American Anthropologist最新文献

{"title":"David Graeber (1961–2020)","authors":"Yancey Orr","doi":"10.1111/aman.28020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"753-757"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641314","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":"When decolonization is hijacked","authors":"Alpa Shah","doi":"10.1111/aman.28021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article asks how we should reconceptualize decolonization when it is hijacked by authoritarian/fascist forces. It focuses on the notorious Bhima Koregaon case in India in which 16 intellectuals/human rights defenders from across the country were imprisoned without trial as alleged terrorists. It shows how, on the one hand, decolonization is hijacked by the Hindu authoritarian regime and, on the other hand, colonial artifacts are resymbolized by the colonized to oppose oppression by native elites. It urges attention to the questions of who is mobilizing the language of decolonization and why. It argues that the most important anticolonial intellectuals may not use the language of decolonization and may not be in universities, but on the streets, with social movements, and in prison. It proposes that contemporary decolonization debates center processes of domination and oppression created by the state and global capital nexus, processes that are cultural, psychological, political, and economic. These processes are shown to entrench casteist/racist hierarchies, work through Indigenous elites, and create internal differentiation within marginalized communities, eschewing a unitary concept of indigenous ontology/cosmopolitics/worldviews. Calls for an emancipatory politics, such as that of decolonizing anthropology or the university, would be well placed to center these global processes and local nuances.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"553-566"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642544","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":"An ordinary future: Margaret Mead, the problem of disability, and a child born different By Thomas W. Pearson, Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. 222 pp. Home signs: An ethnography of life beyond and beside language By Joshua O. Reno, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 264 pp.","authors":"Brendan H. O'Connor","doi":"10.1111/aman.28018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"731-733"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642525","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":"Introduction: Modalities of planetary health and justice","authors":"Kathleen C. Riley","doi":"10.1111/aman.28007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28007","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The short essays in this Vital Topics Forum investigate how communicative modalities contribute to the construction of planetary health and justice “crises” as well as proposals for their “cures.” We explore the ways in which powerful signs (i.e., meaningful forms) have been forged, circulated, and interpreted within the planetary systems that humans have wrought over the last 10,000 years, more specifically beginning 500 years ago with European colonialism, and especially via neoliberal capitalism over the last 75 years. The shared understanding among the scholars writing here is that power-inflected semiotic modalities have been deployed to wrench economic resources, political/legal representation, and sociocultural dignity away from some while enriching, empowering, and valorizing others in ways that have impacted human health, environmental balance, and communal sovereignty at a planetary scale in a range of entangled ways. In brief, we are exploring how linguistic anthropologists can help diagnose a range of age-old injustices inherent in the dialogue as it has been scripted up until now and attempt to change the narrative going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;While we generally agree that the systems of human health, environmental balance, and sociocultural/political-economic justice are clearly enmeshed in a wide web of semiotic modalities, not all of us think it necessary, nor even possible, to create a single overarching model to examine how these systems and semiotic modalities operate. Instead, we are interested in ethnographically exploring a variety of net-makings, on the one hand, and a range of apparently haphazard assemblages, on the other, with an eye toward disrupting some of the globally dominant discourses of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governmental policymakers, elite spokespersons, scholars, and so forth and in support of alternative modalities for agentive bodies to speak justice into being in a range of environmental, social, economic, and political contexts. But before briefly introducing the contributions collected here, we begin with one brief and now all-too-familiar example of how myriad modalities may become entangled in the construction of planetary health and justice “crises” and “cures.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Building on work initiated at the start of the pandemic by numerous scholars (e.g., Black, &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;; Briggs, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;), we use the example of the COVID-19 pandemic to trace a few of the modal threads that entangle ecological, medical, and political-economic systems. This will allow us to unpack how various ideological understandings of the pandemic—its origins and nature as “crisis”—have been semiotically forged as well as how some “cures” have been articulated, communicated, and received, while alternative forms of care have been indexically erased or simply ignored as illegible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, consider how two discourses concerning the pandemic's origins represent long-standing political-economic tensions and s","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"673-678"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642100","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":"Food (inter)activism in the Marquesas, French Polynesia","authors":"Kathleen C. Riley,&nbsp;Emily