Anthropological Theory最新文献

{"title":"Plotting the field: Fragments and narrative in Malinowski's stories of the baloma","authors":"A. Brandel, Swayam Bagaria","doi":"10.1177/1463499619830480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619830480","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given coherence by ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how anthropological icons like hau, mana, and the shaman, are created, and suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski’s stories of the baloma, Trobriander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary experience of social life.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"29 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619830480","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47536383","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":"‘Tortoises all the way down’: Geertz, cybernetics and ‘culture’ at the end of the Cold War","authors":"Poornima Paidipaty","doi":"10.1177/1463499619899747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619899747","url":null,"abstract":"In his essay ‘The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man’, Clifford Geertz asserts that contemporary social science must ‘look for systematic relationships among diverse phenomena’. Geertz credits his approach to developments in the field of cybernetics, which pioneered the study of modern information systems to understand everything from computer systems and biological networks to human organisation. Geertz’s early formulation of culture, as a set of publicly traded symbols and their meanings, relied on cybernetic theories of ‘control mechanisms’, as discreet, ordered instructions and operational codes. In locating Geertz and the notion of culture within the historical developments and transformation of cyborg science, this paper also seeks to understand the expansive transformation of American anthropology in the Cold War period, as it shifts from the study of primitive to complex societies in the context of America’s growing global ambitions. Repositioning Geertz in this way helps contemporary readers understand Geertzian ‘culture’ beyond the limits of the cultural turn. More crucially, it better situates current anthropological interest in contingency, ontology and emergence within a broader historical and intellectual genealogy.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"129 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619899747","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45890847","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":"Actual and potential gifts: Critique, shadow gift relations and the virtual domain of the ungiven","authors":"J. Copeman, Dwaipayan Banerjee","doi":"10.1177/1463499619894426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619894426","url":null,"abstract":"What is given may be evaluated in relation to what might have been given but was not. The central thematic of this essay is what we term the shadow gift relation (as distinct from the more standard anthropological gift relation among exchange partner dyads) between the gift that is given and that which remains ungiven—with the latter, both present and not present, coming to haunt and unsettle the former. The potential of the gift is key for it is intimately related to critique: we explore how the relation between the virtual ungiven and what is actually given may come to form the basis of social criticism. This essay, then, defines a kind of ‘keeping while giving’ that is related to but different from that famously elaborated by Annette Weiner, for what is kept back, in the cases we discuss in this essay, are virtual (imagined) forms of gift. Giving is a technology of the imagination because it is a process that precipitates the imagination of a relation between an actual gift and a double that is virtual but nonetheless real because it exists in the form of a manifold of potentials for how the gift could be.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"28 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619894426","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49469550","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":"Rethinking resistance through and as affect","authors":"M. Laszczkowski","doi":"10.1177/1463499618793078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618793078","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with No TAV activists in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, protesting against the planned construction of a new high-speed railway. Focusing on activists’ experiences of vulnerability and police violence, the article contributes to the recent ‘subjective turn’ in the anthropology of resistance and contentious social movements, and responds to calls to ‘de-pathologize’ and ‘de-exoticize’ resistance. It explores ways to reconceptualize the subjective experience of resistance through a focus on affect, vulnerability and becoming. Combining neo-Spinozist theory of affects with Judith Butler’s feminist perspective on agency and subjectivity, the article seeks to point a way beyond the limitations of established approaches informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Further, the article also shows how affects experienced during direct action are embedded in activists’ longer biographical narratives and gradually structured, through remembering and narrativization, to provide ground for a coherent subjective sense of agency. Third, the article highlights the difference a focus on affect makes compared to the more conventional sociological focus on emotion. The notion of affect helps us to move beyond a rationalist and instrumentalist approach to emotion in social movements. The article stresses the heuristic potential of a focus on affect, but also considers methodological challenges posed by such a perspective. It suggests that the methodological toolkit available to the ethnographers of contentious politics can be enhanced by drawing on the affective capacities of researchers’ own bodies in order to register the visceral intensities vital to the experience of resistance and the ongoing formation of insubordinate subjects.