Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

Examining the relations among ethnographic fieldwork, trains in Tokyo, dementia, and a child's injury, this essay explores the nature of memory. Specifically, it considers the vastness of what is forgotten, how writing can staunch the loss of recollection, and the condition of being unable to forge new memories. The written word can carry the freight of memory, yet it does so through simplification and suggestion. While bearing the indistinct character of writing, fieldnotes inhabit a wider ecology of quotidian life and extraordinary events that, in turn, shape how, when, and if they are read. Recollection with the aid of ink, paper, and pixels is vital to the ethnographic endeavor, but its affective dimensions are largely involuntary and can only be shepherded from a distance.

What happens when we remove key specificities that orient ethnography? Based on 30 months of fieldwork somewhere and set in fictional Landia, this piece eschews conventional ways of representing ethnographic encounters—through specific matterings of people and place—for disquieting generality. Against vague references to violence by Snatchers and a movement to protect the Marked, I foreground the affective experiences of two interlocutors without relying on taken-for-granted specificities that structure modes of seeing. This reveals how power operates through the reproduction of embodied difference, even within movements by and for people with non-normative bodyminds; and how generality as a method of creative ethnographic writing can reveal otherwise eclipsed strands of meaning and experience. Despite being Marked, Yuli and Adan do not see themselves in discourses about markedness. As a result, they question processes of categorization, identification, and marginalization in social movements. My goal is to dwell in these moments where operative narratives unravel, and people overspill their categories. Asking what a messier crip politics of difference might do for those with forms of markedness, this piece encourages readers to envision activist-adjacent modes of redress that acknowledge complicity and entanglement, embrace accountability and repair, and build solidarity across forms of difference.

Throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, the rapid phenomenon of rural marginalization and depletion is one of the most significant social and environmental challenges characterizing contemporary reality. Where, in the second post-war era, about half of the Italian population lived in rural settings, today this percentage has precipitously fallen, leading to an estimated urbanization rate of 70%, concentrated within an area that covers about 30% of the national territory. The future of the remaining 70% is uncertain, raising questions about the country's territorial cohesion and the management of its environmental resources. As the future and present of these communities are increasingly defined by trajectories of impoverishment, aging, and depopulation, these communities' voices seem marginal in the debate, utterly unheard amidst the complexities urban centers face. This poetic project's series of tercets aims to narrate the cosmos of ordinary effects that mark the everyday life of a village amidst phenomena of rewilding, growing silences, and abandonments. It dwells on a specific moment of the day, culturally laden with expectations and meanings, namely the dawn, portrayed here as the advance of a new day, a guarantor of the future, though the forms of this future remain uncertain.

In this article, I introduce the concept of “transcosmogenerationality” to emphasize the sustained and dynamic significance of Ancestral relationalities to particular Indigenous modernities. I draw on the case of certain Akha communities in Southeast Asia and southwest China who are channeling wealth from booms in cash crops, such as coffee, rubber, and tea, into the “ritual economy” bridging the parallel and mutually dependent worlds of Ancestors and descendants. These communities are further channeling their wealth into local and transregional efforts to sustain and vitalize their Ancestral Ways and cultivate a pan-Akha identitarian movement. Their motivations are to ensure their Ancestors remain always living and thus close to and of moral significance for the living living, sustain their and their descendants' receipt of Ancestral geeqlanq or vital life-giving energy, redistribute wealth, and promote the status of their families and clans. I emphasize that growing wealth and access to consumer goods among Akha has led not to the decline, but rather, an intensification of Ancestral relationalities, which they view as the very source of this wealth. I further argue that Akha rites of transcosmogenerational commensality are especially concrete and revealing of the co-presence and conviviality between and among Ancestors, Elders, and descendants.

This piece uses narrative forms from both Black horror and Fantastic literature to grapple with questions of haunting, grief, life in proximity to death, and uneven distributions of access and wealth within global capitalism. The blurring of the lines between the real and the surreal, typical of Fantastic literature, parallels the blurring of the lines between death caused by grief and death caused by the systemic neglect of poor, Black, marginalized folks around the world. As a piece of horror, the narrative deals with both the haunting of the main character by the loss of their sister and the haunting of the ongoing legacies of colonialism manifest as exploitative movements of wealth, resources, and people. While heavily ethnographically informed, this piece also seeks to evoke global theories of water, loss, memory, being, and ancestry. Bringing these common tropes within anthropology into interdisciplinary and transnational, conversations with Black Studies through fiction opens up different ways for anthropology to engage with zombification, both in its use as a critique of capitalist modes of production and in its use as a term for the living dead, or in this case the perpetual living on the edge of death within necropolitical systems.

This piece of creative nonfiction originates from a desire to salvage characters and situations that are slowly disappearing in Romania, for natural and social reasons, from aging to emigration. For decades, especially as part of the processes of industrialization and urbanization during socialism, children left villages in search of opportunities to study and work in towns and cities around the country. Their own children would return to these villages during their school holidays and would stay with their grandparents, men and women born in the first half of the 20th century. I was one of these grandchildren. Until I was 18 years old, I spent the whole summer break with my grandmother. In this piece, I draw upon my childhood memories and conversations with persons of my age about the days they spent in the countryside when they were children, their relationship to their grandparents and village life in socialist Romania. My aim is to take the readers back in time, to a summer day in the late 1980s that an 11-year-old girl spends in her grandmother's company in a southern Romanian village.

The relevance of this study stems from the need to examine diary discourse in modern Ukrainian military literature, highlighted by increased interest in new diary varieties, functions, and genre syncretism. The purpose of the study is to analyze diaries created after the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, focusing on their nature, features, genre parameters, and how they differ from diaries written during the initial aggression in 2014. During the processing of diary texts, historical–biographical, comparative-historical, and complex elements of hermeneutical, structural methods, textual, correlation, and discourse analyses were most often used. In addition, the method of comparing subject–object planes, and dimensions, was used for functional genre refinement. The paper presents a systematic analysis of the modern military diary, highlights its structural modifications, defines static and acquired functions, and describes the status and importance of the latest literary process among other genres. The results of the study can be used for the preparation of basic and special lecture courses on the theory and history of Ukrainian and world literature.