Readings In Anthropology Research Articles

Expanders of the Realm

Abstract The Bīsutūn inscription carries an Old Persian coda dedicated to Darius’ expedition against the Sakā (DBp col. V § 74). The campaign’s geography and the identity of the defeated have been often discussed. Instead, the reasons behind both the campaign and its prominence in the inscription have been neglected. This article contextualizes the episode within its Ancient Near Eastern framework of imperial discourse on universal rulership and the limits thereof. Then, it provides an anthropological reading of the inscription through the prism of sacred (divine) kingship, seeking to account for the paramount importance of Central Asian (border)lands within the mental maps—even the cosmology—of the dawning Empire. This approach puts front stage the proactive role of local élites in negotiating their own position(ality) under, and sometimes—even simultaneously—against, Persian power.

Institutional psychotherapy put to the test by the health crisis. Clinical reflection at the heart of a public psychiatric service

ObjectivePatients suffering from complex psychiatric pathologies require multi-disciplinary care and, in the event of decompensation, may need to be hospitalized. Institutional psychotherapy approaches psychotic, existential and institutional crises as opportunities for clinical elaboration and the deployment of creativity. The health crisis linked to the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted us to rethink its effectiveness and its place within plural contemporary practices. It also offered the opportunity for an unprecedented anthropological reading. In this context, is institutional psychotherapy still a machine for producing “innovation”, for creating, or at least revealing, crises in order to overcome them? MethodKey concepts from the field of institutional psychotherapy can be reexamined in the wake of the health crisis. In the aftermath of the pandemic, we propose an elaboration of what the pandemic has taught us about day-to-day practice, in a public psychiatric department oriented towards institutional psychotherapy. We will draw on a re-reading of clinical vignettes, interviews with caregivers and patients, and notes taken at department meetings during the pandemic. ResultsThe major concepts of institutional psychotherapy may have some limitations, but they can be reinvented by the caregiver-client collective. During a crisis, collective failings and individual symptoms seem to reveal each other. The therapeutic club represents a stage on which to unfold and elaborate both group and individual issues. DiscussionIn this context, the symbolic framework, collectively instituted, and the culture of a service can present operative points of support for continuing care. They “put in crisis” the prejudices and implicit theories of the actors, and support new narratives and new ways of making sense. ConclusionIn the aftermath of a crisis, the therapeutic club remains a space of conflict and intrigue, at the crossroads of collective and individual health crises.

Journey Discourse and the Process of Knowledge an Anthropological Reading of the Book of Alnakheel Wa Alqirmeed, by Youssef Al-Muhaimeed

Journey Discourse and the Process of Knowledge an Anthropological Reading of the Book of Alnakheel Wa Alqirmeed, by Youssef Al-Muhaimeed

Byung-Chul Han and the anthropology of power: reflexive contributions

This essay engages in a discussion on concepts of power, contrasting the works of the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han with discussions on the subject within the scope of anthropology. Within the limits of this essay, the text provides a minimal review of anthropological traditions of studies on power, followed by a presentation of themes that are exposed in Han’s work, especially related to how the author conceptualizes power. While the philosopher proposes the pursuit of a mobile concept, whose appearance could be modified depending on the movement of its constituent aspects; in anthropology, studies on power are centrally linked to the development of ethnography and the study of precise empirical contexts, with no unequivocal concept of power ever being constituted. Despite seemingly irreconcilable differences, this essay suggests that Han’s work can be incorporated into anthropological readings by the possibility of revising the places attributed to power in our research and by its potential contribution to studies dedicated to issues associated with contemporary anthropologies and critical events situated in these times.

