Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

This anthropological nonfiction piece explores the complex landscape of caring for a mother by her daughter during a near-loss. It questions whether, and how, we can miss someone who is still present but changed. Rooted in anthropology, the story examines how personal experiences of caregiving and aging intersect with societal and cultural structures, especially the increasing demand for citizen participation in health care. The concept of “absent presence” frames the narrative, highlighting subtle ways in which absence and presence coexist during moments of transition and loss. Blending memoir with academic reflection, the work emphasizes the power of personal stories to reveal societal transformations, grief, longing, and ambiguity about what remains. By situating individual experiences within larger questions of care and identity, the narrative transforms emotion into a lens for understanding societal values. Ultimately, it seeks to resonate with readers by connecting intimate human relationships to broader social concerns, illustrating how ethnographic stories can shed light on collective experiences of aging, loss, and caregiving.

Ideas like insider/outsider relationships, accessibility, and positionality have been much discussed in anthropology. These become even more complicated in situations where social relationships are always already conceived through inequality and social difference. This paper reflects on my own fieldwork among Muslims fishers on the south-west coast of India, where my belonging to a dominant, inland community elicited a range of responses from my interlocutors, ranging from outright dismissal and verbal confrontation to eventually an invitation to understand bias and rapprochement through what I am calling ethical listening. By ethical listening, I mean practices of engaging with and listening to the other with an intention to understand the mutuality within a culture of difference. While I am exemplifying the use of this method within the context of Islam, I suggest that this method has broader implications to think about other religious contexts. I allude to such a possibility within Christianity and suggest that this method could be of further use beyond religious contexts too.

The title expression came to the fore while conducting a research on the representations of hospitality of individuals and families from East Africa in the city of Padua, Italy. The research focused on traditional representations of “unconditional hospitality” prevalent in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea (former Italian colonies) and how these representations, conceptions, and values were maintained or negotiated in the host society. A woman from Mogadishu tells of arriving in Padua and staying in an apartment building. In her representation of hospitality, arriving in a multi-family dwelling such as a condominium creates a situation that would imply an offering to the community where she arrived as a guest. She knew that Italians like Arabic bread. Therefore, she prepared some loaves of bread and rang her neighbors to donate them. The neighbors opened the door, but when ajar, they stuck their hand out to take the bread and immediately closed it again. The amusing episode allows one to trigger, in the ethnographic interview, a shared reflection and a complicity. It opens up to a wider dimension, calling up the themes of welcoming, integration, hospitality, fear of the other, ambivalence, the meanings of food and conviviality, the “condominium situation,” a set of aspects that involve the ethnographer himself, in his own incomplete integration in the city where he lives.

These five prose poems engage French migrant psychiatry as an ethnographic object in the scene of wandering. They draw from observations of psychiatric consultations and scenes of migrant life in Paris, following ways homelessness and asylum refusal move through migrant life and clinical encounters. Poem (I) reflects on a clinical interview with a mother separated from her son at the border with Turkey, her protective silence; (II) reprises the colonial present in a searing scene of four lifeless bodies on a traffic junction; in (III), the case of a homeless man nursing a brain injury highlights displacements in the shifts of psychiatric practice between idealism, pragmatism, and complicity with the political order; (IV) exposes gendered power in the therapeutic relation, in the texture of chase and negotiation; (V) details a psychiatrist's work to craft the seeds of hope for a young woman from Congo who has witnessed the killings of all her relatives. The poems question ethnographic knowing in the site of displacement, if knowing might emerge more humanely from the changed relation of an oblique view, and exceed the routing of migrant alterity within political and clinical orthodoxy. This exposes a vista of all we cannot see.

Anthropologists in post-colonial societies have proposed subjectivity as a theory to link national political processes with everyday psychological experiences. The Partition of British India in 1947 led to mass violence that has affected millions of people and created the nation-states of India and Pakistan. Psychological anthropologists working with hauntology have sought to explore how psychiatrists construct knowledge in response to mass violence and the symbolism of ghosts within the arts. In this paper, I contrast representations of Partition violence among South Asian psychiatrists with popular films. I begin with an ethnographic vignette from an ongoing project that uses theories and methods from psychological anthropology to jumpstart peace negotiations between India and Pakistan, illustrating that Partition violence remains vivid for senior government officials. I show that psychiatric researchers in both countries have reacted to Partition violence with professional silence. In contrast, films depict contact with ghosts and visions as cultural practices through which Partition violence persists in the popular imagination. I discuss divergences in my psychiatric and anthropological training to argue that to understand the psychological dimensions of Partition, we must turn to the arts and social sciences.

It is the festive beginning of spring in a small village and sailing tourism resort in the Masurian Lake District, Northeast Poland: Catholic Easter is followed by Majówka, the first tourism weekend in May. Caught up between the rituals of Easter and those of tourism in the village, you, Zenon, a middle-aged man born there, lose grip on the communities you used to be part of. Your eviction from the world you know and from the future you have been longing for proceeds at inexorable speed, while you rear up against it, rebelling with your body and imagination. The events are chronicled by me, Sophie, an anthropologist on fieldwork and a woman in her mid-twenties, who stays at your parents' house. I become a witness to the dismantling of your shed and of the longings that were stored inside.

Queer Sonic Fingerprint is the multimodal result of a collaboration between anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker and sound artist Adam Pultz Melbye. Our work embarked from the question of how the sonic as a register of making and experiencing can inform queer relations in the context of ethnographic collections.

All work in ethnographic collections was informed by conversations with curators about the ethical appropriateness of engaging with artifacts. This included considerations of indigenous intellectual property, sacred functions, and cultural belonging statuses of artifacts. We have chosen to engage with artifacts where no conflict of interest could be identified to the best of our own and the curator's knowledge. We are aware that this knowledge may not be comprehensive.