Readings In Anthropology Research Articles

Ethnography and applied metaphysics

Ethnography and applied metaphysics

Until Death Do Us Part and They Upload Us Into Clones: An Analysis of Film Narratives About Mind Uploading and the Myth of Immortality

The fear of death and the myth of immortality are themes long present in various narratives, whether literary or visual. Science fiction as a genre offers us many venues for new explorations of this idea. Mind uploading is one of them. This fictional technique, related to cloning, is performed when the mind and consciousness of a person are transferred to another biological body or machine with the help of technology. In this way, a person continues their social life through their brain functions. This paper looks at four separate recent screen narratives – the movies Self/less, Transcendence, and Replicas, and the episode “Be Right Back” of the TV show Black Mirror. With the help of Tzvetan Todorov’s structural analysis, we find clauses that are present in all of the plots and see what ideas and topics they share. The paper also uses the idea of anthropological reading of science fiction and therefore uses scientific research to analyze these themes. By looking at anthropological findings of immortality, mortality, death in modern society, and digital techniques, we see how the analyzed narratives portray a unique mixture of fear of and longing for all the mentioned processes and ideas. Finally, this paper shows how science fiction could possibly reflect reality – both through presenting thoughts of society and inspiring future technological advances and ideas (in this case, the quest for immortality). While humans are still far from achieving eternal life, the mentioned screen narratives portray the growing stream of ideas that deal with mind uploading in the age of the internet and social media.

God and Time: An Essay on the Bible’s Cyclical View of History

ABSTRACT On the basis of an anthropological reading of a number of representative biblical passages—Deuteronomy 26, Judges 3, Daniel 2, and Revelation 20-21—it is suggested that the evidence fits best the notion of cyclical, repetitive history. Within the biblical cycle, the phase of transition, the “liminal” or “threshold period” from the (shorter) bad, to the (longer) good and golden age carries special importance. Rivaling views of the biblical notion of time—biblical history as the linear “history of salvation” (Heilsgeschichte), and biblical existentialism with its emphasis on making a decision “now”—reflect either late-ancient or twentieth-century mentalities, rather than the archaic mentality of the Bible (and that of Hesiod’s Works and Days).

Friendship: acquisition forms and functions as a web of social relationship in Raya Community of Southern Tigray, Northern Ethiopia

This cultural study was conducted in Raya community of Southern Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, focusing on the relevance of friendship for social relationships. Specifically, the study aimed at identifying the forms of friendship acquisition, describing friendship application procedures and rituals performed and depicting the social function of friendship as a web to strengthen social networks. The study was limited to the friendship of males. To meet these objectives, fieldwork and interviews were used to gather the primary data. The research design was descriptive, while the study approach was qualitative. The author found that there are two friendship acquisition forms in the study community; inherited and acquired. In the community under study, there are three friendship entitlement occasions that is friendship during an early age, friendship at social events, and friendship formed through daily routine practices. In the procedure of applying friendship, there are cultural rituals performed. Furthermore, there are local names with cultural connotations that intimates use to address each other. The social relevance of friendship has appeared as a base for the creation of fictive affinity which ensures decent social relations. Similar ethnographic studies that would contribute to the critical reading of anthropology of friendship are suggested. Key words: Cultural study, friendship, social relations, Raya, Ethiopia.

¿Rituales de juego de pelota, transculturalidad y género en las Américas prehispánicas?

En la perspectiva de la longue durée y en una dimensión americana panregional, este artículo pretende analizar los «juegos de pelota» documentados en los estudios y las fuentes arqueo lógicas y etnohistóricas. Desde Mesoamérica, pasando por la región andina hasta las tierras bajas en Sudamérica, se enfocanen un lente convergente las continuidades y las rupturas sociales unidas en este «juego». De esta manera, se analiza las estructuras físicas, las organizaciones sociorrituales y hasta las materialidades de los «juegos de pelota», ofreciendo una lectura antropológica de las fuentes. De ese modo, se va a determinar que, enfocando las continuidades y rupturas en las diferentes sociedades prehispánicas e históricas hasta el presente desde este ángulo, el «juego» mismo se presenta no solo como tal, sino como encajado en un continuo de deporte, guerra y sacrificio humano. De esa manera, es posible entender mejor las sociedades del pasado, estructuradas también por las relaciones de género, conectándolas con el presente.

