{"title":"Feeding, food, and attachment: An underestimated relationship?","authors":"Wiebke Johanna Schmidt, Heidi Keller, Mariano Rosabal-Coto, Karina Fallas Gamboa, Carolina Solís Guillén, Esteban Durán Delgado","doi":"10.1111/etho.12380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12380","url":null,"abstract":"<p>According to attachment theory, feeding, including breastfeeding, plays only a marginal role in relationship formation. However, studies—especially in rural traditional non-Western contexts—repeatedly demonstrate that feeding can be an important attachment mechanism. We interviewed 30 urban, middle-class families with 6-to-19-month-old infants in the surrounding greater metropolitan area of San José, Costa Rica, to investigate if they consider feeding relevant for attachment formation. Qualitative content analysis revealed that breastfeeding is a key factor in specifying whether caregivers believed feeding to be relevant for attachment formation. The study found that breastfeeding families considered feeding relevant for attachment, and bottle-feeding families associated feeding with mainly alimentary and no attachment-related functions. Furthermore, breastfeeding seems to foster exclusive maternal attachment, while multiple feeding seems to foster multiple attachments. Consequently, the feeding network seems to regulate a child's attachment network in urban middle-class families in San José. A triangulation of caregiver interviews, interviews with key informants, and member checking with key informants support the validity of the findings.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 1","pages":"62-80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12380","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50149132","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":"Mommy brain in the United States","authors":"Valerie Miller, Marcy Price-Crist","doi":"10.1111/etho.12381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12381","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Women undergo profound psychological and cognitive shifts throughout their life course, and motherhood entails dramatic mind–body adjustments. Growing maternal responsibilities and evidence from social sciences suggest motherhood enhances cognitive functioning, but mothers typically claim otherwise. This article uses maternal life stories to reveal cultural schemas of mommy brain as told by mothers in the United States. Our findings illustrate what mommy brain is in practice and how cultural narratives promote associations between motherhood and diminished cognitive functioning. We found that interruptions, cognitive overload, and newfound anxieties were fundamental components in mothers’ mommy brain experiences. We believe that these factors, along with social isolation, play a salient role in self-reported deficits in maternal cognition. Understandings of mommy brain must move beyond neurobiology and attention and memory studies and consider how interruptions, overload, and other subjective experiences shape our definitions and what we know about maternal cognition.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 1","pages":"111-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50136814","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":"Tangible pasts: Memory practices among children and adolescents in Germany, an affect-theoretical approach","authors":"Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, Franziska Seise","doi":"10.1111/etho.12377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12377","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article highlights the ontogeny of autobiographical memory and its sociocultural foundations as an important and underrepresented field of research in psychological anthropology. It discusses the results of an explorative photovoice study on the emotional experiences of children and adolescents. Our study discovered that memory practices play a major role in young people's daily lives. Participants often referred to emotionally significant past events, relationships, or life periods by relating them to particular memory objects. We assume that the material dimension of children's memory practices not only facilitates an affective engagement with the past but also makes past experiences communicable to oneself and to others. The memory objects used by our research participants were linked in substantial ways to culturally specific modes of remembering, (auto)biographical narration, and the <i>formation of feeling</i> among adolescents. In discussing broader implications of our results, we draw on insights from developmental psychology, affect and emotion theory, and social anthropological research on memory and materiality. We conclude with a brief comparative look at memory practices in the Indonesian context to hint at a significant field of cross-cultural research that opens at the intersection of studies on material culture, memory practices, (auto)biographical remembering and narrating, and the formation of feeling.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 1","pages":"96-110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12377","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50136815","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":"Decolonizing affect: Resonance as an ethnographic technique","authors":"Anna Iskra","doi":"10.1111/etho.12366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12366","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article is a call to decolonize affect theory through deepening its engagement with fieldwork conducted in the global South. It examines the native Chinese concept of <i>ganying</i>, or resonance, as an ethnographic technique by engaging with the author's fieldwork experiences among Body Mind Spirit practitioners in China. Participating in <i>ganying</i> captures the formation of affective atmospheres through the ethnographer's involvement in their co-creation. Where attunement functions as a normative ideal, resonance becomes a technique of embodying responsiveness and cultivating intimacy that supports efforts to narrativize affect. Examining the genealogy of <i>ganying</i> and its ethnographic applications reveals this concept's alignment with influential theorizations that in recent decades have been constructed as “new” and “paradigm shifting” contributions to the affective turn. It cautions against the risks of erasure resulting from such Eurocentric negligence of kindred notions circulated in scholarly and vernacular contexts outside of the global North.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 1","pages":"130-145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12366","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50132394","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":"Transgenerational transmission of suffering: State violence, memory, and aspiration for alternative intimate lives in contemporary China","authors":"Shanni Zhao","doi":"10.1111/etho.12374","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12374","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In constructing a socialist order, Chinese state-raised political movements inflicted violence on families. Drawing on anthropological studies of violence, memory, haunting, affect, and transgenerational transmission, along with ethnographic investigation in Shanghai and Hunan, China, I demonstrate that individual experiences of political suffering will not be self-contained but inevitably be bequeathed to the offspring, shaping both intergenerational relationship and youth knowledge of intimacies. While most anthropologists have explained contemporary Chinese family intimacy through neoliberal cultures, economic privatization, and the one-child policy, I unravel a political history of affective undercurrents and its potential for generating a desire for nonnormative intimacy among the younger generation. I argue that generational relationships in the postviolence era are tripartite not bipartite; families’ aspirations and reproductive practices respond to an unfulfilled state-family reciprocity. This tripartite relationship further suggests that desire formation in socialist nuclear families differs from that in Freudian bourgeois families.