Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

In Lebanon, carceral spaces are located in abandoned buildings, underground parking lots, and other such structures. These spaces are marked by neglect: mattresses are exposed to mold, infections spread rampantly, and food and water are scarce resources. Yet in spite of this marked brutality, Lebanon's prisons remain underrepresented in the literature and absent from public awareness. My article seeks to undo this invisibility, centering on the possibilities of life within Lebanon's carceral network through the memories of one formerly incarcerated woman named Sana. From Sana, I learned about the mutual, reciprocal, and intimate bonds that she forged with other incarcerated women. In my article, I mobilize creative ethnographic tools to explore how Sana remembers the caring, kin-like, and relational bonds she forged with other incarcerated women despite the suppression of care endemic to carceral spaces. Drawing on the anthropology of care, I argue that these relationships point to cracks in the workings of carceral power or small spaces of alterity where prisoners collaborate with one another to transform everyday life inside the prison. In the end, this article helps fill a void within the scholarship on incarceration from which the experiences of incarcerated women, particularly in Lebanon, are still missing.

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.