Reliability of anthropological measurements in determining vertical dimension of occlusion in Saudi population: A cross sectional study

BackgroundRange of techniques have been described in traditional prosthodontics to establish Vertical dimension of occlusion (VDO). Experienced clinicians agree that there is no one single method, which is universally accepted record VDO precisely and consistently. Many facial and body landmarks have been proposed in the literature correlating to the VDO. Presence of so many methods to determine VDO further leads to confusion in the minds of clinicians. There is always a need for a research to both substantiate the findings in the literature and check reliability of such correlations in local population. Such correlation between the anthropological measurements and VDO would give clinician an evidence based approach to establish VDO during prosthetic rehabilitation. Hence this study was planned to check reliability of various anthropometric measurements in measuring VDO in a cross section of Saudi population. Material and methodTotal of 500 subjects selected for the study following an inclusion and exclusion criteria. Anthropological readings such as Index finger, Little finger, Thumb finger, Distance between Inner canthus of left eye to outer canthus of right eye and Outer canthus of the right eye to corner of mouth (rima oris) were recorded using digital Vernier caliper. The data were analyzed statistically. ResultsStrong positive correlation was observed between VDO and anthropological landmarks selected in the study. Pearson’s correlation test showed VDO in males has strong coefficient correlation with Index finger (r = 0.7341) and in females strong coefficient correlation with Little finger. (r = 0.5827). ConclusionIn Saudi Males, VDO could be correlated to the index finger measurements followed by Thumb finger. In Saudi females subjects, VDO correlated with little finger measurements followed by outer canthus of the eye to corner of the mouth reading. It is always appropriate to use one or more methods to approximate the measurements of VDO initially and then use the other methods to test the appropriateness of the dimensions initially established.

Human Dignity in an Ethical Sense: Basic Considerations

Abstract The idea of human dignity is an ancient one. It has been the object of reflection with different approaches, during the various periods in the history of philosophical, theological, and ethical thought. This essay focuses on the most relevant approaches to the idea of human dignity in this cultural evolution, proposing a look at the ontological paradigm and its limits, the ethical paradigm and its values, and the theological paradigm and its resources. An anthropological reading concludes this essay, bringing out the relational value of the idea of human dignity. Based on this particular focus, the idea of human dignity assumes a form of critical thinking that makes us sensitive to the real inequalities between human beings and opens the possibility of ethical and political practices of recognition and emancipation.

Religious Rituals as Civil hexis

Abstract In their attempt to question the assumption that rituals are merely symbolic, Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood tried to show that rituals have functioned as instruments. In Asad’s study of medieval Christianity and Mahmood’s work on mosque women, rituals function to make selves. These instrumentalist readings stand outside the usual modernist representational readings. For these anthropologists, the distinction between representational and instrumental understandings of rituals seems to be very clear. Nationalist modernist readings of Islamic rituals seem to confirm the representational logic, which apparently falls entirely outside the instrumental framework. In this paper, I intend to disturb this clear-cut distinction, and demonstrate that in many occasions the instrumental understanding is preceded by a representational interpretation, while the representational may, in turn, help create a civil subject. My evidences come from the Iranian Islamic literature in 1960s and 70s, viz. Mortaza Motahhari, Ali Shariʾati, Mehdi Barzargan, and the authors of Maktab-e Islam monthly. Although some of these intellectuals emphasized the instrumental nature of rituals in making the pious subject, others proposed different rationalizations—medical benefit, collective solidarity and order, and existential meaning. For these thinkers or their audience, there was no clear distinction between these justifications. It is true that many of them had a representational logic; but they contributed to making a proper civil subject. Hence, the instrumental-representational binary cannot always be maintained. Asad’s and Mahmood’s critiques of anthropological readings of rituals have yet to be qualified to take into account the prior interpretations and theological context of religious rituals, to highlight the conflation of the representational and instrumental frameworks in many modern rituals, and to note that deciding on the instrumentality of a particular ritual is not only significant when it is about constructing the interior of the private self, but may be involved in building larger communities.

