Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

While engaged anthropology foregrounds the privilege and ethical responsibility of researchers toward interlocutors suffering all forms of oppression, anthropologists' own vulnerabilities and troubling experiences of violence tend to be ignored and silenced. This silencing is due to the prevailing heroic image of the politically engaged anthropologist, despite longstanding critiques from feminist and decolonial scholarship. In this article, I discuss my witnessing of the violent death of an interlocutor in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. I propose to think of vulnerabilities as diverse yet shared human experiences to explore the epistemological and political potential of researchers' vulnerabilities for understanding and practicing solidarities in ethnographic fieldwork. Building on the perspective of “ordinary ethics,” I focus on the everyday exchanges of care and support that can emerge from the intricate entanglements of anthropologists' exposure to violence with the vulnerabilities and struggles of the people with whom they work.

This paper brings together two brilliant analysts of social encounters, Jane Austen and Erving Goffman. It proceeds by applying some of Goffman's terms for face-to-face interactions to several scenes from Austen's novels in which characters try to extract information from others while preventing others from extracting information from them. In their treatment of these “expression games,” both authors display a similar sociological sensibility. They differ, however, in their treatment of the individual in relation to society; for Austen, an individual can never be viewed apart from family and connections, while for Goffman, the individual is in and of itself a sacred social entity.

Kutiyattam is an ancient form of ritual-theater in Kerala. Kriya is an offering to the gods intended to allure them into giving birth to the special Kutiyattam cosmos. A world in which objects, entities, and words are all made of movement. Expanding a presence that resides in the flame of the lamp brought from the temple, kriya collects the elements of life—water, fire, death, wind, wealth, and more—from the nine gods of the cardinal directions. Although kriya is rooted in purity, sacredness, and worship, and although it clears pathways for the divine, nothing on a higher, exterior level is involved. Such a world is ‘inclusive:’ It includes within itself everything necessary for it to survive and thrive; nothing encompasses it. Following in detail how this world is created through kriya reveals some of the conditions and traits of an inclusive world.

In this piece of flash (non)fiction poetry in the mode of Lydia Davis, I reflect on moments of what I call “relational affect,” during my early 1990s fieldwork in the famous Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang in southwest Amdo Tibet (SE Gansu province, China).

This essay explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on creativity and art. Through a blend of autoethnography and critical perspectives on technology, ethics, and creativity, the essay utilizes the camera obscura as a metaphor to explore how the digital era transforms artistic practices, commodifies artistic products, and reshapes the relationship between human and creation. Obscura 1 examines the shift from traditional artistic practices to those infused with AI. Obscura 2 analyzes the commodification of art in the digital age, considering issues of artistic control and audience consumption. Finally, Obscura 3 reflects on the connection between AI-generated art and the human experience of creativity, particularly the psychological impact of artmaking and its potential transformation in the digital realm.

This story captures the tensions observed during multiple tiger safaris conducted as part of my fieldwork in a central Indian Tiger Reserve. Through the perspective of the reserve's first female guide, it brings to life the inequities in wildlife conservation in India, where the burden of protecting biodiversity disproportionately falls on marginalized forest-dwelling communities. The story explores how fortress conservation—a model that seeks to create human-free spaces by displacing communities—impacts these groups and how tourism further exacerbates these inequities. Blending insights from anthropological debates on non-human lives with lived experiences, the story highlights how community members must reconcile cultural and emotional connections to animals with the pressures of commercializing those relationships. Access to the field offered a behind-the-scenes view of safaris, revealing the demands placed on guides, from meeting tourists' increasingly extravagant expectations to the pressures of ensuring tiger sightings. While inspired by my fieldwork and academic research, this fictional narrative draws on collective experiences and is not based on any individual.

Exhumations of mass graves are emblematic of memory work in Spain and constitute a major focus of anthropological research. As a complement and a counterpoint to that work, I ask: What form does the work of memory take when the Franco regime's specters are glimpsed through more ephemeral encounters with the past: stories, memories, and rumors? This poem has emerged from my efforts to address that question. It conjures Maruxa and Coralia Fandiño Ricart, sisters in an anarcho-syndicalist family who lived in Santiago de Compostela, who were brutalized by the Falange during the Spanish Civil War and shunned. Wearing bright clothing and mask-like makeup, they took daily strolls through the city from the 1940s until shortly before their deaths in the early 1980s. Their presence evoked fear and fascination. Since the 1990s, artists, feminists, and others have worked to compile memories of the sisters in an effort to bring to light the brutal practices of the Franco regime and to bear witness to the sisters' spectacular form of defiance. I envision the poem as partaking of a fragmented archive of imagistic, sensory, and contradictory impressions that comprise the work of memory and conjure a necessarily partial picture of the sisters.

The fragment seeks to explore poetic forms of the experience of silence and its meanings. Along the text, the lines cross multiple faces of this dimension of emptiness and how silence permeates all aspects of human and non-human experience—before birth, after death, in culture, and in nature. It is both presence and absence, oppression, and refuge. So, as an ontology, silence is a fundamental force—agent of meaning through absence, sublime, enduring presence that remains even in the face of losses.

Places, squares, natural landscapes, urban spaces are accepted as familiar when they are domesticated by cartography. The human psyche recoils at the prospect of being adrift in the unknown, prompting the ingenious creation of navigational aids such as maps, compasses, and GPS devices, which have been developed through specific historical contexts, including colonialism and modern warfare. In today's technologically advanced society, the fear of getting lost equates to the loss of valuable time. Yet, for an ethnographer, being lost without any orientation tools raises intriguing questions. Far from being a perilous predicament, wandering can unveil profound insights and unexpected encounters. It is in these moments of disorientation that the self is laid bare to the raw essence of the surroundings. Rather than a threat to be avoided, getting lost becomes a gateway to self-discovery and encounters with others.