American Anthropologist最新文献_第6页

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-11 Epub Date: 2025-11-18 DOI: 10.1111/aman.70041

N. J. Enfield

{"title":"Legibility and Agency","authors":"N. J. Enfield","doi":"10.1111/aman.70041","DOIUrl":"10.1111/aman.70041","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This paper argues that legibility is foundational to human agency. The argument critiques the implication that legibility is exclusively modern or necessarily disempowering. On the contrary, legibility is necessary for the existence of any sociocultural system and for the agency of its members. Using examples from fieldwork in upland Laos and beyond, we define legibility as a relation between agents and environments, both physical and social in kind. First-order legibility, whereby agents tune their interpretation and action to environments, is distinguished from second-order legibility, whereby environments are manipulated to guide other agents’ interpretations and actions. The paper explores diverse relations between legibility and agency, covering social deviance, high modernist state control regimes, semiotic interception, preference capture, and preference installation. These phenomena illustrate the mechanisms whereby individual agency may be both enabled and constrained by legibility regimes. The concluding discussion evaluates the relation between legibility and agency in light of social inequalities and imbalances of power. It is found that legibility presents both risks and opportunities for human agency in all social and cultural contexts and at all scales.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"128 1","pages":"39-51"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146154971","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}

引用次数: 0

Tasting Red, Hearing Silk: Synesthesia, Sensory Labor, and the Social Aesthetics of Chefs 味觉红，听觉丝：通感，感官劳动和厨师的社会美学

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-11 Epub Date: 2025-11-27 DOI: 10.1111/aman.70040

Kelly Alexander

{"title":"Tasting Red, Hearing Silk: Synesthesia, Sensory Labor, and the Social Aesthetics of Chefs","authors":"Kelly Alexander","doi":"10.1111/aman.70040","DOIUrl":"10.1111/aman.70040","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article examines synesthesia as a mode of perception by exploring its implications for culinary labor, specifically how chefs navigate multisensory experience in the high-pressure environment of professional kitchens. Drawing on 30 years of fieldwork and observations of, and interviews with, more than 500 chefs, it brings sensory anthropology, food studies, and the everyday practices of professional cooking into conversation to explore how heightened sensory attunements both shape and are shaped by creativity and environmental culture. While neurological studies often frame synesthesia as a rare or idiosyncratic condition, this article foregrounds its broader social and cultural dimensions, positioning it within the social aesthetics of kitchen labor. Building on the work of Classen, Howes, Sutton, and others, it examines how chefs’ perceptions—whether clinically diagnosed as synesthetic or not—fuse taste, texture, sound, and memory. The article argues that culinary labor reveals the entanglements of sensory experience, cultural value, and embodied knowledge, showing how food functions as both material and metaphor, and how the senses themselves are informed by work. This ethnographic account invites readers to consider the kitchen as a site where the senses operate in concert, linking inner perception to outer worlds.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"128 1","pages":"52-62"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146154743","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}

引用次数: 0

Wheels Turning: Anthropological Solidarity, Engaged Buddhism, and a Return to the 1990s 车轮转动：人类学的团结，从事佛教，并回到20世纪90年代

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-11 Epub Date: 2025-12-17 DOI: 10.1111/aman.70045

Michael Edwards

引用次数: 0

Borderland Anxiety: Negotiating Care Ethics at a Transcultural Clinic 边境焦虑：跨文化诊所的医疗伦理谈判

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-11 Epub Date: 2025-10-30 DOI: 10.1111/aman.70035

Stéphanie Larchanché

{"title":"Borderland Anxiety: Negotiating Care Ethics at a Transcultural Clinic","authors":"Stéphanie Larchanché","doi":"10.1111/aman.70035","DOIUrl":"10.1111/aman.70035","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article explores the borderland as a site of anxiety. I define borderland as a stretch of space (physical and symbolic) or as a subjective positioning where defined border categories are suspended or renegotiated. Anxiety here is an ethical affect that results from being located in a semantically overdetermined location, where individuals are faced with various scripts to choose from, each of which introduces legitimate, ethical arguments. I engage with the institutional management of asylum seekers’ mental health distress as a site of anxiety in the context of contemporary France. From the analysis of an event that disrupts the routine of various institutional actors in social services and public health, I attempt to trace how social anxieties arise and how they are reframed by a specific community of practice: transcultural clinicians at Centre Minkowska in Paris. Centre Minkowska, while itself positioned at the borderland, offers a space where anxiety as an affect can be expressed and legitimately participate in the logics of professional deliberation. By doing so, it offers professionals a safe space to critically reflect on appropriate clinical responses to potentially stigmatizing referrals.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"128 1","pages":"5-15"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146155283","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}

引用次数: 0

A (Linguistic) Anthropology of Ambivalence: Exploring Discourses of Serbian Pasts, Presents, and Futures 矛盾心理的（语言）人类学：探索塞尔维亚人的过去、现在和未来的话语

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-11 Epub Date: 2026-01-27 DOI: 10.1111/aman.70053