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"50 4","pages":"511-527"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74226854","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":"Civil melancholia: Yemenite Jews’ responses to the kidnapping of their children","authors":"Tova Gamliel, Haim Hazan","doi":"10.1111/etho.12365","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12365","url":null,"abstract":"<p>During Yemenite Jews’ stay in Israeli transit camps during 1948–1950, many of their children disappeared in the so-called “Yemenite Children Affair,” undermining the immigrants’ faith in the redemptive ethos of Zionism. To better understand this collective trauma, we return to the original Freudian conceptualization of melancholia as “failed mourning,” locating it within the ethnographic context of the Yemenite Children Affair and integrating its private/individual and public/collective aspects. Moreover, we provide a novel historical reading that integrates the individual loss of children and the collective lack of civic recognition. We use the term “civil melancholia” to reflect on the lingering, hurtful group experience of being overlooked (as refugees and parents) and the continuing collective predicament as “second-rate citizens.” By conceptualizing this civil melancholia and its cultural nuances, the analysis enhances the discussion of cultural traumas and their intergenerational transmission among contemporary ethnic immigrant groups.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"50 4","pages":"449-464"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12365","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91545861","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":"Attaching shame to hierarchy and hierarchy to some versions of attachment","authors":"Ward Keeler","doi":"10.1111/etho.12375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12375","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Attachment theory sees individual autonomy as childrearing practices’ appropriate goal. But many people in the world do not share attachments theorists’ validation of autonomy. They instead believe that they should train their children into behavior appropriate to hierarchical relationships, ones predicated on differences in obligations and privileges. Their childrearing techniques therefore include teaching children to experience shame should they fail to know their place. Little attended to until recently in the social sciences, shame deserves study as hierarchy's enforcer, and doing so counters attachment theory's provincialism.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 1","pages":"47-61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12375","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50127415","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":"Flucht nach vorne (seeking refuge in the future): Trauma, agency, and the fantasy of onward flight among refugees in Berlin","authors":"Ulrike Bialas, Jagat Sohail","doi":"10.1111/etho.12369","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12369","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article is based on fieldwork we each conducted with refugees in Berlin between 2016 and 2021. We were both puzzled by our interlocutors’ repeated professed desires to leave Germany, often when their lives here were improving. We wondered how they could possibly fantasize about repeating the experiences of their initial flight, which were deeply wounding and traumatic. We argue against a reading of trauma and agency as existing in opposition to or in spite of each other. We revisit the moment of trauma to uncover the transformative potential built into it—a crucial step in explaining the puzzling desires of our interlocutors for onward flight. We contrast popular notions of agentive mobility with the German term Flucht nach vorne (literally, “onward flight”) to indicate the complex contradictions, and even “unreason,” built into these fantasies.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"50 4","pages":"480-495"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/etho.12369","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84479676","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":"Subjects to freedom: The entanglements of desire in Upland Indonesia","authors":"Aurora Donzelli","doi":"10.1111/etho.12368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12368","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article draws on fieldwork in upland Indonesia to explore how discursive genres mediate political and affective transformations. Since the millennium, IMF-driven governance reforms have disseminated novel ideals of transparent accountability, representative democracy, and individual entrepreneurialism, which at once presuppose and generate a market-oriented subject endowed with the freedom to express desires and choose among multiple options. Transnational discursive genres play a key role in these transformations by foregrounding a consumerist notion of desire as a site of emancipatory imagining. These discursive technologies are, however, only partially successful. By describing their partial uptake I discuss the predicaments posed by the ethnographic scrutiny of reformist rationalities emerging in post-authoritarian contexts. Indeed, while the emancipatory promise of democratic reforms irradiating from transnational lending agencies undermines entrenched social hierarchies, the emphasis on individual aspirations may also conceal new forms of subjection to capitalist valorization, whereby individuals are turned into bundles of measurable desires.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"51 1","pages":"81-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50127414","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":"Demoralizing care: Moral and ethical dilemmas of parenting a young adult who lives with a borderline diagnosis","authors":"Maureen O'Dougherty","doi":"10.1111/etho.12370","DOIUrl":"10.1111/etho.12370","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article theorizes chronic crises of care parents face concerning how to morally/ethically support their young adult child diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Grounded in five years’ attendance at a support group for families living with BPD and interviews with parents, the article asks: In the era of deinstitutionalization of those with mental illness, what are the moral/ethical dimensions of parents’ experiences caring for their young adult? The concept of demoralization and “moral breakdown,” an ethical crisis demanding a resolution, characterizes parents’ experiences. The parents featured convey anguished struggles over what they ought to do in a context where risks are high, and nothing parents do seems right. I suggest that dwelling indefinitely in demoralizing care is untenable and that a state of demoralization emerges as a testimony to the parents’ inability to identify a morally/ethically acceptable resolution to the crises of care.</p>","PeriodicalId":51532,"journal":{"name":"Ethos","volume":"50 4","pages":"496-510"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86474607","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}