{"title":"Beyond a logic of choice: the role of family narratives in ethical, person‐centred support for individuals with intellectual disabilities","authors":"Aaron J. Jackson","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14246","url":null,"abstract":"This article demonstrates the important role family narratives can play in providing ethical, person‐centred support for people with severe intellectual disabilities living in supported accommodation. Focusing on the story of Daniel, a 65‐year‐old man residing in a group home in Australia, I illustrate, through the lens of his mother Arleen, how family narratives foreground those with intellectual disabilities as holders and makers of memories, offering valuable social and narrative contexts for their ethical treatment. I conceptualize family narratives as evolving frameworks that give meaning to the lives of people, both individually and as a group, grounding shared and individual ways of being and understanding through the passage of time. In a time where the disability sector increasingly emphasizes personal autonomy and choice for service users, I argue for an embodied understanding of ethics, of paying the other their due, by attending to the stories that constitute people as relational beings. This is particularly relevant in the context of consumer‐oriented support, which can drive individualizing, one‐size‐fits‐all approaches to a person's ethical treatment. Such narratives have the potential to influence professional practice and promote a more connected approach to person‐centred support that recognizes the embodied and relational dimensions of our lives.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142929147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To make a difference: responding to migration's demands in returns to Cuba","authors":"Valerio Simoni","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14247","url":null,"abstract":"The article focuses on the predicaments faced by return migrants to Cuba and how they respond to societal pressures to make a valuable difference ‘back home’, opening analytical avenues at the juncture of the anthropology of ethics and morality and migration. It does so by uncovering five distinct but complementary ways in which returnees respond to migration‐related demands. Conceptualized as efforts to ‘make a difference’, it first considers the importance for returnees to exemplify and share the economic gains that are widely expected from a successful migration, before addressing alternative attempts to carve out other sources of prized difference from experiences abroad. To deflect the pressure that weighs on them as (ex)migrants and generates feelings of exhaustion and estrangement, returnees also endeavour to ‘unmake’ migration‐related differences. They do so by deconstructing migration promises, reframing notions and forms of belonging, and downplaying the possibilities afforded by life in Cuba. While the combination of different anthropological approaches to ethics and morality befits the analysis, the returnees’ resistance to scrutiny of their moral lives questions the limitless reach and suitability of such interpretative lenses. Ultimately, this helps assess their relevance and pitfalls in research on migration and beyond.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142935185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"More than bureaucratic objects: the mothers of the disappeared in Mexico and the potentialities of their investigation files","authors":"Isaac Vargas","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14245","url":null,"abstract":"The crisis of disappearances in Mexico started in 2006, when then‐president Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs framed by a military perspective. Since then, more than 111,000 disappearances have been reported nationwide. Faced with this panorama of violence and uncertainty, a bureaucratic body has emerged which attempts to manage the search by, and mourning of, families who are still waiting for the return of their loved ones. This article addresses the way in which the official investigation carried out by the authorities plays a central role in the search process. Through the voices of thirteen mothers whose daughters and sons have disappeared, the investigation files adopt the category of a person‐object, which represents a type of presence of the victim. Thus, one of the central arguments is based on a reflection of how missing persons, through objects, continue to participate both in the daily lives of their relatives and in claims for justice against the Mexican state apparatus.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142917076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Against interpretive exclusivism*","authors":"Harvey Whitehouse","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14244","url":null,"abstract":"Interpretive exclusivism is the dogma that we can only understand cultural systems by interpreting them, thereby ruling out causal explanations of cultural phenomena using scientific methods, for example based on measurement, comparison, and experiment. In this article, I argue that the costs of interpretive exclusivism are heavy and the benefits illusory. I make the case instead for an interactionist approach in which interpretive and scientific approaches work together on an equal footing. Although such approaches are neither easy nor cheap, I argue that they are necessary to improve the intellectual ambition, comparative breadth, and practical relevance of anthropology as a discipline. In all these ways, incorporating rather than excluding scientific methods would improve the long‐term prospects of anthropology as a flourishing field of research and teaching.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"150 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142887417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crossing the timescape of the ‘Here and Now’ on Mount Athos","authors":"Michelangelo Paganopoulos","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14243","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on how the monks of Mount Athos embody its unique timescape in their presentation of the monastic self in everyday life, as it emerges out of the musicality of the Athonian landscape. The article unfolds the embodied dialectics in play between the experience of messianic time and its spiritual affordances against which one's bodily resilience is sociomaterially tested in and by the ‘Here and Now’, following the metronomic measuring of time and its historical affordances. By comparing two ways of measuring each ‘hour’, the article further investigates the use value given to one's personal time as an experiential means of teaching the ‘<jats:italic>techne</jats:italic> of time’ for cultivating a monastic ‘self’ within and against a ‘world’ out there. The article draws three overlapping nested temporal cycles in terms of per‐forming the ‘self’ within the organic community and the institution, through which one naturalizes, synchronizes, and interiorizes the horologion with the tempos of everyday life. Finally, it argues that the crossing from the secular to the monastic timescape disrupts the continuity of common life and its expectations, by opening a self‐revelatory time rupture revealing Eternity in every instance of one's paradoxical presence in the present moment in and out of time.