American Anthropologist最新文献

This vital topics forum focuses on the host of challenges that now threaten the future of anthropology. The political polarization of the current era, along with the economic rationale that matches it, leads to policy and legislation restricting content and speech in universities, cuts and closure of anthropology programs, and the loss of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. This combines the loss of careers and opportunities with the elimination of anthropological perspectives from the public discourse. Cultural shifts delegitimize and devalue the discipline, which struggles not only to increase its ranks but also to maintain its presence within and outside the academy. The articles within this vital topics forum engage with these challenges while raising an alarm to all anthropologists that threats to the discipline are real and requires immediate responses from practitioners, instructors, scholars, programs and departments, and our professional organizations.

This article takes a scalar view of “friction” (Tsing 2005) and “refusal” (Ortner 1995) between ethnography and the archive. The concept of friction was originally formulated in the context of a globalizing world, but friction's perception and experience are highly local. By recurrently destabilizing interactions, friction generates the constant possibility of contestation at the same time that it fosters ongoing renewal and reshuffling of social relations. Refusal, in turn, is shaped by a combination of individual agency and the contextual parameters delimiting any given social interaction. Based on a K'iche’ Maya narrative recorded by Catholic missionary James L. Mondloch in the area of Nahualá, Sololá, Guatemala, I illustrate how refusal not only informs interpretation of the oral history but shaped its 1968 telling. As debate continues over the ethics and logistics of working with legacy fieldwork data, I consider the frictions that anthropologists have to live with when working with archival data and those that we ourselves may generate.

This Vital Topics Forum focuses on the host of challenges that now threaten the future of anthropology. The political polarization of the current era, along with the economic rationale that matches it, leads to policy and legislation restricting content and speech in universities, cuts and closure of anthropology programs, and the loss of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. This combines the loss of careers and opportunities with the elimination of anthropological perspectives from public discourse. Cultural shifts delegitimize and devalue the discipline, which struggles not only to increase its ranks but to maintain its presence within and outside the academy. The articles within this Vital Topics Forum engage with these challenges while raising an alarm to all anthropologists that the threat to the discipline is real and requires immediate responses from practitioners, instructors, scholars, programs and departments, and our professional organizations.

What do people think about anthropology and other disciplines in the social sciences and liberal arts? How do negative views of anthropology influence the discipline's future? A review of public discourse from news, commentaries, scholarly literature, monographs, and institutional reports reveals anthropology's current state and direction. The results point to great distress. Analysis demonstrates powerful disapproval of higher education, the liberal arts, and social sciences threatens the instruction, practice, and ethos of anthropology. Narrative domains in popular discourse reveal active attitudes demanding and executing audits, cuts, and closures of anthropology departments; legislation restricting teaching and research; and the dissolution of anthropology's legitimacy. This review demonstrates the existence and power of such popular narratives, analyzes how they reflect a common political-economic threat to the discipline, then asks difficult, critical questions before offering recommendations to confront one of the discipline's darkest moments.

Friendships between low-wage migrant workers can provide mutual support and information, as well as generate suspicion, jealousy, and competition. Indonesian and Filipino migrant women in Chile maintain counter-intuitive social relations where, despite never fully resolving ongoing conflicts over money, men, or reputations, women continue to attend to new emergencies and provide significant economic, practical, or emotional support to one another. Such friendships take on a hostile quality, where women can be aggressive or antagonistic while caring for the other's needs. These friendships that endure despite open wounds raise questions about the nature of care and obligation in contemporary urban nonkin relations. They highlight how women affectively navigate the potential harm of friendship to survive structural and everyday violence from other social relations. In decentering the role of positive affect in analyses of friendship and caring relations, I propose that a focus on such “ambivalent relationality” can present us with more realistic, although perhaps unromantic, models of how to care for one another in an imperfect world.

In Senegal, Type II diabetes often causes rapid weight loss. Weight loss is usually the reason women will finally seek out a biomedical diagnosis for their ailment. Loss of weight has many negative connotations for Senegalese women—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, financial troubles, or an unhappy marriage. When women lose weight, they become the subject of rumors and gossip in their communities. This leads to isolation. Research has shown that isolation has deleterious mental health effects, especially in places as communal as Senegal. Worsening mental health can also exacerbate diabetes. This article explores Senegalese women's experiences with weight loss due to Type II diabetes and the effects their weight loss, in addition to their diabetes, has on their lived experience and their social networks.