This article examines family care for sick older people in a rural hospital in Guangdong Province. Drawing on six months of fieldwork, I show how local families divide the duty of care for the elderly, and how care is perceived in local discourse. Specific attention is paid to competing notions of care and how their meanings are negotiated: neighbors and even family members often show themselves to be indifferent to elder care, and care work is feminized and devalued. At the same time, family members and daughters in particular have to shoulder duties of care. The contradictory emotions of gendered care work offer a vantage point to understand the changing dynamics of patriarchy, marketization, and state paternalism in China today.
{"title":"The Contradictory Emotions of Gendered Labor","authors":"X. Zou","doi":"10.3167/sa.2023.670101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2023.670101","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines family care for sick older people in a rural hospital in Guangdong Province. Drawing on six months of fieldwork, I show how local families divide the duty of care for the elderly, and how care is perceived in local discourse. Specific attention is paid to competing notions of care and how their meanings are negotiated: neighbors and even family members often show themselves to be indifferent to elder care, and care work is feminized and devalued. At the same time, family members and daughters in particular have to shoulder duties of care. The contradictory emotions of gendered care work offer a vantage point to understand the changing dynamics of patriarchy, marketization, and state paternalism in China today.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77019566","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}
M. Holbraad, D. Murray, Evanthia Patsiaoura, Suely Kofes, Rosalind C. Morris, Iracema Dulley
On the Emic Gesture: Difference and Ethnography in Roy Wagner, by Iracema Dulley. New York: Routledge, 2019.
论主位姿态:罗伊·瓦格纳的差异与民族志，伊拉西玛·杜利著。纽约:劳特利奇出版社，2019。
{"title":"Book Symposium","authors":"M. Holbraad, D. Murray, Evanthia Patsiaoura, Suely Kofes, Rosalind C. Morris, Iracema Dulley","doi":"10.3167/sa.2023.670105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2023.670105","url":null,"abstract":"On the Emic Gesture: Difference and Ethnography in Roy Wagner, by Iracema Dulley. New York: Routledge, 2019.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80201103","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}
The magical idiom of evil occupies an important position in numerous Christian societies. Cosmological capture refers to a historicized process through which Christian narratives and institutions attempt to integrate evil into dualist and oppositional cosmological schemas. This article begins by addressing the way that biblical stories of defeated magicians contribute to modern dynamics of cosmological capture. It then proceeds to address the role of evil in Cypriot society through narratives and descriptions of everyday rituals and events. As these narratives and rituals show, capture remains incomplete, and as evil extends beyond the limits of dualist categorization, the result is a situation of ‘magical disorder’: a cosmological arrangement in which evil manifests as an indifferent and inhuman force, which nevertheless conditions everyday experience and social relations.
{"title":"Evil, Cosmological Capture, and Magical Disorder in Cyprus","authors":"T. Kyriakides","doi":"10.3167/sa.2023.670102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2023.670102","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The magical idiom of evil occupies an important position in numerous Christian societies. Cosmological capture refers to a historicized process through which Christian narratives and institutions attempt to integrate evil into dualist and oppositional cosmological schemas. This article begins by addressing the way that biblical stories of defeated magicians contribute to modern dynamics of cosmological capture. It then proceeds to address the role of evil in Cypriot society through narratives and descriptions of everyday rituals and events. As these narratives and rituals show, capture remains incomplete, and as evil extends beyond the limits of dualist categorization, the result is a situation of ‘magical disorder’: a cosmological arrangement in which evil manifests as an indifferent and inhuman force, which nevertheless conditions everyday experience and social relations.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79553537","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}
One of the most disturbing phenomena during episodes of mass violence concerns individuals who hated a specific group and harmed some of its members while making exceptions for people they had a relationship with. A preexisting social tie, not moral consciousness, produces this aversion to harming a party to the relationship, even if rescuing vulnerable individuals contradicts personal beliefs, orders, or group loyalty. Hatred is stronger than bonds only when the latter are weak, fraught, or missing in the first place. I call this phenomenon relational exceptionalism. Bringing the anthropological literature on interpersonal relationships to bear on studies of mass violence, this article illustrates that to trigger relational exceptionalism, a relationship requires not reciprocity, trust, obligations, affinities, or nearness, but a degree of autonomy.
