American Anthropologist最新文献

{"title":"Intimate ethnography: What's it good for?","authors":"Alisse Waterston","doi":"10.1111/aman.28065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28065","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer and I coined the term “intimate ethnography” in 2006 to capture the research and writing approach in our respective life-history projects, she with her mother and I with my father. Since that time, the genre has seen growing recognition in anthropology. Intimate ethnography centers on an intimate other—family members or someone known to the ethnographer prior to the research—as the subject of an ethnographic project that is also a study of historical conditions and circumstances. Critical to intimate ethnography is attention to crafting accessible, evocative, and scholarly informed works that engage public conversation on serious sociocultural issues and political-economic conditions, past and present. In this article, I define and describe intimate ethnography in relation to the original vision Rylko-Bauer and I imagined for it. In doing so, I situate the genre in a series of intellectual concerns and conversations, sociocultural formations, and political circumstances and events from the writing culture debates to the politics of representation and discussions on ways to decolonize anthropology. In considering the value of intimate ethnography, I will assess its potential contributions and limitations in a time when the need to rethink and recount lives lived and experienced is increasingly urgent.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"300-307"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939290","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 will to speak out: Medical anthropologist and patient in times of COVID-19 in Peru","authors":"Carmen J. Yon","doi":"10.1111/aman.28063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28063","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Using autoethnographic research, I analyze the experience of being an oncology patient during the COVID-19 pandemic in Lima, Peru, the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per million people worldwide. I reflect on my own fears and decisions related to medical treatment and work, since they organized most of my daily life and were significantly impacted by the public health emergency. These experiences were shaped by global and local inequalities in labor conditions as well as access to healthcare facilities and systemic therapies. I speak out as a “vulnerable participant-observer” from my social position as a lower-middle-class working woman, contract university professor, and medical anthropologist facing a still stigmatized disease in her country.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"292-299"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143938981","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":"Understanding higher education policy in Florida among university students: Bound together or in savage slots?","authors":"Kiran C. Jayaram,&nbsp;Alekhya Peddu","doi":"10.1111/aman.28060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28060","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"371-375"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28060","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Higher ed by and for the 1 percent","authors":"Susan B. Hyatt","doi":"10.1111/aman.28061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28061","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;As public subsidies to higher education continue to shrink, and costs continue to escalate, academic institutions struggle to raise the kinds of resources they believe they need to remain competitive in a tightening market. One increasingly critical source of funding has become sizeable philanthropic donations, sometimes from the institution's own wealthy alumni and sometimes not. In recent years, private philanthropy has come to play a growing role in sustaining many academic institutions. According to a recent article from &lt;i&gt;Higher Ed Dive&lt;/i&gt;, in fiscal year 2023, “US colleges received $58B in philanthropic support.”&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; What is somewhat more surprising is that the same article points out that this figure actually represents a 2.5% reduction in charitable donations from the year before.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the implications of universities having become so reliant on the largesse of the nation's billionaires? A recent article from the site Bestcolleges.com details the uses to which many of these gifts have been put.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; It is fair to note that some of these monies have been bestowed on causes that many of us might rally around; for example, the Lilly Endowment Inc. gave $100 million to the United College Negro Fund; Michael Bloomberg contributed $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University to support undergraduate financial aid. The contribution of $100 billion by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support historically grossly underfunded HBCUs was widely lauded as were donations totaling $400 billion from MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos of Amazon, to predominantly minority-serving institutions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But asking whether such contributions were for causes that we can support or not completely elides the key issues that constitute what we might call, “the philanthropic turn.” First, the fact that we even have such a gross proliferation of billionaires who can afford to give so much money to their favored personal causes speaks to the devastating levels of inequality that now are imperiling our democracy more broadly. Second, we have several examples of how these megadonors then come to feel that their benevolence empowers them to meddle in the affairs of the universities they support; such intrusions range from intervening in faculty hires and tenure decisions to weighing in on the intellectual content of departmental offerings and curricula.