Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1177/14634996211066367
Gregory Feldman
This article argues that Schmitt's “state of exception” is only one expression of the deeper sovereign phenomenon, specifically the human capacity to inaugurate new beginnings in shared space. Sovereign action thus includes anything from Schmitt's vertically-imposed state of exception, which eliminates political subjecthood, to the thrill of horizontally-arranged movements, which enable it. To make this argument, the article foregoes the idea of the bounded, internally coherent liberal subject in favor of a relational subject, who is both internally divided and inherently tied to others. The subject's instability and relationality make new beginnings possible and renders sovereign action promising, even if risky. An unexpected example of this fuller view of sovereignty appears in an undercover police team in southern Europe that investigates global human smuggling and trafficking rings. Based on extensive ethnographic research, this article shows how they often act on their own ethical judgments, reached by considering the standpoints of people tied to their investigations, rather than through obedience to law, policy, or superior command. Acting outside constitutional order, these investigators, (re)constitute themselves as particular persons through their joint actions and simultaneously constitute modest sovereign spaces, however tentatively.
{"title":"Sovereignty as new beginnings: Action beyond the liberal subject, among undercover police investigators in Europe, for example","authors":"Gregory Feldman","doi":"10.1177/14634996211066367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211066367","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Schmitt's “state of exception” is only one expression of the deeper sovereign phenomenon, specifically the human capacity to inaugurate new beginnings in shared space. Sovereign action thus includes anything from Schmitt's vertically-imposed state of exception, which eliminates political subjecthood, to the thrill of horizontally-arranged movements, which enable it. To make this argument, the article foregoes the idea of the bounded, internally coherent liberal subject in favor of a relational subject, who is both internally divided and inherently tied to others. The subject's instability and relationality make new beginnings possible and renders sovereign action promising, even if risky. An unexpected example of this fuller view of sovereignty appears in an undercover police team in southern Europe that investigates global human smuggling and trafficking rings. Based on extensive ethnographic research, this article shows how they often act on their own ethical judgments, reached by considering the standpoints of people tied to their investigations, rather than through obedience to law, policy, or superior command. Acting outside constitutional order, these investigators, (re)constitute themselves as particular persons through their joint actions and simultaneously constitute modest sovereign spaces, however tentatively.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"317 - 337"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45736708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1177/14634996211059724
M. Benussi
This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of ‘ethical infrastructure’: the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists’ striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the ‘profane’, often unassuming or religiously unmarked, yet essential material scaffolding constituting the ‘material conditions of possibility’ for pious life in the lifeworld of late modernity. Halalness is conceptualised not as an inherent quality of a clearly defined set of things, but as a (sometimes complicated) relationship between humans, ethical intentionality, and infrastructurally organised habitats. Pointing beyond the case of halal, this article syncretises theories of self-cultivation, material religion, ethical consumption, and infrastructure to address current lacunas and explore fresh theoretical and methodological ground. This ‘ethical infrastructure’ framework enables us to conceptualise the embeddedness of contemporary ethicists in complex environments and the process by which processes of inner self-fashioning change and are changed by material worlds.
{"title":"Ethical infrastructure: Halal and the ecology of askesis in Muslim Russia","authors":"M. Benussi","doi":"10.1177/14634996211059724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211059724","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of ‘ethical infrastructure’: the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists’ striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the ‘profane’, often unassuming or religiously unmarked, yet essential material scaffolding constituting the ‘material conditions of possibility’ for pious life in the lifeworld of late modernity. Halalness is conceptualised not as an inherent quality of a clearly defined set of things, but as a (sometimes complicated) relationship between humans, ethical intentionality, and infrastructurally organised habitats. Pointing beyond the case of halal, this article syncretises theories of self-cultivation, material religion, ethical consumption, and infrastructure to address current lacunas and explore fresh theoretical and methodological ground. This ‘ethical infrastructure’ framework enables us to conceptualise the embeddedness of contemporary ethicists in complex environments and the process by which processes of inner self-fashioning change and are changed by material worlds.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"294 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42472197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/14634996211050610
Martin Palecek
Holbraad and Pedersen have revisited the ontological turn, suggesting that it is strictly concerned with methodology only. Holbraad goes even further, accepting an aesthetic criterion for ethnography only. This is a sign of theoretical decline. In my paper, I claim that ontologists’ tendency to overestimate the significance of ethnographic experience causes theoretical confusion. I claim that neo-pragmatic analysis can eliminate this confusion. I also argue that there is only one remaining issue from the ontological turn that is not entirely lost. A careful evaluation of all folk categories, with all its possible consequences, can boost the robustness of all competitive theories, Cognitive Evolutionary Science included.