{"title":"Hatred Is Not Stronger Than Bonds","authors":"Jean-Philippe Belleau","doi":"10.3167/sa.2023.670103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2023.670103","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000One of the most disturbing phenomena during episodes of mass violence concerns individuals who hated a specific group and harmed some of its members while making exceptions for people they had a relationship with. A preexisting social tie, not moral consciousness, produces this aversion to harming a party to the relationship, even if rescuing vulnerable individuals contradicts personal beliefs, orders, or group loyalty. Hatred is stronger than bonds only when the latter are weak, fraught, or missing in the first place. I call this phenomenon relational exceptionalism. Bringing the anthropological literature on interpersonal relationships to bear on studies of mass violence, this article illustrates that to trigger relational exceptionalism, a relationship requires not reciprocity, trust, obligations, affinities, or nearness, but a degree of autonomy.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90464927","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}
Guido Sprenger, A. J. Pickles, Ilana Gershon, J. Robbins, Rebecca Bryant, M. Strathern
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange—giving, taking, and returning—with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconsidering gift exchange in these terms provides a set of analytical terms, like strong and weak expectations, moral horizons of value systems, and the opacity of personhood, that can be applied to sharing and commodity trade as well. This constitutes a dynamic and expansive theory for the analysis and comparison of case studies that understands society as a shared project of expecting the future.
{"title":"Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions","authors":"Guido Sprenger, A. J. Pickles, Ilana Gershon, J. Robbins, Rebecca Bryant, M. Strathern","doi":"10.3167/sa.2023.670104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2023.670104","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange—giving, taking, and returning—with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconsidering gift exchange in these terms provides a set of analytical terms, like strong and weak expectations, moral horizons of value systems, and the opacity of personhood, that can be applied to sharing and commodity trade as well. This constitutes a dynamic and expansive theory for the analysis and comparison of case studies that understands society as a shared project of expecting the future.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85616472","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}
Valued for its affective and material affordances, competition has long been fundamental to children's participation in development. Despite this, the experiential and material worlds of child competitors have long been overlooked. Combining ethnographic insights from fieldwork in a Delhi NGO with archival sources and reflections on the legacies of Enlightenment philosophy, this article offers a child-centered corrective to Thomas Malaby's call to focus studies of games on institutions and their projects. Additionally, heeding Liisa Malkki's challenge to reconceptualize children as persons and not just as elementary forms of shared humanity, I argue that it is only through sustained engagement with children's experiences and material contributions to competition that we can properly understand how these frequently exceed—and trouble—institutional aims.
{"title":"“Is There Going to Be Another Competition Today?”","authors":"Annie McCarthy","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660405","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Valued for its affective and material affordances, competition has long been fundamental to children's participation in development. Despite this, the experiential and material worlds of child competitors have long been overlooked. Combining ethnographic insights from fieldwork in a Delhi NGO with archival sources and reflections on the legacies of Enlightenment philosophy, this article offers a child-centered corrective to Thomas Malaby's call to focus studies of games on institutions and their projects. Additionally, heeding Liisa Malkki's challenge to reconceptualize children as persons and not just as elementary forms of shared humanity, I argue that it is only through sustained engagement with children's experiences and material contributions to competition that we can properly understand how these frequently exceed—and trouble—institutional aims.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73591700","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}
Anthropologists, like neoliberal economists, have often assumed that competition (re)orders society in broadly predictable ways. By contrast, we contend that competition always facilitates changes beyond its anticipated outcomes and disciplinary effects. We argue that the outcomes of competition are contingent on the varied and co-existing interpretations of audiences, arbiters, and competitors about the nature of competition, what is worth competing for, and how to go about it. Hence, although it is often instituted with the intention of authoritatively determining value, generating order, or engineering predefined changes, competition inherently affords alternative and unexpected possibilities for sociality. In doing so, competition mediates divergent social orders and modes of relating, rather than instituting one order or another.
