Anthropology as Vocation: Positionality, Disposition, and the Interstitial to Understand and Change the World

The article is devoted the problem of human solved under the conditions of education. Demonstrated ways of implementation activities: «Human health», «Human and inner world», «Human and outer world». Examples of schools in the city of St. Petersburg, Leningrad and Pskov regions show the «points of growth» anthropological practice. The formation of health-saving way of school life; the disclosure of the value of health meanings of education; developing individual-oriented systems and programs; support for children's giftedness; the establishment of children's organizations, giving the opportunity to find friends, to demonstrate their abilities in socially significant activities. The problem of human all more than fills the field of educational research that speaks about the rise of the anthropological trends in modern education. At the same time, the building of human in education is constrained by factors: the growing ideological vacuum, the formation of a utilitarian approach to the person, destruction of the purity of childhood. Necessary methodological basis for the emerging anthropological practice. The main role should play the teacher, conscious of his high mission of formation of human potential.

In the modern school the search for ways to update the organization of the pedagogical process is carried out. The task of understanding the orientation of the goals of education is set. Anthropological practice is being formed that identifies a person as the basic value of education. The article offers a technological solution to the organization of educational practice in modern school, reflecting the leading ideas of pedagogical anthropology about a person as a subject of education.

Anthropology, the study of human culture through fieldwork, has long had a special relationship with American Legal Realism. In almost any way we conceive of realism, the discipline of anthropology contributes valuable insight because, most generally, it maintains a close correspondence between abstract thought and observable practice. In this brief essay, I describe the key ideas of American, Anglo and European sociocultural anthropology with a particular focus upon studies of law and legality. I then turn to the main practice of anthropology, ethnography, in order to explore how disciplinary ideas have been developed and reconsidered operationally through systematic “encounters” with legal actors. I conclude the chapter by revisiting the debates in American Legal Realism, both classic and new, to argue that Anthropology remains an indispensible framework and method for understanding “law in action” today.

Background. The article researches etiquette as a phenomenon of the Western culture in normative and anthropological dimensions, basing on the ideas of practical anthropology (empirical ethics) by Immanuel Kant and sociogenetic studies by Norbert Elias. Methods. General scientific methods of analysis and synthesis are used to define the normative and anthropological grounds of etiquette in the concepts of the mentioned thinkers. The specificity of the study presupposes the interdisciplinarity in involving philosophical (ethical) and cultural approaches in understanding the specified issues. Results. Kant's conceptualization of the regulation of proper conduct is carried out within empirical ethics. He defined real rules of conduct that a person has to follow in morally meaningful life. He precisely focused on good manners, which possess individual and social value despite the fact that they are often only "decent illusions" that camouflage passions and indecencies. Elias, in his reflections on good manners, was focused on defining the quality of their transformations in the course of cultural and historical progress. Based on Elias's concept of "conditioning" as the adaptation of individuals to standard modes of behavior, the author of the article demonstrates from which irrational sources good manners are born, how they are disseminated and implemented. Conclusions. Gallant manners acquired ritualized forms at the absolutist court, breaking away from their material grounds. The transformation of external constraint in following good manners into self-constraint became possible in the development of civilization and the weakening of external threats. The initial copying of gallant manners by representatives of the bourgeoisie and their subsequent widespreading in the Western European public space led to the democratization of this phenomenon. Such logic is characteristic of civilizational progress and does not work in conditions of reduction of the social state to the natural one in emergency situations.

