Readings In Anthropology Research Articles

“¿Es la "demokratía" semejante a la democracia? Lecturas contemporáneas de la democracia ateniense

En este artículo analizaré dos importantes aproximaciones contemporáneas a la democracia ateniense. Se trata de las interpretaciones enfrentadas de dos helenistas que han arrojado nueva luz sobre el conocimiento de la democracia clásica. Mogens H. Hansen se ha centrado especialmente en el estudio de las instituciones como fundamento del poder democrático, mientras Josiah Ober, basándose en los textos retóricos, pretende reconstruir la ideología popular a la que hace responsable del dominio político del dêmos sobre la elite. Intentaré, a su vez, trazar las líneas de filiación teórica de ambas posturas y, para ello, abordaré una segunda cuestión, la de qué es la polis griega, un estado o una sociedad sin estado. Mi conclusión es que la lectura de Hansen está muy cercana a la historiografía liberal de G. Grote, mientras que la de Ober no es ajena a las lecturas antropológicas y comunitaristas.

Identity and Multilingualism. An Anthropological Reading of the Representation of Alterity in Literary Katabasis

Summary In a global and multilingual society, indubitable is the importance of a reflection on the Self and the Other as defined by language. This interdisciplinary study aims at investigating, the narrative reinvention of the theoretical principles involved in the definition of the anthropological identity as expounded by Francesco Remotti. Specifically, we analyse a centenary trend in European literature identifying a peculiar form of multilingualism with the non-human and the lack of identity. From Dante’s Inferno to Joyce’s The cat and the Devil, the netherworld, its inhabitants and captives are characterized by the use of several (usually not intelligible) languages. According to this literary cliché, while the clarity and precision of a single language contributes to define a human identity, the plurality of languages is often a sign of a lost identity and of not being human anymore. It is not by chance that the verses of Dante ‘There sighs and wails and piercing cries of woe/ […] Strange languages, and frightful forms of speech,/ words caused by pain, accents of anger, voices/ both loud and faint’ are echoed in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. Multilingualism is the central point in Levi’s memories from the time spent in a concentration camp where ‘languages absolutely not understandable [...], the orders shouted in languages [we] were not able to recognize’ and the ‘endless Babel where everyone is shouting’ symbolize the lost human condition. Both the damned souls and the prisoners of the camp are not human anymore because they have lost their language and, with it, their identity. In our study, the comparative and hermeneutic analysis of the narrative and lexical choices adopted to represent multilingualism in European literature reveals a strong connection between human identity and the purity of language intended as a manifestation of human rationality. On the contrary, a number of recurrent diegetic choices and figures of speech seem to define the non-human as a multilingual world characterized by sighs, wails and strange languages, like the Bellsybable of Joyce’s devil.

Finding women and gender in the sources: toward a historical anthropology of Ottoman Tripoli

ABSTRACTThis article offers an anthropological reading of Ottoman sources on Libya to shed light on the history of women in Islamic contexts while addressing key issues of gender, power, and representation in history writing. It features the potential of a method that, while illuminating the presence of women in a variety of archival and textual Ottoman sources, questions the gendered nature of their representations as historical subjects. In so doing, the article contributes to current debates on history writing and articulates the perspective of a scholar of Women's History in the Islamic context. The article first outlines some of the challenges that have been identified and tackled by feminist historians over recent decades as for the search for sources in which women's lives can be retraced. It then introduces the main sources that were used in the research – a civic chronicle and a petition – and proposes more general reflections on method in historical research, in which the possibility of tracking women's life journeys in predominantly masculine sources is critically explored. Finally, a series of female figures emerging from such sources as for the case of Ottoman Tripoli (North-Africa) is studied, with an effort of reflection on social typologies and categories in which women were often reduced to clichéd characters like the Wife, the Widow, the Slave, and the Prostitute.

