{"title":"Parents, Caregivers, and Peers","authors":"Gabriel Scheidecker","doi":"10.1086/725037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725037","url":null,"abstract":"Research on childhood in anthropology and neighboring disciplines has continuously broadened the range of the social partners that are considered relevant for young children’s development—from parents to other caregivers, siblings, and peers. Yet most studies as well as interventions in early childhood still focus exclusively on parents, who are presumed to be the most significant socializing agents. Objecting to such a hierarchical understanding of the social world of children, I propose a complementarity view. Rather than being linearly ranked in a hierarchy of significance, children’s social partners may complement each other by providing different but equally significant experiences. My suggestions are based on an ethnographic study in a rural community in Madagascar. Focusing on children in the first 3 years of life, I explore the full range of their social partners and the respective experiences they provide. Caregivers focus on children’s physical needs and aim to keep them in a calm emotional state, while other young related children are the most crucial partners when it comes to play, face-to-face interaction, and the exchange of intense emotions. These complementary roles, I argue, lead to the parallel formation of two distinct socioemotional modes: a hierarchical one and an egalitarian one.","PeriodicalId":48343,"journal":{"name":"Current Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42925276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Portuguese Saudade, the Trajectories of Longing and Desire","authors":"M. Wieczorek","doi":"10.1086/725080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725080","url":null,"abstract":"Saudade is interpreted as an ethereal concept dear to the Portuguese people. This intangible idea is often identified with a Portuguese cultural value signifying elusive states of longing, yearning, and wistfulness. This article demonstrates how the spatial realm of a former Portuguese colony, Macau, is experienced through the lens of saudade as an eluding, incorporeal, and culturally meaningful concept. The main goal of this research is to analyze the lived experiences of the Portuguese community in Macau shaped by emotional trajectories of the postcolonial city. This study continues the tradition of anthropological interpretations based on philosophical phenomenology. Anthropologically grounded phenomenology gives priority to acknowledging people’s formulation of experiences vis-á-vis specific cultural settings. It is an extension of “radical empiricism.” The article works with the concept of saudade to analyze the modalities of sensory perception within the former Portuguese city. Saudade is used as a discursive formation to look at cultural and epistemological manifestations of daily urban lived experiences of the Portuguese people in Macau.","PeriodicalId":48343,"journal":{"name":"Current Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43488595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Maritime Piracy and the Ambiguous Art of Existential Arbitrage","authors":"Adrienne Mannov","doi":"10.1086/724981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724981","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the ways in which maritime labor, maritime risk, and seafarers’ survival are embedded in the financial logics and practices of the global shipping industry. By employing the notion of “existential arbitrage,” the ethnography moves through the pursuit of global profit to the value of labor as a commodity, human and financial risk, and ultimately the value of human lives, all of which are arbitraged. Arbitrage is a profit strategy that is based on a belief in the equalizing power of the market yet is predicated on and creates difference among commodities in order to create opportunities to generate profit. Existential arbitrage brings anthropological studies of security and conflict and trade and finance together. By taking the interdependence of these subfields seriously and showing how the relationship between them manifests itself in practice, the notion of existential arbitrage uncovers a brutal financial trading strategy that requires and forces the oscillation between notions of valuable life and the valuation of labor commodities in a competitive global market.","PeriodicalId":48343,"journal":{"name":"Current Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43098568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Racializing Aesthetics","authors":"J. Kahn","doi":"10.1086/724725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724725","url":null,"abstract":"Since the 1960s, thousands of Haitians have boarded wooden sailing vessels in attempts to reach the United States. Commentators have long conflated the perceived characteristics of Haitians making this journey with the material qualities of the vessels they use, creating the racialized archetype of the “boat person” in the process. This article examines how Haitian vessels have emerged as metonyms of Haitian subjectivity within three discourses: US journalistic and security accounts concerned with Haitian migration by sea, North American sailing connoisseurs’ specialized “boat talk,” and Haitian mariners’ informal communications about sailing and boat building. By juxtaposing these discourses, I reveal a set of aesthetic regimes that authorize a range of material effects, including US migration policing at sea but also Haitian attempts to create enduring maritime worlds. While various actors point to socioculturally coded ensembles of material qualities to evaluate Haitian vessels, their assessments also depend on the directional movement and location of the entities they evaluate. I suggest, then, that such evaluations should be understood as kinetico-spatial in orientation. In attending to kinetico-spatial aesthetic evaluations and their racializing effects, anthropologists can illuminate the material entailments, the erasures, and the forms of life such interpretive orders render thinkable and unthinkable.","PeriodicalId":48343,"journal":{"name":"Current Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44694779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To the Readers of Current Anthropology","authors":"L. Ralph","doi":"10.1086/724982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724982","url":null,"abstract":"I am delighted to announce this year’s winner of Current Anthropology’s Visual Anthropology Competition, Pablo Mardones. In our fourth year of the competition, we received more than 30 entries. The work was outstanding. Our editorial board formed a committee chaired by our visual media editors, Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela and Harini Kumar. Benjamin,Harini, and Iwould like to thank everyone for their submissions. I would also like to thank Benjamin andHarini for their hard work. Finally, the entireCurrent Anthropology editorial","PeriodicalId":48343,"journal":{"name":"Current Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42888401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contemporaneous Prehistories: Chronotypes from the Island of Flores","authors":"A. Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart (Strathern)","doi":"10.1086/724682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724682","url":null,"abstract":"expertise and irrigation and drainage a so-called profession of Indian expertise” (91). In one captivating chapter, she looks at engineering drawings and diagrams for anti-inundation constructions, reading these for how they tell stories—empirical and utopian both—about race in Guyana (or, better, about engineers’ declarations/aspirations about who lives and could live where). Engineers, she argues, might be understood as telling “love stories” about their work, tales that “hinge on difference, subsuming theOther into worlds of engineering” (121). Insofar as these love stories seek to embrace and enable rearranged structures of settlement, aspirationally undoing racial marginalization, Vaughn suggests that these narratives are “a subgenre of counter-racial thinking, which experts trained in the engineering sciences create to demonstrate their commitment to the safety of the general public” (129, emphasis added). Engineering Vulnerability concludes with stories of how ordinary people— farmers, squatters—build improvised climate infrastructures both alongside and in the interstices of state and international projects. These small acts become material in Vaughn’s account for thinking about how making and witnessing around technologies of climate adaptation can anchor projects of belonging and inclusion. Matters of race and matters of living with climate modulation make and unmake one another. A key lesson is that “the causality attributed to race, vulnerability, and climate adaptation is nonlinear” (21). This book superbly demonstrates how this is so, enriching our understanding of how climate, nationhood, race, and more all take shape not just intersectionally but also interactively. The pursuit of climate adaptation may also be a pursuit of decolonial governance. Consider Engineering Vulnerability a contribution to what Paul Gilroy (2018) has called “sea level theory” (a phrase he employs to counter the view-from-space characteristic of some Anthropocene criticism), a contribution that leverages on-the-shiftingground ethnography to deliver an account of how earthly vulnerabilities are made and unmade now.","PeriodicalId":48343,"journal":{"name":"Current Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41303929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Imposition of the Holy Cross over the Chakana","authors":"P. Mardones","doi":"10.1086/724886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724886","url":null,"abstract":",","PeriodicalId":48343,"journal":{"name":"Current Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45259230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Climate Transformation, Racial De/Formation, Guyana","authors":"S. Helmreich","doi":"10.1086/724598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724598","url":null,"abstract":"Sarah Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation is a vital contribution to anthropological conversations about how climate transformation is contouring everyday and infrastructural life—particularly in postcolonial places, where the built environment may layer uneven histories of settler colonialism, international developmentalist intervention, and, in some cases, the ameliorative attempts of coalitional multiracial governments to undo hierarchies of precarity structured by the legacies of colonialism and racism. Vaughn’s story is set in Guyana, where since 2005—the year of a disastrous flooding event—coastal engineering projects have been inaugurated with increasing urgency, aiming to adapt to today’s increased probabilities of inundation, both from the sea (sea-level rise) and from the overflow of rivers. At the center of the tale Vaughn tells is the question of how a national Guyanese political imagination draws from as well as shapes the deployment of hydrological-technological expertise, formatting how the climate vulnerability of ordinary people is inhabited and evaluated. The book offers a sharp ethnographic and archivally informed examination of how hydraulic and hydrological engineers seek to counter and contain coastal erosion on this South American/ Caribbean country’s Atlantic coast—and inways thatmight help unsettle existing hierarchies of precarity, often scaffolded by racial division. “Settlement” is a key word in this text, referring both to legacies of Dutch and British settler-colonial endeavors and to today’s work to render the Guyanese coast livable for the range of the nation’s citizens. Vaughn makes clear that projects of coastal adaptation have been settlement projects. But she also urges that not all settlement is settler colonialism. She writes that climate adaptation demands “analysis on its own terms, as a large-scale project that alters understandings of settlement or the multilayered processes that contribute to dwelling and the habitation of a place” (1–2). Combating climate vulnerability often entails planning for and shoring up projects of settlement— both as dwelling and as coming to provisional social compacts. Vaughn is interested in the politics of race in Guyana and in how these interdigitate with coastal adaptation plans. She is keen to resist a kind of off-the-shelf account that would look for evidence that dominated racial groups are simply and linearly pushed to dangerous and neglected marginal geographies and are therefore subject to more environmental vulnerability than other groups. Rather, she shows how the very specific ethnoracial constitution of Guyana (“43.5 percent Indian, 30 percent African, 16.7 percent Mixed Race, 9.2 Amerindian, and less than 1 percent Portuguese, Chinese, or European” [6], according to her citation of the 2002 census)—the layered result of histories of triangle trade slavery, indentured Asian servitude, Dutch and British colonialism, and postindepen","PeriodicalId":48343,"journal":{"name":"Current Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47190629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}