Rachel George

引用次数: 0

“Everything Is Just Done Away With Now”: Contentious Practices of Scalar Brokerage Motivated by Narratives of Welfare Nostalgia in Postcolonial Rotterdam “现在一切都被抛弃了”：后殖民时期鹿特丹福利怀旧叙事引发的标量经纪的争议实践

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-11 Epub Date: 2025-12-29 DOI: 10.1111/aman.70052

Lieke van der Veer

{"title":"“Everything Is Just Done Away With Now”: Contentious Practices of Scalar Brokerage Motivated by Narratives of Welfare Nostalgia in Postcolonial Rotterdam","authors":"Lieke van der Veer","doi":"10.1111/aman.70052","DOIUrl":"10.1111/aman.70052","url":null,"abstract":"<p>According to anthropological theories of brokerage, brokers build bridges, close gaps, make connections, and construct shared norms. In this article, I argue that such structural-functionalist approaches to brokerage do not prove adequate in addressing unsettled and unsettling scale-making practices of refugee-led support initiatives in postcolonial Europe. Refugee advocates of long-term Dutch heritage evoke narratives of nostalgia for a long-lost welfare state to motivate their commitment to social justice and for the inclusion of refugee-led initiatives. However, this article demonstrates that the alleged universality of social security in the postwar caring state is a myth and that fantasies of down-scaled local action cohere with uneasy postcolonial formations. These formations surface in everyday interactions between advocates and organizers with a forced-migration background. Organizers need the support of advocates in dealing with experiences of intersectional racism, but their dependent relationship with advocates is not devoid of power asymmetries either. Inequalities in these relationships culminate in negotiations over scale: whereas advocates are committed to downscaling refugee-led initiatives and weaving together local networks of sociality, organizers seek to upscale their initiative beyond the neighborhood and pursue social mobility. These controversies over scale echo social injustices that are bound up with postwar repair and decolonization.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"128 1","pages":"108-119"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.70052","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146155205","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}

引用次数: 0

How to Fish With Respect: A Transformation of Human-Fish Relations in Riverside Amazonia 如何尊重地捕鱼：亚马逊河流域人鱼关系的转变

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-11 Epub Date: 2025-11-30 DOI: 10.1111/aman.70044

Vinicius de Aguiar Furuie

{"title":"How to Fish With Respect: A Transformation of Human-Fish Relations in Riverside Amazonia","authors":"Vinicius de Aguiar Furuie","doi":"10.1111/aman.70044","DOIUrl":"10.1111/aman.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Riverside inhabitants of the Middle Xingu River Basin, in the Brazilian Amazonia, frequently say that it is important to respect animals and the forest spirits who protect them. In recent decades, however, the development of an iced fish industry in the region has changed what respect means and how it is expressed when it comes to fishing. This article analyzes shifting attitudes toward fish by focusing on the transformation of the notion of <i>panema</i>, a word that denotes an acquired state in which one becomes incapable of hunting and fishing. I argue that the commodification of fresh fish has not altered the animistic principle that fish are imbued with an interior state of mind and other markers of personhood. Commodification, however, has decreased the importance of spirit owners and increased the importance of the mental state of the fishers in their accounts of their activities. I pose that such transformation can only be properly accounted for by breaking down the analytical distinction between political economy and ontology and focusing on how the riverside inhabitants see it as a normative issue, measured in regard to respect.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"128 1","pages":"63-72"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.70044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146155282","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}

引用次数: 0

Spirits, Land, and Bones: The Social Ecology of Forensic Intervention 精神、土地与骨骼：司法干预的社会生态

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-11 Epub Date: 2025-12-17 DOI: 10.1111/aman.70050

Jaymelee J. Kim, Tricia Redeker Hepner

{"title":"Spirits, Land, and Bones: The Social Ecology of Forensic Intervention","authors":"Jaymelee J. Kim, Tricia Redeker Hepner","doi":"10.1111/aman.70050","DOIUrl":"10.1111/aman.70050","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In northern Uganda, the living and the dead remain bound together through land, spirits, and the slow labor of repair. Yet forensic science, when deployed in postconflict settings, often treats bodies as evidence and landscapes as backdrops, severing these ties in the name of science or justice. This article applies a socioecological lens to an “integrated approach” to forensic intervention that begins instead with Acholi understandings of personhood and place, in which spirits, animals, and soil are participants in social life. Based on years of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork—including interviews, community dialogues, and mapping of sites of hauntings and burials—the study shows how Acholi cosmologies unsettle the epistemic foundations of forensic practice. When the dead disturb the living, the problem is not only spiritual but ecological, demanding rebalancing among humans, nonhumans, and the land itself. We argue that forensic anthropology can become an act of listening rather than extraction—one that attends to the agencies of sites, spirits, and survivors alike. Reframing the work in this way reveals both the limits and the possibilities of forensic intervention, offering a vision of justice rooted not in recovery alone but in renewed relations among the living and the dead.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"128 1","pages":"97-107"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146154968","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}

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IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-02-09

引用次数: 0

IF 1.7 1区社会学

American Anthropologist Pub Date : 2026-01-27

引用次数: 0