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"154 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142887418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Racket sociality: investigating intimidation in North India","authors":"Lucia Michelutti","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14241","url":null,"abstract":"This article is an ethnographic investigation into acts of intimidation and threats. Theoretically, it dialogues with ‘racket’ – a key analytical term in the sociology of domination, state‐making, and mafias. The anthropology of power, violence, and crime has paid scant attention to the morphology of threats and the ways interpersonal intimidation intertwines with economic and political forms of coercion. Drawing on ethnographic insights from North India, the article examines the way (criminal) intimidation is normalized, consented to, and socially embedded in everyday life. It shows how racketeering is routinized beyond clandestine organized crime. Ultimately, ‘racket sociality’ is proposed as a new method of ethnographic inquiry into theorizing authority and legitimacy in an age of populist strongmen politics and predatory forms of capitalism.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142887416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Desjarlais, Robert & KhalilHabrih. Traces of violence: writings on the disaster in Paris, France. xxxiv, 280 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2022. £27.00 (paper)","authors":"John R. Bowen","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14224","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142810138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Where do nomads bury their dead? Necro‐ostracism, statelessness, and the pastoral/ peripatetic divide in Afghanistan","authors":"Annika Schmeding","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14239","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes that stigmas connected to social categories of exclusion prevalent during life extend into dealings with the dead, here referred to as ‘necro‐ostracism’, in the context of death and burial of Muslim nomadic populations in urban Afghanistan. Based on qualitative fieldwork carried out in Kabul, Herat, and Mazar‐e Sharif, it explores how the unequal status of pastoral and peripatetic nomads, mediated through a combination of legal status and social stereotypes, renders one group integrated and protected and another stateless. This status in life crosses over into people's differential and often unclear status in death, creating conflicts and problems associated with burial decisions for families based on their general social position in society. This positioning was exacerbated after the US‐led armed intervention in 2001, when access to land, particularly state‐owned as well as agricultural and pasture‐land, became a potent political currency in Afghanistan. Land grabbing – even of cemeteries – became a lucrative source of income and way to establish political loyalties. Taking an approach that focuses on inter‐community negotiation, the article considers how the different statuses of these structurally similar communities is navigated in the interaction between nomadic communities and burial gatekeepers.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142815660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Home is not what it was’: making, unmaking, and remaking precarious homes among housing activists in Spain","authors":"Ana Paola Gutiérrez Garza","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14240","url":null,"abstract":"Activists fighting evictions in Madrid develop various social, affective, and material connections with and disconnections from their homes. This is especially important for people who are immersed in a regime of economic austerity and neoliberal housing policies that have provoked the social and material unmaking and remaking of homes. These processes take place and are performed through the making and unmaking of material and affective links that people have with objects, materials, and infrastructures. I show how making, unmaking, and remaking precarious homes are multifaceted processes that involve material destruction and reconstruction. They are also affective and political responses to austerity and material loss. More importantly, they bring the intimacy and care for the home to the realm of political activism within the PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages).","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142810136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affective assemblages of kinship and single mothers’ labour migration from a ‘climate hotspot’","authors":"Camelia Dewan","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14238","url":null,"abstract":"In coastal Bangladesh, ‘affective assemblages of kinship’ produce differential abilities for landless single mothers to migrate to brick kilns, the garment industry, and the Gulf. This group of women who return to their natal homes as a response to violence or abandonment is neglected by anthropologists of kinship and migration. Thinking of assemblages of kinship as open‐ended gatherings enables us to move away from fixed genealogical constructs of patrilineal and virilocal households and to theorize how different people may join or leave a kinship assemblage based on the fluctuations of emotional bonds over time. A rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape has contributed towards the unkinning of returning sisters from failed marriages, shifting filial duties, and matrifocal living. Such ‘divorced’ women make new kin through unofficial romantic partners, with whom they may choose to migrate together as a means to exert emotional agency. Thinking through ‘affective assemblages of kinship’ via single mothers reveals the gendered complexities of rural labour migration – of economic and affective‐sexual‐moral considerations – and how it is contingent on social reproductive support. Such an ethnographic corrective towards reductive explanations of climate‐induced migration and the vulnerability of ‘female‐headed households’ shows the importance of anthropology in understanding complex phenomena in a world undergoing rapid socioenvironmental change.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142793821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}