Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

In what follows, I outline the possibility of directly applying Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010) to the practice of ethnography. Based on 2 weeks of anthropological fieldwork on the remote Shetland Island of Foula, I attempt a translation of Perec's careful observations of an urban square in Paris in the 1970s into the context of an ethnography in this remote, rural location. After outlining the connections between Perec's book and my work as an anthropologist, I provide readers with my “raw” field notes so that they might then draw out their own analysis in the same way that I believe Perec intended his work to be understood.

This article explores how listening to monājāt (Islamic sung prayer) creates dynamic and unsettling imaginative spaces for Amir—a paraplegic veteran of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War—to be-with Sohrab, his comrade killed in combat. Amir, who both witnessed Sohrab's tragic death and endured severe physical trauma himself, engages in a profound, nonreciprocal relationship with Sohrab through the act of listening to the sung prayer. Monājāt is a collective experience that derives its power from Amir's imagined world where he finds himself whispering the prayers alongside Sohrab. This participatory mode of listening allows the living to host and welcome the dead. Monājāt creates a nonreciprocal relationship with the dead, a place where Amir hears what is otherwise inaudible. In this imaginary world, Amir finds proximity to be-with his dead friend. Listening is a mode of being-in-the-world that challenges one to not neglect the other's needs. For Amir, monājāt provides both images of Sohrab in heaven (the radiant face with the angels) and a disturbance by alerting him to recall Sohrab's suffering and the injured face. Listening, then, becomes a response and obligation to care for the dead; a way to attend to and be responsible for Sohrab which for Amir is both healing and haunting.

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.