Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

This work of creative nonfiction emerges from ethnographic research on Arab women's testimonies of their cancer experience conducted in 2016–2018. It focuses on the account of one Lebanese woman diagnosed with breast cancer and highlights her feelings, thoughts, and perceptions from the time of the initial medical examination through to final diagnosis. The woman's monologic voice dramatizes the fact that her experience of cancer diagnosis takes the form of an alienation of the self from everything around it. In this sense, what is central to this piece are a series of questions around the unhomeliness of being in the world. What happens, phenomenologically, to the patient upon cancer diagnosis? How is the existential dislocation of their world following a cancer diagnosis registered and experienced? What is the place of language and particularly the place of one's native language and second language in the articulation of this sense of foreignness? Finally, how are familial encounters and relations disrupted, othered, and distanced?

504–907 is a comparative visual ethnography linking Louisiana and Alaska through the shared experiences of oil, disaster, and waste. While these regions are often imagined as opposites—subtropical versus Arctic—they are bound together by the same wasting relationships that Marco Armiero identifies as the Wasteocene: processes that produce wasted people and wasted places. Drawing on my own experiences growing up in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon spill, and subsequent fieldwork in both Louisiana and Alaska, I approach these landscapes through walking, photographing, and pairing. At the core of 504–907 are photographic diptychs organized into three categories: building portraits, people, and things seen on walks. These pairings juxtapose structures like grocery stores and bars, moments of kinship from crawfish boils to basketball games, and everyday details like mismatched chairs and patched storefronts. Rather than contrasting differences for its own sake, the diptychs highlight how ordinary materials, practices, and rituals register disaster and survival. Following Jerome Krase's notion of “urban vernacular landscapes,” I argue for a visual semiotics of the Wasteocene, one that makes visible how waste materializes in peeling paint, improvised repairs, and the persistence of community events. This project demonstrates how comparative photography can serve as both an ethnographic method and a theoretical intervention. By treating the ordinary as archive, 504–907 reframes Louisiana and Alaska not as extremes, but as resonant sites of endurance. The diptychs reveal how resilience emerges in the face of collapse, offering a visual vocabulary for the everyday labor of survival in the Wasteocene.

Anthropologists have often turned to poetry as a means of accessing emotional registers of which conventional academic prose is unable to avail. In doing so, they have tacitly conflated poetry with lyric poetry, today probably the most widely practiced poetic genre, associated in particular with the expression of inner feelings and subjectival states. Lyric, however, is not the only kind of poetry. Epic is arguably the most ancient form of poetry, extending back beyond the advent of writing and taking as its subject matter not just the actions of gods, rulers, and heroes, but also in some cases the origins of the cosmos. Epic poetry, British poet Alice Oswald has suggested, propels us “beyond the voice, beyond the mind, out in the pure, unsupervised space.” Since the nineteenth century, the epic form has sometimes been appropriated for nationalist political ends, to provide an immemorial ground for a political community often envisioned in narrowly exclusionary terms. Yet epic also provides a potential challenge to such narrowness. Part manifesto and part collage of my own and others' words and images, this essay proposes and enacts a mode that I call “minor epic” as an alternative to both ethnonationalist triumphalism and lyric introspection.

Managing Death in Exile is a theatrical performance that draws on ethnographic research with long-term asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan Africa in Hong Kong since 2012. The performance told the story of Denise (pseudonym), who had to manage the illness, funeral, cremation, and repatriation of ashes of her good friend, Rosie (pseudonym). Dying in exile means locating one's dead body in a transnational web of conflicting cosmologies, temporalities, kinship structures, and national imagination. What legal and moral strictures does death re-introduce a body into? How does a politically, financially, and socially marginalized diasporic community get mobilized and divided in managing a co-national's death? Denise had to manage all these issues while dealing with her own grief over the passing of a dear friend. The unconventional choice of using ethnographic theater for academic presentation came from my yearning to activate sensorial ways of knowing not available through the written word, to incite embodied responses that resemble those a fieldworker experiences in the field. Performance ethnography as a field has largely developed in North America. In the Asian context, it is uncertain how this form of “anthropology otherwise” could fit into the fierce pursuit of universities' ranking. Hopefully, Managing Death in Exile could be a start.

This article is an autoethnographic essay on the challenges of conducting participant observation in times of crises, both on a personal and on a national level. To summarize, I trace the evolution of my own personal research itinerary, which focuses on Beirut's leisure and clubbing scene during the internal political turmoil in Lebanon and, later on, the 2024 war with Israel. Finally, I examine the impact of these events on my very ability to conduct research, how they affected my relationship to the field and, ultimately, the decisions I needed to make. In conclusion, this essay adds to a growing body of research on ethnography in dangerous times and places: what becomes of research when research becomes impossible?

These are four poems from a collection that burst out of me around the time of my 50th birthday. I am a social and cultural gerontologist and so 50 is a particularly significant age—it is the marker of having finally qualified as an older person, at least in physiological terms. It also signifies menopause and the end of the reproductive stage of life. That significant birthday coincided with my eldest son reaching adulthood. This confluence of life events caused me to reflect on how I have spent my adult life. The past 20 years have been dedicated to academic life, but always within the context and confines of raising a family. The pressure to perform both roles, daily and to a high standard is, perhaps, the most striking message from these poems.