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This article critically assesses the impact of political and moral positions within contemporary anthropology. Re‐examining ideas of advocacy and the ethical within the discipline, it argues for an alternative political anthropology that focuses on perpetration rather than victimhood, offenders rather than the offended. If anthropology wants to be a discipline that works against social wrongs and suffering, then understanding the positions and perspectives of those causing them is, we contend, a necessary point of departure. Yet how can we approach people ethnographically who transgress bodily, legal, and moral boundaries, and why is this not more commonly done? In answering these questions, we analyse mainstream disciplinary ethics, both current and historical, and highlight some of the reactions that the study of perpetrators evoke in anthropologists. This illuminates an inconsistency within political anthropology. While there is ample theoretical and ethnographic nuance within the subdiscipline, this complexity seems to fade when we focus on perpetration. We suggest that anthropology engages more fully in the study of perpetration and approaches the issue by clarifying how (mis)dynamics are anchored within shared social worlds and historical becomings. This article thus calls upon us to expand our anthropological attention and curiosity beyond what might be morally comfortable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary—written to celebrate, but also evaluate, the relationship between anthropology and demography at the 50th anniversary of the journal—I focus on the insights gained and the challenges posed by applying anthropological theory and utilizing ethnographic methods in population studies. Population and Development Review has been the venue of choice for many anthropologists because it has consistently recognized and welcomed the contributions of ethnographic research. Further, the journal has provided a forum for critical engagement between anthropology and demography, publishing research findings that illustrate the benefits of this engagement as well as commentaries that acknowledge, examine, and assess the sometimes‐difficult relationship between the two disciplines. To showcase the possibilities anthropology offers for understanding puzzles central to demographic inquiry, I draw special attention to research and scholarship focused on Africa's fertility transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what follows, I outline the possibility of directly applying Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010) to the practice of ethnography. Based on 2 weeks of anthropological fieldwork on the remote Shetland Island of Foula, I attempt a translation of Perec's careful observations of an urban square in Paris in the 1970s into the context of an ethnography in this remote, rural location. After outlining the connections between Perec's book and my work as an anthropologist, I provide readers with my “raw” field notes so that they might then draw out their own analysis in the same way that I believe Perec intended his work to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue presents accounts of different aspects of the CommuniVax Coalition and its work—a project that conducted rapid, multisited, applied anthropological research to deliver guidance during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Our purpose in writing these articles is to provide details of our work so anthropologists interested in similar types of research can learn from our efforts. While anthropological research has been, and largely still is, an endeavor of individuals at a relatively slow pace, the future of the discipline, and especially of anthropologists working outside traditional academia, is team‐based, rapid research. As such, anthropologists need to know how to conduct research at speed, participate as members of research teams and, more importantly, how to organize and lead teams to conduct timely, collaborative, focused, and practical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists often talk about 'encounters,' but what do they actually mean? This term--'encounter'--shows up everywhere across ethnographic writing and practice, but is itself rarely defined or discussed. 'Ethnographies of encounters,' too, are increasingly common, but are rarely treated as a distinct type of ethnography. In this short essay, I recommend approaching the concept of encountering more consciously, but also defining it in a relatively basic and expansive way. Encounters across difference are open-ended: they can lead to collaboration, conflict, negotiation or an awkward disconnect, to name a few. Encounters are many-sided: much beyond a single studied group of people, beyond the ethnographer's home society, and more than human. Assuming that encounters are very open-ended and many-sided brings new methodological and ethical challenges. Yet, it helps expand our attention and care in fieldwork and analysis, while postponing our judgements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay takes the publication of the first English translation of Lydia Cabrera's magnum opus El Monte as an occasion to reflect on the perplexing nature of Cabrera's text, both at the time of its original publication and in its English translation now. Without doubt, Cabrera was one of the most prolific ethnographers of the African-derived ritual traditions of Cuba that she observed between the 1930s and 1950s. Not unlike American salvage ethnography, El Monte thrives on the trope of vanishing traditional authenticity; the result was and still is a thoroughly undisciplined hybrid text, a multivoiced modernist literary experiment more akin to Joyce's Finnegans Wake than Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. As such, El Monte has been a permanent source of frustration for anthropologists fighting an uphill battle against Cabrera's language