From Incentive to Stewardship: The Shifting Discourse of Academic Publishing

This study investigates the perceptions of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as ChatGPT, among students and academics at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) within the context of higher education in Oman. Using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), it explores five key dimensions: actual use (AU), ease of use (EU), perceived usefulness (PU), perceived challenges (PC), and intention to use (IU). Data collected from 555 students and 168 academics provide valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges associated with the adoption of GenAI tools, based on the results of a t-test. The findings reveal notable differences between students and academics regarding their perceptions of GenAI tools across all TAM variables. Students report frequent use of GenAI for academic support, including personalized learning, brainstorming, and completing assignments, while academics highlight its role in developing learning materials, assessments, lesson plans, and customizing learning content. Both groups recognize its potential to enhance efficiency and innovation in academic practices. However, concerns arise regarding over-reliance on GenAI, diminished critical thinking and creativity, and academic integrity risks. Academics consistently express greater concerns about these challenges than students, particularly regarding plagiarism, academic misconduct, and the potential for over-reliance on GenAI. Despite these challenges, the majority of students and academics indicate a willingness to continue using GenAI tools. This contrast underscores the need for tailored interventions to address the distinct concerns of students and academics. These findings highlight the need for regulatory frameworks, comprehensive institutional guidelines, and targeted training programs to ensure the ethical and responsible use of GenAI technologies. By addressing these critical areas, higher education institutions in Oman can leverage the potential of GenAI while safeguarding academic integrity and fostering essential skills such as critical thinking and creativity.

More Life After Ruins:Autotheory, the Politics of Citation, and the Limits of The Scholarly Gaze Leila C. Nadir (bio) A reflection on my autotheoretical essay, "Life After Ruins: Ruderal Ecologies, Afghan Diaspora, and Another Anthropocene," published in ASAP/J on September 27, 2019. "A name makes reading too easy." A famous philosopher, who wanted to remain anonymous, said this in a now-famous interview. He withheld his name "out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard." He dreamed of a year of "anonymous books," published with no authors' names attached, but he knew this would do no good: critics don't truly want to read, he said, so they would ignore this year of difficult books. Traditional academic scholarship and many forms of autotheory traffic in names. My introduction here is more powerful, more authoritative, more readable, more useful, because I might reveal a famous name. If you know the name I'm talking about, I've just established my theory bona fides. If you don't know, pay attention and you may accumulate a smidgeon of capitalizable gains in the pillaging competition that has become neoliberal academia. Autotheory simultaneously participates in, and disrupts, this hackneyed holy practice. And that is what excites me, and concerns me, about the turn toward autotheory. Autotheory has been an evolution of selfdiscovery for me, a recognition that my experiences as an Afghan-American from an immigrant Muslim family matter, that my own life is in dialogue with the most lauded names and ideas of our time. It's been a way for me to find my way back into academic practices that have alienated me, after I retreated from traditional scholarship to become an artist and creative writer. It has been a redemption of some kind—a way to speak back to the academic managers, editors, and administrators bestowed with the power to monitor the boundaries of what counts as scholarship, the academic employees that, [End Page 547] through the subtleties of institutional protocols and policies, work (often unknowingly) to exclude and invisibilize racialized Others who cannot conform to so-called detached, professional objectivity without erasing our bodies and experiences and ways of inhabiting the world. Now, if I cite enough famous names, perhaps I can be published and heard. Perhaps. And this is what concerns me about autotheory. When I read works like Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother or Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, or when I pen my own personal essays injected with critical theory, I'm hopeful that we are producing an antidote to the parochial understandings of intellectual work passed off as R1 rigor. But I wonder, in this merger of the personal and the critical, the aesthetic and the philosophical, would we be taken as seriously without the citation of authoritative names? What if Nelson left out the theorists in the page margins of Argonauts? Or if Hartman deleted the endnotes that anchor her memoir in critical theory? (I do love how Nelson and Hartman relegate the authorities to the periphery.) What if my essay "Life After Ruins," published on ASAP/J, hadn't mentioned James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donna Haraway, Henry Thoreau, and Sun Ra? Would the story of my embodied experiences of living in the post-Cold War Afghan diaspora, and how they relate to my environmental art practices, be as digestible or useful? Would I truly be read? What if I hadn't articulated my ideas in relation to the concept suddenly invigorating the Environmental Humanities, the one and only Anthropocene, or the emergent discourse on Ruderal Ecologies, introduced by Bettina Stoetzer into Anthropology? "Life After Ruins" was an explanation of my creative artworks, which so many critics hadn't taken the time to read until I pulled in the names. Like the famous masked philosopher said, readers don't read until they see road signs announcing that these pages have referenceable merit, that they are collecting fractionated shares of academic capital. Would we, as autotheorists, be taken as seriously without trading in the stock market of names? Yet I also feel that what we are doing is a reclamation: hacking academic...