Towards an ethics of reading Muslims: encountering difference in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethics of reading across difference in a secular literary marketplace that is invested in representations of Muslims. Focusing on Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017), it considers how this high-profile novel anticipates and negotiates the pressures of anthropological reading practices, including in its representation of the ‘veiled' Muslim woman, and highlights the novel's concern with the sensory everyday - especially the aural - as a means of bypassing the violence of surveillance and the visual more broadly in connecting with others. By examining the characters' encounters, the article considers how Home Fire negotiates its implied reader's encounter with the text. It argues that while the novel's success lies partly in its use of spectacular images of Muslims, its overt theatricality in fact opens up a space beyond the frame within which Muslims are normatively seen or read, and enables a reading encounter that resists an easy consumption of difference. Through its analysis of Shamsie's novel, the article explores the possibility of building through reading a ‘differentiated solidarity’ (Iris Marion Young) - connections forged across lines of difference that nevertheless respect and retain the distinction of that difference - and thereby intervenes in debates about the ethics of writing and reading others.

The way towards a new clinical anthropology: affectivity and corporality in erwin straus's work

From a hermeneutic reading of the phenomenological anthropology of Erwin Straus, current work seeks to explain the original meaning of affectivity and corporality, as constituting modalities of the relation between human existence and its world. On the first term, through a critical-historical reconsideration of certain propositions of scientific psychology and their philosophical foundations, the aim is to go back to the origin of human condition, deformed by interpretations founded on suppositions a priori, uncovering it. Precisely, opposite to current naturalistic psychology, fades off the ontological difference between man and things, from a perspective as Straus', the incarnated subjectivity, which feels itself when it feels something else, is proposed as the primary object of study of psychological science; its own action is exposed continuously to other influences, therefore, its intrinsic vulnerability. The present analysis allows us to establish a new frame, both for the future experimental investigations and for the comprehension of the experience of the alienated man. Indeed, Straus' phenomenological anthropology allows us to break off the three dualisms that support contemporary investigations of corporality and affectivity: subject-object, receptivity-activity, interior-exterior. Secondly, psychopathologies are understood as different modalities of I-world relations, fully significative in which the impossibility of existence to decide on the course of his biography prevails.

Etnografia w archiwum. Chłopskie podania o ziemię poniemiecką w gminie Łazisko w centralnej Polsce. Antropologiczny przyczynek do Historii Alternatywnej reformy rolnej (1944)

The article – by probing / pipetting method – presents the Polish peasants’ applications for former German land in the Łazisko commune from the period of land reform (1944). It opens a problem area and shows that the ethnographic / anthropological reading of documents, which are peasant applications for land, attempts to illuminate an old problems with a new light. The article is a contribution to the Alternative History of land reform, the axis of which is to examine the peasant experience of land reform in the context of relations with German settlers who disappeared from the common local cultural landscape. The alternativity or anthropology of the approach used is based on: shifting the perspective from a macro historic to a micro historic one, focusing on documents located on the border of formality and informality (objectivity and subjectivity, facts and sphere of emotions), deriving history from national borders (for the purpose of focusing on universal suffering), the discourse of counter-history.

Narrativas y etnografías para el escenario post-ETA: una lectura de la película Gazta Zati Bat

En este trabajo realizo una lectura antropológica etnográficamente informada de la intertextualidad simbólica de la película Gazta Zati Bat. Este documental vasco estrenado en el año 2012 narra una serie de historias personales y políticas encadenadas en torno de un movimiento social que nace cinco años antes en un pequeño pueblo guipuzcoano, cuyos miembros trabajan por la autodeterminación a través de producir e incorporar contenido al “Derecho a decidir” inspirados por el modelo escocés. El artículo focaliza en la construcción de agencia política considerando la creación de un nuevo escenario soberanista pacífico y argumenta que iniciativas como esta producción cultural permiten repensar ejes analíticos acerca del conflicto vasco.