Exil, värld och litterärt arbete

Exile, World, and Literary Work. An Anthropological Reading of Three Swedish Narratives from Siberia
 This article is an exploration of exile, world, and literary work. I investigate these themes through a reading of early twentieth century narratives of Siberian exile. Since the publication of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House (1861–62), stories of banishment and prison life in Siberia have evolved into a prominent subgenre of Russian literature. My perspective is different. Rather than relating the texts in focus to Russian literature, I approach them instead as parts of an extensive world literature on travel and exile. More specifically, I focus on three texts written in Swedish: Ivar Hasselblatt, Förvisad till Sibirien (1917; ”Banished to Siberia”), an autobiography about arrest, deportation, and exile; Elsa Brändström, Bland krigsfångar i Ryssland och Sibirien 1914–1920 (1921; ”Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia 1914–1920”), an eye witness account from Siberian prison camps during the first world war; and Ester Blenda Nordström, Byn i vulkanens skugga (1930; ”The Village in the Shadow of the Volcano”), a personal ethnography about village life in Kamchatka. In my reading of these narratives, I explore literary representations of exile in relation to the anthropological problem ”of how to translate knowing into telling,” as Hayden White puts it. This is also the point where world literature and anthropology converge: through worldmaking literary work.

The Specter of the Primitive.

Traditional psychoanalytic theories of development hold that the adult neurotic can regress, or has already regressed, to the childhood arrests and/or fixations in which his pathology originated. More recent critiques have called this possibility into question. It is unlikely that anyone can roll back the additions and modifications of lifespan development in a full-fledged return to the needs, wishes, and anxieties of childhood. By regression, though, some analysts mean not a full-fledged return to an earlier developmental phase, but a non-phase-specific slip into primitive fantasies and defenses. The operational term, in this particular variation, is not regression but primitive. The shift from the depressive to the paranoid-schizoid position is, for instance, considered not a phase-specific regression but a regression to primitive forms of mentation. The psychoanalytic conception of the primitive originated in Freud's reading of late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology. Freud and later Klein believed that the neurotic regresses to a psychological childhood, which in turn preserves the thought patterns of our prehistoric ancestors. Although this proposition and the underlying principle of recapitulation have been disproven, its traces are nonetheless preserved in what are termed the primary processes and primitive defenses. A tradition of theoretical critique and developmental research, however, shows that the primary processes and primitive defenses are not in fact primitive. That is, they are neither evolutionarily nor developmentally primary in human life. By implication, psychoanalysis should discard the term primitive and adopt a lifespan approach to the processes it describes.

Justice as the sacred in language: Durkheim and Habermas on the ultimate grounds of modernity and critique

The article reconstructs the double movement of departure and return to Emile Durkheim’s sociology that Jürgen Habermas realized in his work in order to define the theoretical paradigm of communicative action and revive the original project of Critical Theory. It highlights, in the first part, how Habermas first used Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life to assign a phylogenetic function to ritual practices and explain modernity, from an evolutionist perspective, as the final result of a progressive linguistification of the sacred, having substituted the communion of minds in rites with the communication of reasons in the public sphere. After having discussed the two main objections that Habermas addressed to Durkheim at the time of The Theory of Communicative Action, the second part shows how he recently revised his rationalist framework through a new anthropological reading of The Elementary Forms, aimed at demonstrating, in the context of a more complex account of evolution, why the requirement of justice discloses, even in modernity, the active presence of the sacred in language and orientates the critical work of reason in the search of solidarity. Pointing out the new directions in which the hypothesis of a linguistification of the sacred must be seriously revised, it ends by suggesting how the question of social justice may open the path to a positive cooperation between sociology and Critical Theory.

Anorexie mentale chez une fille de migrants chinois : apports de la psychiatrie transculturelle