A Tapestry of Black Anthropology of Freedom: Insights from James H. Cone and Frantz Fanon

ABSTRACTAbstract: What is freedom without the ability to wonder and imagine new ways of being in the world? This question is at the heart of the works and contributions of Frantz Fanon and James H. Cone in their responses to the colonialities operating in the Black world, and the appropriate response to such colonialities through the medium of strategic alliances and a theological imagination of what it means to be human that is oriented towards blackness itself. However, since blackness is a production of white gaze, it is intended to embody pathologies of dehumanisation. Fanon and Cone do not shy away from shedding light on these pathologies. However, rather than slipping into the realm of nihilism, a pneumatological turn is articulated that allows for blackness to be a medium of encountering the gift of authentic humanity that is in solidarity with God's epiphany of life in the world. Fanon's and Cone's centring of rebellion as the pathway for an embrace of an anthropology of freedom is retrieved as a way of understanding the link between hope and a rich reading of anthropology of freedom that blackness evokes.

Сравнительное изучение антропологических аспектов греческой вазописи и этрусской живописи

Introduction. The fine arts of archaic Greece and Etruria experienced a noticeable influence of the East. The transition from archaic to classical time influenced the forms of depicting the morphological features of a person in antique art. Comparative study of the anthropological features of the antique population of the Mediterranean on the greek painted pottery and etruscan murals of the archaic and classical times was the purpose of our study. Materials and methods. The material was collected in the online-collections of ancient collections of museums. We used the method of a composite portrait in a digital version, the calculation of the frequency of features in our study. Studied features was – beard growth, hair color and nature of the hair. Results and discussion. On the etruscan murals of the archaic period, the frequency of depicting straight nature of the hair in women is the highest (7,7 %) in all samples; for different groups of painted pottery, it does not exceed 7 %. The degree of beard growth according to vase painting and etruscan murals is characterized by a strong and very strong growth. A greater manifestation of hair pigmentation polymorphism according to painted pottery is noted in the images of the classical period. Dark hair predominates in all groups, grey-haired was depicted only in male characters. Hair depigmentation on painted pottery is observed in images of the classical and late classical periods and did not exceed 6 % in the total sample. Pigmentation on etruscan murals indicates a lightening of the hair in the group towards reddish-red shades, depigmentation does not exceed 8%. Features of the depiction of pigmentation in to vase painting and murals, despite the different technique and coloring, reveal common tendencies of variability characteristic of the Mediterranean groups. Composite portraits based on painted pottery reflect the historical transformation of the anthropo-aesthetic ideas of the greeks through the fine arts of the archaic and classical times. Conclusion. Color in greek painted pottery performs not only a decorative function, but is also an artistic means of conveying morphological variability. Involvement of antique written sources of the description of population and the philosophy of color in antique culture can help in the anthropological reading of vase painting and further study of pigmentation polymorphism. @ 2023. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license

Autobiography as Self-Ethnography in Italo Calvino’s ‘La poubelle agréée’

ABSTRACT The relevance of Calvino’s anthropological readings, often overlooked by scholars, is particularly evident in his autobiographical project Passaggi obbligati. The structure of the book, consisting of a selection of crucial turning points in the author’s life, is modelled on the theories presented by Arnold Van Gennep in Les Rites de passage. Considering ‘La poubelle agréée’ as a case study, I will highlight Calvino’s shaping of his autobiography according to Van Gennep’s ritual frame, which can be described as a hybrid form of autobiography and ethnography, and which I define as ‘self-ethnography’. The influence of Mary Douglas’ reflection on impurity and garbage in her book Purity and Danger will then be considered as a further crucial theoretical reference for Calvino’s construction of his self-ethnographic narrative.

Caring for the Sick Person Through a Gift: A Socio-Anthropological Analysis

The issue of donation makes sense in a world where the capitalist logic is growing. The challenges of giving to people in need during the day dedicated to the sick was an opportunity for us to make an anthropological reading of caring for the sick through giving. Indeed, the sick person is vulnerable and requires a particular look. Their needs are biological, psychological, social and spiritual. Caring for them through gifts in kind and the gift of oneself (accompaniment, touching, listening, education and care) are dimensions of caring. However, this approach to the gift is not always shared by all, as it does not necessarily follow the logic of Marcel Mauss' theoretical model. The concept of donation, distorted by the individualist paradigm, is part of a system of giving-receiving-giving back or the theory of reciprocity oriented towards the understanding of social obligations, which has allowed us to understand the practices of donation in our modern societies and particularly in the outbursts of solidarity of donations to the sick organised by the School of Health Sciences each year. This article is an echo for health professionals to understand that making a donation to a sick person is taking care of the other (giving), in a situation of fragility, it is giving oneself to the other.

