American Anthropologist最新文献

Anthropologists’ cross-cultural studies of kinship, gender, and caregiving have shown how care is fundamental to the human experience. Ironically, anthropologists have been relatively silent about the caregiving we ourselves do. To understand these experiences, we conducted an online survey (N = 492), seven focus groups (N = 31), and seven in-depth interviews of anthropologists in various career stages. We use the term “academic carework” both to describe labor made invisible through caregiving and to recognize caring relations that structure our academic work. We show how carework challenges are experienced along axes of race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and precarious academic status, underscoring how anthropology reproduces itself as a privileged space in the context of the deterioration of working conditions in the neoliberal academy. We proceed to illustrate how the prevailing institutional strategy of temporary accommodation temporally confines caregiving experiences that are ongoing and compounding. An accommodation approach encourages caregivers to interpret structural problems as individual struggles and to discipline themselves accordingly, even as they critique its neoliberal underpinnings. We offer recommendations to address the impacts of carework on professional trajectories. More broadly, however, we look to new anthropologies of care for inspiration to imagine a more inclusive anthropology.

This article examines Mexico's “war on drug trafficking” through its affective and ideological dimensions. By ethnographically exploring two sites of official representations of organized crime in Mexico City—the Secretariat of Defense's Drug Museum and the Institute to Give Back What Was Stolen from the People—I analyze the strategies through which the Mexican state acknowledges and addresses criminality's charisma as a key challenge to its authority. In these official representations, the drug world becomes visible in partial and selective ways, such as through drug traffickers’ confiscated possessions, which project ideas of extravagant capitalist consumption and transgressive social mobility. The state's inevitable failure to contain or redirect this criminal charisma is a symptom of a deeper problem. Such charisma is a key element constituting organized crime as a political actor that menaces state power. It does so not only through violence, but also by means of its capacity to align and organize publics ideologically by doubling and mimicking the state's forms of meaning-making and valuation.

This article looks at practices of discernment in disability spaces in India by analyzing (hierarchical) relational contexts in which disability professionals and disabled people in India interact. We argue that discernment, which we explore through lena-dena (giving and taking), allows us to analyze the ethical stakes of processes of communication, interpreting, and facilitation. Vaidya analyzes how special educators make broad discernments about intellectually disabled people by interpreting their unconventional and nonlinguistic communicative cues. In contrast, Friedner examines how speech and language therapists that work with deaf children make narrow discernments regarding what counts as language and perform the labor of training deaf children to communicate in the normatively correct way—that is, using speech. While disability professionals produce specific kinds of personhood for disabled people through their practices of discernment, they also end up discerning themselves in the process as professionals with difficult yet rewarding jobs. We conclude by discussing a program for individuals with intellectual disabilities where both authors conducted ethnographic research wherein disability professionals discerned disabled people as having social needs and desires on par with nondisabled people and created enabling environments, scaffolded activities, and facilitated conversations to produce and enable complex personhood for them.

This article asks how we should reconceptualize decolonization when it is hijacked by authoritarian/fascist forces. It focuses on the notorious Bhima Koregaon case in India in which 16 intellectuals/human rights defenders from across the country were imprisoned without trial as alleged terrorists. It shows how, on the one hand, decolonization is hijacked by the Hindu authoritarian regime and, on the other hand, colonial artifacts are resymbolized by the colonized to oppose oppression by native elites. It urges attention to the questions of who is mobilizing the language of decolonization and why. It argues that the most important anticolonial intellectuals may not use the language of decolonization and may not be in universities, but on the streets, with social movements, and in prison. It proposes that contemporary decolonization debates center processes of domination and oppression created by the state and global capital nexus, processes that are cultural, psychological, political, and economic. These processes are shown to entrench casteist/racist hierarchies, work through Indigenous elites, and create internal differentiation within marginalized communities, eschewing a unitary concept of indigenous ontology/cosmopolitics/worldviews. Calls for an emancipatory politics, such as that of decolonizing anthropology or the university, would be well placed to center these global processes and local nuances.