BackgroundAnorexia nervosa has for a long time been considered to be an occidental culture bound syndrome, but it also exists in other cultural areas such as China. It has been diagnosed at migrant females of Asian origins as well. It should rather be considered as a syndrome linked with rapid social changes or appearing during migration. We question the way cultural factors and transcultural factors, culture clash or acculturation are entangled in this pathology. MethodWe analyzed the clinical situation of an anorexic teenager, Laure, the daughter of Chinese immigrants in France, with the qualitative method of thematic analysis and with the tools provided by a transcultural clinic: a psychiatric and anthropological reading. ResultsFour themes were identified that seemed linked to Laure's anorexia development: acculturation, culture clash, identity construction, and family difficulties. This clinical situation is quite unique because of its history, her strong resistance to being cared for, and also because transcultural and cultural factors are entangled. DiscussionLaure's acculturation could be responsible for two atypical symptoms of anorexia nervosa, as compared with those occurring among Chinese anorexic girls: fat phobia and denial about thinness. Laure's difficulties encountered with her first name, the fact that she refused to learn the Chinese language and her atypical food restriction on Chinese food show intense internal conflicts. Laure meets difficulties with her self-esteem and identity construction which could be linked to the vulnerability induced by migration and also by the effects of racism from which she suffered. The construction of the parents-child relationship and in-between siblings could be more complex in a migration context because of cultural and family breaks it leads to. For instance, migration could result in different acculturation features inside the family or in a culture clash. Consequently, it could be suggested in such a clinical case to provide specific care: transcultural care associated with other forms of care such as individual and familial care. ConclusionTranscultural factors, acculturation and cultural identity conflicts could weaken identity construction and family ties and therefore be risk factors for developing anorexia nervosa among migrants’ children. Transcultural approach is then essential for a better understanding of these disorders, for improving therapeutic alliance, for a better care and for aiding with cultural mixing.

La apicultura del valle central chileno como práctica de conservación socialmente inclusiva en un contexto de escasez hídrica socialmente construida

Mediante un enfoque etnográfico que complementa conversaciones, recorridos y encuestas productivas, este estudio se adentra en la apicultura doméstica realizada en el valle de Colliguay, comuna de Quilpué, Quinta región de Chile. Esta es una actividad que emerge como resultado de profundas transformaciones detonadas por la neoliberalización de la naturaleza en general y del agua en particular. Por ello es que se busca contextualizar la situación de escasez hídrica que desplazó al ganado y puso en su lugar a las abejas mediante una lectura desde la ecología política. Se discute así sobre cómo realizar una lectura antropológica de los escenarios ecológicos que desnaturalicen las fracturas metabólicas que sufre una zona con amenazada presencia de bosque nativo. Se descubre que es el afuerino el responsable material y simbólico de un incremento en el estrés hídrico y pieza clave en las relaciones sociales de confrontación del valle. Se relata luego cómo las abejas han fomentado el interés y afecto hacia el bosque, reforzando así la idea de una conservación socialmente inclusiva.

An anthropological reading of the policies of international development: export competitiveness as a conjunctural case study

Drawing on ethnography of the World Bank’s private sector development program, this paper explores the ways in which discussions of export competitiveness emerged in the past decade or so and how they interacted with larger discourses on solidarity and development. The immediate context within which this idea emerged was that of the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) which had maintained that the public regulation of the private economy compromises on industrial productivity (and by extension distributive social justice). But it would be naive to think that alternative ideologies have not tried to insert themselves within the Bank’s neoliberal discourse on development. If anything, discursive narratives suggest that the very notion of export competitiveness initially worked to justify the role of the state in regulating and incubating the private sector in developing countries even if these attempts became disembedded from their local contexts in the long run. This paper contextualizes this specific encounter on export competitiveness within the broader discourse of development and economic anthropology to examine the discursive politics of policy and knowledge in the global aid industry.

‘Indo-Mauritians’ and the Indian Ocean: literacy accounts and anthropological readings

ABSTRACTStarting from a broad historical overview, and focusing on the main group in the Mauritian population (the Hindu descendants of indentured laborers), this paper goes through the many and changing narratives of indenture, as a ‘domesticating paradigm’ promoted in both literature and identity discourses. It deals with three connected questions, each helping us understand the relations between Mauritius and the Indian Ocean. First, is the issue of the links between so-called Indo-Mauritians and India, the territories their ancestors came from: have they been severed or enhanced? Second, comes the auto-representations and status of Mauritius: is it an ideal center-of-the-world, or a relegated island lost in the Indian Ocean? Third are the representations Indo-Mauritians have of their original migrations, through the crossing of the Indian Ocean. A final point notes the poor inclusion of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean compared with the powerful and exclusive link between India and Mauritius.

