Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

Over the course of the last decade, I have conducted fieldwork on the militarization of Rio de Janeiro and on the security industry that developed in response to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. This fictional short story follows two different imagined security laborers, Nico and Valesca, reflecting the racial, gendered, and class tensions I saw play out between police and military operators from different regions during my research. Working alongside Nico and Valesca, a fictional narrator seeks to navigate fraught power dynamics in a highly masculine setting.

Sporting contests between communities actively engaged in societal struggle comprise an event I call “engaged acrimony.” In these sporting contests, ideas of sport as promoting harmony get tested and often give way to demonstrations of vitriol that mirror actual relations. In this article, I discuss Lakota basketball teams from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation as they played against neighboring white teams, examining how their responses to racism were safely expressed within and around sporting events. I analyze two of the best-known instances of engaged acrimony using Turner's sense of performance and Butler's theory of performativity. In doing so, I offer an understanding of how Native communities can fashion an empowering response to racism.

In 2016, the Colombian state and the country’s largest guerilla group, the Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia - Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) declared the end of a decades-long war. “Peace” in Colombia however is what one campesino called “otra guerra”—a “war” waged on forests and their diverse life-worlds. These poems emerged in response to this ongoing war I encountered throughout my ethnographic fieldwork in Putumayo, Colombia. These poems were written throughout my fieldwork in Putumayo, often in collaboration with the forest itself, through a practice of listening to and learning from forests and the communities who defend them. Poetry, like ethnography, is grounded in listening. These poems emerged through forest walks, working with those communities on their forest farms, and in ceremonial contexts. Poetry enabled me to go deeper into what is often considered “excess” in ethnographic research, which transformed my relationship with forests and my research itself. Listening engenders a poetic practice of writing in relation to forests—a collaborative form of co-resistance to their ongoing colonization and destruction that works to regenerate relations oriented towards resurgent futures.

Listening to the forest drew me into the earthy redolence of decay and decomposition, to the germination of seeds, the comings and goings of pollinators and seed dispersers, and to the silences—the penetrating silence of cattle grass, dead soils, and desiccated crops on farms in the war on Colombia’s forests. Listening to the forest is to witness the loss of connectivities: of death nourishing life and the rupturing of the generative relations of Indigenous and other forest communities that together form the life of the forest. Listening also led me to their entangled expressions of resistance that emerge in rastrojo. Rastrojo indicates forest destruction and the possibilities for resurgence. Rastrojo is the forest growth that emerges following disturbance. It is intrinsic to the forest cultivation of Indigenous and other communities living with these forests. The cultivation of rastrojo involves “learning from the forest.” It contributes to restoring degraded soils rendered lifeless from ongoing war, generating the conditions for life’s ongoingness. Rastrojo constitutes a form of resistance to ongoing colonization and destruction grounded in a reparative relationality with the forest. This is the forest resurgence of rastrojo in which peace with the forest germinates.

“The election” tells the story of the 2000 regional election in Chukotka, Russia's northeasternmost part. That year, Lyosha, a Chukchi activist, invited me to assist Indigenous movements with grant writing for Western-based civil society organizations. When I arrived in Chukotka, the election was in full swing and turned out to be more bizarre as—as Lyosha put it—could be believed. The gifting of the oligarch, the lies told by the governor, the dreaming of Lyosha, and the interrogation of the anthropologist are all things that happened, and I wanted to tell their story. But I also wanted to describe what did not happen: the democracy that was not desired or embraced. The result, I hope, is a story that shows not only what it felt like to be part of this election but also what Russia was at that time, why it has possibly become what it has become, and how and why elections leave ghosts. The narrative form has been inspired by the Russian literary tradition of the skaz, an absurdist form of narrative where things rarely are what they pretend to be.

For several decades childhood scholars have noted children's systematic exclusion from public in many risk-averse societies, a disappearance exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. While many have noted the impoverishing effects for children from such exclusion, during my stay in a New Zealand Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facility, I came to ask, what does society lose when we un-child the public? Through a feature comic, I draw the story of how children infiltrated MIQ's age-segregated spatial–temporal boundaries to inadvertently or deliberately deliver unique forms of care to others with whom they otherwise had no contact. If MIQ represents a microcosmic refraction of New Zealand's adult-centric structure, then children's chalk drawings demand a radical rethinking of who and what constitutes public health care and remind us what we gain when we recognize what children do for us.

Almost like a secret, the women beckoned for me to follow.

They took me to the water, knowing somehow that I wouldn't feel at home until I touched the Tigris.

The water gurgled as my hand disturbed its surface in the night. The yellow moon made the wet backs of the reeds shimmer.