C. Donaldson","doi":"10.1111/aman.28014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28014","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Systems of planetary health and justice are entangled via many different modalities, including food and the language we use around and about it. Environmental balance and human health are both influenced by our foodways (the practices, ideologies, and institutions through which food is produced, distributed, and consumed) and a range of associated discursive practices (Cavanaugh &amp; Riley, &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;; Karrebæk et al., &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;). Relatedly, social justice is both mediated by and facilitated through food and the social interactions that take place through and around it (Broad, &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;; Dossa, &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;). Above all, the listening, reciprocity, and connections embedded in the multisensory aspects of quotidian foodways shape and perpetuate broader understandings of health and the environment. Food (inter)activism (Riley &amp; Paugh, &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;) enlists food-related modes of social interaction in pursuit of food sovereignty, a goal that not only entails fair access to meaningful foodways but will also support environmental justice and health equity (Donaldson &amp; Riley, &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This article offers a brief example of how the just production, circulation, and consumption of foods that are healthy for both the human body and the planet is being hampered by the slow violence (Nixon, &lt;span&gt;2011&lt;/span&gt;; see also Perley, this forum) of gastrocolonialism (see Chao, this forum) and the disruption of local foodway interactions in te Henua ò te Ènana (the Land of the People, commonly known as the Marquesas), a remote archipelago in the semiautonomous collectivity of French Polynesia. Our work with te Ènana ò te Henua (the People of the Land, or Marquesans) has revealed how the semiotic expression and exchange of meanings relating to food and foodways frequently reflects shifting Indigenous identities and values, highlighting the confluences and conflicts between cultural traditions and global health advocacy. Marquesans do not simply accept or reject the health discourses promoted by the French medical establishment. They build new approaches to healthy eating based on scientific medicine, transmitted knowledge about food and the land, and their own personal experiences. More specifically, these transformations emerge from multisensorial engagements with food that support four modes of semiotic discourse: (1) about food—from words and recipes to food-related cartoons and cooking shows, (2) around food—activities in its presence such as fishing, marketing, cooking, and eating, (3) through food—the dishes and foodways that express cultural values, and (4) as food—speech genres such as gossip or curses that can nurture or poison interlocutors (Cavanaugh &amp; Riley, &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;; Riley &amp; Paugh, &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We begin with a brief ethnohistory of how Western interventions have reshaped the Marquesas through the exploitation of marine resources (e.g., turtles and tuna) and arboricul","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"707-711"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642101","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":"An ethnography of joy: Entrepreneurship among Latinx communities in East Los Angeles","authors":"Yana Stainova","doi":"10.1111/aman.28017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28017","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How do people living at the intersection of various forms of injury seek out collective experiences of joy? I explore this question through fieldwork with Latinx female and queer artists and entrepreneurs, some of them undocumented, who consciously seek out and enact joy in their communities in East Los Angeles. At the same time, these communities face gentrification, racism, and discrimination. I rest on joy as a conceptual framework that arises out of the analysis and theorizing of my interlocutors, who choose to push back against mainstream representations of their communities as exclusively defined by their suffering. This approach, or what I call “an ethnography of joy,” draws our attention to what joy does in a particular context, how it becomes politically meaningful, and how it intersects and interacts with other phenomena. For example, in this article, I explore the more capacious idea of joy through a particular angle that emerged in my ethnographic research: entrepreneurship, or small business ownership. A focus on entrepreneurship allows me to explore how my interlocutors summon the forces of neoliberalism to seek social mobility, belonging, and community activism.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"635-646"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642248","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":"The presence of abandonment: Left to live at the borderland of Lampedusa","authors":"Alessandro Corso,&nbsp;Nayanika Mookherjee","doi":"10.1111/aman.28016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing from the extensive literature on the anthropology of borders and border death in and beyond Europe, this article ethnographically explores the processes through which irregular migrants and locals at the borderland of Lampedusa (south of Sicily, Italy) are left to live and die in abandonment. In the process, we highlight the distinct and antagonistic yet shared sense of neglect that both migrants and locals experience in their everyday lives on the island and explore the relationship between abandonment, the everyday, and the law, showing how these are interwoven. By including both irregular migrants and locals in Lampedusa in our analysis, the article importantly establishes how abandonment occurs not in the absence but in the indeterminacy of the law and highlights a chronic failure of the law toward life (deemed as legal and illegal). It moves beyond traditional anthropological critiques on state presence and absence, showing how abandonment pervades everyday life within and beyond borders.