and authorial strategies in aiming to extract ethnographic data from it. In contrast, the book has received rather more attention from literary scholars who, in often equally reductive fashion, have tended to focus on Cabrera's gender and sexual orientation. My argument is that Font-Navarrete's careful translation and annotation of El Monte —a reappropriation for twenty-first-century audiences of both scholars and practitioners—should give us reason to rethink our own ethnographic and authorial practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine 1354 survey responses from members of the American Anthropological Association about their practice and teaching of cultural anthropology research methods. Latent profile analysis and an examination of responses to open‐ended survey questions reveal distinctive methodological clustering among anthropologists. However, two historical approaches to ethnography remain prominent: deep hanging out and a mixed methods toolkit, with the former remaining central to the practice and teaching of all forms of contemporary cultural anthropology. Further, many anthropologists are committed to advancing research methods that account for power imbalances in fieldwork, such as through community‐based and participatory approaches. And a substantial number also teach a wider array of methods and techniques that open new career pathways for anthropologists. Overall, our study reveals a core set of ethnographic practices—loosely, participant‐observation, informal interviews, and the experiential immersion of the ethnographer—while also highlighting the great breadth of cultural anthropological research practice and pedagogy. The findings presented here can help inform how current and future anthropological practitioners and educators position themselves to meet the ever‐changing demands of community members, funders, clients, collaborators, and students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to apply critical scrutiny to post-socialist discourse, an ongoing series of debates concerning the relationship between sociocultural anthropology and ethnology in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). To achieve my goal, I single out Petr Skalník’s writings and subject them to twofold scrutiny. In the first part of my article, I offer factual criticism and point out the factual shortcomings of his work. The second part of the article puts the writings under sociological scrutiny, based on what I call a ‘political reading’, and proceeding from the sociology of science of Pierre Bourdieu. This perspective shows how scholars’ concrete utterances in their factual accounts are related to power struggles within the scholarly community. This approach demonstrates how Skalník’s concrete factual misrepresentations intrinsically relate to his objective of establishing sociocultural anthropology in post-socialist Czechia and the associated struggles between Czech anthropologists and ethnologists. The present analysis, by extension, allows us to better understand the post-socialist transformation of CEE academia and casts doubt on the veracity of post-socialist discourse itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If only implicitly, social anthropology has long incorporated joint attention as a research technique employed in what anthropologists call "the field". This paper outlines the crucial role joint attention plays in anthropolgical fieldwork—specifically in Participant Observation—and advances the position that joint attention is a goal rather than a starting point of fieldwork practice. Exploring how anthropologists tentatively use attention as a methodological tool to understand other people's lifeworlds, this paper draws parallels between Participant Observation and ordinary everyday interactions, thus teasing out a view of joint attention as a goal to be reached only by means of knowing what matters to others in the context of the lifeworld they inhabit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to delve into the "native turn" emerging in anthropology and broad academia in Asia and the Global South in the last two decades, represented by their growing momentum in decolonization, autonomy, and "indigenization." There, however, exists a tendency in anthropology, especially among non-Western and "mixed" anthropologists, to dismiss the idea of native(s) or native anthropologists and sometimes replace it with the amorphous notion of "halfies." I contend that many of the "halfies" scholars, informed by postcolonial and postmodern thoughts, tend to misread the de facto postcolonial conditions in which the West continues to dominate in the existing world-systems. I argue that it is vital to acknowledge the native turn as an ethnographical fact because this recognition is closely associated with the prospect of decolonizing anthropology and Western-dominated knowledge production. Next, I use my experience of the native turn(s) to Tibetan and Chinese sociocultural institutions and political sensibilities to better contextualize and exemplify the examined broad native turn in anthropology and social science in Asia. Furthermore, I propose a multifaceted view of natives or nativeness as a necessary step to engage more constructively with the idea of native(s) and the native turn. In so doing, I advocate a post-postcolonial critique to make a timely and necessary intellectual intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the complex question of evading the state or negotiating the everyday state from the perspective of the lived experiences of the highland people of Tripura, Northeast India. From dominant perspectives, the highland people are perceived as living in isolation or being inclined to want to keep the state at distance. Contrary to such perceptions, anthropologists now posit that people imagine and perceive the state differently, what they refer to as local manifestations of the state. Building on such literature, this paper unravels how highland people of Tripura perceive and negotiate the (everyday) state for their own advantage. