1,720,988 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
Migrant Hospitalities in the Mediterranean. Encounters with Alterity in Birth and Death
Full text linkThis 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
Introduction: Mediterranean Migrant Hospitalities
Full text linkThis 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
Hosting the Dead: Forensics, Ritual and the Memorialization of Migrant Human Remains in Italy
Full text linkIn 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
Ownership and Nurture: Studies in native Amazonian property relations
No full textThe first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology
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
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
Comparison and difference : kinship, nurture and personhood in Amazonia and the Mediterranean
No full textIn this chapter, we will reflect on Philippe Descola’s contributions to comparative methodology to experiment with criteria for comparing Amazonian and Mediterranean material from our field research in both regions
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
Temporalities of emergency : migrant pregnancy and healthcare networks in Southern European borderlands
Full text linkAvailable online: 18 December 2018In Greece, Italy, and Spain, austerity policies combined with the structural density of migration flows have had concrete social and material manifestations in the delivery of public health care. Through our ethnographic case studies in Lampedusa and southeastern Sicily, Melilla, and Athens, we examine the maternity care offered to migrant patients in the midst and the aftermath of the so-called "migration crisis" in state and non-state structures. Research was conducted in Athens and southeastern Sicily from August 2016 to August 2017; in Melilla from August 2016 to October 2016 and in January 2017; and in Lampedusa from August 2016 to January 2017. Data collected consist in semi-structured interviews and long-term ethnographic observations. The article explores whether and how the understanding or the labeling of the maternity care of migrants as an emergency within a context of professed crisis generates new norms of care within health-care delivery. Our findings suggest a) the adoption of solutions or practices that in the past might have been considered urgent, ad hoc, or creative; b) their normalization, deeply connected to the wider social landscape of these European peripheries and c) the institutionalization of humanitarianism in the context of these practices. Our research points out temporalities of emergency against the background of a professed migration crisis. In the context of austerity-driven underfunding, temporary solutions become entrenched, producing a lasting emergency. Yet, we argue that "emergency" can, at some point, generate practices of resistance that undermine, subtly yet significantly, its own normalization.ERC funded Project EU BORDER CARE ‘Intimate Encounters in EU Borderlands: Migrant Maternity, Sovereignty and the Politics of Care on Europe’s Periphery’ (2015-2020) Grant number 63825
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