American Anthropologist最新文献

This article explores family caregiving in Vietnamese households affected by type 2 diabetes. Drawing on existential phenomenology and on fieldwork conducted in northern Vietnam, I develop the concept of care calibrations as a tool to understand how family members respond socially and morally to the needs for care that diabetes confronts them with. The concept of care calibrations highlights how chronic care is undertaken as an ethical endeavor within domestic environments characterized by multiple care needs. The article explores how caregivers find their bearings in complex care situations by looking toward dominant moral standards while also adjusting pragmatically to the contingencies of domestic lives, placing themselves in others’ situations. On this ethnographic basis, the article calls for more sustained anthropological attention to the social implications of human capacities for sympathetic co-living and particularly to the intermediate realm between selves and others where capacities for moral imagination reside.

In an era marked by heightened globalization and climate crisis, the proliferation of alien or invasive species has emerged as a critical issue. This article delves into the contentious debates surrounding strategies for addressing these species, offering insights into divergent visions of “environmental futures” and the intricate interplay of concern, risk, and power relations in the Anthropocene. Through ethnographic research, the article scrutinizes discourses and practices related to the preservation of sabras, recent immigrants from the Americas that have become emblematic in Israel/Palestine, symbolizing a shared connection to the land for Jews and Palestinians. The primary focus is on efforts to protect sabras from an invasive insect threat, which involves introducing a “natural enemy” to combat the intruder, sparking controversy among scientists and stakeholders. By employing the concept of “Anthropocene concern,” the article unveils the anxieties of various actors regarding nonhuman entities and demonstrates how these perceptions drive human actions or inaction. Despite the temptation to associate the political struggle only with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the article shows the importance of analyzing the political–scientific struggle around the appropriate approach to dealing with invasive species and how emotions, politics, and science are intertwined at different levels, requiring careful analysis and interpretation.

As we continue to define anthropology for the 21st century, I argue that ethics—what we mean by ethics, how we invoke ethics, and how we demonstrate our ethics—should be at the center of our conversation. Through this presidential address, I offer a challenge to center an ethics of care in our work that derives not from the Common Rule or broad policies of US institutions, but rather is derived from our responsibility for the impact of our actions, whether intentional or unintentional, and is situated in the moral narratives of the communities that we serve.

What is the role of humor in obfuscating social hierarchy? This article describes how caste prejudices among male taxi drivers in Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayas are enacted through the humor of calling each other “funny” names. Such humor is directed toward Dalit drivers whose proper first names are replaced by “funny” names that caricature their personal attributes as an index of their “lower-caste” identity without addressing it directly. Given the conditions of social change in the practice of caste across India, calling such names provides the “upper-caste” drivers grounds for the disavowability of addressing caste. Calling Dalit drivers funny first names at the taxi stand eschews addressing directly the collective lower-caste identity indexed in their last names even as the humor so enacted becomes the premise for identifying their caste identity. It exceeds and bypasses legalized notions of caste atrocity by distorting personal attributes into humorous name-calling that is indexically removed from the denigration of collective caste identity that can be disavowed. This article offers an ethnography of humor to understand how humorous sociability becomes the means for addressing lower-caste identity while simultaneously providing the grounds for its obfuscation and disavowal.

This article lays out the work of Costs of War, a project of scholars creating public-facing knowledge toward the goal of challenging US militarism. Emerging from literature that critiques US imperial violence and deconstructs the commonplace understandings that support it, our efforts identify and confront pillars of belief about war that are shaped by the powerful military-industrial complex and rooted in an underlying devaluation of the lives of Muslims, people of color, women, and oppressed groups who bear the brunt of militarization both at home and abroad. We use our research and associated website (costsofwar.org) to reach out to journalists, editors, Congress, policymakers, civic groups, social movements, and the US public. In contesting the soundbites about the post-9/11 wars that allow these wars to be seen as inevitable and to continue uncontested, we hope to help avert the next war championed by those least likely to live with the horrific and decades-long consequences. We describe our approach, its successes, and its stumbling blocks in hope of offering insights for scholars in the social sciences who wish to use their research in service of activist goals and social justice movements, antiwar and beyond.

يعرض هذا المقال أعمال مشروع “تكاليف الحرب،” وهو مشروع يضم أكاديميين يعملون على بناء معرفة موجهة للجمهور في سبيل تحدي النزوع العسكري للولايات المتحدة الأمريكية. إن عملنا، المنبثق عن التراث الفكري المنتقد للعنف الإمبريالي الأمريكي والذي يفكك الفهم السائد الذي يدعمه، يعرّف ويواجه مرتكزات المعتقد المتعلق بحرب يشكلها المجمع الصناعي العسكري القوي وتمد بجذورها في الاستهانة الكامنة بحيوات المسلمين، والملونين، والنساء، والمجموعات المقهورة والذين يحتملون -في مجموعهم- تبعات العسكرة إن كان في الديار أو في الخارج. نحن نستخدم بحثنا وموقع الانترنت المرتبط بنا (costofwar.org) في التواصل مع صحفيين ومحررين وأعضاء في الكونجرس وصناع سياسات ومجموعات مدنية وحركات اجتماعية وعامة الجمهور الأمريكي. في طعننا في العبارات الرنانة التي صدرت حول حروب ما بعد الحادي عشر من سبتمبر، والتي تمكن هذه الحروب من أن ترى باعتبارها محتومة ومن البقاء دون مراجعة، نطمح إلى أن نساعد في تجنب الحرب المقبلة والمؤيدة من قبل أولئك الذين لن يضطروا على الأغلب للحياة في ظل التبعات المرعبة التي ستستمر لعقود. إننا نصف نهجنا ، بنجاحاته والعقبات المعيقة له، على أمل تقديم رؤى للأكاديميين في مجال العلوم الاجتماعية الذين يأملون في استخدام بحثهم في بلوغ أهداف ناشطية، وحركات العدالة الاجتماعية ومناهضة الحرب، وغير ذلك.