Journal for the anthropology of North America最新文献

This article addresses how a group of people in the San Francisco Bay Area turns social encounters into opportunities to make money. This group participated in sales schemes known as multi-level marketing (MLM). MLM companies use a sales model in which participants earn money by selling products on behalf of companies while also recruiting people to join the companies as fellow salespeople. MLM participants earn financial commissions through selling products and recruiting others to join their network, leading them to hunt for new customers in public spaces or among existing social connections. The subjects of the study perceived social life as a commercial opportunity that could lead to financial gain, deliberately turning Saturday morning at the farmers' market or Sunday night dinner at a restaurant into an opportunity to recruit new customers. I interpret these activities as a form of social speculation: MLM participants invested their time in relationships that may 1 day be profitable, but they never knew whether their efforts would succeed. The potential to make money from social encounters was a constant motivator. Social speculation is an expression of a development in the United States in which people perceive social relationships in terms of economic potential because of precarious market conditions.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic, spurring dramatic changes in public health policies, travel between countries, and (trans)national economies, as well as in religious and political institutions. In the United States, in particular, the pandemic provoked and revealed an increasingly fraught relationship between scientific, religious, and political sources of information and leadership—an American “crisis of authority” wherein many Americans distrusted scientific and medical establishments. This article explores how Shi‘i Muslim institutions and leaders of metro Detroit navigated these competing authorities, even as their communities faced entrenched societal inequities, including anti-Muslim racism (Islamophobia). Through interviews with Shi‘i religious leaders in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and Detroit, supplemented by digital and in-person ethnographic research at five major Shi‘i mosques, we show how major Islamic centers and leaders argued for the efficacy, safety, religious value, and legality of COVID-19 medical guidance and led extensive community outreach initiatives to help their struggling communities. Supported by religious scholars in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, their guidance offered messages of hope and resilience, as well as an emphasis on the community preservation and selflessness (caring for others) exemplified by the Family of the Prophet. They also emphasized how religious and scientific knowledge intersect, as per the sacred texts of Islam (the Qur'an and hadiths). Their approach compels us to better understand how sources of religious authority can tether vulnerable communities to forms of (legitimate) knowledge in times of upheaval, divisive politics, and misinformation.

Volunteering has long held a vaunted position in the United States, which has only increased in the wake of welfare reform and the state's retraction from the provision of public goods. This article explores how immigrant-origin Latinx youth in Nashville, Tennessee, who are active community volunteers, linked volunteering to moral personhood and their claims to national membership. This linkage is based on an internalized deficit perception of the Latinx immigrant person as an immoral national interloper and a concurrent stigmatization and racialization of economic need. However, youth also reframed membership and volunteering's meanings rooted in their relational commitments to each other and their undocumented peers' blocked paths to citizenship. These socially reproductive and more transformative understandings of volunteering, and their links to self-as-citizen, reveal the contingent value of civic engagement for immigrant-origin Latinx youth. It also reveals their central roles in defining the parameters of membership in an era of increased nativist racism and decreased state social service provision in the United States.

In Miami, the US racial category of “white” is being re-defined to include light skinned Latinx immigrants. In the process, US-born white Miamians find themselves displaced from the top of Miami's social hierarchy as light skinned Latinx immigrants take over these social positions. This racialized Latinx social re-positioning is particularly visible in Miami's restaurant industry where the developing social hierarchy leaves white women restaurant workers juggling their white privilege and their traditional gendered roles, with this playing out most profoundly amongst those who occupy “back of house,” or kitchen jobs, where they become both racial and gender minorities.

Through the case study of Geena, a white female cook, I will explore the extent to which the precarity of privilege motivates white women to be audacious actors of resistance in a racialized, hetero-patriarchal restaurant industry. Using an intersectional framework to analyze Geena's lived experiences, this paper focuses specifically on the degree to which her ideas of hope are shaped by class, language, ableism, and sexual orientation. As I will demonstrate through Geena's case study, ideas of hope allow white women to reposition themselves as white saviors, effectively reasserting and reifying whiteness as a superior social category.

This article is a collaborative ethnographic examination of the formation of white, middle-class, suburban mothers’ subjectivities and mothers’ roles in the reproduction of racial inequity and structural violence. We focus on their affective labors transforming home spaces and suburban landscapes into white fantasies of childhood, which we describe as kind of domestic magic. We argue at the heart of this white racial habitus is the figure of the child and childhood. The child embodies mothers’ hopes for happy families and motivates their work and sacrifice. Our aim in this article is to show how racialized suffering and violence may not be reproduced by racial animus, neglect or ignorance but by seemingly innocuous hopes to make or conjure idyllic fantasies for children.

For decades, studies have shown that white households have greater access and benefit most from the racialized US housing market. Homeownership is the material realization of the American dream, and for many it is read alongside middle-classness and normativity as cultural markers of hegemonic whiteness. Conversely, this article explores personal narratives from white homeowners that are excluded from this dominant understanding: white mobile-homeowners. I apply the concept of “untruths” to illustrate how my interlocutors discursively situated their racialized hopes, anxieties, and aspirations against the disparaging “white-trailer trash” trope. I then consider how I, as a white, working-class anthropologist conducting “home-work,” was figured into these narratives as representing this idealized—yet deeply problematic—whiteness. Bringing together anthropological perspectives on lies and sincerity, I show how white racial “untruths” reveal a more complex and fragmented whiteness that belies the dreamlike fiction of hegemonic white normativity.

Capoeira is a martial art that is said to have arisen out of the colonial encounter in Brazil. Forbidden from practicing martial arts, the enslaved Africans supposedly added music to their training and disguised it as dance, an artful subterfuge sustaining their hopes that they might one day be able to escape from bondage. Regardless of this story's veracity, it has become a foundational tale that practitioners in the United States reference as justification for a variety of social justice efforts they undertake as capoeiristas. This article introduces the concept of affective habitus as a way of thinking about how membership in a serious leisure community alters the ways in which individuals relate to the world around them, offering hope that the capoeirista's affective habitus might disrupt white supremacy.

This article introduces and explores two intersections between hope and whiteness: first, how various forms of hope alternately operate as discursive techniques that reproduce or resist whiteness; and second, whether theorists have warrant to hope for changes in whiteness itself. In order to prompt further study of both, I survey literature to propose seven dimensions for comparing forms of hope. I then apply this incipient typology of hopes to ethnographic evidence of white people who relocated to live in predominantly Black neighborhoods. I argue that their modes of hope transformed to become less agentic, less optimistic, and less conformed to white supremacist modes of hope. I close with a reflexive look at the place of hope in whiteness studies itself, pointing to two possible foundations of hoping for better future possibilities of whiteness.