Anthropological Theory最新文献

Hospitality, as an analytic and a lived experience, is central to the day-to-day workings of home, and to managing the tensions and contradictions inherent in place attachment and appropriation on any scale - from the domestic to the national one. This emerges as a contentious and yet under-researched social question whenever newcomers such as immigrants and refugees lay some claim for guesthood. Following this premise, and based also on our fieldwork, this article outlines a conceptual argument for a joint understanding of home and hospitality in time and space. This leads us to conceptualize 'calibrated hospitality' to appreciate the ongoing dialectic between the spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions of the host-guest encounter in immigrant- and refugee-receiving societies. Looking at immigrant and refugee inclusion in terms of hospitality being claimed, negotiated, and possibly denied, relative to the theories and practices of 'home', opens an extensive conceptual terrain for social research that is more connected to foundational lived cultural idioms, and contextually more sensitive, than approaches based only on policy frames such as integration, or on formal entitlements such as access or residence rights.

This article aims at characterizing how the problem of scepticism about other minds appears in anthropology. To do so, I offer a close reading of Nils Bubandt's book, The Empty Seashell (2014), a study of witchcraft and doubt on the North Maluku Island of Halmahera. Through its deep engagement with issues revolving around scepticism, I take the book to be an example of the tendency to consider the problem of sceptical doubt about others as a problem of access to the inner thoughts and feelings of other people. By looking closely at its attempts to respond to this problem, I endeavour to shed light on the ways in which, in working the problem of scepticism out, we may be doing exactly the reverse: giving into the sceptical impulse. How does a certain way of asking questions about scepticism nourish the drive to it? I am interested in the drift towards scepticism that precisely takes the form of a claim against it. In showing that such a drift is prompted by a certain use of language, I hope to elucidate some ways in which scepticism is lived and is thus not merely an intellectual conundrum, but an ordinary human condition.

Fifteen years ago, Jane Guyer (2007) argued that the near future had largely disappeared from collective imaginaries, replaced by longer-term horizons associated with evangelical Christianity and free market capitalism. While not seeking to repudiate Guyer, this article argues that recent developments have radically altered relationships to the future. It points to a previously unrecognized connection between two of the most significant challenges facing humanity today: the experience of living through a global pandemic and international efforts to limit the harmful consequences of climate change. Responses to both phenomena invoke the grammatical structure of the future perfect tense. During the pandemic, people began to imagine themselves living at a future moment in time when they have already resumed participating in those activities they have been prevented from undertaking, an example of the future perfect. The Paris Climate Agreement, which encourages states and other parties to take action in the present so that in the future they will already have saved the planet, also relies on the future perfect. In reaction to the pandemic and climate change, the near future has reemerged as a focal point of temporal attention. This article examines how the future appears in the present and the contribution of the future perfect tense to the creation of alternative futures.