Critical Anthropology Research Articles

Applying cultural perspective in Indonesia municipal solid waste management process towards a grounded climate concept and action: A mini-review of opportunities and challenges.

This mini-review emphasises the role of municipal solid waste (MSW) as the biggest contributor to climate change, as well as the need for more grounded climate action. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2023 Synthesis Report by the co-facilitators on the technical dialogue Key Finding 3 of applying the 'whole-of-society' approach in this article is interpreted as a cultural approach in MSW management planning and implementation process. Using anthropological critiques of development, the cultural approach is frequently considered an obstacle or a justification for a project's failure rather than an important aspect of the people being developed. Therefore, the goal of this mini-review is to showcase the findings and explore the practical application of UNFCCC Key Finding 3, emphasising its importance in every phase of the solid waste management process for climate action. This mini-review argues that applying a cultural perspective presents both opportunities and challenges. More importantly, without careful acknowledgement and consideration, opportunities can become challenges, if not vice versa. The discussion section explores the ways in which religious and economic conditions might offer a contextual understanding and effective techniques for managing MSW at the local level. To apply Key Finding 3 in practice, academia needs to move away from generality and embrace multiple 'modernities', while practitioners also need to include cultural perspectives to complement scientific knowledge.

Introduction: Contesting the moral worlds, scales, and epistemics of energy transitions

The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is being elided by dominant discourses and forms of production, such as alternatives to socio-material understandings of energy and resistance to the inevitability of extractivism as the basis for new ways of living. Even more, the collection takes up and problematizes the concept of ‘transition’ itself on historical, ethnographic, and epistemological grounds. After describing the themes that emerge from the special issue, and explaining how these themes point toward new configurations of research, theory-building, and critical intervention, the introduction concludes with a broader argument about the indispensable place of a critical anthropology in debates over energy and Anthropocenic harm.

Historicizing historicism: Reinhart Koselleck and the periodization of modernity

ABSTRACT Starting from J. Fabian’s critique of anthropology and its study of the ‘primitive’ Other, Fernando Esposito discusses R. Koselleck’s work as a critique of historical practice, not least the practice of periodization. While often understood as ‘merely’ a contribution to the question of temporalities, Koselleck actually aimed to develop a new way of writing and understanding history. Seen in this light, his work on historical time is really about a fundamental theoretical reorientation of the discipline. This fundamental reinvention of history was the central problem Koselleck wrestled with. Based on his personal experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War, he came to the conviction that history had no meaning and no goal, and therefore undertook a historicization of historicism, i.e. a re-evaluation of the way history had been written up to his own times. Koselleck’s historicization of historicism was a decisive chronopolitical act. It was catalyzed by his intention to debunk an unhistorical understanding of history and to replace it with a self-reflective, truly historicist historicism, a metahistory reflecting upon the ‘conditions of possible histories’.

Anthropological Critique and the Karamoja Question: Reflections on the Post Disarmament Livelihood Sources and Gender Disparities in the North East Region of Uganda

It is presumed that the Karamoja question is due to an anthropological lack of post-disarmament development strategies. This specifically applies to the mismanagement of gender relations. The paper concludes that the Karamoja Question persists because the post-disarmament development organisations prioritise women as change agents. This approach created gender disparities that resulted in a masculinities crisis. Consequently, gender as a social structure became dysfunctional and women have ended up being overwhelmed with both productive and reproductive roles while men are grappling with alcohol, violence, and social lethargy. These conditions cannot enable sustainable development. Anthropologically, gender is a vibrant social structure that determines the system of community governance and management of resources. Therefore, development interventions ought to analyse and incorporate accepted gender relations if they are to succeed in their programs. To resolve the Karamoja question, it is recommended that development agencies integrate social norms to enable hybrid approaches that are socially acceptable. This is because all matters of the Karamojong lifestyle revolve around participation and respect through dialogue and consensus

Kant’s Aesthetics in the Perspective of Sensory Studies

This article gives a synopsis of one of the fastest expanding in the last few decades interdisciplinary scientific fields keeping aesthetic problems and questions in its core, that of sensory studies, in order to sift out and systematize their interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics from his Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgement and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. On that basis, six general conclusions are drawn on the interpretability and actuality of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, analytics of the beautiful and the sublime, division of the fine arts, and his later observation on the outer senses – through the lens of sensory studies.