{"title":"The ontological turn revisited: Theoretical decline. Why cannot ontologists fulfil their promise?","authors":"Martin Palecek","doi":"10.1177/14634996211050610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211050610","url":null,"abstract":"Holbraad and Pedersen have revisited the ontological turn, suggesting that it is strictly concerned with methodology only. Holbraad goes even further, accepting an aesthetic criterion for ethnography only. This is a sign of theoretical decline. In my paper, I claim that ontologists’ tendency to overestimate the significance of ethnographic experience causes theoretical confusion. I claim that neo-pragmatic analysis can eliminate this confusion. I also argue that there is only one remaining issue from the ontological turn that is not entirely lost. A careful evaluation of all folk categories, with all its possible consequences, can boost the robustness of all competitive theories, Cognitive Evolutionary Science included.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"154 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41569730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-06DOI: 10.1177/14634996211037124
T. Diphoorn, N. Wiegink
The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of ‘corporate sovereignty’ and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. This contrasts with claims made by other (non-state) actors who operate in a permissive space that (regularly) lacks this legally grounded relationship with the state. By unpacking this state-sanctioned permissive space and highlighting the role of the state as the arbiter, our approach to corporate sovereignty offers a new comparative analytical perspective to theorize how sovereignty is performed and opens ethnographic avenues to explore how sovereignty is negotiated and co-produced across diverse localities. To elucidate our argument, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on coal mining companies in Mozambique and private security companies in South Africa. By focusing on cases that differ, we want to show the multitude of ways in which corporate sovereignty is enacted and takes shape.
{"title":"Corporate sovereignty: Negotiating permissive power for profit in Southern Africa","authors":"T. Diphoorn, N. Wiegink","doi":"10.1177/14634996211037124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211037124","url":null,"abstract":"The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of ‘corporate sovereignty’ and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. This contrasts with claims made by other (non-state) actors who operate in a permissive space that (regularly) lacks this legally grounded relationship with the state. By unpacking this state-sanctioned permissive space and highlighting the role of the state as the arbiter, our approach to corporate sovereignty offers a new comparative analytical perspective to theorize how sovereignty is performed and opens ethnographic avenues to explore how sovereignty is negotiated and co-produced across diverse localities. To elucidate our argument, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on coal mining companies in Mozambique and private security companies in South Africa. By focusing on cases that differ, we want to show the multitude of ways in which corporate sovereignty is enacted and takes shape.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"422 - 442"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42119463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-09DOI: 10.1177/14634996211035365
M. Schnegg
The Damara pastoralists (ǂnūkhoen) in Namibia distinguish a diverse range of rains. Some rains kill livestock, others care for insects and still others wash away the footprints of the deceased, allowing the person to exist in the spirit realm. While anthropologists have documented cultural classifications like the Namibian rains for decades, we still lack a convincing theory to explain how they come to exist. To address this, I develop a phenomenological perspective and theorise how experience contributes to what rain becomes. I argue with Husserl that the present in which we experience the rain is not a discrete moment, but a unity across a succession of ‘nows’. In the process, perceptions, images, memories and expectations about past and future events blend. In other words, a web of meaningful relationships connects the rain we experience ‘now’ with multiple past and future entities, including people, plants, spirits and animals. I refer to this as network formation. Combining the analyses of the people's pastoral being-in-the-world and their historical–political context, including post-colonialism, allows an explanation as to why some of those combinations are singled out and become distinct ontological entities. I refer to this as node selection. Combining the two processes – network formation and node selection – allows for an explanation as to why precipitation becomes discernible and meaningful as eleven different Namibian rains.
