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The sexual politics of empire: Postcolonial homophobia in Haiti By Erin L.Durban. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. 234 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Dasha A. Chapman
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“Punching is a sickness” American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Leo Hopkinson
Men who box professionally in Accra recognize that bouts are physically harmful and that they involve violently subordinating one another. Yet they also share a sense that bouts can be spaces of mutual becoming and affirmation. To navigate the tension between harm and affirmation, boxers and coaches couch their work between the ropes in idioms of care and mutual support. These idioms reflect their
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Visible critique/critical visibility American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Elizabeth Derderian
Artists based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are pressured by international art elites to critique the illiberal regime under which they live. But doing so is illegal. It can lead the state to retaliate with harassment, detention, cancellation of residency visas, and expulsion. Nonetheless, gatekeeping curators and critics validate UAE‐based artists’ work as worthwhile and good if these artists
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Fiat speech, fiat infrastructure American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Judith Bovensiepen
In 2011 the independent government of Timor‐Leste initiated a controversial oil and gas infrastructure project. To persuade Timorese citizens to embrace their vision of the future based on oil and gas, supporters of the project employed narrative strategies conventionally reserved for ritual authorities. Their scaling of ritual speech to the level of the nation hinged on establishing iconic links across
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¡Alerta! Engineering on shaky ground By ElizabethReddy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. 215 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Lisa Messeri
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Anthropology with a philosophical sensibility American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Eraldo Souza dos Santos
While philosophy and anthropology have much to say to each other, they do not always mesh in productive ways. Critically reflecting on an edited volume that seeks to bring insights from philosophy to anthropological analysis, I consider how the volume's form, while didactic, may contribute to the reproduction of power dynamics that both anthropologists and philosophers have denounced. More broadly
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Pig‐feast democracy American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Veronika Kusumaryati
In most Melanesian societies, pig feasts have been declining in recent years, owing to the incursion of Christianity and the modern economy. But in Indonesia‐occupied West Papua, pig feasts are being held more often, and at a greater scale, than ever. The feasts are taking place in the context of West Papua's “special autonomy” status and Indonesia's democratic reforms, which have established direct
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Situating microbes American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Timothy Gitzen
Microbes are relational, and they foster multispecies relationality. In both mundane and profound ways, they connect, interlace, and affect bodies, and are affected by them in turn. This comes to the fore in two recent ethnographic volumes that interrogate microbial worlds: The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life, by Jamie Lorimer, and With Microbes, edited by Charlotte Brives, Matthaus Rest
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Flexible families: Nicaraguan transnational families in Costa Rica By CaitlinFouratt. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2022. 181 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Lynnette Arnold
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Thanks for watching: An anthropological study of video sharing on YouTube By Patricia G.Lange. Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2019. 362 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Daniel Miller
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Mafiacraft: An ethnography of deadly silence By DeborahPuccio‐Den. Chicago: Hau Books, 2021. 294 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Antonio Vesco
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Without the state: Self‐organization and political activism in Ukraine By EmilyChannell‐Justice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 302 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Emma Mateo
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Experimenting with ethnography: A companion to analysis By AndreaBallestero and Brit RossWinthereik, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 301 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Fulya Pinar
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Sextarianism: Sovereignty, secularism, and the state in Lebanon By MayaMikdashi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 288 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Ola Galal
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Food allergy advocacy: Parenting and the politics of care By Danya Glabau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 296 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Matthew Pappalardo, Holly Horan
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Chemical heroes: Pharmacological supersoldiers in the US military By Andrew Bickford. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 320 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Traben Pleasant
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Fat in four cultures—a global ethnography of weight By CindiSturtzSreetharan, AlexandraBrewis, JessicaHardin, SarahTrainer, and AmberWutich. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 236 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Fernanda Baeza Scagliusi
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Anthropology unbound American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Saira A. Mehmood
As an anthropologist currently working in the policy realm, I provide insights on the value of anthropology and its potential for growth and impact, both within and beyond academia. Drawing from my experiences studying in graduate school, teaching in academia, and holding nonacademic jobs, I suggest that anthropology can flourish by breaking free from disciplinary boundaries and silos, challenging
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The maturing of anthropology American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Daniel Miller
As anthropology reaches maturity, its contributions are likely to grow. This is because the discipline's practitioners, in writing parochial ethnography, can link a respect for individual difference to our understanding of global humanity. Such a practice aligns with the growing political struggle to retain meaning in an expanding world. Moreover, anthropology's commitment to life as lived research
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A view from another side, or, not just another quit-lit essay American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Lori A. Allen
Academic anthropology is a paradoxical realm. On the one hand, opportunities for creatively exploring the human condition are hemmed in by administrators and bureaucracy. On the other hand, scholars in the academy have the space to call for justice—in Palestine and elsewhere, as they did in 2023, when the American Anthropological Association passed a resolution to boycott Israeli institutions. This
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Translating the social in complex technology development American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Melissa Cefkin
As an anthropologist, I have worked with people in both developing new technologies and managing existing ones. Based on this experience, I suggest that although anthropologically informed perspectives can contribute to technology development—from providing insights on particular cases to raising broader questions about a product's impact on society—the route to doing so is sometimes indirect. In this
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The smugness of privilege American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Don Kulick
This essay answers the question What good is anthropology? via a discussion of Susan Sontag's review of photographer Diane Arbus's 1972 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Sontag asserts that Arbus, in depicting people whom Sontag smugly regards as “ugly,” is necessarily exploiting them. I perceive an exact comparison between Arbus's photographs and anthropology as an epistemological
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Seeing our world in 16:9 aspect ratio American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Charles Menzies
A reflection on making Indigenous films in a colonized world. The author draws on his experience as an Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on the settler's gaze and its implications for an Indigenous film practice. This is accomplished through telling stories and reflecting on films made over several decades.