Reaching the End of the World: An Anthropological Reading of Early Buddhist Medicine and Ascetic Practices

This article aims to analyze the ideas of health and illness in ancient Buddhism, making use of the theoretical tools of medical anthropology and historical–philological inquiry. As a contribution to the conceptual history of medicine in Buddhism, I intend to focus the present investigation on the ascetic problem of the “end of the world” as a means of achieving complete healing. The asceticism of early Buddhism reconciles the goal of transcendence with that of healing, carrying out a complex reflection on awareness and presence.

Primo Levi’s Anthropological Readings in Scientific American

ABSTRACTThe present article investigates Primo Levi’s anthropological readings in Scientific American between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The fundamental importance of these anthropological publications in Levi’s career has long been disregarded by scholars who have studied the influence of Scientific American on the author’s work predominantly with regard to scientific and technological articles. After reading Scientific American’s anthropological essays and book reviews, Levi’s interests soon came to include actual books on folklore and anthropological studies. The present article retraces the path of his readings and provides a series of examples from the short stories collected in Vizio di forma and Lilít, as well as from the essays of L’altrui mestiere. The results of this survey of Levi’s anthropological sources also provide new insights into his creative process and lead to a rethinking of the role of ethnography in his intellectual history.

Inculturation and environmental struggles: Catholic Church, public sphere and anthropocentric preservationism in Brazil

The article investigates the growing convergence between the Catholic Church and environmentalism in Brazil, aiming to demonstrate – through an anthropological reading of the Fraternity Campaigns that address sustainability and environmental crisis issues – how the national episcopate has been striving to reinvent the theology of inculturation as a system that incorporates, among other elements, the “natural world” as well. The hypothesis is suggested that the Church has been producing a symbolic narrative that articulates the fundamental elements of its theological conception of Creation with the set of social representations we know as ecology. This ecotheological narrative promotes a new perspective for interpreting biblical texts, seeking to recreate the relationships between Christianity and “nature” by projecting the origins of a certain Catholic environmental activism into a distant past. Despite being marked by anthropocentric categories, this new apostolic narrative seeks to assert, in favor of the Catholic Church and its pastoral work, a prominent position in the public sphere among the other relevant agents and institutions involved in present-day environmental struggles.

Food Production in the Wabigoon Basin: The First Nine Thousand Years

This local history of the Wabigoon Basin surveys food security in the region over the longue durée: from the retreat of the glaciers until the imposition of the Indian Act and industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Synthesizing local history and ethnohistory with recent archaeological and anthropological readings of landscapes managed by Indigenous peoples as anthropogenic spaces, we aim to critique traditional nineteenth-century historiography that saw Canadian landscapes (especially the Canadian Shield) as untouched wilderness before Euro-Canadian agriculture. Here, we use colonization in the 1890s not as a beginning point for history but, rather, as an end point for nine thousand years of Indigenous peoples’ food sovereignty, unhindered by bureaucracy and third-party management. We also discuss the conceptual gap between the reality of Indigenous (specifically Ojibwe/Anishinaabeg) farming food production and farming in the Dryden-Wabigoon and Boundary Waters region, within their long history of innovation and adaptation versus Euro-Canadian fantasies of Indigenous stasis and unpopulated wilderness used to justify late-19th-century colonization.

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: <em>Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century </em>(2020): Review Essay

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern Africa. Her committed exploration of the dialectic of story and event, the review offers, is a fine example of materialist literary criticism indicating the ethical and aesthetic urgency for close and comparative readings of postcolonial literatures of disaster.

Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa: Literature, Film, and National Discourse

Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa: Literature, Film, and National Discourse

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

The uses of class: A Latin American anthropological reading of Marxist debates in the twentieth century

The uses of class: A Latin American anthropological reading of Marxist debates in the twentieth century

The Objects of Reading Gaol

Oscar Wilde thought a lot about how objects come to have meaning, and for whom, but featureless institutional objects presented him with a limit case. Wilde's previous work on the genealogy of culture, traceable to his readings in philosophy and anthropology at Oxford, argued that a culture's "moral sense" could only be accessed via aesthetic objects because their abstract qualities make the invisible commonplaces of collective memory visible. But Wilde had difficulty describing the objects he encountered in prison. As a result, his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) became the site of an experiment in generating collective memory through references to objects that are nothing but abstractions, objects that are designed to anesthetize, neutralize, and anonymize experience.

A rebel territory behind the tourist scene: Negotiating national belonging and indigeneity in Quintana Roo

When we think of tourism or migration, we think of international mobility. However, the history of Quintana Roo teaches us that tourism and migration can be forces of nationalization. This article invites us to revisit the history of the southeast Yucatan peninsula, in order to understand the mechanisms that presided over its inclusion into the Mexican nation and the logic of the resistance movement that was opposed to it. Furthermore, this article delves into the ritual practices, social organization and territoriality inherited from the Cast War, that are kept alive by the rebels’ descendants (Cruzoob), unbeknownst to the gaze of the tourists and migrants who currently inhabit the region. How did the Cruzoob negotiate an identity as Indigenous to the nation, without losing sight of their sense of territorial sovereignty? At the time of the development of the Mayan Train, what are the challenges of the potential touristification of the Cast War? These are some questions that this article proposes to shed light on, in conversation with historical and anthropological readings, and drawing on ethnographic material collected in Tulum.

VISUAL SOURCES IN THE STUDY OF POLITICAL AND LEGAL DOCTRINES

Visual research has been gaining popularity in various social sciences in recent decades. Moreover, developments in sociology, political science and law related to the study of cultural aspects of society are interdisciplinary in nature. Jurisprudence is a fairly conservative scientific field in Russia, and the theories of the Soviet period continue to occupy dominant positions in legal science. Nevertheless, there are quite interesting approaches borrowed from other sciences of the socio-humanitarian profile. In this regard, the study of visual sources in jurisprudence seems to the author to be a promising direction, since, one way or another, legal concepts are represented in the visual. It is worth remembering any works of fine art (propaganda posters) or cinema (cinema), where you can see the reflection of certain political and legal ideas. The purpose of the article is to show the role and importance of visual sources of information in general, as well as in relation to the history of political and steam exercises. Because the standard format of considering political and legal ideas only within the framework of written sources does not allow for a comprehensive study of the influence of doctrines on legal consciousness. Visual as well as auditory sources significantly expand the picture of the legal world. Also, the author for the first time gave a classification of visual and legal sources, which, in turn, are divided into static and dynamic. The work clearly shows that law can also be studied in a visual context, which is to some extent an anthropological reading of the legal matter.

W czasie wiersza. "Posłańcy" Stanisława Grochowiaka

This paper – presenting a close reading of Stanisław Grochowiak’s poem Posłańcy [The Messengers] – proposes reflections on the “time of the poem”. It deals with the issue of experiencing different temporalities while reading (when and where you are while experiencing written words; what is the relationship between the reader's "real" and "fictional" – immersed in the process of reading – lives), and proposes a depiction of pace moderations in the analyzed work – of its own, differential dynamics. The problem of time and velocity is the starting point for a hermeneutic interpretation, or rather hermeneutic exercises (inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style): a conceptual, anthropological and semiotic reading experiment carried out on Grochowiak's poem. This essay is an attempt to pave a few paths for understanding The Messengers and their messages. Following in the footsteps of the title characters (with the help of associations and seemingly trivial observations) becomes a cognitive and imaginative adventure, a revolve around an ineffable, dark mystery of the poem (perhaps of all poems and their messengers).