, widely, and disproportionately impacted poor women and women of color, who experience more significant economic and logistical complications in accessing abortion, even in spaces where it is legal or regulated. This is the landscape of reproductive rights in the Americas that informed my reading of Kimberly Theidon’s latest book, Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin, in which the anthropologist considers the “multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold” (7) in times of war and postwar. A feminist ethnography of postconflict based on three decades of fieldwork in Peru and Colombia, two countries embroiled in long-running internal armed conflicts, the book
2022年2月21日，哥伦比亚宪法法院宣布怀孕前24周内堕胎合法化。这项裁决是拉丁美洲争取更大生育权利的重要行动浪潮的一部分。在哥伦比亚的案件之前，在墨西哥(具体来说是在科阿韦拉州)和阿根廷，堕胎权取得了重大胜利，在这两个国家，怀孕14周以内的堕胎是合法的。与这一现实形成鲜明对比的是，最近最高法院推翻了罗伊诉韦德案(Roe v. wade)——1973年法院里程碑式的判决，使安全合法的堕胎成为宪法权利——以及美国十几个州(包括爱达荷州、德克萨斯州和田纳西州)近乎全面禁止堕胎的最新措施。这些最近的法律决定重新点燃了关于生殖正义的关键辩论，生殖正义被定义为身体自主权——决定是否要孩子并在健康、安全和可持续的环境中抚养他们。正如女权主义活动人士提醒我们的那样，这些措施在历史上、广泛地、不成比例地影响了贫困妇女和有色人种妇女，她们在堕胎方面经历了更大的经济和后勤问题，即使在堕胎合法或受监管的地方也是如此。这是美洲生殖权利的景观，它让我阅读了金伯利·塞顿的新书《战争的遗产:暴力、生态和亲族》，在这本书中，人类学家考虑了在战争和战后时期“孕育、怀孕和分娩的多重环境”。这本书是一本关于冲突后的女权主义民族志，基于在秘鲁和哥伦比亚三十年的田野调查，这两个国家卷入了长期的内部武装冲突
{"title":"Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin by Kimberly Theidon (review)","authors":"D. Pedraza","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0053","url":null,"abstract":"O February 21, 2022, the Colombian Constitutional Court decriminalized abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. This ruling is part of a vital wave of activism for greater reproductive rights in Latin America. The Colombian case follows important victories for the right to decide in Mexico (in the state of Coahuila, to be specific) and in Argentina, where abortion has been legalized for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. In contrast to this reality are the recent Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade—the 1973 Court landmark decision that made access to safe and legal abortion a constitutional right—and the latest measures toward a near-total abortion ban by more than a dozen U.S. states, including Idaho, Texas, and Tennessee. These recent legal decisions have reignited crucial debates on reproductive justice, defined as the right to bodily autonomy— to decide whether to have children and raise them in a healthy, safe, and sustainable environment. As feminist activists have reminded us, these measures have historically, widely, and disproportionately impacted poor women and women of color, who experience more significant economic and logistical complications in accessing abortion, even in spaces where it is legal or regulated. This is the landscape of reproductive rights in the Americas that informed my reading of Kimberly Theidon’s latest book, Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin, in which the anthropologist considers the “multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold” (7) in times of war and postwar. A feminist ethnography of postconflict based on three decades of fieldwork in Peru and Colombia, two countries embroiled in long-running internal armed conflicts, the book","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"915 - 922"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48767637","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 theorizes tech-led gentrification in San Francisco as a form of what I call, "tech-colonialism." Drawing on my ethnographic work with movements organizing against eviction and displacement, this article grapples with the critique from activists and protestors that gentrification and the tech-industry are "colonizing" the city. Taking this seriously, I argue that the analytic of "colonialism" provided San Francisco residents and activists with an important framework for political organizing, identity-making, solidarity-work, and forging belonging amidst the city's on-going "eviction epidemic." Beyond the discursive deployment by activists of "colonialism" as a concept, I also trace the material continuities between historical forms of colonial dispossession and present-day tech-colonialism, in which technology companies enclose the "commons," operate above laws, invest surplus capital in speculative urban racialized property regimes, and treat governments themselves as outdated and archaic institutions to be "disrupted." Ultimately, I define tech-colonialism as the social and spatial strategies of the technology industry that operate through colonial logics of racialized dispossession and materially extend and reproduce the colonial present.