Staying with the blackout: an insecure anthropology of energy

AbstractIn the twenty‐first century, blackouts have settled into a familiar sequence of events in the fully electrified world. After jolting publics into a sudden awareness of energy assemblages, they gradually disappear from public memory. This article is an exercise in dwelling on blackouts that have already begun to recede from public memory so as to better conceptualize ‘energy security’ as an object of anthropological critique. Examining expert reports and retrospective verbal accounts, I focus on the 2021 blackout of Texas and the 2015 nationwide blackout of Turkey. Drawing on my long‐term ethnographic work with the US electric grid, I punctuate these failures with an uneventful day at a high‐security operation building in New England. I show that the desire for security suffuses electricity assemblages, from secure buildings of operation, to governments securing passage for the electric current, to publics demanding uninterrupted electricity access. I argue that in grid experts’ imagination, energy futures hinge on securing high‐risk nodes while continually expanding grids so that potential failures might be better absorbed. This imagination, however, produces a false sense of security when contemporary threats to transmission are too wide‐ranging to isolate and will only be amplified by larger grids.

Voice Lessons

Abstract This paper reflects on the national referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament that took place in Australia in mid-October 2023. At the time of writing, the aftershocks from the failure of the referendum to gain the necessary majorities were still being felt keenly by many of the Voice advocates and supporters. The hurt and grief of many First Nations people were shared by millions of non-Indigenous “Yes” voters, while much reckoning continued in the subsequent weeks and months. The author here explores what might have been gained if more attention had been given to what an Indigenous Voice to Parliament might “sound like,” instead of the excessive focus on, and public discourse around what it might “look like.” Resources from the philosophies and physiology of voice, communication ethics, cultural studies, critical anthropology, Australian Indigenous writing and scholarship, and psychoanalytic politics are utilised to explore the connections between the human voice, vocal expression, hearing and listening, silence and song.

Towards meaningful institutional change: Responsive bureaucracy and the governance of anthropological ethics

This article advocates for a deeper engagement with the organizational structures that shape the governance of research ethics in anthropology. The authors argue that anthropological critiques of bureaucracy often sidestep the kinds of knowledge needed to pursue meaningful institutional change. They show how different regulatory dynamics and organizational arrangements across jurisdictions produce more or less responsive bureaucracies, comparing Institutional Review Boards in the United States with a case study of a European university's Ethics Review Committee. The authors suggest that such organizational understandings of bureaucratic processes can more meaningfully inform their redesign and contribute to developing more appropriately scaled ethics governance. In so doing, ethics review promises greater responsiveness to the particular demands of ethnographic research while remaining legible to regulatory stakeholders.

Towards a critical anthropology of the (de)creative turn in heritage

Heritage processes are today increasingly entangled with multiple forms and discourses of creativity. Connections between creativity and heritage form part of a new consensual authorised discourse, where creativity and (heritage) entrepreneurship are projected as mutually beneficial in a win-win scenario, while co-existing with ever-more visible practices of destruction and loss. Challenging the celebratory narrative, the article unpacks the less visible political, economic, cultural and social processes underpinning the heritage–creativity nexus. This is necessary in order to confront and analyse the domination of space, place and history in the context of depoliticised neoliberal forms of governance. Juxtaposing the contradictions of authorised heritage discourse within the hegemonic politics and profitability in the neoliberal creative economy, we propose a critical anthropological approach centred around the decreativity of contemporary practice.

