30 research outputs found
Silence and Sacrifice: Family Stories of Care and the Limits of Love in Vietnam:by Merav Shohet, Oakland, University of California Press, 2021, 288 pp.
No full textby Merav Shohet, Oakland, University of California Press, 2021, 288 pp., ISBN: 978052037938
Tình Yêu trăn trở: Giới, giai cấp, và ‘theo bóng bên lề’ gia đình hạnh phúc tại Việt Nam
No full textThough socially and politically different, Vietnam's Confucian, colonial, socialist, and marketizing regimes share a common master narrative of ideal women as the moral bedrock of their nation: virtuous, self‐sacrificing mothers. Drawing on ethnographic material collected in Đà Nẵng, this essay examines how women deploy discourses about ethical sentiments and national development to make sense of their experiences of love. I focus on women's moral struggles with and reasoning about sacrifice and care to complicate understandings of romantic love as linked to capitalist individualism and modernity. Instead, I show how women subtly critique, yet remain committed to, forms of love that reinforce—through state policy and common practice—hierarchical gender, intergenerational, and class relations. This is achieved through the telling and living of sideshadowing narratives, that is, subjunctive tales that invite contingency and contradiction. This nonteleological narrative practice reveals the precarious nature of ethical life and the ways love entangles political economy, moral sentiments, and moral reasoning. [morality and ethics, love, class and gender, narrative practice, Vietnam]Résumé: Quoique socialement et politiquement différents, les régimes confucéen, colonial, socialiste et de marché partagent undiscours commun sur la femme idéale, fondation morale de la nation vietnamienne, en tant que mère vertueuseet sacrificielle. Sur la base d’une enquête ethnographique menée àĐàNẵng, cet article examine comment les femmes vietnamiennes signifient leur expérienceamoureuseà travers des discours sur les sentiments moraux et le développement national. En mettant l’accent sur les conflits moraux et les raisonnements sur le sacrifice et le care, il approfondit la compréhensions de l’amour romantique en lien avec l’individualisme inhérent au capitalismeet la modernité. Il montre que les femmes critiquent subtilement–tout en y restant attachées–des formes d’amour qui renforcent, sous l’effet de politiqueset de pratiques, des rapports hiérarchiques de genre, de génération et de classe. Cette critique est rendue possible par l’expression de discours latéraux et évolutifs (sideshadowing), notamment des récits subjunctifs qui évoquent la contingence et la contradiction. Ces pratiquesnarrativesrévèlentla nature précaire de la vie morale et l’enchevêtrement de l’amour avec l’économie politique, les sentiments moraux et le raisonnement éthique.Tóm tắt: Mặc dù khác nhau trong khía cạnh xã hội và chính trị, các chếđộKhổng giáo, thực dân, xã hội chủnghĩa, và thịtrường tại Việt Nam có cùng một diễn ngôn chủđạo vềngười đàn bà lý tưởng tạo thành nền tảng luân lý của dân tộc: những người mẹđức hạnh và giàu lòng hy sinh. Dựa vào dữliệu thu thập theo phương pháp điều tra dân tộc học thực hiện tại Đà Nẵng, tôi khảo sát cách phụnữsửdụng những diễn ngôn vềcảm xúc đạo đức và sựphát triển đất nước trong cách hiểu của họvềtình yêu thương. Tôi tập trung vào những đấu tranh đạo đức trong cách họlý giải sựhy sinh và chăm sóc nhằm phức tạp hoá cách hiểu vềsựliên kết giữa tình yêu và chủnghĩa tư bản cá nhânhoặc chủnghĩa hiện đại.Thay vào đó, tôi cho thấy rằng phụnữphê phán một cách tếnhịnhưng vẫn hướng đến những hình thức yêu thương mang tính củng cốcho sựphân tầng vềgiới, thếhệvà giai cấp xã hội, thông qua các chính sách nhà nước và lối hành xửthông thường. Họlàm điều này bằng lối kểchuyện và sống ‘theo bóng bên lề’, nghĩa là những câu chuyện kểthuộc loại ‘phải chi’đểkhơi ngợinhững khảnăng vềmột hiện thực khác, vềnhững ngờvực và mâu thuẫn. Lối tựtruyện phi mục đích này cho thấy tính bất định của đời sống đạo đức và những đan xen chằngchịtgiữa tình yêu, tình cảm với kinh tếchính trị, cảm xúc đạo đức và lý giải mang tính luân lý.I am eternally indebted to the families who generously welcomed me into their homes, lives, and sometimes hearts in Vietnam. I am also grateful to generous research support provided by Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, Pacific-Rim Research Program, UCLA Graduate Division, and Asia Institute Wagatsuma Fellowship grants, and assistance from Thuy Anh Nguyen, Son Ca, the Danang College of Foreign Languages, the Institute of Family and Gender Studies in Hanoi, Thu-huong Nguyen-vo, Dat Nguyen, Tam Nguyen, Michel Chambon, and Nicolas Lainez. Condensed versions of this article were presented at