American Anthropologist最新文献

Autoethnography, intimate ethnography, and ethnographic memoir have become increasingly central modes of anthropological writing. Although this trend has historical precedents, as found in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Behar, and others, this two-part special section explores the directions this work is taking, the potential contributions of such writing, and how we might analyze this trend. What does the expansion of these anthropological subgenres tell us both about our times and anthropology? How does “unsettling the self” require rethinking not only boundaries between selves and others, but our roles as anthropologists and our discipline in order to produce writing that, as Behar suggests, “does not alienate ourselves from our ourselves?” How does “unsettling the self” also entail, as Anand Pandian observes, “unsettling the world” around us, including explorations of contemporary capitalism, settler colonialism, racial politics, or the agency of natural environments or nonhumans? What are the ethical questions and the limits engendered by such work, and what might such trends bode for anthropology's future? This special section integrates examples of these growing anthropological subgenres alongside efforts to theorize this mode of writing as we attempt to answer Alisse Waterston's provocation: What is such work potentially “good for?”

This article tells the story of my research on Dutch wax cloth, a highly prized textile and cultural artifact in Togo, my home country. I examine the fate of the cloth and of the Togolese women who made it into an object of great significance in the wake of political upheaval starting in the late 1980s, the same upheaval that led to my family's permanent departure from Togo in 1991. Tracking my trajectory through the research as a Togolese émigrée, I come to see clearly for the first time that the cloth's story and my own were not only shaped by the same historical forces but that they also traced similar arcs. Told together, the stories weave a tale of belonging, rupture, and of what comes after; a story of how loss remakes us, and how we remake ourselves in the face of loss. Autoethnography emerges as a tool for unearthing the personal agendas that so often guide our choice of research topics as anthropologists. And research on topics that are close to home proves to be as likely to reawaken old wounds as it is to open pathways to some measure of resolution.

In West Africa, certain objects can act in the world and interact with people as subjects. Labeled “fetishes” by Europeans, these material things have generated centuries of debates on the nature of their agency. In this article, I rely on participant fieldwork as a student in a group of initiated donso hunters in Burkina Faso, which involved using my own fetishes as operator and other people's as client. Starting from this ethnography, I suggest that the agency of fetishes is neither primary to their materiality nor ascribed by humans. Instead, it arises by mediating a three-way identification between the person who uses them and a spirit. Despite recent anthropological critiques of their use to explain away practices and beliefs, I propose using metaphors to make sense of the practical ways people enact such identification with powerful domains of being. Often found alongside metonymies, these enacted metaphors are at work in sacrifice, in embodiment, and in the sharing of substances, where a fetish acts as the body of a normally intangible spirit. While rejecting a symbolic reading of fetishes, I propose reevaluating metaphors as tools to practice relatedness and expand the limits of one's life-world.

In this paper, I consider how one writes an ethnographic memoir about memories, time, and our fieldwork when our memories, or our interlocutors’ memories, are unreliable, inconsistent, false, or simply missing. Reflecting on a brain injury that resulted during fieldwork, my (dis)ordered memories, and the intense reliance on memory in sociocultural anthropology, I ask what writing would look like for anthropologists if we wrote with the forgetfulness? Imperceptible to most, and escaping clinical and lab evaluations, the e/affects of my brain injury have reshaped how I am in this world and shifted how I approach and understand the ethnographic project. I suggest that by writing with memory loss, by admitting there are gaps and fissures, by embracing the confusion and confabulations, and by acknowledging the paralleled unfinishedness of the ethnographic project, we work toward a reformed anthropology that no longer uncritically esteems memory as the basis for the anthropological project. In doing so, the paper contributes to what Marlovitz and Wolf-Meyer have called a “psychotic anthropology,” one that disrupts disciplinary ideas about minds, methods, and memoir and contributes to a productively unruly, and inclusive, ethnographic practice.

This article is an intimate encounter with grief that aims to transform my own field of scholarly study into painful lived experience. The central question of my essay is: When a life is extinguished by street violence, how does a victim's family heal from homicide? The major argument of this article centers around accountability. Drawing from the literature in child psychology as well as the sociology and anthropology of urban violence, I argue that, as a society, our idea of accountability is incomplete. In humanizing both victims and perpetrators of violence, I seek to expand the conception of gang lives by urging my readers to fight against the tendency to reject complexity and gravitate toward purity. As I would come to learn when a teenage family member of mine was murdered, transforming the criminal justice system necessitates that we grapple with contradictory emotions—such as compassion and rage. This is perhaps the greatest and most overlooked aspect of the transformative justice debate today.

Over the past century, debates have raged about the validity of United States corporate personhood and the scope of a person-corporation's rights. While important, these discussions have also erased marginalized peoples’ use of corporate personhood as a strategy for securing the rights denied them by governments. This is the case with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), who incorporated in 1847 to ensure their own rights and protections at a time when their political sovereignty and human rights were being systematically violated. Although legal recognition of corporate personhood began in 1818, the granting of previously human-only rights to person-corporations has accelerated via recent court cases. In this article, I briefly examine how, over time, the US has conferred personhood on corporations. I then deconstruct what this personhood can tell us about the beliefs and practices regarding the meaning of being a person in the United States. Through this, I demonstrate that the act of conferring personhood—the accountability of who is counted as a person and by whom—manifests the underlying ontologies and purposes of what it is to be a person, whether it is through US incorporation laws or in the EBCI's sovereignty protections.

In 2018, my brother Adam Colquhoun, nicknamed “Stretch,” was killed in a bar in Calgary, Alberta by a man he barely knew. Stretch was the kind of person society finds convenient to discard. His history of theft, illicit drug dealing, mental illness, addiction, and homelessness made his humanity “undesirable.” Nevertheless, lessons Stretch learned painfully over his lifetime had something to teach us. In 2016, he told me he wanted someone to write his biography. This paper explores how my brother's murder caused me to collapse the binary between personal and professional, and embrace memoir—a process differing substantially from writing ethnography. I thought of my approach as “pushpin memoir,” akin to a detective board where investigators stick bits of evidence in the aftermath of a crime. Pushpins comprise unusual, standout moments we hold onto among the quotidian we often forget. Meanings gleaned from Stretch's life allowed me to rethink the future of the man who killed him, and thus imagine broader possibilities for people whose actions cause irreparable harm. I ponder how centering the experiencing self feels crucial to future endeavors to write an anthropology that matters to broader publics I hope to engage.

This article is an autoethnographic exploration of life in the former steel mill region of Southeast Chicago in the ‘Rust Belt’ of the Midwestern United States. It challenges assumptions about deindustrialization that depict one discrete historical stage following another (i.e., the postindustrial following the industrial) in favor of what is here defined as the ‘paraindustrial’ (or a setting in which active industry with minimal numbers of workers exists alongside defunct industry and toxic brownfields). This account centers upon the experiences of women who have too often been neglected in research on deindustrialized regions. In particular, it focuses on the author's elderly mother Arlene who has spent her entire life in Southeast Chicago. From her wheelchair on a backyard porch, Arlene observes this damaged landscape built out of the former Calumet wetlands. The article considers the relationships of care, centered around women, that continue to bind together and support the living despite decades of economic and environmental rupture and degradation. Utilizing the concept of a ‘palimpsest,’ the piece considers how different historical, ecological, and social realities and temporalities are both layered on top of each other and intermingle to create the complex landscape found in this former wetland region.