1,721,002 research outputs found
Gamlin, Jennie, SahraGibbon, Paola M.Sesia & LinaBerrio (eds). Critical medical anthropology: perspectives in and from Latin America. 312 pp., illus., bibliogrs. London: UCL Press, 2020. £22.99 (paper)
No full textAnthropology as a global discipline still reflects power inequities between world regions, where the institutional weight of scholarship produced in Anglo-Saxon universities often leads to a lack of awareness of and engagement with the rich diversity of research which is produced in other languages and countries. This is the premise which the authors of this edited volume acknowledge and aim to challenge, by introducing the result of a collaborative effort which connects researchers working on contemporary medical anthropology in Latin America and based in the United Kingdom and some Latin American countries. The collaboration is presented as being institutional, theoretical, and empirical, and is inspired by the theoretical contribution of Latin American critical medical anthropology (CMA), both historical and contemporary, to medical anthropology, especially in the United Kingdom. This is a welcome endeavour, and one can only hope for more initiatives of this kind to be developed in the years to come
The Other's Other: Nurturing the Bodies of 'Wild' People among the Trio of Southern Suriname
No full textIn this article, based on recent ethnographic and archival research, we explore the ramifications of an Amerindian perspective on contemporary savagery. We contend that the cannibalistic wajiarikure (‘wild people’) encapsulate powerful parallels with the wild man of the western imagination. What distinguishes Amerindian savagery from its western counterpart is not so much that fact that it is reversible: the savage in the forest – the man of the woods in the woods – is master, for the western savage is also ambiguous in a similar sense. What really distinguishes them is the kind of nurture that is used to tame and civilize the savage: if western missionaries try to transform the savage mind, Amerindians try to transform the savage body
Securitization, alterity, and the state: Human (in)security on an amazonian frontier
No full textFocusing on the region surrounding the Maroni River, which forms the border between Suriname and French Guiana, we examine how relations between different state and non-state social groups are articulated in terms of security. The region is characterised by multiple "borders" and frontiers of various kinds, the state boundary having the features of an interface or contact zone. Several key collectivities meet in this border zone: native Amazonians, tribal Maroon peoples, migrant Brazilian gold prospectors, and metropolitan French state functionaries. We explore the relationships between these different sets of actors and describe how their mutual encounters center on discourses of human and state security, thus challenging the commonly held view of the region as a stateless zone and showing that the "human security" of citizens from the perspective of the state may compete with locally salient ideas or experiences of well-being
Narratives of the invisible autobiography, kinship, and alterity in native Amazonia
No full textShamanic knowledge is based on an ambiguous commensality with invisible others. As a result, shamans oscillate constantly between spheres of intimacy, both visible and invisible. A place of power and transformation, the spirit world is rarely described by native interlocutors in an objective, detached way; rather, they depict it in terms of events and experiences. Instead of examining the formal qualities of accounts of the spirit world through analyses of ritual performance and shamanic quests, we focus on life histories as autobiographical accounts in order to explore what they reveal about the relationship between personal history (and indigenous historicity) and the spirit world. We introduce the term ‘double reflexivity’ to refer to processes by which narratives about the self are produced through relationships with alterity
Indigenous networks and evangelical frontiers : problems with governance and ethics in cases of 'voluntary isolation' in contemporary Amazonia
Full text linkThe periodic emergence of indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in Amazonia have given rise to sensational media reports and heated academic debate. In this chapter we describe briefly the historical and contemporary relations between indigenous peoples in and out of isolation in the Guiana Shield region of North-eastern South America and discuss the role of indigenous missionaries in histories of contact. After considering these facts in relation to some of the general debates about isolated peoples and policy, we assess the ethical dimensions of the question of emergence from isolation
Humanity, personhood and transformability in Northern Amazonia
No full textIn this chapter we offer an explanation of the difference between humanity and personhood based on observations of the importance given by native Amazonians to a certain capacity of subjects to transform themselves. This implies that humanity is a power to be feared as well as to be cultivated, and represents a challenge to the traditional view of human beings as constituting a convivial community synonymous with kinship. Meanwhile, it supports previous theoretical interpretations of the Amazonian social subject as lacking a centre, not only a hybrid but also composed of recursive or nested oppositions corresponding to the relationship between consanguinity and affinity
Hosting the dead : forensics, ritual and the memorialisation of migrant human remains in Italy
Full text linkDans cet article, nous examinerons, sous l’angle de l’hospitalité, le traitement post mortem des migrants non identifiés qui périssent en tentant de traverser la Méditerranée, depuis l’Albanie et l’Afrique du Nord jusqu’en Italie. Le nombre croissant de décès de migrants dans le monde, en particulier en Méditerranée, a suscité un grand nombre d’études, qui reposent généralement sur une herméneutique de justice transitionnelle laïque et de transnationalisme fraternel. À l’appui d’une recherche de terrain menée sur le long terme dans plusieurs régions du Sud de l’Italie, nous suivrons une approche alternative, en proposant une interprétation tant des opérations de récupération spontanées et planifiées des dépouilles, que des pratiques mortuaires, y compris des procédures d’identification médico-légales et des inhumations individuelles et collectives. L’accueil des étrangers morts se manifeste à différentes échelles : il prend la forme d’une commémoration à forte connotation politique au niveau de l’État et de la communauté locale, où grâce à de initiatives ponctuelles des cimetières leur sont dédiés ; cependant, alors que les pratiques de commémoration des étrangers morts soulignent