the 2014 American Anthropological Association Meeting in Washington D.C., at the 2015 Society for Psychological Anthropology Meeting in Boston, and in the Departments of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough and at Boston University in 2016. I thank Alejandro Paz, Bianca Dahl, Donna Young, Elinor Ochs, Heather Loyd, Maggie McKinley, Maria Stalford, Mary Good, Revital Shohet, and Vivian Choi, as well as Ethos editor-in-chief Edward Lowe, and anonymous and revealed reviewers Ann Marie Leshkowich and Allen Tran for commenting on earlier drafts. They have all helped make this piece stronger. (Social Science Research Council; Fulbright-Hays; Pacific-Rim Research Program; UCLA Graduate Division; Asia Institute Wagatsuma Fellowship)First author draf
Beyond the clinic? Eluding a medical diagnosis of anorexia through narrative
No full textThe persistence and recurrence of anorexia nervosa poses a clinical challenge, and provides support for critiques of oppressive and injurious facets of society inscribed on women’s bodies. This essay illustrates how a phenomenological, linguistic anthropological approach fruitfully traverses clinical and cultural perspectives by directing attention beyond the embodied experience of patients diagnosed with anorexia nervosa to those who are not clinically diagnosed. Extending a model of illness and recovery as entailing sufferers’ emplotting of past, present, and imagined future selves, I argue that women’s accounts of their experiences do not simply reflect lived reality, but actually propel health-relevant states of being by enlivening and creating these realities in the process of their telling. In indexical interaction with public and clinical discourses, narratives’ grammar, lexicon, and plot structures modify subjects’ experiences and interpretations of the events and feelings recounted. This article builds on the insight that linear narratives of “full recovery” that adopt a clinical and feminist voice can help tellers stay recovered, whereas for those “struggling to recover,” a genre of contingent, uncertain, sideshadowing narratives alternatively renders recovery an elusive and ambivalently desired object. This essay then identifies a third narrative genre, eluding a diagnosis, which combines elements of the first two genres to paradoxically keep its teller simultaneously sheltered from, and invisible to the well-meaning clutches of medical care, leaving her suffering, yet free, to starve. This focus on narrative genres illustrates the utility of linguistic analyses for discerning and interpreting distress in subclinical populations.First author draf
Silence and sacrifice family stories of care and the limits of love in Vietnam
No full textIntroduction : Vietnam is a country, not a war -- "Not only those on the battlefield" : (extra)ordinary sacrifice -- Rituals and routines of sacrifice : respect those above, yield to those below -- Troubling love : models for gender (in)equality? -- Waiting as care? sacrifice and tình cảm in troubled times -- Children and lovers : marriage, morality, and motherhood -- Conclusion : mourning in silent sacrifice"How do families hold together when turbulent forces tear them apart? Silence and Sacrifice explores what happens to generations of kin who survived anti-imperial and civil wars in Vietnam, only to be confronted with postcolonial transitions to communism and market-friendly late socialism. In recounting vivid family experiences of conflict, love, and loss, Shohet revises canonical theories of sacrifice as blood-filled religious rituals or patriotic acts. Motivated by enduring Vietnamese virtues of asymmetrical reciprocity and tình cảm (love and material care), a myriad of domestic sacrifices-especially by women-precariously knot family members together by silencing suffering and naturalizing gender and other hierarchies. Rethinking ordinary ethics, this intimate ethnography reveals how quotidian acts of sacrifice help family members forge a sense of continuity in the face of massive political and economic upheavals"-
Situating selves: ‘self-illness’ (nafsānī bali) and living ethical ‘modern’ lives in Contemporary Male’, Maldives