{"title":"Eleven Namibian rains: A phenomenological analysis of experience in time","authors":"M. Schnegg","doi":"10.1177/14634996211035365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211035365","url":null,"abstract":"The Damara pastoralists (ǂnūkhoen) in Namibia distinguish a diverse range of rains. Some rains kill livestock, others care for insects and still others wash away the footprints of the deceased, allowing the person to exist in the spirit realm. While anthropologists have documented cultural classifications like the Namibian rains for decades, we still lack a convincing theory to explain how they come to exist. To address this, I develop a phenomenological perspective and theorise how experience contributes to what rain becomes. I argue with Husserl that the present in which we experience the rain is not a discrete moment, but a unity across a succession of ‘nows’. In the process, perceptions, images, memories and expectations about past and future events blend. In other words, a web of meaningful relationships connects the rain we experience ‘now’ with multiple past and future entities, including people, plants, spirits and animals. I refer to this as network formation. Combining the analyses of the people's pastoral being-in-the-world and their historical–political context, including post-colonialism, allows an explanation as to why some of those combinations are singled out and become distinct ontological entities. I refer to this as node selection. Combining the two processes – network formation and node selection – allows for an explanation as to why precipitation becomes discernible and meaningful as eleven different Namibian rains.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"23 1","pages":"33 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45702690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-26DOI: 10.1177/14634996211033443
James Faubion
In “Governing the Future,” Limor Samimian-Darash does much to illuminate scenarism and the divergence between the simulations and the scenarios that constitute the chief apparatuses of anticipatory governance. She renders both of them fabulations, drawing the concept as well as the divergence between simulations and scenarios from the epistemological and ontological precedents that Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze have set. Her renderings are compelling, but leave many epistemological and ontological issues unresolved. I address three of these issues. First, it has to do with what sort of concept scenarism might be. Second, it has to do with the poetics of simulations and scenarios. Third, it has to do with the virtuality or actuality of simulations and scenarios, in their planning as in their enactments.
{"title":"Fabulous: Remarks on scenarism, simulations, and scenarios","authors":"James Faubion","doi":"10.1177/14634996211033443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211033443","url":null,"abstract":"In “Governing the Future,” Limor Samimian-Darash does much to illuminate scenarism and the divergence between the simulations and the scenarios that constitute the chief apparatuses of anticipatory governance. She renders both of them fabulations, drawing the concept as well as the divergence between simulations and scenarios from the epistemological and ontological precedents that Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze have set. Her renderings are compelling, but leave many epistemological and ontological issues unresolved. I address three of these issues. First, it has to do with what sort of concept scenarism might be. Second, it has to do with the poetics of simulations and scenarios. Third, it has to do with the virtuality or actuality of simulations and scenarios, in their planning as in their enactments.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"417 - 421"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14634996211033443","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43947474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-25DOI: 10.1177/14634996211030196
Sian Lazar
Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.
{"title":"Anthropology and the politics of alterity: A Latin American dialectic and its relevance for ontological anthropologies","authors":"Sian Lazar","doi":"10.1177/14634996211030196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211030196","url":null,"abstract":"Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"131 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14634996211030196","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42974866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-21DOI: 10.1177/14634996211029729
I. Hovland
How can anthropologists describe ethical values—that is, what emerges as important—in the social, material worlds of Christianity? This article considers the question by working along interfaces. The first part of the article discusses two diverging approaches to values in the anthropology of Christianity (realizing values and producing values) and situates these in relation to three groupings in the anthropology of ethics and morality (deontological ethics, first-person virtue ethics, and poststructuralist virtue ethics). The second part of the article follows one value—the value of movement—in a historical example: the writings of a group of Christian women in 1880s and 1890s Norway. I argue that ethical values move in multiple ways through this social world: people realize values, people produce values and people work on values.
