Forms Of Personhood Research Articles

‘Skateboarding is not a sport’: Creativity at the margins of capitalism

One might expect skateboarders to be jubilant that the Olympics recognized theirs as an Olympic sport, but their response is ambivalent. Alexis Sablone, a women's street competition participant, does not consider skateboarding ‘a sport’. What is it if not a sport? This article argues that it is a fugitive, non‐teleological, open‐source practice for creating new ‘existential territories’ – new forms of personhood, public space and social relationships. Skateboarders’ resistance to centralization and their emphasis on DIY creativity suggests skateboarding involves challenging culturally specific and local norms. It rests on creative remakings of derelict and unevenly developed urban spaces and the construction of new forms of identity and social purpose. The argument is based on fieldwork with the Osaka Daggers.

Wild Meets Domestic in the Near Eastern Neolithic.

Simple SummaryMany recent theorists argue that reliance on binary oppositions to structure thought is a feature of the modern West, and therefore an inappropriate model for prehistory. While the world is usually more complicated than dualistic models, I suggest their use is not limited to modern Western cultures. Rather, we should determine whether they apply in each instance, and if the terms are defined in the same way. Here, I examine whether inhabitants of the earlier Neolithic in the Near East, the time of the first livestock herding, distinguished between wild and domestic animals. Lacking written records, I analyze imagery and animal remains. Zooarchaeologists use demographic profiles, size change, and other data to assess whether ancient people hunted or herded animals. I add contextual analysis to identify special treatment of animal remains that indicates they have ritual power, and choices in animal depictions. Three case studies each present windows into how animals were valued, showing that wild and domestic animals were treated differently, and thus a wild/domestic conceptual distinction existed. Moreover, differences between wild and domestic animals, and regional differences in the roles of specific species, shaped how both wild and domestic animals spread in the early days of agriculture.The categories of wild and domestic are one of the classic ways the nature/culture dichotomy manifests itself in human interactions with the environment. Some argue that this distinction is not helpful and a projection of modern thought, and certainly the boundaries are complicated. However, we should try to determine in each case whether it was meaningful to particular people in the past. Here I explore whether wild and domestic were relevant concepts to the inhabitants of the Neolithic Near East in their relations with animals around the time when livestock herding began. Drawing on depictions of animals and the treatment of living animals and their remains, I examine three case studies (Cyprus, Upper Mesopotamia, and Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia) to evaluate whether emic distinctions between wild and domestic existed. I conclude that this was in fact a crucial distinction that shaped economic choices as well as ritual activities. Differential treatment of wild and domestic animals indicates that they were accorded different forms of personhood. The particular nature of human relations with wild animals helped shape the spread of both wild and domestic animals.

Salted Identities: Biocultural Heritage for a Rehumanized Ocean Management in South Africa

SUMMARYIn this article, I discuss coastal and oceanic biocultural heritage and its relevance to a transformed perception of the ocean and coast in South Africa. An anthropology of biocultural heritage at the coast reveals the multidimensional nature of personhoods—specifically transspecies, trans‐material forms of personhood—and the rich dialogical engagement of “humans” with nature and marine species. Through sensory ethnography on coastal biocultural heritage in South Africa’s Northern Cape, Western Cape, and Eastern Cape provinces, I challenge anthropocentric strategies for ocean management and assert the need to consider sensory/embodied relations with the sea and the sentience of other species in the marine space. By presenting on and discussing coastal biocultural heritage, I hope to advance discussions on identity in Africa as well as marine epistemologies for a rehumanized ocean management in South Africa and the world.

Digital aripiprazole as a human technology

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the first ever ‘digital’ drug, an antipsychotic (aripiprazole) embedded with a sensor (Abilify MyCite) that tracks data about drug ingestion as well as activity level and mood patterns. In this paper, we identify the financial and sociopolitical drivers that have facilitated the development and regulatory approval of a digital drug marketed for people with psychotic disorders. We explore the novel ways that such devices blur the distinctions between medication, machine and mind. The risks of digital aripiprazole obscuring and exacerbating the effects of social inequity are discussed. However, we also consider the possibility that this digital psychotropic drug may allow for new forms of personhood, performances of subjectivity, and resistance to emerge. This paper addresses both the conditions that enabled the development of digital aripiprazole as well as the possibilities and limitations it may bring to health providers and service-users.