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that despite knowing that the everyday state is frustrating, the highland people of Tripura nevertheless regard it as their resource and, as active citizens, create strategies in negotiating what best they can extract from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 endeavor, anthropology matters by engaging not just the finished product, when critique is so easily possible, but the process of development, as the work is yet underway. Such engagement is enabled by how people leverage their commitments, stances, and manner of being there along the way and over time. To better enable the impact of anthropology in this work, anthropologists would be well served by engaging more with these kinds of applied questions as a part of their training and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 kind of ethical engagement. Attending to malleability—and its limits—allows us to imagine and produce a more sensitive anthropology. A more sensitive anthropology would expand the discipline's understanding of who counts as an anthropologist and what counts as anthropological praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 in conversation with the people upon whose cultures anthropologists build our careers and capital. Engaging upfront with our interlocutors' divergent desires and demands in turn invites a practice of hesitant anthropology that productively avows—rather than disavows—the dilemmas of disclosure faced by the people whose stories we are entrusted with and become responsible for. Such a practice centers the realities of noninnocence and compromise that animate or preempt the ethnographic craft, including the diverse perspectives, obligations, and betrayals shaping the experience of being there and of (not) writing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work seeks to generate other ways of knowing and producing knowledge, based on Susan Finley's proposal of research (and education) based on the arts. A new tool that is part of the postmodernist turn, and that we will try to frame within the methodological approach of the ethnographic field. To do this, we are going to recall the foundations of this type of work and its genealogy. From the so-called "armchair anthropologists" who turned to the field, to the present day where the modality is oriented, within the qualitative approach, not only to understand exotic cultures, but also segregated or oppressed communities. Arts-based research, we understand, is part of these changes, as opposed to the apparent systematicity of the traditional research process of science and its methodology. Incorporating the strong visceral, emotional, corporal and passionate component that identifies the human, as well as artistic expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mitote festivals are the main ceremonies of the agricultural cycle among the current indigenous groups of the Sierra del Nayar: Coras, Huichols, Tepehuanes and Mexicaneros. These are carried out on stony hills outside the towns and some anthropologists consider them a pre-Hispanic remnant. The ethnographic analogy and especially the ethnoarchaeological record of a mitote cora patio allowed us to interpret certain archaeological sites in wild and difficultto-access areas with evidence of culinary practices but that were not permanently inhabited as ceremonial centers, that is, as patios of mitote and confirm that this type of ceremonies did begin in pre-Hispanic times, at least in the south of Sinaloa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Antropologia Americana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Razón Crítica is the property of La Fundacion Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Anthropologists have yet to fully consider how artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies may be put to work to develop novel ethnographic media that transcend the basic limitations of the traditional ethnographic text. This article describes an experiment in the development of an AI system based on ethnographic fieldwork focusing on a specific form of nonverbal interaction and human practitioners' evaluations of the system's 'humanness'. Among many other elements of humanness, this discussion highlights the many ways that human subjects locate humanness in an agent's ability to parse and respond to others in the midst of nonverbal social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online ethnography is often criticized for being less immersive than traditional ethnography. However, this article argues that the digital medium offers a distinctive way to connect researchers with their interlocutors. Online ethnography can help balance being intimate while respecting research participants by maintaining appropriate distance in anthropological fieldwork. The article presents a case study of bathrooms during the Covid‐19 pandemic. It shows that online ethnography, which only allows access to what is seen and heard on the screen, creates a more limited, transient, flexible and ambiguous relationship with the research participants. This unique form of relatedness makes them more open to sharing their stories, images and videos about their bodily practices in bathrooms. The article emphasizes the potential of digital research methods to reveal the details of embodied practices. It invites anthropologists to explore the different ways of relating to digital and physical spaces in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we critically evaluate the insertion of anthropologists in the field in two locations in central and northern Mozambique, focusing on the negotiation and production of ethnographic data in contexts of uncertainty. The anthropologists entered the field sites of Micaúne and Cóbuè via non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their existing