Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

This piece is part of a special section of “hundreds” in honor of Kathleen Stewart, examining the origins of our personal principles and ideology.

This piece of flash ethnography is based on the experience of making a film with interpreters, who are also refugees, based in Kakuma Refugee Camp. The film, The Bridge, was inspired by a collaborative research project I undertook with several of the interpreters, who then became filmmakers, about the labor of interpreters done for humanitarian agencies in the Camp. In life and film, interpreters become the living infrastructure for the humanitarian project within which they exist.

Deceit is conceived by ufology theorists as intrinsic to the behavior of UFO phenomena, often experienced as slippery and theatrical. In abduction experiences, there is what has been described as a simulacrum of medicine and science, whose content can be absurd and whose purposes are largely obscure. If we begin from the humanist perspective, we could say that these experiences produce antipodal stances—contradictory statements and affective postures that show intense paradox within a schema of play. I argue that this play has two fundamental and oscillating (or simultaneous) aspects. It is both bottom-up, in the sense that it is a confined or segregated aspect of society, and top-down, in the sense that it is experienced as a cosmos of aliens with unknown designs that manifest paradoxically. I argue that the terms of our analysis in the social sciences must reflect the fact that, in this simultaneity of opposites, these extraordinary and sometimes traumatic experiences are neither subjective nor objective but lie in a sort of “hermeneutical” middle ground that recognizes the deeply ironic and recursive nature of UFO phenomena.

In this essay, I follow the migration journey of a young middle-class woman migrating from Serbia to Germany. I explore the existential condition of stuckness that she reports as a continuous impasse throughout various stages of her migration career. By focusing on her migration contradiction, I survey the intimate temporalities brought about by being stuck differently in changing contexts.

This multisited flash ethnography recounts my encounters with a queer asylum seeker from El Salvador trying to move on from a tragedy amid family and legal issues and our observations of the encroaching humanitarian border industry throughout Mexico. It traces events across time and place that are inevitably scarred by the Mexico-US border, which displaces itself beyond territorial lines.

In 1951, Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial-cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. State investment in the transportation infrastructure of indigenous Chiapas enabled the geographical mobility of scores of U.S. anthropologists and students who used these roads to access “closed corporate communities” such as Zinacantán during the late-1950s and 1960s. Working from archived correspondence and field notes, this essay examines Harvard Chiapas Project founder Evon Vogt's early project interviews conducted on these roads in a Land Rover. Reading the Land Rover as a space-making technology of ethnographic rapport, I ask how such vehicles have structured ethnographic forms of intimacy and attachment and whether they render the interview space a site of capitalist capture. I ultimately refract a surfaced critique of the interview form's capitalist coloniality through a weak-theoretical evocation of the Land Rover's social, technological, and symbolic indeterminacy.