Drawing on prevalent Euro‐American folk models, extant theories of envy in the social sciences tend to reduce it to an emotion embodied in individual subjects, who are believed to envy those who have more and those who are hierarchically superordinate. Yet envy can also be viewed as a social, intersubjective phenomenon—one potentially incorporating humans and various other‐than‐human entities into complex and unpredictable relationships involving occult phenomena like witchcraft and the evil eye as well as entire families, regions, and abstract identity categories of ethnicity, gender, and class. The tension between ethnographic accounts of envy in the Middle East and Middle Eastern accounts of envy provides an opportunity to explore the phenomenon of “envying down” and an underappreciated, recursive dimension of envy: envying the efficacy of other people's envy. Envy is revealed to be reflexive, relational, and often institutionalized—even within the institution of ethnography itself.

中文翻译：

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嫉妒的民族志和人类学“东方”中的嫉妒民族志：走向嫉妒理论

利用流行的欧美民间模式，社会科学中的现有嫉妒理论倾向于将其还原为体现在个体主体中的一种情感，相信这些个体会嫉妒拥有更多事物和具有上级等级的人。然而，嫉妒也可以看作是一种社会的，主体间的现象—一种可能将人类和其他非人类实体纳入复杂且不可预测的关系中，其中涉及巫术和邪恶之眼等神秘现象以及整个家庭，地区和抽象身份种族，性别和阶级的类别。中东的民族志羡慕账户和中东羡慕账户之间的紧张关系提供了一个机会来探讨“羡慕”现象和羡慕程度未得到充分认识的递归维度：羡慕别人羡慕的功效。嫉妒被证明是反思性的，关系性的，而且常常是制度化的，甚至在人种志制度本身中也是如此。