development projects. During the fieldwork, the researchers developed a relationship of proximity with several participants who positioned the anthropologists as agents of change at the same level as NGO officials. We explore the partnership and negotiation between anthropologists and research participants, reflecting on the challenges of collaboration at a critical time when the economic development of Micaúne and Cóbuè was at stake. This enquiry goes beyond the political or ethical dimension of development to focus on the management of expectations for future change. Neste artigo, analisamos criticamente a inserção de antropólogos no campo em dois locais situados no centro e no norte de Moçambique, respectivamente, com foco na negociação e na produção de dados etnográficos em contextos de incerteza. A inserção dos antropólogos nas localidades de Chinde e Cóbuè se deu através de organizações não governamentais (ONGs) e seus projetos de desenvolvimento em implementação. Durante o trabalho de campo, os pesquisadores desenvolveram uma relação de proximidade com vários interlocutores que colocaram os antropólogos na posição de agentes de mudança no mesmo nível que os funcionários das ONGs. Neste trabalho, exploramos a parceria e a negociação entre antropólogos e seus interlocutores na investigação, refletindo sobre os desafios da colaboração num momento crítico, em que estava em risco o desenvolvimento econômico tanto de Chinde como de Cóbuè. Nossa reflexão vai para além da dimensão política ou ética do desenvolvimento, prestando atenção à gestão de expectativas em relação a futuras mudanças. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Iluminuras is the property of Revista Iluminuras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, two anthropologists explore what it means to “co-wonder” as an ethnographic and philosophical method, exemplifying what this might mean through an open-ended dialogue about a subject they hold in common—the study of death. As the “last wonder,” death brings home how the puzzle of our embodiment is both the source and the means for human speculation at its farthest limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of socioculturally important "keywords" remains a distinctive feature of critical social theory. This article asks why this is so while offering a critique of "keyword projects" as they have been formulated and pursued across cultural studies and anthropology. Such projects often remain inattentive to wider patterns of sign relations, concealing from ethnographic view the very patterns within which key "words" emerge and are embedded. Overlooking these patterns precludes finer‐grained considerations of what makes certain words situationally "key" within sociocultural life. Engaging with migrant mobilities across the borderlands and borderwaters of Indonesia and Malaysia, the article examines keywords not simply as sociocultural formations or semiotic regularities, per se, but as captions for and construals of fashions of speaking and forms of life. Connecting hitherto unconnected accounts of "rapport," it illustrates how anthropologists might move beyond "keyword talk" to more fully consider how rapport configures anthropological assumptions about "keyness" itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If forensic physical anthropology is the science of biological processes and related medico‐legal investigations, then forensic social anthropology is the science of cultural processes and related socio‐legal investigations. This article lays out the terms, definitions, and application of forensic specialization in social anthropology as it is practised in Australia. The objective of this exercise is to equip both physical and social anthropologists with a consilient model for the joint engagement of their parent discipline in legal proceedings where cultural processes are deemed relevant by a court or other legally empowered body. As demonstrated in Australia, the potential applications of forensic social anthropology range across a variety of matters involving both civil and criminal investigation. Such matters include systematic land expropriation, child removal, forced population movement, modern‐day slavery, unlawful detention, and other important social phenomena. The questionable legality of these kinds of phenomena is not isolated to Australia but is, rather, of international significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an account of ethnographic research examining the specialist scientific processes known as 'Disaster Victim Identification' (DVI) in three settings: Québec, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In cases of multiple deaths, a series of actions accompanied by a plethora of tools are often invoked, housed at a disaster scene, forensic laboratories, a family assistance centre, and a mortuary. In this article, I examine a process dedicated to connecting the biological remains of the deceased with a confirmed validation of personhood. I describe a situation where responders/scientists will attempt multiple testing and re‐testing of human remains, often pushing boundaries of available science. I argue that the search for certainty in identification lies at the heart of the activation of DVI processes, particularly when it is connected to DNA testing. Observing intimate forensic settings and the bricolage of the forensic anthropologist's labour has allowed me to track the production of the science of identity. I then reflect on the wider implications of these observations for affected communities and the responding scientists. Finally, I argue that there is complexity and ambivalence surrounding the increased use of technologies when applied to identification of victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists generally reject philosophical issue-based scenarios such as trolley problems, viewing them as thin and decontextualized in comparison to ethnographic engagement. This article