American Anthropologist最新文献

Industrial landscapes play deep into the imagination of American consciousness, with coal mining rooted in Appalachian culture as both identity and political flashpoint. In Tennessee, coal mining coincided with the convict leasing system that operated across the American South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the Lone Rock Stockade, located in Grundy Lakes State Park, thousands of primarily African American male prisoners were forced to work for a private coal mining company; approximately 10% of them perished during their incarceration. LiDAR collected in conjunction with archaeological research at the site has helped uncover structures related to the violent, racialized trauma at Lone Rock, but also has made visible other historical remnants that have scarred and shaped the valley. This article considers how LiDAR can be further used as a storytelling platform, focusing on novel, integrative ways of communicating contentious histories.

Many artists in Europe now turn to online crowdfunding to fund their creative practices against the backdrop of cuts in state-funded subsidies for the arts. Based on an ethnographic analysis of online crowdfunding in the Netherlands, I suggest that this neoliberal context requires artists to cultivate occupational subjectivities and practices that share a number of dimensions with the occupational subjectivities and practices of artists in 15th-century Europe, which were rejected by Romantic aesthetic theories in the mid-18th century. In that pre-Romantic context, as in today's crowdfunding landscape, artists functioned as people who produce concrete and useful objects that cater to clients’ predilections and whose work can be regulated and remunerated based on extraneously derived and clearly defined quantitative and material parameters. Inasmuch as Romantic aesthetic theories have played an important role in the formation and continued saliency of the values of freedom and autonomy that donors to crowdfunding campaigns (and contributors to other algorithmically mediated forms of participation) are expected to have, the erosion of Romantic normative ideals of creative autonomy and freedom by online crowdfunding for the arts represents a form of hypercapitalist intensification that undermines its own ideological conditions of possibility.

How do we imagine the future, especially in our current moment? This keynote encourages us to consider lessons learned and shared by those who have gone before us. This includes a giant of our discipline, Zora Neale Hurston, whose praxis challenges us to be present and to listen and learn from another vantage point. Listening informs our praxis. In this keynote, I share ways that listening has propelled entry into new spaces of inquiry, activism, and being through direct engagement, such as the Black Cemetery Network. It is surprising what we learn when we listen. When people speak, we generally hear them, but it is when we listen that we learn. Our narrator, our teacher, can be a hidden gravesite, a toxic waste site, a racial trope, an elder's story, a youth's imagination, a river flowing or an ocean current; a breeze, a poem, a song, a sigh, a laugh, a drumbeat, a quilt, a basket sewed with love, or rice recipes shared with pride; soothing hands and calloused hands; a familiar smell or taste for a special dish cultivated over generations and handed down through ways of being and knowing. The call and response to, are you listening, is we hear you; we feel you; we connect in this moment with what you are sharing. This connecting and remembering is our charter as human beings and as practitioners. These are our boldest moments to shine our brightest light as anthropologists, as people enmeshed in the public sphere. This keynote amplifies what can be learned, shared, activated, and acted upon from our listening on multiple levels and across multiple sectors and registers. This is a call to action to accept the mantle and the charge as living legacies of Zora Neale Hurston, to center our human beingness in the many ways that we have been positioned to make a difference.

Racism, heteronormativity, classism, and all systems of oppression produce an inflammatory response across varied scales, from bodily inflammation such as stress and disease to social chaos and structural violence. This response paper to Dána Ain-Davis's notion of “Black anti-bodies” considers how Black queer bodies are targeted and impacted by the inflammatory nature of violence in reproductive healthcare. I reflect upon how Black anti-bodies may also be a vehicle to reimagine Black bodies’ own defensive inflammatory response to violence and social harm.