American Anthropologist最新文献

{"title":"The problem of criminal charisma: State authority and the politics of narcocultura in Mexico's drug war","authors":"Agnes Mondragón-Celis","doi":"10.1111/aman.28024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28024","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines Mexico's “war on drug trafficking” through its affective and ideological dimensions. By ethnographically exploring two sites of official representations of organized crime in Mexico City—the Secretariat of Defense's Drug Museum and the Institute to Give Back What Was Stolen from the People—I analyze the strategies through which the Mexican state acknowledges and addresses criminality's charisma as a key challenge to its authority. In these official representations, the drug world becomes visible in partial and selective ways, such as through drug traffickers’ confiscated possessions, which project ideas of extravagant capitalist consumption and transgressive social mobility. The state's inevitable failure to contain or redirect this criminal charisma is a symptom of a deeper problem. Such charisma is a key element constituting organized crime as a political actor that menaces state power. It does so not only through violence, but also by means of its capacity to align and organize publics ideologically by doubling and mimicking the state's forms of meaning-making and valuation.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"581-595"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641652","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":"Seeking clarity at a time of confusion, through world anthropologies","authors":"Yang Zhan,&nbsp;Jing Xu","doi":"10.1111/aman.28022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"716-721"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641315","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":"Discerning personhood through lena-dena: Disability professionals, ethics, and communication","authors":"Shruti Vaidya,&nbsp;Michele Friedner","doi":"10.1111/aman.28023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28023","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article looks at practices of discernment in disability spaces in India by analyzing (hierarchical) relational contexts in which disability professionals and disabled people in India interact. We argue that discernment, which we explore through <i>lena-dena</i> (giving and taking), allows us to analyze the ethical stakes of processes of communication, interpreting, and facilitation. Vaidya analyzes how special educators make broad discernments about intellectually disabled people by interpreting their unconventional and nonlinguistic communicative cues. In contrast, Friedner examines how speech and language therapists that work with deaf children make narrow discernments regarding what counts as language and perform the labor of training deaf children to communicate in the normatively correct way—that is, using speech. While disability professionals produce specific kinds of personhood for disabled people through their practices of discernment, they also end up discerning themselves in the process as professionals with difficult yet rewarding jobs. We conclude by discussing a program for individuals with intellectual disabilities where both authors conducted ethnographic research wherein disability professionals discerned disabled people as having social needs and desires on par with nondisabled people and created enabling environments, scaffolded activities, and facilitated conversations to produce and enable complex personhood for them.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"647-657"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641281","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":"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}