{"title":"White shirts as sacred amulets: “World-making” and “self-making” during the Burmese political festival","authors":"Seinenu M. Thein-Lemelson PhD","doi":"10.1111/etho.12400","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12400","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing upon Stanley J. Tambiah's idea of “world conquerors” and “world renouncers,” this article examines the Burmese political festival (<i>nainganyei pwe</i>) as a ritual, affective, and material space where former political prisoners reinterpret violence and engage in forms of collective and personal “world-making.” The article focuses on one practice in particular: the ritual wearing of white shirts by the 88 Generation. It is argued that there are psychological benefits to donning this symbolic attire. Like sacred amulets described by Tambiah, the white shirt provides ontological security to former political prisoners. For leaders (<i>gaungzaungs</i>) in the movement, the white shirts are integral to how they create and embody power, becoming conduits of charismatic authority. Within the context of the <i>nainganyei pwe</i> and when combined with other “technologies of the self,” the white shirts create a feeling of inviolability and allow survivors of political violence to reassert personal and collective agency.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"52 2","pages":"186-205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12400","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135980540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correction to “Flucht nach vorne (seeking refuge in the future): Trauma, agency, and the fantasy of onward flight among refugees in Berlin”","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/etho.12404","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12404","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Bialas, Ulrike, and Sohail, Jagat. 2022. “ Flucht nach vorne (seeking refuge in the future): Trauma, agency, and the fantasy of onward flight among refugees in Berlin.” <i>Ethos</i> 50: 480– 495. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12369</p><p>The name of the author of the following article was misspelled as Ulrike Bialis in place of Ulrike Bialas.</p><p>We apologize for this error.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 4","pages":"451"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12404","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136192466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Guangxu Ji, Huiwen Zhai, Daming Zhou, Christopher Lavender
{"title":"Searching for meaning during the pandemic: Delivery riders’ motivations in keeping the city of Wuhan running","authors":"Guangxu Ji, Huiwen Zhai, Daming Zhou, Christopher Lavender","doi":"10.1111/etho.12401","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12401","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the motivations behind the moral code of delivery rider migrant workers who served in Wuhan, China, during the pandemic. Based on ethnographic research, we analyze how riders experienced the challenging situation of everyday work. Influenced by socialist and neoliberal contexts, the riders’ actions reflect diversified moral values combining individualistic and collectivist ethics. The precarious conditions gave rise to alternative visions and opportunities for the migrant laborers. They created a new mode of autonomy with economic rationality and emotional bonds to a geographical locality. Simultaneously, the riders’ identity was temporarily reshaped by both the public and themselves, creating responsibility and meaning. This act of strong “social responsibility” reconnected individuals trapped in the plight of the pandemic. This kind of altruistic behavior exemplified the process of people seeking meaning through their work.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 4","pages":"385-400"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72740686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between “devoted mothers” and “disability advocates”: When Korean mothers of developmentally disabled adults become committed to social change","authors":"Junghun Oh","doi":"10.1111/etho.12403","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12403","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study explores how mothers of children who are young adults with developmental disabilities in South Korea experience identity strain and tension when they engage in advocacy on behalf of their children. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 mothers in Korea who are members of parents’ advocacy groups, this article found that women experienced feelings of tension that arose when they deviated from normative understandings of what it means to be “devoted mothers.” Furthermore, they created two alternative versions of maternal roles—professional “I” mothers and professional “WE” mothers—that supported their identities as “disability advocates” in order to alleviate their emotional experiences. Such differences led them to practice different styles of advocacy in their interactions with disability welfare services. Based on these findings, this article discusses identity strain that emerges during the mothers’ political engagement on behalf of their disabled children. In doing so, it contributes to expanding current attention to parental advocacy activities in order to more deeply understand women's agential power to force social change and to act against existing state policies and power.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 4","pages":"416-431"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80907649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nadine Goeree, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Yvon de Reuver, Joris F. G. Haagen, Eric Vermetten
{"title":"Shaping hope in everyday life: Experiences of veteran spouses with post-deployment mental health issues","authors":"Nadine Goeree, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Yvon de Reuver, Joris F. G. Haagen, Eric Vermetten","doi":"10.1111/etho.12402","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12402","url":null,"abstract":"<p>While spouses of military veterans have not been directly exposed to threats during deployment, they often experience a substantial post-deployment-related health burden while living with and caring for a partner with deployment-related mental health issues. Drawing from in-depth interviews, this study examined how female spouses of military veterans deal with the psychosocial effects of deployment. We show how these women cope. They keep their family lives going by maintaining hope for the future. We argue that hope is a dynamic practice between reality and possibility, and different forms of hope co-exist. These range from temporary formulations of present-centered hope, and permanent hopes directed towards the future. We illustrate how spouses challenge discourses around curative futures and adjust their hopes to maintain a more satisfactory everyday life and a positive horizon towards the future.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 4","pages":"355-369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86948706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carol M. Worthman, Constance Cummings, Daniel Lende
