American Anthropologist最新文献

Mother tongue influence (MTI) is a widely used yet often underdefined term in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. “Mother tongue” is an unavoidable,yet fraught political category linked to sovereignty, education, region, and ethnicity. Yet in the BPO industry, workers are expected to sound “global” with no identifiable regional “mother tongue” accent. Trainers in the BPO industry have responded to this challenge by working to remove workers’ MTI—and to remove workers with excessive MTI from the industry altogether. This paper argues that MTI gets used in the BPO industry to justify the erasure of both speech and speakers without overtly identifying the systemic privileging of upper-caste, elite, urban varieties of English and their speakers. Regional and ethnic affiliations are treated as intrinsic properties of persons and speech through “mother tongue,” while socially privileged accent trainers are able to claim their own global unmarkedness.

As anthropology reckons with its past, present, and future, anthropologists increasingly seek to challenge inequities within the discipline and academia more broadly. Anthropology, regardless of subdiscipline, is a social endeavor. Yet research often remains an isolating (though not necessarily solitary) process, even within research teams and in coauthorship contexts. Here, we focus on peer-reviewed publication as the principal manifestation of knowledge production and propose a method for challenging division, hierarchy, power differentials, and adherence to tradition: writing in community. Writing in community is a collaborative form of writing that centers care, abundance, joy, and personal satisfaction over the individuality currently rewarded by the academy. This process engenders consensus, circumvents normative hierarchical research and writing, and promotes relationship building. Here, we experiment by inviting reviewers and editors into our community to collectively contribute to the writing process and reflect on that experience together. Ultimately, we challenge norms for scholarship, (co)authorship, and ways of knowing to offer a more equitable praxis of knowledge production. We propose that writing in community can help anthropologists enact values of multivocality and research transparency.

If the Cold War space race culminated in a return to Earth, at present we are experiencing a renewed interest in space. Drawing on fieldwork among people working in the space sector in Sweden, this article focuses on some of the imaginaries underpinning this resurgence and the contemporary commercialization of space. Specifically, I hone in on the envisaged potential of miniaturized satellite technology to modify how humans relate to Earth and the cosmos. As I show, the allure of smallness relies on interscalar practices whereby something that shrinks in size simultaneously magnifies its scale of significance, meanwhile pushing the terrestrial infrastructures of space into the background and figuring largeness as an outcome, not a precondition. While this is often achieved with the help of logistical metaphors that conceal the material specificities of low Earth orbit, the proliferation of orbital debris throws such qualities into relief and presents expansiveness as a challenge to be addressed at scale. If space professionals posit smallness as ground rather than figure, emergent threats to their activities dramatically flip the order between smallness and largeness, thereby signaling that to bracket scale in the analytical interest of connectivity and comparison ultimately reintroduces scale as a problem.

“Swamped” cracks open my experience of depression by exploring how a specific place—a swamp—acted on me to bring social and emotional injuries, but also modes of seeing that ultimately moved me out of the depression, to the fore. In writing from this specific place, I build on moments in which something—a desire for beauty, the luminosity of blue, the dullness of gray, the vibrancy of lichen, and the slippage between seeing and unseeing—moved into view. These moments were often minute and small and could seem as if nothing had happened, but in each one something impinged, and something congealed released itself into vision and movement. In placing these moments in loose sequence, I do not only seek to clarify how and why vision matters to me but also to form a method for seeing from which I might be able to draw should the depression strike again. In depression, rational understanding often runs out, pushing memories and associations to the fore. The creation of this piece has been inspired by the associative-autobiographical writing developed by Maggie Nelson and Wayne Koestenbaum, as well as the image-bound, descriptive approach encouraged by Kathleen Stewart.

In this article I evoke key elements of my Italian grandmother's life—her knitwear workshop, her practice as a tailor, and her sensorial engagements with bodies and dress—and interweave them with reflections from my fieldwork in Milan, Italy. Family stories about my grandmother are steeped in things that have disappeared—objects and materialities, forms of women's work, and familiar places in a changing city. Loss and absence are here a particular form of memory that shapes relations between generations of women. I am particularly interested in the difficulties of researching the lives of women when these center objects, places, senses, and experiences that have been displaced as part of historical and cultural change. To this end, I draw from the work of Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. His attention to losing one's place as a form of presence, and to magic as a strategy for noticing that which disappears, helps me consider the stories of my grandmother alongside the changing roles of small tailors and dressmakers. In this context, “intimate ethnography” is a strategy to attend to gendered and historically precarious work while taking into consideration its performative, material, and embodied aspects.

Anthropologists often consider the distinction from our interlocutors a barrier, assuming that overcoming the distance allows us to understand our interlocutors. Other times, ethnographers intentionally maintain ethnographic distance to avoid “doing harm” to our interlocutors. In either case, ethnographers are assumed to be responsible for maintaining a proper distance from our research participants. As two cultural anthropologists who work with marginalized groups (drug users and rural-to-urban migrant workers), we are aware of our emotional, cultural, and epistemological distances from our interlocutors. However, we also notice that our interlocutors often take the initiative to define their distance from us. In this paper, we explore these often-overlooked distinction practices employed by our research subjects. We view such actions as active negotiation with power relations, rather than passive avoidance. Thus, we propose a shift from merely acknowledging the intrinsic distinctions in the researcher-researched relationship to learning from and understanding the distinctions created by our interlocutors. We argue that our interlocutors’ agency in these distinction practices is crucial and warrants significant attention in ethnographic research. We further highlight distinction as a valuable method, a way of not only understanding our research subjects but also participating in their world.