{"title":"Value moves in multiple ways: Ethical values, the anthropology of Christianity, and an example of women and movement","authors":"I. Hovland","doi":"10.1177/14634996211029729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211029729","url":null,"abstract":"How can anthropologists describe ethical values—that is, what emerges as important—in the social, material worlds of Christianity? This article considers the question by working along interfaces. The first part of the article discusses two diverging approaches to values in the anthropology of Christianity (realizing values and producing values) and situates these in relation to three groupings in the anthropology of ethics and morality (deontological ethics, first-person virtue ethics, and poststructuralist virtue ethics). The second part of the article follows one value—the value of movement—in a historical example: the writings of a group of Christian women in 1880s and 1890s Norway. I argue that ethical values move in multiple ways through this social world: people realize values, people produce values and people work on values.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"273 - 293"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14634996211029729","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44329648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-29DOI: 10.1177/14634996211011749
P. Pels
Renewed calls for decolonizing anthropology in the 21st century raise the question of what work earlier waves of decolonization since the 1960s have left undone. Some of this work should focus on the classification of human differences, which figured prominently in all phases of the discipline’s history: as a methodology in its racist phases, as an object of study during its late colonial phase of professionalization, as self-critical reflexivity in the 1980s and 1990s, and as a renewed critique in the 21st century. Can a universal methodology of studying classifications of human kinds arise from the discipline’s past of colonial stereotyping? I argue affirmatively, through an approach that recognizes time as the epistemic condition that connects past and present positions to present and future methodologies. Firstly, my analysis distinguishes the parochial embedding in colonial culture of Durkheim and Mauss’ ideas about classification from their more universal intentions. This is then developed into a threefold reflexive and timeful methodology of studying classification’s nominal-descriptive, constructive, and interventionist dimensions—a process of adding temporality to the study of classification. Subsequently, Anténor Firmin’s 19th-century critique of racial classifications, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness help to show how this threefold methodology addresses the insufficiently theorized process of being classified and discriminated against through racial categories wielded by the powers that be. These arguments radicalize the essay’s timeful perspective by concluding that we need to avoid modernist uses of time as classification and adopt the aforementioned threefold methodology in order to put time in classifications of human kinds. This reverses modern positivism’s subordination to methodological rules of the epistemic conditions posed by contingent history and shows instead that the universal goals of methodology should be understood as a future ideal.
21世纪对非殖民化人类学的重新呼吁提出了一个问题，即自20世纪60年代以来的早期非殖民化浪潮中有哪些工作没有完成。其中一些工作应该关注人类差异的分类，这在该学科历史的所有阶段都占有突出地位:作为种族主义阶段的方法论，作为专业化后期殖民阶段的研究对象，作为20世纪80年代和90年代的自我批判反思性，以及作为21世纪的新批判。一种研究人类种类分类的普遍方法能否从该学科过去的殖民刻板印象中产生?我肯定地说，通过一种方法，承认时间是连接过去和现在的立场，现在和未来的方法的认识条件。首先，我的分析区分了迪尔凯姆和莫斯关于分类的思想在殖民文化中的狭隘嵌入与其更普遍的意图。然后，这被发展成研究分类的名义描述性、建设性和干预性维度的三重反思性和时效性方法论，这是一个为分类研究增加时间性的过程。随后，antsamonor Firmin在19世纪对种族分类的批判，以及W. E. B. Du Bois的双重意识理论，都有助于展示这种三重方法是如何解决被权力所运用的种族分类和歧视的不充分的理论化过程的。这些论点通过得出结论，我们需要避免现代主义者使用时间作为分类，并采用上述三种方法，以便将时间放在人类种类的分类中，从而激进了文章的时间观点。这扭转了现代实证主义从属于偶然历史所构成的认识条件的方法论规则，而是表明方法论的普遍目标应该被理解为未来的理想。
{"title":"Classification revisited: On time, methodology and position in decolonizing anthropology","authors":"P. Pels","doi":"10.1177/14634996211011749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211011749","url":null,"abstract":"Renewed calls for decolonizing anthropology in the 21st century raise the question of what work earlier waves of decolonization since the 1960s have left undone. Some of this work should focus on the classification of human differences, which figured prominently in all phases of the discipline’s history: as a methodology in its racist phases, as an object of study during its late colonial phase of professionalization, as self-critical reflexivity in the 1980s and 1990s, and as a renewed critique in the 21st century. Can a universal methodology of studying classifications of human kinds arise from the discipline’s past of colonial stereotyping? I argue affirmatively, through an approach that recognizes time as the epistemic condition that connects past and present