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"19 1","pages":"489 - 509"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499618793078","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44589732","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":"Prevalence of Low Energy Availability in Competitively Trained Male Endurance Athletes.","authors":"Amy R Lane, Anthony C Hackney, Abbie Smith-Ryan, Kristen Kucera, Johna Registar-Mihalik, Kristin Ondrak","doi":"10.3390/medicina55100665","DOIUrl":"10.3390/medicina55100665","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p><i>Background and Objectives:</i> Relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) has been introduced as a broad-spectrum syndrome leading to possible dysfunction in numerous physiological systems, driven primarily by low energy availability (EA). Research in females has identified specific EA cut-points indicative of risk level for developing physiological and performance disturbances. Cut-points in males have yet to be evaluated. This study examined the prevalence of low EA in competitive (non-elite), recreationally trained (CRT) male endurance athletes. <i>Materials and Methods</i>: Subjects were 108 CRT (38.6 ± 13.8 y; 12.2 ± 5.4 h/wk training) male endurance athletes (runners, cyclists, triathletes) who completed a descriptive survey online via Qualtrics^® and returned 3 day diet and exercise training records. EA was calculated from returned surveys and training records. Resting metabolic rate (RMR) and lean body mass (LBM) were estimated from self-reported survey data. Prevalence of risk group was categorized based on the female cut-points: at risk (AR) ≤30 kcal/kg LBM, moderate risk (MR) = 30-45 kcal/kg LBM, or no risk (NR) ≥45 kcal/kg LBM. <i>Results</i>: In this sample, 47.2% (<i>n</i> = 51) were classified as AR, 33.3% (<i>n</i> = 36) as MR, and 19.4% (<i>n</i> = 21) as NR for low EA. Cyclists had lower EA (26.9 ± 17.4 kcal/kg LBM, <i>n</i> = 45) than runners (34.6 ± 13.3 kcal/kg LBM, <i>n</i> = 55, <i>p</i> = 0.016) and all other sport categories (39.5 ± 19.1 kcal/kg LBM, <i>n</i> = 8, <i>p</i> = 0.037). <i>Conclusions</i>: The findings indicate this sample had a high prevalence of risk for low EA, at 47.2%. Only 19.4% of participants were at no risk, meaning ~80% of participants were at some degree of risk of experiencing low EA. Cyclists were at greater risk in this cohort of low EA, although why this occurred was unclear and is in need of further investigation. Future research should address whether the current female cut-points for low EA are appropriate for use in male populations.</p>","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6843850/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87446504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rendering assemblage dialectical","authors":"S. Campbell","doi":"10.1177/1463499619875904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619875904","url":null,"abstract":"Within anthropology, assemblage theory has achieved broad disciplinary traction, yet the theory’s philosophical premises are rarely explored. This article therefore revisits the Deleuzian notion of difference that underpins assemblage theory as a step towards rendering the theory more consonant with a relational anthropology. In place of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conception of discrete elements related only externally to each other within an assemblage, I propose a dialectical conception, whereby assemblage is taken to be a heterogeneous ensemble whose constituent elements also relate to each other internally. To arrive at this understanding, I examine the dialectical logic of Theodore Adorno. I then consider the implications of a dialectical notion of assemblage for recent work on the anthropology of capitalism.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"228 - 247"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619875904","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49458725","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":"Divine law and ethical immanence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem","authors":"Hannah Mayne","doi":"10.1177/1463499619832707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619832707","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes a Talmudic parable as the starting point to consider the ethical as immanent and imminent in an ethnographic case study of contemporary Jewish prayer. I consider the role of blessings and curses at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, as speech acts in protests over Jewish legal interpretation and state-sanctioned laws. I demonstrate how women’s prayer performances, directed to the divine, also reflect judgments about felicitous gendered worship, and, at the same time, passionately solicit ongoing engagement in argumentation and debate with those who have seemingly incommensurable interpretations. Drawing on Das and Lambek’s notions of ordinary ethics, together with Jewish thinkers, I suggest a reading of what happens at the Western Wall that locates ethics not in transcendent, rationally formalized religious rules that frame women’s visits to this sacred site; rather, ethics is immanent and imminent in their practices of interpretation, judgment, and encounter with those statutes.