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Almost 10 years ago, when I co-edited a book entitled &lt;i&gt;Learning Under Neoliberalism&lt;/i&gt;, most of the contributors focused on the threats to academic freedom and equality of access that originated from &lt;i&gt;within&lt;/i&gt; universities. Such coercions included an increase in audit measures coming from upper-level administrators intended to quantify and police our work; the rapid growth in the number of nontenure-eligible faculty in the academy; and the antiunion measures that have intensified as faculty members, at least in some quarters, became more open to collective organizing in t","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"368-370"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28061","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ethnographies of a dying discipline: Anthropology in the 21st century","authors":"Jose Leonardo Santos","doi":"10.1111/aman.28058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28058","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This vital topics forum focuses on the host of challenges that now threaten the future of anthropology. The political polarization of the current era, along with the economic rationale that matches it, leads to policy and legislation restricting content and speech in universities, cuts and closure of anthropology programs, and the loss of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. This combines the loss of careers and opportunities with the elimination of anthropological perspectives from the public discourse. Cultural shifts delegitimize and devalue the discipline, which struggles not only to increase its ranks but also to maintain its presence within and outside the academy. The articles within this vital topics forum engage with these challenges while raising an alarm to all anthropologists that threats to the discipline are real and requires immediate responses from practitioners, instructors, scholars, programs and departments, and our professional organizations.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"365-367"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28058","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Friction in the field: Milpa, missionary, and scales of refusal in 1960s highland Guatemala","authors":"Mallory E. Matsumoto","doi":"10.1111/aman.28054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28054","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article takes a scalar view of “friction” (Tsing 2005) and “refusal” (Ortner 1995) between ethnography and the archive. The concept of friction was originally formulated in the context of a globalizing world, but friction's perception and experience are highly local. By recurrently destabilizing interactions, friction generates the constant possibility of contestation at the same time that it fosters ongoing renewal and reshuffling of social relations. Refusal, in turn, is shaped by a combination of individual agency and the contextual parameters delimiting any given social interaction. Based on a K'iche’ Maya narrative recorded by Catholic missionary James L. Mondloch in the area of Nahualá, Sololá, Guatemala, I illustrate how refusal not only informs interpretation of the oral history but shaped its 1968 telling. As debate continues over the ethics and logistics of working with legacy fieldwork data, I consider the frictions that anthropologists have to live with when working with archival data and those that we ourselves may generate.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"266-277"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28054","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Eliminate Anthropology”: Attitudes toward social science in the public discourse","authors":"Jose Leonardo Santos","doi":"10.1111/aman.28055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28055","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What do people think about anthropology and other disciplines in the social sciences and liberal arts? How do negative views of anthropology influence the discipline's future? A review of public discourse from news, commentaries, scholarly literature, monographs, and institutional reports reveals anthropology's current state and direction. The results point to great distress. Analysis demonstrates powerful disapproval of higher education, the liberal arts, and social sciences threatens the instruction, practice, and ethos of anthropology. Narrative domains in popular discourse reveal active attitudes demanding and executing audits, cuts, and closures of anthropology departments; legislation restricting teaching and research; and the dissolution of anthropology's legitimacy. This review demonstrates the existence and power of such popular narratives, analyzes how they reflect a common political-economic threat to the discipline, then asks difficult, critical questions before offering recommendations to confront one of the discipline's darkest moments.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"278-291"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939335","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":"“But we met expectations! Why us?”: Threats to anthropology and learning from the program cut at UNC Greensboro","authors":"Susan Andreatta,&nbsp;Keri Vacanti Brondo","doi":"10.1111/aman.28057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28057","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This Vital Topics Forum focuses on the host of challenges that now threaten the future of anthropology. The political polarization of the current era, along with the economic rationale that matches it, leads to policy and legislation restricting content and speech in universities, cuts and closure of anthropology programs, and the loss of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. This combines the loss of careers and opportunities with the elimination of anthropological perspectives from public discourse. Cultural shifts delegitimize and devalue the discipline, which struggles not only to increase its ranks but to maintain its presence within and outside the academy. The articles within this Vital Topics Forum engage with these challenges while raising an alarm to all anthropologists that the threat to the discipline is real and requires immediate responses from practitioners, instructors, scholars, programs and departments, and our professional organizations.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"356-360"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28057","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reflections on the weaponization of “civil” discourse and the silencing of dissent in higher education: An example from Florida","authors":"Amy Paul-Ward","doi":"10.1111/aman.28056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28056","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"353-355"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28056","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From rhetoric to reality: Why we need an anthropology of higher education policy","authors":"Karla L. Davis-Salazar,&nbsp;Emma Abell-Selby","doi":"10.1111/aman.28059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28059","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"361-364"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28059","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}