{"title":"Introduction: What Competition Does","authors":"Leo Hopkinson, Teodor Zidaru","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660401","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Anthropologists, like neoliberal economists, have often assumed that competition (re)orders society in broadly predictable ways. By contrast, we contend that competition always facilitates changes beyond its anticipated outcomes and disciplinary effects. We argue that the outcomes of competition are contingent on the varied and co-existing interpretations of audiences, arbiters, and competitors about the nature of competition, what is worth competing for, and how to go about it. Hence, although it is often instituted with the intention of authoritatively determining value, generating order, or engineering predefined changes, competition inherently affords alternative and unexpected possibilities for sociality. In doing so, competition mediates divergent social orders and modes of relating, rather than instituting one order or another.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83156456","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}
Indonesia has long employed competitions as means of improving ‘human resource quality,’ believing competitions to elicit fantasies of achievement that, even if unrealized, motivate participants to self-cultivate in ways generative for the nation. Meanwhile, scholarly critics argue that such policies encourage a counterproductive competitive individualism that serves the interests of neoliberal capitalism. This article complicates both of these understandings of what competition does. I show that Indonesians may participate in competitions out of a desire to provide for, and receive recognition from, family, mentors, and the state. When the afterlives of competition fail to live up to this ideal, competitors can become alienated from the relations and institutions they blame for thwarting the ‘alter-life’ that could have been, subsequently embracing individualism and the market.
{"title":"Afterlives and Alter-lives","authors":"N. Long","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660406","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Indonesia has long employed competitions as means of improving ‘human resource quality,’ believing competitions to elicit fantasies of achievement that, even if unrealized, motivate participants to self-cultivate in ways generative for the nation. Meanwhile, scholarly critics argue that such policies encourage a counterproductive competitive individualism that serves the interests of neoliberal capitalism. This article complicates both of these understandings of what competition does. I show that Indonesians may participate in competitions out of a desire to provide for, and receive recognition from, family, mentors, and the state. When the afterlives of competition fail to live up to this ideal, competitors can become alienated from the relations and institutions they blame for thwarting the ‘alter-life’ that could have been, subsequently embracing individualism and the market.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83287112","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}
This article explores competition as a technique of social transformation in Amazonia. In recent years, the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia have begun staging festivals to celebrate the unity and autonomy of their new sedentary communities. Festivals include sporting games and beauty pageants that create a positive spirit of competition through dramatization and ranking. In these competitions, the drama and ranking take place within a ‘play-frame’—a frame that separates the festival from everyday life, but also re-enacts new practices of commensuration that have become part of daily life via schooling, markets, and electoral politics. If commensuration works against Shuar autonomy, the play-frame of the festival creates future possibilities for autonomy and mutuality.
{"title":"Competing for the Future","authors":"Natalia Buitron","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660402","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article explores competition as a technique of social transformation in Amazonia. In recent years, the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia have begun staging festivals to celebrate the unity and autonomy of their new sedentary communities. Festivals include sporting games and beauty pageants that create a positive spirit of competition through dramatization and ranking. In these competitions, the drama and ranking take place within a ‘play-frame’—a frame that separates the festival from everyday life, but also re-enacts new practices of commensuration that have become part of daily life via schooling, markets, and electoral politics. If commensuration works against Shuar autonomy, the play-frame of the festival creates future possibilities for autonomy and mutuality.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83114777","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}
Drawing on Weber's classic study of religion, salvation, and the motivation to be a successful capitalist, this article problematizes the relationship among competition and the embodiment of success in the practice of yoga in modern India. Contemporary postural yoga has been popularized in ways that fetishize the body and the relation between the body and enlightenment. It has become a sign of self-realization in a mode that reflects the possibility of transcendence. So-called godmen in India, who embody this possibility, popularize yoga in different ways. Contrasting Swami Sivananda's brand of twentieth-century yoga in the context of Nehruvian modernity with Baba Ramdev's yoga as an expression of free market religious nationalism, this article examines the work that embodied competition does in different ideological contexts.
{"title":"The Ethics of Yoga and the Spirit of Godmen","authors":"Joseph S. Alter","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660403","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Drawing on Weber's classic study of religion, salvation, and the motivation to be a successful capitalist, this article problematizes the relationship among competition and the embodiment of success in the practice of yoga in modern India. Contemporary postural yoga has been popularized in ways that fetishize the body and the relation between the body and enlightenment. It has become a sign of self-realization in a mode that reflects the possibility of transcendence. So-called godmen in India, who embody this possibility, popularize yoga in different ways. Contrasting Swami Sivananda's brand of twentieth-century yoga in the context of Nehruvian modernity with Baba Ramdev's yoga as an expression of free market religious nationalism, this article examines the work that embodied competition does in different ideological contexts.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79174243","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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