positions to present and future methodologies. Firstly, my analysis distinguishes the parochial embedding in colonial culture of Durkheim and Mauss’ ideas about classification from their more universal intentions. This is then developed into a threefold reflexive and timeful methodology of studying classification’s nominal-descriptive, constructive, and interventionist dimensions—a process of adding temporality to the study of classification. Subsequently, Anténor Firmin’s 19th-century critique of racial classifications, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness help to show how this threefold methodology addresses the insufficiently theorized process of being classified and discriminated against through racial categories wielded by the powers that be. These arguments radicalize the essay’s timeful perspective by concluding that we need to avoid modernist uses of time as classification and adopt the aforementioned threefold methodology in order to put time in classifications of human kinds. This reverses modern positivism’s subordination to methodological rules of the epistemic conditions posed by contingent history and shows instead that the universal goals of methodology should be understood as a future ideal.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"53 1","pages":"78 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14634996211011749","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65622249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-25DOI: 10.1177/14634996211010512
Rasmus Dyring, L. Grøn
In this article, we outline a critical phenomenology of potentiality as it emerges in life with dementia. Foregrounding the sources of everyday creativity that are part of life with dementia, we propose a critical counter-argument to that of dementia as a form of living death. Our ethnographic vantage point is an episode we encountered during fieldwork at a dementia unit in Denmark. Here, one of the residents of the unit, Ellen, is interrupted in her ways of inhabiting the world by an intimate encounter with a polymorphous creature she calls ‘the Little One’. We argue that this interruption is an ontological event that ushers in new meaningful possibilities for Ellen and the Little One—and for Ellen’s relatives, caregivers, and several other residents—to co-inhabit the world. In critical dialogue with recent theoretical developments in the anthropology of cognitive disability and the ontological turn, we develop a differential social ontology capable of tracing how such interruptions characterize everyday life at the unit—and how various ways of responding to the potentiality of interruptions form responsive communities of care that cross often profound differences between people and between humans and non-humans, such as Ellen and the Little One. We conclude by briefly sketching some implications of these arguments for the care ethics that underlie institutional practices of dementia care.
{"title":"Ellen and the little one: A critical phenomenology of potentiality in life with dementia","authors":"Rasmus Dyring, L. Grøn","doi":"10.1177/14634996211010512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211010512","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we outline a critical phenomenology of potentiality as it emerges in life with dementia. Foregrounding the sources of everyday creativity that are part of life with dementia, we propose a critical counter-argument to that of dementia as a form of living death. Our ethnographic vantage point is an episode we encountered during fieldwork at a dementia unit in Denmark. Here, one of the residents of the unit, Ellen, is interrupted in her ways of inhabiting the world by an intimate encounter with a polymorphous creature she calls ‘the Little One’. We argue that this interruption is an ontological event that ushers in new meaningful possibilities for Ellen and the Little One—and for Ellen’s relatives, caregivers, and several other residents—to co-inhabit the world. In critical dialogue with recent theoretical developments in the anthropology of cognitive disability and the ontological turn, we develop a differential social ontology capable of tracing how such interruptions characterize everyday life at the unit—and how various ways of responding to the potentiality of interruptions form responsive communities of care that cross often profound differences between people and between humans and non-humans, such as Ellen and the Little One. We conclude by briefly sketching some implications of these arguments for the care ethics that underlie institutional practices of dementia care.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"3 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14634996211010512","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47027556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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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