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Why do I write anthropology? Why do you? American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Alma Gottlieb
What role do passion and poetry play in our research-based quest to promote social justice? In this piece—a manifesto of sorts—I make a case for prioritizing both passion and poetry in our ethnographic writing. Such a commitment will allow our insights to be learned, our interlocutors’ and our own voices to be heard, and our policy recommendations to be heeded. But writing poetically from a place of
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Anthropology and complicated people American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Alexander Edmonds
Revealing complexity in the world—but also creating it—is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex-soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral
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Becoming malleable American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Michele Friedner, Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Drawing on anthropological scholarship on the senses, embodiment, and communication, we argue for a capacity-based anthropology that takes account of human variation in all domains of everyday life, including “the field” and “the anthropology seminar.” Such an approach allows us to consider the ways that humans are differently malleable, and we stress that enacting malleability, when possible, is a
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Ethnography vs. zombie methodologies American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Greg Downey
Beginning in 2011, public scandals and high-visibility critiques of research methods in psychology fed a broader “replication crisis”: foundational experiments could not be replicated, and statistical methods in social psychology demonstrated vulnerability to fraud and manipulation. Even well-intended researchers following accepted psychological protocols—zombie methodologies—could unintentionally
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Privileged observers and colonial continuities American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Maia Green
Anthropological debates about development are often framed by a moral contrast between pure and instrumental knowledge. But the good of anthropology is situationally produced, as we can demonstrate by reflecting on the discipline's institutional conditions. Institutional contexts sustain our professional identities and research practices, including the claimed differences between them. These contexts
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Applied anthropology, injustice, and the ethics of intervention American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Lenore Manderson
Fifty years ago, anthropologists, including applied researchers, were caught up in a dilemma of ethics and practice, in the face of criticisms of ethnographic embroilment in colonial, military, and neocolonial projects. But the epistemological crises that this provoked, together with anthropological engagement in political movements, sharpened our commitment to work with others to counter systemic
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To write or not to write? American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Sophie Chao
It is of critical importance for anthropologists to consider the ethical and representational stakes of writing violence, especially when the values and uses of anthropology are increasingly disputed, both within and beyond the discipline. As suggested by Indigenous Papuan women's contrasting views on the promise and perils of ethnographic writing, the good of anthropology is a question best approached
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What good is anthropology? American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Nolwazi Mkhwanazi
Different forms of care work are essential for the practice of anthropology in South Africa. In this biographical commentary, I describe how I enacted care work in my anthropological practice. I suggest that what is good about anthropology is its potential to be attentive to the multiple ways in which care work is enacted by us as anthropologists, as teachers of the discipline, as well as by our interlocutors
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Ethnographic thinking American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Emanuel Moss
Anthropology and its marquee method, ethnography, have recently been promoted as an analytical key for unlocking problems faced in other domains. This review addresses two books that argue for the value of this anthropological lens: Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life, by Gillian Tett, and How to Think like an Anthropologist, by Matthew Engelke. The differences between these works
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A decolonial birth for anthropology American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Bhrigupati Singh
“What good is anthropology?” Rather than accepting a predetermined notion of the good, I ask, What ancestral spirits animate anthropology as a vocation? In pursuing this question, I turn to the inaugural issue of American Ethnologist, which, I suggest, expresses an anthropological spirit readable via Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau. I examine how this spirit was expressed in other parts of the world, such
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Anthropology at sea American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Jatin Dua
Ethnography remains central as a form and location of knowledge production in anthropology. Given this weaving together of ethnography and anthropology, to ask, what good is anthropology?, is also to ask, what good is ethnography? Taking apart two of the guiding metaphors for ethnography—fieldwork and immersion—allows us to explore a distinction that undergirds them: that between land and sea. While
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Anthropology's good beyond the discipline American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Lara Deeb, Jessica Winegar
In July 2023, the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) members voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions until they end their complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law. The AAA's adoption of this resolution shows the potential good of anthropology, both within and beyond the academy. Anthropology's disciplinary scholarly processes, methods, and theoretical
