Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

In May 2024, the body of Farruko Pop—a Q'eqchi’-Maya singer and social media influencer—was found buried in a shallow grave in Guatemala City. Although he was just 18 years old and from a small rural community, his murder made front-page news and became the major subject of commentary and speculation in the country. This open-ended narration of that event explores the uncertainties of life and death facing young indigenous people in contemporary Guatemala. Drawing on contemporaneous observations of how the case was talked about in print media, social media, and word-of-mouth, I reconstruct the social and cultural implications of the murder. If on the one hand, the case illustrates the multiple and continuing forms of violence that Indigenous people face in Guatemala; on the other, the reasons the case became front-page news suggest how some young people are finding the means and opportunity to contest the conditions that enable those forms of violence. I highlight how Maya cosmology—in particular its conceptualizations of dreaming and death—in conjunction with access to new media technologies affords people from these communities new imaginaries for how to live in contemporary Guatemala.

Muslim cuisine in many Indian contexts is frequently “othered” through various sociocultural mechanisms. Unlike the vegetarian diet which is often associated with upper-caste Hindu practices, traditional Muslim cuisine typically includes meat dishes, particularly beef, which remains taboo in Hindu traditions. The film review explores how the protagonist of The Great Indian Family (2023) navigates these complex social boundaries, portraying his confusion and eventual adaptation to new food practices as a metaphor for broader questions of religious identity, belonging, and cultural hybridity in modern India. It also examines his struggle to reconcile conflicting religious identities, particularly through dietary practices, showcasing how food functions as a powerful marker of religious and cultural identity in India.

Wild edible mushrooms (WEM) are integral to the cultural practices of indigenous communities across the world. Their utilization is essential to effective forest management practices and sustainability within local communities. The intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge plays a vital role in regulating resources, sustaining ecological balance, and ensuring cultural continuity. This paper seeks to document the ethnomycological knowledge of the Kurmi-Mahato community, including an analysis of the local traditional practices and cultural significance of wild edible mushroom species. Ethnomycological hikes and participatory research involved fieldwork with 25 families, documenting fifteen species of wild edible mushrooms. A comprehensive index was developed to assess the cultural significance of WEM, identifying species with high cultural relevance and potential for community engagement in mycophilic activities. Drawing on the anthropology of care, the results suggest the traditional use of WEM is influenced by age, economic activities, and the household's distance from forests. This study contributes to the medicinal exploration of mushrooms, as well as bridges the gap between local ecological knowledge and biodiversity to preserve the intangible cultural heritage. Ultimately, this work leads to a deeper understanding of the factors influencing WEM on cultural significance, and traditional local knowledge of the communities and their environmental management.

This essay reflects on the recent return to the literary within anthropological thinking and writing and places it in conversation with wider dynamics. To do so, we outline the general conditions of this movement, describe the features that constitute a spectrum of literary anthropological works, argue that these features may enable distinctive modes of anthropological engagement with affective economies, political rationalities, and the crisis of critique in social science, and offer some preliminary guidelines for crafting ethnographic projects in these directions. We aim to call attention to a movement that is still emerging and provide initial provocations for further discussion and debate.

This essay experimentally juxtaposes two kinds of extractivism in Jujuy, northwest Argentina—archaeological excavations at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century on the one hand, and contemporary lithium mining in the 21st century on the other. The latter is linked to a government green developmentalist agenda, which is further manifested by the recent taking into service of a hypermodern, electric train, the “solar” train (tren solar), so-called because it is powered by lithium batteries fed from an electric grid which includes solar energy. Extrapolating from a celebratory poem, the essay further suggests that the “properties” that once enthralled the traveler to return to the magic beauty of Jujuy province have now become “witchy properties” of both archaeological and mineral extractivism, disturbing old balances and setting society and environment out of joint.

Drawing on material from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, this paper zooms in on two Icelandic writers, Andri Snær Magnason and Haukur Ingvarsson, and their works Dreamland (Draumalandið, 2006) and Ecostentialism (Vistarverur, 2018), respectively. These two works relate in different ways to the construction of the hydropower plant Kárahnjúkavirkjun in East Iceland. The hydropower plant was completed in 2006 despite mass protests and political controversy. Broader debates in Icelandic society at the time seemed to coalesce around this particular project. Through their writing, on a backdrop of radical societal change and crises, the two writers sought to reshape landscapes of rural Iceland. Inspired by anthropological studies of imagination, literature, and creativity, I aim to show with these two cases, how literary writing, as a certain creative technology, can unsettle and mend the actual and imaginary landscapes that human beings dwell in. I conclude with suggestions for how this study, using literary texts and “ethnographic biography” inspired by Michael Herzfeld, brings about new anthropological approaches to imagination and representation.

This article explores the entangled practices of drawing and ethnographic fieldwork through a series of illustrated vignettes from Athens. Written from the perspective of a self-described “bad anthropologist,” I reflect on the tensions between theory and experience, visibility and failure, and the messy subjectivity of the fieldworker. Drawing—sketchy, ironic, sometimes raw—is treated neither as a romanticized gesture nor a tool for “impact” or mere “illustration.” Instead, it is foregrounded as a thinking practice, an analytical tool, and a situated act—a way to reckon with what escapes writing, to process visual and affective intensities, and to reimagine relationships with theory, memory, and self. The article critically engages with established scholars not to name-drop but to advance its argument through situated dialogues as a form of theoretical storytelling and speculative fabulation. As an anti-heroic anthropologist, in the article, I challenge the macho tropes of classic fieldwork and the institutional dynamics that determine what counts as “valid” ethnographic experience. Rather than offering generalizable conclusions, I argue for a mode of ethnographic writing and drawing that embraces awkwardness, contradiction, and the freedom to be and feel awful.

In this essay, the two co-authors engage in a conversation about violence, an object escaping and defying language. Francesca is an anthropologist employing notes of psychotherapy sessions as ethnographic material; Arinas is a writer gradually gathering narrative fragments to find the truth in her family history. The essay begins with the circumstances of their encounter and follows their narrative process, intertwining pieces of ethnography, journaling, and fiction. In the exchange with the ethnographer, the writer makes, remakes, and unmakes her truth firstly through self-translation, then through a multilingual conversation, and finally through fictional writing. The two writing practices mingle, becoming fragmented and polyvocal, and offering the possibility of inventing, and not just making sense of, experiences. Thus, truth appears as a multidimensional, paradoxical object: intimacy appears in violence, violence in affection, and poison in a piece of cake. The combination of languages, genres, and voices explodes a story into a bigger, shattered picture of fragments, thus opening up a possibility, as well as a risk, of transformation—of imagining a new world.

At a moment when the US university is in crisis, through a deep exploration of the process of building a new liberal arts university in India, this essay offers a complex but hopeful narrative that allows us to see the liberal arts university, and the humanistic tradition, anew. In doing so, the essay centers the discipline of anthropology, both as object of inquiry and as method, arguing for its vital importance even in an era of program cuts and disciplinary contraction.