Fashioning a Mind of One’s Own in the Good Company of Others

ABSTRACT While much theoretical work on value takes point of departure in what adults presumably value, this chapter addresses the valuing work children do. Articulating ideals of ‘being social’ and ‘being oneself’ as good forms of personhood, Danish teachers oblige children to enact a good form of ‘being together as a class’, a sociability considered vital to democratic society. Drawing on discussions of value exemplarity, I suggest that Danish school classes may be viewed from an adult perspective as exemplars representing, and to some extent realising, a high-sung value of egalitarian community. For children tasked with living out an idealised social form, the class is a limited social field, one they ‘value’ through myriad small valuing acts lodged in the sociable give and take of everyday class activity. The verb form is crucial here for exploring, not how children take on adult values, but rather what comes to matter to children as they, inescapably themselves, navigate the ‘class’ as an imposed social field and highly valued form of sociability.

The new contadini: transformative labor in Italian vineyards

Contadini—peasant farmers—are central figures of belonging in a Northern Italian winegrowing community. The skills and languages in which contadini are fluent and who is recognized as one of them organize the values attached to various roles in this world. I show how the immigrant vineyard workers who maintain local landscapes engage with this identity, producing new selves through the labor of caring for vines. Earning the title of contadino allows some immigrants to cross social boundaries usually policed by strict ethnic lines in Italy, generating recognition and benefits unavailable from the state. At the same time, Italian employers’ relation to the land changes as they hand off ways of knowing and doing to categorical outsiders. ‘Traditional’ labor and products are what pull these two groups into a collaborative encounter, but rather than simply keeping the past in practice, immigrants and Italians also generate new forms of personhood and value.

A method of ‘things’: a relational theory of objects as persons in lived religious practice

ABSTRACT Material expressions of religion are some of the most visible ways in which the lived realities of religions can be examined and understood. Religious materiality not only mediates between a continuum of still productive dualisms that exist between ‘official’ and ‘lived’ religion, but is also capable of inspiring relational methodological approaches. Based on a small-scale study of Marian statue devotion in Spain, the article asserts that ‘personhood’ as an approach is an appropriate conceptual and methodological tool with which to frame theoretically, address, and approach practically the religious objects that researchers encounter in the field. Such approaches are considered here as ‘relational’, as lived religion is best understood through the intimate relationships and negotiations that take place not only between religious group or community members, but also between human persons and other than human persons such as religious statues. Acknowledging that researchers and the objects being researched can bring each other into varying forms of personhood carries the possibility of expanding the ‘participant observer’ paradigm, thus expressing lines of possibilities for understanding the volatile relational phenomena that take place in the religious ‘worlds’ of others.

Motorcycle taxis, personhood, and the moral landscape of mobility

• Personhood is critical for understanding how informal mobility is embedded in cities. • Boda boda stages embody and reproduce a distinctive mode of personhood. • Drivers navigate between multiple spatial institutions and forms of personhood. • Digital mobility platforms rely on and supplement existing spatial-moral practices. • State efforts to govern Boda bodas fail if they don’t recognize drivers’ institutions.

Introduction: Normative orders and the remaking of Muslim spaces and selves in contemporary Russia

The aim of this special issue is to explore, from the perspective of various notions of space, the manifold ways in which Muslims in Russia live and practice their religion. We aim to analyse how Muslims in Russia are confronted in the practice of their religion with various conceptual and experiential realms. These realms correspond to certain divisions that they must negotiate and navigate. Examples of these include the boundaries between the secular and the religious; the public and the private; the official and the informal or unofficial; the local and the translocal/transregional/transnational; halal and haram, etc. Looking at Islam through the lens of space allows us to explore the dynamic ways in which Muslims in Russia have continued to creatively redefine, negotiate, reinforce, alter and dissolve these boundaries and divides since the fall of the Soviet Union. Diverse experiences and perceptions of Muslim spaces further help us to relate the question of the (re)appearance of these Muslim spaces to the process of de-secularisation that is currently taking place in post-Soviet Russia. In particular, we aim to clarify how the relationship between the secular realm and the Islamic religion is being reconfigured by examining how Muslim lives integrate, transcend and alter the normative dichotomies that are present in official discourses on Islam. We thus want to look ethnographically at the relationship between the ways in which normative categories define and delimit certain realms and the ways in which Muslims live their religion by creatively shaping and experiencing spaces that go beyond these normative divisions. In addition, this special issue explores the question of how the (re)creation of Muslim spaces is linked to processes of becoming Muslim, of cultivating a Muslim self and of experiencing different (but often simultaneous) identities and forms of personhood.

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

‘To be One’s Own Boss’: Exceptional Entrepreneurs and Products that Sell Themselves in Urban Poland

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the aspirations of young people in the Polish city of Kraków who wish to ‘be their own bosses’ – to become entrepreneurs. The article makes a rejoinder to portrayals of ‘the fine salesperson’ as a man or woman who ‘can sell anything’. The forms of personhood and aesthetics favoured in Krakowian renderings of selling instead place emphasis on a good entrepreneur not as one who persuades, but as one who provides. Comprehension of these areas explains why the salient ‘moment of sale’ is when an aspirant businessperson comes up with their ‘good idea’ for a product. Drawing from the observation that the indiscriminate promotion of goods is widely disdained in Kraków, I argue that the topic of selling opens up discussions about the local constitution of difference and the ways in which successful entrepreneurs are able to match products to demographics.