No full text2024In the Indian Oceanic South Asian nation of Maldives, nafsānī bali (lit. ‘self illness’) has long been a cultural category of (ill) personhood among Sunni-Maldivians. Various modernization projects that have been underway since the nation’s democratization in 2008 offer new frameworks through which Sunni-Maldivian persons today interpret this category of experience. Drawing on 22 cumulative months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives, this study asks: How do Sunni-Maldivians experiencing self-illness and their kin construct themselves as ethical ‘modern’ persons in this contemporary moment? Each of the chapters explore a significant intersection of the various public discourses of ‘modernity’—such as reformist Sunni-Islam, biopsychiatry, humanitarian mental health, and liberal feminism—and how these discourses offer new ways to conceptualize inner processes, such as emotion and sense of moral self. Significantly, the experience-near narrative approach employed throughout the ethnography highlights how people transform discourses just as they are being transformed by them. Through detailed narrative analysis of data gathered from discursive-centered and person-centered ethnographic methods, this ethnography illuminates (1) how long-existing idioms of distress can transform during periods of rapid social change; (2) how individual subjectivities are intimately entangled with these broader processes of social change; and (3) how situating selves in their local sociomoral worlds can refine our existing understandings of concepts such as “madness” and “recovery.” The expansive understanding of Sunni-Maldivian personhood illustrated in this ethnography contributes to the literature on Global Mental Health, studies of South Asian and Muslim subjectivities, and the anthropological project of documenting an ethics of everyday life
Universalism without uniformity: explorations in mind & culture. Julia L. Cassaniti and Usha Menon, eds., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 317 pp.
No full textUniversalism without Uniformity is a powerful homage to Richard A. Shweder’s generative work in cultural psychology. At the volume’s center is one of Shweder’s enduring mantras and intellectual commitments, “universalism without uniformity.” This entails several other foundational principles that trace their lineage, as do the volume’s contributors, to John and Beatrice Whiting’s mid-20th-century interdisciplinary, psychological anthropological comparative work.Accepted manuscrip
Two deaths and a funeral: ritual inscriptions' affordances for mourning and moral personhood in Vietnam
No full textMortuary rituals constitute the social nature of death and mourning, often working to ease painful transitions for the deceased and bereaved. In Vietnam, such rituals involve objects, including commodified yet personalized text‐artifacts like banners and placards bearing inscriptions in various scripts that are associated with various affects and different political‐economic regimes. The material, orthographic, semantic, spatial, and temporal organization of these text‐artifacts mobilize sentiments and structure ethical relations at a funeral. Together, they act as prescriptive affordances intended to discipline mourners’ grief. Yet while these objects reflect how subjects valorize “tradition,” their affective force exceeds the bounded subjunctive world fostered by ritual, and it may retrospectively limit possibilities for moral personhood.My research was generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Research Program, the UC Pacific-Rim Research Program, the UCLA Graduate Division and Asia Institute Wagatsuma Fellowships, and institutional grants from the Centre for Ethnography and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at the University of Toronto. I am also indebted to many colleagues who over years helped me develop earlier versions for invited lectures at the University of Toronto, the College of the Holy Cross, and the University of Michigan's Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and presentations at meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, the Harvard East Asia Society, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology. I further benefited from extremely helpful comments from multiple American Ethnologist reviewers and editor-in-chief Niko Besnier. The tragedies that this article describes continue to leave me painfully grateful to the families in whose sorrows I share, and I remain committed, but struggling, to honor their loved ones. (Social Science Research Council; Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Research Program; UC Pacific-Rim Research Program; UCLA Graduate Division; Asia Institute Wagatsuma Fellowships; Centre for Ethnography; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at the University of Toronto)https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12599Accepted manuscriptPublished versio
From Virtue to Vice: Negotiating Anorexia by Richard A. O'Connor and PennyVan Esterik New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. 252 pp.
No full textEveryday Sacrifice and Language Socialization in Vietnam: The Power of a Respect Particle
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