{"title":"The landscapes of lives II: How social actors navigate dynamic action landscapes","authors":"Carol M. Worthman, Constance Cummings, Daniel Lende","doi":"10.1111/etho.12399","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12399","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Our previous companion article situated practices in a socio-ecological framework to propose action landscapes as person-specific fields of possible practices that are place- and time-contingent. Here we expand this approach to social actors as they navigate complex, fluid social worlds to pursue meaningful lives. Embodiment, social homeostasis, and social interactions shape actors’ abilities to enact specific practices and meet adversity. The expectable range of daily demands and affordances delineates the bounds of individual social homeostasis, whence social actors evaluate experience and draw motivation for behavior in the action landscape. The dynamic interface between actor-specific factors and cultural forces configures individual possibilities for action vis-à-vis their social homeostatic range. We use this model to track interactions of culture and social actor that generate diverse lives and differential well-being or resilience and apply it to two examples, revealing factors and dynamics overlooked in current research.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"52 2","pages":"166-185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12399","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74617744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Secularize, psychologize, neoliberalize: The entangled Jewish self of North American Jews","authors":"Rachel Werczberger","doi":"10.1111/etho.12397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12397","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article unpacks the construction of the Jewish spiritual self in three current projects of Jewish spirituality in North America—Jewish mindfulness, the neo-Musar movement, and the nascent Positive Judaism—and explores their relations with the neoliberal economic regime and ideology. Based on the content analysis of 30 popular online and offline texts, among them promotional websites, podcasts, and published works, and data gathered during long-term ethnographic study on Jewish spirituality in Israel and North America, the article argues that the highly individualized Jewish spirituality has become an institutionally mediated form of Jewish self-expression. By building on anthropological works about the cultural implications of neoliberalism on the self and following the lead of the foundational works linking Jewish cultural production and neoliberalism in North America, this article offers a perspective on Jewish spirituality that recognizes the relations between neoliberalism, self-cultivation, and community life. Fusing the spiritual, therapeutic, and neoliberal discourses, projects of Jewish spirituality package neoliberal ideals such as choice, emotional, resilience, well-being, and happiness as Jewish spiritual commodities. At the same time, the subjectivity cultivated in these projects is a Jewish-specific formation—a self that is highly individualized but remains strongly connected to its religious-ethnic community and cultural tradition. Jewish spirituality is thus used here as a case study for how neoliberalism affects contemporary forms of religious practice and creates new ethical orientations to communal belongings.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 3","pages":"305-320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50129247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The limits of “no limits”: Young women's entrepreneurial performance and the gendered conquest of the self","authors":"Patricia Amigot-Leache, Carlota Carretero-García, Amparo Serrano-Pascual","doi":"10.1111/etho.12398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12398","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Numerous programs have been set up to support women entrepreneurs on the basis that inequality results from incompatibilities between gendered emotional culture and the affective governmentality of the entrepreneurial paradigm. In the context of Spanish entrepreneurial training programs, this article identifies technologies of the self in young women's narratives of successful entrepreneurship. Using a crossed-narrative approach, as part of three case studies, we conducted 14 interviews with program participants and 6 with program trainers. The analysis shows that, to overcome their supposed deficiencies, the participants understood that female entrepreneurialism required unlimited efforts to self-modulate their emotional dispositions. The analysis identified three broad cultural narratives that frame entrepreneurialism as an epic quest, a vocation or calling, and a ludic pursuit of pleasure. Each of these provides an interpretative frame within which the limitless efforts demanded of feminized entrepreneurialism were resemanticized into three moral values that characterized the story protagonists (heroism, sacrifice, passion). The article further explores the vulnerability of young women to the depoliticization of entrepreneurialism by analyzing emotional suffering and lack of well-being, distancing, ambivalences, and microresistances to the hegemonic paradigm.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 3","pages":"285-304"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12398","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50146910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fear of terrorism: Recognizing scenarios of potential danger in urban space","authors":"Stine Ilum","doi":"10.1111/etho.12396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12396","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article is about the fear of terrorism. The few and mainly quantitative studies on the topic have categorized people as afraid or not afraid, treating fear as a known constant detached from time and space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article argues instead that the fear of terrorism is momentary and transient; it flares up as <i>flashes of fear</i>. These flashes are triggered by the sensory experience of the urban environment combined with recollections of mediatized horror stories about previous terrorist attacks. This article shows how affects related to historical events, such as terrorist attacks, do not exclusively linger in the exact places or cities where they unfolded. Rather, affects can also, via media, travel to and flash up in scenarios that are geographically distant yet aesthetically resonant with historical events. This article thus provides an understanding of the temporal and emplaced dimensions of fear, and conceptualizes the relationship between the affects we experience, the surroundings we live in, and the stories we are exposed to via media.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 3","pages":"271-284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12396","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50122490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Time and Its Objects: A Perspective from Amerindian and Melanesian Societies of Temporarility of Images. Paolo Fortis and Susanne Küchler, editors. Abingdon; Routledge. 2021. xiii + 197 pp.","authors":"Yingjie Qiao, Lizhi Xing","doi":"10.1111/etho.12394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12394","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50138848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}