Plants and the Law: Vegetal Ontologies and the Rights of Nature. a Perspective from Latin America

For many Amazonian indigenous communities plants play a central political role within and outside their territories. Vegetal beings are considered a source of knowledge and authority, as well as the origin of law itself. This article addresses the social and legal agency of (vegetal) nonhuman beings in Latin American constitutionalism. I suggest that non-anthropocentric concepts of society, politics, and law should take seriously inter-species encounters, and how they unfold in legal norms, institutions, and practices. In the first section, I briefly discuss the emergence of the so called ‘nonhuman turn’ in the humanities, as well as its influence on what Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas calls the bio-centric turn in Latin American constitutionalism. An expression of this bio-centric turn, Article 71 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador 2008, grants rights to nature. In the second section, I offer two anthropological readings of this clause. I suggest that non-anthropocentric thinking in Latin American legal theory could help us to redefine concepts such as justice and standing, among others, to better face the environmental challenges of the present. Taking cues from the science of plant sensing and intelligence, I suggest, in the last section, that plants can serve as a sort of prototype of (vegetal) nonhuman agency that fully asserts Amerindian principles of relationality and interdependency between all living and nonliving entities. For this purpose, I will briefly refer to the use of an Amazonian ritual plant in the context of indigenous political and legal concepts.

Global Family Medicine: A 'UNIVERSAL' Mnemonic.

In this essay, I borrow the idea of universal precautions from infection control and suggest that family physicians use a set of considerations, based on the mnemonic UNIVERSAL, to nurture cultural humility, enter a metaphoric "space-in-between" in cross-cultural encounters, and foster global fluency. These UNIVERSAL considerations I base on my experiences in global family medicine, attending to economically poor and socially marginalized patients in both international and domestic settings. They are informed by readings in transcultural psychiatry, medical anthropology, development studies, and primary care. I invite others involved in global family medicine to reflect on what they have learned along their own professional paths, so as to enhance their therapeutic abilities as global family physicians, wherever they may be.

Primacía del Mediador. El hombre y Cristo en la teología de Henri de Lubac

The goal of the present study is to perform a christological reading of the theological anthropology developed by Henri de Lubac. The starting point is the vision of human nature as provided with a supernatural finality, a fact that allows one to speak about a certain «potentiality of mediation» in the human being. This potentiality, absolutely inefficient, receives its fulfillment in Christ, regarded as the Mediator between God and men. After the analysis of the figure of «Mediator» in the work of this French theologian, this article proposes a certain of understanding the relation between human nature, considered as a mediator in potency, and Christ’s unique mediation. In this proposal, the absolute primacy of the latter is emphasized.

KARL POLANYI AND THE REALITY OF SOCIETY

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social fact over and above the individuals that constitute it. The essay begins by tracing Polanyi's intellectual development, drawing primarily on the essays found in For a New West. Polanyi's quest to reconcile individual freedom with social solidarity led him first, in the years between the First and Second World Wars, to embrace liberal socialism, before his readings in anthropology persuaded him that traditional economies “embed” the economy in social relations and that the nineteenth-century liberal project of a “disembedded” economy (through the so-called free market) is a departure from this anthropological norm. The essay then examines and questions Block and Somers's claim that Polanyi maintained that the economy is always “already embedded,” arguing notably that Polanyi believed that the advent of market society entailed an economy that was actually disembedded from social relations, not merely one that was re-embedded in an alternative set of institutions.

A CONSTRUÇÃO SOCIAL DO FANDANGO COMO EXPRESSÃO CULTURAL POPULAR E TEMA DE ESTUDOS DE FOLCLORE

Resumo O artigo propõe um olhar antropológico sobre a profunda participação dos estudos de folclore e de categorias usadas por estes estudiosos nas construções de sentido e dinâmicas do fandango, expressão popular comum no litoral sul e sudeste brasileiro, especialmente nos estados do Paraná e de São Paulo. Revisitando obras e processos de pesquisa empreendidos por Mário de Andrade, Renato Almeida, Fernando Corrêa de Azevedo, Inami Custódio Pinto, Alceu Maynard Araújo, Rossini Tavares de Lima, entre outros, procuro elucidar, a partir do fandango, suas diferentes concepções e projetos no tratamento dado a questões, estratégias e práticas caras ao folclorismo, como patrimonialização, regionalismo, risco, rumor e resgate. Proponho ainda pensar sobre como tais autores articularam, cada um em seu tempo e a seu modo, os estudos de folclore com os campos das artes e das ciências sociais.