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"622-634"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641900","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":"Proving injustice: Smuggler killings, impunity work, and vernacular counterforensics in Turkey's Kurdish borderlands","authors":"Fırat Bozçalı","doi":"10.1111/aman.28015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28015","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Kurdish smugglers have been targeted and killed by security forces in Turkey's Van borderlands systematically and with impunity. In response, the killed smugglers’ families and their lawyers conducted what I call <i>vernacular counterforensics</i>—the forensic examination both of the killings and of the legal authorities’ failure to investigate them properly. Associating the Kurdish borderlands with terrorism, the legal authorities often avoided collecting evidence on the killings to make potential perpetrators remain unknown or legally authorize the killings. By documenting this impunity work through their counterforensics, Kurdish complainants and lawyers demonstrated the judiciary's complicity in the systemization of state anti-Kurdish violence. While anthropological studies show that criminal law operates by individualizing violation claims and perpetrators, vernacular counterforensics illustrates a distinct use of criminal law that reveals, rather than blurs, the state crimes’ systematic-collective aspects. Rather than differentiating technoscientifically produced crime scene evidence from the political circumstances of state crimes, Kurdish complainants and their lawyers used the selective production of such evidence to corroborate the killings’ unlawfulness and their systematic-collective character. This dual use of forensic evidence permits us to rethink analytical and methodological premises that view forensic evidence as fully verifiable and universally applicable and contrast it against contextual and contingent knowledge forms.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"567-580"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641899","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":"“Our planet: Too big to fail”: The semiotics of capitalist responses to climate change","authors":"Chelsie Yount","doi":"10.1111/aman.28005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28005","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;In September of 2020, the &lt;i&gt;Financial Times&lt;/i&gt; organized its inaugural “Moral Money Summit,” a gathering of world leaders in business and finance with an interest in sustainable investing. At this online event, the head of sustainable finance at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) premiered a film highlighting “the importance of nature to our global economy and the catastrophic risks to our financial systems if we choose to ignore it.”&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Its title, “Our Planet: Too Big to Fail,” borrowed from the language used during the 2008 financial crisis to justify government bailouts for the world's largest banks, based on the belief that these financial institutions were so large and interconnected that their failure would spell the demise of the greater economic system. This wordplay not only underscored the importance of climate action to an audience of “sustainability” professionals, it introduced a narrative on climate change that frames banks and businesses as integral to achieving planetary health and justice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Applying the notion of something “too big to fail” to the natural world, the title announced a communicative strategy found throughout the film: that of “translating” the stakes of the climate crisis into the terms of the financial sector. “Ecosystems are assets. We're really talking about an asset management problem,” one interviewee claimed. Over images of melting glaciers, the film opens with an admission of guilt, the narrator's declaration that, “our finance sector has unwittingly bankrolled the destruction of the very natural systems that it relies upon.” It calls financiers to rectify past misdeeds by taking the interests of nonfinancial “stakeholders” into account and aiding governments with the transition to a sustainable economy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Claims that finance ought to play a leading role in managing climate change are central to financiers’ arguments legitimating the need for “ESG” and other forms of “sustainable” investing (Campisano, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;). ESG is an investment strategy that proposes to take “nonfinancial” data on environmental (E), social (S), and governance (G) issues into account when determining the value of company stocks.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;ESG and other assets labeled “sustainable” emerged through the language practices of financialized capitalism, which reflect and animate assumptions of the market economy, treating costs associated with things like public health or the environment as “externalities” that need not be accounted for on financial balance sheets. Perceived as “nonfinancial” in nature, information about a company's environmental and social impact thus appears to require translation to be understood and acted upon within the financialized capitalist system. Accordingly, arguments for the importance of ESG metrics are often framed as a “translation” of climate scientists’ warnings into the language of finance. Linguistic anthropologists have long argued that translations are never merely different ways o","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"690-693"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641328","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":"A thousand tiny cuts: Mobility and security across the Bangladesh-India borderland By Sahana Ghosh. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 296 pp.","authors":"Darren Byler","doi":"10.1111/aman.28013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"740-741"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642368","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}