Western Categories Research Articles

A Plum Story? Early Encounters and Colonial Views of the Safu in Central Africa, Seventeenth-Twentieth Centuries

ABSTRACT The diversity of edible species originating in Africa is considerable, but the history of their use and domestication remains largely neglected, despite existing historical records. This essay aims to explore attitudes towards safu (Pachylobus edulis), a Central African fruit that defies Western categories. Based on more than one hundred archival documents, this study examines the history of the safu and the tree that produces it as seen by Europeans (German, English, Belgian, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, etc.) present in Central Africa. The documentation collected on safus and safu trees reflects not only local views of the species but also the broader European projects pursued on the continent and the vision of African foodways. Indeed, their valuation is symptomatic of food encounters and hierarchies during colonial settlement. More broadly, it reveals how subsistence and agriculture were viewed in the region: the ubiquity of this fruit tree around villages, as often reported, contrasts sharply with the historical narrative of the absence of African agriculture in the tropics. Finally, it shows how colonial enterprises, despite hindered dispersal and missed opportunities, circulated the species in different parts of the planet.

Исследование творчества А.Ф. Лосева в Китае

The article gives a comprehensive overview of the research of Aleksei F. Losev's works and intellectual heritage in China. It is noted that since the first publication about Losev in China since 1988 extensive achievements in this field have appeared. The information and the analysis about the results of researches of the Chinese specialists from different generations are presented. The main innovative aspects are revealed on the example of the study of Losev's aesthetic thought by the author of the article: comparison of the concepts and categories of Western and Chinese aesthetics related to Losev's philosophy. The peculiarities of the poetics of Losev's musical-philosophical prose and his “Eros” writing are revealed. The artistic world of Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered with the help of Losev's aesthetic theory of the symbol. The author believes that the study of Losev in China is on the rise and has broad prospects.

The Subterranean Unsettling of Science, Race, and Religion: Obeah, Petroleum Geology, and Risk in Trinidad

Abstract When scholars have compared “African traditional religion” and “Western science,” they have often treated the terms of this comparison as racialized unitary entities, which are either radically different or somewhat similar (even as Western categories of rationality or nature remain the basis for these comparisons). This essay unsettles these assumptions by focusing on practices that are called “science” in the fields of both petroleum geology and Afro-Caribbean religion. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Trinidad, arguably the world’s oldest site of commercial oil extraction, I show how internal differences between those involved in “petroleum science” and “African religion” reveal a spectrum of meanings for the word “science” centered on relations to risk. At one end of this spectrum, science conveyed ideals of stable tradition that de-risked claims to knowledge for energy sector specialists intent on securing foreign investment or for “Yorubacentric” lineages of African religion centering initiation-based authority. At this spectrum’s other end, “science” foregrounded the risks of accessing hard-to-perceive forces in petroleum exploration or “spiritual work.” By focusing on heterogeneous practices rather than cultural essences or ideals of rationality, I show how the ethical implications of “science” depend on differing experiences of the risks of working with subterranean powers. While petroleum surveys at my field site in Trinidad required embodied risks by laborers, geologists backgrounded these contexts of power, representing the risks of their work as a problem of scientific accuracy. Afro-Trinidadian spiritual workers, in contrast, foregrounded the embodied risks of science as the ground of ethical practice.

Pukllay pampa: Andean-inspired time-spaces for learning and unlearning

This article stems from a panel presentation at the 2022 Curriculum and Pedagogy Conference in State College, PA. Drawing on our shared experiences as curators of the Kawsay Ukhunchay Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifacts Research Collection at The Ohio State University, in this article we explore decolonial pedagogies and alternative methods informed by Andean and Amazonian Indigenous epistemologies. The pedagogical approaches emergent in the alternative learning/unlearning space of the collection illustrate ways by which engaging with Indigenous perspectives and practices fosters critical questioning of Western categories and organizing principles and serves as a basis for cultivating openness to alternative worldviews and meaning making. We pair this conceptual stance with applicable, transferrable skill sets for “thinking otherwise” as pathways for day-to-day practices, applied alternative pedagogies, and cross-curricular methods amplification that begin to pave the way for decolonial approaches.