Omani Folk Tales: Anthropological Approach to Understand Social Culture Meanings

This study aims to provide an anthropological reading of some Omani folk tales and discusses them within their context and by their methodological dimensions. The study is also an attempt to classify folk tales. The research paper argues that folk tales have significant social and cultural semantics disclosed by the contents of their events. Folk tales have an important role in supporting the system of social values and cultural norms. Methodologically, this study is a descriptive research from an anthropological approach and uses its tools in the field study. The population study is located in the District of Bahla in the Governorate of Dakhlia. The results conclude that the content of the folk tales reveal the scope of the inherited norms and traditions and their vital role in supporting the social and cultural system, and in maintaining the folklore standards. Despite the threats to cultural values, new forms of folk tales representations in the cultural and artistic scene are taking place in the modern societal trends scene.

Omani Folk Tales: Anthropological Approach to Understand Social Culture Meanings

This study aims to provide an anthropological reading of some Omani folk tales and discusses them within their context and by their methodological dimensions. The study is also an attempt to classify folk tales. The research paper argues that folk tales have significant social and cultural semantics disclosed by the contents of their events. Folk tales have an important role in supporting the system of social values and cultural norms. Methodologically, this study is a descriptive research from an anthropological approach and uses its tools in the field study. The population study is located in the District of Bahla in the Governorate of Dakhlia. The results conclude that the content of the folk tales reveal the scope of the inherited norms and traditions and their vital role in supporting the social and cultural system, and in maintaining the folklore standards. Despite the threats to cultural values, new forms of folk tales representations in the cultural and artistic scene are taking place in the modern societal trends scene.

Appropriating Ancient Greek Myths: Strategies and Caveats

ABSTRACTIn her essay on Medusa (this issue) Doris Silverman proposes an anthropological reading of the myth in its times. She argues for its utility in psychoanalytic practice as a myth that illuminates the mother-daughter dynamic. She claims to be delving into the history of females at the time the myth became established and elaborated but mistakenly assigns the myth, which first appeared in art and literature of the Archaic Period (800–480 B.C.E.), to the Classical Period (480–323 B.C.E.). This error undermines the entire anthropological section of her article. Silverman’s essay moved me, as a classicist, to propose that anyone attempting to appropriate classical myths for psychoanalytic insight and practice (a) specify the version being analyzed and the context, if known, in which the myth arose or later resurfaced; (b) use classical scholarship on that myth judiciously; (c) avoid reductionism and over-generalization (e.g., “Greek women”); and (d) use clues or gaps within the text as a basis for subversive readings. With these cautionary strategies and caveats in mind, I pondered how a classicist and psychoanalyst might join forces, creatively and meaningfully, in an effort to fathom, animate, and appropriate ancient mythic figures and their stories.

Anthropological reading of science fiction

The paper gives an overview of the prevalence of the analysis of science fiction literature and science fiction in other segments of popular culture in Serbian anthropology. This overview is preceded by a consideration of science fiction as a genre while keeping in mind the fluidity of the genre and the interweaving of subgenres as well as the transformations which science fiction is undergoing in certain media (books, films, TV shows and video games). In Serbian anthropology research on science fiction is more prevalent than the study of other phenomena, as the number of anthropologists whose work is represented in the paper is fairly large compared to the size of the anthropological community as a whole. The causes for this can primarily be found in a collective focus on questions such as: who are we and who the others are, what the basis of creating and building identity is or what the role of context in recognition of species is. Anthropology gives answers to these questions through the interpretation, explanation and understanding of the world around us, while science fiction does it through the literary considerations of these same questions.

Embodiment and enculturation: the future of architectural design.

A half-century ago the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck encouraged designers to think about “space and time” not as abstractions in themselves but rather as cultural events better approached through the medium of “place and occasion.” Van Eyck made this point on the basis of his own travels and through his extensive readings in cultural anthropology, and his prescience is only now acquiring the credibility that it deserves through the work of a multitude of interdisciplinary researchers. Phenomenologists argue that we are embodied organisms-acting-within-environments, and these inhabiting abodes are constructed of both material and cultural dimensions. We are thus preeminently social in our range of self-consciousness, and intensely ceremonial in every facet of our being. Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists are currently locating the origin and development of our most basic social behaviors far in our pre-human past; neuroscientists are today modeling our social circuits in the deepest reaches of our brains. Architecture would gain much from an updated cultural theory grounded in these new models of human existence.