argues, though, that philosophical scenarios and ethnography share a structural homology in that they are both attempts to articulate not only a range of solutions but also the nature of the underlying problem that generates them. It investigates the implications of this homology for anthropological analysis by comparing the Turing Test, here framed as a philosophical scenario, with how secular and religious American transhumanists discuss the possibility of sexual encounters with mechanical or computer-virtual entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Norms" seem like a handy concept in the anthropological toolkit for describing, analyzing, and understanding ethnographic data. But contemporary anthropology rarely investigates the concept of the norm itself. This article critically examines norms as analytical constructs and argues for a more precise vocabulary that differentiates between related terms, such as "normality," "normativity," or "normalization," that circulate loosely in anthropological discourse. To do so, it draws from Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler to show the affordances and pitfalls of their analytics for anthropologists. It particularly reveals the value of Canguilhemian understandings of normativity to keep us alive to the surprising queerness of norms in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia & Antropologia is the property of Sociologia & Antropologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call "bearing witness" and "denunciation/confession." In contrast to these models, we perform and theorize our own complicities by staying with the multiple social, relational, political, and epistemological entanglements that our fieldwork produces. Through a braided dialogue, we demonstrate the multiple responsibilities and relationalities that come with the positions we occupy as subjects, researchers, and narrators of empire. We define complicity as an active, transitive engagement with others as we are situated in multiple structures of power. Theorizing complicity helps us reveal what relations of knowledge and power we are responsible for making visible and how we can analytically respond to them. By pluralizing complicity, our aim is to stimulate much needed conversation on questions of anthropology's relation to tentacles of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 highlight the risk of deploying anthropology as a means to other ends, without subjecting those ends to the same theorization and scrutiny as one's topic or methods. While these authors demonstrate that there is significant value that the anthropological toolkit can provide, both in life and in business, there remains a fine line to be drawn between the instrumentalization of the discipline and the broader pursuit for knowledge and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing refinement of internet technology is compelling anthropologists to reconceptualize data acquisition within the digital realm. Conducting ethnography on sensitive topics that involve imagery necessitates the development of innovative anonymization and pseudo‐anonymization methods. This article focuses on two pivotal facets of digital space ethnography: (1) devising strategies to mitigate harm towards participant members of vulnerable communities and (2) ensuring adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) while preserving the privacy of incidental parties on social media platforms. This article demonstrates how artistic blurring is one anonymization technique that may be applied ethically in the digital ethnographic examination of sensitive issues in Norway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: A flash ethnography piece set at an Obon event in Hawai'i, "In Their Footsteps," shows the way the author deploys dance as a method. By asking the reader to follow her through a day of fieldwork at a Soto Buddhist temple, the piece demonstrates how the anthropologist learns about the culture by absorbing and matching the movements of her interlocutors, both when they are dancing and when they are not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 of climate change and biodiversity loss, both the Peruvian state and Indigenous communities have pinned their hopes on mathematically stabilizing Indigenous property polygons. But these hopes are haunted by the confusing accumulations of informal attempts to make sense of these territories over time. To appreciate these accumulations, the state engineer (ingeniero) can serve as a privileged prism. Thinking through polygons provides an opportunity to interrogate emerging forms of Indigenous territoriality in Amazonia, as well as the contentious politics of mathematical abstractions in contemporary global environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shipibo-Konibo indigenous nation, settled mainly on the banks of the Ucayali River, is one of the most numerous in the Peruvian Amazon. This article proposes, based on the cosmogony of the ancient Meraya sages (visionary doctors of the Shipibo nation), a philosophical reflection on the possible ecological and ethical contributions of Shipibo perspectivism. The text argues that the notion of perspective (as understood by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2013)) has an equivalence in the Shipibo concept of Nete, which is usually translated into English as world. The ancestral conception, according to which there are many interrelated worlds, proposes an ethical and ecological requirement for human beings in which no one ethical perspective can be imposed abusively over others. The present philosophical reflections are based on extensive fieldwork, with ethnographic rigour, and on a sustained interpretative study of the oral narratives of the Shipibo-Konibo people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles participates in the interdisciplinary debates over culture and form that emerge in the 1920s through the 1940s, as