Új dialógusok a filozófiai antropológia korai éveiből

The subject of this paper is the program and activities of the so-called “Cologne Constellation” (Scheler, Plessner and Hartmann), i.e. the emergence and critique of philosophical anthropology as a paradigm. Nicolai Hartmann’s new ontology played a significant role in the development of the paradigm and increased its resilience to criticism. In addition to the known writings and activities of the members of the Constellation, some new primary texts have recently been published from Hartmann’s legacy, which are a curiosity in the history of philosophy, and which are special in that they contain the transcripts of some of the meetings of the discussion group that Hartmann led for decades. The presentation of different approaches, the use of vivid examples have resulted in texts that are rich in content and ideas. Of these, the debates of the summer semester of 1942 are crucial for the interest of philosophical anthropology, the stakes of which are to clarify the boundary between the psychological and the spiritual, with particular reference to the relationship between animal-human and the personal and objective (and objectivized) spirit. The latter theme also includes examples relevant to social theory such as mass psychosis, herd mentality or concrete aesthetic experience.

REVISITING POSITIONALITY IN CRITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

Within the field of critical anthropology, the scope of the reflection goes beyond one’s own society, encompassing a thorough exploration of anthropologists themselves as complex products of their socio-cultural environments. This aspect is becoming increasingly important in today’s critical analysis of the status of anthropology. Drawing on the insights of radical anthropologists, this article explores theeconomic and political context that shapes anthropological practice. While radical critics of the 1970s were confronted with well-defined sources of authority, the rise of neoliberalism disperses power and complicates the pursuit of critical anthropology. The question remains: Can critical anthropology maintain its potency amidst the influences it seeks to challenge? This question resonates as a central introspective point for contemporary critical anthropologists, inviting them to navigate the complex web of power, subjectivity, and socio-political context in their pursuit of transformative scholarship.

Inflation as Talk, Economy as Feel

Abstract Whether with central bankers or strolling passers-by, inflation is a recurring term, one that encapsulates contemporary life in Tunisia. How does a concept of economics become everyday talk? Through three stories, I show how what I call ‘inflation-talk’—a mode of small talk that operates as critique and affect—circulates across discursive spaces, ultimately becoming a medium to question economic transformations and reveal political disillusions in post-revolutionary Tunisia. I consider how inflation has become a ‘feel’ of the economy, meaning a measurement not solely for economists but for people to make sense of their everyday. Ultimately, I ask how in times of global inflation, anthropologists, especially ones working in North Africa and West Asia, can theorise a critical anthropology of inflation.

1960년대 이후 한국스포츠 전개 과정의 인간학적 비판

1960년대 이후 한국스포츠 전개 과정의 인간학적 비판

Cultural Identity in the Shackles of Modernization: The Case of Mentawai Indigenous Peoples

This paper examines the shackles of cultural identity in the new flow of the times. Mentawai people as a community group have a local identity as a characteristic of an ethnic group. However, the attraction between local culture and the pace of modernization is getting stronger, where the influence of development hegemony and policies conflict with the cultural identity of the Mentawai people. So, it raises the chaos that is still ongoing until now. Through literature study and critical anthropology view, it shows that human has the potential to create creativity and self-adjustment. However, Mentawai people are limited and suppressed by social factors and conditions, and exploited by the 'authorities'. This means that the reality of being Mentawai people is not created by nature but by humans, namely humans who have the power to 'manipulate conditions' and patent meanings that suit their minds that are full of conflict, illusion, and distortion. Mentawai people are in a 'false consciousness' that modernization helps them see the world better and have consciously stuttered (cultural backwardness) from that objective condition. Culture is deliberately clashed with the pace of modernization in various elements of life. However, Mentawai people are not rigid and make adjustments from the politically charged situation that makes them marginalized, exploited, and subordinated. Cultural tactics (cultural meaning) to follow the pace of modernization are used. Modernization and globalization are considered 'interaction spaces' in which there is a contestation arena of various elements of human life.

Ecologies of quantification in waste management: Landfilling, e-waste recycling, and car breaking

Quantification has become a privileged form of knowing and vehicle of governance. Anthropological critique has demonstrated that a view of numbers as independent carriers of meaning is untenable; instead, numbers should be conceptualized as being part of relations and temporalities, opening space for shifts in understanding. Proposing the perspective of ‘ecologies of quantification’, we acknowledge the wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming. We put waste management at the centre of our interest to explore the ways quantification attempts to conquer arguably one of the unruliest domains of contemporary social life. Based on our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices, and junked cars in Czechia, we point to problems emerging when numbers become stripped of their relations. Our research sheds light on experience in the process of quantification and demonstrates that there are multiple ways to know quantity.

