Bøker i Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity-serien

Honorable Mention for the 2018 American Ethnological SocietySenior Book PrizeHonorable Mention for the 2017 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing presented by the American Anthropological Association In 1963, Kenya gained independence from Britain, ending decades of white colonial rule.While tens of thousands of whites relocated in fear of losing their fortunes, many stayed. But over the past decade, protests, scandals, and upheavals have unsettled families with colonial origins, reminding them that their belonging is tenuous. In this book, Janet McIntosh looks at the lives and dilemmas of settler descendants living in post-independence Kenya. From clinging to a lost colonial identity to pronouncing a new Kenyan nationality, the public face of white Kenyans has undergone changes fraught with ambiguity. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, McIntosh focuses on their discourse and narratives to ask: What stories do settler descendants tell about their claim to belong in Kenya? How do they situate themselves vis-a-vis the colonial past and anti-colonial sentiment, phrasing and re-phrasing their memories and judgments as they seek a position they feel is ethically acceptable? McIntosh explores contradictory and diverse responses: moral double consciousness, aspirations to uplift the nation, ideological blind-spots, denials, and self-doubt as her respondents strain to defend their entitlements in the face of mounting Kenyan rhetorics of ancestry.

Explores everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and the Republic of Congo, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland.

Considers what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war. This book also considers how information and medical technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself.

Schizophrenia has long puzzled researchers in the fields of psychiatric medicine and anthropology. Why is it that the rates of developing schizophrenia are low in some countries and higher in others? The authors argue that the root causes of schizophrenia are not only biological, but also sociocultural.

Schizophrenia has long puzzled researchers in the fields of psychiatric medicine and anthropology. Why is it that the rates of developing schizophrenia are low in some countries and higher in others? The authors argue that the root causes of schizophrenia are not only biological, but also sociocultural.

Social drinking is an accepted aspect of working life in Japan, and women are left to manage their drunken husbands when the men return home, restoring them to sobriety for the next day of work. In attempting to cope with their husbands' alcoholism, the women face a profound cultural dilemma: when does the nurturing behavior expected of a good wife and mother become part of a pattern of behavior that is actually destructive? How does the celebration of nurturance and dependency mask the exploitative aspects not just of family life but also of public life in Japan? The Too-Good Wife follows the experiences of a group of middle-class women in Tokyo who participated in a weekly support meeting for families of substance abusers at a public mental-health clinic. Amy Borovoy deftly analyzes the dilemmas of being female in modern Japan and the grace with which women struggle within a system that supports wives and mothers but thwarts their attempts to find fulfillment outside the family. The central concerns of the book reach beyond the problem of alcoholism to examine the women's own processes of self-reflection and criticism and the deeper fissures and asymmetries that undergird Japanese productivity and social order.

In a world of swift and sweeping cultural transformations, few have seen changes as rapid and dramatic as those experienced by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in the last four decades. A remote people never directly "e;missionized,"e; the Urapmin began in the 1960s to send young men to study with Baptist missionaries living among neighboring communities. By the late 1970s, the Urapmin had undergone a charismatic revival, abandoning their traditional religion for a Christianity intensely focused on human sinfulness and driven by a constant sense of millennial expectation. Exploring the Christian culture of the Urapmin, Joel Robbins shows how its preoccupations provide keys to understanding the nature of cultural change more generally. In so doing, he offers one of the richest available anthropological accounts of Christianity as a lived religion. Theoretically ambitious and engagingly written, his book opens a unique perspective on a Melanesian society, religious experience, and the very nature of rapid cultural change.

What does it mean to be accompanied? How can autonomy and a sense of self emerge through one's involvement with others? This book examines the formation of self among the Urarina, an Amazonian people of lowland Peru. Based on detailed ethnography, the analysis highlights the role of intimate but asymmetrical attachments and dependencies which begin in the womb, but can extend beyond human society to include a variety of animals, plants, spirits and material objects. It thereby raises fundamental questions about what it means to be alive, to be an experiencing subject, and to be human. From the highly personalized relationships that develop between babies and their hammocks, to the demonstrations of love and respect between spouses and the power asymmetries that structure encounters between shamans and spirits, hunters and game animals, or owners and pets, what emerges is a strong sense that the lived experience of togetherness lies at the heart of the human condition. Recognizing this relational quality of existence enables us to see how acting effectively in the world may be less a matter of individual self-assertion than learning how to elicit empathetic acts of care and attentiveness by endearing oneself to others.

This study of colonial memory asks the question, how do once-colonized people remember the colonial period? Drawing on an ethnography of the social practices of remembering and forgetting in one community in Madagascar, the book develops a practice-based approach to social memory.

Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives.

Takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants - young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. This book considers how these aspiring nuns learn to experience God by cultivating an altered experience of their own female bodies.

Anthropologists have long looked to forager-cultivator cultures for insights into human lifeways. But they have often not been attentive enough to locals' horizons of concern and to the enormous disparity in population size between these groups and other societies. Us, Relativesexplores how scalar blindness skews our understanding of these cultures and the debates they inspire. Drawing on her long-term research with a community of South Asian foragers, Nurit Bird-David provides a scale-sensitive ethnography of these people as she encountered them in the late 1970s and reflects on the intellectual journey that led her to new understandings of their lifeways and horizons. She elaborates on indigenous modes of ';being many' that have been eclipsed by scale-blind anthropology, which generally uses its large-scale conceptual language of persons, relations, and ethnic groups for even tiny communities. Through the idea of pluripresence,Bird-David reveals a mode of plural life that encompasses a diversity of humans and nonhumans through notions of kinship and shared life. She argues that this mode of belonging subverts the modern ontological touchstone of ';imagined communities,' rooted not in sameness among dispersed strangers but in intimacy among relatives of infinite diversity.

Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human.Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "e;intuition,"e; comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "e;naturalness"e; of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.

"This pathbreaking book offers a vital analysis of the rising-but-unrecognized category of single women in marriage-minded societies such as India. Through beautifully rendered, diverse stories of never-married women, Being Single in India challenges conventional wisdom and is essential reading for anthropologists, sociologists, and those interested in gender in the Global South."--Marcia C. Inhorn, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University "This lively ethnographic account of the experiences of never-married women makes several key contributions to feminist anthropological appraisals of marriage as an institution. Drawing on in-depth interviews and extensive exercises in participant observation, Sarah Lamb renders a compelling, detailed, and sensitive portrait of compulsory heterosexuality and patriliny as seen from the margins."--Lucinda Ramberg, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Cornell University "For fans of Lamb's evocative narratives on Bengali widows, her new book provides another rich look at the negative space of marriage: the rare demographic of single women in Bengal across class and caste. In the hands of an empathetic ethnographer, we see how they provide care and are cared for (or not), we see their routines and sacrifices and longings but also their laughter and aspirations and resilience, and we see the heartfelt new communities they form outside of biological kin. Being outside of marriage is not devastating or ruinous, it turns out, but reveals the vulnerabilities of shelter and support and the privileges of sexuality, gender, and class."--Srimati Basu, author of The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India "This compelling ethnography offers an extraordinarily fruitful perspective on gender, family, kinship, patriliny, patriarchy, and class in India's dominant cultures. With engaging writing and captivating narratives, Lamb uncovers never-married women's own critiques of and reflections on dominant norms. Her focus is, essentially, entirely new in South Asian studies. It offers fresh insights into the realities of family lives, complicating the notion of the ideal Indian family, and her interlocutors' accounts reveal new insights about women and kinship."--Sara Dickey, author of Living Class in Urban India