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A queer footnote American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Benjamin Hegarty
Anthropological accounts of sexual and gendered difference often serve the role of footnotes that buttress and even expand the reach of Euro-American concepts. In contrast to this contained role for anthropology, queer footnotes can push the discipline toward more capacious and experimental engagements with powerful knowledge. In 2020, governments around the world introduced lockdowns and border-control
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Ethnography and ethical life American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Michael Lambek
This is a reflection on the relationship between ethnography (as practice and as product) and ethical life. I suggest that there are values internal to the practice of ethnography as fieldwork, as writing, and as reading, irrespective of the historically situated objects and values of ethnography external to it. I summarize my understanding of ethical life as it emerged from my ethnographic experience
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Four challenges from anthropology's current meta American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Alex Golub
An examination of American anthropology from 1974 to 2024 shows that the discipline faces novel challenges in today's “meta,” or media ecosystem: two challenges facing theory and two facing ethnography. To remain successful, anthropology must meet these challenges.
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Anthropology as spiritual discipline American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 T. M. Luhrmann
This essay invites us to understand ethnography not only as a science-like comparative enterprise but also as a spiritual discipline. This is because ethnography enables us to imagine other ways of living in the world. The fieldwork, the writing, and even the reading of ethnographies provide people with some external perspective on themselves. Ethnography thus allows people to develop a more a nuanced
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Anthropology is good American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Tim Ingold
Anthropology does not just study people; it studies with people, drawing them into a conversation, of concern to everyone, about how to live. But this means turning the academic model of knowledge production outside in. As a way of knowing from the inside, through participant observation, anthropological study exposes its practitioners to other ways of being with the aim to learn from them, not to
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Patchwork ethnography American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Gökçe Günel, Chika Watanabe
Many ethnographers feel the pressure to suspend familial and professional ties to separate “the field” from “home” for prolonged periods. Since 2019, we have been developing the concept of “patchwork ethnography” to spotlight how ethnographers conduct fieldwork amid intersecting personal and professional responsibilities. We interrogate how researchers’ personal lives impact the process of knowledge
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Anthropology's comparative value(s) American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Rena Lederman
Anthropologists often have to justify their research to ethics and funding committees composed mostly of mainstream social-behavioral scientists. In making their case, anthropologists face a dilemma in representing their discipline's distinctive research practices. For many anthropologists, the value of ethnographic work derives from its global comparativism and socially embedded realism; for students
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Toward anthropologies of the metaverse American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Tom Boellstorff
Anthropology is good for understanding the metaverse, the emerging domain of digital culture that includes virtual worlds, online games, and social media. In the wake of COVID, there has been heightened interest in the metaverse's potential, particularly after Facebook renamed itself Meta in October 2021. Yet current understandings of the metaverse are deeply muddled, warped by rhetorics of promotion
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A possible perfection American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Simon Theobald
Among my interlocutors in Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city, were individuals who repeatedly claimed that some persons, philosophies, and ethical lives not only might be but actually were perfect (kāmel). The salavāt, a polyvalent blessing upon the Prophet and his descendants, evinces this. By evoking a unified, authoritative, egalitarian moment, reoriented in praise of perfect religious exemplars
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Fuzzy borders American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Natasha Raheja
In the western Indian city of Jodhpur, computer typists provide migration brokerage services to Pakistani Hindu refugee-migrants and Indian immigration officers. Such encounters and their interpretations contrast with the Indian state's emphasis on governmental proximity and immediate state-subject relations. Though computer typists—who I am calling brokers—are essential mediators, their acts of mediation
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Cultural loss and compensation in the anthropology of Aboriginal Australia American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Richard Martin
Cultural loss has been neglected in the study of Aboriginal Australia. This neglect reflects the impact of changes in Australian society involving the recognition and celebration of Indigenous culture. Yet new jurisprudence relating to compensation under Australian land rights legislation has refocused attention on cultural loss. This article draws on ethnography from North West Queensland's Gulf Country
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Performing control American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Timothy Neale
During an unprecedented crisis of bushfires, the staff of emergency management control centers in southeast Australia pause to perform rites with their political leaders. They reenact decisions that have already been made and generate divinations of fiery futures that are unlikely to occur. Their work, like that of others in large centralized technical infrastructures, is made possible by ritualized
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The confessional community American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Angela Garcia