Neurological disorders, affective bioethics, and the nervous system: reconsidering the Schiavo case from a materialist perspective

This article proposes a novel approach to bioethics, referred to as “affective bioethics”, which draws on traditions in anthropology, science and technology studies, disability studies, and Spinozist materialism. By focusing...

Squatters make history in New York:

ABSTRACTAs illegal squatters became cooperative homeowners on New York City's Lower East Side, they strategically used the logic and law of property to turn their homes into commodities. But they did so within limits: individuals can sell their apartments at fixed prices yet also collectively maintain the buildings as low‐income housing, valuing their homes as both a source of individual sustenance and an inalienable resource that ties generations together. As in many indigenous land claims cases, changing property relations produced new forms of personhood and collective peoplehood. How people form collectives to make claims on space shapes who can participate in urban processes. Squatters used history making to constitute themselves as a legitimate group that could claim urban space and steward collectively owned inalienable property. [homeownership, inalienable property, squatting, land claims, production of history, New York City]

Non-formal education, personhood and the corrosive power of neoliberalism

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which non-formal education is being corroded by neoliberal values. Given non-formal education is frequently used to develop young people’s notions of citizenship, and that non-formal education providers are increasingly forced to operate within the free-market paradigm, it is significant to consider what forms of personhood are being championed. Qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and observations with coaches and young people from a youth sports charity in the UK. Focusing on a core aspect of non-formal education – caring relationships (as understood by Nel Noddings and Carl Rogers) – the findings suggest that the quality of coaches’ care for young people was conditioned by the extent to which adolescents re-shaped their personhood to align with neoliberal values of individual responsibility and discipline. Thus, the meanings of ‘care’ and ‘good citizenship’ were corroded by a neoliberal rationality.

AyoWahlbergGood Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in ChinaBerkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018. 248 p. $34.95 (pbk.)

AyoWahlbergGood Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in ChinaBerkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018. 248 p. $34.95 (pbk.)

From Comrades to Bodhisattvas: Moral Dimensions of Lay Buddhist Practice in Contemporary China, by Gareth Fisher. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014. x+263 pp. US$50.00/HK$390.00 (cloth).

<i>From Comrades to Bodhisattvas: Moral Dimensions of Lay Buddhist Practice in Contemporary China</i>, by Gareth Fisher. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014. x+263 pp. US$50.00/HK$390.00 (cloth).

Understanding Sign Language Bibles through Affective Audits in South India

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the role that the emic category of understanding plays in creating new forms of personhood and new worlds for sign language using deaf people in south India. As an ethnographic study of the production, dissemination, and circulation of Indian Sign Language Bible DVDs by an international non-denominational Christian missionary organization, this article analyses how the power of sign language as heart language lies in the potentiality of becoming a fluent signer and a member of a deaf sociality. Bringing the Anthropology of Christianity in conversation with the Anthropology of deafness/sign language studies, this article argues that anthropologists have ignored practices of verifying understanding in our interlocutors. In utilizing the concept of affective audits, this article analyses the practices by which understanding comes to take place. In addition, this article also argues that anthropologists must attend to how research on sensory formations might be presuming a ‘normal’ sensing body.

Queer Time in Charles Perrault's “Sleeping Beauty”