Portfolios are an assessment tool that help frame expectations of personal professional learning about teaching in higher education, a key dimension of academic practice. In this paper, we review our experiences in both supporting academic colleagues to develop a teaching portfolio, and in their assessment. We argue that the authenticity of the account offered is key: participants should aspire to render an authentic account of themselves, their context, actions and their professional stance. Likewise, assessors need to verify that an account is authentic. We posit five signifiers of authenticity: biographical/professional context; practice development and experience of practice; integration of core concepts and key ideas from the literature, especially evaluation and conceptions of teaching; purpose and values in continuing professional learning (CPL); coherence of writing, vocabulary used, writing style, etc. These are intended to help course leaders and conveners of CPL activities to articulate what it is that is being sought from participants, and hence clarify expectations for both participants doing the learning and for disciplinary colleagues assisting with the assessment.

The gap between research and design practice has long been a concern for the HCI community. In this article, we explore how different translations of HCI knowledge might bridge this gap. A literature review characterizes the gap as having two key dimensions—one between general theory and particular artefacts and a second between academic HCI research and professional UX design practice. We report on a 5-year engagement between HCI researchers and a major media company to explore how a particular piece of HCI research, the trajectories conceptual framework , might be translated for and with UX practitioners. We present various translations of this framework and fit them into the gap we previously identified. This leads us to refine the idea of translations , suggesting that they may be led by researchers, by practitioners or co-produced by both as boundary objects . We consider the benefits of each approach.

The topic of customer orientation has increasingly attracted interest in both academic marketing research and practice. One factor which has been increasingly discussed as an important driver of a sales person's customer orientation is that of leadership style. If a sales person's supervisor expresses a strong customer orientation this should have a strong impact on the behavior of his or her subordinates. However, this aspect has not received much research attention. In this study, we propose a theoretical framework of leadership style which identifies three key dimensions: initiation of structure, consideration, and initiation of customer orientation. Hypotheses which relate these dimensions to customer oriented attitudes and behaviors are then developed and empirically examined. Results support the presence of three dimensions of customer oriented leadership style. Findings also indicate differential effects of the three dimensions on customer oriented attitudes. The academic and managerial implications of these findings are then discussed.

First I was an urban anthropologist, then I was a medical anthropologist on the faculty of a university medical center. Then I went to medical school, completing undergraduate, graduate and fellowship training in internal medicine and geriatrics. At first I thought of myself as an anthropologist in medical school, a privileged participant-observer of the making of doctors in the United States. Ten years out of medical training I think of myself as a physician. I am responsible for the outpatient and inpatient care of elderly patients. I am also the medical director of a nursing home. I am teaching faculty for medical students and medical residents at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago where I give both lecture and bedside instruction in the finer points of geriatric differential diagnosis and medical management. Occasionally I volunteer for teaching duties in ethics and humanities. Yet my funded research is more recognizably applied anthropology. With funding from the Illinois Department of Public Health and from the United States Army Breast Cancer Research Fund, I direct a research and intervention project to increase use of early cancer detection among older immigrant women in Chicago. In this article I will describe the research, but my principal focus will be on the role of anthropology in my practice as an academic geriatrician.

Trajectories of knowledge and desire: Multilingual women scholars researching and writing in academia

