American Anthropologist最新文献

How does it feel to learn through a genocide? How does one teach on the same campus where student protest is forcibly quelled? In this experimental dialogue between an undergraduate student and a faculty member, we answer these questions in a Black feminist call and response rooted in an ethics of mutuality and care. Drawing on Gutierrez's lived experience in a Gaza solidarity encampment collective, we conceive of encampments as antibodies—an adaptive response to the settler sickness of war and genocide. Thinking alongside Dána-Ain Davis, Christina Sharpe, and Tiffany Lethabo King, we argue that intimate pedagogical and political engagement across diasporas produces a necessary pathway to praxis that can disrupt the normativity of both anti-Blackness and Zionism.

This essay distinguishes between Black anti-bodies and resistive antibodies to examine the grassroots care labor of Black Jamaican women living with HIV. Drawing on a brief ethnographic vignette from fieldwork in Kingston, it explores how women navigate and contest state violence, reproductive injustice, and biomedical neglect through community-based networks of care that are resistive antibodies—protective entities that offer adaptive forms of resistance to overlapping oppression. Grounded in Black and Caribbean feminist thought, this piece reframes care as a radical, life-sustaining praxis that challenges dehumanizing logics of contagion, pathology, and disposability. Ultimately, it responds to Dána-Ain Davis's anti-bodies call by advancing a Black feminist infrastructure of care that both critiques structural violence and foregrounds the protective work of antibodies laboring for wellness, interdependence, and collective survival.

This interview with Professor Mun Young Cho, a leading cultural anthropologist at Yonsei University, explores her intellectual journey and research on poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. Trained in South Korea and the United States, Professor Cho reflects on her encounters with socialism, neoliberal reforms, and the intellectual shifts between these contexts. The conversation delves into her work bridging academic scholarship with public engagement and activism, addressing themes such as the precarious conditions of contemporary youth, the historicity of poverty, and the intersections of anthropology and politics. Professor Cho highlights the concept of “implication,” emphasizing how individuals, including academics, are entangled in the structures they critique. The interview further examines her innovative initiatives, including the “Empathy Forum,” which brought together Korean and Chinese graduate students to encourage cross-national dialogue and collaboration amid rising nationalism and anti-China sentiment. By reflecting on her fieldwork and public-facing anthropology, Professor Cho discusses the tensions between empathy and critique, the politics of precarity, and the potential of ethnography to bridge divides and create transformative encounters. This dialogue offers insights into anthropology's potential to engage with pressing social issues, rethink binaries such as China versus the West, and contribute to a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of global crises and inequalities.

This essay introduces the special section Anti-bodies, Anti-body: A Black Feminist Call and Response, a collaborative Black feminist intervention that emerges from an interdisciplinary dialogue grounded in anthropological critique. Building on anthropologist Dána-Ain Davis's concept of “Black anti-bodies”—bodies caught in the paradox of susceptibility and immunity—we explore how Black and “Othered” bodies are positioned at the intersection of vulnerability and resistance. We frame “anti-body” as both analytic and praxis—one that challenges dominant epistemologies and foregrounds the survival strategies, care work, and resistance practices of groups that are slotted as Other. The “call and response” format contextualizes the development of the special section and outlines how the collective essays from cultural and medical anthropologists, Black feminist ethnographers, medical humanists, artists, and educators uncover how anti-bodies function not only as sites of harm but also as political and imaginative resources. We invite readers to engage with anti-bodies as a frame for unraveling intersecting oppressions and envisioning liberatory futures across disciplines and communities.

How can trauma, specifically, racialized birth trauma, be passed on or reproduced across generations? This essay explores the intersections of trauma research, including forms of birth trauma and racism, alongside the research on epigenetic inheritance, to understand the reproduction of racialized birth trauma. Drawing on preliminary research conducted with scientists and a close reading of Davis's concept of anti-bodies, I argue that it is important to bring biological and cultural specificity to the mechanisms that transmit trauma across generations. Doing so challenges overdetermined interpretations of epigenetic inheritance and the inevitability of reproducing trauma.

The illustration, Four Attempts Between, reflects on a pivotal moment during the birth of my first child, when four failed IV attempts became the most prolonged and painful part of labor. I came to see my own body as rendered an “anti‑body” within a system that could not meet my needs—even in moments meant to be routine. This personal rupture echoes Davis's framing of how Black women's bodies are positioned for failure in medical settings, regardless of intent. Drawing from my work as a birth and postpartum doula and artist, I pair personal memory with visual storytelling to illuminate the need for empathy, skill, and advocacy in birth. This piece is both a record of harm and a call to name these harms, resist their normalization, and imagine care that affirms and protects.

The visual arts can be a powerful tool to deploy in gender equality and racial justice battles. The following essay explicates this idea by exploring overlapping and differentiating characteristics between cultural anthropology and visual art. It includes paintings and collages created by the author that speak to experiences with reproductive racism and gender oppression that are chronicled in this special section.