The Poetics of Persianate Disaffiliation: Recusative Gestures for a Royal Genre

Abstract Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discourse of modernization had a deep, perhaps even dominant aesthetic dimension. Apparently disparate anxieties about oriental indolence, homosexuality and unmanliness, flattery and unmeaning speech, and submission to despots all may be understood as elements of a coherent critique of a single literary mode: taghazzul. Insofar as ghazal was a “royal genre” (Ireneusz Opacki), it provided the formal-aesthetic framing for numerous literary and speech genres, and thus for the social and political order. In case studies from across the Persianate zone, this article considers how writers’ refusal of taghazzul, or its excision from their texts, became a recognizable gesture of disaffiliation from the Persianate. In the resulting reordering of the literary field, taghazzul took on new functions in relation to the Western category of lyric.

Buying into Reproductive Modernity: Tracing the Transnational History of Two Contraceptives in Britain and China

Summary Set in the early twentieth century, this article maps the parallel histories of two popular contraceptive pessaries: ‘Wife’s Friend’ in Britain and ‘Lady’s Friend’ in China. Despite their limited efficacy, both products became commercially successful in their respective markets. Drawing on news articles and opinion columns, this article investigates how these two similar products were marketed to different demographics and adapted to meet the needs of local consumers, highlighting the ways in which medicines take on new meanings in different social and historical contexts. At the same time, the case of ‘Wife’s Friend’ and ‘Lady’s Friend’ pessaries also exposes the blurriness between the categories of Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine and the shortcomings of both types of medicine in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, this research shows that interrogating medicine from a comparative transnational perspective can yield new insights into the relationship between commercialisation, modernity and perceptions of health.

Review: Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment, by Michael D. McNally

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment, by Michael D. McNally Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment. By Michael D. McNally. Princeton University Press, 2020. 400 pages. $115.00 hardcover; $27.95 softcover; ebook available. Tarryl Janik Tarryl Janik University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2023) 26 (4): 130–132. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2023.26.4.130 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tarryl Janik; Review: Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment, by Michael D. McNally. Nova Religio 1 May 2023; 26 (4): 130–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2023.26.4.130 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNova Religio Search This important book engages the ongoing struggle of Native Americans to protect the sacred, their land, and treaty rights. Michael McNally recognizes how the term religion as a western category has failed Native Americans through law by not fully interpreting the complexities of Indigenous religions. Nevertheless, he argues that even though religion is a problematic term, it remains useful, especially if “imagined capaciously as an Indigenous collective right keyed to the collective nation-to-nation relationship [that] can carry the legal teeth of religious freedom” (xv). What McNally proposes in his latest book on American Indigenous religions is an integrative approach wherein Native American religious claims connect with elements of federal Indian law, while Indigenous rights operate within international human rights law. He argues that not only does the language of religion still have value for Native American religious claims in law, but that sovereignty, religion, and peoplehood should be seen as... You do not currently have access to this content.

Re-imagining Reproduction: The Queer Possibilities of Plants.

How did plant sexuality come to so hauntingly resemble human sexual formations? How did plant biology come to theorize plant sexuality with binary formulations of male/female, sex/gender, sperm/egg, active males and passive females-all of which resemble western categories of sex, gender, and sexuality? Tracing the extant language of sex and sexuality in plant reproductive biology, we examine the histories of science to explore how plant reproductive biology emerged historically from formations of colonial racial and sexual politics and how evolutionary biology was premised on the imaginations of racialized heterosexual romance. Drawing on key examples, the paper aims to (un)read plant sexuality and sexual anatomy and bodies to imagine new possibilities for plant sex, sexualities, and their relationalities. In short, plant sex and sexuality are not two different objects of inquiry but are intimately related-it is their inter-relation that is the focus of this essay. One of the key impulses from the humanities that we bring to this essay is a careful consideration of how terms and terminologies are related to each other historically and culturally. In anthropomorphizing plants, if plant sexuality were modeled on human sexual formations, might a re-imagination of plant sexuality open new vistas for the biological sciences? While our definitions of plant sexuality will always be informed by contemporary society and culture, interrogating the histories of our theories and terminologies can help us reimagine a biology that allows for new and more accurate understandings of plants, plant biology, and the evolution of reproduction.

