1,788 research outputs found
First contacts, slavery and kinship in Northeastern Amazonia
No full textThe Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo are Carib-speaking Amerindians of the border regions of Brazil, southern Suriname and southern French Guiana. We have carried out field research since 2003 in southern Suriname, in a predominantly Trio village shared with a number of Wayana and most of the surviving Akuriyo. A relationship of asymmetry has evolved between the Trio and Akuriyo since the late 1960s, although arguably from a native point of view these two populations have engaged in a relationship of mutual avoidance as far back as people can remember. Despite, or perhaps because of, the memory of prior encounters between them, the Trio and Akuriyo would probably have maintained their mutual avoidance longer, had it not been for the intervention of evangelical missionaries
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
Quarantine and the genesis of border controls
No full textVanessa Grotti is Director of the ERC-funded project 'EU Border Care', http://eubordercare.eu/Made available on 28 Feb 2020In this Schuman Short [Video], Professor Vanessa Grotti explains what 'Quarantine' means and how it was born as a technique of disease containment, and later developed as a form of border control
Introduction: Animism and invisible worlds: The place of non-humans in indigenous ontologies
No full textThe nature/culture dichotomy is part of the legacy of Western philosophy out of which modern social anthropology has grown, but the very emergence of the anthropology of nature, and its practice, have been dedicated precisely to deconstructing and discrediting the dyad with which they are concerned. This volume is dedicated to the cross-cultural study of relations between humans and nonhumans, and focusing on personhood allows us to avoid the trap of criticising the conventional nature/culture dyad without ever being able to escape its terms. Data on personhood in animistic societies have always raised questions about the supposed universal validity of the concept of nature, because they invariably demonstrate that nonhuman entities may be regarded as social persons
Nurturing the Other: First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia.
No full textCombining archival research, oral history and long-term ethnography, this book studies relations between Amerindians and outsiders such as American missionaries through a series of contact expeditions that led to the 'pacification' of three native Amazonian groups in Suriname and French Guiana. The author examines and contrasts Amerindian and non-Amerindian views on this process of social transformation through the lens of the body, notions of peacefulness and kinship, as well as native warfare and shamanism. The book addresses questions of change and continuity, and the little explored links between first contacts, capture and native conversion to Christianity in contemporary indigenous Amazonia
Hosting the Dead: Forensics, Ritual and the Memorialization of Migrant Human Remains in Italy
No full textIn this chapter 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 organized recovery operations and mortuary practices, including forensic identification procedures, and collective and single burials of dead migrants, as acts of hospitality. Hosting the dead operates at different scales: it takes the politically charged form of memorialization at the levels of the state and the local community; however, while remembrance practices for dead strangers emphasize the latter’s status as a collective category, forensic technologies of remembrance are directed toward the reconstruction of (in)dividual personhood. These ritual and technological processes of memorialization and re-attachment together awaken ghosts of Italian fascism and colonialism
Introduction: Mediterranean Migrant Hospitalities
No full textThis book takes some of the insights of the anthropology of hospitality to illuminate ethnographic accounts of migrant reception in various parts of the Mediterranean. Anthropology has revisited the concept of hospitality in recent years, drawing on the insights of ethnographers of the Mediterranean, who ground the idea and practice of hospitality in concrete ethnographic settings and challenge the ways in which the casual usage of Derridean or Kantian notions of hospitality can blur the boundaries between social scales and between metaphor and practice. Host-guest relations are multiplied through pregnancy and childbirth, and new forms emerge with the need to offer mortuary practices for dead strangers. The volume does not attempt to define a distinctive Mediterranean hospitality, but explores the potential of the concept of hospitality to illuminate the spatial and scalar dimensions of morality and politics in Mediterranean migrant reception
A Return to Life: Narratives of Birth and Death in a Southern European Periphery
No full textWhile death at sea has always been a reality for Mediterranean fishing communities, it loomed large in the 2010s with the growing intensity of migrant crossings from North Africa, mostly departing from Libya since the fall of its autocratic leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011, and in line with the increasing European restrictions on regular migration channels imposed since the 1990s.1 Local fishers now perish less often at sea, but these irregular crossings produce new victims, strangers to the island’s fishing community, construed officially as ‘migrants’ or ‘asylum seekers’, many of whom are women and children. During the 2010s, gateways into the European Union such as Lampedusa grew synonymous with media representations and political discourses of a ‘crisis’ of migration in the
Mediterranean, characterized as ‘archipelagos of melancholia’, surrounded
by a ‘watery grave’ (Sarnelli 2015: 150–51). Migrant maritime disasters
made a powerful mark on the public imagination in Italy and abroad, espe-
cially in Sicily, and most of all among those working in rescue and treat-
ment of passengers saved at sea, and in the handling of the remains of those who died. Often thousands of people were saved at sea by the coast guard in a single week, and after large disasters, such as those that occurred on 3 October 2013 and 19 April 2015, the emergency services must handle the remains of hundreds of victims (ANSA 2016; Marceca, Viviano and Ziniti 2015; Tervonen and Pourquié 2017). Survivors present serious physical and mental health conditions and complications related both to violence experienced on the trail and to the conditions of the crossing (Crepet et al. 2017; Grotti et al. 2008). Yet local people and migrants alike frequently emphasize the way that the passage of time and the succession of seasons and ecological processes can contribute to healing and to a return to life
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 Wealth of the Body: Trade Relations, Objects and Personhood in Northeastern Amazonia.
No full textThis article is an analysis of trade among the Trio (Suriname), and their relationship with objects and persons in their quest for manufactured goods. Based on data mostly collected in the Trio village of T ̈epu in southern Suriname, it discusses trade from the point of view of Amerindian sociality, with regard to the nature of the interpersonal relations involved. I examine trade through the prism of an Amerindian understanding of personhood, the body and materiality, and show how these relationships tend to be fabricated over a lifetime, eventually becoming an integral and material part of the actors involved. This is manifested in the way Trio social space is constructed and inhabited as an extension of the body, and how objects acquired through trade come to elicit narratives of past exploits and travels to distant spheres of alterity
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