{"title":"Tech-Colonialism: Gentrification, Resistance, and Belonging in San Francisco's Colonial Present","authors":"M. Maharawal","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0045","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article theorizes tech-led gentrification in San Francisco as a form of what I call, \"tech-colonialism.\" Drawing on my ethnographic work with movements organizing against eviction and displacement, this article grapples with the critique from activists and protestors that gentrification and the tech-industry are \"colonizing\" the city. Taking this seriously, I argue that the analytic of \"colonialism\" provided San Francisco residents and activists with an important framework for political organizing, identity-making, solidarity-work, and forging belonging amidst the city's on-going \"eviction epidemic.\" Beyond the discursive deployment by activists of \"colonialism\" as a concept, I also trace the material continuities between historical forms of colonial dispossession and present-day tech-colonialism, in which technology companies enclose the \"commons,\" operate above laws, invest surplus capital in speculative urban racialized property regimes, and treat governments themselves as outdated and archaic institutions to be \"disrupted.\" Ultimately, I define tech-colonialism as the social and spatial strategies of the technology industry that operate through colonial logics of racialized dispossession and materially extend and reproduce the colonial present.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"785 - 813"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46361605","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}
N weapons, contested treaties, and fraught international relations are at the forefront of what Western audiences hear about Iran these days. In Feeding Iran, Rose Wellman offers us something quite different: a rare window onto the quotidian lives, including the foodways, of those who support the current Iranian state, in contrast to the dissident voices within and outside of Iran. Wellman’s ethnographic fieldwork took place amongst the Iranian Basij, the paramilitary group that supports the principles behind the Iranian revolution of 1979. These Basiji Iranians are committed to the Islamic Republic, in contrast to those it describes as “Westernstruck.” Wellman’s primary field site for a year and a half is the provincial town of Fars-Abad, where she was not quite family, but also not quite a guest for the duration of her fieldwork, abiding by the standards of respectability of her host Basiji family, participating in their vibrant social life of hosting and visiting as well as in their everyday chores of cooking and preparing food. While the term “paramilitary” normally evokes political or religious extremists, that is not the view we get from Wellman’s book. Instead, we read of the very ordinariness and practicality of these Basiji families, as they attempt to live decent lives. The proper comportment of their bodies is envisioned as essential to their own souls, the moral and physical wellbeing of their families, and to the ongoing success of the Islamic Republic. Far from the state unilaterally imposing ways of being on their people, she shows how Basiji understand their everyday practices to uphold the state and its current interpretation of the Shi`i Islam. Religion is not cordoned off as a separate sphere; the words and traditions of the Prophet Mohammad and his martyred grandson, Imam Husayn, continue to inform
{"title":"Feeding Iran: Shi`i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic by Rose Wellman (review)","authors":"A. Meneley","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0051","url":null,"abstract":"N weapons, contested treaties, and fraught international relations are at the forefront of what Western audiences hear about Iran these days. In Feeding Iran, Rose Wellman offers us something quite different: a rare window onto the quotidian lives, including the foodways, of those who support the current Iranian state, in contrast to the dissident voices within and outside of Iran. Wellman’s ethnographic fieldwork took place amongst the Iranian Basij, the paramilitary group that supports the principles behind the Iranian revolution of 1979. These Basiji Iranians are committed to the Islamic Republic, in contrast to those it describes as “Westernstruck.” Wellman’s primary field site for a year and a half is the provincial town of Fars-Abad, where she was not quite family, but also not quite a guest for the duration of her fieldwork, abiding by the standards of respectability of her host Basiji family, participating in their vibrant social life of hosting and visiting as well as in their everyday chores of cooking and preparing food. While the term “paramilitary” normally evokes political or religious extremists, that is not the view we get from Wellman’s book. Instead, we read of the very ordinariness and practicality of these Basiji families, as they attempt to live decent lives. The proper comportment of their bodies is envisioned as essential to their own souls, the moral and physical wellbeing of their families, and to the ongoing success of the Islamic Republic. Far from the state unilaterally imposing ways of being on their people, she shows how Basiji understand their everyday practices to uphold the state and its current interpretation of the Shi`i Islam. Religion is not cordoned off as a separate sphere; the words and traditions of the Prophet Mohammad and his martyred grandson, Imam Husayn, continue to inform","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"907 - 910"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48122439","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:Complaints about the uncertainty and instability of everyday life often emanate from mainstream Albanian society, but a small number of local social entrepreneurs are seeking to overcome this prevailing thought matrix. In postulating their entrepreneurial tactics and goals, they see the mobilisation and transformation of the passive mindset (mentaliteti) of the majority of Albanians as the core prerequisite for their own economic success, as well as general well-being in the country. The paper explores mentaliteti and how it relates to entrepreneurial subjectivities, tactics, and plans. In their aim to mobilize the predominant mentaliteti, local entrepreneurs aspire to revitalize certain traditional moral norms such as responsibility. They do this by redeploying already familiar structural processes like remittances that have been important to the country's history and economy. Through their entrepreneurial plans and endeavors, this small group of individuals aims to bring back and remit specific, once important, ethical and moral values to ensure a better future for all. Both entrepreneurship and remittances are important drivers of economic and social enrichment and general prosperity in Albania today and in the future.
