In March 2023, Vanuatu was struck by two category 4 tropical cyclones, dubbed Judy and Kevin, in rapid succession. As the planet heats up and extreme weather events become fiercer and more frequent, disaster response teams will face ever greater challenges to restore vital infrastructure and help the people living on Pacific islands to repair their homes and feed themselves. Based on the information gathered for this article using well-established anthropological techniques of in-depth open-ended interviews and long-term immersive fieldwork, we argue that effective responses to natural disasters may be strengthened by engaging more fully with local and traditional institutions, utilising the best available data and coordinating the efforts of more diverse stakeholders.
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Anthropology in Action in Vanuatu
Troubleshooting Disaster Relief in the Wake of Tropical Cyclones Judy and Kevin
Harvey Whitehouse and Jamie Tanguay
In Anthropology in Action
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2024
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–12 (11 total)
Acteon's tears reversed
João Pina-Cabral
Abstract
This article is a “thought experiment” that takes recourse to Lucien Freud's youthful portrait of himself as Acteon—the hunter whom the goddess Diana turned into a stag, as famously narrated by Ovid. In his drawing, Freud's crisis of presence is mobilized by a play on gender differentiation. More broadly, the piece is an exploration of what it involves being present as a person and of how personal transcendence opens up a propositional ontology that differs from the intentionality of life. The possibility of loss of personal transcendence is an ever-present preoccupation of humans wherever they are.
Addressing the Irrational Drivers of the Climate Crisis
Surplus Repression and Destructive Production
Diana Stuart, Brian Petersen, and Ryan Gunderson
Abstract
An increasing number of scientists have illustrated how economic growth is an underlying driver of the climate crisis. This article examines how associated levels of excess work, production, and consumption repress human flourishing and drive global warming. Drawing from the work of Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz, we discuss the irrationality of a system of excess work, production, and consumption in terms of unnecessary human repression and environmental destruction. In the context of the climate crisis, this system becomes even more irrational as it threatens the habitability of Earth for humans. We examine work-time reduction and related sufficiency measures as a rational response to the climate crisis.
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2024
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 113–134 (22 total)
Algae Openings
How the Bloom Boom in the United States and Mexico makes Environmental Protection Actionable
Laura Otto and Carly Rospert
Abstract
Humans have always lived with and around algae. At times, algae enable life, and at others, render life difficult. This article examines two sites suffering from atypical—and potentially harmful—algae blooms: Lake Erie in Ohio (USA) and the Riviera Maya (Mexico). Referring to ethnographic fieldwork, as well as to newspaper articles, policy papers, and online fora, we demonstrate how the narratives around algae have changed over time and shed light on how changes in these narratives opened the discussion of wetland repair and coastal integrity. We argue that conceptualizing algae as the “unwanted” unifies people, brings them together, and makes the treatment of lake eutrophication and coastal protection actionable.
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2024
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 161–183 (23 total)
Alterity and Tragicality in Shakespeare and Fitzgerald
From Macbeth to The Great Gatsby
Mehrdad Bidgoli and Zahra Jannessari Ladani
Abstract
This article attempts to trace the themes of alterity and tragicality in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. We offer a parallel study of the two works with an emphasis on the (anti)heroes’ struggles with time and the other human as metaphors of ‘alterity’. We present a thematic reading and argue that as Macbeth is preoccupied with his imaginatively fabricated future (time) and tries to execute anyone (the other) who jeopardises the totality of that ideal space, Gatsby is also preoccupied with his past (time) and tries to retrieve Daisy (the other). Tragedy, we discuss, is basically the ultimate result of these struggles. We suggest that Fitzgerald's work generally shares the similar theme of alterity with Shakespeare's Macbeth and somehow modernises the similar tragicality we witness in the latter.
In Critical Survey
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2024
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 95–104 (10 total)
The Americans and “Sleeper Cells” of Russian Intelligence in America
A Story Behind the TV Show
Sergei I. Zhuk
Abstract
In June of 2010, a Canadian couple, Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley, was arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the KGB “sleeper agents.” These KGB agents (Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova) lived in Canada since 1992, and in the United States since 1999, working for the Russian intelligence as “a sleeper cell” of the Russian spies. This story became an inspiration for the American TV show The Americans (2013–2018). Using the reviews of this TV show from the United States and Russia, the interviews with the real participants of the events of 2010 and with the retired KGB officers, the KGB documents from the SBU Archive in Kyiv, Ukraine, this article is an attempt to study how the special KGB/FSB operations in the USA, portrayed in one American TV series became an object of fascination and “fictionalization” on the both—American and Russian—sides of the geo-political conflict.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2024
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 125–139 (15 total)
Anthropology against Borders
Stephen Campbell
Ghosh, Sahana. 2023. A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh–India Borderland. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-5203-9573-2.
Keshavarz, Mahmoud and Shahram Khosravi (eds.) 2022. Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below. London: Pluto Press. 216 pp. Pb.: £19.99. ISBN: 978-0-7453- 4161-3.
Shih, Elena. 2023. Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 288 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-5203-7970-1.
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2024
- Article Type:
- Review Article
- Pages:
- 112–118 (7 total)
At the time of the “backway”
Mobility rules and moral breakdown from the standpoint of a rural Gambian community
Elia Vitturini and Alice Bellagamba
Abstract
“Backway” is the Gambian term for the outflow of people, mostly via the Mediterranean and oceanic routes that during the 2010s turned the country into one of the highest per capita origin points for sub-Saharan migrants in Europe. From the standpoint of Kerewan, a Gambian rural community proud of its migratory legacy, a mobility rules perspective uncovers the specificity of the “backway” in sensible arenas of village life: household and family networks, intergenerational relationships, and development. Since 2017, initiatives linked to the Euro-African mobility regime to immobilize young Gambians meet the practical rationality on the ground of communities like Kerewan engaged in a moral conversation about what family, village, intergenerational and transnational solidarity, and development should and do mean in the current predicament.
Barbie
Feminist Satire and Appropriation
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh
I had the pleasure of watching Barbie when it first came out. I immediately thought of the genre of broad satire, especially visual, as in eighteenth-century Hogarth paintings and prints but with women creators. My first impulse was to laugh at the blatantly inverted world the movie creates. As someone interested in literature of the long eighteenth century—both popular prints such as broadsheets and later novels by British women—I was struck by the strategies used in the film and how they recalled some of those practiced hundreds of years ago to escape the official censor through laughter. I thought of the seventeenth-century prints depicting a world turned upside down with the oppressors at the bottom of the sheet and the oppressed at the top.1 Stemming from this, eighteenth-century theatrical pantomimes carried the inversions onto the stage; this continues today in comic performances that use a camp style. While watching Barbie, the brashness of the blatant inversions made me gasp and laugh.
Becoming an Abla
Homemaking and the Shaping of an Ethical Self among Women in a Turkish Muslim Community in Brazil
Liza Dumovich
Abstract
This article analyses the performance of homemaking and religious practices of six Turkish Muslim women who made hicret (migration) to Brazil, focusing on the domestic space of their shared apartment. Their reasons to migrate combine personal motivations and a sense of responsibility to spread the world view of the Turkish Islamic movement of which they are participants. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I explore their everyday practices in the production of an ideal Muslim self and the making of a home in order to understand the effects of the community's domesticities on their individual trajectories. The analysis shows that the performance of those everyday practices produces a moral and affective bond to the movement and its religious leader, conditioning home to a specific spatial and moral structure.
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2024
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 104–124 (21 total)