Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

This essay introduces a collection of one-hundred-word reflections celebrating Kathleen Stewart's retirement. Dozens of scholars participated in this celebration. Each participant wrote a one-hundred-word reflection to stand alone as an individually authored piece. The disconnected brevity of these reflections may catch some readers off guard. Thus, this introduction develops a lingua franca to welcome as many potential readers as possible. This lingua franca combines five dialects: poetic, metaphoric, bibliographic, historic, and dialogic. Grounded in poetic form, this introduction speaks in the metered voice of one-hundred-word chunks. Many of these chunks offer metaphorical proposals for how to read our celebratory collection. Bibliographic citations, appearing throughout, create affective resonances with various scholarly literatures. Acknowledging anthropology's emphasis on context specificity, some chunks describe the historical development of the one-hundred-word form. Dialogically, this introduction uses the second-person pronoun, you, to invite conversations rather than critiques. Such a five-part lingua franca engages two camps of readers: readers who enjoy experimentation may think this introduction is too paranoid; readers who cringe at experimentation may think this introduction is too poetic. Alienating as few readers as possible, this essay proposes a Goldilocks solution: not too paranoid, not too poetic, but just right—or “good enough” (Milo 2019).

In this commentary, part of a book forum on Srila Roy's (2022) book Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India, I argue that the feminist and queer movement, in response to the neoliberal turn in India, is not totally separate from the Indian state formations. In fact, a shadowy state emerges in the affective life of citizens as an expression of what Timothy Mitchell would have called “state effect.”

In this “hundreds” honoring Kathleen Stewart, I tell a story about an Inuit hunter and his love for dogs.

This essay places Srila Roy's recently published Changing the Subject in dialogue with my book Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities, studying Southern feminist and queer activism to reveal solidarities and dissensions contributing to new world-making forms. My focus is on the first section of Changing the Subject, where Roy describes her research with Sappho for Equality (SFE) to map a queer feminism—one I describe as atrangik narivad in Hindi—characterized by three specific shifts: from physical (community center, organization offices, homes) to virtual spaces; from lesbian to trans concerns; and from activism to consumption. The essay concludes with some observations and queries about feminist, queer pedagogy in connection with Roy's students in South Africa and mine in North America and India.

How can one conceptualize change in societies? What do ethnographies reveal about societies in transition? In elucidating what societal changes entail, this article discusses ethnographies that focus on “societies in transition.” An ethnography that deals with changes in and of society also analyzes people's experiences in a rapidly changing society. In addition to giving analytical perspectives on a region—in this case, gendered ideas and practices in Bangladesh—such ethnographies may guide us to opening new social realities. Hence, ethnographies can reveal the potentialities and temporalities of social systems. Additionally, containing the possibilities of an otherwise within itself, ethnographies reflect critiques of established concepts. Thus, one gets glimpses of the continual becoming of the social rather than seeing it as a bounded system.