La parole entre croyance et savoir, impasses subjectives en soins palliatifs

Based on a cross-disciplinary analysis — carried out by a medical doctor and a psychologist — as well as a psychoanalytical, philosophical, and ethnological reading of a clinical case encountered by both authors in a palliative care service, we identify and explore some of the issues related to speech and to the relationship of care in the particular context of the end-of-life period. Our reflections have led us to explore the following points. In some cases, serious and incurable diseases are diagnosed and announced to patients before they have experienced it in their own bodies. At this stage, the disease therefore only exists on the basis of an interpretation of biological and radiological test results, provided by a “knowing figure.” In this specific context, we question the stakes and effects of this person's discourse, which absolutely contradicts the patient's permanent and continuous bodily experience. Throughout the stages of a serious disease, physical pain can have a range of different effects. On a relational level, it can represent a kind of screen onto which the existential suffering of the patient is projected and communicated to others in complaints. Simultaneously, in terms of the patient's psychic economy, this pain sucks up all the available energy, like a black hole, and thus considerably impoverishes the subject's self. We propose to study pain during the end-of-life period in terms of the functions it could perform, in response to the subjective impasses with which palliative care patients may be confronted. Finally, an anthropological reading raises the question of “voodoo death” and of the doctor's shamanic position — particularly in palliative care —, which we found to be relevant theoretical illustrations of how some patients can heed and believe a knowing figure's words. Some acts, words, or attitudes towards the palliative care patient may be experienced by the subject or their loved ones as a prediction of their imminent death, leaving little room for the desire to participate in life and hindering the opportunity to project oneself into a possible future.

Dead missionaries, wild Sentinelese: An anthropological review of a global media event

This article aims to shed light on the background to a media event that occupied the world press, and even more the digital media, for a few weeks at the end of last year. The trope of the violent ‘murder’ of a white missionary by one of the last ‘uncontacted tribes’ is likely to evoke a variety of Western projections. Ultimately, it is about power over images, interpretations and how we want to behave towards isolated groups of people in today’s world: leave them alone? Protect them from the culture of violence at the fringe of their territories or contact them now and support them in the long term? An anthropological reading of the case does not lead to a simple answer to this question, but it might help in getting a more informed perspective on a complex subject matter.

The history and future of Kham: Perspectives based on a historical anthropological reading of Alai's four novels

Up to the present, the distinguished Tibetan writer, Alai, has published four full-length novels – King Gesar, Nyarong (Zhandui), Red Poppies, and the Hollow Mountain series – which have, to a great extent, shaped outsiders’ impressions of Kham, or Eastern Tibet, one of the three traditional divisions of ‘cultural Tibet’ or ‘ethnographical Tibet’. Based on a historical anthropological perspective, this article examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of Kham history reflected in these four novels. On the one hand, it shows how the native Khampa's senses of space, referring to surrounding political entities, changed first from an ancient model of ‘four regimes in four directions’, then to a dual model of the central Han and local Tibetan polities on opposing sides during late Imperial China and the Republican Period, and finally to the unitary model of a single central government in the contemporary period. In addition, this article shows how Khampa have experienced changing senses of time, from circulatory Tibetan Buddhist time to the dynastic time of Chinese Empires to modern linear time. Beyond revealing the transformations in the spatial and temporal senses of the Khampa people, Alai also implicitly describes the alternative models in Sino-Tibetan relations as both historical reality and ideality: Spatially, in the process of forced integration, Han Chinese and Tibetan people have simultaneously experienced ethnic distinction, which has been recognized by elite Khampa agents; Temporally, free borderland markets, acting in the role of historical transcendence, have been protective and under control, especially for the sake of the Tibetan side. The above narratives are both empirical facts and Alai's expectations and construction. On the one hand, as an ethnic-minority writer and native speaker (Tibetan dialect rGyalrong), Alai loves his fellow Tibetans and tends to understand their conditions from the bottom up; on the other hand, raised in a peripheral Tibetan village near a Han area, educated in modern Mandarin schools and a Mandarin college, and unable to practice writing in his mother language, Alai has a conception of history that has been generated from the top down. It is easy to understand how, faced with issues of frontiers and ethnic minorities, native elites like Alai are quite likely to develop a historical construction of literary complexity. This complexity further diversifies outsiders' impressions of Tibet.