anthropologists and artists deploy new conceptions of culture as relative, plural systems of meaning—debates played out through ethnographies of Southwest Native American peoples, in desert landscapes such as Bradbury's Mars. With Martians in the role occupied by Native Americans in anthropological discourse, Bradbury's text engages the complex interplay between pluralist difference and universalist assimilation/antiessentialism central to early Cold War conceptions of (Native) American culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Malinowski, taking the natives seriously has been a core issue for ethnographers, as this principle encloses two terms nurturing much theoretical debate in sociocultural anthropology: 'native' and 'point of view'. Yet, this entails a parallel issue: aside from taking one's natives seriously, have anthropologists been taking other anthropologists' natives equally seriously? The discipline came to take for granted the legitimacy of Others constituted by discourses of race, sex, class, ethnicity and colonialism. However, anthropology seems to continuously marginalize groups – from children and speakers of 'invented' languages to UFO witnesses – whose practices are routinely mocked or dismissed as foolish. This article analyzes certain anthropologists and their ethnographies of unsanctioned interlocutors who were cast aside by scholarship. I argue that 'taking seriously' must be not only an experiment that builds rapport between individual anthropologists and natives, but also one that makes room for the natives' viewpoints to flow within the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on colonial studies experienced a qualitative leap in these three decades and contents of its majority of age and entry into maturity visualizing foundational schools, conceptual fields, categorical resignifications and thematic incorporations. It mentions categorical borrowings and shared disciplinary fields were notorious, as ethnographers, anthropologists and historians have been proposing since the 1960s.

Anthropology's 'mainstream' research methods mainly rely on the visual sense. In contrast to sighted anthropologists, who mostly rely on their vision to acquire and process data, as a blind anthropologist I have used unconventional methodological sensory research techniques. I mostly rely on my senses of hearing and listening, using auditory means to make sense of people and our environment. Some of these auditory means are eavesdropping, understanding people's emotions through the tone of their voices and understanding the 'acoustemology' of spaces. I am highly attuned to the tones of people's voices and to the ambience of the places I am in. During my fieldwork, I was able to capitalise on these senses and abilities as research techniques, but also consider their ethical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the history of the ethnonyms Temoq, Semelai, Semaq Beri and Jakun, which label Orang Asli groups in the south-central lowlands of Peninsular Malaysia. It combines ethnographic and historical accounts and census analysis to argue that each of these ethnonyms, in the twentieth century, became attached to the groups that now carry them by R.J. Wilkinson and other colonial administrator/anthropologists who were primarily concerned with finding traces of supposed primitive ancestors of modern humans, but who determined that language had to be used as a proxy toward that end. Clarifying the basis of that classification makes the system of ethnonyms that became official somewhat clearer. The article delves deepest into the genesis of 'Temoq', through an analysis of the ethnography of H.D. Collings and through the linguistics of the word. It argues that the Semelai word tmoʔ derives from the Malay word tembok [təmboʔ] , meaning 'tattered and dissolute in appearance', and has been used by the Semelai to achieve social distance from the Temoq, who the Semelai also call / smaʔ bri / 'forest people'. It further suggests that the people now known as Temoq may themselves have once been known as 'Semelai'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a comparative review of ethnographies performed and published as part of the Harvard Chiapas Project (1957-2000), on towns located in Los Altos de Chiapas, Mexico. Although the authors are participantsin the same project, it is possible to identify in their works different ways of making connections between past and present and, therefore, of projecting notions of History and Time. To show these differences, texts by three anthropologists who participated unevenly in the Harvard Chiapas Project (one of the longest-running research programs in the history of the discipline) are reviewed: Evon Vogt, Victoria Bricker and Robert Wasserstrom. The review does not cover the entire production of the project (with more than a hundred people involved). Nor is it aimed at the populations studied, nor at specific ethnographic objects such as the "cargo system" or the "carnival". What is pursued to show is the presence of different frames of Time and History within which ethnographies operate and, consequently, the ambiguousform of the resulting ethnographic objects. The text is the product of a broader investigation of the anthropology of anthropology, based on archival documents and published products of the Harvard Chiapas Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how an expanding Mexican state sought the insights of ethnographic theory and practice between the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the Instituto Nacional Indigenista Coordinating Center in los Altos de Chiapas and its relationship with national and foreign researchers active in the same area, I show how ideas about gender affected the organization of health services, the hiring of indigenous promotores, and the differential treatment of women and men traditional medicine healers as well as anthropology graduate students and researchers. The article