The women murmured to me, held my hand in the glow of our lights.

They taught me the names of the plants.

They taught me names of the soils and landforms.

They told me my face was like theirs, but my words were strange.

They taught me to wrap my teeth around the names of the night.

We laughed in the peaceful quiet.

I heard bugs I hadn't heard, but somehow remembered.

For a moment, it was magic.

It is not really so strange to return to a place one hasn't been before,

Hussai is busy with birds chatting and bickering.

So busy are they pecking seeds and building nests that

The equally busy ruminators seem to move in slow motion …

Sheep with their heads down, tearing at the young grass.

Sweet water seeps, slowly, into the rows of soil,

Settling from its long journey away from the river,

Like a wanderer who perishes in a new world,

Soaked up by shallow grassy roots,

Hair of the earth.

A strange visitor touches the dirt and longs to wash his hands

Quickly with bottled water on the side of the road.

A returnee plunges her hands deep into the dirt, craving contact.

But the one who is of this place eats from it.

Her fingernails are stained henna-orange by the very same dust.

Her grandchildren fall asleep on her lap. She has a joyful face and

The deep inhale of generations breathing into one another.

Even as metal shimmers in the dirt, glints of explosions past,

The air is sweet with the smell of bread.

You sit still in your chair, plastic unweaving from the legs, your eyes closed, while the creaking door and false light and electronic clicks of the tea kettle drive sensory spikes around you.

I move swiftly in and out, washing, sewing, on the balls of my feet. My flip flops squelch with stray water, fabric burdens my arms, wet soft things all around me.

It's all inescapably hetero.

But none of this is quite what it seems.

We are in flow.

Spontaneous silence descends over this home, wordless-ness: crisp and smooth at once.

Today a man yelled at me in angry grief over his sons' death and American violence. He asked me to answer for my country, and I left out the most important sentence: I am sorry.

Today we visited the oldest standing home I have seen in Iraq, one that survived the battles, with wallpaper and lights from an era past, when figures of humans and horses were in vogue.

Today a young father told us he witnessed the massacre of his village, 700 men executed and buried nearby. He survived.

Today Bilal shivered as we drove past the home where

This piece presents a narration of a dream by a rural migrant, Yang Cui, who works in the city of Shantou in China. It reveals her inner struggles to end an affair with another migrant worker, Lao Bo. This piece is written as a part of an ethnographic book project on rural–urban migration in China, in which I experiment with different genres of writing in an attempt to address migrants' bewildering existential multiplicity of interior experience, among which some are presented more analytically, some more subjectively, and some more imaginatively. Understanding the human condition in terms of the limits of knowing others and ourselves requires anthropologists to seek creative forms of ethnographic narrative to give shape and voice to existential struggles, ambivalence, and uncertainty of everyday life. This piece attempts to use Yang Cui's narration of her dream as an evocative form of describing her inner struggles being with Lao Bo as a so-called linshi fuqi (“temporary couple”), through which her self-knowledge unfolds, reflection takes place, and consciousness finds expression.

The following story—based on several years of fieldwork in a southern Appalachian city with an ugly Jim Crow past—is a fiction about place and identity. The city, despite its progressive reputation, remains deeply segregated. Its segregation is obscured, at least for some, by a veneer of gentrification and Black Lives Matter yard signs. When bodies begin turning up in unexpected places, the White narrator, a retired folklorist, uses French Structuralist theory to interpret events as though they were part of a single story. Over time, however, he realizes that his interpretations do not fit the facts, prompting him to shift his thinking from the structural to the idiographic. The story is an allegory, a contemporary fable, about the ultimate inscrutability of others—but also about the possibility, with sufficient imagination, of understanding.

What was it like to care for older residents in a care home during the COVID-19 pandemic? Care work was in crisis before the pandemic, which brought the fragility of the UK's healthcare system and those who work in it to the fore. I recount my experiences in a care home with isolated older people during the early months of the COVID-19 global pandemic. In this autoethnography, I consider my attempt to prioritize isolated older care home residents' personhood alongside the complexities of caring during an inordinately physically and emotionally precarious time. While neglecting some aspects of my own needs, I describe how care work, while rewarding, can reproduce the already ingrained inequalities that characterize it. I argue that sensing absence as experienced by older people can be a means to help reduce some of their isolation and loneliness. During my time caring during the pandemic, time to care was corroded, further frustrating what care should be. Through my autoethnographic account of caring during the pandemic, I argue that the well-being needs of caregivers alongside care receivers should be acknowledged as an integral aspect of care. [caring, COVID-19, absence, care home, isolation].