Review: Religion and Culture in Native America, by Suzanne Crawford O’Brien with Inés Talamantez

Review: <i>Religion and Culture in Native America</i>, by Suzanne Crawford O’Brien with Inés Talamantez

«БРЕМЯ НЕБЕЛОГО ЧЕЛОВЕКА»: КОЛОНИАЛЬНОЕ ПРОШЛОЕ И ПОИСК НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ В МНОГОПОЛЯРНОМ МИРЕ

The colonial past continues to play a significant role in the national consciousness of Indian politicians as well as leaders of Western countries who seek to maintain the status quo in bilateral relations with India. By critically reflecting on the remnants of the period of colonialism the Indian political elite develops its own sense of national identity rather than fall for the one ‘invented’ by the Europeans. Instead of ‘mimicking’ Western categories of democracy and freedom, the Modi government defends its vision of the spiritual and cultural development of society in the subcontinent based on traditions and values from the pre-colonial past. It is for these reasons that US attempts to return India to its orbit through global “summits of democracies” and calls for joint defense of the ideals of freedom and human rights were unsuccessful, since they are perceived as alien in the subcontinent

A Case Study of Secularism in Nepal

Secularization has constituted the centerpiece of the sociology of religion indecent years. It is argued that this controversy is a particularly important and illuminating site upon which the redirection of the sociological enterprise is being wrought. So far, secularism been seen as an opportunity for religious minorities to claim equal support. The state is given the active duty to enhance and reform religious traditions. The emerging form of Nepalesesecularism may not merely contribute to a rethinking of the Western categories of the secular; its continuing evolution may also be most instructive for western countries. The objectives of the research are to know the emergence of secularism in Nepal and to evaluate the consequences of secularism in Nepal. In this paper, I have focused on the debate of secularism in Nepal. Here, I have applied the qualitative methods with case studies. The respondents were selected through purposive sampling. The aim here is to offer a perspective from which to begin to analyze the formation of Nepalese secularism, and the forces which are presently shaping it.

Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance by Heidi Bohaker

Reviewed by: Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance by Heidi Bohaker Natasha Myhal Heidi Bohaker. Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 304 pp. Paperback, $34.95. In Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance, historian Heidi Bohaker addresses the doodem (clan) traditions within the Anishinaabe worldview and how their governments interacted with settlers and then later settler colonial policies beginning in the seventeenth century. Anishinaabe philosophy within Doodem and Council Fire indicates that a doodem was given by the Creator to the Anishinaabe, which detailed responsibilities for them. This book presents a rich and detailed analysis of the doodem as an "analytical category" (44) to support Anishinaabe histories. The beginning of the text details the doodems' meaning to the Anishinaabe, as a philosophy, system of law, and a foundation of their alliances with other tribes and European settlers. The text then demonstrates the Anishinaabe view of doodemag (plural) as living ensouled beings, that they were in relationship with and held responsibilities toward. Thus, these relationships guided their own negotiations and the treaties they would later make with settler governments. The rest of the text provides an in-depth analysis on doodemag as different facets of Anishinaabe philosophy and law. Bohaker first relates Anishinaabe stories (aadizookaanag) that were written down by either European trader or interpreters and includes, when possible, Anishinaabeg writers and their own doodem stories from that time. This lays the foundation from an Anishinaabe perspective on how doodems informed Anishinaabe kinship practices. "To share a doodem is to be immediate kin" (57), and thus Bohaker describes how the Anishinaabe view kinship through "shared souls" and not blood. Bohaker's work is different than other historians in that she [End Page 357] provides a nuanced analysis of the how Western categories, such as kinship, imposed on Anishinaabe life, do not adequately describe relations between doodem. In her reliance on Euro-American written accounts, she pulls from the accounts of fur traders. In particular, a seventeenth-century fur trader Nicholas Perraut describes in his writings how Anishinaabek governments were based on doodems. Bohaker's book is filled with various accounts such as this, which shed light on how doodems related to a particular place, and how doodems took up various roles in the community. Bohaker goes on to describe how doodemag represented various cultural and spiritual practices for the Anishinaabe, such as burial practices, adoption, and marriage. In particular, these topics extend themselves to the overall argument that doodemag are a web of relations. Bohaker emphasizes that one's doodem encompasses a way of life and often teaches the person how to live through everyday acts, ceremonies, and employing care toward others. A web of relations is best shown through a discussion of the environment and alliances. For example, the Anishinaabe used wampum belts or strings to record alliances in what Bohaker considers "the literal weaving of thoughts from living human being and materials for living marine, floral, and faunal beings" (92). When the Anishinaabe exchanged wampum with other tribes and Europeans, it signified an alliance that came with a set of responsibilities. Ultimately, the Anishinaabe philosophy of minobimaadiziwin (to live well/balance) informs doodemag relations. Their philosophies remind them to care for their relations, which extends into the foundation of their governance. The second half of the text describes doodemag through the Anishinaabe worldview of fire and leadership practices. Bohaker's emphasis on the Anishinaabe government as founded upon council fires supports Anishinaabe decision-making through alliances. Bohaker critiques the terminology or labels prescribed on the Anishinaabe—such as "nation," "tribe," "village," or "band"—emphasizing the Eurocentric nature of these terms, as they do not accurately describe the fluidity or seasonality of how council fires shift within various regions. Bohaker then goes on to describe how Anishinaabe leaders embodied doodemag and were guided by their teachings. The meanings behind certain doodems, such as the thunderbirds "with its wings outstretched," imply "preparing to do battle with the underwater manidoog, [End Page 358] protecting the Anishinaabek from dangerous lake storms" (140). This analysis is illustrated with images of doodemag so readers can visualize Anishinaabe employment of these images. Bohaker reminds...

The communicating materialities. The speaking non-objects of the digital Amazon Forest

The article presents the performance and communicative qualities of a few materials present in some Amazon regions. Concomitantly, the article addresses the communicational relations between humans and non-humans from the perspective of two ethnic groups in the Amazon: the Krahô and Sateré-Mawé. In addition to the non-anthropocentric description, the article combines the ethnography and geolocation mapping methodological techniques. It also addresses the digital transformation of these non-objects, their displacements, and their new lives in digital networks. The result of both studies shows the impossibility of defining such materiality, alive and interacting, through the use of Western categories based on the ontological distinction between subject and object.

J.C. van Leur and the Problematic Origins of “Autonomous” Indonesian History

The main purpose of this article is to criticize J.C. van Leur's reputation as a Dutch historian who had been very vocal in criticizing his predecessors regarding Indonesian history. For modern Indonesian historians, van Leur is seen as a pioneer to reverse the perspective of a centric Western perspective to an Indonesian centric point of view. The Western centric point of view places Indonesian history as an extension of the Dutch history in Europe so that it is clear that Indonesian history does not have autonomy. However, van Leur's critique is true for the history of Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period, not for critiques of the pre-colonial period. To critically review van Leur's conception of Indonesia's historical autonomy, this article will take a close look at the intellectual trends that Van Leur responded to. This article argues that van Leur's research is very deductive by making the claim that the picture of the past trading community in Southeast Asia is proving to be misguided. This article finds that one of van Leur's weaknesses is that he conducts historical research that is thesis-driven, not research-based, and his belief in a thesis has prompted him to impose totality on Western categories of Southeast Asian history. The use of Max Weber's model in analyzing history actually makes van Leur's analysis of Southeast Asian history not even fully autonomous

Disease, Illness, and Sickness: The Difficulty of Classification. The Example of Saka in The Malay World

Saka is a medical disorder that appears in the Malay speaking world. However, it is difficult for medical or psychological experts to denote whether it fits one of the well-known categories like disease, illness, and sickness. In psychiatry, the term Culture-Bound-Syndrome (CBS) was introduced to cover psychiatric abnormalities, and in the Malay speaking world, CBS like amok and latah are well-known. In this article, the authors argue that the Western concepts and categories might not suffice to understand and categorize emic concepts of non-Western societies. The authors conducted qualitative field research in the North-eastern Malaysian state of Kelantan. Kelantan is considered to be a traditional Malay state. The researchers observed and interviewed five persons with saka. They discovered that there are no uniform patterns of people with the medical disorder of saka.