{"title":"Restoring Pasts and Enriching Futures in Albania","authors":"Nataša Gregorič Bon","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Complaints about the uncertainty and instability of everyday life often emanate from mainstream Albanian society, but a small number of local social entrepreneurs are seeking to overcome this prevailing thought matrix. In postulating their entrepreneurial tactics and goals, they see the mobilisation and transformation of the passive mindset (mentaliteti) of the majority of Albanians as the core prerequisite for their own economic success, as well as general well-being in the country. The paper explores mentaliteti and how it relates to entrepreneurial subjectivities, tactics, and plans. In their aim to mobilize the predominant mentaliteti, local entrepreneurs aspire to revitalize certain traditional moral norms such as responsibility. They do this by redeploying already familiar structural processes like remittances that have been important to the country's history and economy. Through their entrepreneurial plans and endeavors, this small group of individuals aims to bring back and remit specific, once important, ethical and moral values to ensure a better future for all. Both entrepreneurship and remittances are important drivers of economic and social enrichment and general prosperity in Albania today and in the future.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"731 - 760"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42645407","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:Scholarship on the Arab Gulf region often links heritage production with technologies of state pedagogy in its efforts to fix the spatial boundaries of a nation and entrench authoritarian rule. Yet, such a modular explanation ignores pressing questions regarding how statist narratives domesticate heterogeneous populations and regulate social difference. This paper explores the ways in which official accounts of the historical past have interpellated the material traces of diasporic communities, specifically the enclave of a minority community in Oman, the al-Lawati with links to the Sind region of the Indian sub-continent. The Sur al Lawati, a fortified residential enclosure of the Al Lawati community, draws from Gujarati traditional architecture rather than the surrounding Muscat cityscape. The sur (enclosure) has been mobilized as a token of the nation's pluralist history as an Indian Ocean trading power. This is consistent with Oman's expanding culture industry, which since the 1970s has generated history-making practices to sediment a homogenous Arab and general Islamic identity. However, using archival and ethnographic research, I argue that the enclave's material presence has presided over the complexities of a more entangled history in which the boundaries of this community of merchants and retailers have been reconfigured over the course of the 20th century. The very act of incorporating the sur and its residents into the history of a national people is grounded on the one hand in celebrating a cosmopolitan past as a sea-faring nation that traversed the Indian Ocean waters. On the other hand, it is also tethered to a sense of the past shaped by such categories as the "Arab tribe" and a "generic Islam" Both histories become an exercise of selectivity. They involve gaps, disjunctures, and diversity at the core of what passes as a unifying history of a sovereign nation.
{"title":"Assimilating the Heterogeneity of Migrant Populations through a National Past: Transforming a Shiʿa Minority Community in Post-Nationalist Oman","authors":"Amal Sachedina","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0047","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Scholarship on the Arab Gulf region often links heritage production with technologies of state pedagogy in its efforts to fix the spatial boundaries of a nation and entrench authoritarian rule. Yet, such a modular explanation ignores pressing questions regarding how statist narratives domesticate heterogeneous populations and regulate social difference. This paper explores the ways in which official accounts of the historical past have interpellated the material traces of diasporic communities, specifically the enclave of a minority community in Oman, the al-Lawati with links to the Sind region of the Indian sub-continent. The Sur al Lawati, a fortified residential enclosure of the Al Lawati community, draws from Gujarati traditional architecture rather than the surrounding Muscat cityscape. The sur (enclosure) has been mobilized as a token of the nation's pluralist history as an Indian Ocean trading power. This is consistent with Oman's expanding culture industry, which since the 1970s has generated history-making practices to sediment a homogenous Arab and general Islamic identity. However, using archival and ethnographic research, I argue that the enclave's material presence has presided over the complexities of a more entangled history in which the boundaries of this community of merchants and retailers have been reconfigured over the course of the 20th century. The very act of incorporating the sur and its residents into the history of a national people is grounded on the one hand in celebrating a cosmopolitan past as a sea-faring nation that traversed the Indian Ocean waters. On the other hand, it is also tethered to a sense of the past shaped by such categories as the \"Arab tribe\" and a \"generic Islam\" Both histories become an exercise of selectivity. They involve gaps, disjunctures, and diversity at the core of what passes as a unifying history of a sovereign nation.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"839 - 868"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49543931","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：