Decolonising cosmopolitanism: An anthropological reading of Immanuel Kant and Kwame Nkrumah on the world as one

This article offers an anthropological reading of the works of Immanuel Kant and Kwame Nkrumah. By doing so it seeks to expose the Eurocentric and racist ontology that lies behind dominant contemporary forms of cosmopolitanism. The article draws attention to the possibility of a more egalitarian vision of the “world as one” that can be derived from the perspective of an African philosophical viewpoint. Rather than regarding African social theory as a subordinate or subaltern mode of apprehending the world, it places African philosophy on a par with European traditions of philosophical thought. By focusing on some of the central tenets of cosmopolitanism, it argues that Nkrumah, by insisting on freedom and equality for all of humanity, had articulated a more genuinely cosmopolitan ontology than any that can be derived from the philosophy of Kant. The article argues that an engagement with critical anthropology enables us to imagine forms of decolonised cosmopolitanism which are genuinely both inclusive and egalitarian.

Basic human needs as values: exploring John Dewey’s normative perspective on social philosophy

O projeto de John Dewey sobre a filosofia social não tem sido considerado como uma peça importante de seu pensamento. Entretanto, seus textos sobre esse tópico constituem um notável esforço para articular diversos novos conceitos e ideias, os quais não podem ser encontrados em outra parte de sua extensa obra filosófica. Inserida nesse contexto, a nova edição de suas “Palestras em filosofia política e social” – série de palestras que Dewey apresentou quando esteve na China – fornece um material único para revisar seu ponto de vista social. Levando-se em consideração que o pragmatista introduz uma “figura normativa” e que ele identifica um conjunto de necessidades humanas básicas de maneira a compreender plenamente esse critério normativo. Como hipótese, considero (i) que a filosofia social está principalmente associada com juízos práticos e (ii) que é plausível interpretar essas necessidades humanas básicas como valores. Para sustentar essas afirmações, primeiro, reconstruo a proposta de Dewey sobre um terceiro tipo de pensamento social. Segundo, examino sua posição sobre valores e normas. Terceiro, analiso a “figura normativa” e considero a “leitura antropológica” apresentada por Roberto Frega (2015). Por fim, ofereço uma análise complementar, argumentando que é possível explicar o padrão normativo de Dewey de maneira coerente com respeito aos propósitos do seu pensamento social – e, além disso, que é possível evitar qualquer compromisso essencialista.

Dom na wsi. Antropologiczna lektura palimpsestów etnicznych: zamieszkanie i zadomowienie

The author’s reflections are carried out on three interconnected planes. On the first plane, the author attempts to demonstrate that the metaphorical concept of a palimpsest, which in anthropology is almost paradigmatically referred to cities and their spaces, may just as successfully be applied to the countryside and to rural space. A house in the country, just as a house in a city, located in an ethnically marked space – a formerly-German house, for instance – may then be viewed as an ethnic palimpsest delineated by the complexity of history and the logic of culture. At the second plane of his reflections, the author attempts to show that an anthropological reading of a house as an ethnic palimpsest is the reading (i.e. the search for and analysis) of particular combinations of trace-objects. This reading must, in addition, be twofold, penetrating deep into the layers of the palimpsest which came to overlap with the passage of time, and concurrently moving on its surface structures in search of involutions. This approach conforms with Sarah Dillon’s conception of combining palimpsestic reading with palimpsestuous reading. On the third plane, taking as his example two adjacent formerly-German houses in the village of Cekcyn in the Tuchola Forest and the histories of two families that have migrated there, the author shows the applicability of this method of reading in the analysis of two types of habitation: one that results in a failure to achieve a sense of settlement and one that produces the feeling of being successfully settled. His reading of ethnic palimpsests constituted by these countryside houses is based mainly on narratives of memory which reflect settlement processes that took place in the Tuchola Forest after the Second World War, that is – in the histories of these Polish families – the episode of their settling in houses that formerly belonged to German residents