Planetary Health: Capitalism, Ecology and Eco-Socialism

ABSTRACT Adopting a critical anthropology of health perspective, informed by political ecology, we examine planetary health in the era of late capitalism or neoliberalism. The shift to a planetary health thinking was driven by the growing awareness that not only are all human communities now multiply linked together by flows of commodities, ideas, people, and health-related influences from vectors to medicines, but that the health of human communities is multiply linked to the environment including other species within us (e.g. gut flora) and around us. Within the planetary health framework, we focus specifically on both emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing impact of anthropogenic climate change on health. While poorer regions of the world need economic development, that is, access to basic resources and health care, much of the developed world and parts of the developing world are, in a sense, overdeveloped. Perhaps more than any other issue, the ecological crisis, which includes catastrophic climate change allows critical scholars to contemplate the contradictions of the capitalist world system, including its implications for health, and to ponder the creation of an alternative world system, namely eco-socialism.

Landscapes of otherwise: Anthropological critique in want of “better” worlds

Landscapes of otherwise: Anthropological critique in want of “better” worlds

Curiosity and Creative Experimentation Among Psychiatrists in India

Medical anthropologists have not paid enough attention to the variation at the level of the individual practitioners of biomedicine, and anthropological critiques of biomedical psychiatry as it is practiced in settings outside the Global North have tended to depict psychiatrists in monolithic terms. In this article, we attempt to demonstrate that, at least in the case of India, some psychiatrists perceive limitations in the biomedical model and the cultural assumptions behind biomedical practices and ideologies. This paper focuses on three practitioners who supplement their own practices with local and alternative healing modalities derived from South Asian psychologies, philosophies, systems of medicine and religious and ritual practices. The diverging psychiatric practices in this paper represent a rough continuum. They range from a bold and confident psychiatrist who uses various techniques including ritual healing to another who yearns to incorporate more Indian philosophy and psychology in psychiatric practice and encourages students of ayurvedic medicine to more fully embrace the science they are learning to a less proactive psychiatrist who does not describe a desire to change his practice but who is respectful and accepting of ayurvedic treatments that some patients also undergo. Rather than simply applying a hegemonic biomedical psychiatry, these psychiatrists offer the possibility of a more locally-attuned, context sensitive psychiatric practice.

Justice in the Vernacular: An Anthropological Critique of Commensuration

This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, legal, and economic phenomena are treated as variables that can be measured using statistical procedures that flatten the underlying complexities. Commensuration, in this sense, takes place at all levels: local, subnational, national, and international. At each stage, the process of “measuring justice” through commensuration has the paradoxical effect of becoming more precise as variables become more detached from the nuances of everyday conflicts. In Merry’s analysis, the global “seductions of quantification” reinforce the dominance of commensurability as an ideology of both scientific validity and social change. Drawing on both Merry’s work and wider comparative research in the anthropology of human rights and justice, this contribution to the symposium argues that the anthropological critique of commensuration carries important lessons for the meanings of “justice” more generally. How can justice be measured at a global level if, as Merry’s research shows, the underlying factors that supposedly reflect injustice are highly specific, contingent, and, most importantly, incommensurable? As a potential way out of this dilemma, the article explores the possibilities of conceptualizing “justice” in the vernacular, an approach grounded in local cultural and ethical realities.

White Supremacy and the Making of Anthropology

This review presents a historical and contemporary view of white supremacy as an entrenched global system based on presumed biological and cultural difference, related practices of racism, the valorization of whiteness, and the denigration of nonwhiteness. We center the role of the discipline of anthropology, and contend that the discipline is shaped by, and shapes, structures of white supremacy. In this article, we detail anthropology's role in the development of racial science and the subsequent placement of whiteness at the top of the world's global political and cultural systems of power. We examine the early critiques of anthropology's racializing practices by Black and Indigenous anthropologists, which set the stage for an anti-imperial analysis that addressed how white power was entrenched within the discipline and broader society. Last, we discuss emerging scholarship on the anthropology of white supremacy and the methodological and theoretical shifts that push the discipline and refine the concept.