American Anthropologist最新文献

Despite American football's inherently violent nature, its corporeal demands are not evenly felt by all players on the field. This article builds on Dána-Ain Davis's term to describe how Black football players become Black anti-bodies. These athletes are encouraged to pursue more dangerous playing positions, are commodified to bolster the sport's economic value, and are offered corporeal concern so their bodies can continue to play. While the team benefits from the creation of Black anti-bodies at play, the well-being and health of Black players are neglected, as they continue to suffer physical harm on behalf of the sport.

This essay argues that maternal condemnation is a key technique of carceral disciplining in sexual assault sentencing hearings in the United States. The frequency, arbitrariness, and intensity of such condemnation demonstrates Black women's susceptibility to public critique, even when they are not at the center of projects of carceral discipline. By engaging the concept of Black anti-bodies, the essay shows how carceral institutions extend a logic of caring for Black women and girls in the process of sexual assault prosecutions. The public nature of court proceedings produces a spectacle of condemning Black maternal figures in the name of this care. The forms of talk that are publicly uttered also become part of a public record, which forms the basis for future sentences.

This afterword examines the paradoxical nature of Black anti-bodies, as highlighted by Dána-Ain Davis's insightful opening call. It discusses how timely responses in this collection provide valuable frameworks for understanding what I call Black ante-anti-bodies, with the hyphens serving as essential analytical tools to complicate the relationship between Afro-pessimism and Afro-futurism. This approach encourages a Black feminist praxis that effectively navigates the complexities of objectification and subjugation while also emphasizing the potential for joy and resilience. Ultimately, this afterword advocates for an ontology of Blackness that remains open to possibility, revealing its dynamic and richly layered realities.

Medicaid for Pregnant Women is an important safety net program that covers nearly half of all births in Texas, the second most populous state in the United States. This article explores the bureaucratic mechanisms of exclusion from coverage under Medicaid for Pregnant Women for Latinas in the Texas–Mexico border region. It gives particular attention to exclusion during the COVID-19 public health emergency, when federal policy prevented states from disenrolling Medicaid recipients. Ethnographic work conducted during the first 2 years of the pandemic shows how bureaucratic procedures tied to using publicly funded programs may undermine the potential for these programs to remedy social inequities. The bureaucratic exclusion that may result constitutes reproductive violence, given that the inaccessibility of health services can contribute to adverse reproductive health outcomes and undermine a person's ability to manage their reproductive lives with dignity. While the focus is on Medicaid policies, this analysis is relevant for understanding how bureaucracy has the potential to wield power in ways that perpetuate various manifestations of violence within society.

Beads are a medium through which settlers and Indigenous peoples of North America shape the future. Here, we apply the analytic of futurity to examine two case studies of bead making and bead working across archaeology and cultural anthropology. Johnson examines The Mint at Pascack, a fictionalized account of the Campbell Wampum Factory. The Campbell Factory was a Euro-American-owned workshop in New Jersey that produced shell beads for export to Indigenous consumers throughout the 19th century. The Mint shows how settler futurity replaces histories of Indigenous dispossession and appropriation with futures of civilizational supremacy and Native elimination. Eddy considers the Native Baby Yoda phenomenon and adjacent uses of Disney to show how Indigenous beaders use popular media to claim space in new art movements. Beaders engage with long-term intergenerational futures while also contesting settler futurity through rupture, play, and reinvention. We argue that both Indigenous and settler futurities are made and contested through a creative combination of storytelling and transformations of material culture centered on youth. Where settler and Indigenous futurities collide, we observe the affect of settler bafflement, or the confused, sometimes humorous experience of being forced to recognize Indigeneity in ways that interrupt settler expectations and temporalities.