Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

In this article, I examine how poetry serves as a form of semiotic rearrangement for those undergoing episodes of what psychiatry calls psychosis. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, I explore how poetry's capacity to hold intemporal experiences facilitates an ambiguous economics of meaning that serves as a semiotic container for supposedly disordered speech. While poetry is frequently recognized as a therapeutic tool for its expressive process, my analysis extends beyond discussions of expression, release, and meaning-making. Instead, I shift the focus toward the potential of rearrangement that gives form to the ambiguous terrain of everyday life for those experiencing episodes of psychosis. Furthermore, when exploring experiences of psychosis, traditional anthropological modes of inquiry fall short. Poetry offers anthropologists an alternative mode of ethnographic engagement—one that may foster a more ethical and intentionally opaque approach to representation, description, and relationality. The opacity of poetry may illuminate something unconcealed about anthropology itself.

This poem emerged in the confluence of my ethnographic work with plant medicines, Western herbalists, and Truong Tran's poetry. It is one attempt to represent the halting, hurting way that stories, truths, and impacts of plant medicines unfold in settler colonial contexts.

This essay traces the entangled legacies of political violence, memory, and kinship by following the life of the author's father, whose adult years unfolded under Chile's dictatorship (1973–1990). Through intimate conversations and ethnographic attention to domestic life, it explores how closeness to and eventual disillusionment with state violence sediment into everyday gestures, silences, and hauntings, composing the inheritance of dictatorship as a lived condition. As familial love and political history converge, this work considers how the shared labor of remembrance may reopen pathways for healing—and how anthropology may itself become a practice of reciprocal reckoning.

The fundamental rights of people in a nation not only serve the necessities of its subjects as citizens but also as humans deserving primary self-supporting conditions. It is inevitable that these rights for the tribal communities in India are violated by external forces on a regular basis over various levels. On such a scale, violations demanding crucial counteract could include life under bonded labor systems, and forced sex workers among the tribals. The concept might be alien to many, yet the same is true for tribal and economically weaker communities across the nation. The persistence of such a system against the enforcement of the law is due to its unreachable implementation in remote areas of the state and nation. Social workers and representatives like Mahaswetha Devi, Pankaj Sekhsaria, G.N. Devi, etc., working among different societies, communities and cultures, help and represent the subjugated and marginalized in their fight for basic rights against social hierarchy, gender dominance, false accusations, etc. Many such take the help of stories and literature as a medium to fight against injustice. This article attempts to investigate a few literary representations of tribal plights and their historical and cultural evolution based on factual analysis.

In this piece of creative non-fiction, I use a countercultural artifact, love beads, to reflect on what life was like on an American countercultural commune in the 1960s and 1970s and to construct a sense of the style, visions, and hopes of the times. Not intended to be reflective of the counterculture writ large, the piece centers on one countercultural commune, its members, and their experiences. The beads take us through the beginnings of the counterculture in the mid 1960s, to the social experiments of the San Francisco Diggers, the performance politics of the Yippies, and a commune that was inspired by both.

In Lebanon, carceral spaces are located in abandoned buildings, underground parking lots, and other such structures. These spaces are marked by neglect: mattresses are exposed to mold, infections spread rampantly, and food and water are scarce resources. Yet in spite of this marked brutality, Lebanon's prisons remain underrepresented in the literature and absent from public awareness. My article seeks to undo this invisibility, centering on the possibilities of life within Lebanon's carceral network through the memories of one formerly incarcerated woman named Sana. From Sana, I learned about the mutual, reciprocal, and intimate bonds that she forged with other incarcerated women. In my article, I mobilize creative ethnographic tools to explore how Sana remembers the caring, kin-like, and relational bonds she forged with other incarcerated women despite the suppression of care endemic to carceral spaces. Drawing on the anthropology of care, I argue that these relationships point to cracks in the workings of carceral power or small spaces of alterity where prisoners collaborate with one another to transform everyday life inside the prison. In the end, this article helps fill a void within the scholarship on incarceration from which the experiences of incarcerated women, particularly in Lebanon, are still missing.