Reply to Dr. Yu Yihsoong Stephen C. Angle (bio) I am grateful to Dr. Yu Yihsoong for having engaged so deeply with my book Sagehood and its view of Coherence (or li 理), and to the editor for giving me this opportunity to reply. I am also pleased that Dr. Yu is not hung up on the translation of li as “Coherence”—indeed, he says he likes the translation—but rather argues with the details of what I say about li itself. As I read him, Dr. Yu’s critique of my book has three main aspects. First, he sees that I defend a virtue-ethical rather than a rule-ethical reading of Neo-Confucianism, and based on his sense of what virtue ethics is and requires, this leads Dr. Yu to conclude that I am forced into certain errors of interpretation. Second, Dr. Yu believes that while my views are problematic as interpretations of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, they resonate much more closely with the ideas of Wang Chuanshan, whom Dr. Yu himself endorses as a superior philosopher. Dr. Yu therefore regrets that I did not develop my account in closer conversation with Wang Chuanshan. Third, Dr. Yu argues that I downplay the ontological (for Zhu Xi) and immanent (for Wang Yangming) aspects of li. In this brief reply, I will focus primarily on the first and third of these points. Dr. Yu is surely correct that I would benefit from a more detailed engagement with Wang Chuanshan and that we should all pay careful attention to the recent work that has been done in this vein, most especially in JeeLoo Liu’s excellent Neo-Confucianism: Metaphysics, Mind, and Morality.1 Still, a dialogue with Wang Chuanshan that is both charitable and yet critical would require more space than I have room for here, and I believe that it is possible to clear up some potential confusions about my views without taking that further step at this time. In brief, then, I will argue that the particularist emphasis in my account of Neo-Confucian virtue ethics does not depend on a bifurcation of intellectual and moral virtues, and that once we have a clearer understanding of what I mean by “agent-based” virtue ethics, several other misunderstandings of my views on Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming can be resolved as well. Before turning to these two arguments, it might be useful to call attention to one of the major methodological differences between Dr. Yu’s approach and mine. He relies on the idea that Neo-Confucianism can be usefully divided into three distinct schools—the “School of Principle,” the “School of Mind,” and the school of “Qi-based Ontology”—and that the differences among these schools are sharp. A premise of my work, both in Sagehood [End Page 260] and in the book I have more recently co-authored with Justin Tiwald, is that the major Neo-Confucians do not divide neatly into such schools and that focusing on these divisions often obscures more than it reveals.2 We are better off attending to differences and similarities in piecemeal fashion and noticing different patterns of emphasis (Justin and I write of different areas of “focus”) as they emerge from our interpretive work. I will suggest some ways in which this approach—which, admittedly, runs against the mainstream of modern intellectual historical work on Neo-Confucianism—might make differences to the outcome of our interpretations as I proceed. Dr. Yu’s understanding of what I intend by “virtue ethics” has two key dimensions. On the one hand, he sees that I believe that the Neo-Confucians stress the “virtues of responding well to one’s circumstances” instead of what he calls the “the virtues of following moral doctrines.” While I am surprised that he finds it obvious that “traditional Confucian ethics” stresses the latter, Dr. Yu is correct that I do not think that Neo-Confucians endorse a rule-based (or moral-doctrine-based) understanding of ethics. In their different ways, neither Zhu Xi nor Wang Yangming believes that our ultimate guide is one or more state-able rules or “principles” that we can follow. It is true that Wang...

This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions about what value means for anthropological practice by considering how anthropologists engage with their field sites and projects via critique and collaboration.

A antropologia do Mediterrâneo mostra-se um campo fecundo para a discussão do exercício antropológico em geral, pela forma particularmente instigante em que neste campo se confundem objeto e sujeito de um discurso acadêmico. Em Anthropology Through the Looking Glass, Michael Herzfeld salienta aspectos, sobretudo políticos, embutidos em construções conceptuais mediterranistas e antropológicas como um todo. Inspirada em seu trabalho, a autora propõe distinguir alguns pressupostos que parecem orientar nossas práticas, acadêmicas e quotidianas, a partir de certos elementos recorrentes em análises centradas nos temas "mediterrânicos" por excelência da honra e da patronagem. Recorre aos trabalhos reunidos em Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies e Honor and Shame, referências fundamentais da antropologia do Mediterrâneo, no intuito de reiterar riscos envolvidos nas construções simplificadoras de princípios culturais, com poder explicativo questionável, bem como de enfatizar a importância da pluralidade de elementos locais destacados e de perspectivas adotadas, fatores que podem dificultar simplificações e promover o enriquecimento das concepções que produzimos acerca dos outros e de nós mesmos.