American Anthropologist最新文献

Anthropological studies of risk have long focused on how people respond to and aim to manage potential harm. But despite its long and important genealogy, this article suggests that risk can pose an analytic blind spot that potentially occludes other ways of understanding how people aim to live well in potentially harmful situations. In doing so, it argues for anthropological attention to a Mongolian “protection” concept: an optimistic idea that imaginatively tethers defense against harm with prospects of living well in the conditions that follow. This approach aims to recast and deepen anthropological understanding of how people conceptualize, deal with, and move beyond harms encountered in everyday life.

Resilience is everywhere in contemporary US discourse. In this article, we map anthropological research on resilience and suggest future contributions to resilience studies. To date, anthropological work either uses resilience to describe practices of human survival in adversity or studies resilience as a policy discourse. While anthropologists have long been concerned with human adaptation to adversity, we theorize that resilience discourses hold a particular appeal to a Euro-American middle class newly affected by crisis and precarity. We offer scenes from preliminary fieldwork on resilience discourses in three domains in the United States: middle-class parenting guides, urban governance and future planning in St. Louis and New York City, and the cultural productions of Black and Indigenous activists and artists. Drawing these sites into the same analytic frame reveals how resilience discourses can serve distinct political ends, from accommodation to the status quo to qualified social reform to resistance to socially unjust systems. We conclude with a call for more synthetic and comparative research, greater clarity about the distinctiveness and benefits of resilience over other terminologies, and analyses that consider resilience as both a discourse and a ground-level experience in different global sites.

You are reading the first sentence of this essay. In fact, outside of this abstract and a brief introduction, there are only first sentences in this essay, all collected from anthropology monographs and articles. Anthropology is a promiscuous discipline, but there are only about half a dozen ways to begin an anthropology essay. I collect sentences into their tropes, organize the sentences within those tropes, then arrange those tropes among one another, so this text reads like an opening to an anthropology essay, despite being composed entirely of openings to anthropology essays. I'd like to say I got the idea from Christian Marclay's film, The Clock, a memento mori whose 24-hour narrative is driven by excerpts of movies that feature timepieces, but it probably came from a YouTube montage of Nicholas Cage screaming “Fuck” 40 times in 40 seconds. The expectations of academic realism as a genre transform this essay from archive to narrative: the text itself is theoretical, geographic, and historical nonsense, but it consolidates as an essay through the academic readers’ (your) efforts to suture discrepancies into cohesion. If this essay makes any sense, it's due to a magic trick realism performs on us. This might be worth thinking about whenever we read something that makes sense.

In a world of proliferating displacement crises and restricted mobility pathways, low-wage labor migration has become, for many, a more feasible refuge than formal asylum. The refugee-as-displaced-migrant has thus become emblematic of our time. But how do contemporary displacement crises, and violent ones at that, shape the predicament of the migrant-refugee in countries of arrival? And how might the particularities of the displaced migrant's vulnerable condition be read as clues, both to violence committed abroad and to the profitable leveraging of said violence in countries of arrival? In this article, I engage these questions through an investigation into how displacement-inducing violence lingers, as traces, in the lives of Myanmar migrant-refugees in Thailand. Unfreedom, I find, is internal to ostensibly free market relations. Advancing this claim, I turn to a growing anthropology of borders to grasp the nation's geopolitical perimeter as a social relation that border crossers cannot easily discard—a relation that conditions social life, even at sites far from a given country's territorial margins. I show, in sum, how employers and other regulatory actors in countries of arrival internalize, across borders, displacement-inducing violence perpetrated elsewhere.

Emergent scholarship in political geology highlights multiple ways of knowing the earth and its materials. By examining the politics of Western knowledge production within the earth sciences, political geology queries who has the power to define geomaterials and the sociopolitical impacts of such categorizations. Simultaneously, political geology demonstrates how earthly formations cocreate politics alongside humans through their vibrancy, with societies and geomaterials transforming each other. Here, I develop a political geology of archaeological ceramics to move beyond Western categories that can sometimes hinder interpretations of politics due to their rigidity. I use the concept of geopower—how earthly forces engender new collectivities and political possibilities—to overcome the interpretative challenges archaeologists face when describing Recuay sociopolitical organization (Ancash, Peru, ca. 100–700 CE). Specifically, I show how so-called “impure” kaolin helped to temporarily organize otherwise insular villages through their emergence and meaningful position on the landscape. To recognize geopower in the deep past, I present a layered narrative framework that blends interpretations of earthly materials, thereby making space for the existence of many worlds. In this sense, political geology can learn from archaeology, particularly Indigenous archaeologies, which advocate for the integration of myriad knowledges of the earth and its histories.

This article examines how tours of an industrial pig slaughterhouse reinforce the continued enfoldment of Danish pigs into the fabrication of Danish national identity, an enfoldment that underpins the formulation of subjects, human as well as more-than-human. A discourse analysis that weaves ethnographic moments from the tours and tour narratives along with historical and literary influences on Danish national identity and current debates on “Danishness” explores how narrativizing industrial slaughter is a means of formulating subjects that are sustained by agricultural histories, existential texts, and fairy tales. Through “humanizing” slaughterhouse conditions, tour guides are performing a kind of affective and pedagogical labor that produces modernist subjects, from the citizen-consumer to that of the happy pig. In consuming happy Danish pigs, citizen-consumers consolidate what it means to be Danish as they tacitly accept the industrial sacrifice of pigs, whose lives are worthy of living but crucially, also, worthy of taking. This work demonstrates how a multispecies awareness can enrich our understanding of the complex, unstable, and inseparable emergence of value production, nationhood, and capitalist subjects.