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"19 1","pages":"362 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619832707","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46729043","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":"Those who go underwater: Indignation, sentiment, and ethical immanence in northern Uganda","authors":"Letha Victor","doi":"10.1177/1463499619832702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619832702","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Anthropologists have engaged in a sustained discussion on the parameters and temporality of ethical life. If one understands the ethical as intrinsic to ordinary acts and practice, rather than solely evident in moments of crisis or ‘discursive interaction’, then ethnographers have been tasked with better describing and locating practical judgment in the lived experiences of their interlocutors, who daily encounter existential ambiguity. In situations where chronic violence makes crisis itself quotidian, and the appearance of ‘moral breakdown’ is mundane, the waters of anthropological ethics become even more muddy. This article takes up that consideration by examining ongoing ethical projects amongst Acholi residents of socially disrupted northern Uganda, where ethnographers are also called to relate and deliberate. It describes the problem of purported spirit attacks and witchcraft at a secondary school for girls in the town of Gulu, which many of the pupils judge to be the work of lute ceto pii (‘those who go underwater’), a category of devil worshippers thought by many Ugandans to be the source of ill-gotten wealth, power and fame, to cause misfortune, and to signal an imminent end to life as they know it. Reminiscent of the slave revolt detailed by Nietzsche, wherein a new type of morality is founded upon a ressentiment of the powerful, in contemporary Uganda acts of acknowledgment, passion, irony and ritual nevertheless reflect ethical underdeterminacy. I argue that interpreting and responding to such rancour is a question not just of tracing the genealogy of moral sentiment or indignation, but of acknowledging and acting (despite) the underdeterminacy of affective forces that inflect the palimpsest of Acholi ontologies.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"19 1","pages":"385 - 411"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619832702","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46522436","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":"Ordinary ethics and its temporalities: The Christian God and the 2016 Ghanaian elections","authors":"Girish Daswani","doi":"10.1177/1463499619832116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619832116","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I provide an analysis of how the then-imminent event of the Ghanaian 2016 elections operated within and interrupted a born-again Christian understanding of social and political change. I argue that much can be gained from understanding Pentecostal Christianity in Ghana by paying close attention to how born-again Christians anticipate and participate in shaping the near future. My analysis of this period, just before (and after) the 2016 elections—from the perspective of born-again Christians in Ghana—contributes to an engagement with the immanent and imminent qualities of ethical life. In accounting for the ways in which the Christian “God” and the “nation” overlap or collide in born-again Pentecostal discourse and practice in Ghana, I propose that the precise configuration of how these forces come together and come apart has a force that complicates how we imagine ethics as something explicit in discourse or about the ability to step back in reflection.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"19 1","pages":"323 - 340"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619832116","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42710373","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":"Ethical immanence","authors":"J. Sidnell, M. Meudec, M. Lambek","doi":"10.1177/1463499619836328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619836328","url":null,"abstract":"Ethical judgement suffuses everyday life: it is not only objectified in rules or codes, experienced as duty, or realised as reason distinct from action. Nor in its primary manifestations is the ethical realised as a separate domain of thought, activity or expertise. The possibility that we explore in this collection is that ethics is immanent to action and to social life more generally, within it rather than at arm’s length from it. Our intention is not to reach unanimity, claim an exclusive truth or build a consistent model, but to follow the diverse paths along which thinking about the ethical in this way leads us.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"19 1","pages":"303 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619836328","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44720672","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}