Journal for the anthropology of North America最新文献

In this piece, we bear witness to the photos, reels, and videos produced by Palestinians documenting—and trying to survive—genocide in Gaza. Drawing primarily on archives that we have built through engaging with interlocutors, colleagues, and social media platforms, we focus on the realities faced by disabled Gazans and their kin, who urge international disability movement counterparts and disabled communities to support a ceasefire and the broader call for Palestinian liberation. On the one hand, we understand and approach this ongoing Nakba as a prolonged exercise in collective disablement. On the other hand, we also recognize how people in Gaza continue to hold onto the specific experiences of people who are (already) disabled.

A small elite liberal arts college in the northeastern United States provides a context for the promotion and proliferation of a discourse of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article considers projects emergent from a summer research fellowship offered to groups of faculty members and students. We compare the ways in which the group of students led by us and the group of students led by another set of faculty developed questions and explored aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We show that the other group began their efforts by foregrounding work on the production of inequality but ended up with a rather neoliberal subjectivity focused on the exploration of the self and one's feelings. Our group managed to avoid such an outcome, but, unlike the other group, our work got passed over for promotion on the College's website. Our insights seek to provide a context for the transformation of calls to “do something” in the academic institution in which we work into depoliticized representations of difference ripe for institutional display and promotion.

We (Megan Raschig and David Flood) write this as the outgoing editors-in-chief of JANA, having started our term in Spring 2020. Our goal in this “outro” is to reflect on some lessons from our editorship, unfolding as it did through the pandemic and a series of unsettling changes to AAA publishing. We share understandings and concerns that transcend our journal and speak to the transformations in the ways we develop, write, read, publish, and share anthropological knowledge.

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.