On the Way to Salvation: A Reading of Shinran's Tariki in the Light of Heidegger's Gelassenheit

On the Way to Salvation:A Reading of Shinran's Tariki in the Light of Heidegger's Gelassenheit Tony See (bio) The relationship between Heidegger's thought and East Asian philosophies has been the subject of much discussion in recent years. While these discussions are diverse and varied, they may be classified into three approaches (Ma and van Brakel 2006). The first approach is characterized by the study of how Heidegger's philosophy may have influenced East Asian philosophers, or how Heidegger's philosophy may have been influenced by East Asian philosophers. Reinhard May's work on Heidegger's "hidden sources" is a good example of the latter approach (May 1996). The second approach is characterized by scholarly observations that there are congruences between Heidegger's philosophy and East Asian thought. This is usually done by drawing analogies between the two. A good example of this is Joan Stambaugh's "Heidegger, Taoism, and the Question of Metaphysics" (1987). The third approach addresses the relevance and critical importance of Heidegger's philosophy in initiating intercultural dialogue (Ma 2005). It is sometimes characterized by a sense of pessimism with regard to whether such projects can be meaningful at all, for the linguistic and philosophical distances that have to be bridged is great. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel, for instance, argue that while Heidegger was genuinely interested in East–West dialogue, he questioned whether such dialogues can be meaningful, since the philosophical barriers between the two seem to be insurmountable. I believe that a more significant reason why such dialogues seem to be impossible is that we are already engulfed in an age of planetary Ge-stell, or enframing. Scholars in East Asia are likely to have been trained in Western-style academies and to possess modern subjectivities, and hence their access to East Asian thought is likely to be enframed by Western categories. To be sure, this does not mean that it is impossible to have a dialogue, but rather that any meaningful dialogue demands a high degree of self-reflexivity so that we may avoid imposing our prejudices and presuppositions on the Other. This paper adopts the second approach and is interested in the resonances between Heidegger's philosophy and the philosophy of Shinran. [End Page 169] The choice of engaging in a comparative study of Heidegger and Shin-ran may seem odd, given that the two thinkers come from vastly different philosophical backgrounds. However, a closer examination of their ideas reveals something in common, namely, what constitutes the right mode of comportment and what sort of experience we can expect. While there are scholarly studies in this area, such comparative East–West studies, which have become more and more important in recent years given the rise of intolerance, they remain a small minority in the field of Heidegger studies. This is why Dennis Hirota's "Shinran and Heidegger on Dwelling: Reading Shinran as a Phenomenology of Shinjin" (2014) is a welcome contribution to this area and deserves more scholarly attention. In this paper we will examine Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit and temporality and their relationship with Shinran's idea of tariki and its relation to salvation. Gelassenheit is usually translated as "letting be" in modern scholarship. This refers to a comportment of no longer trying to overcome but to be in a relationship of "letting be" with Western metaphysics. This comportment of "letting be" resonates with Shinran's well-known recommendation to give up on "self-power" (jiriki) and to turn toward "other-power" (tariki) for salvation. For Heidegger, when we turn away from "overcoming" to "letting be" we begin to enter a different dimension of time, which he calls "temporality." In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1988), Heidegger already analyzed this experience of temporality in terms of an intensive awareness of one's present existence which encompasses the past and the future. Shinran likewise describes a new temporal experience when we place our faith in the saving power of Amida Buddha. To be sure, Shinran did not use the same terminology as Heidegger, nor should we presume that he referred to the same phenomenon, but he does describe this new dimension of time as being fundamentally distinct...