is organized around two conceptually distinct though, in reality, overlapping spaces: (1) the anthropologist's fieldwork site and relations between informants, professors, and students and (2) the Mexican state's provision of health services. Even if gender was not an automatic category of exclusion or inclusion of the researcher into a local community, ethnographic insights were formed through fieldwork practices that were determined in part by gender difference and relations among researchers and their subjects. Ultimately, both anthropologists and the Mexican state indigenous agency grew to rely informally on gender as a category of expertise for gaining access to indigenous women in particular, even if the "gender intermediaries" who helped achieve this access were frequently unpaid and received little formal recognition or reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of one Iranian-Canadian woman's experiences navigating personal and global trauma, the authors seek to explore how the act of embroidery is ritualized to aid in the processing of tragedy and loss. Of particular interest is how this performance lies at an intersection of COVID, global injustice, diaspora experiences, and personal grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wrong Question? is the response by an anthropologist to a question posed by a philosopher concerning the intelligibility of alien forms of thought. I argue that it is wrong to describe the problem of intelligibility as one of logic or rationality. Indeed, foreign practices (no less than our own) may become intelligible only once they are not evaluated according to abstract criteria of rationality. To ask of a given practice or form of life whether it is rational is an error of grammar (nonsense) in Wittgenstein's sense. I describe how intelligibility emerges over the course of ethnographic fieldwork but also argue that we must work on our own concepts in order to make foreign ones intelligible. The response draws from both Gadamer and Wittgenstein as well as anthropologists Geertz, Evans-Pritchard, and Lévi-Strauss. Following Cora Diamond, I suggest further that the ethical and rational dimensions of understanding another are indissociable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Iluminuras is the property of Revista Iluminuras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iluminuras is the property of Revista Iluminuras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

From 1912, British anthropologist W. Baldwin Spencer and buffalo-shooter Paddy Cahill collected 163 bark paintings made by artists who also painted in rock shelters in western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Spencer made detailed notes about the bark paintings, secret/sacred objects, and other material culture he collected and some rock art, as well as genealogies and other details of the Aboriginal people he encountered but did not record the names of the artists. In general, the names and life stories of the individuals who made most Aboriginal archaeological artefacts or ethnographic objects and paintings now in museums across the world are not known. We have recently begun to address this for western Arnhem Land contact period art and in this paper focus on an elder, Majumbu ('Old Harry'), who made numerous rock paintings as well as at least eight of the Spencer-Cahill bark paintings. We use his work to begin a new interpretation of the importance of the Spencer-Cahill Collection in relation to land-based religion and show that knowing the names of the artists behind the collection, as well as related rock paintings, puts their work and the entire collection in new meaningful contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effectiveness of ritual is a major anthropological question. In this paper, I challenge some of the explanations anthropologists have provided to such a question and I attempt to formulate an original theorization of ritual as metaphor. The proposed hypothesis is grounded in two inspiring concepts: Ernesto De Martino's idea of "dehistorification" as the main technique of the ritual and Bruce Kapferer's "virtuality" as its proper dynamic dimension. Drawing on these theoretical foundations and a direct ethnographic experience and conceiving of ritual as a practice rather than as a symbol, I propose to regard it as a particular practice of metaphorization that is not representative of reality but effective on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the standing of three important and widely accepted criticisms of the use of the concept of belief within the anthropology of religion. It does so by examining whether these criticisms track the historical use of the concept within the discipline, that is, whether the problematic implications that they associate with the concept can reasonably be inferred from the historical use of the words 'believe' and 'belief' by anthropologists. It argues that the criticisms do not meet this standard, and that we therefore have reason to think that they are pseudo-problems, which have no legitimate claim on our attention. It concludes by suggesting some reasons why these apparently arbitrary concerns about the concept of belief should have arisen, looking first at some discussions of the meaning of the terms 'believe' and 'belief,' and second at the reception of Rodney Needham's 1972 monograph Belief, Language, and Experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outcome is a rich ethnography of fraught Mozambican-Chinese and Mongolian-Chinese encounters, in which, perhaps unexpectedly, the three anthropologists are inextricably present. What can an unsuccessful collaboration between three "middle-aged, male, white, heterosexual anthropologists from Denmark" (p. 231) teach us about Chinese globalization in Mongolia and Mozambique? I Collaborative Damage i is not the first book-length collaborative ethnography of Chinese globalization. [Extracted from the article]