The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws by Marcus Folch

Reviewed by: The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws by Marcus Folch Susan Sauvé Meyer Marcus Folch. The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xiii + 386 pp. Cloth, $82. Plato's last dialogue, Laws, investigates the goals, method, and history of legislation, and applies the results of this study to the task of formulating the constitution and the law code for a new city to be founded on Crete. Musical performance will be ubiquitous in this "city of the Magnesians" (860e); it is the medium by which the legislator cultivates and sustains the desirable character traits of the citizens in a busy calendar of religious festivals; its educational importance is underwritten by a psychological theory; and a theory of literary criticism identifies the criteria for selecting the works to be performed, along with the social institution (the "Chorus of Dionysus") in which that criticism is to be practiced. It is this "performance culture" of Magnesia that is the focus of Folch's study. In contrast to recent anthropological readings of the Laws that treat Plato's text as evidence for ancient practices of chorality, Folch stresses that Plato's project is normative; its aim is not simply to report but to improve upon contemporary practice. Rather than reconstruct ancient practices of musical performance from Plato's text, Folch seeks to identify the ways in which Plato's blueprint for Magnesia repurposes and revises the musical genres and gender norms of his Greek contemporaries, as well as the contours of the ideal city of the Republic. In one of the many memorable phrases in the book, "Magnesia is a palimpsest of Platonic thought and ancient practice, at once in conversation with Plato's earlier works and in a dialectic with the cultural fabric from which the second-best city is woven" (42). A substantial introductory chapter gives an excellent précis of the content and structure of the Laws and situates it in relation to the Republic and to the fourth-century political and intellectual context in which Plato is writing. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the theory of "performativity" that informs Folch's analysis and then discusses the interlocking psychological, educational, and aesthetic doctrines that underwrite the central role accorded to musical performance in the lives of Magnesia's citizens. The latter nexus of doctrines has drawn significant attention recently from philosophers working on the Laws, who will find much to agree with in Folch's well-informed and textually detailed discussion, and in particular the prominence he accords to comparisons with the Phaedrus (a welcome change from the more usual comparisons with the Republic). I confess that I found the analytical framework of "performativity" rather hard going and unduly jargon-laden; its upshot for our understanding of the Platonic doctrines, as far as I could tell, is that musical performance is not just [End Page 717] expressive of civic thoughts and ideals, but plays a role in shaping and sustaining the characters of citizens and civic institutions. While the speech act theory developed by Austin and Grice in the 1950s continues to have a lasting impact in contemporary analytical philosophy of language and mind (see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/#Bib), it has not generally been embraced as a useful tool of analysis by historians of philosophy. (For a philosophical polemic against the use to which the theory has been put by literary scholars, see D. Gorman, "The Use and Abuse of Speech-act Theory in Criticism," Poetics Today 20 (1999) 93–119). Chapter 2 addresses the principles of literary criticism to be practiced in the city of Magnesia by the Chorus of Dionysus, whose membership and function are explained in Book 2. Folch contrasts that model of literary criticism with the anarchic and anti-authoritarian mode of criticism ascribed to contemporary Athens in the fanciful "history" of Athenian literary criticism offered in Book 3 (700a–701b). We are not to read this alarmist lament of declining critical standards and crumbling generic boundaries as an accurate history, Folch argues, but rather as a polemic against what Plato...

Understanding skill, food and field

ABSTRACTBuilding on an epistemological reading of anthropology as a field-based social science, I argue in favour of ethnography, namely a reflexive field-based practice and a defining methodology for anthropology. I introduce the methodology of ‘comparing by context’ as a way of rigorously translating the experience of apprenticeship in the field into forms of social learning and of understanding. I argue that practising anthropology as an ethnographer is a matter of negotiating the pendulum between participant observation – a form of apprenticeship in the field – and anthropological understanding.