At first glance, there might seem to be little that is queer about Charles Perrault's La Belle au bois dormant, or Sleeping Beauty. There is seemingly nothing in broadest arc of tale that deviates from norms of gender or sexuality: a story about a princess who falls prey to a fairy's spell and a charming prince who awakens her and overcomes adversity to ensure requisite happy ending (with two children in tow) has all makings of a classically normative heterosexual fairy-tale plot. This admittedly reductive summary, which corresponds to what many recognize as Sleeping Beauty tale (whether or not they attribute it to Perrault), gives nary a hint of even a more capacious understanding of queer, beyond domains of gender and sexuality. We might think, for instance, of definition proposed by Lee Edelman, for whom word queer denotes the excess of something always unassimilable that troubles relentlessly totalizing impulse informing normativity (Dinshaw et al. 189). Judging from hostile reception by many feminists, spectacle of a passive princess waiting to be awakened by her prince is all too normative.1And yet, if we take trouble to look at letter and detail of Perrault's text, something altogether different comes into view, and that something, I argue, is queer. Saying this, I do not contend that this version of Sleeping Beauty is unproblematically queer (if indeed anything ever could be); as we will see and as others have shown, there are moments of undeniable misogyny in this and many of Perrault's fairy tales, and these cannot be explained away.2 Yet alongside and in tension with these moments are deviant desires and disruptions to heterosexual marriage plot. What at first glance appears to be a tale about inevitable triumph of heterosexuality turns out to invite a far more skeptical if not perverse view of ostensible love plot. Ultimately, my reading invites us to take a fresh look at commonplace assertion that Perrault's fairy tales establish a normative patriarchal discourse for genre. What 1 want to propose through this reading of inaugural tale of his 1697 prose collection, Histoires ou contes du temps passe (Stories or Tales of Past Times), is that Sleeping Beauty encourages readers to imagine another tale, unlike one cited by narrative voice, that is replete with queer potential.1 argue that queer potential of Sleeping Beauty stems from temporality, by which I mean specifically narrative uses of to both construct and undermine normative social plots of sexuality and kinship. Like Kay Turner in her essay in this special issue, 1 am inspired by considerable body of queer theoretical work on cultural understandings of and how it shores up and undermines normative social structures, in process giving form to subjects, their consciousness, and affects.3 As Elizabeth Freeman has put it, ... is not only of essence, it actually produces 'essences' (Introduction 160). Time is used to transform unequal power relations into natural bodily rhythms and to control access to positions of mastery within cultures. In short, what is commonly understood as normal is inextricably- and almost imperceptibly-bound up with hegemonic social relations. Freeman coins term chrononormativity to describe the use of to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity. . . . People are bound to one another, engrouped, made to feel coherently collective through particular orchestrations of time (Time Binds 3). Linked with chrononormativity is a notion Freeman borrows from Dana Luciano (channeling Foucault), chronobiopolitics: 'the sexual arrangement of of life' of entire populations (3).These two notions foreground a logic by which unfolds naturally through a series of cause-and-effect sequences to produce particular forms of personhood with foreordained roles to play in larger sociopolitical order. …

Placed Parenting, locating unrest: failed femininities, troubled mothers and rioting subjects

Critical attention has been given to the consolidation of classed forms of <em>placed personhood</em>, as compelling future-orientated and self-regulating subjects that 'fit' into contemporary economic and social formation. These forms of personhood, spoken of as moral character and behavioural 'traits', are increasingly attached to placed parenthood: as that which (self)locates in the right moral and material terrain. Good subjects – made through good parenting and in particular via 'good mothers' – are tasked with self-optimizing and bringing forward their own futures and those of their families (Allen and Osgood 2009; Armstrong 2010; Evans 2010, Gillies 2007; Lawler 2000; Taylor 2012a; Taylor and Addison 2011). A broader 'public' as concerned with equity, welfare and redistribution is dis-placed and entirely re-placed with a self-orientated 'enterprising' privatized response. This limited response is self-congratulating of its own 'responsibility' and condemning of those who 'fail' heightened efforts (in times of 'cutting back' parent-citizens are told simply to be more 'efficient'). 'Necessity' and 'austerity' are, as the editors of this special issue highlight, invoked to re-do all kind of classed and gendered violence, where the most privileged sections of society are evacuated from blame in times of economic crisis: in contrast, what re-circulates is a stated need for poor, 'failing mothers' to 'step-up' for all our sakes. Those who cannot bring themselves forward and propel into this neo-liberal future are increasingly condemned as the wrong kind of parents. This piece aims to chart some of the 'ugliness of parenting' (Taylor 2009, 2012b) as placed parenthood attaches to specific classed locales and subjects as that which 'fails' and 'troubles' the future. This is witnessed in the example of and responses to the English Riots of 2011, which is placed as a case study casting light on intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality in forms of placed parenthood.

PATHWAYS TO CREATIVITY

Focusing on the ‘talent pathways’ outlined in the 2008 Department of Culture, Media and Sport Creative Britain report, this article explores how different forms of creative agency are positioned to make a ‘contribution’ to the creative economy. Drawing on Paul du Gay's concept of personhood, case studies on digital gaming explore the formation of two forms of personhood – creative consumers and creative workers. Specifically, these forms of creative agency are analysed in terms of their connections on the ‘talent pathway’, and the transitions that see creativity and talent as inherent in all individuals and in need of channelling and directing. The creative-consumer case study unpacks the digital games industry strategy of enrolling fan-creators within their commercial operations. This case study reveals the increasing importance of co-production for the creative economy, and the extent to which diverse cultural practices are facilitated and positioned. Higher education Games Design courses will then provide the case study for examining how the creative-consumer can be positioned to make a productive contribution to the creative economy as a worker. Within this context, the formation of fans/students into a creative worker or industry-ready worker is evident. Through tracing different forms of creative agency and how they are connected to make a contribution to the creative economy, this article explores the governance of creative agency and economic subjects.