le statut de ceux-ci en tant que catégorie collective, les technologies médico-légales d’identification sont orientées vers la reconstruction du caractère (in)divisible de la personne. Ces processus rituels et technologiques de mémorialisation et de rattachement réveillent ensemble les fantômes du passé fasciste et colonial de l’Italie.In this article we consider the afterlife of the remains of unidentified migrants who have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Albania and North Africa to Italy. Drawing on insights from long term, multi-sited field research, we outline paths taken by human remains and consider their multiple agencies and distributed personhood through the relational modalities with which they are symbolically and materially engaged at different scales of significance. The rising number of migrant deaths related to international crossings worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean, has stimulated a large body of scholarship, which generally relies upon a hermeneutics of secular transitional justice and fraternal transnationalism. We explore an alternative approach by focusing on the material and ritual afterlife of unidentified human remains at sea, examining the effects they have on their hosting environment. The treatment of dead strangers (across the double threshold constituted by the passage from life to death on the one hand, and the rupture of exile on the other) raises new questions for the anthropology of death. We offer an interpretation of both ad hoc and organised recovery operations and mortuary practices, including forensic identification procedures, and collective and single burials of migrant dead, as acts of hospitality. Hosting the dead operates at different scales : it takes the politically charged form of memorialisation at the levels of the state and the local community ; however, while remembrance practices for dead strangers emphasise the latter’s status as a collective category, forensic technologies of remembrance are directed towards the reconstruction of (in)dividual personhood. These ritual and technological processes of memorialisation and re-attachment together awaken ghosts of Italian fascism and colonialism
Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, animals, plants and things in contemporary Amazonia and Siberia
No full textAmazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged "western" understandings of man"s place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also "things" such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, this volume offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas. The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processes of their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity
Introduction : altering ownership in Amazonia
No full textThis book revolves around two concepts: ownership and nurture. The objective is twofold: on one hand, it is an attempt to bring into dialogue (and into tension) these concepts such as they appear in the anthropological literature and such as they are expressed in indigenous practices and concepts; on the other hand, it is to articulate them, investigating the practical and emotional nexus between ownership and nurture that exists in native Amazonia. The idea of nurture has been explored in the ethnography of this region since the end of the 1980s, especially through processual studies of kinship. A rich literature has grown around notions such as care, feeding and commensality, focusing on the processes through which identity and kinship are constituted. The fundamental vector of identification here is food, the artefact par excellence of culture. In contrast, until recently indigenous Amazonia appeared refractory to the notions of ownership and mastery. This image results as much from the theoretical options available as from empirical phenomena with their own historicity. A substantial part of the ethnographic record of Amazonia coincides with the demographic nadir of the indigenous peoples since the beginning of the Conquest. This was reached between the 1940s and the 1960s, and the reversal of the downward trend began only from the 1970s onwards. A large number of the studies written towards the end of the 20th century reflect to a large extent this historical moment, during which indigenous Amazonia was characterized by small, mutually isolated populations, which resulted from the breakdown of native social networks through the process of colonization (Fausto and Heckenberger 2007). At the time, this historical situation was seen as corresponding to an original state expressing an essential characteristic of Amazonian societies: their aversion to power, to hierarchy and, of course, to property. It was this conjuncture between a historical situation and an anthropological imaginary that made Amazonia seem a terra nullius for the concepts of ownership and mastery
The ethics of anthropology
No full textThe early history of professional anthropology is characterized by chronic ambivalence between, on one hand, participation in colonial rule (providing insights into native social and political organization) and in postcolonial economic domination (helping to overcome perceived “cultural barriers to development”) and, on the other hand, the role of culturally informed “conscience” of Western powers (revealing and denouncing social injustices and vulgar misrepresentations of exotic alterity). From the 1970s, anthropology’s critical role gradually became dominant among academic practitioners. A reflexive, critical approach to field research thus emerged from within the discipline years before the institutionalization of research ethics discourses and protocols. As funding bodies and universities came to introduce formal ethics protocols largely derived from regulations developed in relation to medical research in the 1980s, professional anthropologists first responded with irony and resistance. This was not only because the discipline had invested considerable energy over many years in questioning and reevaluating the position of the researcher and the consequences of her actions but also because the generic expectations of ethics protocols were poorly suited to a discipline based on long-term immersive field research. Anthropological departments, careers, and scholarship were built over decades of professional involvement in field research and had developed distinctive but informal protocols based on a long-standing tradition of working across regional, cultural, and social divides. We argue that the best basis for any ethics of the discipline lies in continued reflection on case studies of ethical dilemmas in anthropological research and that special attention should be paid to data ownership and protection, consent, and the treatment of incidental findings
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