In the past two decades, drug-treatment centers called anexos (annexes) have proliferated throughout Mexico. Run and attended by the working poor, anexos’ therapeutic practices blend criminal violence and religious ritual, and they are widely condemned as abusive and unethical. Based on several years of ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article situates anexos within a larger historical frame
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Rubbish sick and the dancing devil American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 John P. Taylor
How are the historically fraught contexts of alterity that define postcolonial settings generated and negotiated in the context of medical uncertainty? What role does narrative play in the lived experience of such uncertainty and alterity? Focusing on a single “diagnostic odyssey” of childhood illness, this article examines the relationship between chronic uncertainty, alterity, and narrative sensemaking
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Private health care, cancer, and the vulnerable middle class in Kenya American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-09-24 Ruth J. Prince
A novel terrain of health care is emerging in Kenya at the intersection of a cancer epidemic, expanding medical and health insurance markets, the continued evisceration of public health care, and a middle class that can raise funds from credit, loans, and social networks. As middle-class cancer patients and their families navigate these landscapes, they find themselves vulnerable both to the “ordinary
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More-than-“bird” American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Ariel Appel, Nurit Bird-David
Bird language is an emerging practice among nature-connection enthusiasts in which practitioners strive to comprehend the signals emitted by birds and other nonhuman beings. This practice shares much with contemporary academic interests in more-than-human sociality and foregrounds relational ways of knowing. Beyond merely classifying birds as communicative and social beings, the practice of bird language
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A ritual of indistinction American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Sayantan Saha Roy
The state of exception is classically understood as a situation devoid of laws and marked by the sovereign's absolute powers. This picture is unsettled by offering a more tenuous account of the state of siege, showing that normal laws and processes can be a constitutive dimension of modern exceptional regimes. Through an ethnography of a permanent space of exception in India, I argue that emergency
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Inside a jaguar's jaws American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Daniel Ruiz-Serna
Inspired by the case of a jaguar raised as a pet by some paramilitary warlords, this article discusses how armed conflict encompasses more-than-human realities, becoming a hybrid experience capable of dislocating the borders between environmental and social processes, predation and warfare, human and nonhuman agency, and subjects and objects. It draws attention to a pervasive form of damage—afterlives—that
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Realms unseen American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Jane L. Saffitz
Since 2006, albinism has emerged as both a subject and an object of contestation in Tanzania and beyond. An abiding global narrative purports that, as a recessively inherited condition, albinism is fetishized by Africans who falsely attribute otherworldly potentials to albino body parts and commodify them in a grisly market run by “traditional” healers and their patrons. In response, translocal albinism
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Cultivating a trauma-informed pedagogy American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Catherine Trundle, Tarapuhi Vaeau
Māori students in Aotearoa New Zealand have recently challenged anthropology to better support them to thrive on their own Indigenous terms. This commentary responds to their call and critically reflects on one fruitful avenue for deepening decolonizing work, namely engaging with historical trauma and trauma-informed frameworks. Such frameworks address the legacies of colonial violence and the present
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Decolonizing Middle East anthropology American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-07-21 Amahl Bishara
In the anthropology of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), there is an effort underway to decolonize the field. This process is taking shape in academic writing, in academic institutions, in field practices, and among broader publics. It must arise from priorities in the region; it also builds on wider scholarship on race, indigeneity, and militarism. It requires an expansion of the bounds of
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Consultation is the new C-word American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Gretchen Stolte
The neoliberal turn has had significant impacts across Australian universities and First Nations communities, especially since the emergence of the global pandemic. These developments have highlighted the inherent flaws of the consultation process in developing programs and policies. Here, the weaknesses of the consultation process are analyzed using an anti-politics framework together with two comparative
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Decolonizing anthropology American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 A. Lynn Bolles
Thirty-two years after the publication of Faye V. Harrison's edited volume, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology of Liberation, I take stock of the book's origins and its impact on the discipline. Despite intellectual barriers and postmodernist critiques, Decolonizing Anthropology has influenced a generation of anthropologists who carry forward the book's original spirit
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Polygons American Ethnologist (IF 1.906) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Eduardo Romero Dianderas
Anthropologists have extensively examined the material politics of bureaucratic rule and technical expertise. But ethnographic analysis must also attend to the politics of mathematical abstractions that cannot be reduced to any specific kind of materiality. A key site to appreciate such politics is the georeferentiation of Indigenous property polygons in Peru's Amazonian region of Loreto. In the context