{"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":"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":"Desjarlais, Robert & Khalil Habrih. 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":"10.1111/1467-9655.14224","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 1","pages":"326-327"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-11","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":"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}
{"title":"Aloneness and the terms of detachment in West African migration","authors":"Michael Stasik","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14236","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I examine practices of social detachment among West African migrants in urban Ghana. Faced with pressures arising from expectations of reciprocity, especially from kin back home, some migrants exert considerable efforts to break, if temporarily, with relations of mutual recognition and support, entering what I term migratory aloneness. Far from being an individualizing endeavour linked to the corrosive effects of modernization, this contingent withdrawal from social relations has a continuity with the cultural grammar of West African frontier mobility, wedded to a paradoxical pursuit of social becoming through social detachment. By attending to the efforts and effects of detached relations, which I explore in relation to valuations, predicaments, and the temporality of aloneness, I seek in this article to nuance anthropological arguments about the significance of relatedness in West African migration practices, as well as to contribute to broader efforts to depart from anthropology's fixation on norms of reciprocity and connection.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142776605","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":"INDEX to THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14233","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14233","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"30 4","pages":"1171-1181"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142763359","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":"Books and films received","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14213","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14213","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"30 4","pages":"1167-1170"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142763070","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}