American Anthropologist最新文献

{"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}

{"title":"A semiotics of argan phytodiplomacy","authors":"Becky Schulthies","doi":"10.1111/aman.28004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"685-689"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642404","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":"Vibrant modalities: Indigenous modes of being and survival in the sixth extinction","authors":"Bernard C. Perley","doi":"10.1111/aman.28008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28008","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;It seems every summer, one cannot escape the daily news reports from across the globe detailing the devastation from fatal floods, fatal heat waves, extended droughts, killer red tides, and inextinguishable wildfires as well as the human intransigence in the face of these existential threats. The reports that reverberate across media platforms and across continents are tangible evidence of an anxious semiotics of doom. In these tumultuous years of upheavals attributed to climate change, excessive resource extraction, rapacious development, and a continuously resurgent pandemic there are also signs of life beyond species extinction. The immersive and immediate conditions of these existential threats blind many to the recursive nature of life and death in the sixth extinction; an endless cycle of new species and biomes replacing antecedent ones. Once in a while, a story offers relief from fear and uncertainty and provides a glimpse of what survival in an apocalypse might look like.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On August 2, 2021, an article on the &lt;i&gt;USA Today&lt;/i&gt; website featured a story titled “‘Homecoming’: 100 Years after Forceful Removal, Native American Tribe Celebrate Reclaimed Land in Oregon.”&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The article describes the process by which the Niimiipuu (Nez Perce) bought back land that was taken from them over a century ago. Vice Chairman Shannon Wheeler evocatively said, “Our people know we sprang from this land and we're tied to the land in that manner and the land is tied to us in the same way” (Lugo, &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;). The article featured photographs and a video of Niimiipuu returning to their ancestral land on horseback. These media illustrate “vibrant modalities” of survival in alienated landscapes (Zimmerman et al., &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;). Zimmerman et al. define vibrant modalities as “the kin-based social interpretation of meaning-making as an emergent property at the intersection of human modes of communication in relation to the vibrant environment” (&lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;, 224). These modalities offer insights into how we might approach negotiating the sixth extinction with “vision” (Leakey &amp; Lewin, &lt;span&gt;1996&lt;/span&gt;, 224).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The last five centuries constitute the opening act of the sixth extinction. The Indigenous worlds of the Western Hemisphere were dramatically altered (Cronon, &lt;span&gt;1983&lt;/span&gt;), some beyond recognition, others were obliterated (de las Casas, &lt;span&gt;1992&lt;/span&gt;; Pagden, &lt;span&gt;1982&lt;/span&gt;). Not only were invasive species introduced to the hemisphere but so were pathogens, biomes, and most devastatingly, invasive concepts (Baldwin et al., &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;). Today, we are all witnessing the opening scene of the second act of the sixth extinction. The slow violence (Nixon, &lt;span&gt;2011&lt;/span&gt;) of colonialism and its attendant concepts are the systemic conditions creating the largely “invisible” ontological vulnerability (Lear, &lt;span&gt;2006&lt;/span&gt;) that threaten many lifeforms and their respective environments. Humans can no lo","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"699-702"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641246","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":"Conceiving Christian America: Embryo adoption and reproductive politics By Risa Cromer. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 320 pp.","authors":"Andrea Ford","doi":"10.1111/aman.28010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"736-737"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641248","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":"Plastics, children, and health—Who cares?","authors":"Smruthi Bala Kannan","doi":"10.1111/aman.28011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28011","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Describing their experience of the 2015 and 2016 floods in northeastern Tamil Nadu, Priya (sixth grade) said “When the water started entering the house, it was twigs and leaves. As it started rising, it pulled along so much plastic and things stuck to it. It took days to clean all the plastic out when we went to the house again.” I listened as we sat on the cement floor of the craft room of a peri-urban school in the region in 2019. We were sitting in two circles, learning to braid wires into bags. The strands made of sturdy nylon were just “wires” that the girls had witnessed their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers braid into grocery bags for sale, gifts, and family use. I did the braids well, the girls said. I smiled and, encouraged, pursued more questions about their opinions of plastics in their everyday environment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The conversation was one of many that I had with schoolchildren during my fieldwork in Tamil Nadu in 2019−2020. This was focused on two cleanliness campaigns—a “plastic ban” emphasizing environmental and ecological health and a contagion-prevention campaign promoting handwashing and other individualized preventative measures for human health. The two campaigns shared a discourse of sanitation to secure the health of future generations, echoing a colonial and caste modality of intimate governance through children. Centering on children as their protagonists—agents, conduits, and beneficiaries—the campaigns evoked parallel discourses of care for human and planetary health as their goals. However, in their everyday lives, schoolchildren had to negotiate the interdiscursive gaps (Silverstein, &lt;span&gt;2005&lt;/span&gt;) between the two campaigns and their actionables through the material modality of plastic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Plastic, while a threat within the environmental campaigns, acts as a protective shield against contagious diseases. In this essay, I outline some of the questions that children's lifeworlds raised about conflicting material discourses of care work in efforts to secure human and planetary health, dimensions that are portrayed as aligned within environmental discourses relating to childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Plastic takes many forms in Tamil Nadu, India—from commodities of everyday use and idols of Gods, to medical equipment and food packaging where the signification of its use value subsumes and takes precedence over its material composition (Dey &amp; Michael, &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;; Pathak, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;). However, one discourse that marks the material modality as “plastic” is that of waste and pollution (Nagy, &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;) alongside concerns about toxicity (Pathak, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;). Litter and garbage in public spaces such as roads, bodies of water, and schoolyards draw attention to plastic's longevity and the obstacles it poses to human, animal, and ecological health. Governmental and nongovernmental campaigns in Tamil Nadu draw public attention to this issue through temporal discourses of securing planetary health for futur","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"703-706"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142641247","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":"Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science By Benjamin Breen. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024. 384 pp.","authors":"Jim Weil","doi":"10.1111/aman.28009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"734-735"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642444","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":"Microbial semiotics: Sites of ideological work in antibiotic resistance","authors":"Joyce Lu","doi":"10.1111/aman.28006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28006","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;As I was wrapping up fieldwork in Guatemala in late 2021, I encountered and saved an advertisement circulating on Instagram (Figure 1). It displayed a series of images of medications beginning with a box of azithromycin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic used to treat various bacterial infections. The ad was sponsored by Paiz, a Mexican and Central American subsidiary of Walmart, which took advantage of the Instagram Shopping feature: a big red “shop now” button that takes viewers to sites where they can purchase the advertised products. In this post, the price was 15 Guatemalan quetzals (approximately 2 USD) for 30 500-mg tablets of azithromycin. The accompanying caption proclaimed, “Contamos con más surtido para que en tu alacena siempre tengás lo que te gusta” (We offer a greater selection so that you can always have whatever you like in your cupboard). A white label with a red sticker adorned the box. Its small lettering only became legible upon zooming in, reading, “ESTE PRODUCTO SE VENDE SOLO CON RECETA MÉDICA” (This product is sold only with a medical prescription.) Despite the antibiotic's advertised availability, this fine print reflected recent efforts to limit its unrestricted sale in Guatemala. As part of a strategy for combatting rising rates of antibiotic resistance, the Guatemalan Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance (MSPAS) issued a decree (acuerdo ministerial 145–2019) in June 2019 prohibiting nonprescription sales of antibiotic medications. This was also part of a broader effort among global health institutions and national governments to develop strategic action plans to address antibiotic resistance (Patel et al., &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Months after returning to the United States, I showed the downloaded Instagram advertisement to a group of medical and public health colleagues who regularly encounter antibiotic resistance as an area of research interest and/or of practical concern in clinical contexts. Given their shared understanding that antibiotic overuse and resistance is a serious problem, I was curious to hear their thoughts concerning the clash between governmental policy and corporate agency indexed in this ad. As we spoke, it became an unexpectedly fraught site of ideological work in which “experiences and ideas are swept up—drawn into ideologized interpretations” (Gal &amp; Irvine, &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;, 167). A graduate student, whose research training was in toxicology, remarked that the ad equated antibiotics to other medications sold over the counter in the United States, such as Advil or Tylenol. In response, the medical trainees reflected on the gruesome sequelae of chronic Advil and Tylenol use that they witness in clinical settings. That is, antibiotics were not the only medications in which overuse was a problem. They then debated whether solutions to medication overuse should focus more on public education campaigns or physician-prescribing practices, configuring antibiotic resistance into a targeta","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"694-698"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642447","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":"Hunger as more-than-human communicative modality on the West Papuan oil palm frontier","authors":"Sophie Chao","doi":"10.1111/aman.28001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28001","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Large-scale agribusiness developments across the Global South are often framed in state and corporate discourse as necessary to meet the food and fuel needs of the world's growing population. In response to this rising demand, monocrop plantations—a hallmark of the Anthropocene—are spreading relentlessly across the tropics, wreaking havoc on native ecosystems and exacerbating climate change through soaring rates of greenhouse gas emissions. Rampant biodiversity loss and environmental pollution in these zones of capitalist extraction are often accompanied by the forced relocation of Indigenous and other local communities from their customary lands and territories, who become deprived of the vital natural resources that they depend upon for their economic livelihoods, cultural continuance, and collective physical and psychological well-being. State and corporate rhetorics of development, modernization, and progress thus obscure the systemic and violent forms of dispossession, displacement, and disempowerment experienced by Indigenous peoples on the ground. They also communicate a deficit-based narrative of Indigenous peoples and foodways as backward and in need of advancement and transformation. In the process, such top-down narratives efface the diverse local modalities through which Indigenous people communicate the effects of capitalist violence on their more-than-human relations, ecologies, and communities.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Indigenous communicative modalities of hunger among Marind in West Papua offer a powerful example of the human and more-than-human idioms through which peoples inhabiting the shadow places of capitalism understand and articulate the form and effects of agro-industrial expansion. In rural Merauke, a district located in the Indonesian-controlled in West Papua province where I have been conducting fieldwork since 2011, Indigenous Marind communities have seen some 1 million hectares of their customary forests razed and converted to monocrop oil palm plantations in the last decade (Chao, &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;). These agro-industrial developments are promoted by the Indonesian government in the name of achieving national food sovereignty, meeting renewable energy targets, and transforming Merauke, as the slogan goes, into the “nation's rice bowl” that will “feed Indonesia and then the world” (Awas MIFEE, &lt;span&gt;2012&lt;/span&gt;; Jong, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;). On the ground, however, rampant deforestation to make way for oil palm plantations has resulted in unprecedented rates of food insecurity among Marind, who traditionally depend on the forest for their subsistence. Stunting, wasting, and chronic protein-energy malnutrition are particularly high among women and children, rendering them vulnerable to pneumonia, parasitism, bronchitis, and a range of gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal diseases. As native ecosystems give way to monocrop plantations, nutritionally diverse foodways composed of game, fish, fruits, sago starch, and tubers are being substi","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"126 4","pages":"679-681"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142642445","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}