La Familia versus The Family: Matriarchal Patriarchies in Peruvian Mormonism

By sacralizing the Western categories of gender and kinship and by exalting the husband-centric, nuclear version of family, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints not only alienated its transgender and feminist members, but also its Peruvian families. This study employs ethnographic encounters, kinterm linguistics, and home décor analysis to situate the existence of Peruvian Mormon matriarchies in the context of a phallocentric religion that spanned two strikingly different, patriarchal societies: one in the Southern Andes of Peru and the other in the US state of Utah. Thus situated, the article then dwells on the transcribed oral history of Ofelia, a Peruvian single mother who utilized the power of the male-only Mormon priesthood to preside over her household as the acting matriarch. Ofelia’s fealty to patriarchy during the very enactment of forbidden priestesshood brings to the fore the profound contradictions that some Peruvian Mormons in the late 2010s disentangled as they sought to become legible to their church as participants in eternal families.

Decolonizing the Boundaries: Indigenous Musical Discourse in the History of Kurdish Radio Baghdad

Divided between empires and nation-states for centuries the Kurds have, by and large, been excluded from discourses of indigeneity. In a similar manner, musical practice among the Kurds cannot be easily cajoled into Western categories such as folk/popular. How then might scholars begin to approach the decolonization of research describing Kurdish musical practice? In this article, I propose that one important step in this process is learning to pay closer attention to the ways Kurdish musicians themselves have challenged the colonial legacy, adeptly navigating, challenging, and sometimes simply ignoring the political, linguistic, and cultural boundaries established by their colonizers. As an example of this practice, I describe key moments of resistance in the early history of Kurdish Radio Baghdad. I argue that accepting these acts of resistance as a form of indigenous musical discourse is an important first step toward the decolonization of Western knowledge in this regard.

Exploring Successful Small Urban Spaces’ Criteria with Emphasis on Cultural Context

In the crowded cities of the present age, public spaces can provide a quiet area away from the hustle and bustle of the city that citizens can interact with by incorporating utility features and meeting human needs and Relax there. Small urban spaces are among the most important and effective urban spaces to achieve this goal. Because these spaces due to their small size and lower costs (compared to larger spaces) for construction can be created in large numbers and distributed throughout the city. In this way, citizens will be able to reach a public urban space on foot in a short time. If these spaces are well designed, they can encourage people to stay in and interact with each other. It is not difficult to identify and experience high-quality successful places, but identifying the reasons for their success is difficult and even more difficult, understanding if similar spaces in other places can be considered successful. This question is important because public space with deep social content is considered a cultural product. Public space is the product of the historical and socio-cultural forces of society. Therefore, one of the most important issues that should be considered in the study of public spaces and the reasons for their success is the cultural context. In Iranian cities that have been influenced by the values and principles of Islam,recognizing Islamic principles and their role in shaping public spaces can lead us to desirable results. The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual model of successful small urban spaces with an emphasis on cultural issues, especially in Iranian-Islamic cities. In this regard, the effective criteria for the success of urban spaces in general and small urban spaces in particular in the two categories of Western countries and Iranian Islamic cities were examined and then, taking into account the criteria derived from cultural theorists, the conceptual model of research with 38 subcriteria is provided.

Antennas Up! Laura Nader’s Undergraduate Lecture Courses as Public Anthropology

Abstract While teaching lecture courses at the University of California, Berkeley, Laura Nader taught generations of students to raise their anthropological antennae. This article uses an autoethnographic approach to describe the author’s exposure to anthropology at Berkeley in the nineteen-nineties, gesturing towards the way undergraduate lecture courses play an important but largely underrecognized role in fostering public anthropology. Nader’s lecture courses were particularly effective at this because their focus on pushing students to question dogma and analyze controlling processes offered students a sense of how anthropology could foster critical public discourse. Nader stressed the importance of asking good questions designed to challenge assumptions, finding the right methods to answer those questions, and paying attention to pathways of power. While always questioning received wisdom, ideological assumptions, and Western categories of knowledge, Nader continued to stress the importance of developing straightforward, highly-accessible concepts that captured the attention of students—like Harmony Ideology, trustanoia, controlling processes, and the vertical slice.